Blocked: Classroom Research

Classroom Assessment Techniques und E-Learning Strategien der Einsatz an der FU. Dr. Diana Kelly. We hired Prof. Diana Kelly to lead our seminar of a dozen student assistants, who we called “learning designers” as it describes the role we thought they ought to play in mediating faculty, students, and technology. Our idea was to develop a testing mechanism, one based on providing meaningful feedback to students and faculty in the context of the seminar, as well as a reflective practice that would help us identify relevant criteria for success as well as guide our experimentation and to do so on a continuous, weekly basis, and thereby provide meaningful feedback to all.

These methods proved highly effective and were embraced in the dozen courses in three departments where we were able to implement them. Typically, faculty chose first to administer the “minute paper” to solicit feedback on teaching and learning and to the end of confirming student achievement, identifying problem areas, and faciliting discussion of classrooom learning and management. Once instructors and students learned how to use these methods in the classroom and became convinced of their effectiveness, the learning designers showed them how to use online forums to conduct the surveys a day or two before class so that everyone arrived in class knowing what others thought and thereby fully prepared to discuss how they might best proceed. Thus, the technology helped bring students and faculty together before class, extending the seminar. It helped them anticipate and prepare for that class, and thereby helping intensify it. And insofar as these and other accounts of what went on were often added to the course websites, it offered a record of achievement as well.

This initiative was vigorously opposed by the administration and considerable resources since then have been invested in an exclusively summary evaluation system (electronic tests).

Blocked: Student Needs Assessments

Computer Literacy and Connectivity Project: Report, Felix Seyfarth. The student learning designers consistently reported that at the end of the week not everyone was able to complete the web-based assignments and for a wide range of reasons. So, we decided to commission a survey of student access and needs and found a strong need for providing access to computers in addition to wireless connections, a need for developing student computing literacy more generally, as well as confirmation of the vital role the student assistants played in the design and management of relevant e-learning activities. After this report, e-learning furthering support criteria was revised to exclude support for developing student literacy and our applications to support the development of student literacy within the e-learning furthering program were rejected. For an indication of how vital student literacy might be to academic achievement, you might be interested in in the Association of American Colleges and University publication, Beyond Computer Literacy: Implications of Technology for the Content of a College Education

Blocked: Exploration of Methods

A Roadmap of Blended Learning Strategies, Bruce Spear. In 2003-4, my colleagues and I felt that we really didn’t know if our research protocol was extensive enough and we felt a more systematic approach to discovering what methods might be of assistance to students and instructors might be explored in a department-wide e-learning inititiative. Based on a Pennsysvania State University outline, I prepared a Roadmap that served as the basis of an application for e-learning furthering support. This, too, was blocked until, over a year later and with the assignment of other faculty to the project, the rejection of the experimental model and adoption of the recommended “loading dock”, was a department-wide application welcomed for submission. For an indication of how a similar approach has been constructively developed, consider the Roadmap to E-Learning @ ETH Zurich, their extensive bibliography, and in the context of their long-range planning documentation.

Blocked: Case Studies

Using e-learning for social sciences: practical lessons from the Free University of Berlin, by Katharina Schiederig. This case study offers a student’s view of the advantages of student involvement in developing e-learning methods, including, their ability to approach e-learning as a research problem in the context of a seminar, the unique role they play in the mediation of students, faculty, course content, and web technologies, their commitment to the use of these technologies to fulfill class goals, and the unique role they play in the evaluation of these efforts. This paper was written entirely on this student’s own initiative, accepted for publication on the website of the European Union, translated into 18 languages, and viewed, as of March 2008, over 18,000 times. However, neither this paper, nor anything like it, appears or is linked on the Freie Universität Berlin’s CeDiS website. It should be noted that the CeDiS evaluations have been limited to customer satisfaction surveys designed to support the status quo and do not include any evalations of student learning (such as one finds for MIT’s iCampus, never mind any attempt to develop a cost-benefit analysis

As always in this blog, I am trying to develop some constructive criticism of the Freie Universität Berlin and its management of academic computing services through its Center for Digital Systems that I know best, where the learning management system program goal is some vague, abstract notion of replacing and not strengthening teaching and learning, where the program criteria for e-learning furthering grants is limited to status categories (professors, departments) and technical specifications (databases, communications tools) and examinations and not teaching and learning, where advice on implementation is limited to manipulation of the user interface where the “expert group” includes not a single instructor with teaching experience, descriptions of sponsored projects are no more than summaries from grant applications, where evaluation of student use is limited to customer satisfaction surveys designed to support the university’s choice of a single, central learning management system to the exclusion of alternatives, presentation of good practices or “helping hands is limited to normative descriptions of what might one do with the technology but not what people are in fact successfully doing with it, and where a list of project results by department leads to no links, blank pages, project posters, or the learning management system’s firewall, which is to say, for all practical purposes, nowhere at all.

The alternative policies I’ve outlined in this series thus far include those aiming to integrate academic computing into faculty continuing education programs at the ETH Zurich, achieving significant cost savings through large course redesign led by the National Center for Academic Transformation, and evaluating e-learning programs by involving outside consultants charged with examining improvements in student learning and achievement, as in MIT’s iCampus program — a program which also sets as its criteria of success the successful adoption of whatever MIT develops by others: that colleagues elsewhere think highly enough of a method that they adopt it for themselves. Such universities are setting the competitive standard for research universities, and in my three years on the staff I not only never heard of our evaluating our e-learning support strategies against such standards, but I found little evidence that such standards and examples had been taken into account in the formulation of the present policies nor, since CeDiS is a service and not a research organization, did we have the authority or resources or orientation, as a proper e-learning research operation would, to do so. An odd setup: “e-learning” without learning.

In the hopes that I might help inform a future debate, I will offer yet another compelling alternative: that we aim for the scholarship of teaching and learning whereby the faculty add e-learning to their research program, conduct research, publish results in peer-reviewed journals, list this research in their applications for promotion and tenure: to put e-learning on the strongest academic foundation, on par with the disciplines themselves and not, as at the FU at present, by aiming simply (and I do mean ’simply’) for statistics of course and student enrollments on Blackboard, mere confirmation of the present technology choices and bureaucratic arrangements, and a few photos of sheepish-looking prize-winners: that we instead evaluate e-learning for the disciplinary work that can be made out of it. I’ll explore how e-learning support units might better be grounded in the disciplines, held to disciplinary standards for quality, and support the disciplines as they make the turn to the modern technologies — and not assume, as here, that they are incapable of it themselves and that someone else must lead them. I know this first hand as I had little trouble in 2003, before the FU bought into Blackboard, finding instructors in three departments eager to explore classroom communications following the protocols of Classroom Assessment Techniques and using the open source learning management system, dotLRN, which I myself installed (this is not rocket science) on a linux box at the JFKI: when left to their own devices, early adopters among the faculty pick things up fast: the problem, if it is one, is getting the early and late majority to go along with it.

Faculty go along with new ideas when they have been vetted by their peers, through scholarship and practice, and when they learn about it at conferences, from journals, or over coffee. This is not rocket science either, but it is not trivial, is typically led by early adapters, and is dependent on functional communities of learning — something not all disciplines or departments or universities share to the same degree. But here we have a good example. Consider the scholarship of teaching and learning presented every year in the Textbooks and Teaching Journal of American History, and especially the “Beyond Best Practices”: Taking Seriously the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning issue of 2006, including essays based on work in the Visible Knowledge Project (2002-6), a project involving 22 institutions and 70 scholars in the field of history. In the introduction, the editors say that the use of technology in instruction reflects three significant and inter-related changes in the way research is being done in their discipline –three “turns” in historical scholarship:

-The pedagical turn, whereby historians are increasingly thinking about how students learn to think historically and use discipline-specific research methods to evaluate them.

-The pictorial turn, based on the recognition that historical work increasingly involves the sophisticated use of imagery and that reading strategies for images ought to be as rigorous as those developed for textual sources.

-The digital turn, whereby the very language in which history is written and discussed is being transformed by the new media and professional and that sophistication in the use of the web, multi-media-based articles, etc.

There is plenty of evidence confirming similar changes in other fields, and my favorite is the research presented at the Harvard University Law Schools Berkman Center for Internet and Society conference, “Bloggership: How Blogs Are Transforming Legal Scholarship“, and especially, Paul L. Caron’s paper with the same title, “Bloggership: How Blogs are Transforming Legal Scholarship“. But I choose the Georgetown example because one finds here a more direct relationship between the academic disciplines and institutional support such as I have known most recently and because this institutional support here more clearly shows evidence of having involved the professors and disciplines on their terms and on their turf and adaptation of e-learning tools to serve disciplinary, and not simply institutional, ends. Support for this approach involves support for discussion of methods and the building of a scholarly conversation and not simply, as the faculty have here for the most part been led, to see e-learning as a problem of individual instructors managing individual classrooms and simple presentations of courses of study and so for most little more, if the design of the CeDiS surveys is to be believed, than the storage of files behind a firewall.

What we do not have here are program priorities based on improving the quality of instruction as of one piece of changes in the disciplines more generally and support for talking about these changes openly. In contrast, at Georgetown one can see the translation from the research presented in the journal above to specific course syllabi reported on, in the form of posters, in lists after lists of case studies.

The poster above was produced by Randy Bass, the director of Georgetown University’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS), and features a one-page overview of his course including the project summary, key findings, examples of student work, pedagogical design, and important sources, and as one follows the links one finds a number of truly sophisticated models, such as the “Learning Activity Breakdown.” It is based on extensive research in the fields of literature, the use of technology in instruction, and considerable experience working with colleagues and staff. It is designed not simply to reflect that scholarship, but to offer instructors seeking advice on how to integrate technology in the classroom an outline of teaching and learning goals and the methods used to achieve them.

E-learning at Georgetown sells methods to deliver effective teaching and learning, and not, as at CeDiS, mere technologies. Where the CeDiS service strategy is to create a monopoly over university-wide technologies, which puts it constantly into a defensive position as these technologies change, the Georgetown model is dedicated to effective teaching and learning, regardless of the technology. Where CeDiS is “locked in” to Blackboard — which of course is the Blackboard Corporation’s strategy — and where, in turn CeDiS must do everything to “lock-in” their customers, the Georgetown strategy is technology-independent: teaching and learning are what matters.

Even as Georgetown has moved on from its Poster Tool, it remains a compelling example for those committed to teaching and learning as the tool continues to provide access some 2,000 posters, designed to:

… capture(s) a vast array of materials in a succinct and accessible format, acting as a shared workspace for courses or groups, helps organize course or project data into an online snapshot, and facilitates the use of various types of content. The tool works as a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, making it easier for users to create or edit online content. Depending on the needs of the instructor or group, a template controls the content format—a feature intended to help students structure their thinking, or at times, elicit certain types of thinking.

It is designed to help instructors and students present their work to others, and as we see here, and will see in more detail below, it is used to make course design and redesign transparent and support a culture of institutional learning — which is the far larger problem than simply making this or that technology available and offering instruction in the manipulation of the user interface. Solving problems of technological change with more instruction in technology is hardly a solution for problems that are social and institutional in nature, and for this we need fewer technicians, or if technicians, those skilled in inter-personal communications, group dynamics, and conflict resolution.

Many those of us at the FU who are excited about the use of such new technologies as blogging for teaching and learning are completely frustrated at the sorry state of the FU blogging initiative, after 18 months and a lot of resources, because it now stands, basically, dead in the water with but a handful of users and workshop participants from our university of 45,000+ students and faculty because, I believe, the strategy here is little more than simply offering what anyone can get cost-free on the web on their own when the problem is not access or manipulation of the user interface, but how to find and adapt or develop these new technology in meaningful ways to support our research and teaching. This might not even be something that technicians who have not taught in the classroom or had experience dealing with group dynamics might easily be able to do: as an instructor, I typically haven’t the least interest in bewildering technologies, but show me how to connect better to my fellow researchers and help me help my students understand the things that are so important to me, well, I’ll give you the afternoon. And the only people that can really make claims on such massive time are my peers: people of my age and training and who speak my language and in a context where I am comfortable — like a professional conference where I am jazzed to discover new and better ways or when one of my best colleagues comes back from on and shows me what he or she has learned.

CNDLS shows us how this might be done. On their “The Benefit of Blogs” website, they eschew entirely the technician’s concerns and language to address directly the instructor, his or her immediate concerns, and in the language of instructors who have written things up for their peers:

It is not that the advice of my former colleagues is not based on years of training, a strong understanding of the technologies, and a genuine desire to help others, but that their helpful hints for teachers are written at high levels of abstraction and do reflect the thinking or the language of instructors who have sat around coffee tables and conference tables sharing what they’ve learned with their peers. While I’m sure that such documents could be written by non-instructors, they would at least have to be based on classroom observation, consultation with faculty, and the application of the most basic principles of modern documentation — as illustrated very nicely in the introductions to the O’Reilly Head First series of computer programming books, and where one learns about the importance of conversational language, graphics, the emotions, and helping readers to think more deeply about things.

If you felt that the question of “Why should I Use a Blog in My Course?” was answered well, then you will likely click one of the attractive icons to view the case studies and where you will find another short summary, this time introducing you to a case study.

Instead of those long lists of abstractions, here one is being led through a well-designed, interactive website that is a model for brevity and attractiveness and so in itself educating its users to good web design. One is here being led from short introduction to icon to introduction to case study, one is being given options, being led from generalization to detail — and from the voice of story-tellers talking like instructors right up to what we imagine to be the voice of the instructor himself, which we get by clicking the “Faculty Poster (PDF)”.

These design of these posters is less fabulous and more functional than the website, but they remain attractive and follow the now familiar, problem/solution format and emphasis on addressing practical problems in the classroom. Where the typical CeDiS page and begins and ends with presentation of CeDiS technologies, the CNDLS pages begin with real world problems and solutions in the manner of, “to solve this … we did that …”, and where the solution is not so much a technology as a method.

The brevity of the presentation is deceiving: behind each sentence, experience instructors will recognize a sophisticated approach. Behind the method that would help students write frequently, is a behavioral psychology. Behind the debate method is a smart reference to the genre of the opinion editorial, student debating societies, and the riches of conversations in class, business, and professional life. And so forth.

In this post I have outlined how one university has developed support for academic computing by allowing technology-friendly professors play leading roles in e-learning policy formation and program management, and I think we see here how they came to do so on the terms of the disciplines that matter to them most: how, in the field of history, the turn to images, pedagogy, and use of the web has enriched the discipline, placed students more squarely in the field, and gotten them closer to what we ought to be happy to call “academic happiness”. In the process, they have learned how to transform dry academic writing into something that lives and breathes in the new languages of the web, also including strong visual, pedagogic, and web-specific elements such as the sophisticated use of imagery for icons and hypertext, sophisticated information architectures with dramatic transitions as one drills down into the site, and a communications approach that is warm, human, and decidedly non-technical: it’s about people, as one sees at the top of their web page, they put people first, before projects and support.

I conclude with an screenshot from the CNDLS page and were one sees a most definitely non “sheepish” colleague as one part of a very sophisticated modern support team and to contrast with the very flat, limited CeDiS offerings of simple training in the manipulation of this or that technology’s user interface and the notable lack of learning designers or specialists in group dynamics or teachers, outside of myself, with significant classroom experience. The argument here is that supporting the disciplines and institutional learning is every bit as demanding as the rigorous sciences and humanities themselves and involving highly trained and highly differentiated workforces. For the sake of illustration, I’ll call this learning designer the warrior, as I see it, in the CNDLS version of the primitive fighting group organized to help instructors use technology in the classroom and report on it to others: her job is to walk the faculty through student learning and problems of course redesign: not an easy thing to do with an academic tribe long used to the privileged, protected spaces of the seminar. CNDLS has apparently organized a number of these groups, for they are linked prominently next to every case study and they clearly play, in this complex organization and production involving the fields of pedagogy and learning, art and design, group dynamics and institutional learning, a vital role. The other roles, modernized, include the professor, surely playing the role of the chief and necessary to insure that the party keeps to the academic path. Then there is the philosopher of religion playing the role of the jester, excelling in the serious business of optimizing group dynamics and engaged in conflict resolution. And finally the photographer/graphic designer, the genius in my view, who made the picture above and designed this website, playing the role of the priest invoking the images of people who are not here but will serve as guardian spirits leading you to safer shores and organizing the symbols and sketching in the sand boundaries and pathways to heaven. I think the use of technology in the disciplines is every bit as sophisticated to manage, institutionally, as that primitive hunter band and that our support systems should be staffed accordingly.

And there it was: both how students mostly learn, from each other, and what they prefer to do when left to their own devices, using cost-free web services that they could tailor to their own purposes. So I went on the web to see what would come up if I typed “using google groups” into Google and in seconds found a great blog post on using Google Groups by some instructors (and this post has no less than 54 comments) on their group blog, “Learning with Laptops,” and there you go: a fine example of instructors learning how to use these technologies, too!

Hi Niklas:

I’ve very much enjoyed following this blog, and now that I no longer work for CeDiS I am free to contribute.

The problem with such descriptive, “customer satisfaction” surveys is that they assume we are all stupid, passive consumers and should be content with things that are “nice to have” and the status quo,

We do not find here, for example, any meaningful cost/benefit analysis. To say, for example, that “e-Learning war nützlich für die Vermittlung der Lehrinhalte’” does not explain why, in some large lectures, students download and print out one copy from Blackboard and then take it to the copy shop where it can be printed out for everyone else at a tiny fraction of the cost. As CeDiS is an administrative unit, you would think that a cost/benefit analysis would be central to their enterprise.

For the academic faculty and students I suspect the questions would be far different. It seems to me that, as an intelligent student or instructor, I first want to know how e-learning might help me research, understand, present, discuss, evaluate, and otherwise further my research, teaching, and learning: how it might deliver significant, tangible outcomes, such as: higher student understanding and achievement, lower dropouts and failures, lower costs, etc.

For an example of such evaluations, please visit the website of the “Program in Course Redesign”, run by the U.S. National Center for Academic Transformation.

The CeDiS surveys are limited by design to “nice to have” results plotted on basically meaningless scales: they do not evaluate how any of this might actually contribute to teaching and learning or explore how some uses might be more useful or appropriate than others: they neither evaluate the costs and benefits nor help me figure out how to use the technologies better to achieve my ends, nor consider the alternatives. These surveys do, however, paint a glowing picture of the current (Blackboard) technologies and bureaucratic arrangements.

I would think FU students, faculty, and tax-payers deserve more. But I haven’t figured out where at the FU such questions are being asked. Have you any idea of who else is asking such questions, and if not, who at the university ought to be asking them?“

All the best,

Bruce

Niklas replied:

“Well, in WS 06/07 Heinz Gralki planned a more critical e-Learning survey. But as far as I know he put the project on the back burner. The draft is still online. In addition he framed a couple of assumptions (scroll down to read Katrins critical remarks as well).

And now my present comment:

Thanks for the reply, Niklas!

I’m well aware of Dr. Gralke’s excellent “6 Thesen zum E-learning” and support him and the many others who feel the same way, but who abandoned attempts to participate actively in the direction of e-learning at the FU because they could not see how they might work with CeDiS in substantive terms. I remember well, for example, sitting beside Prof. Joachim Stary for three hours of Blackboard training about three years ago and his asking, at the end of it, “that’s all very nice, but how might you use it for teaching and learning?” — and how ill-prepared we were to answer him.

We lost him, and no matter how often I brought up this story at CeDis and pressed the issue little progress has been made: the CeDiS approach to “e-learning” remains as it started almost three years ago: as little more than an introduction to the manipulation of the user interface based on the operating instructions published by the Blackboard Corporation and a very general idea that e-learning is serving “content” provided by experts — much as Gralke referred to the Nürnberger Trichter. How this might actually work out in practice was not, we were told, our concern, and of course, those of us who were committed to other e-learning concepts, such as communications-oriented e-learning models, received no support at all.

The lack of relevant examples in the CeDiS training programs is breath-taking. When I recently asked one of the current “e-teaching” program’s organizers what examples were being presented, she answered: “we have none, and we are hoping the participants will come up with some.” How is it that a university that includes such well-informed, thoughtful, and committed instructors as Gralke and Stary, and dozens of others, could develop e-learning policies governing the expenditure of over 1 million euros per year without them, and when they showed up, disappoint them so completely — as Gralke’s extensive, well-founded comments on the web document so clearly?

Things could be done much differently, and we do not lack good examples. For instance, consider the ETH Zurich. There, support for e-learning technologies is embedded in a larger research and continuing education program run by accomplished researchers and teachers; their program begins not with the technology, but with a variety (over a dozen each term!) of seminars based on current, state-of-the-art teaching methods and principles. And following current beliefs, instruction begins with an explicit criticism of the file storage or “content” model CeDiS advances exclusively: the first topic title of their current (Summer 2007) program offering is “Paradigmawechsel: Die Lehre ist mehr als Stoffvermittlung”. Where at the FU support for “e-learning” is technical, at the ETH Zurich instructors receive support for instruction; moreover, they get this support from their peers: fellow instructors with PhD’s in relevant fields, with considerable experience in the classroom, and able to engage in the disciplinary conversation.

So, why is it that our qualified instructors have not played an active role in the design of the FU’s e-learning strategies and why are they not playing a leading role in the offering of seminars, workshops, lunchtime sessions … why do they now appear in CeDiS-sponsored events only as the winners of prizes and not as those determining who wins them? Why were they not part of the application process for the Project FUeL, why were they not consulted in the process? How is it that we do not find at least one of them on the CeDiS staff, or on the LG-eL that administers CeDiS, or on a consulting committee that might advise either office in a regular fashion?

Or more generally, why do we not find in the current arrangements that elaborate framework of research and collegiality that is the distinguishing feature of professorial and academic authority? Why is it that the only time they appear at the Ihnestr. 24, and for that matter in their applications to the Office of the President, is as petitioners for peanut-sized grants of 10-20,000 Euros: why is their role limited to that of clients and not educational professionals, certified by their disciplines, holding themselves in every other sphere accountable to a critical community of their peers? If their proposals have pedagogical dimensions, is it really the case that only those whose major qualification and experience is administration are the best to judge? How is it that the university has long established that the faculty are responsible for instruction, but when it comes to educational technologies, they are prevented from exercising any meaningful execution of that responsibility except in individual, or better privatized, terms and accountable to no one but those administrators?

Finally, as noted in my previous post, the one claim that administrators might make, that e-learning might somehow contribute to achieving efficiencies, is hardly measured either: we do not find any evidence that e-learning is being subject to a cost-benefit analysis: we are given user-satisfaction surveys that merely support the status quo, but no research suggesting that the FU, or more properly, the German tax-payer, is saving any money with its investment of one million Euros per year in e-learning never mind, for that matter, that it contributes in any substantive way to “excellence.”

Where my previous blog post and reference to my del.icio.us site concerned websites devoted to research in the natural sciences, this blog entry includes an outline of the contents of an online course website in the humanities that might be helpful for instructors wanting to know in a more detailed fashion what kinds of information might be helpful to include, and especially, how they might go about integrating the use of blogs in their courses. What follows is a brief discussion of why this example might be important and a simple list of the material and links I have found on this site with very brief explanations.

To be sure, the most extensive online presentation of course syllabi is the Open Course Ware site of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (), but the problem with using this site as a guide is that it has been constructed by a large, well-paid team. The virtue of Paul Schacht’s website below is that it is a one-man operation that to my mind is a more realistic model for many of our instructors, and also, that it includes surveys and the blogs use that is our immediate concern.

The blogging use here is comparatively limited to providing students with the opportunity to practice writing blogs and commenting on their class work. The students were required to set up their own blogs and post comments on a regular basis. Of the 30 blogs, approximately 75% include significant contributions of 6-12 entries on the class, the assigned readings, relevant links, and what students think about the use of blogs and their own learning.

I have not found a web-accessible evaluation of this course or blogging use, but I have found an online book chapter on the “The Collaborative Writing Project” by the author and will add my review of this text here soon. However, by reading the student entries one quickly gains an impression of young people rising to the challenge of putting their comments online and having done so well – well meaning the most of the entries are coherent, thoughtful, and reflecting commitment to learning.

I can imagine two ways these blogs contributed to class and learning. First, by having students express their thoughts on the class, they and the instructor found here helpful advice on student learning and likely grasped the opportunity to talk about it and so supporting classroom management. Second, this writing frequently has meaningful content: the sharing of observations here suggests that students used the blogs to clarify their learning goals and actually made progress towards those goals through the writing process.

Of additional interest is the instructors use of the forums. Here, the instructor used a simply phpbb forum site, and the one entry the includes responses from all students – apparently this was required – was on the topic of what students expected from the class. As an instructor, I can easily imagine that this exercise played a vital role in helping the class define what it is about, helping students commit themselves to class, and supporting the creation of a cooperative classroom and online atmosphere.

1. Basic course management (links on the top right-hand column). Rules, regulations, course requirements, office hours, etc.
a. Outcomes: what student may expect to learn in the course.
b. Requirements: what students will be required to do, with emphasis on deliverables, including contributions to the class forum, creation of their own blogs, and contribuion to the “Collaborative Writing Project” wiki
c. Class Schedule: class meeting dates and times, topics, required texts (with links).
d. Papers and Exams: what they will be required to deliver, including dates and times, topics, submission formats, and how to get help.
e. Resources: recommended websites (links) for student research as well as advice on avoiding plagiarism, advice on using sites critically, and the proper way to write attributions.
f. Fine Print: Detailed information on office our times, place, and procedures; policies on attendance, use of cellphones and laptops, paper submission forms, plagiarism, examinations; grading polcies.
g. Links to the course forum (phpbb), the course electronic reserves.
h. Link to data input functions, including surveys, student blog urls and cell phone numbers, and examination topic.
i. Preview of the examination questions.
j. Link to a page including photographs of almost all enrolled students.
k. Link to produce a printer-friendly output of the course syllabus.
2. Links of general interest (left-hand column and part of the right-hand column)
a. Links to wiki and rss feeds on podcasting.
b. Links to online literature archives.
c. Links to online guides for writing and dictionaries.
d. Links to interesting websites, newspapers, journals, political advocacy groups, bloggers.
e. Links to university websites, including departments, library, student guides, student disability services.
f. Of special interest is the extensive online writing guide authored by the class instructor Paul Schacht, “The Guide”. Similar to the handouts of many instructors, this resource would function as the basis information for student writing tutors and tutors, including advice on the qualities of good writing, considerations of audience an purpose, and advice on paper organization, editing, and conventions. Additional topics include advice on the writing process, including how one goes about developing outlines, developing topics, preparing and editing drafts, proof-reading, etc.
3. Links to blogging advice and student blogs (right-hand column).
a. Advice on setting up blogs and writing entries. The blogging service link is to the cost-free Blogspot service registration page featuring a simple accessible registration process. The advice on writing is practice, general advice from the university on formal and informal writing.
b. Links to all student blogs

When people are asked what they think blogs are all about, the single-most frequent association (28.2%) is with the personal journal and the second-most frequent (13.2%) association is with sharing of opinions – only 9% say they view blogs as an information source. But when people are asked what they actually do with blogs and are given a number of choices, the greatest number (66.7%) confirm that they find in blogs information not found in other media; 52.5% say they find recommendations, tips and tricks; 52.3% say they find background information on current themes, and significantly fewer confirm their interest in the more subjective terms associated with personal journals (15.8% anger and criticism, 10.8% to meet new people, 9.1% to influence the thinking of others). That is, regardless of what people are thinking about, they are turning to blogs as a place of real work.

These results suggest that we might examine how blogs are being used in the workplace. In a study by the Gilbane Group, “Survey on Enterprise blog, wiki, and RSS use” the major categories include knowledge management, project collaboration, and internal information dissemination and over 40% of respondents say their firms use blogs for these purposes. Similarly, a study by the Deutsche Bank Research group, “Blogs: The new magic formula for corporate communications?” plots corporate blogging use (see page 4) for international and market communications as well as public relations across discursive forms, including provision of information, persuasion (build image, set agenda, underpin contracts), and argumentation (nurture relations, resolve conflicts). We might infer from this that increases in blogging use are associated with the servicing of practical and important business needs.

Applying corporate models to the university is a tricky business, but a business model for academic blogging might well be built along the lines of the university’s core business: research and teaching. The structure of the Stemweder powerpoint reported here earlier this week, “Adventures in Science Blogging” assembles illustrations of academic blogs according to their support of the various stages of university research, including, discussion of research and presentation of research results, review and commentary on research literatures, commentaries on the institutional and political conditions within which science is being conducted, and finally, commentaries on scientific life and with emphasis on improving working conditions.

This brief overview of popular, corporate, and academic blogging surveys might thus support Stemweder’s thesis that academic blogging is on the rise because it creates opportunities for communications that might not otherwise happen.

The best explanation I’ve found thus far of how blogging is being used to contribute to research is “Adventures in Science Blogging: Conversations we need to have, and how blogging can help us have them,” by Professor Janet D. Stemwedel at San Jose State University (USA), which I found on the website of the January 2007 North Carolina Science Blogging Conference.

As you will find in the Powerpoint presentation Prof. Stemwedel first asks what communication problem needs to be addressed, then outlines how blogging might address this problem, and then offers an illustrated typology of blogging types.

Stemwedel identifies the communication problem by listing a number of questions: What do the other participants know already vs. what do I have to explain? What do they want to know, and why is it important to them? What do I want them to understand, and why is it important to me? What can they help me figure out?

She then distinguishes between traditional disciplinary communications and the unique features of blogging. Traditional communications, in her view, include published reviews of scholarly literatures, conference presentations, and press releases/popular presentations. Blogging, in her view, ably supports the scientific process itself because it supports short-term publication (not long-term, like journals), because it supports more detailed work-in-progress reports and commentary (not ephemeral like conference papers), and because it reaches an audience larger than specialists with the means to access journals and conferences. In sum, she argues that blogging has opened up a space where conversations might occur that otherwise might not be happening.

As you will find in Stemwedel’s presentation, she then offers a typology or categorization of this new blogging space. I have found these categories and examples to be VERY helpful, and to make it easier to learn about them and examine the examples she offers I’ve created a “conversation” tag on my del.icio.us site and prefaced blog titles with a category, such as:

Discussion of research-in-progress: Circadiana
Sharing new scientific findings: Cognitive Daily
Reporting on scientific conferences: Cosmic Variance

I have found the use of such online examples to be highly effective in winning my client’s attention and leading them to act. First, they see that some very real professional work is being done. As then survey different examples they seek those that might interest them and prove relevant to their work. Once convinced of the technology’s value to their work, they ask what is involved, and it is at that point that I can explore with them the “how-to”s” and “know-how” – the modern skills of blog/web use that make these new technologies truly effective.

university implementation strategies that begin with the technology, and not the learning/teaching problem, and I mean this here as an historical principle associated with institutions that made the leap to extensive, and expensive investments in learning management systems. Let’s call this principle “the LMS Fallacy”, because its premiss and commercial basis have been definitely exposed in the last few months, and here I’ll first explain the fallacy, then talk about the bureaucratic/technical approach, and conclude by exploring the insight of the “Ecompetence Profiles” article.

The LMS Fallacy
By LMS Fallacy I mean here the end of something: the end of the boom phase of LMS systems and the beginning of a far more critical appraoch to providing web services for teaching and learning. During this phase, many of us felt that a single application offering coherent and efficient accces to a wide range of functions would help universities get started on the path to enhanced web use. This phase was led by dozens of smaller initiatives, but especially by the major firms WebCT and Blackboard. The end of this phase may be identified in the rapid development of competing system components and architectures, as my colleague Ahmet Acar in his blog entry “googleversity” describes. This article is about the rise of readily-available web-based services able to offer integrated solutions not only far more cheaply and efficiently than integrated commercial applications, but at a pace and increasing sophistication that commercial applications can hardly sustain. The end of this phase was also quite obvious to many of our “early adopters” as they saw that the costs of using these new technologies were quite high and, once their initial fascination (and initial subsidies) drew to an end, they began to develop more realistic expectations: they see that most use the technologies for simple storage and announcements, that only a tiny fraction of users exploit the communications technologies, and some, particularly those who have begun to use things like Ebay, Google, blogs, and web 2.0 applications more generally, have developed higher standards for web application design and what a future LMS system ought to be able to do.

The business models that supported university-wide implementations are changing as well and taking into account not only costs, but politics and increasingly sophisticated models of learning. This change has been highlighte in the current debates over what many see to be the ruthlessly competitive, monopolistic policies of Blackboard Corporation, particularly in their suit against open source software — as explained in such articles as Al Essa’s “The Blackboard Morality Tale.”

This debate is of particular interest not only because it has reached a “tipping point” in mainstream academic opinion, but in the educational terms this opposition frequently includes. As well-argued by the EDUCAUSE Board of Directors in their Letter to Blackboard, a lot of people feel that: “Our community has participated in the creation of course management systems. A claim that implies this community creation can be patented by one organization is anathema to our culture,” and their conclusion that this suit “… will certainly have a chilling effect on the open sharing of ideas in our community.” Foremost among these ideas is the reformulation of e-learning concepts, how they might best be developed, and how they might be integrated in web services or application design. What is meant by “community creation” distinct from the commercial logic is evident in a current article by authors of the EDUCAUSE letter, including the President Brian L. Hawkins and Vice President Diana G. Oblinger, The Myth about No Significant Difference: “Do we think of technology as a solution in itself or as a means to an end? Using technology does not necessarily produce change. A lecture may be enhanced when the lecturer uses presentation software, but if everything else remains the same—the interaction, the examples, the opportunity to problem- solve—the learning won’t change. Colleges and universities should not expect learning outcomes to change if the pedagogical approach does not change. Learning is an active process; technology can provide a wide range of active learning opportunities and can enable those to scale to reach more learners. But adding technology without altering pedagogy is not a solution.”

The pedagogical orientation is of one piece of the author’s outrage: they write as if they had been betrayed — as if they had finally realized that the cozy, cooperative relationships they had thought they were enjoying have been lost. Their outrage is defended in terms of first principles: active learning, problem-solving, and most important: putting the learning enterprise first; that the technology is but a means to the end of educational purposes.

The Bureaucratic/Technical Approach

Now that we can begin to see the limits to the technology, we might also begin to see the limits to the pedagogical strategies, or lack of them, in the way this technology has been presented and sold. I have read deeply in the Blackboard documentation as well as among dozens of university websites based on it and with but few exceptions find presentations beginning with explanations of the user interface and how it might be used: where I do find “best practices” they are essentially an afterthought, as so many would-be plums in the technological pie, basically presented as illustrating the technology. I think this is strongest when the LMS has been implemented by IT organizations heavily staffed with technicians and a business model based on the simple provision of IT services as if simply showing people how to use the technology is enough. In part, this is due to the division between academic and staff services, and particularly, where the academic staff — the instructors — jealously guard what happens in their classrooms (“lehrfreiheit”) against the incursion of IT services which, almost everywhere, are provided by non-academic staff.

I know this from having being on the “inside,” from having taught professionally since 1978 and and from knowing lots of academic colleagues quite well, but also, from working on the “outside” as an IT staff person and where I often find it difficult, outside of my friends among the academic colleagues, to connect to academic staff as an academic: they see me as an IT technician paid for by the administration, and as soon as I might begin to talk about teaching and learning I am talking from the other side. Learning how to integrate the new technologies in teaching and learning is difficult to do: it costs time, energy, and involves experiment and risk, and when the primary purpose of learning is not immediately and readily served (and in our university research comes first — nobody is hired or promoted because of their success in teaching), the technology is used only minimally: the posting of syllabi and texts, the use of email and maybe the gradebook. The exploitation of communications features requires a lot of experiment and learning, and apart from emails there is limited use of it. The building of learning modules requires far more costs in module design and construction, and these uses are almost entirely dependent on subsidy. As long as the funding and management of learning module design is seen as an external service, and not inherent in research and teaching, this will continue to be the case. The bureaucratic/technical approach all but insures that this will be the case — and particularly as no instructor that I know here has been given “release time” to develop e-learning: he or she maybe be given a student assistant, but for him or herself, the costs in time of experiment are all but prohibitive and there is almost no reward for it. Again, insofar as we start from the presentation of technology from the outsite, we perpetuate this state of affairs.

“Ecompetence Profiles: An Instrument for Ecompetence Management”

The reason I think the “Ecompetence Profiles: An Instrument for Ecompetence Management“, is so important is that the author, as well as the larger project of which he is a part, started from the premiss that the problem is bringing the faculty to effective use of the technology, and not the other way around, and that the way to do that was to create a roadmap, an online instrument as it ended up, based on an analysis of the conditions necessary to bring faculty along. Moreover, where the bureaucratic/technological approach remains at the level of individual users confronting an application interface and at best the preparation of learning materials as the “content” to be navigated and delivered by that interface, this article begins with the question of the organizational goals, the social dimension, that would support such individual solutions.
In a fascinating list, the writer talks about the “absorptive power” of the organization to incorporate new knowledge, the “diffusion capacity” to disseminate that knowledge in the organzation, the “generative power” to develop new knowledge, and the organization’s “exploitation capacity” to actually the knowledge effectively. In sum, the problem this writer presents is not how to manipulate objects, but attitudes, including “the norms, values, support and willingness to change.” Further, the article describes how the need for organizational development was realized in the project’s first part and then explicitly included in the matrix developed in the second: that learning how to learn became thematized. Upon this, the question of elearning was expanded to include the question of “the expertise present in the organization, the commitment of the management, the organisational culture, the infrastructure, the system of rewards and the resources.” The larger question, then, is “eCompetence management”, and it is this larger managerial problem that forms the basis of their “instrument” — an online heuristic device to guide everyone involved in needs assessments, resource allocations, and implementation strategy development. (I’ll be editing this in the coming days -B).

“early adopters” — those who rely on the innovators to present them with tried and tested solutions that they can readily adapt to their own purposes. They say: “please, no experiments, no explanations, and don’t try to tell me how computers work: you’ve got 15 minutes: simply show me how to solve my problem.” If we succeed with this group, we might stand a chance getting the “early majority” and “late majority” on board over time.

A 15 minute presentation of complex technologies requires significant preparation. “Showing” means preparing simple, clear graphics explaining principles and practices. And the size, complexity, and diversity of our faculty and students recommends our assembling a variety of examples and organizing them in pathways that will quickly lead to the discovery of relevant solutions.

The best examples of “showing” web application use that I’ve found thus far is on the 37signals website, in both the design and Tour of their Backpack application. The Tour is remarkable for the brevity and clarity of the callouts explaining the web page components. The application design is remarkable for the simple, straight-forward organization of topic explanation, “to do” list, notes, files, and images. How this might work with different topicss is available in their extensive examples. I have also developed something similar in my advice on “Illustrating Best Practices” and “On Authoring”, available on my Documentation page. (Incidentally, the conceptual basis for this approach is described in the Wikipedia entry on Agile Software Development and the 37signals online book, Getting Real.)

The problem then is how to organize such pages, and the best solution I’ve found thus far is the University of Nottingham’s Promoting Enhanced Student Learning website, which collects a variety of “talking points,” case studies, enquiries, and techniques in an attractive, accessible manner.