Yesterday was the final day of Blackboard World 2009.  It was an enjoyable conference.  I met some interesting colleagues who are all grappling with best ways to teach online.  It was great seeing old friends from Georgia Virtual Technical College.  Twitter as a backchannel was going strong, and I added quite a few new contacts in Twitter.  The hashtag #bbworld09 allowed us to attend a session but keep up with several other sessions simultaneously.  Yet, as compelling as the digital links were, I think I enjoyed most the quiet retrospective back in the hotel room with my colleague Bud Deihl about what the two of us were experiencing.

Thursday was only a half day.  I started the day the way I start every day – up before the sun, coffee, and a review of emails, tweets, Google Reader, and Facebook.

Before the closing keynote, I attended two sessions.  Kathy Keairns of University of Denver discussed leveraging Web 2.0 tools for teaching, research, and fun.  I liked that she provide her wiki handout link.  She focused on four tools:

• Jing

- A great screencast tool that I frequently use
- Free but limited to 5 minute videos

• Picnik

- Free online image editing tool
- Works in the cloud, no downloads
- Good for quick resizing, cropping, and neat effects like Polaroid view

• dVolver

- Cute and quick animated video program’
- Text based cartoon – no audio (other than canned music)

• Gabbly

- Chat Box on the fly
- Just add ‘gabbly.com/‘ in front of any URL

After her session, I attended an interesting session by two gentlemen from England.  Mark Kerrigan and Mark Clements discussed using Web 2.0 as an assessment process to improve institution retention and learning.  They noted that students come to college to get a degree, but the reality they find is that they are enrolled in 24 siloed courses.  At University of Westminster, they have integrated a process where by every student is assigned a “tutor” – what we would call an academic advisor.  After every major learning event in each course, the students are automatically sent a questionnaire/ survey, with the results forwarded to their advisor.  The students are also encouraged to blog about their learning journey after each learning event.  The advisors use the survey results and the blog reflections to help the students see the relevance of their course work and the interconnections with their chosen degree.

U of Westminster is much smaller than VCU, yet I could see parallels between their effort and our Focused Inquiry program for first year students.  Their use of social media could enhance our process in which our students are together with each other and the same faculty member for both FI One and Two.  Food for thought!

The closing keynote was Lester Holt of NBC News.  He gave a very engaging presentation on the parallels between how journalism has been evolving and how education has been evolving. One comment I liked is that both good journalists and good teachers are in the business of informing and provoking deeper understanding.  He said that Brian Williams reminded them all the time that they were writing the first draft of history.

He focused on the timeshift that was occurring, where the new generation of students expect and demand both their news and their learning on demand 24/7.  NBC is partnering with Blackboard to provide its archived news material for online learning (details and costs about NBC Learn to be provided later).  Lester noted that he was not a super student, preferring hands-on to book learning.  He suggested that he might have had better grades if he had had the online opportunities today’s students have!

His keynote was upbeat and a nice way to end three days of learning at Blackboard World 2009.

{Photo Credits: Sheila Chandler, Glenn Harris}

My BFO – Blackboard may be a Learning Management System, but it remains teacher-centered and not learning-centered.

Now, I am not a Blackboard basher…I have enjoyed using Blackboard for six years. But it does have limitations, and one of them is that it lags the rest of the edtech world in features, particularly those associated with Web 2.0.

I was creating some discussion forums and saw that our upgrade to Bb 7.3 this past May had added a new feature – “tagging”

Well all right now!!!

Tagging is an essential component of user-generated material on the web, and is part of what makes Flickr, YouTube, SlideShare, and Delicious work so well. As described in Delicious (relating to bookmarks, but the same principle applies to pictures, videos, posts, etc.):

“A tag is simply a word you can use to describe a bookmark. Unlike folders, you make up tags when you need them and you can use as many as you like. The result is a better way to organize your bookmarks and a great way to discover interesting things on the Web.”

I thought – “Cool, now students can tag their posts and search other posts using tags!” This would be folksonomy at work in my class!

Wrongo!

What I soon learned when I tried out a few threads is that students cannot tag anything, nor can the instructor while replying. It is only when the instructor collects multiple threads that a tag can be added. While this has some marginal usage, it remains Web 1.0 in philosophy. I put tags on my blog posts and appreciate when others do the same. Students have learned to search using tags. Blackboard apparently allows students to search by tags, but only the tags that the instructor has put in on the threads the instructor chooses. This is NOT a folksonomy, but a very teacher-centered approach.

I’ll still use Blackboard…but in many cases it will be a springboard to jump out of into the interactive world wide web…where I can turn students loose and watch the learning occur!

{Photo Credit: shoebappa – Nice picture that combines the concepts of “Blinding Flash” and “NAVY”!}

As validated by the ECAR study over the past four years, students by and large want faculty to use course management systems like Blackboard because of the access and convenience it gives them to course content, assignments, and grades. Faculty likewise appreciate the convenience that it gives them to post materials and communicate with students.

Our challenge is that while a majority of faculty “use” Blackboard, they are not necessarily using it for learning. As a course management system, the focus has been on management – posting material, collecting homework, posting grades. Many faculty are missing a wonderful opportunity to use a course management system as a tool that facilitates learning.

When we in faculty development focus on tools such as Blackboard, we run the risk of reinforcing this faculty and student desire to develop a portal for access and convenience. Focusing on the set-up of Blackboard tends to focus one on design features (course layout, organization, navigation, etc) and on the indirect support features to learning, such as gradebooks, assignments, and loading of course material.

Our focus recently has been more to see Blackboard as a place in which to jump off into social media. As Mike Wesch noted in a recent presentation, students are interested in learning but not necessarily interested in school or classes. One way to change that perception is to give the students their voice and give them responsibility for their own learning. Web 2.0 provides some rich environments for this to occur and the use of Web 2.0 apps links nicely with Chickering and Gamson’s Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education. We have been exploring the use of social bookmarking within classes, blogging, and collaborative writing through Google Docs and wikis. There is no reason NOT to use the access and convenience afforded by the course management system, but one should not stop there.

I would be interested in comments from others on what you are doing to move both faculty and students beyond access and convenience to uses that support active learning.