I love Monterey, California. AND i loved the New Media Consortium summer conference (#nmc2009), June 9, 2009 – June 13, 2009 in Monterey, California hosted by California State University, Monterey Bay. I was invited to present a 3.5 hour workshop, teaching outside the “box”, and was fortunate to have gotten approval to travel out of state to California to attend this conference and the Sloan-C emerging technologies conference in San Francisco back to back. My workshop was intimate (meaning small = 10 people : ) But being small and having 3.5 hours we got to know each other and i love this presentation where i get to show why, how, and what happened when i taught a course mostly outside the moodle “box using about 10 web2.0 tools. My prezentation was in prezi – you can browse my prezi here: teaching outside the “box” about a week prior to the conference and workshop i sent out some materials to the folks that had signed up for it so they would come prepared. I also asked participants to engage with me prior to the workshop, so that we could get to know each other, and so that i could get a sense of their expectations of me and the workshop… trying to be diligent and practice what i preach – i set up a voicethread for this.
Go ahead try it! I set it up so that anyone can contribute to it! Many of my prezentations often have the theme of the power of the social web, so prior to the workshop i tweeted asking my twitterpeeps for a shout out to the workshop participants as an illustration of the power of twitter and the social web as the most powerful professional development tool in the universe … this is a snapshot of some of what i got:
how cool is that!!!! @jimgroom @kathysierra @hrheingold are rock stars to me!!! at the time of this twitter stream i had never ever met any of them and yet they are in my “network” and willing to respond to me to help me illustrate the power of the social web!! Barbara and Carol are respected colleagues that i actually know. Suzanne and LillieJay are SUNY colleagues, JJ Johnson i had never met, but it turns out that he took an online course from me a couple of years ago, and the rest i have never met, but know from twitter. In addition to the twitter shout out i also posted a video in seesmic, a tool i don’t use in my online course, but a tool i feel has great potential to extend one’s learning community and can be used effectively to demonstrate the power of the social web. This is the response i got from that:
I loved my workshop. And i loved meeting the wonderful participants:
I think i am missing some, let me know and i will add you : ) The conference highlight for me was definitely meeting Kathy Sierra and being there to see her live giving her opening plenary – creating passionate learners. If you don’t know who she is, it doesn’t matter – you must watch this video!
Kathy Sierra – creating passionate learners – NMC 2009 opening keynote
I introduced myself to her after her presentation and stammered like a school girl meeting a Jonas brother… something like “hi kathy. blah blah blah (who i am). blah blah . . . I loved your presentation. blah blah…thanks so much for twittering for my workshop blah blah blah . . .” to which she replied “oh, you wrote the i-teach-like-a-girl blog post (where i describe the day i “met” her and how . . .) ” She really knew who i wuz! <<blush>> that was seriously cool. seriously. I loved her presentation. u must watch it now!
These are some of the sessions i attended:
More than meets the eye: using google earth and geospatial apps for story telling, teaching, and finding your way by Keene Haywood, University of Texas, Austin.
My take aways from the session:
I was completely lost in this presentation, but i know it was cool and awesome, i just didn’t understand what and how he was doing stuff.
Globally engaged, digitally enabled: harnessing web-based technologies for service learning and scholarly networking by Rick Jaffe and Noah Wittman, From the University of California, Berkeley. My take aways from the session:
I was kinda lost in this presentation, it was not what i expected. Surprised to hear presenter reading their presentation, and not having links ready to poke around in.
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) – Rubric for Online Instruction (ROI) by Brett Christie, Sonoma State University, CSU, and Peter DiFalco, CSU, Chico.
My take aways from the session: they had never heard of QM. This was a great presentation! Overview of UDL, their ROI (which i had never heard of), and accessibility. Their rubric of online instruction asks what does a high quality online course look like? it is lms agnostic, developed at CSU. Its use at CSU is voluntary. The way they connect UDL with their rubric and accessibility is very interesting. Their online resource of “suggested tools matrix” is fantastic! Would love to have Brett present at the SLN Summit. They help faculty learn about assistive technologies and the perspective of those that need them.
Very cool presentation.
After a long day of presentations i went looking for the 100s of baby seals that had been twittered about several times. After a very long walk (NB: Monterey is a penninsula. If you walk out to the ocean and turn right you won’t necessarily be walking in a northerly direction, as i found out the hard way : ) this is what i found:
Designing the Learning System: Building efficient Linkages between padagogy and institutional resources by Morgan Reid, University of British Columbia.
My take aways from the session: my favorite part of this presentation was learning about Etherpad and using http://etherpad.com/m5fkSNrpxK – very cool! Morgan was lovely to listen to not just because of how he pronounces “process” but because he is extremely articulate. According to Morgan:
what he is talking about is building a community of practice ala Etienne Wenger.
Using open content and the Collaboratory Model for real-world science learning by Megan Simmons, ISKME, and Amee Godwin, ISKME and OER Commons. Amee, as i mentioned earlier in this post, attended my workshop and as a result overnight changed her powerpoint in to a prezi – http://prezi.com/101757/view/ -how cool is that!!
my take aways from the session:
Other highlights for me were chatting with Larry Johnson and Gardner Campbell, and meeting Alan Levine for the first time in person. I also saw Dan Eastmond, now of WGU, and I also met tons of new people with whom i had great conversations and have a stack of business cards to prove it. Martos Hoffman, head of student research for the Globe program and Kathleen Heyworth from the Burchfield Penney Art Center at Bufalo State College, come to mind immediately and their possible interest in SecondLife : ) I also LOVED the pathable site, the conference organization (thanks Nancy!), the SecondLife streaming of the keynotes (watched Marco Torres’ plenary, it’s not about IT, it is about what we do with it! from SL http://www.flickr.com/photos/alexandrapickett/tags/nmc2009/show/) and the five minutes of fame!! – especially Jackie Gerstein ! !
I was very disappointed not to have had the opportunity to meet Jim Groom, whom i think was there, and Bryan Alexander, whom i know for sure was there. Both whom i would really love to meet someday.
During the conference i also tried to keep up with my online course, reviewed the faculty development proposals as track chair for the next Sloan-C ALN conference, and created my first video for the NUTN award acceptance ceremony – i got very little sleep that week. Personal highlights included my daughter and brother joining me in Monterey after the conference for a visit to the aquarium, a whale watch, a drive to moss landing where we saw 50+ wild and care-free fuzzy cute sea otters, not to mention tons of piled up sea lions ! ! !
loved loved loved this community and this conference!
forgive me, i am having an existential moment . . . i am reflecting on who i am and how i represent myself online. I have become increasingly self-conscious about this over the last 6 months, and by that i mean i have been noticing and observing things about myself and how i think, feel, act, and articulate myself online.
i use the social web professionally extensively. In addition to in my online teaching, i use the social web to connect with colleagues. I would characterize this as my primary use of the social web. In the beginning i used it exclusively professionally- to talk to and keep in touch with my professional community, and to share with them what i do – an amalgamation of professional networking, collaboration, and increasingly a significant component of my professional development -my own personal learning environment – helping me to keep up with who and what is going on in my field. I am always aware of my digital persona… I always have in the back of my mind when i post anywhere and anything “Larry Johnson, CEO of the New Media Consortium, will read this…” : ) And that awareness is very interesting to me when calibrated against my desire to authentically represent myself online. Yes, i filter. i am very conscious of my professional persona and protecting that. I am very well known in the national online education community and am adjunct faculty at UAlbany. i put energy and care into my digital presence and my online persona. The personal stuff creeping in is something i can’t control completely. I am sensitive and aware and i monitor.
A serendipity that i did not anticipate is this blurring of my personal and professional selves… i resisted it somewhat for the first 2 years and just in the last half year or so i have slowly noticed myself letting that blur happen and enjoying it…partly because friends and family have found me, and partly because i want my students and my professional community of followers to understand that i am multi-dimensional – that i am not just what i do. In my bios, one will note, that i have always said that i am 1. Isa’s mom, 2. an artist. and 3. that i know a little something about online learning : ) So this awareness of myself as a multi-dimensional being, and diligence at representing myself as such, has always been there unconsciously emblazoned publicly on all my profiles.
I am sprinkled all over the social web, twitter, diigo, delicious, facebook, seesmic, linkdin, spock, plaxo, youtube, slideshare, flickr, and on and on and on . . . There is something about the presentation of self online that requires these presences, and the little artifacts posted to each, to give one substance/credibility/real-ness online – they are a digital commodity – used to gain status, relevance – or merely as proof of one’s existence. I think of them as my footprints, a history and journal of sorts of my meanderings through the social web, and my thoughts and interactions along the way. I also think of them as extensions or facets of myself that when looked at as a whole do a pretty good job of representing me and what i care about. These little artifacts give me digital substance, that if lost, would be like loosing my memories, erasing my existence, and if deleted purposefully, would feel self-injurious… Richard Smyth has an extremely engaging notion of memories in the digital age http://www.slideshare.net/rsmyth/mnemonomics that has got me thinking a bit too about my memories and the digital pushpins and footprints that i leave online in facebook, twitter, etc., and that make up my digital self…these little inane pushpins in the time line of my social web life have become increasingly and inevitably a blurring of my personal and professional selves … i have been thinking about this a lot.
Richard talks about technology as aides de memoir – mnemonomics (managing memory) he describes as a theory for understanding web2.0, communications technology, and social networking as collaborative memory. Memory he says, started out as oral stories stored in human brains and exchanged f2f. Literary memory followed with the alphabet and print stored in books and libraries. Today, he says, our memory is increasingly stored electronically and digitally – evinced in social bookmarking, for example. He talks about the collective intelligence inherent in social networking, where who you know becomes how you know – epistemology as community. He asks: how is web2.0 changing the nature of memory? how do these technologies supplement our memory? how do they free our minds from having to remember?
From the profile fotos i post, to the little bios i am obliged to write on all the sites i join, i have noticed things. But, i only started noticing when they changed – recently. For example, since 1994 i have had one digital photo of myself that i have used professionally for all my profiles, publications, online and in print, etc. When i first digitized it 14 yrs ago, i probably “selected” it as a good likeness, nice composition, and a pretty image of me. After that though it was just alex.jpg, the image i used for everything. I didn’t think about it at all – for 14 years . . . in the facebook world where people change their profile images like socks, it just never occurred to me. (The same was true for me in SecondLife – i lived in my newbie skin for more than a year – i just didn’t occur to me to change it.) It was not until my friend, Thomas McGuiggan, from high school friended me that it started occurring to me. I wanted Tom to know what i look like today. I noticed. That old grainy orange-ish 14-year-old image of me just seemed wrong somehow. One minute the image was real enough, the next i felt self conscious that it was not my authentic self. I have changed my FB profile 3 times since February 2009. Not really sure why. Vanity -maybe. Because i can -probably. Because i am now aware of it- i think.
I think it really started when Elizabeth Hanson friended me in FB about 8 months ago … she is a friend that i feel really close to and love from college. She put up pictures from college, we talked in FB, other friends of ours joined…i got “engaged” in the whole FB thing … when the 25 random things meme went ’round Elizabeth’s was one of the first i read. I loved it. (I have a thing for a well turned phrase and Elizabeth is an artist with a pen.) I didn’t get tagged right away, but loved reading the notes of my friends and acquaintances. When i was tagged, i LOVED writing my 25 things. I had no problem coming up with 25 things … my master list was over 60 items. I also worked very hard on that list. I spent time making sure they were each just so. I also noticed that some of them, though completely “me,” I just could not post (even though part of me really wanted to). . . And so i filtered … consciously… and noticed that i was filtering. I had a conscious sense of observing myself prune that list down, however, interestingly enough i did not notice till after i posted, that none of my things have to do with what i do : ) weird right?! …not one of my 25 things random things about me has anything to do with my job … i totally love that! And i don’t understand it. It was a very interesting exercise for me that may have been a tipping point of sorts in some way.
Here is the time line as best as i can figure – June 2, 2008 and then again on June 13– i posted my first non work-related videos on YouTube. In August 2008 Elizabeth friended me and posted old college photos of us and our friends. January 6, 2009, my friend Kevin Lim twittered and blogged about changing the way he uses twitter (http://theory.isthereason.com/?p=2407) January 7 i posted my first twitpic – http://twitpic.com/photos/alexpickett – note that none of my twitpics are work related – these are posted to my twitter stream – the point being that this is not just in FB, but that this phenomenon is happening in all my social sites. January 9th Thomas friended me in FB. January 27 i read my friend Alex Ried’s wonderful blog post on why blogging is so hard (http://www.alex-reid.net/2009/01/why-blogging-is-hard.html). Approximately on February 1, 2009 Elizabeth deleted just about everything on her wall. (This astounded me. How could she do that – like she was erasing her memoires or part of herself – she points to her Virgo nature and penchant for tidiness and thinks of the FB wall as ephemera…) February 3 i posted my FB 25 random things about me. February 11th i changed my FB profile picture for the first time. February 15, pondering my friend’s wall deletion, I posted the question on seesmic, do you delete stuff you post? Around this same time i started actually visiting and hanging out in FB regularly, where previously i merely had my various feeds auto update my wall.
Alex Reid said in his digital digs blog post that these mundane little things. . .
…may not matter to you, but they matter to me. Of course twitter also becomes a way of sharing interesting things discovered online and having quick conversations, so it is not all daily minutiae. But my point is that even that minutiae can become a way of creating a networked identity that becomes a basis for stronger and more productive connections.
Kevin Lim in his theory is the reason blog post waxing philosophical about twitter noted:
Pragmatically, most would say that the conversation is a signature of being human, which in itself is a value which we cannot yet reproduce mechanically simply by constantly tweeting links. The reward of twitter was that our connections felt alive whenever someone @replies (reciprocates).
In a low-resolution environment of 140 characters, I thought I could get by with being human through a simple machine. On the contrary, twitter was about the celebration of being human, and I had a choice whether to partake in it.
My new friend George Siemens just wrote in his newsletter:
The internet, specifically social networking tools like Twitter, assaults the boundary between our private and public selves. The many representations of “George” – father, son, brother, employee, friend – move toward one on Facebook. Social networking and social theory explores this blurring of identities through Erving Goffman’s (a connection to Manitoba!) work: “front stage” and “back stage” concepts have been a useful way to understand social life. Goffman wrote in 1959 of how we keep certain information private, part of the process of impression management.” Impression management is not solely under our control. If you have presented at a conference, commented on a blog, or had someone take an image of you and post (and tag) on Flickr, you exist online. Others participate in defining and broadcasting who we are.
I don’t like thinking about it as “impression management.” And yet, there it is, no matter what i believe, we all filter and consciously or unconsciously make choices about how we represent ourselves online, in person, on the phone… etc. True, some people are (as my friend Kevin Lim says) more noise than signal – but being all signal is not right either. I want a balance in my life, and i want to connect with people that balance.
So, Sarah, i want to know that you found your pink hair dye today, and to see photos of the socks you knit, what you are making for dinner, and that your doppler is out of date. Your tweets are relevant to me. Alex, i want to know that you have contactors coming to your house today, about the demo in your department meeting, and that you showed your little girl twitter – and that you have a new blog post. I like the snark you sometimes have in your voice. Kevin, i LOVE hearing your twitter voice, knowing what you are eating for breakfast/lunch and what you are doing while you eat, and knowing that you get turned on by pedagogically-focused gaming links : ) George, I am interested in hearing about your parent-teacher conference and when you are looking for coffee… Because your “noise” gives you context and makes me feel closer, more connected to you and our common human-ness, which makes you more real to me, helps me trust you, and makes your “signal” to me, and its impact – that much more powerful.
I am what i bookmark and what digital breadcrumbs i leave about the net. I am who i know and who i interact with online. I am known by the digital pushpins and footprints i leave about. AND i am more than what i do for a living. It is really important to me that people know that – and that people know me – my real multi-dimensional self.
I started out today working on a web space for my daughters school parent council… went looking for free online web forms to incorporate for various purposes… found wufoo (which looks fantastic!) Read about the founders (love their voice/felt connected), wanted to know them more/better, clicked on their blog. Immediately clicked on the post “on asking users for their feelings” – thought about marti cleaveland and her work on emotional presence and also about getsatisfaction.com and how they ask you how you feel ….. and there i “met” kathy sierra. And now i want to really meet her.
Along the way, FYI, i also found this gem Seven rules for establishing a corporate presence on Twitter and viddler (“…So, to sum things up: you should use Viddler. The end.” This made me think of homer simpson (which makes me think of my husband – which makes me warm and fuzzy), laugh, and love the person behind that voice… same as the wufoo guys.) also incredibly cooltool that i can’t wait to play with.
So i “met” Kathy Sierra through her blog creating passionate users googled her to learn more… to see if i could find a list of presentations on her (thinking about SLN SOLsummit) found Kathy Sierra on “building a Global Microbrand” on slideshare and by similar serendipity “met” Garr Reynolds, read about his presentation zen, and was treated to his preso on brain rules. Found them both on twitter and followed them immediately. This has been my learning journey today … it has been a very satisfying string of learning experiences and encounters today and documenting it has been an interesting exercise…
This is a long way to get to what i finally wanted to get to, which is Kathy Sierra’s blog post i code like a girl that resonated with me, and got me thinking. My six year-old daughter has said several times over the last couple of days, “and mami…he screamed like a little girl. [then lots of giggles]” I asked her “where did you hear that expression?” “why do you think that is funny?” “what does that mean?” She no doubt heard it from Hunter, or Adam, or Dylan, or Arlo,
who in turn got it from their daddies, or perhaps their coaches, or more probably from some TV show… or movie… that i let her watch… she is such a sponge. It hit me like a brick in the face. My precious little daughter parroting something so superficially funny, and seemingly innocuous, yet such a simple insidiously powerful negative statement. I am a short round Colombian woman. I am an administrator of a large (the 2nd largest) university wide program in a large (the largest) bureaucratic university system in a sea dominated by old(er) white male suits. i am an educator, instructional designer and technologist, and artist and a mom in a world dominated by application developers/domain administrators/CIOs/, who are generally neither educators nor right-brained, and who are generally usually male. I not only code like a girl. I supervise like a girl, i administrate like a girl, i conduct meetings like a girl. I also
All of my today has a theme… the emotional voice found in the wufoo pages, being asked about my feelings, thinking about creating passionate users, thinking about community (building it, sustaining it, nurturing it) at work with faculty and instructional designers, at school with the parent council web space, and of course in my summer ETAP687 course. So it is official… i teach like a girl and am proud of it : )
here is what my students say: http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=1106177
One of the most thorough and nurturing instructors I have had in my academic career. Helped to shape us into better leaders and teachers
Difficult course but learned the most of any other course I have taken in years. Too much work for the 3 credits, though.
Really helpful and great personality 🙂 Would have enjoyed taking the class F2F more so than online, but did enjoy and appreciate the class.
Great course, I hope to take another class with Professor Pickett again
Great course, and a terrific teacher. Lots of work, but worth it!
Alex is awesome!!! She is very down to earth and expresses a mothering presence in the course. I would def. take another class with her. This was by far the hardest, most time consuming course I have taken for my Masters. When I signed up for it, I was extremely excited because I wanted to know about teaching online. In comparison to many other elective grad classes, I found the work load to be quite a bit. Developing an online course takes a large amount of time (as you know!) – Maybe in the future cutting down on the number of discussion posts (maybe 4?) or blog posts (1 per module) might help students find more time to work on their courses, which to me was the most important/exciting/gratifying aspect of the class.
You have been the most influential teacher I have had online yet. You have also taught me how to improve my teaching and teacher presence through the modeling you do in this course. Thanks for investing so much time in me and my fellow student’s learning! 🙂
This was the most challenging course in my Master Degree career at UAlbany. I loved every minute of it. I think that pushing students to perform at higher levels helps them to break the plateu of what they think they are capable of. Usually they are capable of more than you think. It also helped my learning to use diigo and rate my posts. At first I thought it was painstaking and hard, especially when I spent an hour on constructing a post only to recieve a 2, but as I learned that it was more about teaching others, I began to perform better and was more motivated to teach something new and provide a cool resouce in diigo
My feelings about this course are great! I would recommend anyone interested in online course development to take the course with Alex. She makes everyone in the course feel welcome and comfortable, which is the key to being successful and having students who are motivated to working with her.
Relationships and feelings are one of the underlying keys to success in a course. If you have a teacher you like, don’t you want to work harder to please them? I know I do…and I know that I don’t really feel like working for someone who berates my feelings and is insensitive.
Overall, this has been the most challenging course that I have encountered in my educational career and that is saying something since my background includes some biological and chemical science courses that most people dread the mere thought of taking.However, I feel I have learned more in this course that I can apply to my own life and profession than those afore mentioned courses.The principles presented and utilized in my online course design made me revaluate my FTF courses and how I will teach them in the future, too.
Another major impression is the degree to which Alexandra is adept at infusing “teaching presence” in to the online learning experience. She, along with Peter Shea et al. (2005) designed a study that looked the effects of teaching presence, using as research subjects 2,036 students participating in the SUNY Learning Network (SLN). Pickett, Shea, and colleagues, examined the “connection between students’ sense of learning community as measured by Rovai’s Classroom Community Scale and teaching presence as measured by indicators that reflect components in the Community of Inquiry Model as described by Garrison, Anderson, and their colleagues” (p 70).The researchers reported a correlation between teacher presence and a well-developed sense of community, which is key in the constructivist paradigm. Especially important is the instructor’s participation in “directed facilitation”, which may play a significant role in the creation of community, and may “include whether the students feel the instructor is drawing in participants, creating an accepting climate for learning, keeping students on track, and diagnosing misperceptions” (p.71). I think it is fair to say, based on her very high level of robust participation, that Alexandra is adept at producing directed facilitation.
In this course, I think you are demonstrating teaching presence mostly through the discussions within each module. Not to be little feedback provided to us through our written assignments, much of the teaching presence that I sense from you is in the discussion areas; likewise, from student teaching presence. I made a related comment to how much students are contributing to my learning in this course within my blog. I think that the class community is sort of being created in the blogs but also has pieces of it spread out in the discussions. Reading through each discussion post, whether it applies to me directly or not, creates a sense that other students are experiencing similar things as I am within the course. The icebreaker activity in this course was unique. The use of a conversational tone provides a personal sense to all posts. In this module, the use of Diigo to work individually and within the entire group to share references and to comment on the shared references is another way that a sense of community is being created.
I still remember how I felt that first time I accessed this course through blackboard and clicked on the link that said click here first. A video from Youtube came up and there was Alex saying hello and introducing herself and the course in video format. This was only the second time I had a professor in my online learning career that made a video appearance to welcome me and my classmates to the class. One striking aspect of her video was that it wasn’t edited or scripted. It was just her talking to us all in one take… how much more “real” that it get? This first glimpse into the course immediately got me thinking that my instructor was going to be knowledgeable and techno-savvy and would be able to help me learn a great deal. I also had a chance to hear her voice in real time and see what she looked like. I have taken online classes before in which the instructor NEVER gave us a description of herself, and many don’t provide pictures. I like to see who I am working with and know a little bit about them, don’t you?
I think another way Alex has created a welcoming online environment is in how she utilizes the 7 principles for effective online teaching. She maintains very frequent contact, encourages cooperation among each of us, provides us with learning activities that get us actively involved in our own learning, she gives prompt feedback, emphasizes time on task, maintains VERY high expectations (which pushes us to reach beyond our normal threshold for learning), and presents a lot of the information in a variety of ways which appeal to various learning styles.
You have brought a fresh perspective to my learning and it has shaped me into a better student, and hopefully a better teacher as well. In facilitating discourse, you have done an excellent job taking our comments and observations to another level. I’ve enjoyed how you have been able to encourage us to add to our points by asking us additional questions. You have also provided us with opportunities to rate ourselves and each other, further enabling us to push ourselves to new levels. One of the things in teaching presence that I have found most effective has been your ability to “Draw in participants, prompting discussion/interaction.” (Pickett 2008) I enjoy looking at the emails I get each day to see if there are points I may want to followup on later. By having Moodle auto-send us updates, it keeps the course in our mind and enables us to stay connected even when not connected. In terms of developing class community, you have been most effective at “Create activities where students must rely on each other.” (Pickett 2008). I have received so much feedback and new perspective from my peers through the use of diigo, student responses, and by observing others coursework.
I think from day one, Alex made it a goal to establish teaching presence and class community within this course. Starting with teaching presence, there are three main components that are each addressed: facilitating discourse, direct instruction, and instructional design and organization (Pickett 2008). Starting with the course information documents which showed us basically the guidelines for the course, the module break down complete with time frames, and the rubrics which would be used to evaluate us, we were able to experience teaching presence. Continuing, Alex set up specific questions for our discussions and presented content through readings and presentations – this is all apart of teaching presence. It is important though to realize that students play a large role in teaching presence as well and this is clearly evident in our course. Through our discussions, in which we are encouraged to respond and challenge our classmates’ thinking, through our blog posts, through our interaction with Alex whether it be about our personal courses, our ideas presented in discussions, or the content of our blogs, we are absolutely illustrating teaching presence.
When it comes to class community, also from day one, this was started and continues to grow with each module. We started with the Getting to Know You Activities, which included creating the Voice Thread welcome, the course profile, putting our pictures and even for some of us, our voices online. All of this helped establish who exactly this class is and for me, helps make it more comfortable to interact within the class. We continue to build community by responding to classmates blogs and sharing our own experiences, but I think one of the most important ways is through our discussions. In each module, we must interact with our classmates – whether it is sharing our reflections, our experiences, new knowledge, or just giving positive feedback, we are constantly interacting and building trust in each other. This is what class community is really about.
I am hard, hot and nurturing! Hell yes i teach like a girl.
I was surprised that there were k-12 educators in the course. I just assumed it would be all college level instructors that would be developing courses for adults. It was very very cool to see things from their perspective and to see the courses they developed for various k-12 age levels.
I was surprised at how polite everyone was in the course… maybe that was not it, maybe it was more that there was a formality to the interactions that i did not anticipate.
I think the concern about grades/failing/etc. also surprised me.
I was VERY surprised a student’s trying to interact in the course using a cell phone. I did not anticipate or expect that at all. Really interesting implication. Not sure what to do about that yet : )
I was surprised that most students seemed to prefer communicating with me privately via coursemail with stuff that needn’t have been private… i need to manage that better by directing students to the appropriate areas of the course. I wonder why… perhaps it was just easier than scrolling down to find the question areas or the talk with me area…?
I was surprised that no one really used the Bulletin Board or any of the class community areas really. No one found the hidden picture : ) i wonder if that is cuz the area is way at the end of the topics physically.
I was very very very happy with the blogging activity. I loved reading the student posts!
I loved using jing in the course.
I learned a lot using diigo for the shared references in the course. I need to shore that up some now in the course. I want all links that are used anywhere in the course or the blogs or anywhere to be posted and tagged in diigo. Also, i need to set up some standard tagging conventions and have some instruction on how to tag effectively for students, especially thinking about the resource moving forward with the student beyond the end of the term. The diigo link roll embedded right into a moodle block rocks!!!
Twitter and voicethreads worked great.
I found grading very tedious for technical reasons. I had to do everything manually. Tally up all the discussion grades… etc.
Using moodle for course management was extremely challenging. There are limited course management tools, or i just don’t know how to use moodle, so following and keeping up with things during the course delivery was very difficult. I also need to look at the design of my activities, the amount of work required and my own levels of participation in the course.
Not having a HD for tech support was also very challenging. Not having a MID to review my course and to give me feedback on optimizing the features and functionality of Moodle was also frustrating… or i missed having that a lot.
In spite of all the work, i loved every minute of developing and delivering this course. It has been awesome. And i had wonderful awesome students that I can’t thank enough for sharing this first online teaching experiences with me. : )
I am using moodle to teach ETAP687 because UAlbany was unable to provide instructor-level BLS course shells for the students in this course to create their own online courses, which is a main project for the course. I created the course in Moodle so that students could see from the student perspective what moodle can look like and how it functions. It didn’t make any sense to have students create courses in Moodle and have etap687 in BLS.
I also wanted students to be able to take what they create here in this course and be able to keep it and possibly teach it sometime in the future. With Moodle, an open source platform, it seemed like a better choice than locking things into one of the commercial course management systems…
That brings me to some of my other choices in the design of this course… as i have mentioned elsewhere in this blog i have incorporated various web2.0 tools into the course such as voicethread, diigo, edublogs, twitter, jing, meebome, audacity, youtube, breeze …. etc.
So….why did i “choose” to do that you may wonder?
Moodle provides a blog utility for students, it also has a news forum by default for each course and blocks that tie into the news forum to post announcements, etc. There is a calendar and ways to create links to shared resources or references within the course… last time i actually used the “glossary” feature to create a way to collect and present a list of categorized/sortable shared references for the course that the students used to build a shared annotated bibliography of resources – they had to provide a link, as description and an evaluation of the resource. I also used the “journal” feature for the “reflections” metacognitive activities of the course…
I chose to incorporate public freely available tools external to the CMS on purpose for several reasons.
There is something about the nature of interaction in a public forum. There is something about ownership….being able to for example, customize a blog visually to yourself by picking a theme and deciding what widgets to display and how you choose to present yourself to the world. There is also something about the responsibility you have regarding the public ownership of your thoughts and interactions, as well as the investment in time and energy to build or contribute to something that is yours and that reflects you. If you know it is just for a course, then you are doing it for me. If it is yours, then you can build it for you… a much more authentic exercise. I think that even the character of your “voice” is different, more authentically you, in a “real” blog, for example, than in one that is locked into a CMS. Plus – again you get to keep it or have access to it beyond the end of the course and term!
i personally love exploring the instructional potential of technology, but i do not advocate the use of technology for anything other than a compelling instructional reason. I would never advocate the use of any technology unless it assisted in meeting an instructional objective better, safer, easier, faster, or cheaper… You don’t need a backhoe to plant a tomato seed .
In my work at SUNY i never “train” the use of tools – even the almighty CMS. I discuss best practices in online pedagogy and plug the effective use of the tools in when and where it serves the pedagogical objective.
So, here is the question… is the cost of “stitching” all these tools together worth the hassle to the students (and to the instructor), the multiple authentications required to access resources housed at various external sites, the lack of technical support, the risks of johnny appleseeding course work and content around the web, the learning curve to be able to use them effectively/productively in an online teaching and learning environment?
For me, the answer is yes. Online social networking, social computing, folksonomy/social/collaborative tagging, data mashups, ubiquitous broadband, wireless, hand held and mobile computing, mobile broadband, and the cultural shift from passive consumers of content to engaged user-generators of content, has brought about a grassroots revolution resulting in a global democratization of access to tools, information, experts, content, professional development, and education as evinced by the open courseware and open source software initiatives that have changed how education is delivered, conducted… and defined. It is my obligation as a responsible netizen and educator in this moment to participate, to evaluate, to document, and to expose and engage my students to and in this process.
The commercial CMS is extinct… they just don’t know it yet.
some desicisions i’ve made:
i am using the topic summary pane for the course information documents. People read from left to right and this is important first information for the students to read, but after reading through this info. it takes a less important role in the course… and i don’t want it taking up the valuable course content real estate on the front page, so off to the left is the perfect location for this… it is there, visible throughout the course so that students can refer back to it, but it is not in the way of the current course content and areas of course interaction.
I am using the top center pane above the topic areas as a newsflash area. I want students to feel my presence every time they login immediately rather than having to go click on something to see an announcement. I will post daily announcements in this location. So, though there is a news forum, and a news area built into moodle, I will use this area to communicate on a daily basis with the course participants. I will archive these posts in the news forum, so that if they are missed, the course participants can see a running archive of each of my newsflashes. In addition, the moodle news forum forces subscription, which means every one will always get an email when anything is posted in the forum… I hate that, it is really irritating to get all these emails outside of the context of the course… a listserv is vastly different in nature from a course… i don’t understand why there is not the option to completely restrict course activity to the course location in moodle. I don’t want emails from my course as a professor or as a student. So that is why i also created the bulletin board in the class community are of my course. It is a space for non-course related communications, and it won’t force sending emails to everyone.. . my preference would have been to consolidate this area into one. So, since the moodle news forum is this forced subscription area, i had to come up with another area to meet the need of non course related communications for class community purposes. This is irritating because what this means for me as the instructor is that i now have 2 areas to tend to instead of just one and for my workload the result is more work. Another factor was that in the news forum, you only have 30 minutes to edit your post… reorgainze it, change the date… so if you are trying to set it up as a community area for students it’s narrow functional scope just makes that too difficult… you can’t organize posts, edit them, the date posted becomes an issue, etc.
course modules follow the course manual. I organized them logically into the three week workshop modules. Loosely the content falls logically as follows 2 weeks for each step in the Manual.
each module has a consistent structure. They begin with an overview of the activities for the module, followed by a discussion, followed by assignments or activities . every module also has an ask a question area and a reflection blog activity. Consistency is very important from module to module. the questions asked in module one will all post to the module 1 question area… this so that i can best manage and understand the questions posted. One discussion per module. Very important for workload reasons.
its all in the design.
