Donâ??t Call it A Blog!

I started reading РDon̢??t Call it A Blog! at bavatuesdays and got to thinking. (Which is dangerous at times for me particularly on little/no sleep which the son is insuring these days.)

We should be thinking of the tools formerly know as blogs as personal publishing tools because that is what they are it might be for education, profession or person.   By avoiding the blog tag, we are more likely to avoid the eye glazing and snickers of who wants to know about when I woke up and what I had for breakfast.

Calvin on Revising Your Plan

A good reminder that a project that fails does not mean it is a bad project.   It might just require a little more planning.

Delicious Posts Finding Value in Microposting

As of late most of my posts have been via my delicious bookmarks.  This is partly because of limited time at work but now I am finding value in tagging url’s in delicious and allowing that to post to my site.  I think if I am more focused in making sure that I take advantage of the description field this will provide a reminder of why I bookmarked the resource in the first place.

How to bring this around to a practical tool for the masses? That is the question.  Any suggestions?

Developing a Faculty Consultation Model

There are lots of instructional design models that are employed by various instructional designer, instructional technologist, and instructors. It is a pretty universal thing to teach in graduate school. But has anyone put together a model , or at least best practices for consulting with faculty by instructional support professionals? (I will need to do a little research. Perhaps PODNetwork is a good starting point.) If there is such a model I wonder how closely what I do fits with the model.

My work with faculty requires two things trust and expertise.

Trust is first as teaching is a very personal endeavor.

Expertise is second because trust will be broken quite quickly if:

• I prove to be less than competent in my knowledge of instruction(al technology).
• I don’t demonstrate an appreciation of the faculty member’s expertise especially as without the expertise in the discipline what content is there to be learned?

So that is my philosophy but what are the steps of a consultation?

Pre-consultation

• Be available – being physically available to faculty is the first step. If the faculty member does not see the instructional technologist, (s)he is not likely to ask for assistance.
• Take a personal interest in faculty subject and teaching – it is an instructional technologist’s job to help faculty accomplish their course goals. To be successful it is imperative to understand where opportunities for assisting lie.
• Develop skills and understanding of emerging technology – staying current with instructional technology expands expertise which can easily translate in to more opportunities to assist faculty.

Consultation

• Personalize – We are talking about education so there is no cook book to follow. It is important to know that each problem is unique and efforts should be take to avoid fitting a round peg in a square hole.
• Share possibilities - Both parties need to share. The faculty must share such things as teaching, problem, goals, and style. The instructional technologist must share his understanding of the faculty’s situation, possible solutions, and commitment required.
• Action plan – Identify concrete steps of innovation – Important to note that while the project might not be considered cutting edge or noteworthy by others, it is a change and new practice for the faculty member. The project should be treated with the appropriate amount of care and encouragement. – and responsible party. It is important to divide the work evenly based on expertise.

Implementation

• Develop options – This phase is where the faculty make/revise instruction to include the technology and where the instructional technologist develops the tools and processes for use.
• Incorporation – The faculty uses the technology for teaching. Questions, troubles, and new insights flow from the first uses.
• Develop Confidence and Support faculty – This step is key to continued use. The tasks of this phase vary depending on what the faculty member finds during initial uses. How well problems are addressed and solved and the rate at which the faculty member feels ‘I can do this’ will be key in determining whether or not the innovation will be incorporated into subsequent courses. (Of course there is the caveat that the innovation has to further teaching and learning of the content).
• Evaluate – It is important not to close the books on a project without at the very least a quick check-in with the faculty. It is obviously preferable to have a focused conversation with faculty about the project and the parts that needs improvement.

Now this is not science but these steps have produced many interesting projects.

I would be interested to read about how those of you reading this approach your consultations. I am going to tag this and future posts about faculty consultation models fcmodels and invite you to do the same so that we can tie our posts on this topic together.

An inevitable dilemma for bloggers?

I was reading Geeky Mom today where she writes about the tension of integrity of person and online personae. She is not the first blogger that struggled with it. Most likely she won’t be the last. I have similar thoughts from time to time and often worry about encouraging faculty to incorporating such a public platform into their classes.

Perhaps these are just growing pains of a changing paradigm of publishing and personal, professional, political expression. And that the tension that many of us are struggling with (partially) come(s) from the possible judgements one could make about each of us based on one post as opposed to considering the collective work.

What is the proverb about first impressions?

Personally, I hope Geeky Mom finds a position of comfort where she can continue to blog from. Her insights and humor are a pleasure to follow.

Facebook – faculty/staff not welcome?

Well, there is a lot of talk/examples about how students are using Facebook as a regular part of college life. And there have been brave soles working on college campuses that are attempting to join the student community through facebook profiles to provide services. This act seems to be met with mixed reviews. Often such attempts are viewed favorably by the service provider and poorly by the students.

This makes me wonder how (if at all) to take advantage of the social networking tools to help the students.

But wWhat is the balance between engaging in this space and not invoke undesired push-back from the students when they realize that we are infringing on their turf?

One idea is to make it easy for them to bring resources from our websites into their online life by using Share in Facebook Links. This is a new feature of Allegheny’s daily news site. It works nicely, at least from my point of view.

I also wonder if advertising events using the flyer system is another possibility. Currently, there are two of these for the Allegheny Community. And they only cost $5 per day.

Where could one find out how these experiments are being received?

Will students accept ‘us’ in facebook to provide information as long as we don’t expect to interact in there or pretend to be overly hip to their jive?

compos(t)ing » The Privacy Myth?

I was reading this post (compos(t)ing » The Privacy Myth?) and its comments and got to thinking.

Last year, I would have agreed with Libby that all of this social networking is not as pervasive as it is reported.

But,when I hired a first year work-study my opinion changed. His life is through IM and Facebook. Google and Wikipedia are the gateways to information. And his attitude about technology is one of expectation. He expects to be connect to friends, information, and the social scene. Ya, this workstudy might be one of the few but I don’t think so. Instead I think he and his peers are the first wave of students where technology is life not tools for life. (I would not say that this makes the generation any more savvy in assessing the information as true and reliable which is a little scary and an opportunity for the education system.)

While the tip of the iceberg are filling the seats of our introductory level courses, it will not belong before the rest of the generation and the next generation will be our students with their own set of expectations of technology, interactions and how to learn.

For example.. Without prompting on my part, really. I just thought it would be cool to check out noggin.com one day as we were watching the upside down show or something. Since then my three year old daughter prefers the interactions of ‘TV’ on the computer (like noggin, sprout, or nick jr) where she can pause, rewind, and alter her experience to regular TV. She likes sending and receiving e-postcards, making shmash ups, and coloring on the computer as she can easily send them to her small network of friends. I am amazed at what is out there for preschoolers and how much more participatory and creative it is now compared to even 5 years ago when my niece started using a computer.

While privacy however we define it is topic for consideration, caution, and concern, I wonder if as educators we need to start to consider how to put students at the center of learning so they will not need to unlearn how they have learned to learn.

I hope that this is not too much of a tangent from the original post. Blogging is a cool technology as it allows for related ideas to be shared directly to a post, using commenting, or by linking to posts using trackbacks to comment externally or take the starting idea in a slightly tangential direction.
We live in an exciting time.

Wired Campus Blog: A History Department Limits Use of Wikipedia

Troubling -

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: A History Department Limits Use of Wikipedia

This is not to say that I believe Wikipedia is or an encyclopedia should carry the weight of a peer reviewed article or a first hand artifact from an expert.

What troubles me is:

• impact of this news/precedent will carry in the hands of the uninformed.
• the fact that it is even necessary
• opportunity lost

We are fortunated that it happened because: 

• it opens the doors for conversations.
  

Would this be a creative and acceptable use of Wikipedia?

What if instead of barring Wikipedia’s was used as part of the research assignment? A student would was to choose a topic, review the Wikipedia entry as a starting point, research the shortcomings, and ‘continue the dialog’ of research and publishing through the Wikipedia community?

Not only would the understanding of the topic be fostered in the student, research/information evaluation and communication would be a real experience (I can’t remember the last time my boss asked for a twenty page research paper) and the student would be connected to other with an interest in the field as they challenge, defend, explain, refine, and revise their understanding.

4 minutes 30 seconds

I just spent the last four minutes and thirty seconds watching a youtube video on the read write web.  [thanks: Far From a Shining Star...: Web 2.0 Explained]

I feel a little overwhelmed by the content of the video. It contains many things that I have come to learn over the past few years regarding the web, but in a way that I do not normally think from.

Is this how colleagues, faculty and students feel when I start touting the power of the social software.

Allegheny On My Space

Interesting stuff = www.myspace.com/alleghenycollege = it even gets a mention in this year’s Horizon Report (as html) and on a few other websites like the syndicateblog.petersons.com.

Just a small aside – in the last few months, I have casually tried to gauge students reaction to an academic/administrative invasion of social networking sites. To say the least I experienced a lot of push back from the students. They view this as their space. I think the Allegheny MySpace page balances having a presence without presenting an agenda. From the comment’s list it looks like it could be a good tool for keeping recent alums connected as they start out in new cities.

With social networking sites about to break into the mainstream of daily teaching, learning, and business, for more than the geeky on campus is it time for the college to have a discussion on how to efficiently use such tools to accomplish the business of the college?

It seems that if those that see applications for such tools as blogs, myspace/facebook, value is in the community aspect. Developing a community understanding of the strengths, pitfalls and appropriate use could lead to some really creative outcomes not possible through other media. Along with the creative implementations a communal understand would allow for a kind of mission statement (lack of better word) that new ideas and projects could be measured against during project consideration.
Some possibilities of the top of my head (so a lot of discussion is necessary before truly considering them).

• Connect Students to Alums working in chosen field of study through blogging
• Tag news/press releases about the college with an Allegheny specific tag and providing an RSS feed of tagged items. to keep community, friends and alums informed of the great things happening at Allegheny.
• Encourage working groups and committees to blog proceedings
• Encourage departments to provide news and updates using an rss feed
• Live Bookmark news feeds in browsers as part of the standard configuration
• Encourage conference goers/groups to use tags to tie experiences together by tagging posts (ex. ELI2007)
• Consider the elements of community networking that can be incorporated into new projects or retrofitted on to existing systems
• Provide online spaces for foreign language immersion perhaps a facebook space or a blog
• Admission Counselor blogging the admissions cycle providing tips and insight for prospective students – could be a recruiting tool and a service at the same time.
• Consider collaborations (intra and inter college) that takes advantage of loosely joined tools of Web2.0. – Lower threshold for adoption than video conferencing.

I wonder if other colleges have already started doing some of this?