Learning In a Flat World

I am enjoying my second day at the SLOAN-C International Conference on Online Learning.  The program can be found here.  The Twitter backchannel at #aln12 has been lively and fun. What is neat is that no one is dominating discussion, and lots of  voices are being heard:

Twitter stats for #aln12

The theme this year is Online Learning at a Crossroads…and that has been appropriate. SLOAN-C has been holding this conference for 18 years, and yet never in those 18 years has online learning been so much in the news or so diverse (lots of people differentiating between “traditional online” and experiments like Udacity and other MOOCs).

The keynoter was Sebastian Thrun, who discussed his vision for Udacity.  They are offering (a few) high quality courses to the masses for free, and have designed the courses to take advantage of interactive and engaging multimedia content with instant assessment and feedback.  A comment worth noting – this individualized approach allows for one to view his course not as a single class with 160,000 students, but rather 160,000 courses each with one student enrolled.  I thought that was interesting!

I attended some great sessions yesterday. John Vivio’s “Improving Course Interactions Through Analytics” looked at the analytics currently available in Blackboard and how one might use them for proactive interventions with students.  Jeff Seaman discussed the upcoming latest version of the Babson annual survey on online learning, with the interesting comment that after 10 years, there has remained a consistent 12% of academic leaders who do not see online learning as critical for their institution. Alex Pickett and friends discussed “Best Faculty Strategies“.  It was a Twitter moment, but after years of tweeting with Alex, I got the chance to meet her face-to-face!

The first day ended with a plenary panel with Jeff Young of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jose Cruz of the Education Trust, Alan Drimmer of the University of Phoenix, and Jack Wilson of the University of Massachusetts.  Cruz and Wilson hit homeruns, setting a compassionate case for the use of online learning to better this country.  I was disappointed in Drimmer’s remarks.  He seemed to be not as prepared and as eloquent as his fellow panel members, and more apologetic than positive about online learning.  Perhaps this is because Cruz had just illustrated that for-profits had taken advantage of the disenfranchised populations of this country, charging high tuition and setting up high debt without the retention and successful completion of degrees by for-profit students.

Today, in addition to Thrun’s keynote, I attended a great session by my old colleague Bill Pelz, again teaming with Alex Pickett, to discuss SUNY BLEND.

Jeff Nugent and I had good attendance at our session: From Critique to Community.  It is obvious that quite a few of us are trying to figure out the best way to do faculty development for online teaching and learning.  Jeff put out a call for other Centers to think about partnering with us to share best practices and processes.

Our Prezi:

Heading to EPCOT tonight, and then will finish the conference tomorrow.

Next week, Jeff Nugent and I will be attending the 18th Annual Sloan-C International Conference on Online Learning, October 10-12, 2012, at Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort in Orlando, FL.

This will be the first time I have attended the SLOAN-C conference, so I am looking forward to it.  Jeff and I will be making a presentation on October 11th in the Oceanic 5 room at 2:20pm entitled “From Critique to Community: Exploring Faculty Development for Online Teaching”, which will discuss our Online Course Development Initiative.  I will post our Prezi next week.

May is always a crazy time here in the Center, and this has been a busy week leading up to two more busy weeks.  On Monday, our Center of Teaching Excellence hosted our first Online Learning Summit.  Yesterday, several of us did a road trip to Fredericksburg for University of Mary Washington‘s 17th Faculty Academy.  Next week, we start our third Online Course Development Initiative, and the week after, we conduct our EdTech Collaboratory. As I said, crazy…

I have not blogged in a while, so let me try and at least capture some of what we did at the summit and academy.

The online learning summit Monday was a first for the faculty of VCU and our CTE.  In some ways, it started as a trip down memory lane.  Bill Pelz of Herkimer County Community College and the SUNY Learning Network was our keynote presenter.  I had the pleasure of working with Bill at HCCC, and was there as he started Herkimer on its online journey.  In fact, we were recalling that he, I and Ron Carvin gave a presentation to SUNY chairs back in 1998 on this new thing called online learning!  Bill gave the keynote, and he was followed by seven VCU faculty presenting papers.  I have linked to the papers below.

The summit was conducted in a room with multiple round tables, and following each set of presentations, the presenters moderated the table discussions to capture faculty perceptions about shifts in teaching practice.  Bill set the stage with his discussion of “technoheutagogy” – a term most had not heard (since Bill created the term) but a term that captured in part the evolution of learning online.  Bill took us on a historical look at first pedagogy (how children learn), then andragogy (how adults learn), followed by heutagogy (self-determined learning).  Bill added the “techno” prefix to move self-determined learning online.

Our first panel presented the following papers:

• “The Centrality of Social Presence in Online Teaching and Learning” – Kia Bentley
• “Courses Are Conversations: What Can Universities Learn From The Cluetrain Manifesto?” – Deborah Cowles
• “Online Personae: Identity in the Virtual Classroom” – Jeff South
• “Teaching large lecture classes online: Reflections on engaging 200 students on Blackboard and Facebook” – Marcus Messner

We really wanted this summit to be a chance for dialogue rather than passive reception of talks.  Following these presentations, we discussed the talks at our tables and collected ideas on what shifts in practice seem most important, how are instructor roles changing, and how does teaching online shape expectations about faculty load.  We also brainstormed support that faculty felt they needed in order to more effectively teach online.

In the afternoon, three more faculty presented their papers:

• “Bringing a mashup of learning theories to bear on online learning: A critical reflection” – Jon Becker
• “Can you hear me now? Creating and maintaining an effective synchronous online learning environment” – Brendan Dwyer and Carrie LeCrom
• “Collaborative Learning in an Online Environment: Voices from Students” – Mary Secret

We again did small group discussions around effective teaching practices as demonstrated by these papers.

Our plan is to collect these table discussions with the papers and publish a conference proceedings from the day.  All the papers contained valuable and relevant information, and I would recommend your review of them.

We spent Tuesday completing our plans for next week, and then hit the road Wednesday morning for UMW and Faculty Academy.

We could only attend one day, but as always, Mary Washington’s Faculty Academy inspires us.  Martha Burtis was unfortunately out sick, but Jim Groom,  Steve Greenlaw, Tim Owens, Alan Levine and others welcomed those of us from off campus and provided a rich selection of presentations to move our thinking.

Giulia Forsythe let us use multiple markers as we played with visual notetaking.  While she had each of note “I can draw!” on our charts, Joyce’s looked a lot better than mine!

Jason Davidson, Mike McCarthy and former student Shannon Hauser showed different uses of the UMW WordPress blogs in their teaching and learning.  I was particularly blown away by Shannon’s rich uses of blogs both personally and professionally.

Grant Potter gave a great plenary on “Tinkering, Learning, and the Adjacent Possible”.  His main point was that creativity and innovation do not often happen in structured spaces (physical or virtual), but rather need open, transparent, and chaotic processes that allow recombinations / remixing of ideas.

Lots to think about from these past few days…and lots to look forward to in the next two weeks!

{Photos shot on iPads by Britt Watwood and Bud Deihl, the FA12 Banner from UMW FA12 website}

At the recent NMC Retreat, the hashtag #NMChz had 998 tweets over the three days (at least that I could capture with Archivist).

I copied the text of the tweets, removed NMChz and RT as two obvious repetitious terms, and then dumped what was left in Wordle.

Interesting results:

Click on the image above to see the full screen version.  The retreat focused on the future of education and the role the Horizon Report could play.  After Horizon, “learning” was the most used word.  Other words that popped out at me were “thinking”, “future”, “online”, “new”, “trends”, and “change”.  What strikes you?

Day Two at the NMC Future of Education Retreat was just as amazing as the first night, if not more so.  Take one hundred colleagues from higher education, K12, museums, and corporate technology companies and have them think out loud for a day…that was the process at this retreat.  Just look at the sticky notes on the board to the left:

Lev Gonick started us off this morning with a description of work Case Western Reserve has done to extend into the Cleveland community.  The problem was framed with three numbers.  Kids in Cleveland who attain a degree – 8%.  Women in Cleveland with diabetes – 33%.  Families in suburban Cleveland in poverty – 57%.  His premise – if everyone in the community (not just inside four walls of institution) had unlimited bandwidth, what opportunities would now be possible?  Could an institution of higher education begin to impact health, poverty, social good, or the local issues any community has?   If bandwidth is infinite and everyone has a mobile device, would institutions of learning change their structure?  David again captured the discussion.

Rueben Puentadura then walked us through two hundred thousand years of human history, mapping out the need for socialization, mobility, visualization, storytelling, and finally gaming.  This was mapped to emerging technologies from the past eight or so Horizon Reports.  More discussion around the table, resulting in:

We then shifted gears to discuss transformations.  Over the course of the rest of the day, we worked in groups to visualize changes and emerging trends.  What surfaced was something David Sibbet termed VUCA – volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.  The image below backs that up!

The social media was very busy.  Using Archivist, I captured 613 tweets from today, as well as this social graph of twitter users of the hashtag #NMChz:

Obviously, it will take days to process what happened over ten hours today…but this gives a feel.  The energy level in the room never dropped, and I felt very lucky to swim in this stream with these amazing colleagues!

Related articles

• What is the Future of Education? (bwatwood.edublogs.org)
• Our First Session at the NMC Horizon Retreat (bwatwood.edublogs.org)

I have enjoyed two full days at the 2012 Educause Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference in Baltimore.  I previously posted materials from our presentation and my Twitter 2o2 session.  By the way, Skyping Jon Becker in for Twitter 202 went just fine, and Jon added some great observations on the personal, professional, and academic use of Twitter.  Thanks again, Jon, for being a part of this session!

Some overall impressions:

Before they disappear, check out the rich conversation that has  been going on backchannel using the hashtag #marc12.  As of this evening, 818 tweets have been sent.  Jeff Nugent clued us on to The Archivist during our Twitter 202 session this morning, and I just used it to capture these 818 tweets and run some analytics.  Looks like we added quite a few new “tweeps”.  I spotted that Derek Bruff was in the top dozen twitterers for MARC 2012…and he was not even here.  The power of a distributed learning network!

Randy Bass gave a great keynote on “Disrupting Ourselves: Cherished Assumptions, New Designs and Problem of Learning in Higher Ed.”  During his talk, I could not resist shooting a picture with my iPad that showed attendees shooting pictures of Bass’s slides.  As Bud Deihl noted, this was not your granddad’s conference!

Last year, Randy talked about the problem of learning in the post-course era.  His talk yesterday continued this notion of the change needed in higher education.  He talked about courses with low impact versus courses with high impact, and noted that in many cases, those courses with little impact are what we in education call “curriculum”.  The high impact courses are internships, capstone courses, student research and service learning opportunities.

One of the more interesting sessions was by Jim Jorstad, the Director of Educational Technologies at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, entitled “Making Teaching and Learning Authentic- Engagement Through Social Media in Politically Charged Times.”  Jim showed how video he filmed of protests in Wisconsin and posted through YouTube and CNN iReports were picked up and widely distributed, which for me was simply another example of distributed networks at work.

Today, Terry Carter and her grad student Jonathon West discussed their student research project.  In “Going Digital: Conducting Student Research in Teams with Web 2.0“, her capstone students used a wiki to collaboratively gather data on a real world problem involving hospital readmissions and literacy, which was cool in and of itself.   What blew everyone away was the student generated digital story at the end to summarize their findings, but also give voice to the patients they interviewed (using actors and Flickr images so as to not violate HIPAA.)

John Shank of Penn State discussed “Learning the Net Generation Way: Reimagining Instruction with Digital Learning Materials.”  A good session for faculty wishing to locate and use digital material, but I thought it was light on “learning” and the so-called Net Generation.  I asked about students building their own digital learning material as a way of learning, and it really was not an area he wished to discuss.  Shucks!

The lunch roundtables were interesting.  I sat in on the Analytics table.  There was a mix of conversation about analytics for academic support, such as recruitment, retention, and logistics underlying academic institutions.  I was more interested in learning analytics at the classroom level.  Of note, an IT member of University of Maryland-Baltimore County noted that his institution would be doing some beta testing of Blackboard’s new analytic service.

That should give you a taste of two days worth of conference.  We wrap up tomorrow and catch the train back to Richmond.

Our entire tech team is here in Baltimore for the Educause Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference.  Bud Deihl, Joyce Kincannon and I are presenting today on our use of online courses to prepare faculty to teach online (with thanks to David McLeod, our CTE Grad Fellow, who helped with the analysis).  Without the words, the slides may not mean alot, but here they are:

Tomorrow, I will be leading an exploratory session on Twitter, while Jeff Nugent will lead a session on polling. Looking forward to the keynotes by Randy Bass and Kathy Humphrey.  Will post again later on my impressions.

At next week’s Educause Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference in Baltimore, I have been asked to lead an “Experience IT” session  on Twitter 202.  Per the program, “…the “Experience IT” format offers a hands-on, highly interactive introduction to newer tools and technologies so you can explore their potential impact in the workplace and classroom and on your professional development. Please bring your laptop or other session-specific technology (such as smartphone or tablet) to the session so you can engage with the presenter…This session will share best practices in using Twitter as a backchannel in conferences and will offer an opportunity to delve deeper into innovative uses of this online application. When you are through with this session we hope you will tweet your observations throughout the rest of the conference”

I have asked one of my Twitter heroes – Jon Becker  – to co-facilitate virtually and join us via Skype and Twitter.  That in itself should make this a fun session.  Per the conference program, the conference hashtag will be #MARC12.  We will also use #twitter202 as a session hashtag.

In getting ready, we have been guided by work done by Derek Bruff.  Four resources of note for using Twitter as a backchannel in a conference:

Derek Bruff, Encouraging a Conference Backchannel on Twitter –
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/encouraging-a-conference-backchannel-on-twitter/30612

Derek Bruff, Instructions to the Twitter Team -
http://derekbruff.com/site/classroom-response-systems/instructions-to-the-twitter-team/

Olivia Mitchell, How to Present While People are Twittering -
http://pistachioconsulting.com/twitter-presentations/

Ross, C. Terras, M. Warwick, C. and Welsh, A. (2011). “Enabled Backchannel: Conference Twitter Use by Digital Humanists. Journal of Documentation. Vol. 67 Iss: 2, pp.214 – 237.
http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/155116/1/Terras_EnabledBackchannel.pdf

Jon and I also want to highlight some possible uses of Twitter in the classrooms.  Some resources for these include:

Howard Glasser and Maggie Powers, Disrupting Traditional Student-Faculty Roles, 140 Characters at a Time – http://teachingandlearningtogether.blogs.brynmawr.edu/archived-issues/spring2011-issue/disrupting-traditional-roles

Three Research Studies on Potential Advantages of Using Twitter in Classroom -
http://clintlalonde.net/2011/02/03/3-research-studies-on-potential-advantages-of-using-twitter-in-the-classroom/

Derek Bruff, Gardner Campbell + Backchannel in the Classroom -
http://derekbruff.com/teachingwithcrs/?p=491

Jeffrey Young, Professor Encourages Students to Pass Notes During Class – Via Twitter -
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/professor-encourages-students-to-pass-notes-during-class-via-twitter/4619

The Twitter Experiment – Twitter in the Classroom, UT Dallas
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WPVWDkF7U8

Finally, a useful website with lots of good Twitter-related links is Andrea Genevieve’s 28 Education and Technology Keywords or Hashtags to Follow on Twitter
http://www.andreagenevieve.com/technology-meets-education/28-education-and-technology-hashtags-to-follow-on-twitter/

Are we missing anything?  Are there other uses for Twitter that you would recommend highlighting in an “Experience IT” session?  Let us know, and join us via Twitter on Thursday morning, Jan 12 at 8:30am EST.

{Graphics/Photo Credits: Educause, Steve Garfield}

ELI 2011

Back home in Richmond, VA tonight, but my brain is still buzzing from the excellent sessions and networking at ELI 2011.  My post on the first day of ELI 2011 is here.

David Wiley kicked off the second day with a keynote address on Open Educational Resources and Learning Analytics.  Wiley noted that “open” carried many connotations, so he defined it as free teaching materials with the permissions already given for re-use or re-mixing.  He discussed the “Four R’s” of education – Reuse, Redistribute, Revise and Remix.  To illustrate, he went into advanced search in Google and looked for items with Creative Commons licensing, and found over 350 million items.  He compared this to our out-dated legal system that allows us to be stingy on a scale never seen before.  There were chuckles as he compared academics who do not want to share with your basic 2-year-old yelling MINE, MINE, MINE.  From David’s perspective, openness is the ONLY way to do education.

If one shifts the higher education model away from “you must come to us for the learning” and instead acknowledge that the content is already out there, then new business models are possible.  David mentioned Western Governors University and the new University of the People, where students sign up and pay for assesments, but self-organize their own learning groups.  This would not work for all disciplines, but I could see some real advantages to programs where demonstrated performance is part of the assessment.

The real “ah-ha” moment for me was when David began discussing learning analytics.  We are all used to analytics.  If we buy a book at Amazon or Barnes and Noble online, we always see recommendations for other purchases…based on tracking tons of data of previous purchases.  In a similar manner, David demonstrated how he could look at data for a class and track online activity versus time and GPA ranking.  The resulting waterfall of dots was darker for students with higher GPAs (i.e., more time on task online) and lighter for lower GPAs.  Getting to that type of data is difficult for most faculty, but as the latest Horizon Report noted yesterday, learning analytics are on the horizon.  Increased use of learning analytics will allow for the customization of learning for each student…something I find pretty cool!  For David, the combination of open education resources and learning analytics can lead to processes that allow continuous improvement in teaching and learning.

ELI used IdeaScale to gather and rank questions for David.  This was an interesting use of crowdsourcing to set up the Q&A portion of his talk.  One person asked if computers were replacing teachers.  David said YES – replacing them as broadcast machines and allowing them to concentrate on the human side of teaching.

The next session I attended was with Cole Camplese and Barton Pursel of Penn State on Exposing Emerging Pedagogies: Can Web 2.0 Tools Influence Teaching and Learning? In another example of learning analytics, they looked at usage patterns of wikis and blogs at their university by schools and departments.  They noted that their students have expectations not being met by the university.  Students expect a Facebook-like level of interactivity and get Blackboard instead…which is by just about any measure pretty unengaging.  The Penn State dorms have cable TV but the data shows that it gets little use.  Instead, students watch their “TV” on their computers when they want to watch it (not when it is “on”).

The data showed them that schools tended to adopt single platforms and not the range of Web 2.0 tools.  Information tech students like wikis, but science majors like blogs.  They could also see gender differences surfacing.  Women were more active both in posting and in commenting, including continued conversation after semester’s end.  Some courses found greater traction using a course-wide blog rather than individual blogs, though I agree with Gardner’s tweet:

After all, Jeff Nugent and I have both had our students blog individually and then aggregate the class blogs into either Netvibes or Google Sites.

I took a break and hit the “power room” to recharge my laptop.  Luckily, Jim Groom, Matt Plourde and Mike Caulfield were hanging out there as well.  We talked about Jim’s current MOOC on Digital Storytelling – ds106 (worth following on Twitter under hashtag #ds106 for great examples of student work).  That led us to recall one of the better storytellers – Tom Woodward, and the video he and Jim did two years ago about RSS.  I have put a link to that video in my current class for this week’s readings on RSS!

After lunch, I attended a session by Paul Fisher and Danielle Mirliss from Seton Hall University on supporting a mobile campus.  Seton Hall has been issuing laptops for years but now recognizes that the vast majority of students show up with computers in their back pockets (smartphones) with capabilities that exceed those of the older laptops.  Their surveys show that while faculty heavily rely on email as a ways of communicating with students, 60% of their students do not routinely use email – they text or Facebook instead.  The folks at Seton Hall University are looking for ways to capitalize on the technology their students already possess and use.  The definition of “mobile” is changing and evolving, so they want applications that are device non-specific and carrier agnostic.  They showed some neat projects students completed this year using smartphones to capture video and audio (similar to the NPR StoryCorps project). While this was going on, there was a fairly active backchannel conversation about the original “mobile” devices – books!  That prodded Derek Bruff to post “Here’s my (tongue-in-cheek) take on the book as a mobile device: http://is.gd/vRuuY6“. Loved it!

Dinner Tuesday night was in an unexpected yet delightful place that many of my colleagues knew…but my wife and I just stumbled on – Kramerbooks and Afterwords Cafe. Good people, good food, and some nice wines. Plus I checked in using FourSquare to note our good time, and they tweeted back a thank you!  Good food and socially networked as well!

Today was spent at our poster session.  I previously posted our slides here. Valerie Robnolt, Ibironke Lawal, Alma Hassell and I had a good flow of people come by and talk, and we had a chance to circulate around to some of the other posters.  Our colleagues Terry Carter, Joan Rhodes, and Fran Smith had a poster on moving learners into the open, so VCU was well represented.  I also enjoyed talking to Linda Futch and Francisca Yonekura of University of Central Florida about their online faculty development process.  And I finally got to meet Kelvin Thompson of UCF…someone whom I have tweeted with for several years!

So, a wrap up of a very good conference! I know that I have missed some interactions in these two blog posts, but rest assured, it is not because these interactions were not important.  Rather, there simply was a lot to process…and I will be doing that for days!

ELI 2011

This is Day One of one of my favorite conferences, the Educause Learning Initiative Annual Conference…even though this is only my second one that I have physically attended.  As usual, the tweeting using hashtag #ELI2011 has been superb, such that I have interacted with attendees in my sessions, other sessions, and those not physically here (and this is how I attended the last few years).  I have to admit that it is nice actually being here, as it has given me an opportunity to catch up with some friends I have not seen in awhile.

One of the first tweets I saw was this one:

Maybe they will be collector’s items, as mine starts with page 19-36, and then has pages 1-18.  As they note, the content IS correct!  Good to see a sense of humor at play.

Only a half day today, but some good sessions.  The opening general session featured Eric Mazur discussing his use of clickers to engage students in his physics classes at Harvard.  He noted that when he first started teaching in the 1980s, he never questioned “how” to teach – he assumed that he would teach in the same manner in which he had been taught, using lecture.  He came to see that lecture was good for DELIVERY of information, but that the assimilation of learning was left to students, and that was the hard part.  He learned that data from the Force Concept Inventory showed that many physics students showed little gain in knowledge during introductory classes, and when he tested his own Harvard students, they matched national results.  He then went to using clickers and peer teaching, which showed significant gains in learning and retention of knowledge. Mazur went on to note that the specific technology was not important – technologies come and go – but the use of peer teaching helped move the learning from shallow (what do I need to pass the test) to deeper learning (what does this concept mean).

For my second session, I listened to Amy Campbell, Samantha Earp, and Edward Gomes of Duke University as they discussed the process Duke had used to decide on a new LMS as their license with Blackboard expired (or as Edward noted…how to make someone on campus continually mad at you).  Their 15 month process is documented at E-Learning Roadmap.  Interesting, they narrowed their move from Blackboard 8 to one of three solutions – Blackboard 9, Moodle, or Sakai.  They ultimately settled on Sakai, but less for functionality than for strategic reasons.  As they saw it, Bb 9, Moodle and Sakai represented a three-sided coin…little real differences in functionality.

Finally, I checked out some of the poster sessions.  Three caught my eye.

• John Fenn of University of Oregon discussed his use of student generated content and remixing of student work through blogs, Diigo feeds, and YouTube for collaborative learning.
• Jeff McClurken and Martha Burtis of University of Mary Washington discussed how they teamed faculty, an instructional technologist, and students to develop group digital history projects.  It was also an opportunity to talk to Martha about the work she and Jim Groom are doing in their Digital Storytelling classes (check the twitter hashtag #ds106).
• Joseph Madaus discussed a University of Connecticutt project to apply Universal Design for Instruction to their online and blended classes.  Joseph noted that many think of physical disabilities when exploring UDI, but in fact the larger audience is students with learning disabilities.

The last session of the day was the annual rollout of the NMC annual Horizon Report. For nine years, the New Media Consortium has tracked new and emerging technologies for teaching and learning.  Near term technologies are already pretty evident – ebooks and mobiles (one only need look around this conference).  Mid-term (2-5 years) will see more use of augmented reality and game-based learning.  More far term will be the emergence of gesture-based computing and learning analytics.

Looking forward to a full day tomorrow.