Dangerously Irrelevant

From Will Richardson:

Iowa State University held its second annual ComETS symposium a couple of weeks ago. Faculty, professional staff, and a few outside folks gathered together to talk about technology integration and implementation in higher education.

Building a community of practice through blogging

Below is my 10–minute ‘lightning strike’ presentation, Building a Community of Practice Through Blogging. I didn’t have my ‘A game’ that day and wasn’t as energetic a presenter as I usually am. I also spent too much time on the ‘creating a listening station’ portion and not enough time on the ‘participating in the conversation’ portion. That ratio was supposed to be 50–50, not 75–25. Despite all that, I think that the presentation came out pretty well and is a solid introduction to RSS and blogging communities for academics. Here’s a quote from my talk:

Most academics have yet to realize the power of social media. . . .

The reason we go to academic conferences is for the conversations. It’s not for the research presentations because you know how good those are. And it’s not to access the papers because we can get those in other channels. It’s to be around other people and have those conversations in the hall and after the sessions and at dinner and so on that solidify our relationships with people. Well, now we can have those conversations year-round. All we have to do is choose to be part of the conversation.

Extreme presentation makeover 

My faculty colleague, John Nash, also gave a lightning strike presentation titled Extreme Presentation Makeover. He took some slides from our rejected UCEA presentation proposal and went to town. [Note to self: always present before John, not after, because he’s a hard act to follow!]. He also has a blog post about his presentation. Here’s a quote from his talk:

The other thing that we generally fail to think about when we give presentations is a call to action. What is it that you want someone to do after you’re done?

All of the symposium videos are available at the ComETS symposium web site and also are being uploaded to the ISU YouTube channel. 

Charting our course: Exploring 21st century learning

Our keynote for the symposium was Malcolm Brown from Educause. Here are my notes from his talk:

"Improvement in postsecondary education will require converting teaching from a 'solo sport' to a community-based research activity." – Herbert Simon

Technology predictions v. course charting

The pace and scale of Internet change is unprecedented, so it's very hard to wrap our heads around it. 

Every second 1,157 videos are uploaded to YouTube.

2.2 million e-mails sent every second

What Colleges Should Learn from Newspapers' Decline

iTunes has many academic lectures / lessons

So does Academic Earth

I love this line from the Kaplan University video: "?"

Funny thing about paradigm shifts: If we knew what the next paradigm was, we'd already be there.

Where is the student in all of this?

The opportunity is in increased student engagement [Do most profs at research universities really care about increased student engagement? If so, they haven't really showed it to date.]

How we learn, National Academies Press

Discussed the impact of the printing press

The 3 Cs of mobile computing

1. Content – delivery, anywhere anytime, ebooks, etextbooks, etc.
2. Collaboration – language learning, formative assessment, first-hand data collection, etc.
3. Community – student authors, leveraging messaging, enhanced polling, etc.

Angela Maiers: We haven't invited our students to be creators or co-creators of content.

Malcolm just cited quick penetration of clickers as examples of higher ed moving more quickly on the tech front

'Some' is not a rebuttal

Expanding from those that already are technology-inclined to those that need to be

I think that all colleges and universities should have technology communities like ComETS at ISU and at University of Wisconsin-Madison. I said to Jim Twetten, who’s heading the ComETS efforts here:

I like ComETS because it's an opportunity to learn from other ISU educators, both faculty and professional staff, across campus who are doing interesting things with digital technologies. The annual ComETS symposium gives us an opportunity to intersect face-to-face in a variety of different ways. The ongoing ComETS listserv connects us and allows us to share and discuss in between symposia. We're off to a good start. Now the challenge becomes: how do we expand from those that already are technology-inclined to those that need to be? The latter group is much larger than the former…

You can see some backchannel conversations from the symposium by searching for the Twitter hashtag: #comets. Happy reading!

Many of you may have seen this commercial for Kaplan University. It made the rounds in the edublogosphere because of its message about change, talent, and learner-centered instruction. I’ve used it myself in several presentations to higher education folks.

Now Dr. Punya Mishra, of Michigan State University and TPACK fame, offers his take on the commercial as he reflects on his own new graduate program. I think you’ll enjoy his 2-minute video. Happy viewing!

Here’s the latest educational technology video that’s making the rounds. I know a few professors like this!

“If you are here, why are we Skyping?”

This is the message that I just sent my Education Law and Ethics students (the two cohorts are in Des Moines and Mason City, Iowa). Thought I’d share here too…

———

Time to set up Google Reader!

1. Watch this video:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU

2. Go to www.google.com/reader. Sign in with your new Gmail account info if need be. Once you’re in, click on the gray ‘Add a subscription box’ (top left). Paste in the first URL below. Repeat for each of the remaining links on the list. When you’re done, you should have 11 ‘feeds’ in your subscription list (bottom left). Click on a specific feed name to see items from just that one. Click on ‘All items’ (top left) to see all 11 feeds mixed together.

• http://www.nsba.org/RSS/MainMenu/SchoolLaw/LegalClips.aspx
• http://www.edjurist.com/blog/ (a CASTLE blog)
• http://educationlaw.foxrothschild.com/
• http://www.schoolsecurityblog.com/
• http://miketully.net/blog/
• http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/school_law/
• http://specialeducationlawblog.blogspot.com/
• http://jeffmarcus-specialedlaw.blogspot.com/
• http://www.detentionslip.org
• http://englishteachersandthelaw.blogspot.com
• http://twitter.com/ELAOffice
• http://twitter.com/aimeebissonette

3. My goodness, what have we done? Well, we’ve just saved you time by putting ten school law-related feeds into one place. Now you’ll be up to date on all of the latest school law news and you’ll only have to go to one location (www.google.com/reader) rather than ten! Try to visit Google Reader at least once or twice per week just to stay current.

4. Note that you can add other feeds to Google Reader too! For example…

• http://feeds.feedburner.com/dangerouslyirrelevant (my blog)
• http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/LeaderTalk/ (another CASTLE blog)
• http://www.desmoinesregister.com/rss (click on an orange button, then add that URL to your Reader)
• http://www.globegazette.com/news/ (click on an orange button, then add that URL to your Reader)
• http://www.cnn.com/services/rss/
• http://content.usatoday.com/marketing/rss/index.aspx
• http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/index.html
• http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/rss/index
• http://www.news.iastate.edu/rss/
• http://www.weather.com/weather/today/Des+Moines+IA+USIA0231?lswe=des%20moines,%20ia&from=searchbox_localwx
• http://www.weather.com/weather/today/Mason+City+IA+USIA0541?lswe=mason%20city,%20ia&from=searchbox_localwx

5. Start looking for the letters ‘RSS’ and/or the little orange RSS symbol on web sites. Those tell you that you can add that site’s content to Google Reader, meaning one less place you have to visit separately on the Web. Use Google Reader to ease your personal, professional, and academic lives. See the attached file for ways you can supercharge your Google Reader experience!

6. Get in touch if you have questions / difficulty!

Google Reader Tips (click on image for larger version)

Seth Godin says: 

If you want to change people, you must create enough leverage to encourage the change to happen.

I’ll be making this argument when it’s time for me to go up for promotion…

I gave a bad presentation yesterday. It wasn’t bad because I had poor content or delivery. It was a bad presentation because I didn’t sufficiently account for the needs and understandings of my audience. Let me explain…

I’m in Anaheim, California for the annual conference of the University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA), which is the primary association for educational leadership faculty members at large research institutions. In other words, UCEA is the organization for professors that prepare school principals and superintendents. I currently serve as UCEA’s Associate Director for Communications. I’ve been helping UCEA transition from a very static, fairly unhelpful web site to a more robust online presence. This past year we transitioned UCEA to Squarespace and now I am helping them take advantage of its interactive tools and other social media such as Twitter and podcasting.

Yesterday morning I was scheduled to give a presentation to UCEA’s Executive Committee (EC). The EC is the governing body for the larger organization and is made up of 10 faculty from a number of different postsecondary institutions. You can see my presentation below. I shared various statistics and information about the UCEA web site, Twitter channel, and BlogTalkRadio podcast series.

The members of the EC were fine until I got to the recommendations. Then I lost them (at least that’s when I think I lost them). The problem was that I’ve been working with Dr. Michelle Young, UCEA’s Executive Director, and she gets what we’re trying to do. But the EC hasn’t heard from me in a while and to them I might as well have been speaking in tongues. As a group, their level of technology understanding was much lower than Michelle’s, perhaps because I’ve been answering her questions as we’ve gone along.

It was my fault. I know that I need to tailor my presentations to the level of my audience. I’ve done that well in the past – including with the EC – but I forgot my audience this time. The end result was a dissatisfying experience for both them and me. Although some of them said to me later that I did a good job, I know they were being polite.

So now I have to remedy the situation. For some that will mean individual follow-up conversations just to clarify or touch base. For others a series of explanatory e-mail updates will suffice. And I’ll need to roll up my sleeves with a few and start walking them through the same questions and answers that Michelle and I already have navigated. In the end it will be fine, but now I’ve created more work for myself – work I could have avoided if I’d done what I should have yesterday.

I gave a bad presentation yesterday. Lesson learned. Reminder received. Time to adjust, compensate, and move forward…

I was one of the faculty members interviewed by the Associated Press for an article on technology integration in higher education. I think the article came out pretty well. It’s appeared in a number of different online outlets, including U.S. News & World Report. Here’s a short quote:

"They're going to use it no matter what," said [Beth] Simon, of the University of California, San Diego. "How do you use this ubiquitous technology that's out there to change the dynamic of the classroom, to engage the students?"

Happy reading!

Some of you may have noticed that I have two online courses coming up this fall. Here’s what I’m thinking…

I’ve been reading Jeff Jarvis’ superb book, What Would Google Do? (which I’ll be writing more about soon). Over and over again, he stresses the importance of openness, transparency, collaboration, collective action, co-learning, co-creation of knowledge, and giving up control in this new Internet era.

So what would that look like in a graduate-level course? I’m not quite sure but I want to find out. I’m taking my two most popular educational leadership courses - School Law & Data-Driven Decision-Making - and offering them online to anyone, anywhere who wants to take them.

I’m looking for teachers and administrators who want to dive in deep, wrestle with thorny problems, and challenge their thinking regarding these two important school leadership topics. I don’t know yet what directions we’ll go; we’ll determine that together. I don’t know yet what topics we’ll cover; we’ll determine that together. I don’t know yet how we’ll demonstrate our learning; we’ll determine that together. The point of this is that I’m not going to be the omniscient, omnipotent faculty member dictating course structure, sequence, assessment, etc. This is a joint exercise in learning and I need participants who are willing to be active co-learners.

I’ve taught these classes online before with great success. I’ve prided myself on being a student-centered instructor. But it’s time to take my teaching to the next level. Am I a little uncertain about this? Absolutely. But a little healthy instructional tension will be good for me and my students both.

More information on the two courses – including tuition costs and how to register - is here. Both classes should be excellent options for educators who need relicensure credits, are exploring the idea of graduate-level coursework, or need to take an outside course for an existing graduate program.

Hope some of you will join me; please feel free to also pass this along. We start at the end of August!

A two-part tale of higher education and online instruction…

“Students demand free beer too”

A May 29 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education reads as follows:

Opponents of online instruction believe that traditional, face-to-face teaching is always better. A colleague of mine, wary of caving in to students’ demands for online courses, remarked recently that “students demand free beer, too; that doesn’t mean we should give it to them.”

What her academic colleague somehow, incredibly, fails to realize, of course, is that students don’t have to attend his institution. Since postsecondary students vote with their feet and their pocketbooks, the institution does indeed have to give students online courses if that’s what they want. Otherwise, the university literally won’t have any tuition revenue because its potential students went elsewhere instead.

I can’t wait to see what happens over the next couple of decades. As online courses become even more prevalent than they are now, colleges and universities either will have to get in the game or be left behind. There are too many options available to students for anything else to occur. Some postsecondary institutions are going to realize that they must become more responsive to student needs and desires in order to survive; others won’t realize it until it’s too late and will disappear altogether. It should make for interesting times.

In the meantime, all I can say is… stupid faculty.

“I’ll never do it again”

Another article in the same issue of The Chronicle describes one faculty member’s woeful experience teaching online. The author goes into detail regarding all of the problems that she had with the course, including (but not limited to):

1. there was a ‘lack of immediacy’ in communication;
2. she was ‘only able to introduce students to a limited amount of material outside of the textbook readings;’
3. it is ‘simply impossible to replicate a lecture online;’
4. there wasn’t ‘enough time or a proper forum’ to help students ‘develop writing and critical thinking skills or to foster original ideas;’
5. online courses are too big;
6. she had no time off during the week like she would with a regular 3–hour, once-a-week, face-to-face class;
7. she got too many e-mail messages from students; and
8. she suspected her students didn’t like her very much.

This faculty member obviously has no idea that 1, 3, and 5 are dependent on how the course and the technology were structured. Setting up the course in a different way might have alleviated many of her concerns. Issues 2 and 6 seem to be the result of her own decision-making, not any inherent flaw in online instruction. Issue 4 doesn’t make any sense to me; didn’t she have the same number of weeks as for her other courses? It’s hard for me to be sympathetic regarding Issue 7: My students contacted me too much and asked me too many questions! Waaahh! I guess she prefers it when her students stay out of touch and don’t try to get their questions answered. Finally, can she really blame Issue 8 on the fact that the instruction was ‘online?’ There sure are a lot of faculty who teach online and also have students who like them.

Again, my main thought on this is… stupid faculty.

Wrap-up

Whether we want it to or not, the paradigm shift is occurring around us every day. As postsecondary faculty members, it behooves us to learn about it and adjust rather than dismissively rejecting the new learning landscape and stubbornly trying to stick to the status quo.

[Okay, calling these faculty members stupid probably is a little harsh. But I think clueless fits quite nicely…]