Teaching with Technology Roundtable
Please join Lois Frankel from the School of Industrial Design and the EDC for this month’s Teaching with Technology Roundtable, on Friday, March 20, from noon to 1 p.m. in 422 Dunton.
Professor Lois Frankel will show examples of students’ use of blogs as part of weekly assignments in a studio course. She will share the successes and the challenges that she and her students have encountered and facilitate a discussion about opportunities for improvement.
This session will be of interest to anyone who is using blogs or thinking of using blogs in their courses.
Please register to attend this event at http://edc.carleton.ca/teachingwithtechnolog.
If you are unable to be on Carleton’s campus at this time we will be making this session available via an online Elluminate session and as a recording after. Please check back for the online event information and the recording posting.
The EDC’s STLHE Presentations
This year at the Society for Teaching in Learning and Higher Education (STLHE), my colleague Maggie Cusson and I will be presenting three times. I’m writing this in advance so that by the time you read this, I’ll actually be in the midsts of presenting!
Two of those presentations will be hour long sessions in a workshop format: one presentation will focus on the Centre’s use of Blogging and the other will examine our attempts to develop a TA Workshop Presenter’s community. The final presentation is a poster session and will examine the variety of online resources we’ve used in the past year to communicate with Teaching Assistants.
I’m most comfortable with is the The End of Isolation: Establishing a TA Workshop Presenter Community because I developed the group. I was enticed by the idea of such a group following a presentation by the Psychology department’s Chris Motz and Matt Sorley at the EDC’s December teaching event. Their session, entitled If You Build It, Will They Come? The Development of a Faculty Learning Community, was practical in its description of starting and maintaining a teaching community, as well as its benefits. Their presentation came on the heels of a request from a TA Workshop Presenter who indicated that he had never had the opportunity to meet the other presenters or see the overall structure of the program. The result was an attempt to forge a group: we began to meet regularly to discuss our workshops and the larger structure and communicated more regularly via e-mail. The biggest obstacles were time commitments (how much effort everyone was willing to put in), scheduling (when everyone could meet) and our methods of communication (initially we would e-mail following each workshop, which quickly became unmanageable). In the end, though, we managed to double the size of our group in a single year – from 6 to around 12 – and we’re actively recruiting new and talented members to help round out our topics.
Our second presentation, entitled Why We Blog: Adopting a New Communications Strategy for Teaching and Learning Centres, owes its existence to our former Educational Technology Assistant, Valerie Doucette. She was the pioneer who initiated the blog in October 2007 and regularly maintained it with the help of Matthew DiGuiseppe until she left the EDC in April to pursue her MA (Good luck Val!). In addition to developing and organizing the look, feel and content of the blog, Valerie set us up with a strong model to follow. Since her departure, Instructional Technology Coordinator Ryan Kuhne, the remaining ETAs Derek, Margaret and Mehrak and I have assumed blogging duties. The biggest obstacle is the time commitment: not only do we strive to post regularly, it takes time to find a topic, write and edit a post and ensure that it has practical benefits for Carleton’s teaching community. The benefits far outweigh the hurdles, though – the blog is an indispensable tool for sharing information and resources without being forceful, and it creates an open dialogue with our readers (casual surfers and/or our 30+ regular subscribers). Our wide range of contributors ensures a plethora of voices, tones, topics and specialities, which are only some of the reasons why it currently sits (according to Google Analytics) as our 5th most visited webpage.
The third presentation is our poster session entitled Creating New Online Resources: TA support using online resources. This one proved to be quite the challenge: the poster had to be not only pleasing to the eye, but remain functional enough to educate about our various online initiatives. The end result – thanks to Lauren Potvin and Ryan Kuhne – masterfully achieves both criteria. The red and black colour scheme is striking, and the information is well organized and easy to follow. Content wise, the poster details the EDC’s efforts to vary our communication strategy with TAs this year, using a mixture of traditional (e-mail, website) and new media (streaming video, Facebook, blogs). Our efforts appear to have worked very well considering the increase in successful Certificate recipients, as well as a huge spike in attendance number at training workshops.
Look for online versions of all three presentations, as well as a STLHE review, in the coming weeks!
Hot Blog: An Alternate Point of View
One of our main goals in writing the Educational Development Centre blog is to help Faculty and Teaching Assistants discover new ways to teach, research and manage their time with pedagogy and technology.
Naturally ours is not the only educational blog out there, but generally the people involved in this communication stream are educators or technology gurus, etc. So it comes as a nice change of pace to read Hack College, a technology blog written by and intended for University students.
The site is the brain child of Kelly Sutton, a Loyola Marymount junior in computer science and film production, and has an amusingly sarcastic, ‘damn the man’ tone about it (the slogan is work smarter, not harder). It is also genuinely useful in terms of highlighting educational technology – albeit with a student’s perspective in mind.
I read about the blog in The Chronicle of Higher Education (product placement alert: this weekly newspaper is available – for free! – to all Carleton faculty should you choose to stop by). The blog is featured in an interview with Sutton, who had plenty of interesting things to say, including:
-The most popular article from the blog is “10 ways to recover a lost Word document” (which, all things considered, is a pretty useful tip)
-Technology has added a lot of “overhead” to students’ lives in terms of the time it takes to check the abundance of social networking sites
-Professors using technology often fail miserably, which Sutton rationalizes because they are simply using technology instead of marrying the material to the technology in a logical way or – in his words – “It’s like, ‘Let’s make a podcast.’ Well, what problem is that podcast solving?”
All in all, it’s an interesting opportunity to see what technology can serve to improve a student’s life, and what some students think helps – and hinders – the business of learning…
eLearning Blog
When I sat down this morning to work on the blog, I got a bit of a rude wake-up call: it turns out the topic I’d decided to write on had actually already been blogged on! So much for spreading the word about Zotero – a really awesome online bibliography tool (Check out the zotero post here).
And so I’m forced to break out my back-up subject, which might prove to be even more useful. Over the weekend I discovered a blog written by Tony Karrer, the CEO/CTO of TechEmpower – a software, web and eLearning development firm in Los Angeles. Tony maintains an eLearning Blog on educational technology which has an astounding number of resources as well as practical tips. Judging from the caliber of his posts, as well as his extensive number of years in the biz (and the classroom), he obviously knows his stuff. Apparently someone else agrees because last year his blog won best elearning blog at the edublog awards.
Although the blog can be a bit business oriented, there are some really good ideas for your personal (re: research/organization) as well as teaching needs (re: presentation/teaching resources). Recent posts directly reflect this, including a bit on electronic flash cards as well as his thoughts on the application BrowseMyStuff.
Wednesday: Blogging Links to Munch On
(I’ve been waiting to use this picture for a long time – “Blogger gangsign” by lawgeek)
Blogging in Academe (PDF) is a short introductory article by Dale Kirby and Mary Cameron to the practice of blogging at the academic level. Both are professors at Memorial University, and both decided to use blogging as a means to “reach the ‘digital natives,’ namely our students and to add to the public sphere of knowledge as scholars and teachers in higher education.” I enjoyed their survey of several popular forms of academic blogging (with mention of Canadian academics), as well as their discussion of the possibility that academic blogs can hinder the careers of the bloggers, since other academics can take offense to the writing in them.
For other insights:
- David Warlick presents A Path to Becoming a 21st Century Literate Educator
- Ryan Bretag reviews the blog study Edublogging: Instruction for the Digital Age Leaner by Dr. Felix and breaks down some important points on using blogs in the classroom.
Intute Recommends Academic Social Science Blogs
Just a heads-up to a new series over at the Intute Blog:
As part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science 7th –16th March, Intute: Social Sciences is featuring a series of articles by our subject editors presenting their favourite blogs. (…)
With thousands of blogs being published by academics and many more that may be of interest to the scholarly community, this won’t be a comprehensive overview of them all, but we hope it will perk your interest in exploring further. (…)
Here’s what we’ve got coming up:
Friday 7th of March: Sociology
Monday 10th of March: Psychology and Law
Tuesday 11th of March: Elections and Statistics / Data
Wednesday 12th of March: Economics and Business / Management
Thursday 13th of March: International Relations and Europe
Friday 14th of March: Politics / Government and Round-up of the weekYou can contribute to this event by leaving a comment on any of the articles, perhaps letting us know about your favourite blogs in a particular subject or by helping expand our catalogue of academic blogs by filling in our suggest a site form.
CALPER – Educational Language Resources
Carleton University Linguistics instructor Biana Laguardia turned me onto a great language resource center from Penn State called CALPER standing for Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research.
“CALPER’s particular focus is to improve the environment of advanced-level foreign language teaching and learning, and assessment.”
Tips and Tools in This Week’s Web Reads
- Over at Mashable, 12 Screencasting Tools for Creating Video Tutorials – including free options. (via E-Learning Acupuncture)
- Have been enjoying the CBC Spark podcast with the accompanying blog (and detailed show notes). From show #22 learned of the MIT Lecture Browser, a pilot project wherein MIT has translated audio lectures into text and indexed them into a search engine. You can search for terms that will bring you to that specific point in a given lecture.
- Two interesting blog tools: Lijit and Snap. Lijit seems particularly intriguing as an alternative search tool. (via Ed Techie)
- Really fun way to improve your typing skills – light-weight, flash-based Keybr. (via Innovation Centre)
- At ReadWriteWeb – How to Manage your Online Reputation?
- What is Twitter and how could it be used in academia? An excellent effort to answer this question over at AcademHack, Twitter for Academia. Includes a very practical, detailed list of uses.
Edublogs Expands Their Services: Edublogger, Magazine, and Edublogs Campus
The people over at Edublogs have been busy expanding their web of educational blogging tools.
They started out as a platform employing the Wordpress framework to provide easy hosting of educational blogs for different levels all under the edublog umbrella. So you can have a blog through uniblogs.org (for university/college level needs), learnerblogs.org (for students), edublogs.org (for education professionals), or eslblogs.org (for those involved in ESL education). My impression is that all of these different categories are roughly defined, so that a classroom blog could be under uniblogs or edublogs, for example. Their service offers free Wordpress blogs with no advertisements and 100 MB of space. According to blogger Baan Jochim Phuket, there is a plug-in that allows for a completely password protected blog and you can use the different types of users (admin, editor, author, etc) to denote levels of access to changes.
But lately they’ve been up to even more. They began the Edublogger blog which seems very helpful for hands-on tips, tricks and techniques to using Wordpress effectively – great for those instructors getting into blogging with little understanding of the Wordpress administrative options to customize their blog. They have also founded the Edublogs magazine which is somewhat like a blog in that its has regular articles, but welcomes contributions from the wider education community. One of their recent interesting articles was on the top bloggers on using edublogs according to Technorati, where they highlight some of the best edubloggers that are getting attention – a great summary with spotlights on their most popular posts.
And as if that weren’t enough, they have also unveiled Edublogs Campus, which allows you to set up an official campus Edublogging platform complete with custom domain, control over implementation, unlimited storage, and support from Edublogs. Take a look at their features page for more detail.
Of course this service does have annual fees according to how many blogs will be set up at the institution. At the EDC we techies have been thinking about university-wide blog hosting for a while – it would be great to have a setup where instructors and students are blogging and we have it connected so that it’s easy to read others’ blogs within the university community of scholars. But already having the WebCT blogging function we’re still not sure if we can justify a systematic set up of outside blogs (despite clear differences between the two interfaces). Edublogs is offering a great looking service though, especially the part where they give email support and tutorials videos to make it easier for instructors and students to jump on board. Here’s the introductory video from the Edublogs campus site:
Canadian Blog Awards: Educational Blog Finalists
Via Open Thinking & Digital Pedagogy I learned that there is apparently a Canadian Blog Awards. Interesting to have a selection of great writing from Canadians with lots of great categories to check out, including Best Podcaster/Vlogger, Political blogs, Best Humour blog, etc.
Near the very bottom of the Finalists page are the choices for Best Education blog:
A Difference
The Crux-of-the-Matter
Remote Access
Michael’s English Usage
Open Thinking & Digital Pedagogy
Of course I was already enjoying Open Thinking & Digital Pedagogy but did not know of any of the other finalists! While Michael’s English Usage is about proper English language in terms of grammar and punctuation, I really like his choices for vocab word of the day – they are in exactly the right range of useful and still advanced. Everyone needs to brush up on their vocabulary including me, so I think I’ll subscribe. Actually they are all very interesting reads. A Difference wrote a great post called “Blogging: Does it Scale?” where he outlines the different types of educational blogs and tries to theorize how blogs for classes might have a larger scale across curricula and years. At any rate, all of the blogs are well worthy of nomination.
