The Active Class

I’d like to write today about a topic that is rather pertinent, as I’m gearing up to embark on teaching an intensive summer class:  How do you facilitate effective, online discussions?

The use of online discussion boards is increasing — I’ve seen some instructors use class blogs, and encouraged students to post questions and discussions, or perhaps posted a discussion question and required students to respond (via blog comments, for example).  Some instructors use class wikis.  Many course management systems (CMS) now automatically include discussion boards.  I was thrilled to find that this was a feature of our new CMS that I’ll be using this summer.  But then I remembered my experiment last summer, using a course blog and asking students to post comments or questions on the posts.  It fell flat.  What went wrong?

As I’m considering what to do differently, here are a few things that I’ve gleaned from my readings about how to promote effective discussions online.

1.  Make it comfortable

Last year, I just encouraged students to “post questions or comments” on the blog.  I thought that the need to get help on the homework or content would be a sufficient driver to do so.  I guess not.  It’s sort of sticking your neck out to post something online to a group of people you don’t know very well.  This year, my first homework assignment includes some “getting to know you” questions, such as their major and interests and hobbies.  Part of the assignment is to then post whatever they feel comfortable posting on the class discussion board.  This serves several  purposes, (a) getting them to discover the discussion board, which is where some other assignments will be posted, (b) giving them a chance to get to know their classmates, and (c) making their first posting something that is not about the content, but something that is hopefully more interesting.  This kind of “ice breaker” is considered best-practices for online discussion boards, as is providing a “social cafe” part of the board for off-topic posts.

This relates in part to what is called “social presence,” which is the sense of knowing someone online.  Getting a sense of their personality and selves through their postings.  There is a lot of research to suggest that people engage more fully in online discussions when they feel like they know the people they are talking to.  This is an important consideration for the instructor, too — how do you seem like “you” online?  Maintaining an informal tone can help.

2.  Give them a reason to do it

Again, last year, I thought that the motivation of getting help on homework would be sufficient, but it wasn’t. This year, I’m having students submit two types of assignments to the online discussions.  I’m hoping that by having them posted in the discussion forum, it may spark some discussion, or at least students can read what their peers write and see if their struggles are similar to those of their peers.  The two assignments are:  (1)  Post-reading, pre-class preparation questions, asking them to observe something in the natural world or explain something from the reading.  Since the point is to make sure that they do the reading and that they’re thinking about it, rather than that they get the answer right, the option to see each others’ answers is OK.  The other assignment is (2) posting pre-quiz review questions.  I’ve told them that if there are no questions, there is no review.  My hope is that they can start seeing each others’ questions and hopefully responding, and maybe even use this as an online study group.  We’ll see if it works.

3.  Tap in to their desire to share

Derek Bruff wrote on his blog, “Agile Learning” about Clay Shirky’s book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.  I haven’t read the book, but Derek’s posts provide a really useful summary.

In Chapter 3, he focuses on what motivates people to contribute to…. social initiatives. He draws on research by Deci, Benkler and Nissenbaum, and others to describe four common intrinsic motivations: the desire to be autonomous, the desire to be competent, the desire for connectedness, and the desire to share.

So, Derek asks,

“How do you tap into your students’ desires for autonomy, competence, connection, and sharing?”

There are many ways to do this in-class as well, of course, but online, one might ask, what do students want to share?

4.  Make it authentic

To answer the above question, what do students want to share, I think it’s important to make the online assignments authentic and interesting.  In other words, it’s important to provide well-designed questions for the discussion, that help students stay focused and interested.   Derek suggests using questions based on the reading for that day, but one has to be careful to ask questions that students want to answer, that they are interested in sharing their opinion about.  Fact-based reading quizzes don’t promote an interest in connectedness.  You either got it right or wrong, what is the motivation to see what your classmates said, other than to see if you got it right?  Rather, thought-provoking questions are more likely to spur authentic discussion.

5.  Instructor’s role

And what do you do, once discussion gets rolling?  Mostly, just stay out of the way — don’t respond to every comment, so students don’t feel like you’re Big Brothering.  If you act like a good listener, you can know when it would be a good time to interject or add your insight.   If students get off-topic or post inappropriately, it is better to contact them separately, rather than shaming them in public.  Your people-skills are important online, just as they are in-person.  But it might be useful to post some summarizing comments at the end of the discussion, to wrap it together.  And of course, before things get started, it’s important to make it clear to students why they’re doing this, what the payoffs are, and how it relates to the topics being covered in-class.

6.  Credit?

I’m really torn on this one.  Early talks that I saw on the topic of online discussions said to make it really clear to your students what you expect of them in their discussion posts, in terms of quantity and quality.  That students should be graded on whether they post, but also on the richness of their posts, since many instructors find that students will post a cursory and shallow response in order to get credit, but that that doesn’t fulfill the spirit of the assignment.  If one wanted to grade on richness, one can easily use a “0/1/2″ scale, which is very helpful for grading such participation-oriented assignments.  “0″ means you blew it off, “1″ is that you did a somewhat adequate job but with something lacking, and “2″ is the default, for solid work.

However, I have several colleagues who argue against providing grading incentives for items such as clickers, or discussion boards.  This kind of motivation, called “extrinsic motivation”, since it is tied to something that someone is imposing on you from the outside, can sometimes become the end in itself rather than the learning.  My colleague Ian Beatty argues that clicker use in class, for example, should all be for the intrinsic, self-directed motivation of learning the material and doing better in the course.  Derek Bruff wrote on this topic too, in the same posts about the Cognitive Surplus book, about how assigning credit for participation can negate the social contracts in the classroom to participate. Could the same be true of online discussions?  Does assigning a grade reduce the motivation to authentically participate?  The research on grading clicker questions seems to suggest that it might — in classrooms using high-stakes grading incentives for correct answers to questions, the conversation devolves from making sense of the material to desperately deciding on what the right answer is.

I think the best answer, for most of us, might lie somewhere in between.   Provide some credit for doing the assignment, enough to push them to the discussion board, but not so much that that is the only reason that students are engaging in the conversation.

7.  Other ideas?

Some other suggestions that I got from a talk by John Thompson of Buffalo State College at a conference a few years back:

• Give specific guidelines and rubrics regarding acceptable responses
• Don’t just settle for opinions:  Opinions must be supported with rational discourse.
• Don’t have too many, or too few, discussions.  Use enough so that there is fresh content, but few enough to avoid dilution.
• Bring in a guest participant
• Publicly acknowledge good participation in order to encourage it
• Ask for more detail when students submit shallow comments
• Relate your personal experiences, and keep some humor and fun in it
• Have students lead discussions on a rotating basis

Please share your experiences or best-practices on using online discussions in the comments!

Image by JohnnyMrNinja

The title of this post is taken, as a sincere form of flattery, from the title of an excellent semi-recent article in the Journal of College Science Teaching (Connie Russell, November 2009, pp 84-86, subscription required).  That, almost verbatim, is the text of a student email to her.  There was no salutation and no signature.  I’ve gotten disappointingly unprofessional emails like this — often from high school students who have read my blog on a topic and want the answers to their homework on a similar topic, or help on a science fair project.  One student wrote to me, frantically demanding a resource that had been linked to a blog post on ferrofluid, but the link was broken.  It was so rude that, while I answered his query, I did indicate that this was not the proper way to ask assistance of a professional.

So, why talk about students’ seeming inability to communicate properly with their professors?  Because, argues Connie Russell in her article, this problem is indicative of the lack of college readiness in the current crop of students.  While this is not a new problem, the nature of the problem might be changing.  What has changed about students’ high-school preparation in the last ten years?   Well, the increase in state-mandated testing, for one.  Has “teaching to the test” reduced attention to college-readiness skills in high school? Some have suggested that creativity and critical thinking suffer under the march towards higher standardized test scores; that students may not be well-prepared for college by this shift in K12 methods.

This poor college preparation could mean a dearth of critical thinking and reasoning skills, but it can also just mean that students are ill-prepared to understand what is expected of them.  And it could also mean that the “digital natives” have not been equipped to apply technological tools appropriately to support their learning.  Today’s instructors did not grow up in a digital world, and so did not themselves receive instruction on how to appropriately use technology when they were students — how to properly write an email without text-speak, whether multitasking by surfing the web during class will affect their attention to course content, or how to use good internet research habits.  Well, actually that last one has become the purview of the school librarian, bless their souls, but it’s not clear who should be responsible for helping students learn how to best use many other technologies in education.

So, who should be responsible for helping the digital natives integrate technology into their education?  The faculty teaching introductory courses should, it seems.  Not only are these faculty responsible for introducing freshmen to their discipline, but they are introducing freshmen to the world of college.  One of the goals of college instruction should be that a student becomes an expert learner — that they learn how to learn — or how to be metacognitive in their approach to their education. Or, as Russell concludes:

If we want students to meet our expectations, we must give them instruction on what we expect.

That includes the use of technology, such as the internet, email, and clickers.  In fact, one of the most common failure of clicker users that I’ve seen is to fail to explain to students why they’re introducing this technology, and how they expect students to engage with it.   It’s also important, too, to make it clear — to yourself and your students — just what your learning goals are for the class.  And if you’re using technology, how it relates to those goals.  Technology isn’t used just to keep students awake, but to further your goals in class.  One possible resource of interest – Ten Top Tips for Teaching with New Media (Edutopia, free registration required).

So, while it’s easy to roll your eyes at such inept emails, it’s worth a moment to pause and consider:  Is this a symptom of a larger breach in the college-readiness of students and their use of technology?  If so, consider making your expectations of students explicit — and giving them a chance to become more expert learners.

Image from University of Salford on Wikimedia

Assessment is a stressful subject — for teachers and students alike.  How do you get through grading all those tests?  How do you know if your test really measured your students’ learning?  How do you know if they got it?

I recently attended a talk by Andy Rundquist of Hamline University where he introduced the audience to the idea of standards-based assessment — and showed us how he’s using some innovative technology to measure his students’ achievement of those standards.  In standards-based assessment, you don’t just take the students’ overall average on several tests and midterms to get their final grade — rather, you test to see if they’ve achieved mastery of some of the core concepts that you have set as the “standards” of the course.  Typically those standards take the form of a learning goal or learning objective.  Can they derive the centripetal force on a planet rotating around the sun?  Can they write a computer program to add together simple numbers?  Etc.

But the trick is that, now, how do you know if a student has achieved mastery of that standard?  A typical paper test doesn’t seem as useful anymore.  That tests whether they can fill out the test, but not necessarily true mastery.  Hence, I think that Andy’s technological fix can be potentially useful to many of us instructors.

What he did was to use pencasts and screencasts to see whether students had achieved mastery of the goal.  This way, he could watch the student, and hear their thinking, and get a very complete picture of just how well they grasped the material.  Think of it as an oral exam, but one that the teacher can conduct from the comfort of their own home, and one that causes the student a bit less stress (and allows him/her to think about, and correct, their mistakes more easily).

Pencasts

These were done using the Livescribe pen and software.  The Livescribe pen records audio as it keeps track of where the pen is and what it’s doing.  The result?  A play-by-play audio recording with accompanying digital transcription of the student work.  We use these in research, to watch student thinking, and we use them in notetaking so that we have complete audio to go along with our rough notes.  But I’d never thought of using them as an assessment tool.  Andy pointed out that he can jump around to the “tricky bits” of a problem as he watches, so he can see whether they properly explain what they do at that point.  He can see the entire worked problem, too, so can see at a glance if it’s correct — but what he’s really listening for is whether they can explain why they did what they did.  I love it.

Screencasts

A screencast is just what you’d think — you can watch the student’s screen as they talk.  This is most important if you’re assessing them on something that’s not written, such as a computer program.  He used Jing, but there are a variety of tools out there.  Just like the pencasts, he was listening for student reasoning and thinking.

Of course, if you have a large lecture, this is harder to do.  He conjectures that you might be able to have students engage in peer assessment — in fact, during the oral exams that accompanied this approach, he had the class discuss the merits and shortfalls of each student’s work, coming to a consensus on what grade the student deserved.  He managed to frame this as a communal, not competitive, activity.  So, with the right framing and clear rubrics, this could work — and could really benefit students too!

Students often struggle to get the key concepts in any discipline — this is certainly true in physics, the subject that I teach.  They can regurgitate the formulas, or recite a law, but many students don’t quite put it all together to see what the physics really means — how those laws and equations affect the way the world behaves.    One of the enduring findings of education research (particularly in the sciences; but if you’re in the humanities, keep reading, there’s something for you here), is the necessity of using multiple representations to get an idea across.  Examples of multiple representations are:

• Words (textbook, lecture)
• Pictures and sketches
• Diagrams
• Equations
• Graphs
• Data

Different representations help students with the content in different ways — equations can help with computational ability and mathematical insight, whereas a visual can help make the concept or idea more concrete.  In fact, if we want to promote qualitative (instead of quantitative) skills in our students, concrete representations such as graphs or diagrams or pictures can be much more useful than abstract numbers and words and equations.  Furthermore, experts actually use different representations of a problem in a more flexible way than students do — suggesting that being able to produce and use different views of a problem is an important part of being good in a subject.

I keep running across fantastic tech visualization tools, so I wanted to share them here.

Create a Timeline:  Dipity

This one is for the humanities folks, as well as the sciences.  A cool tool called Dipity allows students to create and share timelines amongst each other.  Students can add pictures, web links, and put the event on Google Maps.  This is great for providing a historical perspective for scientific topics, or outlining the history in any discipline.  It’s interactive, visual, and provides a birds’ eye view of a subject.  A recent article in the Science Teacher suggests this tool for making a historical timeline of chemistry and chemists for the International Year of Chemistry.

Interactive Simulations:  PhET

Admittedly, this is a plug for a tool from the University of Colorado (where I work), but it’s a good one.  The PhET Interactive Simulations are specifically geared to provide multiple representations of a topic — in  Energy Skate Park, for example, students can see the visual (the skateboard), multiple graphs (of energy vs time, for example), and play with it to see the effects of changing a parameter (like gravity) in real time.

Data visualizations – Tableau Public

I wrote about Tableau Public on my other blog. This is a very cool free software (for PC only) that lets you input your data, and then write in interactivity so you can play with the results to let you gain insight into the underlying patterns. The importance of data representations for understanding has been written about by Edward Tufte before.  I can’t recommend his work enough.   See an example of Tableau Public here.

Have your students draw

This is pretty low-tech, but I want to encourage all instructors to have students draw out what they understand — it gives you wonderful insight into their thinking and lets them gain new understanding through the process.  Felice Frankel (who does wonderful projects on scientific images as art) recently embarked on a project called Picturing to Learn.  College students were told to draw a picture to explain a particular scientific concept to a high school senior.   The results were meticulously documented on the website, and give insights into how students think about different topics.  You can register for full access to the database, and learn to interpret student drawings for yourself.  A great tool for teachers!

There are a ton of other visualization tools out there.   What are your favorites?

Image by Steve Jurvetson on Wikimedia

Hey, I just wanted readers to know about my two upcoming webinars on clicker use. One is on how to teach faculty how to use clickers effectively — basically, some tips on effective professional development. That’s coming up next Tuesday! The second is a repeat of an earlier webinar — how to use clickers effectively. Details below!

Teaching Faculty about Effective Clicker Use

Time: Tuesday, January 18, 1pm Eastern Standard Time. Register.
Note: Want the recording? You’ll get a download link after the session if you register.

Geared specifically for those involved in faculty development and support (e.g., instructional technologists, faculty excellence programs, or other faculty professional developers), this webinar will cover best practices in helping faculty to use clickers to enhance their teaching. The webinar presenter has been creating faculty professional development materials around clicker use for years, and will share tips and techniques — many based on research — for helping faculty to see the potential power of this technology and learn to implement it effectively. Webinar components will include: (1) best practices in clicker use, (2) resources available for faculty learning to use clickers, (3) research-based techniques for faculty development around clickers, and (4) working with faculty resistance and alleviating frustration. HIghly recommended: Watch “Make Clickers Work for You” webinar recording at http://theactiveclass.com/speaking-events/ prior to this webinar, and/or the video “How to use clickers effectively” at http://STEMvideos.colorado.edu.

Make Clickers Work for You

Wednesday, Feb 16th (1pm EST). Register.
In this interactive webinar, we’ll explore tips and ideas for incorporating clickers into your particular class. Clickers offer a powerful way to increasing student engagement and improve learning. At the University of Colorado, we have transformed our classrooms by using clickers to promote peer instruction. We’ll show research results on the most effective use of clickers, and discuss common challenges. In particular, we’ll focus on the attributes of “great” clicker questions, discuss example questions, and share ideas on facilitating effective wrap-up discussions once all the votes are in.

I am a Science Teaching Fellow at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and have been working with faculty and K12 instructors for the past several years on effective use of clickers. See my other workshops, and the videos we’ve produced on clickers in the classroom.

I’ve gotten more and more excited about some of the tools that Google offers (for free!) that can help in collaboration and class discussion.  I want to highlight a few that I’ve recently become more familiar with, and how they might be used in the classroom.  The wonderful thing about most of these applications is that they inherently support social learning and student discussion.  Many of these applications are more obviously geared to K12, but with some creativity they can be applied to a wide variety of academic settings.

First, do you get confused signing into Google?  You don’t have to have a Gmail account.  Any email will do to create a Google account.  And if you have the problem where people invite you to share a Google Document but use the wrong email address, you can associate multiple email addresses with your Google account:  From within Google, click “settings” in the upper right.  Under “personal settings” look for “email addresses” and click “edit”.  Add an additional email address.

1.  Google Documents

If you haven’t yet discovered Google Docs, you are missing out.  I was first told about Google Docs in, of all places, the Apple store by a random passerby.  Google Docs is a suite of online word-processing, spreadsheet, and presentation tools (think MS-office goes online and free).  They can be made private, shared with a set of individuals, or made public for viewing or editing.  Students could collaboratively fill in data into a Google Spreadsheet, or an agenda for a meeting can be embedded in the site and collaboratively edited.  Several helpful tips about Google Docs are on this article which talks about applications such as using a Google Doc for a student speakout, collaborative student presentations, and peer-edited essays.

2.  Google Wave and Google Groups

If what you want is really want is a discussion board, Google has a few nice options.  Google Groups basically creates an email listserv, with an online archived discussion thread.  An option that could have some more power is Google Wave, which was temporarily suspended but now it’s back.  This provides a rich real-time discussion forum, but it’s so much more than that.  You can collaboratively edit a document or create an agenda or brainstorm.  To get an idea of what a wave looks like, see this Wave on Using Google Wave in the Classroom.   Waves could be used for student discussions, but also for professional discussions like this — like a beefed up version of Twitter or blogs for enhancing your professional learning.  More on Google Waves in the classroom here.

3.  Google Sites

If you need an easy website, especially one that multiple people can edit, Google Sites is pretty handy.  Google Sites is sort of a webpage builder for dummies; choose a template and fill in your content just like you would on a website, and hey-presto, you’re published.  They have templates for creating wikis, class websites, and more.  This can be a great way to build a course website, especially if you’re making use of a lot of other Google tools because here’s the wonderful thing:  You can easily embed a bunch of other Google applications into a Google Site, such as documents, spreadsheets, or discussion boards.  Any Google Doc can be embedded (and made open for editing, if you wish).  Videos can be embedded, with an accompanying public document where students can provide commentary on the video.  A class calendar can be created on Google Calendar and embedded on the site.  There are just a ton of “gadgets” that can be embedded; just choose “insert” and choose “more gadgets”.  Many of these gadgets are customized for education.

My colleague Ed Johnsen has compiled a helpful site detailing some of the different things that can be done with a Google site at an example site here .

Some other ideas

(many courtesy of Edudemic)

• Google Earth, Google Sky and Google Maps all have potentially useful applications in Geology education.  Geo Education has more.
• Use Google News to include current events in the classroom
• Make an iGoogle personalized homepage (similar to My Yahoo) to provide a one-stop shop for resources related to your course
• One that I’m going to try right away is Google Notebook. Sort of like a web-based scrapbook, you can organize information from the web in a single location.  Helpful for researching a topic or collecting teaching ideas.
• Google Sketchup is a super powerful tool for making 3D drawings; helpful for geometry and drafting.

Helpful resources:

• A wonderful collection of links related to Google applications for education (thanks to Matt Kuhn of McREL).
• Google for Educators discussion group
• Google Apps for Educators provides suggestions and training for using Google Apps for educational use
• 15 little known ways google can help teachers (Edudemic)
• 100 ways Google can make you a better educator (Tech Learning)
• Google for Educators makes many of these tools available (for free) in a closed system for a K12 school.  A free IT solution!

Wave image from Malene Thyssen on Wikimedia; others in the public domain

I’ve had a few posts recently on using social media in the classroom (such as Facing Facebook, and Blogs and Wikis,  and Backchannels).  But these are only little windows into a large, and growing, body of literature on how to use these tools in education.  The trend seems to be much stronger in K12 education settings than in college, but I believe that there is some overlap between the uses in the two realms.

One particularly useful resource is the web 2.0:  New tools, new schools and the companion book, web 2.0 how-to for educators, published by International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE).  The first is more of an overview and best-practices manual, whereas the second is a directed guide on how to use the tools in your classroom. Both are written by a professor of education and a technology in education specialist.

From the ISTE website:

What can Web 2.0 tools offer educators? Web 2.0: New Tools, New Schools provides a comprehensive overview of the emerging Web 2.0 technologies and their use in the classroom and in professional development. Topics include blogging as a natural tool for writing instruction, wikis and their role in project collaboration, podcasting as a useful means of presenting information and ideas, and how to use Web 2.0 tools for professional development. Also included are a discussion of Web 2.0 safety and security issues and a look toward the future of the Web 2.0 movement. Web 2.0: New Tools, New Schools is essential reading for teachers, administrators, technology coordinators, and teacher educators.

Download a sample chapter here.

And regarding web 2.0 how-to for educators,

Web 2.0 How-To for Educators explores the very best online collaborative tools available today (including blogs, wikis, and social networking) and Web 2.0 applications (Skype, Google Earth, Wordle, and more) that make a difference in education. Using a simple formula for each concept, the book describes what the tool is, when teachers should use it, why it is useful, who is using it, how you can use the tool, and where you can find additional resources. Practical examples from educators around the world offer an abundance of ideas, and the recommendations for further information and comprehensive lists of Web 2.0 tools and applications will be valuable resources as you integrate Web 2.0 technology in your classroom.

——–

Here are some additional tips on web 2.0 tools especially for your own learning (which is how I recommend getting started), here are a few things to play with, courtesy of an article in The Science Teacher by Eric Brunsell and Martin Horejsi:

RSS Readers / personalized home page.

Websites and blogs often have syndicated feeds that you can aggregate into your own one-stop personalized news feed.  Some good readers are:

• Google Reader
• iGoogle
• PageFlakes
• NetVibes

Social Bookmarking Services

I’ve only gotten into these recently, but the ability to tag bookmarks for easy searching and categorizing seems to make a lot more sense than the folders that live on my Firefox browser, which never quite seem to allow me to find what I’m looking for.  Diigo lets you create folders and add comments. Some often-used sites are:

• Diigo
• Delicious

Google Docs

I can’t sing the praises of Google Docs enough.  It includes an online word processor, much like Word, but you can share documents with others and make real-time collaborative edits.  You can create polls using Forms, have students fill in lab results into a collaborative spreadsheet, or work with each other on a collaborative presentation.

Online Concept Mapping

I hadn’t heard of this tool before reading the article by Brunsell and Horejsi, but I’m a big fan of concept mapping both to assess and to enhance learning.  Apparently webspiration is a tool to do this online, and it’s got a public beta version.  But it looks like it’s moving to an online subscription sometime soon.

Video Websites

You can find tons of useful video for your own learning or your students.  For example:

• YouTube EDU.  YouTube results relevant to education.
• iTunes U. Educational related iTunes offerings, from educational institutions.
• MIT Open Course Ware. Entire MIT courses online for your viewing.
• TED Talks: hundreds of free, short science lectures on everything under the sun (and beyond) from today’s visionaries
• NSTA Learning Center and Classroom 2.0 Live! Free webinars on science and technology teaching.
• KickYouTube. Allows you to download YouTube videos for viewing offline.

Other tools to get you thinking…

I’m a big fan of starting with the goal, rather than the tool, but there is something to be said for getting an idea of what’s out there, and getting inspiration from there.  So, here are some other tools listed that might be of interest:

• Glogster.  Interactive online posters using text images, video and audio.
• PhotoPeach. Online slideshows combining text and images.  Might be used to document field trips, topical presentations, or lab procedures.
• VoiceThread. Like PhotoPeach, but with a voice option.
• ScreenToaster or Screencast-o. Capture what is on your screen to narrate presentations or other guides for students.

Again, a big old tip o’ the chalk to Brunsell and Horejsi for compiling the helpful list that inspired this post!

An item in my Facebook newsfeed this week: the campus copy and printing center asks followers about buying pdf course packs instead of hard copy xeroxed bundles of course readings.

Lighter! Cheaper! Better!

“If we offered digital at a substantially lower price point than paper, would you go for it?” they asked.

The responses on Facebook were as follows: “Nope!” “Definitely not!” “I like paper and highlighting” “Absolutely I would purchase that. (serious haha)”

However, in spite of the comments, the results of the poll indicate students might actually consider taking the digital plunge. Responders were almost evenly split on whether a budget-friendly digicoursepack would suffice. Will this translate from online sentiment to real life consumer practice in September? (What do you think? Take our poll over there on the right—>)

The debate around user experience and eBooks continues to rage.  As more schools opt for eBooks and eReaders for a variety of reasons including mobile learning initiatives, protests about accessibility grow, and students add their push back to the mix.

Weighing cost and convenience.

More environmentally responsible. More financially reasonable. More portable.  More convenient. And yet, all things considered, the digital native cohort maintains its resistance to electronic textbooks and digital course readings. As interested in sustainability as Gen Y is, in this instance it seems that convenience wins out when it comes to studying. By and large students find it easier to read hard copy text, quicker to highlight on paper, and more effective to use post-it notes than digital stickies.

Nostalgia may be a factor, as it often is where media consumption is concerned. “There’s a deep-seated resistance to digital versions of a centuries old traditional of printed books,” observes journalist Jemima Kiss in The Guardian, “which have rightly enchanted, educated and enlightened readers since movable type.”

Generation Gaps.

From professors’ POV, going paperless makes sense in the context of working in wired classrooms. Multimedia teaching is catching on so quickly across the disciplines that it’s almost become the norm—profs and their TAs are using videos, interactive whiteboards, PowerPoint, clickers, course management software, websites, intranets, even Facebook and Twitter. In response, academic publishers offer a range of supporting materials and tech tools, including of course electronic versions of textbooks. The ability to swap sections, update, personalize and customize a course textbook is an ideal solution for some profs.

As the Boomer and GenX professors warm up to teaching paperless, not only but largely because of the ease in distribution it affords, their students hit the photocopiers and printers, and at the bookstore, reach over and around the featherweight eBook coupons to fill their carts with traditional textbooks by the pound.

Understanding digital resistance.

So, easier for teachers and publishers to produce and distribute, but are e-readings easier to use for students? Allegedly not. Last fall Mashable’s Josh Catone identified three reasons why students resist eTexts, and the roadblocks he pointed to remain in place this year. Catone explained hurdles that include format wars, negligible cost savings, and digital rights management issues—and it’s this last one that has proved a real sticking point for many students. When eBook subscriptions expire, students are left with more open space on their digital devices, some confusion, and an odd sense of loss.

It’s not just about being able to resell used books, my students tell me. Tattered and marked-up textbooks and readers getting dusty and piled high on shelves signify the learning experience. They are memory objects, symbolizing all those hours of dedication and accomplishment, in solitude and with friends, that it takes to complete a course or degree.

So it’s not just the experience of holding a fluorescent yellow marker in hand while plowing through homework that makes eBooks unworkable. There’s more to students’ love of books than scribbling in the margins. The weightiness of bound paper is felt not only in knapsacks, it would seem, but also in our longstanding cultural love affair with hardcopy books.

Gen Y learns through being plugged in, connected, and online, for sure. But there are times when old school learning styles win out, when paper’s the thing and new book smell means fall is here.

Even a technoprof gets that. Let’s hit the books.

But since having options is always helpful, and my local campus copy centre poll shows evidence of sentiment shift, my solution will be to give students a choice of going paperless, by ordering a textbook with e-version available.

Your students are already using tools like Facebook and Twitter.  In fact, they’re often using them when you’d rather they’d be doing something else (like paying attention in class). How can we turn the potential obstacles of Web 2.0 and social media into an opportunity for effective teaching and learning?

I recently gave an overview talk at the American Association of Physics Teachers, sharing some techniques instructors are using for communicating with their students and each other, including class blogs, real-time aggregated conversations in class, tweeted answers to student questions, dedicated YouTube channels, wiki-based class contracts, and more.  I did a lot of research for this talk, and wanted to share the fruits of my labor on this blog.  I argued that by using these tools, rather than ignoring them, we can help students gain social media literacy skills.   Thus, we may choose to leverage social media to promote conversation about things that we care about, using platforms that students find familiar and fun.

Below is the Prezi that accompanied this presentation.  I recommend you open this in another window to watch, while you read this blog post.  First of all, it took a lot of time to make it, and I think you’ll enjoy it!  Secondly, a visual is always helpful in getting a sense of the landscape of ideas, and I was very careful to make this presentation a concept map of a rather broad area in the scholarship of teaching and learning.

I also recommend you check out the Diigo list of social media links that I made for the presentation — here you’ll find examples of class blogs, research articles on social media, and more.  It’s a really useful list.

1.  Students’ Use of Social Media

Students are using social media a LOT.  They’re a different kind of student than we were.  Some startling statistics that I found while researching the talk:

• Teens spend as much time on social networking and websites as they do watching TV!  This was the bastion of education back in my day.
• 73% of teens and young adults use social networks (from Pew study)
• 80% of young adults are on Facebook
• The average Facebook user spends more time on Facebook than on Google, Yahoo, YouTube, and Wikipedia combined.

Interestingly, most young adults don’t use Twitter.   They like the Facebook status updates, but the microblogging of Twitter hasn’t caught on in the same way.

So, they’re using social media – this is an opportunity for social learning, right?

Not so much.  The Venn diagram of how they’re using social media, and what we want them to learn, has very little overlap.  For the most part, social media and the web is serving as a distraction from their studies, rather than a support. [read more]

I’m at the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) meeting this week, and picking up a few good tips on ed tech in the physics class.  Yesterday, Ed Price gave a very nice talk regarding the use of technology in the classroom.  “The pedagogy is not the technology,” he told us – that is, the teaching technique is not embedded in the tool itself.  When trying to consider what technology to use, take into account:

1. The affordances. What does it do for you?
2. The constraints. For example, the PhET simulations restrict what you can do, but they restrict it productively (productive constraints).  You can change the voltage of the battery, for example, but not the color of the wire, focusing your attention on the important aspects.
3. Tools shape what we do. If we’re using a motion detector, we’re going to focus on measuring the motion not, for example, the data analysis.
4. Enable new possibilities. Again, the PhET simulations let us see the electrons moving through the circuit, which we couldn’t usually do.
5. Tech tools are not deterministic. Even though the tools themselves suggest a particular use, you can adapt them to do what it is that you want to do.

He reported on his institution’s experiments with tablets and  digital ink – hand drawn, on the fly, digitally created images and documents.  For example, if you’re going to make a circuit diagram quickly for class, it doesn’t need to be perfect. So, digital inks and tablets are particularly well-suited for physics class. The internet and software allow us to share and archive this digital ink.

In a typical physics lab, students use a lot of different tools that are notwell integrated, including lab equipment, computers for taking data, and lab notebooks.  So, instead, he uses digital lab notebooks with a tablet PC.  He uses Onenote, which enables students to embed images and data and hand-drawn objects with typewritten text.

There were some challenges, of course.  For one, there was only one tablet per student table, so only one student would really be running things when tablets were used in group work.

A low-tech way to let all students have their hands on a “tablet” is to use erasable non-digital whiteboards – you know, the old-fashioned pen and physical whiteboard.   You can use this to draw a graph, make a sketch, or work out a problem. We’ve used this at Colorado, though have had trouble getting it to work well.  We’ve since seen it used really well at Oregon State, suggesting – once again – that it’s not the tool, but how it’s used.  But even with this low-tech tool, technology can be helpful.  Ed Prather uploads pictures of the whiteboards with the final problem solutions to a course-specific Flickr account.  Students can tag or comment the photos in Flickr, though he admitted that this didn’t happen that much.  One positive outcome was that students started to care a little bit more about whether their whiteboard had a correct solution, given that it was going to be posted in a public forum.  Before, they wouldn’t bother to correct something that they had wrong on the whiteboard.  But now, the photo would capture a correct and complete solution.  While getting the answer isn’t always the point, this would push students to consider their problem and correct it, like reviewing homework for errors and learning from one’s mistakes.

Ed Price is currently experimenting with using Wii remote-controlled whiteboards. Students interacting with a large whiteboard as a group looks neat.

One more word of wisdom from Ed – “Pretty good isn’t enough.”   If the software is just “pretty good” that doesn’t make it good enough for the classroom.  You want it to work well, and work all the time.