Here’s a snapshot of what our research team found in a survey of over 4,000 students taking two or more online courses in Summer 2014.
Curating Conference Notes
In an attempt to curate and share my conference notes more efficiently, I decided to try my hand a creating a Storify of the Twitter backchannel from a recent webinar I attended. I often use Twitter to take notes during presentations, and Storify looked like it would be an easy way to create a record of the comments that I wanted to remember. The tool was remarkably simple to use, and it encouraged me to gather my thoughts together quickly and avoid the procrastination that arises every time I become determined to blog more regularly.
View the story “LX Design notes” on Storify
http://storify.com/cjholsing/lx-design-notes
Back to Work after the TLT Symposium
As I’ve done for many years, I attended the TLT Symposium at Penn State this weekend. This will be my first blog post about one, however! (I see a pattern developing here….attending a conference seems to be what gets me over my blogging inertia).
As a start to the day, the keynote by Clay Shirky was fascinating. I’ll confess that I was not familiar with his work before the conference. He, like many of the TLT keynote speakers in the past, promoted increasing the use of technology in education (this is the Teaching and Learning with TECHNOLOGY conference, after all) but he added some unique points. He mentioned Kitty Chirapongse, the fashion student who became a media source for the 2006 coup in Thailand in the midst of her blog posts about a new pink cell phone. His point? That the mix of serious and frivolous in social media is something that we will have to get used to if we want to use this tool.
(As an aside, while listening to Shirky’s talk, I remembered what a GREAT tool my iPad was at a conference. It was fast, easy and convenient to check out websites, keep an eye on email, take notes and otherwise stay connected (more on this in a minute) during the sessions using my iPad. And, as an added plus, I could also manage to manuever safely through the buffet line while carrying it!)
Keeping up with the backchannel was also simple using the iPad, and this was one of the best parts of the conference. On a day to day basis, I would call myself mostly a Twitter “consumer”, not a “producer”. I usually have Tweetdeck open and follow some extremely informative posters. But I post rarely, and sometimes when I do, I feel like I’m shouting in an empty room. If I have a question that I think others might be able to answer, I’ll throw it out there on Twitter, but more times than not, I’ll also walk over to my colleague’s office or pick up the phone and ask someone in person. But I truly believe that the backchannel at a conference adds immeasurably to the overall experience. It is great to see what others find meaningful during a session and add my own thoughts to the conversation. I can also be a part of what is happening in other sessions that I can’t attend in person. It feels like a community of practice. We’re all thinking about the same issues, struggling with the same questions, having the same ah-ha moments. I can see the benefit in so many educational settings as students gain from being part of this kind of learning community.
This brings me back to Shirky’s point about social media. There wasn’t alot of “frivolity” on the #tltsym11 backchannel. How did that effect the use of the tool? Did more people want to tune in (“wow, there are some good thoughts here”) or tune out (“this is boring…I want to know where the party is afterwards”). Does this change with the age/demographics of the audience? How does that relate to using Twitter as an educational tool?
Back to the Future Part Two
This is not a somewhat cheesy sequel to a great original movie, but rather a follow up to the post by my colleague, Kate Miffitt, on Ellen Wagner’s keynote presentation at the Sloan-C Emerging Technologies Conference last week. Like Kate, I was impressed with Ellen’s presentation. So much so that you may see a resemblance between one of her presentation slides and the title of my blog:
Ellen explained that “the path from innovation to adoption is a lengthy journey of implementations and evaluation to determine the benefit/return.” This statement struck a cord with me because it so aptly describes my instructional design role with faculty and technology. Early technology adopters are often eager to try the “latest and greatest” and are willing to accept some technical glitches or frustration along the way. If a tool doesn’t work as needed, they are comfortable trying another approach, so are willing to rework a course to incorporate a more effective option. However, those of us in the instructional design community who support a wide range of faculty with varying interest in/expertise with/comfort levels about technology are constantly challenged with demonstrating the benefit gained from introducing a new technology into a course. Yet it is sometimes hard to describe or quantify those benefits without first implementing them to assess whether or not they are effective. Combine that with the fact that if a technology does not work as planned we will need to quickly produce Plan B for the next time the course is offered, and it can be difficult to persuade faculty to take the risk to try something new that others have not done. We are caught in between the proverbial chicken and egg.
So, hence the name of this blog. One take away (of many) from my time spent in San Jose.
And it begins…
I’ve decided to become a blogger.
That even sounds strange when I write it since I don’t really think I have the right personality type. (I even looked for research articles on “introverted” bloggers to see if there actually were any.) It has always seemed to me that bloggers were the extroverted life of the party; people who gained energy from lots of interactions with others, and who often jumped in first to offer an opinion or idea. These attributes don’t really describe me as I’ve always considered myself more of a lurker. And to top it off, I don’t particularly enjoy writing. So why am I doing this?
I guess I can come up with several reasons: after recently finally carving out the time to convert my old Penn State website into the new “professional template”, that empty blog tab has been haunting me. Combine that with a long, unconnected cross country plane trip (to attend the 2010 Sloan-C Emerging Technologies for Online Learning Conference in San Jose) and a desire to practice writing on my ipad, and this blog was born. I’m not promising much. I will try to capture thought-provoking sessions at the conference this week and will see how it goes from there. Wish me luck!