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June 11, 2007
Back from the Moon & Reflecting on Online Learning
Hi everybody. The Spouse and I returned from our sojourn to the moon. We had tremendous fun, and we'll spare you all the tedium of our hundreds of vacation photos.
I'm writing now from New York City, the city that never freaking sleeps. And from my dorm room on the 17th floor of NYU's Hayden Hall, I can assure you that its drivers never sleep, either.
Anyway, I'm here for a week at the Faculty Resource Network's Summer seminars, participating in a seminar on "Ensuring Successful Online Learning." Day one is almost over, and our seminar convener has instructed us to BLOG OUR REFLECTIONS!!! (Back in Vermont, hundreds of my former students are laughing hysterically, the memories of my own incessant demands that they reflect on their readings and experience having unbalanced the poor dears....)
Anyway, this morning we had a lively discussion of what exactly "instructional technology" is. I'm a big-picture kind of guy, and I argued that everything technological that can or could be used for teaching or learning should be included in our definition. I offered the surprisingly controversial examples of pens and eyeglasses. (I also mentioned blogs and other high-tech stuff, of course.) It seems to me that part of our mission as educators of/with technology has got to include educating the public about the mind-boggling vastness of technologies that they already use every day. Tech isn't just digital. (Of course, this issue keeps coming up in my scholarship, which invariably blends discussions of digital texts with paper and codex texts. Note to self: spend some time and make that point more explicit in my next paper.)
So far in most of my classes at UVM I've blended online elements with face-to-face instruction. I've used the online parts, like the course blog for the CyberCulturalStudies to aggregate course materials and resources, and to make clear to my students that the class really is about issues that they face every day, and that compartmentalizing away the work they do in this class from everything else that's going on with them is just plain foolish.
I think I was pretty successful with this last part in the CyberCultural Studies class. Many students came to talk with me before or after class or sent me e-mails with links to stories they'd seen on their own that related to cyberculture, and they didn't just want to show off what they'd found -- they wanted to talk about these things!
I don't do much with BlackBoard/WebCT, largely because it's such a sterile and dead-feeling environment. However, after talking with two colleagues in the seminar from Johnson C. Smith University, I'm ready to give Moodle a big try. Obviously, I'll blog about that as I try to get up to speed on the program and work it into my Fall courses.
In my experiences with online-only courses, I've been struck by how much of the time and energy of the professor is spent trying to make the course feel populated. Surfing web pages is great fun, but it's the sense of voice and personality (and connection and community) that comes from reading my favorite blogs (and even from watching YouTube videos) that keeps the experience from feeling devastatingly lonely. In online-only courses, there's only as much voice as you/I put out there. And if you're a reader of this blog, you've probably noticed that I don't type that much voice here that often. It's easier to talk for an hour or so two or three times a week in class than to type the same amount of verbal presence to a course blog or in class discussion boards.
My thoughts on the student/professor dynamic and their particular roles is still evolving following several of our discussions today. I'll try to put that here as it becomes clearer in my sleep-deprived brain.
Finally, here are some online learning programs I'm working with, playing with, and thinking about working/playing with more often:
- Bubbl.us (collaborative concept-mapping program)
- Thinkature (another collaborative concept-mapping program)
- Purdue University's Online Writing Center (one of the major players in OWLs)
- iTunesU (still not sure how I feel about the intellectual property issues here, but what the heck)
More later. Our convener has threatened (BWA-ha-ha-ha-ha!!! my students laugh) to make us blog our reflections every day. That'll be more posts than this humble blog has seen in a while. I hope it can handle the stress. :-)
Posted by reparent at June 11, 2007 4:39 PM
Comments
Great blog, btw, glad you came back from the moon!
Try Moodle out (with some Spanish accent), the instructions are in the FRN course site discussion board.
What have you done with bubbl.us?
Posted by: Antonio Vantaggiato at June 12, 2007 9:44 AM