Creating accessible online classes for students who are deaf/hard-of-hearing

Next fall, I am offering my first fully online course.  It will include, among other things, narrated MSPowerPoint lectures and YouTube videos that students will watch and respond to.  Now, it just so happens that this course of mine is about social work practice with populations with disabilities.  Therefore, you can imagine my somewhat red-faced embarrassment when a potential student wrote to me and asked me how I would accommodate her hearing impairment - and - wait for it - I had no idea how to respond.  Luckily, I had two amazing resources at my fingertips and within 6 hours, I had more information than I needed to know about how to make an online course accessible to students who are deaf/hard-of-hearing.

First, I spoke with the wonderful Mary Gribbins over at Salem State University's Disability Services Office.  You can find them by clicking here.  Mary let me know that although I am the "test case" on accessibility of online course for this population of students with disabilities, that she and her office would be right next to me, helping me to figure it all out.  As it turns out, the office will work with me on using the top rated (click here for more on that) speech-recognition program "Dragon Naturally Speaking" so that I can dictate my lectures for transcription (whilst simultaneously narrating my MSPowerPoint files for posting online) - OR - she will work with her office's work study students in order to get materials transcribed for my student.  As long as I begin the process in July, we should be fine for a September start date.  Mary also shared with me that YouTube videos often have a captioned option, and instructed me to look in the lower right-hand corner of the screen to determine if this was present or not. So helpful to know.

Second, I posted a query on this topic on the national MSW Education Listserv (you can subscribe to that by clicking here). Within minutes (literally), I had many responses.  I learned that while Dragon Naturally Speaking is not always all that it is cracked up to be, it is pretty good.  I heard from professors that have had to fight with their University administration departments to get transcripts - and from professors who just type out all of their transcripts.  I got technical advice, but most of all, I found camaraderie and encouragement.  This is the best that the Internet - or as my nephew calls it perhaps more appropriately the "Interwebs" - has to offer in the way of community-building.

I'll keep you posted on the project as it unfolds - but the bottom line is this...while this will allow for my student who is hard-of-hearing to access the online experience - this may also work well for people for whom reading vs. listening will be better for their learning style.  There you have it, folks, the power of universal design in instruction.

Revisiting clickers: Managing cheating

Many of us have heard about the use of "clickers" in classrooms as a way to engage students, take a temperature on student comprehension and even to manage large classrooms.  SSU has provided a range of talks and workshops on the use of this teaching technology.  Our BSW program, as I understand it, is even interested in using clickers as part of the ongoing data collection process mandated by our accreditation body, the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE).  While I have not thought of bringing clickers into my seminars, I am starting to consider their use when team-teaching two sections of a research methods course on an ad hoc basis.  The silence that greets me in these large groups of merged classes is surprising - and very different from the positive hubble, bubble that I usually experience in my own section's classroom.  So, this weekend, while thinking about the use of clickers for this particular purpose, I googled around, and came upon this essay from earlier this fall, addressing the management of clicker use when cheating becomes an issue.  While not something that relates to my own possible use of this technology, I thought I would share this thoughtful essay from The Chronicle on cheating management when clickers are present.  What do you think about clickers for social work education?

September 4, 2011


With Cheating Only a Click Away, Professors Reduce the Incentive

Handheld devices can answer a question—even if a student is home sleeping.

By Jie Jenny Zou

As soon as the handheld gadgets called "clickers" hit the University of Colorado at Boulder, Douglas Duncan saw cheating.

The astronomy instructor and director of the Fiske Planetarium was observing a colleague's physics class in 2002, when the university introduced the electronic devices that students use to respond to in-class questions. He glanced at the first row and saw a student with four clickers spread out before him. It turned out that only one was his—the rest belonged to his sleeping roommates.

The student was planning to help his absentee classmates by "clicking in" for the sleepers to mark them present. The physics professor had to tell the student that what he was doing was cheating.

Clickers—and the cheating problems that accompany them—have become a lot more common since that day, many instructors say. Today, more than 1,000 colleges in the United States use the devices, which look like TV remotes.

At Boulder alone, about 20,000 clickers are in use among the university's 30,000 students. In addition to using them to take attendance, professors pose multiple-choice questions during class, students click answers, and software instantly projects the responses as charts at the front of the room. Particularly in large classes, that lets instructors assess student comprehension in a matter of seconds.

But the system can be abused. Students purchase remotes and register the devices in their names. Those who choose not to attend large classes can simply ask friends to bring along their clickers and get whatever credit the instructor assigns for showing up.

Derek Bruff, a senior mathematics lecturer at Vanderbilt University and author of a popular guide to clickers, which are formally called student response systems, says he thinks cheating is fairly common; he hears complaints whenever he gives a talk about using the devices. But, he added, educators can take steps to limit wrongdoing and reap the benefits of the technology.

Absent and Accounted For

"It happens in every class," says Corey T. Shipeck, a sophomore studying business at the University of Florida, where classes can exceed 400 students. He says it is typical for students to bring devices to class for absentee friends, recalling when a professor once walked around a classroom taking away clickers from students who had more than one. Mr. Shipeck has two clickers himself, but that's because his courses require different models—his roommate has three.

Mr. Shipeck's experiences with clickers have varied as much as the models themselves. In some classes, professors awarded just a sliver of the grade for participation via clicker, while others penalized students with whole letter-grade reductions when they failed to click in. In some classes, clickers were the only way to participate or to indicate presence. "If you forget your clicker, you can just leave, because it's just not worth it," Mr. Shipeck says. "It's a pain."

Kevin D. Livingston, an associate professor of biology at Trinity University, in Texas, was told by students in his genetics course that other students had used clickers to cheat on homework. Instead of grading assignments individually, he had used clickers to poll students on homework questions in class. He was dismayed to learn that some students had simply shared homework answers during the clicker poll to get credit instead of actually doing the problem sets beforehand.

He also teaches an introductory-biology course in which clicker questions and attendance constitute 20 percent of the grade. He assumes there is some cheating using the devices but leaves it up to students themselves to report abuse, since cheating can nullify hard, honest studying. "I can't spend all my energy trying to police cheating," he says.

Benjamin Surpless, an assistant professor at Trinity, has used clickers in his geoscience courses for the past five years and has encountered cheating throughout—even though clicker responses no longer count for credit. Although he tells that to his classes, "students think that there's some kind of grade attached to them," he says.

He teaches introductory classes of about 50 students and says he can tell when students aren't there. Now he uses the clickers to monitor students' understanding, guiding which concepts to review based on student responses.

Mr. Bruff, the clicker expert and a fan of the devices, says the concerns about cheating are not exaggerated: He sees students boasting about it on Twitter. "I saw one where a guy took a photo with his camera of the clickers he had on his desk—his and four of his friends'—and he was basically bragging about it." Mr. Bruff says he attends education-technology conferences throughout the country and is constantly asked how to curb abuse.

Certain situations lend themselves to wrongdoing, he says. "The larger the class size, the easier it is for students to get away with it, and so the more likely they are to do it." The way to deal with it is to keep the clicker stakes low and accountability for cheating high.

The 5% Principle

Low stakes, Mr. Bruff says, means that professors use clicker answers for 5 percent of the grade and no more. In his own courses, that level of incentive has raised attendance rates—real attendance, not clicker phantoms—by 20 percent. More important, he says, students in his class of 50 are participating and interacting on an individual level. That, he suggests, should be the primary reason for using the devices.

At Georgetown University, Matthew B. Hamilton, an associate professor of biology, adheres to the 5-percent limit. He also polices his students to see if they are using more than one clicker by having teaching assistants circulate the room during clicker quizzes.

And he, like Mr. Bruff, believes that the devices have real advantages. The interactivity of clickers outweighs the hassle of monitoring students and keeping of fresh batteries on hand, Mr. Hamilton says.

By specifically outlining for students how clicker cheating violates academic honor codes, Mr. Bruff says, universities can clarify the situation for students and bolster professors' positions. "The instructor can point to the honor code—the university has decided that this counts as cheating, so it's not just me being a tough guy. It's that this is commonly accepted as inappropriate," he says.

That kind of clarity works, says Mr. Duncan. At Boulder, the student-enforced honor code takes a strong stance against all forms of cheating. It's one reason that, since the first physics class he watched, he has used clickers for nearly a decade and has caught students cheating only twice.

"You need to make very, very clear with the students," he says, "what is considered legitimate."

Reluctant Twitterite (Me) Moves to Supplement Social Work Research Instruction for MSW Students

Twitter.  Sigh.  I use it, but don't quite "get" it.  Of all the new technologies out there that I have tried to learn about, this one stumps me the most.  I know that there are professors out there who have successfully harnessed it in support of target learning outcomes.  However, I have not yet seen a way that professors in social work have used it - the physicists and political scientists are, apparently, having a field day.  It has been on my back burner for a while now, the goal of developing some useful sort of way to add Twitter into my teaching.  To tweet or not to tweet - in class and out.  That is my question. Well, at least my question of this moment.

For those not in the know, Twitter is a "microblogging" site on which you can send out messages of 140 characters or less.  I don't know how they settled on that, but that's what it is.  I use it to share articles and links of interest with a a cadre of social work professionals interested in disability, child welfare and social work education.  Although I only do this circa 1 time per week, I often find links of interest to my students on a range of topics.  It has been a neat resource - but I often feel I do not use it optimally, thus, back to the question, to tweet or not to tweet?

So, as my question of the day focused on tweeting in the classroom, you make ask why.  Well, Twitter raised its ugly head today, in my classroom.  Stewing on the way home, I went over the scenario in my head several times.  Generally, today's class went well and my students seemed fairly engaged during a mock IRB small group activity.  I only had to remind one person to put down their smartphone in the midst of class.  The response? Wait for it.  "Just checking my Twitter to see what's happening with my family."  Inside, I boiled.  The students let out a combination of snorts and guffaws.  Sort of a spectrum ranging from silence to snort to giggle and on to guffaw.  Then all heads swung over to me. You know, the "what's she gonna do now" look. 

Now, I knew that the student in question was experiencing a significant family transition, but I still deemed this behavior unacceptable and the nonchalant response a bit disrespectful.  I was, however, ready.  I reminded my students about what they nicknamed the "loser-takes-all" rule.  At the next infraction, I will unveil my fancy new red spray-painted basket painted in late August in anticipation of this moment, and ask everyone to place their smartphones in there for the duration of our three hour course.  At the start of the semester, I had explained that I wanted to have the students attention as we have difficult subject matter to "translate" as, well, research for social workers, that's really sort of like "research as a second language." I explained that if people were awaiting important calls about, say, their partner's impending delivery of baby, or some such, it would be fine to let me know and keep the phone with them. After two years of what is WAY worse than the subtle clock-check, namely, the blue screen hue under the desk, I decided I was done.  Yes, I have read the reports suggesting that this generation of students learn through multi-tasking on their laptops and other devices.  I can even understand this as someone who cannot conduct data analyses in SPSS without certain music on my ipod headphones.  However, when the same students engaged in the smartphone checking et alia are the ones consistently doing less well in class, then it is time to act.

OK, so next week, the red basket is going around the room.  And then I drove home, and sat down to dinner with my husband.  We are trying a technology-free dinner time this week as we feel a little disconnected. No technology in sight.  The Blackberry and iphones are off.  The three laptops in our two-person home are powered down. The flat-screened television is all but a distant memory.  Even the radio is turned off.  And, to boot, our CD player is not working.  Even my ipod is out of juice.  Inhaling the soft aroma of the Gorgonzola gnocci and sipping a bit of Syrah, I watched as my husband added fresh lemon juice and olive oil to the arugula salad.  Ah, lovely, no technology, back to our roots.  And then it hit me.  It was something along the lines of "if you can't beat em, join em" but more of a compromise.  There will still be no classroom use of Twitter, but here's the plan.  Open to any and all criticism!  

Tonight, I am going to email my students (how passé, I know) and invite them to "follow" my professional twitter account (that's @eslayter for those already on Twitter).  I am going to send reminders about papers, links of interest to particular teams conducting research on particular topics,  articles related to the topic of the week, words of encouragement about getting through "research as a second language."  I still won't allow it in the classroom - but I am just going to see what happens.  Will they follow me?  Will they ignore me?  Will it facilitate engagement?  Will it spawn something I don't expect that might be of use?  We will see.  I will let you know.  I may even make a facebook page for the course as well.  You never know.  Follow me and see what happens.

Check it out: The 2011 Mind-Set of Faculty (Born Before 1980)

It's almost that time of year - no, not back to school - almost time for the Beloit list that helps us to get into the mindset of the first-year students entering college.  But wait!  This year, we have something new and interesting, something about, wait-for-it, ourselves!  Thanks to Dr. Jonathan Singer who pointed this article out - it is a list that describes the mind-set of faculty born before 1980! While there are many technology-related references, it's not all technology, but we thought we'd let it slide, just this once!  So faculty, check it out, giggle a bit at yourself, and perhaps even see a bit of what your students may see in you!

The 2011 Mind-Set of Faculty (Born Before 1980)

By Bruce Krajewski (re-posted here, all image and text credits from The Chronicle of Higher Education)

As an antidote to Beloit College's annual Mindset List (the latest version is being released this week), designed to orient faculty and administrators to the cultural touchstones that have shaped the lives of incoming freshmen, I hereby offer, for the benefit of students and administrators, a similar list of characteristics of faculty members who were born before 1980 and who teach at public institutions. Are faculty members' mind-sets less important than students'? If you prick our mind-sets, do they not bleed?

1. The faculty members freshmen will encounter are likely teaching more and larger classes and doing more "service" than ever before at the same pay or less as faculty were three or four years ago.

2. A growing percentage of faculty members rarely meet in person the students they are teaching, thanks to absentee learning, more commonly known as online education.

3. Freshmen will encounter some faculty members who first used "iPhone" as a noun and a verb, as in "I will phone, I have phoned," etc.

4. Faculty members who have been teaching for more than a decade are most likely indifferent to the Kardashians, celebrity-wannabe housewives, desperate or otherwise, from any city or county on either coast, especially the ones from New Jersey.

5. Those same faculty members are regarded by many parents, administrators, and state legislators as lazy, inefficient, and unaccountable. If it were not for all the work the faculty members must do, they would have the time to live down to those expectations.

6. The faculty members freshmen will encounter in the classroom are probably untenured and working part time, with many employed at more than one institution and feeling loyalty to no employer.

7. Faculty members born before 1970—we have to reach back a bit further here—are usually willing to help students learn how to pretend to give a damn about their education, and are involved in less absentee teaching and learning than their younger colleagues. (This issue is addressed here.)

8. Faculty members born before 1980 said "Wii" to express the euphoria they felt as children when sledding down a hill.

9. Faculty members born before 1980 rarely feel a need to respond immediately to anything and have particularly "procrastinaty" reactions to messages that students label "urgent."

10. Faculty members born before 1980 remember a world in which people lived entire days without access to bottled water.

11. Faculty members born before 1980 (and who didn't live in Seattle) remember a world without Starbucks, in which people made their own coffee each morning. In those days, tap water was potable and "barista" was not yet a word typically spoken outside of Italy.

12. Freshmen will encounter some faculty members who used to work at institutions where faculty governance did not require the inclusion of administrators, advisory boards, and regents in academic decisions.

13. Faculty members born before 1980 grew up during a time when "like" represented the beginning of a simile, rather than a piece of verbal confetti.

14. Many faculty members prefer Mae to Kanye West.

15. Faculty members who have been teaching for more than a decade remember when C was an average grade students received in courses, because it represented an ancient concept called "satisfactory."

16. Faculty members who have been teaching for more than a decade do not refer to students as "customers," and to anyone as a "stakeholder" (not even Buffy, if those faculty members even know who Buffy is).

17. Faculty members born before 1980 remember when the word "chancellor" referred to a short German person with a mustache. (In a way, it usually still does.)

18. Freshmen will encounter some faculty members who can recollect a time when sports coaches were other faculty members who were not receiving million-dollar salaries. (See here what the world of student athletes has become.)

19. The same faculty members can recall when stadiums were built without sky boxes for indulged alumni, and when tailgating meant that you were following too closely behind someone while driving on the highway, all the while neither talking on a cellphone nor texting.

20. We (i.e., the "they" the Beloit people use to refer to anyone older who is not "you" freshmen) never used libraries as restaurants or coffee shops. We faced books; we did not facebook.

21. The "you" that is you will eventually become the "they" that is us.

22. "We" never promoted Jonas Brothers-like/Palinesque abstinence campaigns, which is why some of "you" are here, able to read this list. You're welcome.

Bruce Krajewski is a writer and translator. He also works as a professor of English at Texas Woman's University.

Five points on why we need professor 2.0 in social work education

Image thanks to The Chronicle at link listed to the right

Hello all, 

I wanted to pass along David Perlmutter's thoughtful essay (click here for link to article, also pasted in below) on the tech gap on college campuses (both between students and faculty and junior and senior faculty).  You may be sick of seeing these posts, you may even be saying "yet another one of these articles, Elspeth, really?"  

My response is this, yes, we have been getting what some might be referred to as 'bludgeoned' on this topic from our IT departments, our students and the Chronicle as of late, but the arguments made here once again make the reasons for this 'bludgeoning' of sorts clear.

While it is clear that the power of social networking during the Arab Spring (which has continued into summer in Syria, for example, and likely on into the fall) indicates to me that as social workers interested in social justice and mechanisms for social change, we need to at the very very least understand the technology and how it is used - perhaps even disabusing our notions of what it is and is not.  However, there are also some self-serving reasons that we need to be "up" on technology - our jobs, our value in society as professors. 

Here are some of the reasons why this particular article stood out for me as a social work educator:

1) The power of social networks to support social change:  The author discusses hearing a junior colleague's work on using social networking to track the relationship between election fraud and voting-related violence in Kenya for immediate, on-the-ground action, surmising that "Most of all, she was not employing technology for technology's sake, but using it to solve problems to help real people."

2) A need to foster the "cool factor" in student engagement - and to avoid a no-wiring disaster in the social work ivory tower:   Perlmutter says it well "Our college freshmen grew up wholly within the era of the commercial Internet. Eighteen-year-olds have seen their lives permeated by social media for almost a decade. Our young up-and-coming scholars, in their 20s and early 30s, are probably the most tech-oriented generation of educators yet. Many senior professors are embracing this revolution. But clearly the young are digital natives from the start. There is a real danger of a technology gap becoming a wedge issue between faculty members—in the same way standards of promotion and tenure, the job market, and salary compression have been divisive issues—at a time when professors need to be more united than ever in addressing the challenges of higher education."  Perlmutter also refers to the "cool factor" in showing students that you know about/can use the new technologies to support learning in the ways that they have used it......I am not sure what I think about this, and it is dangerous, in my opinion, to call this a cool factor, as this may fuel the flames of people who think new technologies are used just because they are there...however...the point does get to engagement whether we like it or not.

3) Recognizing that ALL teaching (and research, and practice) are affected by new software, hardware and 'wetware':  Again, Perlmutter's point:  "Of course, proficiency in communications technologies means much more than owning the latest version of the iPhone or following a Twitter feed. Being "up" on tech or "part geek" is a useful component of being a modern professor—Professor 2.0—because all research and teaching are affected by new software, hardware, and wetware (ways of thinking about new and emerging media and technology)."

4) "Becoming adept in social media and new and emerging communications technologies is not to be confused with becoming a worshiper at the tech temple."  Perlmutter argues that "to critique the role of technologies in society (or in the sciences, or in politics, or in the classroom itself), one must first understand those technologies, both in theory and in application."

5) If nothing else - learn about technology for selfish reasons - our value, our role, our jobs:  "Finally, we need both a new and a senior generation of Professor 2.0, telling the world what our contributions are. Many aspects of the lives and careers of today's professors are under attack. It is vital that we eloquently and entertainingly speak up and out, to the public, legislators, parents, alumni, and especially our students, explaining what we do and its importance to society."

July 24, 2011

Bridging the Generational Tech Gap

By David D. Perlmutter

Over the last two years, our department of journalism and mass communication has hired five new tenure-track faculty members. In reviewing the current job market, I pointed out to our doctoral students that despite our new colleagues' varied interests, research methods, and pedigrees, they have the following in common: an already burgeoning publication record, even though four of them are or were recent doctoral students; participation in the grant-making process; and a reputation as virtuosos of new and emerging communications technologies in research and teaching.

One of them, a job candidate at the time, came and presented to our faculty a summary of her study of social-network patterns in elections in Kenya. Using geo-tracking software and hardware along with social media, she showed how the participants she had trained locally were reporting voting violations and associated violence in real time and then creating interactive online maps that local and international media and election monitors could use to respond quickly to crises.

I was awed.

In a field where revolutions in media technology change what we teach and what we study continually, her skill set was one we definitely needed to add to ours. Also, I knew that tech-suffused undergraduates would be impressed by her and trust that she was knowledgeable in many things, not just the latest gadgetry. Most of all, she was not employing technology for technology's sake, but using it to solve problems to help real people.

I offer this introduction because I believe that there is a growing technology gap on campus.

New communications technology and platforms in particular are arriving fast and furiously. Our college freshmen grew up wholly within the era of the commercial Internet. Eighteen-year-olds have seen their lives permeated by social media for almost a decade. Our young up-and-coming scholars, in their 20s and early 30s, are probably the most tech-oriented generation of educators yet.

Many senior professors are embracing this revolution. But clearly the young are digital natives from the start. There is a real danger of a technology gap becoming a wedge issue between faculty members—in the same way standards of promotion and tenure, the job market, and salary compression have been divisive issues—at a time when professors need to be more united than ever in addressing the challenges of higher education.

Furthermore, a tech gap may well be increasing in an age of social-media revolution. A 2009 faculty survey at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, conducted by the university's office of information technology, found that faculty attitudes toward technology differed significantly by age group, and that those differences had grown sharper over time.

Minnesota's IT office concluded: "When compared to their younger colleagues, older faculty members perceive greater barriers to their use of technology and are, in general, less attracted to using technology to enhance their teaching. In particular, older faculty members perceive themselves to be less technically skilled than their younger colleagues. This self-perception may explain why they feel more pressured by the time needed to learn about technology, by keeping up with technological changes, and by lack of standardization.
And it may explain why older faculty members enjoy working with technology less than their younger colleagues do and are less inclined to use multimedia materials."

Of course, proficiency in communications technologies means much more than owning the latest version of the iPhone or following a Twitter feed. Being "up" on tech or "part geek" is a useful component of being a modern professor—Professor 2.0—because all research and teaching are affected by new software, hardware, and wetware (ways of thinking about new and emerging media and technology). To use an example from my own field, I teach at a school that offers strong professional training in news (journalism and all its related fields of the discovery of information and its dissemination) and strategic communication (the creation of persuasive information in many areas, including public relations, fund raising, and health-related fields).

To discover facts today, however, the required skill set contains much that is traditional but also much that is new. The time-tested values of the investigative journalist—good interviewing, discovery of credible sources, combing of documents and materials, following up on leads—are now augmented by the emerging technologies of data mining and search-engine optimization. One kind of proficiency does not replace the other; they are complementary. Likewise, my colleagues in physics, history, and sociology all witness constant technological revolutions that update what they do and how they teach.

Second, becoming adept in social media and new and emerging communications technologies is not to be confused with becoming a worshiper at the tech temple. To critique the role of technologies in society (or in the sciences, or in politics, or in the classroom itself), one must first understand those technologies, both in theory and in application. The researchers in my discipline who are the most astute critics of the effect of, say, the text-messaging culture on writing and thinking, or of the overreliance on new teaching gadgets as pedagogical panaceas, are people who are themselves very familiar with those technologies.

In addition, for our students there is a definite "cool factor" we can't ignore if we want to be successful teachers in the modern classroom. Whether first-year assistant professors or senior scholars, showing that you can use and understand the technologies of the world that students live in buys you credibility and respect for everything else you want to teach. I say this as someone who has read thousands of student evaluations and discussed this issue with many administrative colleagues. A mathematics professor gives this example: "If a student comes to you asking for help in using their graphingcs calculator and you reply, 'I never learned that,' they instantly feel you don't respect them and are out of touch."

Or, as members of my department's faculty put it in their evaluations of a one-week tech workshop they completed this summer: We need to know this stuff, and students should know we know it.

Finally, we need both a new and a senior generation of Professor 2.0, telling the world what our contributions are. Many aspects of the lives and careers of today's professors are under attack. It is vital that we eloquently and entertainingly speak up and out, to the public, legislators, parents, alumni, and especially our students, explaining what we do and its importance to society. Faculty members cannot sit around waiting to be called by a reporter or writing an occasional op-ed. Social media are the perfect venue to evangelize our knowledge, accomplishments, and centrality to the continuing mission of educating our nation's students. The senior Professor 2.0 could also be an inspiration to many American workers who, as adult learners, want to come back to enhance their educations for new or recast careers.

There are definite steps that individuals, departments, and institutions can take to shrink technology gaps. The most obvious is training. I'm very proud that this summer, 10 graduate students, staff, and faculty members of our school devoted a week to an intensive technology workshop taught by an instructor from a local community college. Seeing veteran professors mixing with 25-year-old doctoral students and pouring their energy into adding to their skill sets was incredibly gratifying for me as a department chair. It has also impressed the school's donors, alumni, university administrators, our professional and industry peers, and students who have learned about it. Tech training is a guaranteed investment that no university should ignore.

Yet the encouragement of faculty to expand their skills can't be punitive or negative. Telling a senior history professor to devote 20 hours to a data-mining workshop because "otherwise you'll look like an idiot to your students" is not the right way to promote enthusiastic self-innovation. Institutions need to create logical pitches and built-in incentives.

In our case, through the generosity of our donors, I was able to offer participants in our tech-training workshop extra money to apply to technology-related research or yet more training. Many other inducements and trade-offs are possible depending on individual and budgetary circumstances.

To me, the greatest opportunity for closing a technology gap is that the novice and the senior, the interested and the experienced, can be brought together in partnerships. Consider a team-teaching arrangement between a young scholar prepping for her first course and a senior scholar, long seasoned in the classroom:

How much they could teach each other! We have so long thought of mentoring as a one-way street, with the old hand tutoring and advising the novitiate. But in today's academic environment the generations can edify each other, and beneficiaries of such an exchange include students, colleges and universities, and higher education itself.

The technology gap on campuses, whatever it is and whatever it means, is a positive opportunity for we professors to redesign ourselves and our institutions together.

David D. Perlmutter is a professor and director of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa. A regular contributor to The Chronicle, he is the author of Promotion and Tenure Confidential (Harvard University Press, 2010).

Check out NPR's report on "rethinking how we teach the 'net generation'

Cartoon thanks to this website

As we hit mid-summer, perhaps it is time to begin thinking anew about the new academic year, and addressing what I call my "new school year resolutions."  Generally, this involves something along the lines of, work to be a better teacher, try something new.  Perhaps this year, you might choose to think about how to teach this new generation of students.  As I mentally emerged from a far-away vacation, this report brought me back to thinking about technology and social work education.  NPR has a new report out (from 7/14/2011) on how we teach what is being dubbed "the net generation."  For social work educators, for whom the client-social worker relationship becomes the student-social work educator relationship, we may need to come to terms with what, how and where that relationship exists - whether we like it or not.  While the primary interviewee in this article focuses on how lecturing is not as effective with the net generation, perhaps we don't have to throw the baby COMPLETELY out with the bathwater.  While I feel very uncomfortable with the laptops a-clicking in my classroom, feeling that people should be focusing on a tough topic with all of their attention, maybe there are aspects of my feelings that I should re-consider.  Time to challenge my thinking on this.  See what you think of this article, and enjoy discussing it - feel free to do so in the comments section below this post!

Rethinking How We Teach The 'Net Generation'

• July 14, 2011, 1:00 PM

Author Don Tapscott says it's time for universities to adjust to students digital habits — not the other way around. (iStockphoto.com) 

Few will argue about America's colleges and universities being critical to our economic and intellectual future. And by many measures, that future looks promising: Competition for places in the country's top schools is fiercer than ever, more families are willing to pay higher tuition, and employers are putting a greater premium on a college degree.
But Don Tapscott, co-author of Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business And The World, argues that universities are woefully behind the times.

Tapscott — who has studied the digital revolution — tells NPR's Neal Conan that the traditional lecture model in American universities is no longer appropriate for a generation that has grown up making, changing and learning from digital communities.

Kids that have grown up collaborating ... walk into a university, and they're asked to sit there and passively listen to someone talking.

 

–Don Tapscott "My generation — the boomers — grew up watching 24 hours a week of TV per kid," Tapscott says. But, he adds, today's young people have had a very different experience.

"This new generation comes home and they turn on their computer and they're in three different windows and they've got three magazines open and they're listening to iTunes and they're texting with their friends," he says, "and they're doing their homework."

With such a networked approach to work and leisure time, Tapscott says the traditional university classroom is starting to feel less appropriate.

A Harvard student studying the corporate management expert Peter Drucker once summed up his disillusionment with what Tapscott calls the "broadcast model" of learning: "Why would I sit there and listen to a [teaching assistant] talking to 300 of us," Tapscott recalls him saying, "when I can go online and interact with a real-time Peter Drucker?"

"The big thing is to get an 'A' without having ever gone to the lecture," Tapscott says. "All these kids that have grown up collaborating and thinking differently walk into a university and they're asked to sit there and passively listen to someone talking."

He says that if someone from 100 years ago miraculously came back and found a modern engineer designing a bridge, it would be clear how much technology had changed things. But if that same person walked into a university lecture hall today, it would be entirely familiar.

"We need to move toward a collaborative model of learning that's student focused, [that's] highly customized and that is a model appropriate for a new generation that learns differently," says Tapscott. He warns that universities are ignoring the changing needs and desires of young people — and they're doing so at their own peril.

"When you have the cream of the crop of an entire generation thinking that the model of pedagogy is deeply flawed," he says, "well, the writing's on the wall."

FYI - Upcoming Webinar: The Power of Networks and Technology in Human Services Case Management

Shamelessly lifted directly from the website....located here....check this out!

Upcoming Webinar: The Power of Networks and Technology in Human Services Case Management 

June 9, 2011 from 2:00 - 3:30 pm (ET)

~This free event is a Webinar and takes place online. Registration required.~

This event will examine how technology innovation and the power of networks are transforming human services. National leaders in both thought and practice will share their experiences and insights into how technology, collaboration and social networks are modernizing care for society's most vulnerable children and families.  This webinar is being organized by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Ample time will be allocated for audience Q&A.  The panel includes:

• Kathleen Feely - Vice President for Innovation, the Annie E. Casey Foundation; Chief Executive Officer, Case Commons, Inc.
• Bruce Kamradt - Director, Children's Mental Health Services, Milwaukee County, Wisconsin; Director, Wraparound Milwaukee
• Maurice Miller - Founder and Chief Executive Officer, the Family Independence Initiative
• Julie Boatright Wilson (moderator) - Harry Kahn Senior Lecturer in Social Policy; Director, Malcolm Weiner Center for Social Policy, Harvard Kennedy School

Register now - Please fill out some basic information if you are interested in attending.
Instructions - Review these instructions and practice logging in ahead of time (Try it now!).
Resources - Links to resources related to this event (this list will be updated periodically).
The Power of Social Innovation Series features practitioner-led webinars on timely topics from education reform to economic development. Each webinar highlights innovators sharing their experiences and insights with fellow practitioners, students and scholars from across the country.  *We encourage you to also check out the other forthcoming webinars in the Series and listen to past events!
Questions? Contact us.

More on Twitter from The Chronicle ("Twitter meets the Breakfast Club")

Recently, I have noticed that many of my colleagues are beginning to look into the Twitter phenomenon in earnest.  Not that any of us still necessarily "get it," but we are making some exploratory attempts to think about the utilities it may offer.  Some would say we are attempting late.  I read a bit on higher ed online the other day that indicated that the "exploration of social networking of the 2009-2011 academic years by most U.S. universities is over and now people are honing in on their strategies."  I really don't know who the ultimate arbiter is on this, and I do think we should take our own time on deciding how to use this technology - or not.  I have held this position for a while.  However, in the effort to continue exposing social work educators to material that may aid us in our Twitter-considerations, here is a new article out in the Chronicle, which was brought to my attention by Dr. Shannon Mokoro.  I am particularly struck by the vignette at the start of the article which states something along the lines of "Faculty member:  Be careful, future employers might see what you put online" and "Student:  But I want them to see what I put online!"  It had not occurred to me that this might be one way to "get the word out" in a GOOD way about one's activities.  Controlling one's online presence is an important consideration for all of us.  I, for one, choose to control my online presence by keeping a profile on blogger.com as the personal website space provided to me by my University does not come up in most search engines.  So, maybe twitter plays into this as well.  Not sure, need to do some more thinking, but thought I'd share.  Enjoy this person's thoughts!

May 8, 2011

Twitter Meets the Breakfast Club

By David Silver

"Be careful," I used to warn my students back in the mid-1990s as I taught them how to make what we then called "home pages." "When you put something on the World Wide Web, you're making it public. And that means future employers may find it."
For the next 15 years, I repeated my warning as I taught students how to build Web sites, craft blogs, use Flickr, and create content on a small but growing site called Facebook.
About three years ago, all of that changed. "Be careful," I said to my students as I taught them how to use Twitter. "Future employers may find your work."
"But Professor Silver," said one of the students as he looked up from his laptop, "I want future employers to find my work."
This semester I am teaching "Green Media," a media-studies production course devoted to making media about making food. In the course, students learn about the history of television cooking shows, how to make their own food media, and how to share their work via social media like Twitter, Flickr, and blogs. To give us some context, we read Kathleen Collins's Watching What We Eat: The Evolution of Television Cooking Shows (Continuum, 2009); for some contemporary views, we read Novella Carpenter's Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (Penguin Press, 2009).
On the second day of class, I required the 10 students in the course to join Twitter (if they had not already) and to create public Twitter accounts. I further required them to tweet under their real names. And finally, I asked them to follow all their classmates and me on Twitter, and to get into the habit of checking Twitter at least once a day.
While many discussions about Twitter and teaching revolve around the brevity of tweets (140 characters or less), my use of Twitter has more to do with the public nature of its platform.
I have my students begin a Twitter account for a number of reasons.
First, because their Twitter accounts are public, their professor, their classmates, and the larger Twitter community have access to their work. As I learned years ago when my students posted their work on their home pages, the larger the potential readership is, the better they make their work. With Twitter, the stage is bigger and the stakes are higher—and invariably, students' work improves.
Second, because they tweet under their real names, they become, I believe, more responsible for their work. Too often, online anonymity contributes to rude and reckless discourse—witness comments on YouTube and on blogs. By tweeting under their own names, students post with a bit more deliberation and, perhaps, caution—not out of fear of future employers finding their work but rather with hope and expectation that they will.
Third and most practically, for both my students and me, Twitter simplifies course management by replacing at least three classroom technologies. Twitter replaces the class listserv (or course blog, Blackboard, or discussion group) for our outside-the-classroom discussions and resource sharing. Twitter replaces e-mail announcements for new readings, location changes, and relevant happenings around the city. And Twitter replaces the cardboard box I used to bring to class to collect papers and other assignments. Now my students post tweets with links to their work.
In early February, I (or @davidmsilver on Twitter) tweeted the following: "breakfast project for #greenmedia http://bit.ly/ewCOix."
Roughly translated, the 54 characters announced a project to students in "Green Media" (signified by the #greenmedia hashtag, a method of categorizing, and thus searching for, tweets) and provided them (and anyone else following me on Twitter) a shortened link to the whole assignment posted on my blog (http://silverinsf.blogspot.com).
The assignment was fairly straightforward. First, students had to cook, bake, or prepare something suitable for breakfast or lunch. Second, they had to document the cooking process with digital photos, upload them to Flickr (an online photo-management and sharing application), and curate them into a set that tells a meaningful story about their dish. Third, somewhere within their Flickr set, they had to provide a recipe (title, ingredients, instructions) for their dish. Fourth, once finished with their breakfast project and before class on February 15, they had to tweet a link to their recipes and include a link to their Flickr sets and the #greenmedia hashtag. Finally, they had to bring their dishes to class and share them with the rest of us.
As the deadline approached, breakfast-project-related student tweets began rolling in.
Stephanie Bruno, @princessbruno, tweeted, "Chocolate Chip Banana Muffins for #greenmedia are all done! Don't you wish this was your homework? http://bit.ly/ghVsqx."
Chris Williams, @ChrisUSF, tweeted, "Mmmmmm Blueberry Lemon Bread for breakfast. http://tinyurl.com/4wj7qez #greenmedia now we feast."
Nicholas Ryan, @nryan89, tweeted, "Rice pudding breakfast project ... cant wait to see everyones #greenmedia ... http://tinyurl.com/4z3zbld."
What I find especially interesting is that in many of the students' tweets, there is both an announcement of an individually created dish and an anticipation of a collectively created meal ("#greenmedia now we feast"; "cant wait to see everyones #greenmedia"). Students are tweeting as both individual creators and collaborative sharers, a powerful combination for both learning and working environments. Increasingly, being able to operate within a team is a crucial skill for effective citizenship in the 21st century.
One student, Sophia Miles (@sophiamiles7), mentions other students' work within her own tweet: "My stomach is growling with excitement for class today #greenmedia! Scones, muffins, banana bread, OH MY! http://tinyurl.com/4qf5kf3."
In all my years of using a cardboard box, I can't recall a student's giving a shout-out to another while turning in a paper.
Each time I saw a breakfast project-related tweet I would "favorite" it—an option which, similar to bookmarking Web sites, easily stores favorite tweets. Because my students used the #greenmedia hashtag, finding and favoriting these tweets was easy. When I arrived in class on February 15, I fired up the classroom laptop, logged in to Twitter, and clicked "favorites." With one click, I had links to all of my students' projects in the order that they completed them, giving us a convenient and ready-to-go order for Demo Day, the day students present their projects to the class.
But before we demonstrated our media, we devoured our dishes.
Through Twitter, Katherine D. Harris, @triproftri, an assistant professor of English literature at San Jose State University, learned about the breakfast project and integrated it into a first-year composition class, "Food and You." As part of an in-class workshop, she had her students create Flickr accounts, visit my students' Flickr sets, and leave comments on their work. Out of the many comments from San Jose students, my favorite was from Dtagaloa90, who commented on Jaime Giacomi's (@jcgiacomi) cinnamon rolls: "The results of this recipe look great. My mouth is watering right now! I appreciate the pictures that are pretty self-explanatory in terms of making the dish. I don't know how to cook anything, but I may try this one soon."
Of course, Twitter didn't invent cross-institutional collaboration, but it sure makes it easier. By tweeting my syllabi and then my assignments, I invite and engage with other professors who follow me on Twitter in hope of encouraging more collaborations like the one with San Jose students. Perhaps with Twitter and social media we will begin to witness new forms of the "networked classroom," which not only connects enrolled students to one another but also allows students from different courses to network together, creating larger, more diverse, and more collaborative learning environments.
Although exciting for professors, such open, public pedagogies are even more exciting, I believe, for our students. Making her recipe for cinnamon rolls public is great for Jaime, whose work now involves a very real readership that goes beyond her professor and home institution. And it is great for Dtagaloa90, who, with Jaime's help, may learn how to cook her first dish.
"Be careful," I used to warn my students. "On the Internet, you never know who will find your work."
"Make it great," I now tell them, "because people will find your work."

David Silver is an associate professor of media studies and environmental studies at the University of San Francisco, and is co-director of its Garden Project, a learning community built around an organic garden on campus.

What the heck is a "podcast" and what does it have to do with teaching about social work practice?

Welcome to the second installment of our "what the heck" series (the previous installment addressed "wikis") - this time focused on learning about what a podcast is - with specific examples of podcasts that can help in teaching people about social work practice.  According to Wikipedia, which I use here as a source given that the topic relates to the Internet, a podcast is a :A podcast (or non-streamed webcast) is a series of digital media files (either audio or video) that are released episodically and often downloaded through web syndication."

One of the most popular podcasts out in the wild world of the Internet (known affectionately by some of our  young(er) and hip(per) students as "the interwebs") is Dr. Jonathan Singer's Social Work Podcast.  You can see some of his thoughtful work on "how to listen" (perfect for students in our introductory practice courses) by clicking on this link.   Here is Dr. Singer's blurb on it:  "The Social Work Podcast provides information on all things social work, including direct practice (both clinical and community organizing), research, policy, education... and everything in between. Join your host, Jonathan Singer, Ph.D., LCSW, as he explores topics near and dear to every social worker's heart. The purpose of the podcast is to present useful information in a user-friendly format. Although the intended audience is social workers, the information will be useful to anyone in a helping profession (including psychology, nursing, psychiatry, counseling, and education). The general public might also find these podcasts useful as a way of learning what social workers understand to be important. If you have ideas for future podcasts, please send an email to jonathan at socialworkpodcast dot com."

Check out these podcasts for application to practice courses:

On DSM diagnosis for social workers


On social work practice with the parents of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender kids

For a list of the different (many!) podcasts available, see this link.

Please consider using these for your classes next fall - I find them most helpful as posted links on WebCT that students can read ahead of class vs. something for class...............enjoy the world of podcasts!

Drop your memory stick - and check out dropbox.com

Learning to work in groups is a vital skill for all social workers.  For many of our students who are juggling work, school and family - the challenges of group work add in one more ball into the juggler's mix.  One of the most common challenges experienced by groups in my research courses relates to working on the right version of their proposal/paper/presentation.  While Google docs has been of use to many, some find that the "invitation" to view and edit a document gets blocked in email spam filters...and that's where some new technology comes in.  It's called "dropbox." I have been testing it out for the past couple of months, and recommend it highly.  I am currently working on a project with a colleague at another University in Massachusetts as well as another colleague in Norway.  It works for the home-office computer gap as well.  Goodbye memory stick for me, most of the time.

This new, free online tool may be helpful to you as you navigate between home and work computers - but may also be useful for your students as they navigate between home computers, field placement computers and school computer labs...check out dropbox.com

• 2 MB storage for free (more for paid customers)
• Super-easy to download and use
• Automatic synchronization - if you change a file, it is changed across all locations

A balanced view on online learning - and alternatives to moodle and WebCT/Blackboard

After spending an inordinate amount of time dealing with red tape around access to WebCT/Blackboard issues this week - and hearing myriad complaints from students about this interface, I gravitated toward this headline this morning while reading The Chronicle.  This essay is a very thoughtful - and balanced - commentary on the pros and cons of face to face vs. face to screen (aka online/hybrid) learning.  You can click here for the permalink to this article.  As my frustrations with the WebCT/Blackboard interface rise, I was especially interested to see this author's references to other, allegedly more user friendly Internet resources that faculty are experimenting with.  This caused me to wonder about those of us that have attempted to foray into the world of online or hybrid teaching and the ways in which the particular technologies we have had access to have colored our views of this experience, at least in part.

So, I began to look around at these other possible options.  I had not heard of PBworks or Ning for this purpose - but had heard of Moodle and Google Sites.  Here are my brief thoughts on each.  

PB Works - seems to be more focused on primary education teachers but looks like it has promise - but it costs $99 per year for an individual.  Not willing to pay to try it out.

Ning - I knew of ning as a website that would assist in creating an online social network...it has potential for creating a course website...but I am not sure it would be great as a document delivery mechanism which is a major way that I use my course websites as I am not wholly reliant on textbooks in most courses.

Moodle - we have posted on that in the past, click here.  I do not find it particularly user friendly as compared to WebCT/Blackboard...

So, this leaves us with Google Sites.  I think this is the next best option.  I found it a bit more user friendly than WebCT/Blackboard...however in a previous semester when I tested a module online with a class, students without gmail accounts had some access issues...this was 2 years ago, so this may have been worked out.  I do not know if we are less "covered" in terms of posting links to readings via the SSU library database, but have an email in to Tara F. Contact me if you are interested in learning more about the outcome of that discussion...I plan to work on a google sites approach to one course next fall, and will post again with my experiences at that time...

February 3, 2011

More Face-to-Face, Less Face-to-Screen

Brian Taylor

Enlarge Image

Brian Taylor

By Sharon Marshall

The university where I have been teaching for the past four years prides itself on being technologically up-to-date and environmentally conscious.
New students and faculty members receive laptops, and many efforts are made to educate all of us about emerging technologies. The university, in seeking to reduce its use of paper and to decrease the number of cars on our largely commuter campus, has encouraged instructors to use online course-management platforms like Blackboard.
As new faculty members in a newly created writing institute, my colleagues and I were encouraged to include "21st-century literacies" among our learning objectives for students. Because I had dabbled in Blackboard, I decided to see what would happen if I made it more central to my course—both as a way to promote those literacies and, frankly, to come more fully into the 21st century myself.
My students and I shuttled back and forth between our physical classroom and our online home on Blackboard, where we kept and retrieved all of our stuff. I posted assignments online, and students uploaded their papers from their computers. I experimented with the paperless option, which meant downloading student essays, saving them in a file, using the track-changes tool to give feedback, and then e-mailing the papers back to students. It took many hours, and now that I have learned that reading on a computer screen can be about 25-percent slower than reading on paper, I understand why.
In our discussions, instead of writing their first thoughts about a topic in their notebooks, they recorded those thoughts in a dialogue box online. In the old days, we would read those thoughts aloud from the notebooks. But being citizens of Blackboard meant that—in class or not—we were able to view all of the other responses and papers and give peer feedback online.
Students could access the assigned readings by clicking on a readings tab and viewing or printing the files. From a Web-links tab, they could instantly access Web sites I had linked to the course. Discussions and responses to films and readings, some of which might previously have occurred in the physical classroom, happened online. When we were together in the same room, I spent a lot of my time at a computer console in the corner, directing the Blackboard show when it came time to explain an assignment, discuss a reading, or evaluate a paper.
For their midterm and final projects, students wrote and published traditional-style essays on Blackboard, designed PowerPoint presentations, adding links to blogs, Web sites, and videos, and created a final electronic portfolio.
Using Blackboard gave us easy paperless access to all of the texts produced and used in the course—whether that was archives at the Smithsonian, the syllabus, or one student's response to another student's essay. But that access via computer screen cut down on the face-to-face contact that is the lifeblood of a traditional classroom.
My ideal class—students sitting in a circle, or around a seminar table if we're really lucky, discussing, reading aloud, exchanging hard copies of student papers—had become, in a sense, a figure of nostalgia. It was something I did with students "back in the day."
These days we would often sit in a circle, but even when we were engaged in a discussion that didn't require consulting a laptop, students would inch up those screens and attempt to engage in all manner of online shenanigans (instant messaging, Facebook, poker, YouTube, and the like). That forced me, the former caring, supportive, "I write with you" professor, to take on a bad-cop role and immediately arrest the inappropriate use of the technology that I was, ironically, privileging in the course.
Gradually it became clear that, given the choice, most students preferred to live online, rather than engage with actual humans in a classroom, even when there was a seeming sense of community or camaraderie among classmates. Being online all the time had become learned behavior that was hard to give up, even for only 55 minutes.
Technology is supposed to make life easier, but I found that maintaining a separate Web site for my three courses—posting assignments, creating links, keeping up with their online responses—was the equivalent of teaching a fourth course.
More disturbingly, a subtle shift occurred in my focus vis-à-vis student writing. Reading their papers became a second priority, after first making sure that everything was up to speed on Blackboard (really, a less-than-user-friendly platform that has prompted my colleagues to experiment with others, including Ning, Moodle, PBworks, Blogger, and Google Sites). Something as simple as checking to see that students had done the writing—which, in a physical classroom, just means collecting their papers—is more time-consuming online.
I was spending a lot more time with the "interface" than I had bargained for, and it was compromising my face-to-face teaching.
Classroom innovations typically arouse enthusiasm from would-be innovators and knee-jerk skepticism from the old guard. I remember, back in the 60s, when the prospect of television in the schools was cause for alarm. When I was in third or fourth grade, I brought an article to school about how teachers would be finished once TV's were rolled into the classroom. And of course, as a kid, I was intrigued by the prospect of spending hours in school watching TV. Neither scenario played out. But clearly, the uneasy suspicion that new technology might somehow replace us, make us less human, or make traditional ways of knowing obsolete, has been around for a long time.
The flip side of technophobia is the kind of unexamined technophilia that welcomes everything new and different, whether or not it improves life or teaching, or the lives of students and teachers. I want to find a place, a stance, somewhere in between, a both/and strategy that allows my students and me to, dare I say it, extract the best of both worlds.
I can remember how intrigued I was when e-mail came onto my radar for the first time in 1990. A student in one of my writing classes at the City University of New York wrote a literacy autobiography in which he rhapsodized about sipping his morning cup of joe while reading his electronic mail. Electronic what? That was long before there were more than a billion e-mail users worldwide, so I can't imagine who he was getting the mail from (Al Gore?).
Twenty years later, I have an app-saturated iPhone and 301 friends (and counting) on Facebook, I'm typing this on a MacBook, and submitting the manuscript online. But what I'm wondering is this: Because technology plays such a huge role in our lives when we are not in school, is it really necessary that we duplicate those experiences and environments when we actually have the opportunity to connect in more direct and immediate ways in a synchronous classroom?
How can I learn to teach with technology in a way that doesn't compromise the feeling of community, engagement, focused attention, and sense of personal responsibility that I value so much and want my students to value, too?
I heard a comedian on satellite radio the other day talking about the mysteries of text-messaging. The punch line went something like this: Why are you bothering to type a message with your thumbs when all you have to do is press some buttons and talk on the phone? Texting is like towing a jumbo jet behind your car to travel across the country.
In reassessing my use of Blackboard, I don't want to succumb to a fear of change that would prevent my students (and me) from taking full advantage of the benefits of digital technology. But I also don't want us to become so preoccupied with the technology itself that we miss out on the connections we might make by simply turning to the person next to us.
I'm not going to completely abandon Blackboard or a similar online platform, but I am going to make sure that, at least while we're in class, we spend more time face-to-face and less time facing a screen.

Sharon Marshall is an assistant professor at the Institute for Writing Studies at St. John's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

A creative way to invite guest speakers without travel?

In this article from the Chronicle, the topic at hand is what to do when students would like to attend class sessions via webcam.  Never even thought of this as an option - and not sure what I think about that!  Not sure I like it.  However, it also discusses the use of skype, for example, to invite guest speakers into the classroom via video conference call...this might be an option for some of us to consider as we are losing the ability to provide honoraria to cover the time and travel of our guest lecturers...perhaps this might work for your course in some way? Let's discuss!

January 30, 2011

Absent Students Want to Attend Traditional Classes via Webcam

Professors already welcome their guest speakers using this same technology

By Jeffrey R. Young

It was just 30 minutes before class when Thomas Nelson Laird, an assistant professor of higher education at Indiana University at Bloomington, got the e-mail from a student: "I can't make it to class. Can you beam me in by Webcam?"

"I thought, I don't know if I can do that," the professor says. He looked at the clock and thought about the time it would take to rig up a link via Skype or some other video-chat system. He had used the technology before, though, so he figured, Why not?

Professors across the country are facing similar questions. Webcams are ubiquitous, and students are accustomed to using popular services like Skype to make what are essentially video phone calls to friends and family. Recognizing the trend, this month Skype unveiled a service for educators to trade tips and tricks, called "Skype in the classroom."

Professors also frequently bring in guest speakers using the technology, letting students interact with experts they otherwise would only read about in textbooks.

Mr. Nelson Laird's course, on diversity in education, has about 20 students in a circle. So on one seat, he set a laptop with a built-in Webcam for the missing student, who could not make it because of a snowstorm. It worked—the student even gave a five-minute presentation, her face displayed on the laptop screen and projected on a screen at the front of the room. But the professor noted that he had squandered five to 10 minutes of class time in setting up the connection, with a program called Adobe Connect.

The scenario was a first for Mr. Nelson Laird, and he says he hasn't yet thought out what his policy will be should a flurry of such requests occur. "Am I willing to do this occasionally? Sure," he told me this month. "But I'm not going to set this up every week."

Exactly how often professors fire up Web­cams in their classrooms is hard to figure. The most recent data from the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement shows that about 12 percent of professors said they had used videoconferencing in their teaching. Mr. Nelson Laird helps lead the annual survey, which was conducted in the spring of 2009, of about 4,600 faculty members at 50 American colleges and universities.
As that number grows, will videocon­fer­encing change the dynamics of traditional classrooms?

Talking Heads

Perhaps no classroom professor has experimented more with videoconferencing in a single course than Paul Jones, an associate professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In his fall 2009 course on virtual communities, he brought in a guest speaker via Skype nearly every week.

That let his students inter­act with some of the leading scholars and authors on the topic—including Fred Turner, an associate professor of communication at Stanford University, and Howard Rheingold, who has written many books on Internet culture—who would have been unlikely to make the trip down to speak in person.

The guest speakers did not have to offer prepared remarks. Instead they were asked to simply make themselves available for questions from students during their Web­cam appearances. In advance, students were required to use their Webcams to record short videos about the visitors' ideas. The guests would view the responses ahead of time, on YouTube or some other video-sharing site, to see what the students were most interested in.

"It's a bargain for these guys," says Mr. Jones, referring to the guest speakers. "They don't have to prepare a talk, and they get to interact with really smart students who are familiar with their work—and they don't have to travel."

Mr. Jones chose not to record the guests' video appearances themselves, or open them to the public. "I wanted the speaker to feel free to say whatever the hell they wanted," he says.
When I visited the University of Virginia last year, I saw a Skype guest speaker in action. Siva
 Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies there who frequently explores new educational technology, had agreed to give a half-hour talk via Skype to a friend's class at the University of Wisconsin at Madison's library school, and he let me sit in. A few minutes before he was to appear, he headed to his faculty office, logged onto Skype, and donned a headset. A Webcam built into his monitor broadcast his image, and thanks to a camera on the other end, he could see the classroom full of eager students. He spent a few minutes on prepared remarks, and then took questions. Afterward, he joked that his friend now owed him a beer, or else a guest lecture in return.

In his own courses, Mr. Vaidhyanathan cashes in on those favors. During one recent class session he linked in Jeff Jarvis, an associate professor of journalism at the City University of New York. "I get to talk to students I wouldn't have otherwise talked to," Mr. Jarvis told me. "I've done this probably a dozen times at least. You're in for 30 minutes, and you're out. The obligation is so minimal that it makes it easier to say, What the heck?"

New Chore for Professors

There are some downsides to classroom videoconferencing.

The technology does not always work, although it is far more reliable than it was just a few years ago.

The first time Katherine D. Harris, an assistant professor of English literature at San Jose State University, tried inviting a guest speaker via Skype, she could not get the video to work, despite help from one of the university's tech-support staff members. Students in the course, "Digital Literature: the Death of Print Culture?" could hear the guest but not see him. Sometimes the audio would cut out as well, which made it harder for them to concentrate.

Would she do it again? Only if she knew technical help was close at hand. "It's almost easier to do it in person because you don't have the technology mediating everything," she says. "There's just so much to handle and take care of rather than just going to pick someone up."

Even letting students participate via videoconference has its drawbacks.

"I want to throw out this caution," says Scott Johnson, director of Illinois Online Network, the online division of the University of Illinois. "Unless the professor is committed to personally supporting and facilitating these ad hoc accommodations and provisions, and willing to carve out class time to set up and maintain the provisions, this is a moderately dangerous road.

"My issue is that the creation of an on-demand condition of readiness for any technology is not feasible for the majority of the faculty of many institutions. If the institution has educational technologists on staff, it is critical to enlist their assistance for the present and future if this technology-friendly teaching climate is going to be sustainable."

The concern reminds me of a scene in the 1985 film Real Genius. A series of scenes shows a classroom at an elite university. Early in the semester, all the students are in their seats, attentively taking notes. As the term wears on, more and more students have left tape recorders in their seats, since they're too busy to make it.

Finally, recorders fill every desk, and the professor, too, is absent—replaced by a reel-to-reel machine playing his recorded lecture. On the board reads the message: "Math on Tape Is Hard to Follow: Please Listen Carefully."

Some level of phoning it in might be helpful, but professors will have to decide how far to go in accommodating their students' desire for convenience—and their own.

College 2.0 covers how new technologies are changing colleges. Please send ideas to jeff.young@chronicle.com or @jryoung on Twitter.

 

To teach online - or not to teach online...is this the question?

Both/and may be the answer. Before I begin my thoughts on this for today, let me say that although I have taught two hybrid courses, I am not necessarily a fan - but I do think we need to get more in depth thinking done on this...as uncomfortable and/or unpalatable it may feel.

We are hearing more and more about online teaching these days.  The need for it.  The push towards it.  The pros and the cons of taking this approach.  Our own Dr. Shelley Steenrod has looked at differences between an online and traditional approaches to teaching a social work service learning course, for example. 


The applicability of online methods for social work education SHOULD be a topic of hot debate for us.  I even heard last week that there is a 100% online social work program.  Yet, only once in a while, we visit-  and revisit - this issue in our School of Social Work's faculty meetings.  This year, one of our faculty members is teaching an online/hybrid version of one of our required MSW courses in a hybrid fashion for the first time.  It is a course in the human behavior in the social environment sequence.  We are anticipating an interesting discussion at the end of the semester...but I often get the feeling that we need to delve much more deeply into this topic, and really make some decisions about how to proceed with "all of this online learning stuff."  I think we are behind the curve that is curving on without our input.  I heard this when our Dean visited us recently...so, let's think about this more, and make some of the future with our own imprint - whether it is a full-embrace of online learning or not - or somewhere in between (my bet).

Given all of this stuff on my brain's back burner,  I was interested to see the results of a recent survey of faculty from around the country re: online learning.  Check out these interesting data on faculty views about online learning from around the country...whether you "agree" with online learning or not, still interesting.  These charts are derived from a survey of 10,720 faculty members at 69 colleges and universities.  I was particularly interested to note that 82% of faculty who had NOT taught an online (or hybrid?) course indicated that they thought this medium was an inferior way to teach as compared to traditional face-to-face teaching.  I was not surprised to see that most survey participants felt that preparing an online course required A LOT more work than a traditional course...this has certainly been my experience - and I know I would have been "in the weeds" without some training from SSU's Center for Teaching and Learning.  Perhaps most interesting - and compelling - was the fact that 82% of survey participants indicated that their motivation for adopting this teaching approach was to "meet student needs for flexible access."  Boy, this sure sounds like SSU to me.

Given my own limited experience with hybrid teaching (part online, part in-person), here are my thoughts on the questions that should guide our discussions:

1) What do we need to change about how WE TEACH and WE ENGAGE STUDENTS in order to feel ok about exploring any positives of online teaching approaches?

2) Which social work courses are most appropriate for online teaching?

3) What do our students think about their online courses?

4) Given the difference in workload re: preparing to teach an online course vs. a traditional, face-to-face course, what incentives are in place to entice/encourage us?

So, once again, as someone that is somewhat in the negative camp on all of this - let's really start to talk about this issue and make the dialogue our own.

Time to do some thinking about you, your students - and Facebook...

Social media is ever-present in the news these days - not to mention ever-present in many of our lives.  I joined the Facebook wagon late - but have enjoyed re-connecting with high school and college friends.  Facebook has also been a great family photo sharing spot.  However, I have always felt a bit strange when students ask to "friend" me.  "To friend," in case you are unaware, is a verb indicating that one has asked another to become "friends" on Facebook (or MySpace, or.... etc.).  After ignoring my Facebook "friend request" page for many months in a true avoidance of the issue...I decided that my policy would be that I would do the following:

a) Never accept a "friend" request from a current or potential future student


b) Never request to "friend" a current, potential future or former student

c) Would accept "friends" who were graduated students with whom I had some significant and positive teacher-student interaction 

With respect to a) and b), I don't want my students to see my photos of family gatherings or my somewhat wacky running commentary on my favorite FoodNetwork show "Chopped."  Or, for that matter, photos of my new home.  It isn't too long ago that a local professor who had proffered a low grade opened her door to an irate and aggressive student.  I may be paranoid here, but still, better safe than sorry.  This takes some of the fun off of a post about Facebook, I do realize that. 


With respect c), I am always shocked when students who have failed out of my courses or who have been called on the carpet re: plagiarism show up in my "friend request" page. 

So, imagine my surprise, when logging on to Facebook, I saw that a friend from college (Jackie Cohen, who works as an Editor for Allfacebook.com, which should tell us something about our need to be thinking about the Facebook phenomenon) posted this article on Virginia's potential ban on Facebook friendships between students and teachers - albeit not at the undergraduate or graduate level - but still something to consider. Although this move appears to relate to sexual relationships between teachers and students, I still think it is a good discussion point.  The article also references, for example, the fact that students and teachers in some cases communicate via text message.  So,  I have posted the story in below...but would love to hear your thoughts on how Schools of Social Work should handle both the issue of Facebook and perhaps texting? 

Please share this blog posting with your social work academic colleagues - the blog is located at http://socialworktechnotes.blogspot.com/ and this will be the first posting (or in a few days, the second, and can be found in the blog archive if scrolling down does not work).

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Virginia May Ban Teachers From Facebooking With Students

Posted by Jackie Cohen on January 7th, 2011 7:44 PM

School teachers may be officially discouraged, if not completely banned, from communicating with students via Facebook, depending on the outcome of a January 13 vote by the Virginia Department of Education.


The state educational agency may set an example for others in the U.S. in requiring teachers to deny or ignore friend requests from students.

This would comply with a report called “Guidelines for the Prevention of Sexual Misconduct and Abuse in Virginia Public Schools.”

The big picture: The Virginia Department of Education has dealt with of 120 cases of sexual misconduct between teachers and minors since 2000, according to The Daily Caller.

The Board’s proposal for reining in potential misconduct would prohibit teachers from sending text messages to students one-on-one and also disallow private communications via noprofessional social networking sites.

If a student sends a friend request to a Virginia public school employee via Facebook, not only would that recipient have to decline or disregard it, but also would have to report it to a direct supervisor. This would have to go in writing on the next business day and include the date, time and nature of the contact.

This is all still in the suggestion stage, as a spokesperson for the Virginia Department of Education told The Daily Caller that she couldn’t “begin to speculate on how the board will vote.” If approved, then Virginia schools would be encouraged to adopt the policy.

This sounds like the kind of measure that parents would support in the interest of protecting their children. School officials probably like this too because of the cost of potential lawsuits related to anything resembling “sexual misconduct.” But I suspect students might have mixed reactions to this proposal, and free speech poponents might actively dislike the idea.

What’s your opinion on whether school employees should be able to communicate with students one-on-one via social networks and text messages? Do employers have the right to dictate how staff use Facebook even during off hours?

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