The subject of the article is Michael Wesch, a popular, innovative professor at Kansas State who has garnered much recognition for his willingness to embrace a wide variety of technologies in the classroom, especially web 2.0 ones. But when other professors attempted to copy his approach, things fell flat. The article contrasts Wesch with another professor at the same institution, Christopher Sorensen: a highly regarded, lecture-loving, self-described “old fogy”. Both of these professors are beloved by students, and both do what they do very, very well.

After thinking about why his tech-intensive methods were not equally successful for other professors, Wesch has concluded that – more than technology – what makes for a successful learning experience is the bond between professor and student.

Here are a few excerpts from the great conversations this article has sparked:

EduGeek Journal: “I think at some point we are going to have to realize that old methods aren’t all bad, and new methods aren’t always the saviour.”

Lisa’s Online Teaching Blog: “Few of us were asked to consciously develop pedagogy when we began teaching. We were either left alone or given a specific model to follow (deliberately or accidentally). We assessed our own effectiveness through how well we thought students understood, and what grades they earned according to our standards. Most of us got upset when students did poorly, and changed our pedagogy and materials (often every semester) to try to “get through” and improve results. In this development, we came to believe that certain things were important and other things were not, and through experience created our own pedagogical framework. We operate within that framework every day, keeping what seems to work and changing what doesn’t. But we must learn to articulate why, to understand our own strengths and the reasons we teach the way we do.  . . .You cannot use a technique effectively if you can’t do it well, and none of us does everything well.”

Agile Learning had some great posts about this topic. First, check out his insights about about what wildly innovative teachers do (and don’t) bring to the table. Namely, good teaching is more than personality and smart technology: it’s the writing of measurable and specific learning objectives, the design of assignments, the depth of discussion questions, and the ability to keep the learner engaged, among other things. These are skills that can be emulated by professors across the university. The key is to use technology in service of these goals. On that note, he makes some great points about the ways in which one fairly easy educational technology, clickers, can help professors in many disciplines meet the needs of their learners.

Second, he’s also got a wonderful discussion of the principles of effective learning environments – an effective learning environment is, after all, the desired outcome, no matter the method. Drawn from the work on cognition and learning environments summarized in How People Learn, he recounts that optimal learning environments are learner-centered, knowledge-centered, assessment-centered, and community-centered. Putting these principles into practice can use high-tech tools, low-tech tools, or even some of each in order to achieve the different goals. In fact, he’s written some wonderful paragraphs about the ways in which clickers can help engaged, thoughtful professors excel in creating each dimension of an effective learning environment (do go read his re-cap of each, if you’re at all interested – you won’t be sorry!).

Indeed, technology done well – thoughtfully selected, pedagogically grounded, and subject to careful reflection – can meaningfully enhance the learning environment (and may also let your personality shine through and build a bond between professor and student, as added bonuses).

When students fall behind in the reading, class discussions can become strained: there’s “wait time” when you ask a question and wait for someone other than your usual suspects to respond, and then there’s “huh, wait a minute . . . ” time when it dawns on you that most of the class has no idea how to answer the perfectly reasonable reading comprehension question you’ve just asked. The latter is, obviously, undesirable.

I’ve heard of the quick-poll anonymous method of asking students to use a piece of scrap paper to write down what page they are on in the reading (or just all / most / some / none in reference to their progress on that day’s materials). But this method a) works better for smaller classes (flipping through 200 pieces of odd-sized scrap paper at the start of class takes rather more time than one would think), and b) doesn’t work at all for online courses.

Enter Google Docs.

Prof Hacker has a great post about how to use a Google spreadsheet to quickly and anonymously compute how much, on average, your students have read. Yes, your students will need computer access to do this – it’s great for online courses, and works well for face-to-face courses since all you need to do is share the link in advance (students can punch in their data whenever they realize they’ve done all the reading they are going to be able to do before next class) and then you can just check the spreadsheet shortly before class.

Now you’ll know if there’s just a lull in the conversation or if most of the class really isn’t prepared – and you can adjust your teaching methods accordingly.

As the author notes, at $19 the product isn’t free (there is a free trial option, though). But, as the commenters note, there are a few free options out there if you think having a clipboard feature on your Mac would make your life easier.

What types of social media are you using? Which forms of social media would you like to see us write about here?

Via: Online Universities Blog

I particularly love her points about embedding tutorials and providing copious amounts of feedback. What do you think? What’s your best online teaching tip?

You can use videos in your face-to-face courses before a classroom discussion or post them in the prompt for a threaded discussion or journal entry in LearningStudio. Videos can offer new perspectives, provide illustrations of concepts or realities that students might not truly “get” without a visual aid, and can provide a succinct review of content. They are also great unit introductions, nicely helping students make the transition between old knowledge and new content. Likewise, you can have students use video content as reference material for writing or as knowledge that students demonstrate in an exam or quiz.

First, note that we’ve collected some video resources for you on the multimedia portion of our website. Of particular use might be the tutorial on embedding YouTube videos in LearningStudio and the link to the amazing list of educational internet streaming videos collected by the Arizona State librarians.

Here’s another briefer round-up of video sites – some of these, like TED and the Khan Academy, we’ve covered before. However, I’d like to draw your attention to Open Culture, as this site has some of the most interesting free thought-provoking videos on the web. It’s not all textbook-educational; as the name suggests, the focus is on culture. That said, there are some real gems when it comes to arts, science, and foreign language learning resources.

Here’s a tip for what seems like a useful video transcoder – in case you need to convert video formats so they can play on a variety of devices, for example. Note that this relies on open-source software, so you’ll definitely want to carefully review the tool before you begin.

If you’d like to take it to the next level and have your students actually produce videos, here’s a great scholarly article on some of the methodology and pedagogy associated with having students produce their own educational video content via their smartphones. Also, here’s a useful review of various video-creation resources for the DIY-ers.

And, last, because well, we’re talking about video – and, thus, how can you not have this song in your head?!

Their product basically locks down a student Mac/PC laptop, desktop, or lab computer, that has the ExamSoft software installed, and makes it secure, unable to access other files or programs on the computer and basically takes over during an exam.

The system breaks down into the following compoents:  Exam Design, Exam Delivery, Scoring & Analysis, and Admin Services.

Images from their website explaining features:

For a school without a testing center, this could be quite beneficial.  Have you used this product before? What do you think of it?

–Kerrie

Learning Beyond Walls: 21 Skype Resources.

Per their website:

“Highlighter is a web application that creates a dynamic relationship between publishers and readers. With Highlighter, readers can share, save, and comment on words, sentences, paragraphs and even images. All of this data is passed back to the publisher in the form of powerful analytics.”

Our staff has just started playing with this in the past few days.  So far it’s pretty cool!  I see a lot of uses faculty/students could have with this product to edit documents, collaborate on peer-review of papers, and potentially demonstrate the critical thinking a student does while reading a document (i.e. highlighting items they find to be important or that raise questions, etc.).  There is an e-book storefront to sell & publish your documents, analytics behind the scenes, security features, and mobile device support.

Josh & John so far have been very eager to hear feedback and quick to respond to questions.   As this is a growing product, there are still changes being implemented and development is still happening, including a new redesign of pieces of their site/tool to launch in the next few weeks.

We look forward to “playing” with Highlighter more and figuring out the ins/outs.   To try it out for yourself, go to Http://www.highlighter.com and select “Sign up” in the top right corner.   If you create a sandbox account to test and want us to join in, send an invite to elearning@tcu.edu and we will be happy to try it out with you!

I’ll be posting more once I dig in a little more. Stay tuned…

–Kerrie

First, it gives a great subject-specific overview of how clickers might make a concrete difference in the classroom. Look at all the different types of questions one could ask using clickers: that’s some serious student engagement, reflective thinking, and quick feedback!

Second, it uses Prezi as the vehicle for presenting his ideas. Prezi is sort of like a zoomable, hybrid whiteboard-sideshow that lives in the cloud. If you haven’t seen a Prezi presentation before, give this one whirl. And, if you decide you’d like to try and make your own, note that they have some free educational licenses.

p.s. Should you ever need to put a Prezi on a wordpress.com blog, here is the how-to.