I have used wikis as part of my teaching for over 2 years now, but I have largely used them as a communication centre where I left information about the course, and about weekly assignments. As well, I had some of the information in the course presentations posted in the wiki as resources for the students. This was especially useful in a university course where students needed to use some relatively complex software.

This term, I'm trying to take that to a new level with my 3 college classes. I have won points with them by pointing out that they haven't had to buy a textbook, but (to their surprise) they are going to create their own. They are not a in a computer program, but rather an arts-oriented one, and their abilities with writing and using the internet for communication are mixed. Many have web knowledge limited to IM and MySpace. I want to broaden and deepen their knowledge working from what they already know, and there's no textbook I know of that could cover that. Besides, the web yields so much information I would like them to become familiar using it as their own learning tool. What I'm hoping is that they will learn the skills of searching and being web 2.0 users, in other words, to build their own PLE. So we're using a Wikispaces wiki to create their text. (Is this constructivism made concrete? ;-> )

The first wiki assignment is to create a page of web vocabulary definitions with pictures.

• Each student signed up for one word,
  
• found a definition,
  
• re-wrote it, if needed, so the rest of the class could easily understand and remember it,
  
• took a screenshot that illustrated it,
  
• put it into a Word table cell, and, in the other cell labeled the image, using (for fun) coloured arrows.
  
• Then they took a screen shot of that,
  
• turned it into a jpeg and
  
• were ready to paste it into the wiki page.

Up to this point, it worked reasonably well, with those more familiar with playing on the web finishing faster and helping others and/or passing the information about Google Earth around the class and exploring the world from that vantage point. I thought things were going well.

Then I asked them to put their definitions up on the wiki. (In an LMS, this is usually not a problem as they each upload to their own account.) In the class wikis, however, we discovered a (not illogical) problem: many people on one wiki at the same time doesn't work well. They were, without meaning to, pasting their images over other people's work, and generally, chaos ensued. Some managed to do their assignment -

Many didn't. So I have learned, don't put the class all on one wiki page at the same time.

I'm still sorting out how to deal with this. Any suggestions would be welcome.

technorati tags:wiki, wiki_text, PLE, constructivism

Blogged with Flock

While I'm still a believer of using wikis in classes, I am learning more about what works and what doesn't. Some things that were easy in an LMS, are not so easy in a wiki. My big example is what happens when more than one person edits at the same time.

In most of my previous wiki use in classes, I have had pages where only one person, or only a small group working together, edited the same wiki page during the same time period. As I described in my previous post, it doesn't work, at least not in Wikispaces. (Writely has a warning system if more than one person is editing the same material at the same time - an excellent feature in my opinion.)

In an attempt to sort out the assignment I had given of having each person in the class add a definition on the same page, I heard with sympathy the student complaints about how work they had done had simply disappeared. I will hear with empathy from now on.

Above is a screen shoot showing the work intensive set-up I was planning on using to deal with the multiple simultaneous editor problem. It's a shot from a history page, because all the anchors and links I had set up disappeared when a dutiful student did her homework right over mine, with no way of knowing that she was doing that. Hours, well almost an hour, of my work gone, or at least gone till I restore my page and dump hers. I will never ask for multiple simultaneous editing of the same wiki page again, EVER!

An aside - thanks to the commenters who gave me advice and sympathy - it really helped.

I expect I have given myself a few hours of work I had intended for my students because I still want them to know and understand the definitions, so I will sort out the page myself.

An other aside - I found (on my Mac iBook), that I could edit Wikispaces more quickly in Firefox than in Flock, which I do love, but maybe it and/or the Diigo plug-in slow things down. In any case, now I edit on Wikispaces in Firefox.

Finally, a friend sent me the link to Seymour Papert's paper, Why School Reform is Impossible, which is still interesting reading. He concludes -

education activists can be effective in fostering radical change by rejecting the concept of a planned reform and concentrating on creating the obvious conditions for Darwinian evolution: Allow rich diversity to play itself out.

Why School Reform Is Impossible

I think this is what we are doing as we learn from LMSs and then try out wiki possibilities.

technorati tags:wiki, LMS, Writely, FirefoxFlock, wiki_problems

Blogged with Flock

The Microsoft deal is the latest amid a flurry of activity in the online video sector. On Monday, online search leader Google Inc. bought YouTube Inc., the owner of the popular video sharing site YouTube.com, for $1.65 billion US following reports last week the firms were in talks.

Blinkx inks video search deal with Microsoft

Microsoft answers Google's purchase of YouTube by buying the video Search Engine Blinkx, and I say "Crazy!"

http://www.blinkx.com/wall?query=Crazy and up pops all kinds of small screens associated with the word "Crazy". I was going for the Gnarls Barkley video, 3rd down, second from the right.

Google Inc. is making its word processing and spreadsheet programs available for free to all comers on its website, marking the internet search leader's latest effort to provide an alternative to Microsoft Corp.'s dominant software applications.

The software package, available Wednesday, combines a spreadsheet application that Google introduced in June with a word processing program called Writely that the Mountain View-based company bought for an undisclosed amount in March.

Google takes aim at Microsoft with free office software

And Google developed this to go with what used to be called "Writely" which they bought last year sometime.

I never used to follow business news but it's become a fascinating drama that affects me directly. I use these applications; sometimes I even find out about these applications from the news. What used to be a minor area, appearing irregularly as Technology News has become central. People compare what is happening now to the so-called "Dot.com" bubble of the 1990's, but it's very different, IMHO. This is the Web 2.0 Rush.

The Dot.com bubble, from my outsider and beginner observation, appeared to be caused by people who knew almost nothing about the web gambling that this was a trend with legs. They didn't know what they were buying or doing.

Web 2.0 by definition "let[s] people collaborate and share information online" and is, therefore, far better known and understood, I believe. Plus, Web 2.0 applications, if they are effective, often have visible proof of their effectiveness in their stats. Even if

it turns out that MySpace really has roughly 43,000,000 users

Debunking the MySpace Myth of 100 Million Users at Forever Geek

that's still a very impressive number. And it has an impressive number of ways for people to play and learn about the culture they are creating.

And YouTube has fascinating possibilites and stats, too -

* In a single month the number of videos on the site grew 20% to 6.1 million
* YouTube has some 45 terabytes of videos
* Video views reached 1.73 billion
* 70% of YouTube's registered users are American, roughly 50% are under 20
* The total time people spent watching YouTube since it started last year is 9,305 years

Micro Persuasion: YouTube by the Numbers

And YouTube has great buzz potential, if Google want to keep itself and its "family" in the news.

But where's Yahoo in all this?

But internet observers are convinced that Yahoo will have to do something dramatic to get Wall Street and web surfers excited about the company again.

"I think they will be in the penalty box" until next year, said Ellen Siminoff, a former Yahoo executive who now runs Efficient Frontier, a search marketing firm in Mountain View. "This [YouTube] deal will probably encourage Yahoo to be more aggressive than it has been in the past."

The conventional thinking is that Yahoo will step up its efforts to buy Facebook.com, the second most popular social-networking site behind MySpace.

YouTube deal puts pressure on Yahoo

So Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo are all engaged in web wars, the big fish swimming menacingly around each other as they race towards a new semiosis, while small players work in garages and spare rooms, developing the next idea that might sell for, oh, say, about 1.65 billion sometime if they are reading their culture accurately and have the right technical skills, plus luck and timing.

technorati tags:web2.0, YouTube, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, MySpace

Blogged with Flock

SlideShare (the so-called YouTube of PowerPoint) is still in beta, but if you request an account, they provide one, or at least they did for me. I have uploaded a few of the PowerPoints I have in my files, just to try it out.

If you don't mind your PowerPoints being public, it's another nifty way to post information for students or friends. You can upload using PowerPoint or OpenOffice files, tag your shows, embed them in a blog, link to them,
http://slideshare.net/vinall/elements-of-msword
and comment on shows. It's really easy; it took SlideShare only a couple of hours to respond to my request for an account, and then I uploaded 5 PowerPoints I had tucked away in my files in under one hour. That included going through all of them before and after I uploaded them, and browsing some other shows with the same tags.

This will make it easier for me to share PowerPoints with my students, especially those who don't have PowerPoint on their computers at home.

technorati tags:SlideShare, PowerPoint, web2.0

Blogged with Flock

Recently I posted about how multiple users couldn't work on the same wikipage, and the problems that caused in myn courses here. I complained about how much time I'd spent setting up ancors and links for each word to be defined. I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that it was totally wasted time. The good news is that I learned a faster and easier way to do the same task.

This is what a Wikispaces table of contents looks like -

You can see, on the right, the extensive table of contents for this page. One click takes you straight to that heading on the page.

This is what the page looks like as it is being edited using the WYSIWYG editor

See that innoculous little bit of wikitext on the left, right about "Windows" - it's 2 square brackets on each side containing these letters "toc". Instead of labouriously adding anchors - see the squared brackets, number sign and word "net" on the right about "internet" - instead of the time spent creating these ancors and then linking to them, all I had to do was use the formatting field and make each sub-heading a designated heading. Above, each word to be defined is set at "Heading 3". (It's just like Styles in Word, applying heading designations and automatically producing as table of contents!)

I love the table of contents and have now added one to almost all the pages.

I think Wikispaces is trying to deal with the multiple editors too. A couple of times recently when I tried to save some changes I'd made, a screen came up telling me that someone else was editing too and giving me some choices about how to deal with that.

So I continue, creating pages with the information I want to share with my students, and asking them to add information and/or edit, but just not all at once. I think I will set up more pages that serve as landing spots with links to further pages just for individual students. I'm learning as I go along.

technorati tags:wiki, Wikispaces, toc

Blogged with Flock

In Tony Karrer's eLearning Technology blog, he posed a question about how we put information on the web for others - http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/2006/10/personal-publishing-balance-of-blog-vs.html

When I commented, I found myself thinking about my Oral Rhetoric course where we are dealing with some of these questions. Personally, I like to scan and dig rather than listen, especially when I'm focused on the content. However, the discussion in class has repeatedly revealed that there are different preferences for different people. (And for some who are dyslexic, listening is much better - I think ER is starting a plotline on that very observation, for those who follow that show.). So, IMHO, we are lucky to have the multi-platform web ;->

Another point that I think is very important - we learn/perceive different information from different media. I asked my class to go to http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/archive/2003-03/a-2003-03-27-3-1.cfm and first read, then listen. When they posted (in a Community Blog in Elgg) on their two experiences of the same words, it became clear that different information comes in on different (media) channels. So the kind of information you want to process influences your media preferences.

Personally, when I want information, especially non-emotional, apparently 'objective' information, I like to read, to scan and dig. When I want to know about the context, the people involved, to get a sense of the whole (or the emotional space), I want audio or video.

Learning styles and perceptual patterns shape our choices too. So we need to provide what we want to communicate in the many ways we are lucky enough to have on the web!

 

technorati tags:media, Karrer, dyslexia, perception, audio

Blogged with Flock

In my experience, undergraduates are not only not “digital natives” in the way that people over 30 like to think of them; they have cell phones, they have IM, but they have no idea how to find information on the internet, are floored by a new web application, aren’t comfortable playing around with something like a wiki to see how it works, and no idea why it’s not a good idea to send email from their h0tchk1987@yahoo.com account to the registrar’s office or two a potential employer. Technology literacy cannot be judged by a person’s gadgets; I often think these ideas are generated by people who are in awe of the toys available and find them difficult to use.

Random Access Mazar » MLearn: Don’t forget about Training!

I couldn't agree more. I regularly teach college and university students subjects connected with communication, and my experience matches Rochelle's. I believe it's urgent that we teach students about such basics as

• the differences between search engines and directories
  
• some searching skills and techniques - even that these exist
  
• how to search for (and use) tutorials and FAQs for web applications
• how to find out about (and think about use possibilities for) new web applications
  
• how to use Styles and Insert Caption in word processing and generate Tables of Content and of Figures
• how to make life easier by using citation applications such as easybib.com
  
• basic page layout and design principles
  
• basic Netiquitte

Those are only the very basics for communication; they are not technologically esoteric, but only a small percentage of current post-secondary students, even those from technically-oriented courses, are skilled in all of these.

When I hear people speaking of how tech-savvy the young digital natives are, I find myself assuming that they, the speakers, are not at all tech-savvy themselves - or they would have noticed that it isn't so. While part of the problem is that we are in an age of rapid technological change, I believe teachers are responsible for learning the applications that impact on their field and integrating the use of these into their courses, no matter what their ages are. At the very least, they should be following developments and learning about them with their the students, IMHO.

I don't mean they should have complete knowledge of every aspect; that way boredom and frustration lies. but writing teachers should know about researching on the web as well as off, blogs and how they can contribute to writing practice, and reflective thinking, and the use of Styles and other aspects of word processing, including how a page should appear so readers are attracted rather than put off. And curriculum developers and designers should be including these as direct parts of students learning, not just assuming it will happen.

 

I think one of the problems is an unconscious belief system that students and even teachers ourselves will somehow just absorb what we need to know, and if we don't, it's too hard. We don't expect ourselves to work at learning. We say we don't have enough time, and fail to see that we can spend some time to save a lot of time and frustration in the future. I have heard people (who have had training freely available to them) complain about being expected to know something that is part of their job. (I have heard myself doing this ;-> that's how come I've noticed it happening!)

The web is the greatest learning platform in human history, IMHO, and Education is endangering itself by not ensuring that training (for students and teachers) is available, and demanding that all involved learn how to actively make use of it.

technorati tags:DigitalNatives, training, technical_literacy

Blogged with Flock

Teaching two courses, one with 3 sections of between 25 & 30 students each, and another with 35 students keeps me busy. I was caught up on my marking for 37 minutes yesterday!

As I was collecting yesterday's assignments, I noticed consciously that I had planned the course so that students have many ways to demonstrate their knowledge. (Can you tell I've been editing course outlines and using eduspeak?) In one course,  they

• write reviews twice,
  
• create and present PowerPoints twice,
  
• post definitions supported by images in a wiki (though that didn't work so well)
  
• use some basic design principles to layout a title page and/or small poster
  
• set up their computer screen to show their own del.icio.us (and/or other web 2.0) accounts, then take screenshots of them, insert the screenshots into a word document, and use arrows and labels to point out answers to my questions
• do the same with some searching exercises
• write out short answers to questions on computer definitions, netiquett, and other required learning
• create a highly formatted resume
• create their own web page using a WYSIWYG application

I've set it up without thinking much about it, using tacit knowledge from years of teaching and studying how people learn. It was pleasant, however, to notice what I've done in distributing how "students can demonstrate their knowledge" while talking to someone who has some learning "disabilities" and showing them how they write, perform, answer questions, and create in order to expand what they can do with a computer and on the web. They don't just write, or just produce some finished project, they do a variety of things, which keeps them, and to be honest me, more interested. Besides, some learning should be generalized (like structure for communicating) and this variety of activities which all require structuring of information, helps them to learn how to use know-how from one venue in working in another. Or so i believe.

It's sunny today afters days of winds and rain, with golden leaves still on trees but paving the sidewalks as well.

I taught someone to open email messages, open attachments, and save them in files in My Documents last night. It's always good to have to slow down and explain how to do what has become automatic. It gives depth to my own understanding of the content and how people learn.

How to (Mis)Use Priorities and What You Can Learn
On the weekend, I needed to mark essays for my Monday afternoon classes, and my bathroom was dirty. Often I can leverage one against the other to get both tasks done. I find extended marking of essays really hard work. It takes an intense multifocus to watch for detail (grammar and spelling) structure (overall and within paragraphs) and information (correct and designed for the audience) plus figuring out what the individual needs most to know to improve, so they aren't overwhelmed with negative information. After a while my brain numbs out,  and it's time to clean.

I made a tactical error. My other course has a community blog, which they mostly don't post in till the night before class, but I thought I'd give myself a treat and check it before i started to mark and clean. Some stragglers had added last week's post after the deadline so I had something to read.

Here's some more context. Most of my teaching life, I've seen students in classes from 15 (heaven) to 40 (not heaven;->) for, used to be 16, now it's 13 or 14 weeks, for 2 or 3 hours a week. It's hard to get to know how individuals perceive and learn, and what skills and knowledge they have, are starting to have and need/want in that short a time.

Very rarely, I've had students for a second term. In my experience, the second time together is the most productive learning/teaching time. Both teacher and student know more about how each other 'works' and can get on with our tasks of teaching and learning. In my opinion, we waste a lot of educational time and money in classes as musical chairs where students and teachers are just getting acquainted when the course is over.

As I mentioned earlier, I was putting off marking essays and cleaning the bathroom by reading blog posts. I had assigned a couple of readings for this third year university course and given them a quote from each. I asked them to chose one and talk  write about it, and how they could tie it into their own life experience. (A little phenomenology never hurts!)

As I read, I found myself getting excited and adding more than brief comments to some of the posts. I found myself entering into a discussion with their takes on the quote in a way that was far more one-to-one than could happen in a busy crowded class time. But here's the important point -

The Important Point!
It's only halfway through the term and I'm beginning to perceive some of the students in the way I never used to get to till our second class together, if that ever happened. Some students are right out there saying writing what they think, and I can respond, actually respond, not just repeat the course information. It is in this genuine response that I believe both the students and I actually learn. To use a cliche, something sparks between us to the benefit of both. They learn and I learn.

Because that's my dark secret; I teach for selfish reasons. I want to keep learning. I take courses, and roam around my places in the web for the same reason, I'm addicted to the brain juice that the spark of insight, of learning provides.

My bathroom, however, is still dirty.