Here is the presentation I’ll be giving in the morning. Yes, I’m still playing with the “screencast-as-slides” approach: ooh, distracting motion!
Update: And here is a short outline of tips I handed around:
phases.
You may have noticed I have abandoned the idea of going all audio here. I’ve also decided not to echo every post from my grad courses here, but instead to do more periodic posts. And the periodicity will be rather long, since this semester’s classes are set up on a two-week cycle, in order to prepare for the shift from 16-week semesters down to 7-week courses. I know: yikes.
Today, allow me to introduce you to the Introduction to Interactive Communication Course, designed to be the first course people take when they come into the program. As former students know, I’ve taught some initial version of the “first graduate course” for about seven years now, in three different graduate programs. I like it because it is always, in some way, a survey, and it gives me the chance to try to set a trajectory for students’ graduate programs. I don’t know how successful I am at that, though, since many students end up thinking of it as that strange anomalous course we took at the beginning of the program. In fact, now that we are shifting the program, I think we need to be thinking about the curriculum again to make sure we are covering all our bases and not being more redundant than absolutely necessary, but that’s fodder for another post.
Like most of my grad courses, this one is blog-centric. The main course blog for the course may be found here, along with the start of a blogroll as students get their blogs set up. The assignment for the initial two-week “module,” may be found here, and includes a longish introductory talk and a shorter “nuts & bolts” overview of the syllabus. As the syllabus notes, the course provides a bit of a sampling of what the program is about, though the focus is less on design (found in more of the courses) and more on some form of overall social understanding of what interactive communication is and what it does.
As always, I’m trying something new with the classes this semester. (At some point, I’ll write about my experiments with Facebook as courseware last semester.) At the suggestion of an instructional designer, I’m trying self-assessments for each unit, to hopefully be able to get a better read on what students are getting out of the course—or not getting out of it—at each stage. I’ll let you know how that goes. Be sure to check out the participants’ blogs, once we get rolling, and I will likely point you to posts I think are interesting along the way.
Many (scores, actually) moons ago, I happily volunteered to write an article for the “Blogs for Learning” Nicole Ellison was putting together. I actually wrote this almost a year ago, while in Aruba, and then inconveniently forgot about it entirely. Blame it on the Balashi. Just ran into her again in Vancouver, and sent it along, and now it appears at the site.
Of course, these days, a “large class” is one that grows to 30 students, thanks to my switch to teaching a smaller private university. But I hope some of the hints that appear in the short article can be of help, especially if you are new to using blogs in lecture classes. Here’s the beginning:
In this short article, I hope to provide some examples of failures and successes in managing blogging in large classes, and some indication of where this might go in the future. Like many people, I started blogging in small senior-level seminars. This was in 1999, and at the time there were not really blogging systems available, and like many other people, I had to write my own. What I saw as a very simple way to replace email lists and bulletin board (forum) systems turned out to be an extraordinarily effective way to encourage conversation among students, and I have used blogs in most of my classes in the years since. Today, blogging in a small class is a fairly easy way to get started for both students and teachers.And here’s the rest.
Kevin Lim is one of 20 bloggers up for a $10,000 annual blogging scholarship. Many of the other blogs are also quite good, but Kevin—who is a former student of mine—has the best one, and deserves to win. If you’ve been reading this blog for any amount of time, you know that I’m a regular reader of Kevin’s blog, and often find interesting stuff there that I wouldn’t otherwise find.
Unfortunately, it looks like they are deciding who to award it to based on the inherently flawed internet poll. Not only is the willingness to vote a bad indicator of real popularity (if popularity, rather than quality, is their major criterion), let alone quality, but there is far too much opportunity for fraud. Not that I am impugning any of the finalists, only indicating that it’s a bad way to judge things. Right now, for example, the number of votes cast for each blog has no relationship to the Technorati ranking or PageRank, which suggests something is fishy. Moreover, it’s clear that more popular topics are going to win out over more academic topics in broad popularity.
But, who am I to complain, since I encourage my students to court an audience. Good luck to Kevin, and to the other entrants. And bravo to Collegescholarships.org for offering money to student bloggers. Yes, it’s a commercial for them, but this is marketing I can get behind.
I admit it: I thought DOPA was too dopey to be very worried about. After all, Net Neutrality seemed to me to be more important in the long run, and more embattled. I never imagined that DOPA would make it very far, and so I wasn’t worried about it. As Will Richardson notes the anti-social networking bill has passed in the House of Representatives. The vote was 410-15. My response is aligned with the American Library Association’s: what are these guys smoking?< ?a>
So, time to call your senator. Really. Schools already are too much like prisons. At least, social networking provides a bit of escape, and a chance for students to be proactive. At most, it encourages self-driven learning, collaboration, and creativity. Let’s not let our congresscritters add more blinders to students eyes.
In particular, I’m going to be calling Hillary Clinton’s office to make clear that if she expects to get any of the under-40 (yeah, yeah, I had another birthday—and I won’t be part of this group too much longer—but 40 is the new 30) vote in future elections, going after social networking is the wrong way to do it. And I promise, when it comes to 2008, I will remember her vote on this issue, and I will be very noisy about it.
I’m a bit behind the curve on this one. I’ve done the standard 15 minute presentation, but it took me a lot longer to put together than I had expected. The topic: the learning blogosphere. I’ve glanced as some of the other offerings for VR@RL, and this is a bit on the lightweight side, but I hope there is something there of interest.
You can also download a copy of the presentation in WMV (18 Mb) or MOV (35 Mb) formats.
Update: By popular request, the video (split into two halves) is now up on YouTube:
Had to see this coming: Republican representatives have
introduced a bill that would mandate that schools provide a filter that cuts students off from any website that may cause them to “easily be subject to unlawful sexual advances, unlawful requests for sexual favors, or repeated offensive comments of a sexual nature from adults,” among other things. The target is not email, but “commercial social networking websites” (which might, in effect, lead to distributed, non-commercial, open social networking systems—which might not be a bad thing). Also, it seems to aim to block off chat rooms and IM; in other words, they want students to be passive recipients of information from the web.
They also want a warning label on MySpace. No, seriously. The act would require the FTC to set up a site to warn users of the evils of MySpace, and similar sites. That sounds ridiculous, but, if done right, might be the only sensible part of the proposal. That is, if parents, teachers, and kids are aware of the potential dangers of the online world—just as they are told not to get in cars with strangers—it would allow schools to use the internet to their own benefit rather than cutting off their net to spite their educations.
And congresscritters wonder why they have such low approval ratings? This is just really, really dumb. And DOPA (Deleting Online Predators Act) is pushed by the party that is for personal liberty and small government? The CNet article above suggests that Republicans think this kind of restriction of student access to computing is what will help them keep a large chunk of their seats.
At a time when US businesses are worried that kids are unprepared in science and technology, one wonders what on earth cutting off the interactive pieces of the internet will do to our ability to compete in a global market. From a more practical perspective, if it makes any headway (very unlikely, I hope), it means teachers will have difficulty using sites like Blogger and Livejournal in their instruction.
I don’t want to be accused of being negative. What I would support is a significant grant that would support research into the effects of social networking sites, as well as other uses of internet use, in education. Once the facts were clear, Congress could decide whether legislative action was warranted, or whether a campaign of parent and teacher education was a smarter way to go.
(via Weblog-ed)