During the poster session at the TLT Symposium this past Saturday, I had the chance to talk with Glenn Johnson, the Project Manager of Penn State’s e-Portfolio Initiative. I had previously attended one of Mr. Johnson’s training sessions last semester so I was familiar with the e-Portfolio Initiative. The initiative provides students with help in creating their own portfolio. Although there is no set template, students can model their portfolio off of other sample portfolios. I have had previous experience in creating an e-Portfolio. As a Masters student at The College of New Jersey in 2005, I created an e-Portfolio for my expertise in Mathematics and Computer Science Education. I coded in html using Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and Flash to bring together images and video for an interactive page. I was very happy with the site but it was what we would call web 1.0 or 1.1 technologies. At the poster session, I was interested in how e-Portfolios could be combined with web 2.0 technologies, so I engaged Mr. Johnson in conversation. Mr. Johnson suggested going away from the normal old e-portfolio and instead using blogs@psu.edu or similar technologies to form an electronic portfolio.This brings me to my idea for further research. I would like to take Mr. Johnson’s ideas of combining e-Portfolios and web 2.0 technologies and go one step further. In the near future, I would like to create an e-Portfolio system (SaaS) that serves as a Mash-Up of our Identity on the internet. Instead of just using a blog or other tool as an e-Portfolio, I would like to make a Mash-Up of all the communities, blogs, and technologies that we are involved in on the internet. In other words, I would like to create an application that is very similar to Pownce but with the specific goal of using it as an e-Portfolio. For those that do not know, Pownce puts links to users many accounts on one page. On my Pownce page, I have a link to my facebook, myspace, flickr, aim messenger, msn messenger, and twitter accounts.My research question would be to find out if students (who use this new e-Portfolio Mash-Up) are less likely to post incriminating pictures and vulgar text or blog posts. I think this research would be significant because it could provide a start of responsible social networking and web 2.0 living. In this context, responsible = fun yet smart, appropriate, and professional.
Archives for March 2008
#tltsymposium2008
Saturday’s Symposium was a great learning experience. Lessig’s keynote address drew very interesting parallels to the past, with the one about Latin standing out for me. When the masses did not speak the same language as the elite, each group became irrelevant to the other. As educators, we need to recognize where the students are coming from and work with them rather than ignoring their backgrounds and forcing our material upon them. I think I felt personally challenged because I felt like the giant Uncle Sam finger was pointing directly at me. The sessions that I attended were very informative and taught me about new technologies that I am already telling others about (zotero). The conference was designed to make people aware of what is already happening at Penn State. Drawing speakers from the branch campuses highlighted the university-wide prevalence of emerging technologies. Building in time for questions and leaving plenty of time to walk down the hallway facilitated face to face conversations that let me walk away with most of my questions answered. The designation of a hashtag for the symposium allowed the community members to share their updates with each other. This helped for all the tweets people were authoring throughout the day. I had heard about a conference at which people tweeted and had a lot of activity, but I grossly underestimated the volume of tweets that would take place over the span of eight hours. I felt that I got more out of sessions when I was able to read the realtime thoughts of others in the room. The backchannel communication also permitted me to find out what was occurring in the other rooms and provided me with laughs on several occasions. Many people made twitter contributions, but a lot of people did not – was there another backchannel or were they trying to avoid possibly being considered “rude”? The tradeoff to audience members (micro)blogging during presentations is a lack of eye contact and uncertainty for presenters. The community came together throughout the day. People were having face-to-face conversations and technology facilitated conversations. On some occasions I would speak to the person next to me, on others I would electronically send my thoughts through a tweet or a google doc. I found myself reading updates from people I have never met and vice versa. What mattered was that each person was at the symposium and communicating about the symposium. The community seemed to be largely faculty, which makes sense because they are the ones using the technology at Penn State, but I think a larger student presence would be nice. I think undergraduate education majors and minors should be encouraged to attend to provide an additional viewpoint for the benefit of all and to make them aware of new technologies for potential use in their future classrooms. Thank you to those who put the symposium together and those who presented. Thanks to Cole and Scott for having us attend.
Meeting Roy Pea and discussing the CELF initiative
At the AERA conference in NYC last week, Dr. Roy Pea spoke as the Keynote speaker for the Technology as an Agent for Change in Teaching and Learning (TACTL) Special Interest Group. I was very interested in attending for a few reasons. First, we have already read Roy Pea’s “Distributed Intelligence” in class and I wanted to meet the author. Also, the title of his presentation “Learning Environments Transformed” caught my attention and seemed very interesting. Although it was nice shaking his hand and introducing myself after his presentation, I enjoyed listening to his ideas the most.In the presentation, Pea discussed the properties of emerging learning environments. They are 1. fast growing as part of a participatory culture, 2. created as Software as a Service (SaaS), 3. social networks, 4. search engines, 5. gaming worlds, and 6. pervasive (i.e. ubiquitous) and mobile. He also discussed an initiative that he helped put together for the National Science Foundation. The initiative entitled “Cyberinfrastructure for Education and Learning for the Future: A Vision and Research Agenda” (CELF) was created to find out where we need to be (as educators) in this new web 2.0 rich world. You can find the CELF initiative at http://www.cra.org/reports/cyberinfrastructure.pdf. In the next few paragraphs, I want to discuss a few of the words in the Chapter entitled “Communities of Learning” and relate it to CI 597.”Cyberinfrastructure will make it possible for students in school settings to be more directly engaged with life beyond the classroom, and to observe and interact with communities of professionals and others who develop products and results that matter, both within and outside of their communities.”This is already evident in our class’ use of Twitter outside of the classroom walls. At the TLT Symposium, our class met with a community of professionals. Twitter will enable us to stay in touch with these professionals and learn more from them long after the symposium.”Virtual communities of learning can help address many of the issues raised about the need to retain qualified and talented teachers and support them in their professional practice. They can provide personal support as well as access to professionally interesting conversations and resources; connections to practicing scientists and education researchers; and more opportunities for advancement than the local context often can offer.”Online communities are available that allow teachers to share resources. Along with social networks and blogs, these online communities also provide easy access to conversations with others in their field. Our class blogs and podcasts have created many conversations that would have never happened if we kept those conversations inside the classroom walls.I am providing the end of the Chapter below in the hope that it will help foster future research questions for anyone reading this. I am interested in a few of the challenges and providing some research in the future to address them. Specifically, I am interested in providing research for the challenge of community and member feedback.”CELF research challenges include: Managing the need for large-scale, robust production systems upon which practitioners can rely and researchers can do research, coupled with the ongoing need for innovative experiments. Developing shared standards and specifications to enable the collection and analysis of data about communities of learning. Understanding and planning for educating teacher practitioners to use Cyberinfrastructure for learning collaboratively and across groups. Understanding the affordances of the virtual context for individuals and groups to develop multiple competencies and various senses of belonging that they and others can manage to construct, and adapt the learning environments to their needs. Understanding how social capital influences the participation of different types of learners and, in turn, how various forms of participation impact learning. Identifying and learning to assess criteria for engagement and success within communities of learning. Integrating across different forms of assessment data, such as interviews and observation, discourse and conversation analysis, log analysis, and performance evaluations. Developing effective community feedback mechanisms for “reading” member engagement and perspectives and facilitating various forms of decision making. Understanding how access, availability, and ubiquity affect the development of Communities of Learners enabled by CELF. Understanding how pedagogical content knowledge and related principles should influence the design of infrastructures to support communities of learning. Understanding how to support cross-project collaboration and fertilization. Understanding how Cyberinfrastructure can bridge projects both within and across traditional disciplines. Understanding how projects move from pilots to large-scale efforts and from grant-funded to sustainable. Understanding the global nature of Cyberinfrastructure. Although the Internet and much of industry are already internationally oriented, education in the United States is remarkably parochial. Cyberinfrastructure can help bridge learners across countries (pilots, and small-scale individual efforts) and make it possible (time zones notwithstanding) for class projects to consist of team members worldwide, and to bring in experts from around the world.”
assignments for Apr. 03. class
Assignment: Find a video on youtube(http://www.youtube.com), which you find interesting in educational sense and be able to access in class. Be prepared to discuss: 1. Why did you select this video? 2. How does it apply to teaching and learning? Have fun guys..:)
Communication and Community
During the Facebook session of the Penn State Teaching and Learning Symposium, the fascination with Facebook and the desire to communicate intrigued me. I began to think about how we have previously defined community, and I think that the definition needs to include communication. In a community, you are constantly communicating both verbally and nonverbally. You are confirming and rejecting ideas, thoughts, perceptions, and actions. Communication is essential in a community (I think). From there, my thoughts wandered into whether communication was innate. After all groups of animals, be it herds of cattle, flocks of geese, schools of fish, and even communities of people, all have to communicate in order to function and survive. The rise in popularity of the social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, etc.) confirmed my thoughts about our natural desires to communicate with others and create community.
I’m all A-twitter
Okay, I’m sure that little riff on Twitter has probably been used a million times, but one of the main takeaways I got from the TLT Symposium was not from the content itself (though the content was really powerful) but was the use of Twitter during the day. I got on board with Twitter probably about a month ago and found it to be an interesting way of connecting with my classmates outside of class hours. As a writer, I find the activity of capturing my current activities in 140 characters or less to be a good brain exercise. It is easier than e-mail to write and read. Those of us in 597 who are in the Twitter group have shared not only interesting insights about class, but also provided glimpses into our personal lives as well. Some have shared news of family deaths and illnesses, some have shared funny stories of pets or children, some have asked technical questions, some share what they had for dinner. It varies, but the key is that it’s all in 140 characters or less. Having many of us “tweeting” during TLT was a grand experiment for me, in that it allowed me to be a fly on the wall on breakout sessions where I wasn’t physically able to be, and allowed me to share my insights and comments with my classmates without having to be physically with them, or even lean over to whisper. Or, on a less serious use, how else would I have been able to share during Lessig’s keynote that I thought Sousa’s “Infernal Machines” term would be a great name for a band? How else would Becky and I have been able to have our wiki “stud2stud” exchange? Which begs the question, is “virtual notepassing” an unintended consequence of Twitter? Several of us began wondering, via Twitter, during the sessions, whether all of this Twittering is distracting to, or impacting the presenters. I do think it impacts, but is it just that presenters need to adjust their expectations and know and assume that their audience members are doing this? Or should they demand complete attention? One of us noted that there were many laptops open during a session, but few were Twittering; they were doing other things online. My 597 group led the wiki discussion in class on 3/20 and it
was my first experience facilitating a session where so many eyes of
were on laptops, with fingers flying on keyboard. It was a bit distracting to me, but I assumed that was what the class was doing, and I was proven correct when I read the Twitter “transcript” that took place during our presentation. On the other hand, I teach Comm 471 (public relations media & methods) to undergrads and purposely schedule this to be held in a traditional classroom instead of a computer lab where most of the other 471 courses are held– mainly because I don’t want people straying into checking email, etc., during class. Am I an old fogey for wanting to do this, and am I hindering their abilities to build community with one another in the same way our 597 class has done as a result? Does the answer change depending on who is being taught? Is it okay for “adults” like us to Twitter during class because we’re generally just commenting on the content and building community, whereas younger students, like HS and undergrads, would likely be doing other things? Is that generalization fair to them? Also, with students’ developing capacity to be able to be surreptitiously texting underneath a desk with eyes generally still up front, what then? Should that bother me as an instructor? The “instructor me” from pre-597 would have said absolutely. The “instructor me” for post-597, I’m not so sure.
Reading Assignment for 04.03.08
Made you look. Actually, thanks to bburns you will not have readings this week. Please post on your experience at TLT symposium this weekend (or whatever alternative activity you were involved in). Obviously, you should try and connect to the three themes (identity, community, and design if you forgot). Next week I will post another section of the Wenger book along with an interesting article about the Web 2.0 mindset and its impact on education/learning. Hopefully you all enjoyed and learned from your TLT experience and will insights to share. See you on Thursday.
NASA/NSTA
Everybody loves an acronym…right? I spent the last week at NASA lunar educational workshops and the NSTA (National Science Teacher’s Association) conference in Boston. To be honest, the NSTA conference was very overwhelming. There were sooo many people and booths. It seemed that every booth was trying to sell an educational “product” of some kind, so I had to approach with caution. I don’t really have any money to spend or a classroom to spend it on, so the vendors didn’t like me very much. I did see the Toyota trumpet playing robot. (Very cool… but also very creepy). <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqubUfKrDIY&feature=related>. There was lots of talk about technology at the conference, but I didn’t pick up on too much Web 2.0 stuff. A good idea I did hear was to create wikis centered around curriculum. As teachers modified and tried out the lessons, they could post comments and revisions to a common wiki.
Reading Assignment for 04.03.08
Made you look. Actually, thanks to bburns you will not have readings this week. Please post on your experience at TLT symposium this weekend (or whatever alternative activity you were involved in). Obviously, you should try and connect to the three themes (identity, community, and design if you forgot). Next week I will post another section of the Wenger book along with an interesting article about the Web 2.0 mindset and its impact on education/learning. Hopefully you all enjoyed and learned from your TLT experience and will insights to share. See you on Thursday.
Tweet Talk 2 – Wikipedia & Twitter
Thoughts on the TLT Symposium will be forthcoming, but first I wanted to share our the next installment of our podcast, Tweet Talk. This episode features our discussion on the Wikipedia entry for Twitter, and our brainstorming for how we can enhance the entry with our own efforts.
tweets2.mp3