Author Archives: Janine Lim

Reflection: Muddled Thinking about K12, Higher Ed, Learning and Research

I feel the beginning of a shift in my thinking. I can hardly articulate it right now, but here’s a stab at it….

When I was working in K12, I always had this thought that most higher ed schools of education were “behind the times” in use of technology. I know, sounds terrible to put it in writing, and potentially shocking, but I had that kind of a gut feeling. Teachers always raved about the practical usefulness of our training, workshops, and courses.

But now it seems like I’m seeing a little bit of a light (or going to the dark side as my K12 buddies might think!).  I’m seeing a focus on depth of learning, systematic assessment, concern about using technology in ways that actually encourage higher level thinking – that focuses on learning as the innovation – not necessarily the latest gadgets or free online tools.

When I reflect on the majority of what I hear in edtech circles – it seems like much of it is racing after the latest cool tool. There are certainly some excellent exceptions in the K12 world – thinking of Whirlidurb’s work in particular. You could think of more, I’m sure!

What do you think? I know now I have readers from both worlds… am I crazy? Maybe it’s not really a higher ed vs. K12 thing. Instead it’s a focus on gadgets vs. a focus on learning. And what I’ve seen in the three sessions I’ve attended so far here at AERA, there’s a strong focus on learning and how we know if students are learning. That’s where it’s at, right?!

I’m also thinking that the thoughtfulness I’m seeing is not making it out to the K12 world very well. For example, there are interesting taxonomies on wiki use that would be incredibly helpful in all the workshops out there for wiki use in the classroom. I guess that’s the point of the conference theme – To Know is Not Enough – but it also seems to me that the structure of publishing and research in higher ed puts barriers to this knowledge getting out to where it can be used.

Developing In-Service Teachers’ Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge

I chose this session because I’ve heard about TPACK but haven’t really learned what it is. This session had four papers on TPACK:

  • Supporting Adaptive Expertise for Teachers Through a Customized Graduate Degree Program Meghan McGlinn Manfra, North Carolina State University; Hiller A. Spires, North Carolina State University
  • Identifying Effective Pedagogical Approaches for Online Learning: Exploring Educators’ Experiences in a Graduate-Level Course Erica C. Boling, Rutgers University; Erica Michelle Holan, Rutgers University; Brent Horbatt, Rutgers University; Mary Hough, Rutgers University; Jennifer Jean-Louis, Rutgers University; Chesta Khurana, Rutgers University; Hindi L. Krinsky, Rutgers University; Christina Spiezio, Rutgers University
  • TPACK (Technological, Pedagogical, and Content Knowledge) Development in an Online Masters Program: How Do Teacher Perceptions Align With Classroom Practice? Nancy Staus, Oregon State University; Henry Gillow-Wiles, Oregon State University; Margaret L. Niess, Oregon State University; Emily H. Van Zee, Oregon State University
  • Affordances of Digital Technologies for Practicing Teachers by Beth Bos, Texas State University-San Marcos

What is TPACK?

  • It stands for technological pedagogical content knowledge
  • It is a framework for using technology with curriculum
  • Teachers may struggle with theoretical frameworks – they want the practical
  • The intersection of technological, pedagogical and content knowledge is where the transformative learning occurs
  • Neiss, (someone there called her the founding mother of TPACK) was there. At the very end she talked about how the knowledge in the middle – the center of the TPACK graph – is actually different knowledge. It’s like a chemical change where what is created is actually different – not that you can separate out the pieces and identify them like some people are doing with TPACK. If that is the case, what are the characteristics of that transformed knowledge? What does that really mean?

Identifying Effective Pedagogical Approaches for Online Learning

  • Not innovative is “linear text-based format”
  • Cognitive apprenticeship model as a framework to think about teaching online – because it focuses on the LEARNING not the technology
  • The courses in the study focused on project based learning and discussion forums
  • The courses consisted of modeling and coaching – in the form of video interviews, guest speakers in the discussion area
  • Instructor modeled using tools such as Animoto making videos. Then the introductory videos were embedded into the discussion forum.
  • Project proposals went to both the instructor and the participants
  • Very specific rubrics for participants
  • Their course was in ThinkFinity in a private community; and then using tools all across the web no evidence of being in an LMS – so that’s interesting – like the digital storytelling course community ds106.
  • They used Screenr to do tutorials for the teachers; and then teachers in the class would make screencasts to show the progress on their projects. (Screenr is free for 5 minutes and very simple to use because teachers don’t have to download software.)
  • They had to do critiques of tools such as Prezi – sharing with screencasts  – I like this idea of critiquing tools – I’m not doing this in my online classes right now – but it ends up in the discussion area.
  • The importance of instructors giving modeling and prompting students to elaborate further and to dig deeper in their conversations

Take-aways: I need to help our faculty see how they can use video and screencasts in their online teaching; to push teachers harder in my own classes to critique and think more deeply about the use of technology.

TPACK (Technological, Pedagogical, and Content Knowledge) Development in an Online Masters Program: How Do Teacher Perceptions Align With Classroom Practice?

  • Levels of TPACK: Recognizing (knowledge), accepting, adapting, exploring, and advancing (Niess, 2009)
  • This study looked at three teachers and their perceptions and classroom observations – and looked at how the teachers were using technology in their classrooms.

Questions Raised:

  • Is TPACK easier to do in some content areas than others? Thinking of the comparison of the math teachers vs. science teachers?
  • The presenter alluded to the tension among the three types of knowledge within TPACK. What is that and how does it work? Does trying a new technology drop teachers down to a lower level of implementation (thinking of Fullan’s work where the management of the new method is the main focus at the beginning of implementation)? Is it only the really technically comfortable teachers who can easily add a new technology and use it at a high level?

Affordances of Digital Technologies for Practicing

  • There’s a TPACK survey. I found this online but am not sure it’s the same one they are talking about.
  • The center of TPACK is the sweet spot – where all three types of knowledge interact.

Discussant:

Natalie B. Milman, The George Washington University

Interesting questions and comments from Natalie:

  • What are the best ways to study “effective online pedagogical practices”?
  • She has a bias for mixed methods – that when studying technology we need both types of data
  • How do you determine when to collect what and what to collect? And what are the ramifications of those choices?
  • She sounds like she’d be an amazing research coach – has really good process and research questions for each paper presented…
  • There’s a document called Standards for Reporting on Empirical Social Science Research in AERA Publications. A good guide for publications both at AERA and when submitting to journals also.
  • Why is TPACK important to study?  Is TPACK a theoretical or a conceptual framework? Is TPACK measurable?
  • The instruments were developed for pre-service teachers… should it be used for in-service teachers? The instrument hasn’t been validated for that other population.
  • Context is really important to share with the research study – what is the context of the study?
  • Koehler & Mishra, 2008 said that technology is a “wicked problem”.  How do we factor in those challenges as we design research on technology in the classroom?

I thoroughly enjoyed Natalie’s questions and want to learn more about her work, particularly her research and portfolio work.

Last Thoughts

Now that I’ve had a chance to link some resources to this post, I can see more of what TPACK is. I can see it fits well with my idea of teaching instructional strategies at the same time as teaching the technology tools. I attempty to do that in my latest Integrating Technology with Pathways classes. But what I’m missing in my work is the focus on the content knowledge. Hmm. I can see that I want to think about this much more.

Investigations of Wikis for Collaboration and Knowledge Building: Part 3

Educating With Social Media: Policy and Practice in British Columbia
Presenters: Rachel F. Moll, Vancouver Island University; Julia Hengstler, Vancouver Island University

Emails: rachel.moll@viu.ca and Julia.hengstler@viu.ca

Google Presentation

They started with several data points that showed that social media is growing at multiple levels.

Complexity Thinking (Davis & Sumara, 2006) is the theoretical framework they used – they think that most work on social media doesn’t think deeply enough about what is so engaging about the connectedness of social media.

They have two studies in one paper.

Student use of social media included Facebook, videos (i.e. YouTube), online forums (i.e. Yahoo Answers), Google, and Wikipedia – in that order of frequency. Students use Facebook and chat clients to ask their face to face friends at school about assignments. High school students looked online for “the answer”; whereas postsecondary students were looking for resources as references for their higher level thinking assignments.  The students said that when teachers used social media, they didn’t use it in a way that allowed for collaboration among the students.

The other study was a case study surveying 27% of the staff at a school district in British Columbia looking at teachers knowledge, beliefs, and learning from a workshop on social media – finding that teachers need support to use social media appropriately in the classroom and how to work with the school policies and provincial laws. SD10 is following the Kent County UK model for teaching social media, and for further study, Hengstler will research further to see how that progresses and what can be learned from it.

In the discussion afterwards, the practitioner in the room started a conversation on how critical it is to create a social contract and understanding for how to behave online in social media, just like there is a social contract of how to behave in a classroom. Scaffolding is critical to help students learn how to behave well on social media.

Reflections

My take away from the Friday set of sessions at AERA 2012 is that it’s so critical to scaffold, plan, and support learning to use technology in transformative ways. Otherwise, you have the same types of “following directions” or low level thinking activities that are common in schools anyway. The distribution graphs with 1-10% of high level activity presented in multiple sessions was thought provoking. What does it take to bring high level critical thinking and collaboration to all students?

Investigations of Wikis for Collaboration and Knowledge Building: Part 2

Where these sessions cover multiple papers, it seems that this might be more useful and readable for others to break it out by paper. So here’s the next paper from this session:

The Sequential Analysis of Individual versus Collaborative Writing Processes in Wikis
Presenter: Allan C. Jeong, Florida State University
CoAuthor: Patricia Anne Heeter, Florida State University

Problems with wikis – students are reluctant to edit each other’s work, just as Justin mentioned – the strong individual ownership of writing.

  • Can we define the collaborative writing process?
  • What processes identify individual vs. collaborative writing?

These conversations are making me think about my own collaborative writing. Collaborative blogging the 20 Days Challenges with Roxanne Glaser: it included collaborative brainstorming; shared posting on both of our blogs; some posts we wrote alone; some posts one of us would start, the other would come along and add to it, then someone would polish it up into a final document. It seems that the process of collaborative writing isn’t necessarily set in stone – and needs to be fluid and include back & forth editing and contribution over time.

This study generated a coding scheme and then coded wiki postings to analyze what type of editing happened on the wiki pages being analyzed.

Another learning for me from each of these sessions are the research methods. Dr. Jeong has over the last 10 years developed a Discussion Analysis Tool which is a software tool for analyzing discussion linearly or hierarchically.

Interestingly, given my reflection above, his data shows a pattern in the collaborative writing: first adding paragraphs, then a first round of edits, then a second round of edits. I didn’t catch the context of these wikis, which would be interesting to know as well. It seems to line up well with my own collaborative writing experience. 

In the Q&A, someone asked about people who draft things quickly, and those who are good editors. It’s a good question and interesting thing to think about when you consider what we might expect from students working on a wiki. What skills do we really want out of them??

Investigations of Wikis for Collaboration and Knowledge Building: Part 1

Investigations of Wikis for Collaboration and Knowledge Building: Part 1

Chair: Sara L. Dexter, University of Virginia

Here I am about to listen to another session, realizing that it’s mostly K12. Since I’ve just come from the K12 arena, it feels familiar. But I’m also curious if anyone is doing engaging things with wikis on the higher ed level also.

There are a couple other roundtable and poster sessions coming up on wikis that I hope to get to or find the paper for in the online repository:

  • The 4E (Establish, Extend, Elaborate, and Edit) Wiki Model: Facilitating Writing Development and Conceptual Understandings in a Technologically Relevant Way Jenifer Salter Thornton, The University of Texas – San Antonio
  • Effects of Structure in Wiki Templates on Holistic and Analytic Students’ Learning Outcomes and Knowledge Construction Patterns Ying Xie, Idaho State University
  • Leveraging Wiki Technology Support for Threaded Discussion to Facilitate Online Collaborative Knowledge Construction Andri Ioannou, Cyprus University of Technology; Agni Stylianou-Georgiou, University of Nicosia
  • Wikis as Collaborative Learning Tools in Higher Education: From Content Analyses of Wiki Behaviors to Instructional Practices Chun-Yi Lin, Indiana University – Bloomington; Hyunkyung Lee, Yonsei University

I am glad to see the emphasis on imposing some type of scaffolding or structure on the wiki to teach and encourage the desired collaborative behavior. Using a technology tool without some instructional goal, scaffolding, and planning usually results in disaster or at least less-than-desired learning outcomes.

Justin Reich from the Distributed Collaborative Learning Communities Project

Paper: Are Great Classroom Wikis Born or Made? Using Continuous-Time Data to Model Online Community Development
Presenter: Justin Fire Reich, Harvard University
Paper CoAuthors: Richard J. Murnane, Harvard University; John B. Willett, Harvard University

Background, Research Questions, and Theoretical Frameworks

The data they are looking at are publicly accessible wikis with real-time data easily included.

Research questions include: What is good? How to measure wiki quality? How do wiki quality trajectories correlate with school level SES?

Interesting concept: “Quality would be a time varying quality over time.” The quality isn’t a single point but a trajectory.

Educational Researcher: The State of Wiki Usage in US Schools

The wikis studied range in median life from 6 days (low income schools) to 33 days (median-high income schools).

Theoretical debates in wikis and collaboration in IJCSCL  – Glassman and Kang (2011) – meaningful collaboration vs. Dohn (2009) – just posting in the same place.

If you put files in the same place, is that collaboration?

This is interesting because it comes back to – what is collaboration? What do we mean when we say collaboration? Makes me think of Mark Elliot’s work on Wikipedia and other massive collaboration. He differentiates between coordination, cooperation,and collaboration.

Data collection interesting details: They looked at 179,851 publicly viewable education related wikis on PBworks between 2005 and 2008. Wow!! BIG DATA research. Took a 1% research sample. 255 of the wikis they could identify what school and were able to correlate that to the SES data on that school.

Wiki Quality Instrument

The Wiki Quality Instrument has 24 dichotomous items (is it present) within five categories: information consumption, participation, expert thinking, complex communication/collaboration, new media literacy. The trained researches looked to see if that item exists or not on the wiki.

They looked for those 24 things on the wiki across time – 7 days into it; 14 days into it; etc. all the way up to 400 days. What a lot of work!!

What is Collaboration? Are Wikis Born or Made?

He shared several graphs and statistical details to show how they looked at the data to see if the wikis are born or made – and it seems their quality stays the same for most wikis. If they do grow in quality, it tends to be at the beginning  of the life of the wiki. In addition, the vast majority of wikis aren’t collaborative – they are teachers posting materials or students doing individual pages. Would that be coordination in Elliot’s taxonomy?

How They Start Predicts How They End

It’s incredibly important to impact the genesis of wiki projects – because how they start out tends to be how they interact the rest of the time. Also that how people first experience an online learning community is how they will continue to think that is what you do in that online learning community. This worries me quite a bit… I’m thinking of faculty who start using an LMS such as Moodle to put their syllabus online. Then they want to teach online, and think that all that means is to put “stuff” online vs. designing engaging interactive learning opportunities. This deserves more reflection and planning!

Justin’s second paper:

Just Posting in the Same Place? A Taxonomy of Collaborative Behaviors in U.S. K-12 Wikis Justin Fire Reich, Harvard University; Richard J. Murnane, Harvard University; John B. Willett, Harvard University

This study looked at one piece of the quality indicators:

  • information consumption
  • participation
  • expert thinking
  • complex communication/collaboration
  • new media literacy

This second paper looked closer at complex communication:

Complex Communication – Seven Kinds of Communication on Wikis

  • Concatenation –
  • Copyediting
  • Co-construction
  • Commenting
  • Discussion
  • Scheduling
  • Planning

90% of the wikis they looked at didn’t have an interaction where the students were working on the same page. Does working on the same page mean collaboration?

Ownership of Text

Students have incredibly strong individual ownership of text, which makes it very difficult for them to write collaboratively where the text is truly a combination of everyone. Hmm. Makes me think of a paper we’re working on for a conference next week – where it is currently in the stage where everyone wrote their section; but soon it needs to be massaged to be coherent across everyone.

High Level Collaboration

High level complex communication happens when ALL the other types of communication are happening. Interesting.

Informal co-creation projects also have these same graphs – 2% of projects have more than 10 developers. Clay Shirkey has similar graphs for contributions to Wikipedia and other mass collaboration projects. Is it really just standard human behavior that 20% of the people do 80% of the work?

Scaffolding and Assessment

Work is needed on how to develop strategies for scaffolding online student collaboration.

If a wiki rubric is looking for x number of paragraphs, x number of links, and x images; then the teacher is evaluating students’ ability to follow directions; not the high level 21st century learning skills the teachers might say is why they are using the wiki in the first place. Pretty strong message on thinking through assessment.

In the Q&A, an interesting discussion of what collaboration is and what quality is. Justin thinks that it’s really that two students have text on the same page. Someone questioned that though – could collaboration and quality be much broader than that? He agrees that their instrument misses much context. Another person added that another indicator might be how linking happens. Makes me think of Silvia Tolisano’s recent writing on hyperlinked writing. This may be another piece of wiki quality as well. A practitioner in the room asked, given all this, what is the point of using wikis in my classroom? Flat Classroom came up several times. Justin gave the example of southern all white students who are strongly anti-racist because of their participation in Flat Classroom. That is very powerful learning.

Anne Frank Confronts Queen Isabella: Learning Phenomena in Historical, Cultural and Social On-Line Simulation Games

Session Title: Anne Frank Confronts Queen Isabella: Learning Phenomena in Historical, Cultural and Social On-Line Simulation Games

Chairs: Jennifer Killham and Miriam Raider-Roth (University of Cincinnati)

I’m at the AERA Conference 2012, and finally getting to blog a conference since I started my new job. My first session is on online simulation games. It started with an argument between two of the presenters dressed and acting as Queen Isabella and Anne Frank (shown posed after the session). 

They have a site called Place Out of Time (POOT) – and has a sister project called Jewish Court of All Time (JCAT). The JCAT project grew out of POOT and attempts to create the same type of opportunities for Jewish day schools.

It’s a great project based at the University of Michigan (yay connections to my roots), and is also a partnership between higher ed and K12 (always exciting!) and a partnership with the Center for Studies in Jewish Education and Culture at the University of Cincinnati (yes! Distance cross-institution collaboration!).

They have lots of people involved: project directors, middle school students, action researchers…

From the University Professor’s View

Presenter: Jeff Stanzler, University of Michigan – Ann Arbor
Paper Co-Authors: Michael Fahy, University of Michigan – Ann Arbor; Jeff P. Kupperman, University of Michigan – Flint)

These are Interactive Communications and Simulations at the University of Michigan. They are trying to create web-based writing projects and simulations that have challenging and dynamic environments.

Courses taught at the U of M and the U of Cincinnati with a university course that accompanies it. The undergraduate and graduate level students are mentoring the middle/high school students in the interaction. How cool is that?! So many possibilities and ideas are coming to mind.

All of the scenarios are based on a trial scenario and each participant comes as a historical, literary or invented characters – and to use the wisdom of history to do purposeful intellectual work. There is a dynamic story built with public and private discussions / interactions among the students. This scenario also includes evaluation of historical evidence. Interaction!! Need some ways to build interaction into online learning? Good ideas here!

Important points to make this scenario / simulation work includes learning communities and self as learner – students work through identity issues looking at who they are and who their character is – and need to do that in a safe way. It’s also important to have a playful  spirit while trying on different voices; and to experience the work of the historian.

If students are portraying a character talking to another character out of time, there is no way they can find the right answer. It generates serious moments of original research to try to imagine what they might say to each other based on historical evidence.

Reference: R.G. Collingwood: using historical imagination. (That’s not the actual reference but an interesting analysis of it.)

In the weekly meetings, the professor and students discuss where the learning moments are.

In working through portraying characters, they start with discussions that have them describe what items their character has brought. Then they examine issues (such as reparations for a historical wrong), and then examine a primary source document of historical evidence – to think from the character’s point of view.

These discussions are all done in an asynchronous discussion board – their pictures are representing

In the class, Jeff works with the mentors (graduate/undergraduate) to have them think through how to get the students to respond in a way that is more thoughtful – and to build on the comments students have had so far.

From the Communication Researcher’s View

Presenter: Jonathan D’Angelo, University of Wisconsin – Madison
Paper Co-Authors: Susan Kline, The Ohio State University

Reflecting on the simulation scenario: Online educational games are becoming an increasingly popular way to increase students’ subject knowledge while engaging them in critical thinking. Students these days aren’t very good at arguing, but these are important skills. This scaffolded interaction is a way to push them harder. So for example – the conversations are actually between a middle/high school student and the undergraduate/graduate student – this way students are talking with someone a bit smarter than them to push them harder in their conversation.

The research part of this project was hypothesizing that students would express greater awareness of other perspectives and that their argumentation skills would increase. As might be expected, they  found a significant increase in awareness of other perspectives and argumentation skills over the 10 weeks of the course/project.

Theoretical explanation: “Cognitive apprenticeship is taking place… instruction is mediated by mentors who engage in conversation via online communications – the mentors are showing students rather than explaining how to perform in an argument.”

Teachers don’t generally use Place Out of Time to teach argumentation – they use it for world history. But this skill seems to be a by-product.

We are thinking of rewriting the Griggs History of World Civilizations classes, and this type of simulation would be an excellent format to include or to base the class on.

From the Teachers’ View

Presenter: Aimee DeNoyelles, University of Central Florida

Paper Co-Author: Miriam B. Raider-Roth, University of Cincinnati

The teachers participating in this project were from Canada, Florida, and other locations across the country. In addition to the simulation, they had an online learning community for the teachers who were using JCAT in their classroom. Almost all of them had never even used a simulation in their classroom or tried to integrate it in their curriculum.

They used a WordPress site to host an online asynchronous discussion (JCAT Talk) for teachers to talk to each other as well as Adobe Connect for realtime conversations (they used video, poll, collaborative note taking, and chat. The teachers voted on the topics they would discuss each time. Adobe Connect was nice for live; but it was incredibly hard to get the time zones lined up. A few mic issues were challenging also.

Because they tried both, they had some questions about which method was better, so they did an action research project to think about their process. They did a mini-cycle of research – analyzing each week’s communication – both JCAT Talk and Adobe Connect – and used that for the research as well as to plan the next week’s interactions.

Teachers reflected on “self-as-teacher”: juggling their roles as character and identity, as well as teacher responsibilities – how it works; and to discuss the challenges.  Challenging and practical reflection happened more often in Adobe Connect. Teachers also reflected as the “students-in-relation”. Connect allowed for immediate feedback when discussing issues such as how to help students maintain their characters’ voices. Teachers bridged between the mentors and the students.

They recommended using the Connect and Talk (synchronous and asynchronous) to be complementary – not duplication. Some people preferred the Connect and some preferred the JCAT Talk. Connect was where they shared challenges more than in the asynchronous JCAT Talk. I’m really interested in this comparison and use of both synchronous and asynchronous and people who are thinking through which to use  when and what the challenges are for each.

From the Action Researchers’ View

Presenters: Jennifer Elaine Killham, Susan P. Tyler, University of Cincinnati

The University of Cincinnati’s contribution to this project is the action research of the mentoring relationship – particularly from the mentors’ perspectives. They started the research as participant observers, then analyzed the posts, interviewed mentors, and then did detailed analysis.

The mentors were University of Michigan pre-service teachers.  Interesting that the researchers are at one university and the participants are at another. This is the type of cross-institution collaboration that I’m seriously interested in!

Mentors were encouraged to bring a complex subject such as geopolitical conflict to the playground where students could understand: fair and not fair. Same concept – at a level that students can understand.

Reflections

  • For research formats and presentations at AERA: That one project can have three research projects examining different angles of the rich online community.
  • A little thing: interesting to see what seemed to be an age difference in the look of the PowerPoints. The younger researchers seem to be influenced by Presentation Zen in how their Powerpoints look. And from a newbie perspective – how a PowerPoint of just visuals makes you listen more carefully because the words aren’t there in bullets where you can read them faster than the presenter can talk.
  • Creative destruction: the idea of using new high end technology rich learning environments to destroy other low end teaching practices.  (via Discussant Jeremiah Isaac Holden, University of Wisconsin – Madison)
  • Wow! For my first 2012 AERA session, I’m super inspired and my brain is swimming with ideas.
  • Thinking about a small private university where I work (Andrews University), do we have the support and resources to pull off a collaboration like this between multiple universities and supporting many K12 schools? I hope when things settle down with our merger that we could do at least one major project like this that we run and improve every year.
  • In looking at where all the presenters and paper authors that work, I’m thinking about collaboration: There are two “heavyweights” in the collaboration whose work spaces make room for significant time on the projects – U of M and U of Cinncinati. But around them are many others contributing – and there is mentorship going on with the professors and doctoral students, as well as the relationships with the K12 schools/teachers.
  • Every “situation” that arises out of the scenarios is seen as an opportunity. An opportunity for learning. Every student has an adult keeping an eye on them as mentorship.

References:

Papers presented at this session were

1.    Mentoring in Online Simulation: Shaping Preservice Teachers for Tomorrow’s Roles Jennifer Elaine Killham, University of Cincinnati; Susan P. Tyler, University of Cincinnati; Miriam B. Raider-Roth, University of Cincinnati

2.    Being an “Agent Provocateur”: Utilizing Online Spaces for Teacher Professional Development in Virtual Simulation Games Aimee DeNoyelles, University of Central Florida; Miriam B. Raider-Roth, University of Cincinnati

3.    Argumentative Discourse Skill Development in Online Educational Simulations: How George Carlin Can Teach Critical Thinking Jonathan D’Angelo, University of Wisconsin – Madison; Susan Kline, The Ohio State University

4.    “A Placement at Masada”: Supporting Novice Teachers in the Jewish Court of All Time Project Michael Fahy, University of Michigan – Ann Arbor; Jeff P. Kupperman, University of Michigan – Flint; Jeff Stanzler, University of Michigan – Ann Arbor

Learning is the Work

As you may have surmised from the changes in my blog and Twitter feed, I’ve been swamped in recent changes in my life! Not only have I changed jobs, but I moved into the middle of a merger between Griggs University and Andrews University. As I’ve been experiencing this change, I keep reflecting on a book I read during my studies on change: The Six Secrets of Change: What the Best Leaders Do to Help Their Organizations Survive and Thrive.

Six Secrets of Change

The six secrets are:

  • Love Your Employees
  • Connect Peers with Purpose
  • Capacity Building Prevails
  • Learning Is the Work
  • Transparency Rules
  • Systems Learn

Learning is the Work

I’ve been thinking particularly about the learning. Learning is the work. Systems learn. Learning is the work.

We have so much learning to do, it’s hard to know where to even start!

  • With a 60% staff turn over, we had to learn how to do things “the Griggs way”.
  • We had to learn how to work with each other.
  • We have to learn the “Andrews way”.
  • We have to learn and create new ways of doing things.
  • Some of us have great tech skills in some areas; others need to learn those skills.

Ways We Are Learning

Photo by psutlt

Remembering that learning is the work keeps me focused on the importance of taking time to learn and to teach each other. Here are some ways we are doing that:

  • Lunch and Learn. Our technology committee has scheduled bimonthly Lunch and Learn sessions. We have shared tips for using Outlook/Exchange, how the copier scans to the shared drive, email and computer security, for a few examples. They are not formal workshops, just informal sharing times where everyone asks questions and shares tips.
  • Departmental informal learning. Within my department, we have lots of learning happening! Student workers teaching each other, staff teaching each other. We are trading knowledge and sharing what we know, not just about technology tools, but how the university works.
  • Faculty Institute. Andrews University is starting a two day Faculty Institute in the fall. We will have two strands of sessions on online learning and educational technology topics. The expectation is that this training continues on through the school year.

 What about you?

In what ways is learning the work for you?

Zoho Project Management

One of the online collaborative tools I’ve been learning lately is project management software. We are playing with Zoho Project Management (selected due to it’s integration with GoogleDocs). I’d heard of project management software before but didn’t really have a need for it.

Course Production

Photo by striatic

We (Andrews University) inherited 120 courses through the merger with Griggs University. These courses are in need of upgrading. After spending several months getting a handle on the state of the courses, how they were used, and stats about them, I knew that we needed some method to manage the work of the upgrades. In addition, we have several staff working on the project. I wanted a way that everyone involved could see the work to be done and could even pick next projects on their own. Self management is possible if everyone is trained and can see the pile of work!

We have several different categories of people working on the courses:

  • Student workers
  • Staff
  • Instructional designers
  • Course authors (subject matter specialist)
  • Two of us are supervising the student workers

All of these people have logins to the Zoho site except for the course authors. But we did make a dummy account called “AUTHOR” so we could mark and track various tasks that the course author is doing.

Zoho Projects Features

We are using only a few of the features of the site:

  • Tasks. We have a Task List for each course. We may assign work to the students, or they can also assign themselves to a job. They know to pick a job that they are trained on. Within Tasks, each job has a completion graph. Everyone is putting the percent finished at the end of each day so we can monitor progress and who will need another job soon.
  • Milestones. At the moment we have four milestones. We are using them as big categories for the sets of courses we are working on. We have a deadline for each milestone.
  • Wiki. We have a couple pages with instructions, and have collected a few supporting links.
  • Documents. We haven’t put up too many documents – a few syllabi in progress. Most of our documents are on our shared drive for courses instead.
  • Dashboard. The dashboard is fun to see our progress.

Other Uses

Now that we have a system going with Zoho Projects for our course development, I’m starting to think about other ways we could use this.

  • Online Course Approvals. We have an Online Course Approval process that is required by our accrediting agency (NCA HLC). We have built a process that divides the work among the committee members. I’m thinking that Zoho Projects might be helpful for tracking the work.
  • Dissertations. One of my assignments is to figure out a way to track dissertation progress and provide online tools that support it. We have a few doctoral level degrees in the School of Education that are online – and an online tool to support the dissertation/thesis process could be very helpful. I haven’t seen anything online designed specifically for this, so it seems maybe project management software would help. We could have document versions, task and calendar tracking, as well as discussion areas. I have questions around this still, but am thinking about it.

We currently have one Zoho Projects site, which is free. If we expand, we’ll probably look into getting into some type of campus wide plan. But so far we’re not ready to think about that!

What about you? Do you have any large scale projects that need managing? How do you track them? What tips do you have?

 

Reflecting on Federal Definitions of Interaction

Since January, I’ve been working hard on creating new Andrews University definitions of distance education that match these federal definitions (34 Code of Federal Regulations 602.3):

Correspondence education means:

Education provided through one or more courses by an institution under which the institution provides instructional materials, by mail or electronic transmission, including examinations on the materials, to students who are separated from the instructor.

  • Interaction between the instructor and the student is limited, is not regular and substantive, and is primarily initiated by the student.
  • Correspondence courses are typically self-paced.
  • Correspondence education is not distance education.

Distance education means:

Education that uses one or more of the technologies listed in paragraphs (1) through (4) to deliver instruction to students who are separated from the instructor and to support regular and substantive interaction between the students and the instructor, either synchronously or asynchronously. The technologies may include:

  1. The internet;
  2. One-way and two-way transmissions through open broadcast, closed circuit, cable, microwave, broadband lines, fiber optics, satellite, or wireless communications devices;
  3. Audio conferencing; or
  4. Video cassettes, DVDs, and CD-ROMs, if the cassettes, DVDs, or CD-ROMs are used in a course in conjunction with any of the technologies listed in paragraphs (1) through (3).

Interaction!

The emphasis in the quotes above is mine. I find it very interesting that the focus of the difference between the two types of education is interaction. It reminds me of the development of the AVLN standards in the early 2000s. What did we emphasize? Interaction:

Courses developed shall address the relational basis of learning

  • a design for interaction between learner and content
  • a design for interaction between learner and learner
  • a design for interaction between learner and teacher
  • a design for interaction between learner and self (reflection)
  • a design for interaction between learner and the community (includes service)
Interaction (photo by ConferenceBasics)

At best, correspondence courses only address the interaction between learner and content, and learner and self; and may not even do reflection well if the course uses primarily objective assessment methods like multiple choice, true/false, and matching.

Is Correspondence “Old”?

I have found it interesting to observe the objections and concerns on campus about the term correspondence. It is a term that makes people think of paper correspondence courses from the World War II era. However, given the federal definitions, many online courses are actually correspondence courses!

  • Courses that are self-directed and self-paced (what about independent studies?!)
  • The concept of putting syllabi and PowerPoints online to make an “online course”. Problematic! No interaction!
  • Even a course consisting of video clips, recorded lectures, either online streaming or on DVD/CD is correspondence is there isn’t INTERACTION.
  • If a course doesn’t have a thriving discussion area, is it correspondence?
  • If a course consists of readings, assignments turned in to the instructor, and the instructor never initiates communication with the student, is it correspondence?

Reflection

When you really think through the ramifications of these definitions, it raises the bar for the quality of the course!

I can see a focus emerging for faculty development workshops in the coming months: interaction. What is it? What does it look like? How do you design for it?

I know Carol Skyring has been researching interaction and some of you are constantly thinking about it as well. What other tips and resources do you suggest for ensuring quality interactions in all forms of distance education?

Estimation Applied to Course Production

A few years ago, my brother, a programmer, shared with me the concepts and challenges with estimating time for software development. For example, as addressed in Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art. I’ve found the concept interesting before, but now more applicable in my work.

Bean Counting! (Photo by cookbookman17)

Griggs University brought about 120 distance education courses to Andrews University, and many of them are in need of upgrades and complete rewrites.

Part of my recent work has been to start developing a system of course development and revision. As I organize a small force (army?) of student workers and staff to work on courses, I’ve been looking more closely at estimation. I am heading towards having an estimate for how long it takes to do certain sets of jobs – like creating quizzes, applying CSS designs to content pages, etc.

This includes teaching my workers how to do their own estimation for converting lessons to HTML pages with appropriate CSS applied. In one case, we thought through carefully two different ways to approach the estimation process. I thought it might be helpful to share here two simple methods that I taught:

Approach #1: Starting with known amount of time on a task

If you know how much time it takes to do a certain task, then you can estimate how long it will take 10 or 20 items of the same type of task.

So, the question is: Given a known amount of time to finish a task, how long will it take to finish x tasks?

For example: given 1.5 hours to finish 1 lesson how long will it take to finish 40 lessons from where I am now.

Steps:

  • 40-14 = 26 (40 lessons – 14 done = 26 lessons to do)
  • 26×1.5 = 39 (26 lessons left x 1.5 hours to do the lesson = 39 hours to complete goal). Round up to 40 hours; which is about 5 days of work
  • Given that 80-90% of work day is accomplishing tasks; 10-20% is interruptions and breaks etc. …
  • 40 hours x 10% is 4 more hours; so that is about 45 hours actually accounting for breaks etc. Or a better more generous estimate would 45-50 hours left for this job.

Approach #2: Starting with a desired end time (pedal to the metal method)

If you have a desired end time, then you can estimate how fast each task needs to be completed.

So the question is: Given a specific deadline; how fast do I need to do each task?

For example: Given that I want to finish 26 lessons by the end of the day on Thursday, and it is now Tuesday afternoon, how fast do I need to do each lesson?

Steps:

  •  I have 26 lessons left (40-14=26 see above).
  • In two days (Wed & Thu) I plan to work 9 hour days with an hour of interruptions and breaks, so I can estimate about 8 hours a day per day.
  • 16/26 = .61 (16 hours divided by 26 lessons = the fraction of an hour that I need finish a lesson in)
  • Convert the decimal to hours:.61 x 60 minutes = 36 minutes per lesson

Reflection

I’ve come to the conclusion that this type of thinking isn’t necessary “caught” or “taught” in our high schools and colleges. Students may know what estimation is, but might not be able to apply it to real-life scenarios when they graduate.

What do you think? I realize this is a very simplistic method to estimate how we are doing in our work, but it’s a start. Do you try to estimate progress on online course development? How do you do it? What data do you collect and track?