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Adventures in Technology Planning Class Launched

This year’s adventure in technology planning–also know as EPPL 639 has officially launched, and seven brave souls (graduate students) have agreed to join me in exploring how a better understanding of technology might help them make better decisions in their future careers as K-12 or Higher Education administrators. (The second class met last night, but I always wait to see who comes back before I declare the class officially launched.) Over the coming weeks, I’ll use this blog as a reflective tool to share some thoughts and ideas about teaching this kind of class with the students, and with anyone else who might be interested.

This is the second time I’ve taught this class at William and Mary, and, just as last time, the students bring a very impressive range of backgrounds and experiences to the group. We’re about evenly split among those in Higher Education and K-12 programs, and we have a pretty wide range of technical abilities. I’ve been very impressed with the energy of the folks in the group, and most especially by their willingness to jump into new areas of learning for them.

The syllabus for the course is extraordinary fluid–so fluid that it resides on a wiki rather than a word document to allow constant tweaking and adjustment. The structure of the course is provided by 4 loosely-structured assignments:

  1. Everyone will keep a reflective journal–preferably in blog format–that reflects his/her personal interests in educational technology.
  2. We’ll work together on a major technical review of a piece of open-source software to configure it and test its applicability for a specific educational purpose involving K-12 teachers, college faculty, and librarians.
  3. We explore decision making styles through a series of critical incident discussions affectionately known as You Be The Dean.
  4. A series of short presentations on technical topics, with each student giving 2-3 over the course of the semester. We started with RSS and News Aggregators as a gentle introduction to how relatively simple technologies like the lowly text file can have such a huge impact on the communications patterns of hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of users.

I’m looking forward in watching how the interaction of these four assignments shapes our time together.

Design for learning: New Classroom Models

CNN.com – Design for learning – Aug 12, 2005

Both K-12 educators and those of us in higher education are trying to find effective ways to align what we know about effective student learning with the contruction and renovation of our classrooms and buildings. Jeffery Lackney, an architect and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, identifies several major learning trends that are shaping (or should be shaping) the design of 21st century schools.

In such an environment, students can set their own agendas with teachers who act as advisers. Some teachers focus on collaborative projects that link to the real world, such as building a community garden.
In response to these trends, designers are replacing traditional classrooms with “studios” that contain storage areas for long-term projects and spaces for individual, small-group and large-group work.

I’ve always been impressed with the kind of communication and commitment that is developed in the studios of artists, actors and musicians and the labs of scientists. I’d like to see us explore what learning resources it would take to create learning spaces that would foster that same kind of learning within the humanities and social sciences. I’d also like to see the college work to incorporate some of the ideas mentioned in this article on natural light and others on sustainable building practices.

William and Mary is about to emark on a major program of renovation that will touch the majority of the academic buildings on campus. We’re also looking at a significant opportunity to bring much of the IT staff into a single building. This notion of “neighborhood groupings might be interesting for us to explore with our architects and planners.

There is a push to build smaller schools, with smaller class sizes. When redesigning large school buildings, architects reconfigure schools into “neighborhood groupings” and remove corridors to make more spaces for learning.

Systematic Support for Teaching and Learning at Tech

EDUCAUSE | Professional Development | Systemic Progress in Teaching and Learning 2005 Award Winners

Virginia Tech has developed a multi-faceted program of supporting teaching and learning through a “suite of supporting programs that include the Center for Innovation in Learning (CIL), Faculty Development Institute (FDI), Graduate Education Development Institute (GEDI), as well as the well-known and frequently emulated Math Emporium, which traces its roots to early FDI workshops.” The newly re-configured “Faculty Digital Center” at William and Mary will attempt to consolidate the best of these programs in a unified organization with collaboration within the Charles Center and Swem Library and with continued very strong connections to the academic departments and programs.

Writing the Living Web

10 Tips on Writing the Living Web: A List Apart

A List Apart is required reading for most of the web developers and designers I know. The comments made about this article on writing for the “living web” imply that many bloggers found the piece to be common sense or common knowledge, but I think it’s a great piece for new web writers–like most of my students. I’ll definitely use this piece as background as part of the blogging assignment for my course this fall.

I think it’s important to students who are using blogs, wikis, Flickr and other social tools to understand that they are participating in a medium that is much different than a book. This new web isn’t made up of “finished, unchanging creations–as polished and as fixed as books or posters”.

For students writing for a class assignment, the following is good advice, though difficult to follow:

If your site belongs to a product, a project, or an enterprise [or a class], you must still find a way to represent its passion and excitement. If you do not understand why your product is compelling or comprehend the beauty of your enterprise, find the reason or [consider not taking the class.

Other good advice for students is to “let the story unfold.” Too few web sites feature good stories built with the tools that creative writers and journalists have developed over the years to gain and sustain interest. This section has some good reminders for experienced writers, and suggests some interesting exercises and assignments for course work.

The Highly Designed Dorm Room

The Highly Designed Dorm Room

One of the highlights of working with students in our fall startup program has been watching the interaction among students and parents in decorating their rooms. Can’t say that I’ve seen anything like this, though.

Patrick Baglino, a Dupont Circle designer, works with multimillion-dollar budgets. He’s decorated mansions in Spring Valley, New York lofts in SoHo, homes in Kalorama and Georgetown, waterfront condos in Florida. He also does dorm rooms.

A recent makeover for two friends at Georgetown University included Ralph Lauren bed linens, window treatments from Anthropologie and a $1,200 Angela Adams carpet. Total price: about $5,000, not including Baglino’s fees.

One interesting statisic was that the average entering freshman spends $1,200 on school items. (This must exclude computers, I would think.) Aggregate figures are pretty impressive:

The breakdown: $7.5 billion on electronics, $8.8 billion on textbooks, $3.2 billion on clothing and accessories, $2.6 billion on dorm or apartment furnishings, $2.1 billion on school supplies, and $1.5 billion on shoes.

Seven Things You Should Know About Wikis

Seven Things You Should Know About Wikis

I’ve been fascinated by the possibilities of Wiki-Wikis for years, but have always had a hard time getting past the inherent ugliness of most implementations and the difficulty of getting nontechnical users comfortable with the interface. The succes of Wikipedia and the increased use of more attractive skins and templates seem to be moving Wikis into the mainstream. The Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) has released a nice summary of the software that can be used to introduce the technology to faculty and students.

This is a part of the NLI’s “7 Things You Should Know About…” series which provides concise information on a variet of learning practices and technologies. Each fact sheet focuses on a single practice in a common format: What is it? Who’s doing it? How does it work? Why is it significant? What are the downsides? Where is it going? What are the implications for teaching and learning?

Other technologies covered in the series include:

Exploring Faculty Ratings Sites

“He Will Crush You Like an Academic Ninja!”: Exploring Teacher Ratings on Ratemyprofessors.com

Most universities spend an enormous amount of time, money and energy in evaluating courses and faculty performance, but the information gathered is seldom available to students. A number of faculty ratings sites have been established that offer an totally open and accessible forum for students to evaluate their instructors with anonymity and “almost absolute impunity.”

This is a interesting study of RateYourProfessor.com. It’s long, but there are some interesting comparisons with traditional evaluations. At least a few traditional studies have questioned the impact of “attractiveness” on teacher ratings, with one study concluding that “attractive professors consistently outscore their less comely colleagues by a significant margin on student evaluations of teaching”. RateYourProfessor allows faculty members to assign “chile peppers” as an indicator of overall “hotness”. We’re still looking for ways to encourage students to complete on-line evaluations of their courses; maybe a faculty “hotness” item would help.

IM Back Channels In Class

Future Present » Blog Archive » IM channels in class !?!

One of our ongoing concerns/interests as part of the myNotebook Project at William and Mary is how to integrate the student machines into medium and large classes so that they contribute to the learning–rather than distract from it.
Larry Johnson, Chief Executive Officer of the New Media Consortium, discribes a pretty low tech way of enhancing communication with IM using three screens in lecture hall.

A few intrepid professors are doing just that — for example, at the University of Southern California, several classes are setting up active IM “backchannels” to encourage a running dialog during class. The IM threads are displayed on one of three screens at the front of the room. Another is controlled by a “Google jockey” who does real time searches on words and sites mentioned in either channel.

This was used as an example of the one of the major trends in the NMC’s 2005 Horizon Report (PDF) on Extended Learning.

“This I Believe” Essays on NPR

National Public Radio is reviving a radio series from the 1950’s called “This I Believe” that was hosted by Edward Murrow. The show featured essays from both the both the famous –Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Robinson, Helen Keller and Harry Truman– and the not so famous. One of the more interesting entries on the site is the comparison of two essays by Elizabeth Deutsch–one from when she was 16 and another 50 years later as a professor at Cornell.

Murrow’s introduction to the original series is chilling in the similarities between our current situtation and the concerns in the US during the 1950’s about the Cold War, McCarthyism and racial division. For many of my conservative friends, the 1950’s were seen as America’s golden age, but Morrow’s short explanation of the need for the country share this personal philosophical essays offers a much more unsettled vision of life.

An Aside About Personal Philosophy Statements

One of the first exercises when I enrolled in my graduate program in adult education at Syracuse was the construction of a personal philosophy statement Roger Hiemstra, who chaired the adult ed program at that time, and Ralph Brockett, who was teaching the course, shared a common belief that ethical practice by teachers required continued and careful reflection on the nature of reality, meaning, and human nature. I’ve continued the tradition in many of my own courses, even though many students find the exercise very difficult–as I did.

(Ralph went on to edit a book published by Teachers College Press on Ethics in Adult Education, and Roger outlined his rationale statement in a chapter in that book.)

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