VC Benefits Student Motivation and Discipline

Do you think that videoconferencing benefits student motivation and discipline? This would make a great research question. But here’s an anecdote from a teacher who participated in ASK: Night of the Twisters with Region 12’s weather guy, Rusty.

The kids really enjoyed it, and here I was so worried about my 30 students from last hour. They were on their best behavior.

We’ve had local teachers cancel programs because they were worried about student behavior. But I’ve also heard many stories like this one where the students behaved much better than the teacher expected. Do you have any stories to share either way?

Newman Workshop at Andrews Fall 2007: Chapter 1 & 2 of the Dissertation

The following are notes and scribbles from my attendance at the Nov. 8-11 Doctoral Dissertation Workshop with Dr. Isadore Newman.

This workshop is mainly for the faculty to learn the process of working with doctoral students and for doctoral students to learn the process of writing a dissertation. Three students were selected for the “fish bowl” section of the workshop and I was one of them.

These notes are from Dr. Newman’s instruction on Friday morning on chapter 1 and 2 of the dissertation.

Formatting
If you’re reading a book about dissertations, etc. for example Newman’s Theses and Dissertations, and it conflicts with what your committee is saying, your committee is right. There are institutional documents that you have to follow.

“APA Research Style Crib Sheet” it’s all the things you need to know in 10 or 12 pages. By Russ Dewey

You have to follow APA style with AU formatting. Bonnie Proctor likes to receive your document two times. She gives you feedback on one chapter early on; and she expects you to generalize that learning to the rest of your chapters. Then she gets the document at the very end of the dissertation process too.

Chapter 1: Title, Purpose, Problem
Quotes: Chapter 1: “You need to have a lot of ideas, and then you have to throw away the bad ones.” Linus Pauling

The problem section presents a formal and succinct statement of the problem to be investigated. It answers the question of WHAT is being done in the study.

In chapter one you’ll also describe the underlying assumptions.

Chapter 2: Literature Review
Chapter 2: “Believe nothing and be on guard against everything.” Latin Proverb
“These are not my figures I’m quoting. They’re from someone who knows what he’s talking about.” US Congressperson in a debate

Start chapter 2 with your research question. Indicate how each set of reviews is related to your research question. End the literature review with, the literature didn’t answer this question; therefore my study fills this hole in the literature.

A chapter 2 should be able to be picked up and published as a review of the literature.

The dissertation format is very redundant. Chapter 1 should stand alone. Chapter 2 should stand alone.

They want all of our literature reviews to be at the evaluation level of Bloom’s Taxomony. The lowest level, knowledge, looks like a bunch of abstracts. At the evaluation level, the lit review estimates the quality of articles and validity of the findings. The lit review should critique the articles’ strengths, weaknesses, and limitations. It is a thematic organization of the literature; not by article. Logical synthesized conclusions are based on the literature. The synthesis includes connecting themes, integrating, comparing and contrasting.

If there’s “nothing good out there”, it justifies my study. Point it out in your literature review. But make sure you do a good search. Search the citation index as well. Search using the following keywords: meta-analysis or meta-synthesis. When you evaluate one, look at how they searched the literature.  The literature is biased towards significance. The non-significance studies don’t get into the literature. Dissertations and federal and technical reports don’t have to be significant. Indicate the sources – are they just refereed journals? If so then it’s statistically biased towards significance. The other sources – dissertations and technical reports may have useful information too.

ERIC is another important place to search for technical and federal reports. There are 3 or 4 ERIC searches, so be sure to check them all.

Chapter 2 includes what databases you used for your searches. There are lots of sources, but be sure you tell which ones you referenced.

If you can’t find a meta-analysis, you look at literature reviews in dissertations on your topic.

A meta-analysis – the “n” is the number of studies. Is there a difference among the treatment groups over the n number of studies.

Don’t forget to use Boolean searches: “and”, “or”, “not” “near” parenthesis, asterisk.
The asterisk is the most interesting – put motiv* – motivation, motivating, etc.

You might even use popular magazines or advertisements, but you would do it to tell what the popular belief system is to make a point. But you wouldn’t treat it the same as a research article.

Ed Researcher: Boote & Beile: Scholars Before Researchers: On the Centrality of the Dissertation Literature Review in Research Preparation. Maxwell responded to this and these two have debated back and forth about the research.

The Boote & Beile article has the literature review scoring rubric in it that they handed out.

Keep your references in EndNotes and it will save you hundreds of hours finding the references. In the latest version, you can link the Word, HTML or PDF file of the full text article in Endnotes.

Chapter 1 Reviewed
Then come back to chapter 1. Does anything in the review of the literature change what you wrote in chapter 1? Then you’ll adapt.

p. 175 – chapter 6 – A Handbook for mixed methodology. This was copied as a handout. A typology of research purposes and its relationship to mixed methods. Page 175 has a list of research purposes. To Predict. To add to the knowledge base. To have a personal, social, institutional or organization impact. To measure change. To understand complex phenomena. To test new ideas. To generate new ideas. To inform constituencies. To examine the past.

Another handout has a list of things that should be in the dissertation – but also in research projects. So this would be very helpful on what should be included in the final project for EDRM 611 that I’m in right now. Here it is in summary:

Chapter/Heading 1: Introduction
•    Contains a good summary of the background
•    Contains a clear statement of the problem
•    Theoretical frame of the research
•    General hypthoses or research questions clearly stated
•    Appropriate assumptions stated
•    Delimitations of the study stated
•    Presented a good and clear set of operational definitions
•    Presenter a clear summary of this section

He skips the lit review because this is from a methods class and he leaves the lit review to the content people.

Chapter/Heading 3: Method
•    Start with a paragraph telling how the chapter is organized.
•    Presented a comprehensive description of participants (who they were, where they came from, age, racial-ethnic identity, gender, SES, etc.)
•    Presented a clear and detailed procedure of how the data were collected
•    Presented a good description of the instruments (why chosen, reliability, validity, usability)
•    Hypotheses are clearly stated
•    Presented the statistical methods needed to test the hypotheses
•    Presented a clear explanation of the research design
•    Presented a clear summary of this section

Chapter/Heading 4: Results
•    Presented the results objectively
•    The results summarized in tables that are clear and easy to read
•    Presented a clear summary of this section

Chapter/Heading 5: Discussion, Conclusion, and Implications
•    Presented a concise restatement of the problem
•    Contains a concise restatement of the method, focusing on the major points.
•    Presented a restatement of the hypotheses and the results for each hypothesis.
•    Presented conclusions and discussion of the findings in great detail.
•    The conclusions were based in the findings and avoided assumptions and inferences.
•    Provided appropriate implications and inferences.
•    Presented suggested applications of the findings that are reasonable.
•    Presented suggestions for further research.
•    Presented a clear summary of this section.

Some other notes on research design:
How large should your sample be? From Conducting Survey Research.
If your population is, your sample should be: – from his book.
15 – 15
300 – 170
500 – 218
1000  – 275
50000  – 381
1 million  – 385

You don’t want a significant difference in age, ethnicity, or gender between your sample and the population.

No instrument is ever reliable or valid. We have an estimate of the reliability. Some instruments have been used on so many populations that they have a really high reliability. It’s sample specific. Instead you have “this instrument has good estimates of reliability on a number of studies.” You should always run a reliability

Put your data in and SPSS can give you reliability results. Look in SPSS for: Internal Consistency. Cronbach’s alpha test. Percentage of agreement.

Newman’s bias: State the hypothesis you’re interested in interpreting, which is the research hypothesis. The null hypothesis is what you test; the research hypothesis is what you are interpreting. The research hypothesis has the directionality in it. If he sees the research hypothesis, he can state the null. But if he sees the null, he can’t always state the research hypothesis. So Newman prefers to see the research hypothesis. But he also says that whatever your committee says is right. If you keep it consistent throughout the writing, all null or all research, it will be easier to read/understand the study.

Start with a dissertation that’s really close to what you’re doing. Then find another meta-analysis. Then find the other little ones that fill in the gaps.

Time for lunch. Stay tuned for this afternoon.

Definition of Successful Implementation of Curriculum Videoconferencing

Here’s a question for you. How do you define the successful implementation of curriculum videoconferencing in a building? How do you measure it? What does “successful” curriculum videoconferencing in a building look like?

Total Events?
When we first starting using VC, from about 1999-2005 or so, we had access only in the high schools. Elementary and middle school teachers used it occasionally for activities that seemed worth getting a bus to the high school to experience. During this time we counted how many videoconferences a district did each year. Districts that used it for 20-40 curriculum videoconferences a year were our “high use” districts. The others did 2-5 or so per year.

Total Events and Percentage of Teacher Use
Last year was the first year most of our districts had access to VC in all of their buildings. District use shot up to 80-90 curriculum videoconferences in some areas. Some buildings alone were doing 50+ conferences with individual teachers using it at least twice in the year. So last year, for the first time, we starting counting the number of teachers who participated in a videoconference at least once throughout the year. That number, combined with the total number of events for a building, gives a picture not only of how much they use it, but the breadth of implementation across all the teachers in the building. For the first time, I have building coordinators setting a goal for this year to have EVERY teacher participate in at least one event this year.

Is “More Use” Success?
So here’s the question. If we are only counting how much they use it, does that imply “using it more” is success? Does that imply we believe everyone should use it at least once a year? Do we believe that everyone should use it every year? If this measurement of success isn’t “up to par”, then what would be?

Effectiveness?
Someone suggested to me last evening that I should be measuring the “effectiveness” of curriculum videoconferencing. I’m not sure about this. What do you think? Can you measure the effectiveness of VC in a school? I know for sure that we can measure the effectiveness of particular programs (ASK, content providers, MysteryQuest, Read Around the Planet, etc.). We do collect evaluation data on these events. But can we measure the effectiveness of VC in a school? What is the desired end result? Can a few 1-2 hour events through the year impact student achievement? Can a few events through the year impact the attitudes about students towards the world around them? Can a few events – or even one event – impact the students’ understanding of technology communication? What do you think?

Quality?
What about measuring the quality of the experiences? Isn’t that based more on what events the teachers choose, the money they have available to spend on content providers, etc? Would you say connecting to COSI for a live surgery is better quality than Monster Match? Is that a fair comparison? Don’t they both meet curriculum goals in unique ways?

Independence
What about the ability of the schools to use videoconferencing on their own? I think that increased use results in building coordinators and teachers able to connect and participate in videoconferences on their own. (Of course, they call for help when something major is broken.) So is their independence in using and creating videoconferencing experiences a measure of success? Or is that independence actually collected in how much they are using it? I don’t have any buildings using it at a high rate who aren’t able to connect & create their own VC experiences.

Integration into the Curriculum
Can we measure how well videoconferencing is integrated into the curriculum? Can we measure if the events participated in actually address curriculum goals? Would this be a measure of successful implementation?

What do you think? How do you know if the buildings you service, or even your own building, is successfully using videoconferencing? What is your definition of successful implementation? I really want to know!! So please comment!

Newman Workshop at Andrews Fall 2007: Trust, Feedback, and Dissertation Titles

The following are notes and scribbles from my attendance at the Nov. 8-11 Doctoral Dissertation Workshop with Dr. Isadore Newman.

This workshop is mainly for the faculty to learn the process of working with doctoral students and for doctoral students to learn the process of writing a dissertation. Three students were selected for the “fish bowl” section of the workshop and I was one of them.

These notes are from Dr. Newman’s introductory remarks about the process of writing a dissertation.

Trust
If you trust your chair and your committee, they can be critical and give you feedback and you can learn. If you don’t trust your chair, you’ll feel like “why is everyone out to get me”?

Purpose
In your purpose statement/paragraph you need to ask and answer the question – so what? Why are you studying this question?

Research Design – is in chapter three.
Make sure you’re clear on the difference between a procedure or a design.
Designs are: case study, quasi experimental, etc.

Don’t get tied up in the method. You have to let your title, purpose, and problem dictate your method. “Try to control your emotionality about that.”

The Process
He knows someone who did a dissertation in five weekends (wrote a chapter a weekend) (himself). He knows another person who was much brighter and took 10 years to do it (his wife).

PDS is pre-dissertation syndrome.

Dr. Newman told about a student that found that people who finished their dissertations were more neurotic than those who didn’t finish – they were more normal people.

Neurotic behaviors are what get you finished: structure in your life.

There’s a price to pay for not finishing. There’s a price to pay for finishing. Hopefully when you finish, you can switch back and be normal again.

One thing that helps is doing things in small pieces. Set small goals. Do little pieces. Don’t say I’m going to write chapter 1. Write the purpose. Get feedback. It’s easier to do 2-3 pages a day vs. 30 pages by the end of the month.

The Role of Feedback & Relating to Feedback/Criticism
Realize that no matter what you say, it’s going to be changed. The person giving you the feedback is giving you their time and their intent is to help you become successful.

When you send the document to the committee, ASK for criticism. What can I do to make this better? It frees your committee to be very candid with their feedback. Build an expectation for criticism and feedback. You want to help your committee to know that you won’t get mad or cry and walk away.

It is not intelligence that finishes the dissertation. It’s a style. It’s a support system. The workshop is to help give you a style.

It’s not going to be perfect. Is it “good enough”? Be willing to share it and get feedback. That’s a style.

The dissertation is the beginning of developing a scholarly community. You write, get feedback from your committee, and rewrite based on that. Same as writing articles. You get peer reviews and revise based on that. You are learning from a scholarly community. The dissertation is the beginning of learning to function in a scholarly community. The intent of the PhD is the way to develop people to contribute to the scholarly community.

The time to be the most critical is at the proposal stage. Proposals are a contract.

Who cares? That’s the importance of your study. Why is it important to do? That’s the purpose of your study.

Someone asked: how do you choose a chair?
Choose a chair who has a common interest in your topic. Choose a chair who is willing to take the time. That’s what most people say. Newman says it’s a two way street. You have to feel that the chair has the ability, skill, and knowledge to support you through the learning process. It’s one-to-one learning. You should have enough respect for them, to understand why they don’t like something. There’s probably a good reason. “I’m arguing with you because I respect you. If I’m arguing with you I can learn something from you.”

A dissertation to read: Jill from Akron. Who completes and who hasn’t completed dissertation. University of Akron. It’s online. 1500 subjects. Look it up & read it.

Someone asked: how do you deal with time constraints?
Time constraints. Do your reading in the bathroom. No one will bother you. Take an hour a day to do the reading. Don’t look for large blocks of time. Instead take short periods of time and work on it consistently. You should write at least an hour a day. You’ll continuity vs. if you do it for 10-12 hours on the weekend. Don’t stop at a place where you’re stopping. Go past that to a place where you have a place to start next.

“I’d rather read short pieces several times vs. a whole dissertation.”

You’ll have at least three first drafts. Dissertation writing is a different type of writing.

More on feedback & change.
Newman is a “statistical therapist.” People come with statistical problems and he helps solve them.

Every time you give something to someone to read, it’s going to change. So you should expect that.

The importance of the title
If you don’t have a title, then you don’t know what you want to do. The title is the summary of your summary. The title is an advance organizer (link). It gives you an expectation of what to look for. Does the title reflect the purpose? Are they consistent? Is the problem consistent with the purpose and the title? If not then we change it.

Take notes when you meet with your committee members and then read it back afterwards.

A few other scribbles
Purpose statement – a few paragraphs
Importance answers “who cares?”
The lit review has a section on each of the main key words in the title
Delimitations are the scope of the study
Limitations are the things that you couldn’t control in the study
Operational definitions of the terms are explained in chapter 3

After this, Dr. Newman worked with three of us just by asking us questions about our title, our purpose, and our problem. It was a lively discussion as it flip flopped between role playing (actual learning for us guinea pigs) and the audience commenting and asking questions on the process and on our titles/purposes/problems. My brain is spinning from the discussion on mine and I need to write and think more to be able to share. But this was the gist of the 1st section of this weekend workshop.

Dialing Insanity

I’ve written before about the problems with dialing that happen with our K12 collaborative projects. Here’s one of my really sticky examples from this week.

  • School A, one of my schools, can only dial out due to the district firewall.
  • Their partner’s school B has an IP plus extension dialing (I think it’s behind a Polycom V2IU). My school couldn’t call it. After some experimentation, I figured out that if our units are registered to our TANDBERG gatekeeper, they can’t call extensions.
  • So we tried to unregister, but the unit had an admin password on it that I didn’t have record of. Thankfully the district tech figured that out.
  • Sometimes I can put it up on my TANDBERG MPS MCU, but I have it set up with conference 1 as the one conference that people outside can dial into with just the MCU’s IP address. That conference was already in use during the time their program was scheduled. I couldn’t use one of the other conferences to dial out to school B because I can’t call out to an IP plus extension from our bridge unless the bridge unregisters from the gatekeeper & then my other conferences won’t work.
  • So I begged School B’s educational service agency to connect with their Polycom MGC. They can connect their school & have my School A’s unit dial in without any gatekeeper problems. So voila, it worked! Whew.

I realize that I could have my MCU set with the Single Dialin Number, but I haven’t had good luck with other schools being able to navigate the menus. So I’m not quite ready to switch to that model.

Here is a second scenario; not quite as complicated.

  • My School C is behind a Polycom V2IU and the connection requires an IP plus extension to dial in.
  • The partner class, School D, is new to VC. They appear to be set up for dial out only.
  • They have a Tandberg 6000 which can’t dial the IP plus extension.
  • In this case, my conference 1 is available on the bridge, so that’s how they are connecting. Whew. Another connection solved.

Remember the days of ISDN? Have I forgotten already? or does it seem to you also that dialing was easier then. The teacher/building coordinator in School A mentioned that this is the reason other teachers don’t want to try videoconferencing.

Are you running into the same issues? Do you have any interesting scenarios of trying to make a connection to work?

Live Surgeries from LSC

Hey! Check this out. I was just wandering across the Internet and ran across this: Live Surgeries from Liberty Science Center. But, upon reading further, it sounds like an opportunity that you can only access while you are physically AT the Liberty Science Center. It’s an interesting model.

We’ve all been connecting to museums and science centers offer content from their location to schools. Here is one using VC to bring content to students who are visiting their center on a field trip.

What will they think of next?

I just wish this was offered to outside schools too!!

H.239 and MCUs

Recently, I was reading the release notes for the latest version of the TANDBERG MPS MCU software after we upgraded our bridge. I noticed a section about H.239 that indicated that passing the H.239 streams between different types of bridges – the Polycom MGC, Codian, TANDBERG, still doesn’t work consistently. There are known issues.

I’ve written already about other scenarios I’ve seen where H.239 doesn’t work.  The MCUs talking to each other seems to be another area of potential conflict.

So if you have a unit that does H.239, you should always have a back up plan for showing your visuals. I’m thinking specifically of MysteryQuest where we connect a lot of different types of endpoints in the same conference, and even Read Around the Planet.

Note: If you are reading this and it’s a few months or more past the date of posting, please test it out for yourself. I know the vendors are always working on these issues and they may have solved it by the time you read this.

Patchy Patch Cables

Have you ever found that your videoconference equipment has unexplained packet loss? Do you know how to find out if you are losing packets during a videoconference? Do you know what packets are?

I’m starting to teach my building coordinators how to pay attention to these things. This is the way I explain packet loss to them: Everything on the Internet is broken into little packets to send over the wire. With email, if a packet gets lost along the way, the receiving end asks for it again and eventually you get the whole email. With videoconferencing, if a packet is lost or arrives too late, it’s thrown away because the information is real time. Late information isn’t useful. This is what causes colored blocks on the screen. The information for that block didn’t come through.

Then I show them how to look at the packet loss during a connection. Most of my schools have Polycom VSXs. So I show them how to press the yellow Help button during a call to get the call statistics. (Unless that button has been reprogrammed for another feature. Also can someone reply & share how to do this on other units?)

I tell my building coordinators also that usually they can’t do anything about it and neither can I. However it can give us useful information.

For example, if usually you get 1% of less packet loss and suddenly you’re getting 5-7%, then you should tell your techs. Something might be up with the network. They say that 2% and below is tolerable; but if you get higher than 2% you really start to notice and it can affect the educational quality of the experience. Sometimes the packet loss in a videoconference is an early warning of problems with a router or switch. In this way, VC can be the “canary in the coal mine” for network health.

In two of my buildings this fall, we had some unexplained packet loss. In theory everything else on the network should have meant that they would get a solid 0% packet loss connection. But they were still losing packets to an annoying level.

Come to find out in both situations, the patch cable (also known as the ethernet cable) from the Polycom to the jack in the wall was bad. In one situation I actually saw the cable. It was quite mangled and the cart wheels had rolled over it enough to flatten one section. We swapped out the cable, and voila! 0% packet loss like it should have been.

So, if you have unexplained packet loss, check out your patch cable! Sometimes we forget about the wear and tear on technology in schools. That cable might be due for a change.

Planned Pauses

Here’s a little tidbit I learned from a participant in one of my online classes (who prefers to remain anonymous). Plan pauses into the agenda for your videoconferences. 

For example,  after one class presents, mute for a few minutes and debrief with your class. What feedback might you want to give them? What constructive comments could you share?

Another appropriate time for a muted pause is just before asking questions of the other school. Have the students brainstorm what questions would be useful to ask.

These pauses can be like the Think Pair Share cooperative learning strategy. The think time (planned pause) gives the students opportunity to increase the quality of the interaction. Think time increases the depth of learning.

So, how have YOU used pauses in your videoconferences?