Monthly Archive for December, 2006

007 goes Web 2.0

Published
by
Tom
on December 19, 2006
in Blogs and Blogging and Wikis
. 1 Comment

Mikhail recently pointed out to me the cover article from the December 3, 2006, New York Times Magazine: “Open-Source Spying” (available digitally to NYT members or for a one-time charge here; or through “Proquest Newspapers” or “Business & Company Resource Center” databases). As he noted, and I have been spending some time thinking about, the article raises some interesting questions related to our use of blogs, wikis, and other information sharing technologies in the realm of education.

Despite intelligence analysts’ emphasis on secretiveness, their success relies heavily on collaboration. This phenomenon is not new, but has been gaining more attention post-9/11 as agency leaders consider (or are forced to consider) altering traditional, hierarchical structure in the face of a newly-defined enemy. “To fight a network like Al Qaeda,” says a professor of defense at the Naval Postgraduate School, “you need to behave like a network.”

Based on this philosophy, U.S. intelligence agencies are piloting new (relatively cheap) information systems modeled after “Web 2.0 technologies” such as blogs and wikis, to see if systems that favor rapid, relatively free flow of information can outperform their current (very expensive) systems, which favor secrecy but restrict inter-agency communication. Supporters of the new technologies hope they will enable analysts across agencies to effectively ‘connect the dots’ (disparate shreds of evidence turned up across the world). They aim to harness “the wisdom of the crowd” (ranging from large groups of government analysts to huge groups of public amateurs depending on the security level) in the manner of Wikipedia, drawing conclusions that even the sharpest experts can reach in isolation.

Not surprisingly, the use of information technology to disperse more information to more people raises challenges for spies, some of which overlap with those encountered by educators. The most prominent problem is data overload. One interviewee points out that the already difficult challenge of finding a needle in a haystack is not alleviated by new technologies that make it easier for more hay to be dumped onto the pile.

Additionally, there is the hurdle of achieving a critical mass of users. Particularly in the case of wikis, the power of collaboration lies in numbers. In the case of an inter-agency intelligence wiki now being piloted this means persuading thousands of employees to participate in the new venture, requiring a major cultural shift in communication. In the case of blogs, a similar situation arises where traffic remains low until a dense enough network of links moves a certain blog into overlapping discussions.

The bottom line here is that the spies are taking a page from the social networkers. Whether they succeed or not is yet to be seen. My question is what can educators learn from the spies? To what degree do universities face an analogous problem as the intelligence agencies, and what might effective inter-departmental, inter-faculty, or inter-student collaboration look like?

Fun with Patents

Published
by
Mikhail
on December 15, 2006
in Oral Communication, Resources, Technology and Writing Instruction
. 0 Comments

As some of you may have heard, Google now lets us search patents issued in the US over the last 100 or so years. Fun stuff. Here are a few relevant to the sorts of conversations that go on around here:

System and method of providing evaluation feedback to a speaker while giving a real-time oral presentation (2002)

Grammar Game (1947)

Game for teaching grammar (1994)

System and method for teaching writing using microanalysis of text (2000)

Device for teaching writing (1912)

Teaching method and apparatus (for expository writing, 1981)

Enjoy.

Grammar Mechanic

Published
by
Mikhail
on December 13, 2006
in Language and Pedagogy
. 6 Comments

Much research in composition and rhetoric has shown that grammar is most effectively learned in the context of one’s own speaking, writing, and reading rather than by way of formal study of grammatical rules and drills and sentence diagrams and that sort of thing.

Some local television producers in Nashville circa 1984 thought that, maybe, you could help teach grammar on TV through something like a sitcom. That said, from the annals of pedagogical arcana department at cac.ophony.org, comes this bit of good old fashioned educational television. Enjoy this 2 minute clip.

Final GW faculty development seminar tomorrow

Published
by
Joanna
on December 7, 2006
in Baruch College and Faculty Development
. 0 Comments

Hi everyone — the Great Works team is hosting its third and final faculty development seminar of the semester this Friday (tomorrow), 12.08.06, at 10:00 am-1:30 pm, in VC 14-269. Last month’s seminar on revision stimulated plenty of controversial discussion among our participants. This time around we’ll focus on how to foster a student-centered classroom.

If you’d like to sit in, please let me know as soon as you can via email at giuttari27@gmail.com. Lunch is included and small group activities are on the agenda, so we’ll need a head count. We’d be happy to have you join us!

Blogging the CUNY IT Conference

Published
by
Luke
on December 5, 2006
in Conferences and Technology
. 0 Comments

The CUNY IT Conference has grown significantly since its inception five years ago, from a few hundred attendees at the first conference to well over a thousand this past Friday. Seemingly, every IT person from within CUNY attended, lol (did you ever notice that when “lol” is used, most often nothing funny has preceded it?).

The conference is an interesting convergence of the separate areas of IT at CUNY, with attendees ranging from registrars to systems administrators to instructional designers to, yikes, historians. I attended three panel discussions, in addition to the keynote address, and each event raised important questions about the state of information technology in higher education, generally, and at CUNY specifically. In anticipation of questions and discussion that I hope will come, I’m dividing reviews of each panel into their own posts below. My apologies for taking over the top of the blog, but there was a lot that I found interesting and thus a lot to share.

The CUNY IT Conference: The CUNY Online Baccalaureate

Published
by
Luke
on December 5, 2006
in Conferences and Technology
. 15 Comments

The first panel was a presentation of the work of the CUNY Online Baccalaureate Program. This was likely the most highly attended session at the conference, and also the most densely populated panel (I believe there were thirty-seven presenters limited to forty-five seconds each… or at least it seemed that way). The speed of the presentation and the minimum time allowed for questions made it difficult to come to any conclusions about the program. The presenters also, more than once, positioned their experiences as “one-hundred eighty degrees” different from one another concerning this pedagogical conundrum or that, so it seems that the faculty teaching in the program also haven’t yet reached any synthesized conclusions. That, I suppose, is to be expected from something so young and experimental. Each course in the program, which offers a degree in Communication and Culture, is taught entirely online through Blackboard and Learning Objects, Inc. extensions to it. While some of the faculty felt that Blackboard did a fine job of facilitating their classes, others felt stifled by the software and its proprietary logic, and have looked for outside solutions.

The short presentations combined with the Blackboard wall between the public and the program make it difficult for me to assess exactly how effective the online instruction is. The faculty do seem to feel as though they are teaching and reaching many of their students… this, it seems to me, is the most you can really hope for from a program that’s taught entirely online. Clearly, there are a lot of talented faculty involved in the program and a lot of resources invested, so it seems likely to me that a lot of good work is happening. Hopefully, we’ll hear more about the CUNY Online BA in the future.

No faculty member really wants to teach a course entirely online, but I do feel that this program allows students to complete a degree who, due to work and family commitments, might otherwise find it impossible. The program fits well within the CUNY mission of providing affordable, quality higher education for the diverse population of the city and, judging from what I saw, the instruction is rigorous and demanding. In this case, technology is entirely responsible for making it possible.

The most astounding factoid to come out of this session was the claim made, privately to me, that there hasn’t been a single instance where a student has needed technical aid, because the program orientation covered every possible potential problem. I have a hard time believing this, but if it’s true, that must have been the Best Orientation Ever.

The CUNY IT Conference: The Keynote Address

Published
by
Luke
on December 5, 2006
in Conferences and Technology
. 0 Comments

The keynote at the CUNY IT Conference was an enjoyable presentation from Chuck Dziuban, the Principal Investigator of the Distributed Learning Impact Evaluation and Professor of Educational Foundations at the University of Central Florida. Dziuban theorizes the emergence of new teaching technologies, and has a boatload of data to back up his conclusions. As a historian who fancies himself rigid, I’m no great fan of explaining historical developments through the concept of “generations,” though I have to admit I found Dziuban’s research that broke down satisfaction with online learning practices by age intriguing. The most interesting conclusion, to me, was that the younger a student, the less likely they are to be satisfied with what their faculty are doing in online courses. Since most college faculty are older, this very fact calls into question the ways that faculty evaluate their own online teaching, and illuminates the challenge we have going forward in designing online teaching tools that intimately connect with students. We keep getting older, while the students stay the same age. To download Dziuban’s Powerpoint, chock-full-of-stats, click here.

The CUNY IT Conference: Making Multimedia History

Published
by
Luke
on December 5, 2006
in Conferences and Pedagogy
. 0 Comments

Chuck Dziuban did a fine job, but as theory values the abstract over the concrete, his talk provoked thought more than it suggested actual, real uses of technology in the classroom. The second panel session I attended was a group of CUNY historians who designed online teaching modules as part of the “Investigating US History” project. The modules consist of scalable research projects that employ primary sources available via the Web. Students are directed to examine a series of historical documents—say, lithographs and advertisements related to the slave trade, or audio tapes of Lyndon Johnson’s conversations in the White House– and then to write responses, on a course Blackboard site, to the prompts of faculty members.

The historians involved in the project are top-notch, and both the scholarship directing the modules and the design of the site are strong. I was struck, however, by how methodologically similar the pedagogic process of these modules was to the ways in which primary sources have been mobilized in the teaching of history for years. The Web has drastically improved access to primary sources, and the success of these modules lies in how faculty have framed the sources for students and directed their exploration. The site harnesses the Web’s speed and ease of information exchange for high-level history teaching. In this case, new technologies have expanded what can be done in the classroom without significantly altering the processes of teaching and learning.

It seems to me that the next generation of technological teaching tools—the products of Web 2.0, which enable increased interactivity– may pose a challenge to traditional pedagogies. While I haven’t seen inside the Blackboard sites to the fruits of the “Investigating History” modules, they seem to work on the same tracks that the teaching of history has for some time. That is, a scholar/teacher provides materials and background for students to work through with guidance; as students do, they learn about the past and about participating in the historical project. These are sound pedagogical goals for any history course.

In other disciplines, blogs and wikis have upended traditional teaching methods and goals by empowering students with more accessible means to produce and disseminate knowledge. In the teaching of history, such empowering elements of the Web have been employed in this project to reinforce and strengthen one traditional model (while also enabling more robust discussions of visual culture due to the increased accessibility of images). Historians like those who presented at the conference sense that the future of teaching history lie in using technology to more vividly open up the worlds of the past to their students. It will be interesting to see if new technologies continue to reinforce traditional methods of teaching history, or if they challenge those methods. One example of how they might is here.

The CUNY IT Conference: Notes Towards an Open (Source) University

Published
by
Luke
on December 5, 2006
in Conferences and Technology
. 0 Comments

Finally, and fittingly, the last session I attended featured Famed Friend of the Institute James Groom, who offered his “Notes Towards an Open (Source) University.” Prof. Groom’s views have been well-represented on this blog, and though I urged him to rename his talk “Waging War on the Proprietary-Software University,” his diplomatic disposition clung to the more affirmative appellation. Groom’s presentation asked, in a way, why pay lots of dough for something mediocre when you can get something fantabulous for free? He presented and discussed a few cutting edge open source course management systems, showed how certain packages can be modified for use in the classroom, and asked the very important questions: why aren’t more folks exploring this stuff at a place like CUNY, and why is open source so underrepresented at this conference? The answer, it seems, was hinted at by one of the items raffled off at the close of the conference… Blackboard provided tee-shirts for the raffle! Drupal, Wordpress, and Sakai ask not what they can do for you, but what you can do for (and with) them. Who knew the open source movement was so selfish?

(note: A few audience members were flabbergasted when the gentleman who followed James Groom, Florian Lengyel, Assistant Director for Research Computing at the CUNY Graduate Center, showed us that open source has recently become a more significant presence at the Graduate Center. See here.)

Writer’s reference

Published
by
Yana
on December 4, 2006
in Resources
. 2 Comments

At our last professional development session (which probably deserves a separate blog entry) there was a discussion about the publication of “A Writer’s Resource: A Handbook for Writing and Research” by Elaine Maimon, and Janice Peritz. The discussion focused mainly on educational publishing and its complicated relationship with the academic world. I want to mention something more concrete and practical that came to my mind while I was listening to Janice Peritz. She mentioned that one of the chapters in her handbook lists some major grammatical points that students needs to work on in order to make their writing clear. I believe she started with 6 points in her draft and then had to extend them to 12. I think this would be a nice reference to give to our students at Baruch (and elsewhere).

While reviewing a number of student drafts, I noticed that there are quite a few common errors, like subject-verb agreement, dangling modifiers, their vs. there, punctuation, etc. I think it might be useful to give out some such reference to students in the beginning of the semester (put it on the CIC’s Blackboard site or just hand it out). A whole chapter from that handbook would probably be daunting (and bulky) for students, so we could develop something more laconic that would include references to additional resources for those who want them. We could even distribute this among teachers, so that they could give it to students selectively. I think especially the professors who are teaching something other than composition or literature would appreciate that. There surely are similar resources online and in different handbooks, but somehow students often don’t get to them.

Do you all think this is worth doing?