5130: Jott - Tool of the Week

I just checked out Jott...see my post below. I made it using my phone. I just dialed in and left a quick message, and they can post it to the blog within about 2 minutes. Jott seemed pretty pricey so I just signed up for the free account, but this is a pretty neat tool. It could be used to blog, email or text others, or leave myself notes. I used to wonder what people did before cell phones, but now with all of this new technology, it almost becomes a question of how did people get along when all their cell phone did was dial and ring?!

Hello, I'm on my phone,...

Hello, I'm on my phone, and I 'm creating a blog to my website just to see if this works and I hope that the jott works, thank you. listen

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5130: Thoughts on Tufte

The first week's reading for IT5130 was from Edward R. Tufte's Beautiful Evidence. The reading was specifically on The Cognitive Style PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within (pages 1157-185).

I had some trouble reading this article and finding things I could really identify and agree with. For example, at the beginning, Tufte states that PowerPoint is presenter-oriented and not audience-oriented. Now, I can see from his different examples how PP does not present tons of information and how using a PP when there should be a formal scientific report could produce deadly results. But as a high school teacher, I have found PP to be a useful tool. It gives students a break from simply listening to a lecture and taking notes. It can help students who need some visual to help tie information together. I also have them do PP presentations so they can research topics and present them to the class - now these are topics they need to learn about, not be experts on. I see where there are visuals that might be more effective and more engaging for students, but sometimes that is not feasible with the school's technology and budget. I have to say that this tool seems to be effective in my experience and does not seem to detract from the students' learning experience. But I will keep a close eye on this and see how my use of PP could be improved or replaced and what new methods I can use.

Another point I took from this - you cannot be lacking as a presenter. You must have specific points to make and something to say, rather than just taking up time. Now, Tufte does point out that Microsoft holds the monopoly and probably does not have any motivation to make a superior product and can thus blame poor presentations on poor presenters. He says that even good presenters can have a poor PP presentation. I can see where he is coming from, but I also think that it IS possible to have a good PP from a good presenter.

What are those tools that could be used instead of PP? Tufte said over and over that other presentation tools would be better. But I did not really understand what tools and how they might be more effective. I can see where adding a handout to the presentation could help, especially when it contains data and charts. Tufte said that written sentences and reports are definitely better than PP. I guess I struggle with that in the sense that my students already have so much reading to do, and I don't see the value of giving them more to read instead of presenting them with some variety. I suppose that is part of the reason I am in this Masters program, to learn about these more effective tools and how to use them and why they are better.

So it is a lot to think about and ponder. I am looking forward to seeing what is said on the discussion of the reading in class and how others feel about it. I think it has also prepared me to learn a lot in this class and face some challenges to my current thinking and teaching style.

2nd Year - Fall 2008

I am now beginning the 2nd year of work on my Masters and am looking forward to these new classes and meeting new people. So far the program has been great, a lot of work, but very rewarding. I decided to keep my old blog for the new classes so as to keep everything in one place. It will be easier for me to look back in one place to see my thoughts on what I've learned. I will try to use different colors/fonts/etc. to make a distinction between blogs for different classes when possible. So here we go into IT 5131: Instructional Message Design and IT 5650: Policies & Planning for eLearning Programs...

Getting Started

Getting an online class going off to a good start is important because it is more likely to keep going at that pace. Bender, in Chapter 5, talked about how it is easier to keep going at a good pace than try to pick up a class that starts off slow. There are several ways to set up a strong beginning, and it is necessary to think about this, especially in planning the EdWeb project that will have discussions and social aspects.

Eileen pointed out the example of “thawing the online ice crystals,” which is a great image to keep in mind when trying to get students involved at the beginning. We had some discussion on how to get people to speak up at the start, mostly revolving around introductions, games, and starter sentences. Sherri said, “In the context of an online course, such as an interactive edweb, or our class here starting off with an activity that addresses each individual is a good idea.” I have to agree with this and spent some time thinking about how to apply it to my EdWeb. I added a post about this towards the end of the week. Since my students are already required to be a part of my geography class, and since they know each other, it would be inappropriate to start off the EdWeb discussion with introductions. But I still want the students to feel comfortable getting involved in the discussion online, so I need to come up with a good icebreaker to get them warmed up. Something like fun facts or a game or scavenger hunt would work in this case. It should be something fun in any case, to ensure that the students feel positive about getting online for the unit.

However, I do not want it to take up valuable time since we will only have a limited amount to complete the project. So I am thinking back to posting a “norms of discussion” for the students to browse over quickly and then just a quick little discussion or activity that would be engaging. I think a lot of people liked the activities we had last semester at the beginning of IT5660, like the Picasso drawing, the Fly Guy activity, and making up a caption about a picture. I would like to find something simple and fun like this but related to the topic the students will be studying so it ties in well. So I must go spend some time working on this, checking out different ideas, and getting it all ready!

Instructional Approaches

In week 10 of ILT 5670 we had a discussion on Bender’s Chapter 3 about rethinking learning theory and how to apply this as we approach the EdWeb project. There are definitely benefits in having discussions for online learning because the responses are often more thought out, participants can review the discussion more than once and pull out new ideas, and because there is still the social aspect that is important for learning.

It seems to be a recurring topic, but we again came to discussing the lack of participation in the Web Conference and ways to try to solve that. After the first run, we made changes and thought and talked about what worked and did not work to get participants involved. But this run had much less participation. Armi and Kerry had some great ideas on this such as laying out discussion expectations better and giving examples of what an engaging discussion might look like. I also liked Armi’s thoughts on using a case study but making sure it was relevant so that the connections would occur faster. This should make for better discussion too since it will be relevant to the jobs of the participants.

Could the lack of participation be because there was not motivation in the form of a grade or job requirement? I included a quote from the reading in our discussion that I think is an important part of teaching: “"Learning, Fardouly states, is an emotional process, but the right balance must be struck. Some excitement, encouragement, and challenge can be motivating, whereas too much anxiety over a course can severely limit the potential for learning.” (Bender, 22). I wonder if some of the participants felt anxiety over this new type of conference and jumping into discussions for the first time. I thought the encouragement was there, but maybe there was not enough excitement to overcome the anxiety. I hope to get my students excited about going online for the EdWeb but also put enough support in there to keep them from being too anxious or overwhelmed. It will be something different for them as far as learning in school goes, but this could be a motivating factor because of their involvement with technology in other facets of their lives. After getting started on my formative evaluation, I have some ideas on reorganizing the navigation to guide them through the project a little better and some ideas on how to get them motivated and interested. Now it is just a matter of putting those thoughts into action.

Techniques

In week 5 of the IT5670 course, we had a discussion on the different techniques presented in our reading that might be applied to our Web Conference sessions and how those applicable techniques might be altered as well. My first post (and maybe most beneficial) was about the idea of team teaching, which is something we started doing back in the first semester with the conference. We shared in facilitating the different discussions in our shell. This seemed helpful because with the shell being available 24 hours a day, it can be beneficial to have more than one facilitator available to respond to incoming posts and steer discussions where one person may not have time to constantly check on the forum and keep up with everything. I think this is different from a live classroom because one person can maintain the class that occurs during a set time.

Kerry Escobodo brought up some interesting points about the team teaching. She said she uses this style in teaching yoga and has found it sometimes useful because the other teacher can often share things she missed and also brings a different style. The down side, which Bender also discussed, is that there may be conflict in whose time it is to teach or ideas on just how the class should be taught. Bender also notes that it may cause confusion for the students as to who has the authority.

I also found the discussion on chatting interesting. Working with high school students, I am sure many of them are well versed in the world of chatting. It seems like many people in our class have a negative view of chatting. Concerns include confusion and the facilitator not realizing if some people are not participating. There was some discussion on grouping, which might help alleviate some of the problems, but the facilitator might have to find a way to jump into all these chats to keep an eye on what is being said and to steer the discussion. David Beattie had an interesting idea about sending people to new groups if a chat room got too full and then adding a facilitator. There was some discussion as to why this would not work. But I think there may be ways to set up groups ahead of time, maybe even schedule them for different times, so this resource could still be used, especially if it is something the students feel connected to and can respond to better. We aren’t using it for our Web Conference, and I’m not sure that it would fit in with my EdWeb either, but I still have a feeling it could be a valuable resource in teaching eLearning.

The Big World of Formative Evaluation

Week 4’s interview with Dr. Marty Tessmer and the discussion following it were very interesting to me. Patty Mills summed it up very appropriately by saying that had the discussion been a meal, she would have been stuffed. The topic seems huge, and there are many different ways to look at it. I have not had much formal work with formative evaluation and ended up learning a lot about it. Many questions came up during the discussion, many of them centering on the navigation aspect of our EdWeb projects. I started off with a post referring to what Dr. Tessmer had talked about during the interview dealing with navigation and how I was questioning my own navigation system. I was relieved to find that other classmates were tackling the same issue still! I appreciated the responses to the post with suggestions on who I should have evaluate my prototype. At this point, that will include both teachers, elearning instructors at my school, and students who will represent the group of people actually using the finished product. Linda Guillory helped me realize that having the students evaluate is one of the most important parts of the formative evaluation and that I should try to use learners of different abilities. So maybe I ask an A student who picks up on things very fast and then have another student who tends to struggle and might not instinctively know to click a certain link to get to a certain piece of information.

I appreciated the post from Armi Trenas questioning what the basis is of saying a formative evaluation has been done effectively. I was actually wondering that myself. From what I gather, it is effective if I am able to find out what things do not work and change them so that they do. I am still trying to figure out how to come up with my formative evaluation plan and how to measure its effectiveness. I am wondering if doing a few evaluations, one initially and then one after the prototype has been revised, would be one way to see if the first was effective.

There is still a lot more to learn on formative evaluation, and I think it will continue to be an interesting topic moving forward with the EdWeb project.

Discussion Facilitation

Week 3’s discussion centered around our reading of Tisha Bender’s Discussion-Based Online Teaching to Enhance Student Learning, specifically Chapter 6 about facilitating discussion. It came up in the discussion that many of the groups during the web conference had a lot of “silence.” So most of this week we considered what we could do better for the next conference now that we had some experience. Our Simulations group had a couple of discussions that went well and others we were excited about that did not get any posts for several days.

In our examination of what could be done better, Richard Stewart pointed out some good ideas on how to phrase the starter questions, such as giving a sentence to start. For our Simulations group, this might go something like, “I think simulations are useful for learning because…” So the participant feels more connected to the topic and more compelled to answer, instead of just asking, “Do you think simulations are useful for learning?” Kerry Escobado also brought up the idea of timing for the discussions, which I thought was very useful and something to really consider, especially looking at how the first conference went and what changes need to be made for the 2nd one. This got me thinking about how we could restructure things to make the next conference more successful.

I think my most valuable contribution during this discussion was: “One thing was that we introduced all of our topics at once, and it seemed like people wanted to do just one discussion at a time and in order (although the first discussion continued to get responses all week). Like you both said, maybe it is better to have fewer questions and time them better so participants can get involved. We may also need to rephrase the questions to promote discussion.” It has been very helpful to take a look back at things and get opinions from the rest of the class as to what works and what doesn’t. Issues involving timing, phrasing, quantity, and motivation are all things that we have a little better handle on and can now look at using more effectively.

5670 Web Conference Evaluation and Planning

Well, it has been good getting back into eLearning this semester. We started off having a discussion about the Web Conference from last year and working on coming up with questions and answers as a class so we can make some changes for the 2nd round. Before this discussion, I had an idea of some things that worked or did not work (ie. our Simulations group had a lot of questions asked about what the difference is between Simulations and Games that we were not quite prepared for beforehand). But actually getting into a whole discussion and coming up with solutions has helped me feel more confident about the next Web Conference.

I really appreciated the work Marilyn Czerwinski did in putting up all of the starter questions and getting the discussion going. Sometimes it can be daunting to start a big discussion like this, and nobody had said anything for a few days. Then David Beattie put together a list of questions from the evaluations done by Joni’s class which was very insightful and addressed some of the issues that our participants had. This will help us make the conference more useful and interesting for the people who will be visiting in February when we run it again.

I think my best contribution for this discussion was: “I think one of the issues that came up in our session was a question about the difference between Serious Games and Simulations. There was a lot of discussion back and forth, but I don't know that we ever really got to a clear distinction between the two. So my question is, can we get clear definitions together or would it be advantageous to combine the groups because of the overlap? If there are also other groups combining, then I would also suggest we do a little longer run of the conference, perhaps the 2 weeks of running them all at the same time?” This issue on the difference between Games and Simulations seemed to generate a lot of discussion, and I think that we could have some discussion on it and get them defined well and then move on so we can have people learn more about how they work and who they benefit. Then we will not spend all of our time on semantics in 2 different groups. I am definitely looking forward to seeing how this next conference goes now that we have one run under our belts and have worked together in groups and as a class to improve it for the 2nd round.