because it’s about experimenting with how ideas support, collide and work in real life

I met with an instructor last week who thought that maybe he’d like to use the university learning management system. I asked for the syllabus, and we spent some time talking about how much time he wanted to spend online, and how he wanted to share information with students.

Turns out that he wanted to share new lecture outlines and other resources each week, but not spend time maintaining two-way communications online. He had a very specific focus, and was very clear about the limits he placed on his online world, and on the new skills he wanted to learn.

So I recommended a blog - he can post items using his email, students can go to a central location each week to get the outlines (or grab an RSS feed), and he can limit the ability to comment on the posted items. I think this is a good balance of his teaching objectives and his personal priorities. The strengths of an LMS are in the range of tools - you can choose to implement grading, discussion, content delivery and assessment in one place. This comes with a range of decision, implications and maintenance issues, however. A blog can do lots of things, and you can plug in plenty of other widgets. But what it’s really, really good at is delivering content in a consistent manner. It’s reverse chronological nature keeps it current, and the tagging makes it browsable. The comments can focus discussion (a bit, anyway) if needed, but overall, the nature of a blog keeps things moving (assuming there are new posts).

I’m happy with the conversation we had and the decisions he made. He made it easier by his conviction in what he did and didn’t want (or would do), and his willingness to look at different ideas. A good day.

From the Canadian eLearning Conference at UBC this year, I have plenty of scribbled notes, new delicious bookmarks, and more people to follow on Twitter.

Some of the highlights included sessions that had a research question, sessions that didn’t prosthelytize,  meeting new people (or putting faces to names), and some great food as well! I’ve got things to try out and questions to ask, and I’m re-engerized to try out some new ideas, or reinvent some old ideas.

Good stuff….

The LIDC has recently finished the six-session Teaching Portfolio series, which covered the different steps in developing a Teaching Portfolio or Dossier. The sessions are hands on, scaffolded, and rely on the active participation of everyone who comes. If you were not able come, or will attend in the fall, here is a link to a good resource in the mean time.

The Canadian Association of University Teachers has written a comprehensive Teaching Dossier Guide. It was first prepared in 1986, and the most recent update from 2006.

The Guide (download the pdf here) contains a general explanation of what Teaching Dossiers (or portfolios) are, and how it can be used in academia, how to create a dossier (and what to include), and also contains an example dossier.

The focus is on the use of a teaching dossier as part of an evaluation process, and so it stresses evidence, clarity and conciseness. This is a good resource if the purpose of your dossier is for employment or tenure for example.

Clickers have slowly been introduced in large (and medium sized) classes in the last two years. We asked one of our early adopters to do a presentation and talk on clicker use in her classroom. I pulled a few key ideas from her talk and my interpretation on them:

Types of questions
“Read studies in your field of common student misconceptions, and address these questions. “
In class questions and feedback demonstrate the faulty logic and give you the change to immediately dismantle the misconceptions and assumptions. These misconceptions can become enormous road blocks to students future learning.

“Write knowledge questions: based on information from readings, a past lecture or a few slides ago”
This ties in with keeping your questions aligned with your teaching objectives – while it may be fun to ask a off-beat or simply interesting question, your students may lose interest and faith in this technique if it does not relate to the learning and assessment described in your objectives and outline.

“Write predictive questions: show a slide with some facts or information, and ask a if/then question”
If you choose to describe an experiment or series of events, students will be far more interested in the result if they’ve used the clickers to predict the outcome. You can present a series of facts on one slide, and the ask – what was the outcome. If X were applied, what would the outcome be? This engages students in the material in a complex manner – they are shifting through knowledge and evidence to analyze the facts and apply their learning to a problem.

Students
“If you register your clicker as an instructor iclicker, and then lend it to a student, mysterious things will happen”
If you use the iClicker technology, you’ll receive one or two blue iClickers. They’re blue to remind you that they’re yours, not your students (who get a white clicker). You can program this clicker to advance PowerPoint slides, start and stop a clicker question, and display or hide the responses. If you do choose to program this iClicker, and lend it to a student, they won’t be able to answer the clicker questions, but will inadvertently create havoc with your presentation.

“The student – instructor dynamic will change”
If you use clickers, you can expect more office hours. Students are being shown misconceptions or gaps in knowledge before the midterm or final, and some will use the knowledge to seek you out for answers (or with more questions!).

In addition, if the clickers are increasing your attendance (due to grades being assigned for answers), your student evaluations may go down initially. The students who would normally be reluctant or resistant are more likely to be in the classroom on the day you hand out the evaluation forms, and may express this opinion on the forms. That being said, the majority of the students do like the clickers and think that they improve their learning.

cross posting at Education.Building

I’m probably never going to read a management book, which would undoubtedly include many detailed plans for meeting management. But I did do something today in a meeting that I think worked well.

I asked the other members of the meeting to briefly take one or two minutes to write down what we thought the outcome of the meeting should be (we are planning on a report that we have to present to a Bigger Committee). After the free writing exercise, we compiled what we’d written on the whiteboard. There were many similarities, and we were immediately able to build on those common themes, thereby saving much debate. Reflective time in meetings - it could work.

I’ll take my victories where I can get them.

I deliver workshops at my university, mostly on online software platforms that can be used for educational goodness. It’s natural that I get many questions (though email, at the workshop) about mysterious error messages, blocked doors or inexplicable misunderstanding of the software’s vocabulary. I have a golden rule of the three R’s:

• Read: Sometimes when we’re frustrated, we miss clues or instructions on the screen. No, really, it’s true!
• Resources: There are probably some great self-help resources (or even Google) that will help you find the answer quickly.
• Relax: and this is the most important one. I would hazard a guess that 90% of meltdowns while using online platforms are due to user error (an inability to follow instructions, for example) or the computer/browser just needs a  break. So in these cases, I sometimes make a cup of tea. It gives me time to cool down (if necessary), and approach the problem with new eyes when I return to the computer.

Tea - it solves so much.

I am reading a book right now called “The Graphic Syllabus and the Outcomes Map: Communicating Your Course” (by Linda Nilson). The authors objective is to demonstrate how a syllabus drawn like a concept map (for example) can show how a semester long course discusses the similarities and differences between two theories, or how initial background information is the building blocks for later units. It’s a very interesting book, and I’ve started looking at museum introductions, workshop outlines, and even correspondence as graphics, not paragraphs of text.

One of the observations that the author makes is that her students were using her graphic syllabus’ as a reference point during the semester (instead of immediately ignoring it). They were tracing their route, and checking their learning against this document. Fun stuff.

I go to the gym on campus regularly, and take the bus everyday. This gives me excellent opportunities to listen to student conversations.

At the gym, two young female students were chatting about the beginning of the semester, and just how much reading there was. The one is taking a lot of time to read each article, because of the extensive notes she’s taking. Her friend reassured her that it was okay, she’ll learn in a few weeks which course readings are necessary , and which can be dispensed with. They concluded the conversation talking about the black mold in the first students kitchen, which she’s been working with the landlord to deal with.

I was never really taught to read critically in university, I don’t think. Sure, I know the vocabulary, but I think that instructors mostly assumed that you knew how to find the themes, or the assumptions that the author makes. I probably spent way too much time highlighting 80% of the text, and writing down every heading (when I did the readings “properly”). The students in this conversation were just talking about the content to be absorbed, and which is expendable, but maybe the challenge is that students are reading inefficiently?

Instructors often talk about not having enough time for content, but maybe the issue is that students aren’t grasping how to read.

Some of the staff in my department had a meeting the other day to discuss supporting each other in the building of eportfolios. The conversation ranged to include if these would be eventually templates or examples of good practice for others, and looked briefly at teaching portfolios out there.

I sent a twitter out later bemoaning that I’m not so good at self-promotion, and a colleague at a different university replied suggesting that I structure it around self-reflection. I started to shake my head, but then considered that this blog is a series of reflective posts - be it about my acts, things I find, or what people tell me. So maybe that does work for me.

So them where do you start with a eportfolio? I’m going to begin with what this portfolio should do for me; declare my digital footprint; catalogue the work that I’ve done; showcase excellence in my work? And how structured do I want this to be? Do I want specific and linear categories to fill out, or a growing and inter-linked series of individual nuggets? Who is this for: prospective clients; prospective employers; myself?

I think this is about my digital footprint. Next step is to consider how I’ll combine my different online presences; twitter, flickr, the blog, the wiki…

I recently delivered a presentation on the use of Wikipedia in the classroom at a conference. I’m not experienced in this, and do get nervous. I came to a couple of important conclusions (for me) at the last one.

1. The reason that people tend to cover similar topics again and again is because they develop expertise and experience on that topic, and each time you deliver the variation on a theme, it becomes easier. You begin to develop a feel for what questions people will ask (and prepare for them), can anticipate what will resonate with people, and can develop a sense of what might be new, and what might not be new. Now that I’ve discovered this trick, eventually I’ll have to figure out when it’s time to retire (or substantively re-write) a presentation. But later. I’ve got time.

2. Probably, since you’ve actually thought about your topic, done some research and organized your knowledge in a coherent flow, you know more than most of the audience. You can’t of course take this for granted, and some discussion questions are good to have in the back pocket for a knowledgeable audience.  When I presented on Wikipedia, however, two people came to me later and said that I’d helped them reconsider what they knew about it. So the presentation was effective for some; a success!

Those were my two big epiphanies; stay tuned for more.