Next week, I’ll be offering several times a 2-hour workshop on ‘Tools for Online Teaching’ for colleagues at UNE.
Since the recent changes to the ‘une-official’ email list, it’s a little hard to get the word out about workshops and other news, hence posting some information here for the benefit of any UNE staff who drop by!
The details of the sessions are as follows:
Tools for online learning
This ‘hands-on’ session will explore some of the new tools and social software that can be used to support and enhance student collaboration, engagement and learning. Tools such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, audio and video files, animations and student presentations will be explored and examples discussed of how these can be used effectively in University education.
It is highly recommended for ALL staff engaged in, or considering, online teaching.
The session will be offered four times next week:
Monday 11th September – 11am to 1pm (booked out!)
Tuesday 12th September – 2pm to 4pm
Wednesday 13th September – 11am to 1pm
Thursday 14th September – 2pm to 4pm
Please note that due to a limitation on places in the computer lab, bookings are required. These can be made online at http://www.une.edu.au/tlc/workshops or by phoning Kerryn Reeves.
Categories: General · Teaching · Technology
Sorry for the absence of posts lately – I’ve been away on leave, enjoying a couple of weeks in the outback.
The 11th Teaching Carnival is now up at WorkBook . What’s a Carnival, you might ask? In the blog sense, a Carnival is a collection of links to interesting recent posts in the particular field or discipline. The Teaching Carnival is published every two weeks or so, an relates to blog entries about teaching in Higher Education. It’s a great way to get an overview about what university teachers are blogging about in relation to their teaching.
As an example, here’s the Teaching and Technology section of the 11th Teaching Carnival:
Carrie Shanafelt is trying out a Wiki for her British Literature class to facilitate the sharing of student work. She hopes that “[t]he creation of a wiki…would render these [assigned historical context] memos in an attractive, interconnected, easily browsable format that would ensure that they don’t get lost or forgotten in the bottoms of bookbags”.
Originally posted on the Humanist listserv, Alan Liu’s proposed policy for appropriate student use of Wikipedia generated significant online buzz, both on that listserv (1, 2, 3) and at Kairosnews, one of Jonathan Goodwin’s class blogs, cac.ophony.org, and the CHE’s Wired Campus Blog.
Metaspencer explains the answer to “Why course websites?“
At Academic Commons, Susan Sipple discusses Digitized Audio Commentary in First Year Writing Classes, and Derek Mueller has tried commenting with audio in some online courses. At the Rhetorical Situation, Oxymoron finds online students more willing to engage in discussion than in-class students usually are.
While I have a set of regular blogs that I subscribe to via RSS*, Carnivals provide an additional, easy way of seeing what’s current in the blogosphere of disciplines I’m interested in.
Other Carnivals I’ve come across include:
There’s also a list of Carnivals over at Blog Carnival – but many of these are not academic in nature. I’d love to hear about other Carnivals that are relevant to academic work.
*Links from the Teaching Carnival led me to a good explanation of RSS over at academHack.
Categories: General · Links - Teaching and Learning · Teaching · Technology
When I was a child, in the late 1960s, early 1970s, my father worked at the John Curtin School of Medical Research. My first engagement with the world of academic publishing and scholarship was the piles of printed cards my father would bring home – requests for copies of articles, sent from around the world, to the researchers at JCSMR (this being in the days before photocopiers, when authors received a certain number of printed copies of their article for distribution). As my sisters and I carefully cut around and soaked off the stamps for our stamp collections, the avid reader that I was read most of the cards, trying to decipher the handwritten names, addresses, article titles, journal names, and marvelling at the connections that paper made between professors and doctors in such far away places as Canada, Poland, and India.
Many things have changed since then, and as I sit in my office now, I have access within seconds to millions of journal articles. In fact, just yesterday I experienced a sense of frustration that a particular article I want is not available online, and I shall actually have to walk the 60 meters or so across to the library building, find the hard-copy journal, and photocopy it myself. (Yes, aren’t we spoilt these days!)
But apart from the relative ease of access to published material, has academic publishing really fundamentally changed in the last 3 or 4 decades? Is our model of scholarly dissemination still relevant to the 21st century?
Over at if:book, the blog of The Institute for the Future of the Book, they’re exploring this very issue, and developing an alternative approach. A recent article introduces the MediaCommons project-in-progress:
Our shift from thinking about an “electronic press” to thinking about a “scholarly network” came about gradually; the more we thought about the purposes behind electronic scholarly publishing, the more we became focused on the need not simply to provide better access to discrete scholarly texts but rather to reinvigorate intellectual discourse, and thus connections, amongst peers (and, not incidentally, discourse between the academy and the wider intellectual public). This need has grown for any number of systemic reasons, including the substantive and often debilitating time-lags between the completion of a piece of scholarly writing and its publication, as well as the subsequent delays between publication of the primary text and publication of any reviews or responses to that text. These time-lags have been worsened by the increasing economic difficulties threatening many university presses and libraries, which each year face new administrative and financial obstacles to producing, distributing, and making available the full range of publishable texts and ideas in development in any given field. The combination of such structural problems in academic publishing has resulted in an increasing disconnection among scholars, whose work requires a give-and-take with peers, and yet is produced in greater and greater isolation.
The whole post is worth a read, and has generated some interesting coments and views, some of which are outlined in yesterday’s follow-up post at if:book: initial responses to MediaCommons
Categories: Academia · General · Technology
I’ve always tended to think of a museum as a place, a building or specific space, somewhere one goes to to view (and perhaps experience) collections. While museums have evolved from the draughty, old, quiet places of static displays that I remember from my youth to more vibrant and involving experiences, often with web presences and access to information, images etc online, I still think of a collection, managed by experts, in a place.
An interesting item over on if:book recently, flickr as virtual museum challenged that concept and opened up more possibilities in my mind:
The Brooklyn Museum has been availing itself of various services at Flickr in conjunction with its new “Grafitti” exhibit, assembling photo sets and creating a group photo pool. In addition, the museum welcomes anyone to contribute photographs of grafitti from around Brooklyn to be incorporated into the main photo stream, along with images of a growing public grafitti mural on-site at the museum where visitors can pick up a colored pencil and start scribbling away.
What a great way to connect a very public form of art with the public that creates it and sees it, and form a far more creative, dynamic and involving exploration of the culture as well as the artefacts; an exploration that builds a collection even as it shows it.
Categories: Art · Technology · Using images
Konrad Glogowski is the author of the blog of proximal development. I have found his reflective explorations of his experiences as a teacher using blogs, and a doctoral candidate researching blogs and teaching, to be always interesting and thought-provoking.
In a recent entry, Unending conversation, he reflects on the changing role of the teacher, and his own transformation from a ‘teacher who peddles content’ to one engaged in the co-construction of knowledge with his students. Several of his comments stood out for me:
I no longer view the texts produced by learners as definitive pronouncements or conclusive statements on assigned topics. Texts are tentative attempts to construct knowledge and, if they are produced within a community of inquiry-oriented peers, they will lead to further knowledge building and meaning-making.
<snip>
The discourse of one always interacts with and interanimates the discourse of others. Definitive statements and conclusions are discouraged. Instead, we build our understanding through incomplete attempts at constructing knowledge, attempts that will always remain incomplete because it is their very incompleteness that allows us to keep constructing, to keep questioning, revising, and reflecting.
So much of our assessment at university level – essays, exams etc – is focussed on ‘testing knowledge’ and asking students to answer questions with their statements and conclusions. Our assessment tasks serve to end conversations, rather than begin them. We demand answers rather than questions, we give marks rather than participate in dialogue, we make the limited conversation of those marks and the feedback private rather than collaborative. We expect students to ‘complete’ a conversation about huge complex topics in 1,000 words or maybe 2,000 or 2,500, within the space of a 13-week semester.
I know that we have to balance the reality of demands of time, and the expectations of systems of marking, examining and ranking students, but perhaps the learning of our students, and their motivation, might increase if the emphasis was on encouraging their assessment tasks as the beginning of constructing knowledge – necessarily tentative and incomplete by their very nature – and continuing the collaborative conversation around and beyond the tasks themselves.
Categories: Assessment · General · Teaching
Chat tools can be difficult to use for online teaching – typically, with 20 or more students participating, all seeming to ask questions at the same time or having separate discussions, the chat can get very busy and hard to follow.
However, used with some sort of protocols in place, they can be managed effectively to provide an effective online tutorial. I have been involved with a number of very successful online chats, where senior editors from major international publishing houses have discussed writing and publishing with writers. These chats were set up with a few simple protocols for those participating, and flowed well, with the guest experts not overwhelmed with questions, time to respond, and much learning for all involved.
In the current issue of Innovate, the journal of online education, Craig W. Smith's article Synchronous Discussion in Online Courses: A Pedagogical Strategy for Taming the Chat Beast provides a good outline of a suggested 'Virtual Class Chatiquette' to enable effective use of chat tools in teaching.
The approach described by Smith is similar to the simple one I've experienced, and can be used both for tutorials with the course coordinator, and for chats with guest experts, whether the expert is in your office or half a world away at their desk – another one of the benefits that online teaching brings.
Categories: General · Teaching · Technology
If you’re using photographs of places in your teaching, you might be interested in a geotagging site provided by BeeLoop.
Actually designed for use with Flickr (the photo sharing website), it generates a code you can paste into any html document which students can click on to go to a Google satellite photo of the place that the photograph was taken.
As an example:
Click here to see where this photo was taken. By courtesy of BeeLoop SL (the Mapware & Mobility Solutions Company).
(The photograph is of the back of Booloominbah, the homestead built in 1888 by the White family and later donated to form the University of New England. You can take a virtual tour of Booloominbah to explore it’s gorgeous interior and exterior.)
Categories: General · Using images
An interesting but brief item from the online BBC news last week about how a lecturer is restructuring his teaching to utilise some of the benefits of the web and free up more of his time for small-group teaching.
Dr Bill Ashraf is using podcasting technology to deliver lectures to students, which they can listen to in their own time, using their computer, mp3 player, or phone. He will respond to questions about the lecture on his blog.
Dr Ashraf said the move would better suit the needs of distance learners, part-time students and those balancing studies with family and work.
He said: “Some lecture classes have 250 students, so I question the effectiveness of a didactic lecture for an hour.”
Categories: Uncategorized
Today is one of four days of graduation ceremonies this semester at my university. As a predominantly distance-education university, some of our students are rarely, if ever, on campus, and many travel long distances to be present for the graduation ceremony.
Graduands and their families are milling around, taking photographs, celebrating a milestone. As most of our students are distance students, they are also mature students, so there are small children, elderly parents, and all ages in between here for the day.
I love graduation days. I'm not involved in the proceedings, but there's a wonderful buzz and energy around the place. And as I look at the graduands, resplendent in their caps and gowns, many of whom have studied part-time over years, juggling jobs and families and life, their commitment to their own education keeping them going, I think, 'YES! This is worth celebrating!'
Categories: General · Teaching
Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog
A medieval scholar has fun with a blog… Read Geoffrey's advice column, follow the progress of the 'flayme werre' between him and John Gowere, and generally have a hoot! (You can even buy the t-shirts.)
Fyghten togeder we dide, this valet and ich, in Rethel-toune whanne the Frensshe layde waste to yt to letten the Prince Noir from crossinge, and in the melee we were scatterede from the hoste, and we two dide runne like eye makeupe on a televangelistes wyf.
(Not, I should warn, for those lacking a sense of humour.)
Categories: For fun · General
