New course, new term, new uni.

Well, I am continuing the GCTE, but this term am studying a course through USQ instead of my home institution of CQUniversity. I'll be quite interested in the differences.

The first difference I have noticed is in the introductions - obviously not an institutional, but more an individual difference... We have been asked to introduce ourselves by one word or image and describing that word or image. I read through the 8 or so posts that were there, and noticed that they were quite personal. Most of the posts revealed quite intimate details about the students' lives. This made me feel a bit uneasy... how much do I share of my life? Do I want to share the sorts of details in those posts with people I don't know?

So that raises questions: Does sharing intimate personal details with your learning peers help you to engage with the learning? Does a personal connection with the others in the class help you to be willing to commit more effort to learning? Does opening yourself up (potentially to attacks on you as a person, or what you believe) to people you don't know, help your learning?

Really.

Then turn to being the teacher/lecturer/facilitator. Does opening up to your students help their learning? Is there some personal connection that has to be made so that your students will study harder (read as not let you down)? Do you risk the exact opposite and the students will dislike you? Does revealing your own information mean that you are wanting the students to do the same? What kinds of professional boundaries might this overstep?

I'm not much into sharing personal details either in a class or as a lecturer. Am I ashamed? Am I fearful (as per forum post), or is it justified? Being a 'thinker' rather than a 'feeler', and knowing that many other people are... this is hard to answer.

Standby as I investigate!

Other tools

Apart from webquests, which I will go into more detail in at some stage, the rest of the tools on this page are very similar to those already covered. Slideshare, file storage, and music, certainly have the same problems, advantages and uses.

WIKIPedia

A great tool for basic understanding. It is often written in a way that is more general knowledge and this is useful to students who are only starting to study the material. I would actually encourage its use (informally).

Google Earth

Great tool, have played with it an awful lot, including some of the extras and user defined parts. Would be excellent for history and geography. I can see the assignment to be find the historic places, or track an explorer’s path or something like that. Unless I used it to find and describe the physics of certain bridges or buildings, I think it would be way too over the top for my course :)

Podcasting

Audiofiles are not particularly useful in Physics. Would be rather boring. See my post on videos as to how I would rather do things.

YouTube

Yep, great tool. I encourage students to use it themselves, and post the links on a discussion forum. Though not compulsory or for assessment, some have done so, and I’m sure a lot more have used YouTube without reporting it.

Quizzes

I think we’ve all used quizzes in one way or another. I much prefer to use the quizzes embedded in lessons in moodle to give better feedback. This makes it a learning tool instead of just a test. For summative assessment, however, care needs to be taken about when and where feedback is given to ensure that the students do actually have the understanding required, and enough, but not too much prompting is given along the way.

I have used them with great success in a non-academic course and would be happy to move them to academia, in both formative and summative assessment. Students also say they enjoy the lessons, and that they are better than quizzes.

Animations and Simulations

NHC Science animations probably would have been good. The link didn’t work and I don’t know if my google search provided the right page… seemed to be, but I wasn’t going to download the plug-ins to make the animations work.

Dissect a frog was interesting, if the voice wasn’t ridiculously digital, it might have been worth watching all of it. I’m sure the rest would have gotten better, with more interaction which seemed to be going down the right path, asking questions and getting the student to click and then giving descriptions. Good approach.

The Gizmos was very similar to a program we had the students use in undergrad Physics, ‘Mastering Physics’. I think the Gizmos are great. Fantastic, especially in a teaching package. Subscription fees and issues seemed to be the biggest problems we had. Should the students have to buy it? Should it be provided? Another problem that was never looked into was that students would be getting 95% or better in the embedded assessment, but over half the class still failed the exam. How good a teaching aide was it really? There was no transfer to problems outside the system. This would have to be used with care. I still think it is excellent and quite unparalleled for distance and online learning. Just perhaps not by itself.

Image Manipulation

Good for it. You don’t need online technologies to do this. In fact, after my previous post, I would suggest not doing so. Yes, fancy image manipulation tools are expensive, but Microsoft picture editor is easy, simple, and comes with Office, so no extra cost. Mac has ColorSync Utility for resizing. Publisher is great for adding text, lines, circles… cropping, merging photos… and saves in several file types. So I’ll stick to those for now. Anything else, I’d want to be running a multimedia course to bother about.

Flickr

I am familiar with Flickr as my friends use it and I think I might have used it once. I can’t see particular relevance to teaching, except perhaps getting the students to take photos of something and put them up? We did this when I was at Purdue University. For research into primary school teachers’ understanding of what engineering was. We did pre and post intervention photos and they wrote a little about each photo. Flickr could be used to collate the photos.

I just tried to log into Flickr. I thought it would be easy since it takes a Google id and I had one of those. Then it asked for me to put in all my details. I was partially through that when it asked for a screen name. I tried Gemma, but that was already in use. I thought, here we go! So 6 tries later with strange combinations, I got so frustrated I had to shut down the computer and walk away!

This seems to be quite a trend with these technologies. They are SOOOO much more frustrating than I could ever have imagined and that is very depressing. While some of them would be good in my course, or other courses, until they become user friendly, I’m not touching them with a 10 foot pole!

Video

Videos are great. In this day and age, a simple video blog from the lecturer can promote engagement. Videos of document cameras are really good too, especially in my area where verbal and textural communication is just not enough. Drawing diagrams and solving problems on paper with a pen right in front of the students’ eyes is just the best. I have used that so many times in my course. I just wish there was an easier way to do it from my home office, since I lecture casually and have a full-time day job. At the moment I use the doc camera in the ISL room and can flip to lecture cam easily too. I almost want a movable desk camera that I can turn to me, put on the paper or show small experiments with. Wow, there is just nothing that will meet having the students standing there with you is there? Virtual reality, here we come!

PowerPoint

This tutorial could be helpful if you have no idea about powerpoint. If you have some idea, it would be hard to just find the bits you don’t know about. The formatting was very painful in a thin column on one side and a lot of scrolling. This could be avoided.

There is a lot of information in there – so comprehensive indeed. If you were using that as a tool in a guided way to help your students learn powerpoint it would be good. On its own, perhaps a bit overwhelming. Not very interactive either. Yes, there are quizzes, but it should be used in conjunction with activities designed to have a practice at using powerpoint.

It is a bit condescending with the people and the words. Maybe a story is helpful for engaging?? but it could also be a turn off. There is no quick way though it. Wow, and the more I go through it, the more insanely boring it gets!

OK, so I get the point of a tutorial – start from the beginning and cover everything. But now I know what not to do!

Pontydysgu

My first impression was ‘holy crap what a jumble of stuff!’

I did look through some of it. This time there is a landing page, although a crazy one with no explanation of what is what. It looks like an interesting collaborative space and there seem to be great projects going on. It would, however, take some doing to trawl through it and find what you want. Then I guess RSS would be a good idea!

I’m not sure of the point of this particular page, but it does give the idea that this might be useful for a class as a class project. Create this page where there are different group projects where all participants can contribute and do so in different media – photos, text, videos. Perhaps a tad more interesting, if not confusing, than a standard group project? Also more creative and available to the whole class and afterwards the whole world as a consolidation of learning than a typical wiki? Might need a fair bit of facilitation with techno-novices as students, so might work better in a course focussing on technology, and would still need to be clear and easy to use. I could, potentially, see students setting up this page with different people responsible to different tasks in different weeks, such as the news bites – all members of group 1 have to contribute a news bite in week 1, a personal blog in week 2, a critique of an article in week 3, etc. This would all be in a consistent format but end up creating a fabulous resource.

elearningspace blog

This is an interesting approach. It puts all of the learning into a blog by the lecturer. I guess that is good since it means that the lecturer is engaged, HAS to be engaged to some extent to keep blogging (or copying and pasting) and that probably does create a rapport with the students, especially if they are blogging too.

On the other hand, I went to the blog and was a bit confused as an outsider looking in. That would probably not be the case for new students who start at the beginning, except for students who start late. There is no “landing page” with information about what to do, where to find help… all the things we like on our Moodle sites.

Oh, and talk about the scroll of death :)

RSS

I already use Google reader and it is fantastic. It is a great way to keep up with friends and colleagues blogs – once you know where they are! So I did do it with last term’s blogs, but that got rather ahead of me, but was so easy to see. Then I have added that portlet to my igoogle page that is my home page so every time I open up the internet on my computer I get my RSS feeds. Easy :)

Creating Digital Books in Excel

While it was all very interesting to have a nice pretty book, is it useful for my context? I can see for kids, yes. I think it might be able to incorporate graphs and if I lock cells and only leave certain cells open for editing then it would change variables and that would be useful to show cause and effect in basic Physics. I did already know this and have made reporting packages for a couple of applications, one for emissions from the Stradbroke sand mines and the other for aligning an Instron testing machine.

What was pointless was that I have a Mac and even in the Help search, I could not find “speak cells”. I think that is a little condescending for uni students though! Great for young kids, especially since they are using computers more at younger ages and this could help them even write their own books, or complete sentences or stories.

Authentic Learning and Assessment

The link went to a site that was down for upgrades, so couldn’t access the article. This is a reminder that if ever I put a link to an article in my Moodle course to make sure that I put the full reference there so that students can find it even if that particular link is down. I also think that it is not useful to put links directly to articles within password protected databases in the CQUni library as this makes it difficult. I have had some difficulty at home because it doesn’t ask me for my password, so I have to trawl the databases to try and find the article, so actually describing which database and how the article was found would be significantly more useful than a link (even though many might think that is easiest).

Blogs

One thing that I have found is that I can’t use blogspot.com while in the CQUni mail system as they require different log ins. Now that is mostly because I already had a gmail account before CQUni gave me another one. Means a fair bit of swapping around.

The Machine - Us

The Machine is Using/Us

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE&feature=player_embedded

Just watched this video.

How this relates to my learning - I'm afraid I'm still a bit of a static learner. I don't find the idea of being able to edit Wikipeda exciting. I don't even really like thinking about the fact that this blog may be being read by many people. At least I know that this blog is for my ideas, and while people might or might not like my ideas, that doesn't matter. If I have to put facts out there, or reports... that would be different.

How this would relate to my teaching - I could imagine the pressure students would be under if their Physics assignments were somehow to be published on the web, in the 2.0 environment where it could be changed. Even as a class group. Students don't like looking stupid in front of other students. They don't ask questions on forums and even if they just email me, they are always saying something like "sorry, it is probably a silly question, but..." Could they then really put something on a wiki and then have other students changing what they said because it was wrong, or answering the questions...? And my students range in grades from pass to high distinction, and while I want to change them all to HDs, making them put working on a wiki so that the other students can help, wouldn't be doing much for their self esteem.

How this relates to learning in general - with all of the information out there, we are already struggling to help students understand what is academically rigorous literature. The more blogs and sites like Wikipedia that are out there, the bigger our challenge. Great for synthesising and critical reflection, especially in areas that are 'opinion' driven, but not for 'fact' driven areas. You just have to read the newspaper to find crazy, unsupported, unsubstantiated, mis-represented statistics. Did you know that 45% of the Capricornia electorate are homophobic? Too many people just accept that and don't ask about the method, the terminology... the rigour of that data.

Edutopia and technology in curriculum design

Video

George Lucas and Robert Thurman

www.edutopia.org

They documented ideal learning environments.

Project learning

Cooperative learning

Integrated studies

Comprehensive assessment – multiple measures

Teachers – the human touch – the most valuable element

Higher ed gives more self control over what they are learning.

Learning is a fun thing to do if you are interested in the material

Students don’t always know what their passion is, and like George, can stumble on it by chance.

Using stories in film in learning.

Tell the story of how to integrate technology into schools.

Don’t put computers in a classroom and teach students how to use them once a week. Use computers as a tool, like a pencil, to learn other subjects, and cooperate.

Lots of great theory, but there are holes.

Kids want to be adults – so give them adult tasks. Don’t teach them maths, tell them to design a plane, and they will want to learn the maths and science to do so.

Using the knowledge to do something.

Website shows you how to organise the classroom around the technologies.

Edutopia

Looking through the website it seems that there is a lot of information on integrating technology, but pretty much only in person. Cameras, probes, photogates, video, heart rate monitors… How would we get students to use that sort of equipment when studying at a distance?

One thing that I did love about it was the encouragement of integrated learning. They took the data from the cheerleaders heart rates etc and graphed that in Maths and then talked about velocity and acceleration in Physics using videos. Since all we can work with is that the students have computers, it would need to be carefully considered exactly what we asked of them. Yes, we can put up the videos, but of course that won’t be as meaningful as if they were in the videos. We can get them to graph data, but that’s not the same as if they had generated the data to start with.