Really interesting article in the recent  EDUCAUSE Review by Tapscott and Williams on Innovating the 21-st Century University.  Essentially, they argue that the Industrial Age model of education needs to change to more collaborative models of teaching and learning.  Nothing new in that, of course.  But  they seem to have a vision (it honestly isn’t very clear to me) of a Global Network of Higher Learning built around a network of inter-institutional collaborations (of knowledge creation, market, and, presumably, revenue).

In terms of the pedagogy, what they argue is nothing new, of course.   Moving from “broadcast” delivery models of instruction to more collaborative, constructivist, discovery based learning models has been so long in the conversation, it has almost become cliché.

Certainly in our graduate online programs here at McDaniel, it’s what we teach, what we design, and what we do.

So I have no argument with that.  But I think Tapscott and Williams may be getting a couple things wrong here as they present their arguments.

One. This self-paced business.  That was tried in the late 90s with online classes.  It failed miserably.  Self-pacing tends to remove one from the learning community and tends to minimize teaching presence.

Two.  Their model probably puts too much emphasis on content (and/or on technology mediation) and not enough on teaching/social presence.  Thing is, “content” really isn’t a problem.  We don’t need community to produce content.  Or at least we don’t need any more community to produce any more content. That’s going on just fine without any new models of Higher Ed institutional collaborations. (Plus, we have these things called texbooks.)

We do need community to co-create knowledge, however.  And I agree with Garrison, Anderson, & Archer who have long argued that learning is most effective when it occurs in a community that has social presence, cognitive presence, and teaching presence.

Should we adopt collaborative learning as the core model of pedagogy?  Sure!  Should Higher Ed institutions collaborate more?  Definitely!  Should we invest more in technical infrastructure?  Absolutely!

But I’m not convinced that the University of the Future will be structured around interinstitutional collaborations.  Maybe it will.  But if effective teaching and learning is going on, I suspect it will be occurring in (relatively) small collaborative learning communities that fully enable social presence, cognitive presence, and teaching presence.

Well, not the video itself.  That’s the video title.

Not everyone will agree, but it is certainly worth watching.   Ironic, that…

Jeff Jarvis is the author of What Would Google Do? (HarperCollins 2009), and his blog at Buzzmachine.com is worth subscribing to.

Did anyone watch Frontline’s Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier last night on PBS? If not, it is on the PBS Web site in segments.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/view

Much of it was annoying to me, especially when the professional reactionaries were trotted out (Todd Oppenheimer and Mark Bauerlein, frequent ranter on The Chronicle) to complain that things are not how they used to be.

I know. Documentary. All sides and all that. Still, I was annoyed by the overall negative tone.

But there were some nice moments.

I was especially interested in the Virtual Worlds segment (7th on the navigation bar up top), which focused on Second Life. Worth watching as an introduction to SL, perhaps, although it just briefly mentions education and focuses more on IBM.

Segment 2 on multi-taskers is also interesting. It covers recent research that suggests that multi-taskers in fact do NOT learn more effectively when doing more than one thing (there was a recent Chronicle article on this subject). They just think they do.

Or maybe it depends on what is being measured..

I did like seeing and hearing Mark Prensky (segment 5, I think). I loved it when he suggested those who fear that technology is changing how we learn, read, write, socialize, and interact are confusing the best ways we did something once upon a time with the best ways of doing something now (my words, but I think that’s what he was saying).

And I really am enjoying the roundtable discussion on the PBS site conducted blog style by some of the folks who were featured in the documentary. The discussion is on the Web site too.

The Universe is About To Change

An unforgivable lapse. All these weeks since my last post. Though it has been a busy few weeks, I’ll try not to let so long a time pass between posts again.

For September and October–in a nutshell: I went to Italy, saw lots of opera, came back and started working on:

• the Academic Continuity class;
• several online course designs;
• course development processes–policies and procedures– appropriate for McDaniel (I’ve uploaded them in the documents section);
• my presentation for the Sloan C Conference.

It’s been a little over a week now since I’ve come back from the Sloan-C Conference in Orlando. It was a terrific conference for me.  I saw old friends. It met a number of folks I have long admired.  I attended several interesting sessions,  two excellent afternoon workshops (one on online program models and another on Second Life), and even got a little bit of attention on my own presentation.

If you have even a vague interest in online learning and/or Virtual Worlds, I hope you’ll take the time to take a look at a condensed version of my Sloan Presentation. I spend a little time talking about the long arc of virtual learning environments, and claim the universe is about to change. I also show a few scenes from McDaniel College’s Second Life campus and talk about where I think we are going and how I think we are going to get there.

The Ravens have gone, the students are back in force, and summer is over.

DEPARTMENT ACTIVITIES

It was a hectic first day of class for us in InTech.  Nothing particularly unusual, though.   A technical glitch here and there with Blackboard—file uploads without extensions, data integration slips, quizzes that didn’t copy,  students not on active directory, classes didn’t get turned on, browsers with security settings that block scripts and cookies. Stuff like that.  In addition, we’ve been merging course sections, uploading publisher course cartridges, and just fielding calls throughout the day.  All in all, though, things seem to be running relatively smoothly.

I just checked. First day of class, we had  (so far) about 1,600 different users sign on to Blackboard and view nearly 40,000 pages.

One surprise here this first week. Chris has been busy showing folks Qualtrics.  We honestly didn’t expect that.  Actually, we sort of expected that the need for supporting that application to tail off.  How many folks really want to do surveys anyway?  Turns out, more and more faculty want to use it for peer review, evaluations of projects, signing up for advising, special sessions and the like… as well as doing surveys.  Who knew such a tool would be so popular?

Anita is gearing up for several class visits coming up.  I think she has seven or eight to do in the next few days.  I know she will be meeting classes in labs and working with students on setting up blogs and wikis.  And she is doing a lab presentation/workshop for an HRD graduate class on how to use WordPress to set up an ePortfolio.  That and supporting the use of e-Beam and interactive whiteboards that several faculty are using.

COMING SOON

Next several days, we’ll be busy putting out the new edition of InTech News and preparing for our fall workshops series.  We will get our workshop calendar and sign-up form out by mid-week. This fall, the three of us will be offering nearly 60 workshop sessions.  And they start next week!

Chris will be doing the Blackboard series, of course. Pretty much the same as last semester, with a few updates and improvements, and with a little more emphasis on the Blackboard Grade Center.  She had a successful series of pre-semester Blackboard workshops just this last couple weeks.

Anita will be doing blogs, wikis, and podcasts.  Continuing our collaborative technologies for teaching line….    Anita is also preparing one new workshop–Slide Shows, while significantly updating her workshop on video editing and podcasting fundamentals.

My focus will be the Academic Continuity Class (more on this later), preparing a series of online workshops, and writing a new workshop on WIMBA CLASSROOM.  We are very excited about this new application.

Wimba is a live, virtual classroom environment now available in all Blackboard classes.  The application includes audio, video, whiteboard, text chat, application sharing, and Mp4 capabilities.

With Wimba, you can create online videos from PowerPoints, “capture lectures,” and  meet students online in real time.  You can also demonstrate live what you are doing on your computer, and/or take “control” of a student’s computer.  What’s more, everything you do can be archived and turned into a podcast.

We’ll be talking up WIMBA quite a bit throughout the year.  We’ll have a main article about Wimba in InTech News.  And we’ll be offering dozens of workshops. Watch for details coming very, very soon.  In InTech News.  And here!  :-)

It is just going by too fast. Summers usually do, of course. But with year-end reports, budget issues, year-ahead goals, summer institutes, new online class designs, new workshops to write, new software to learn… Seems we hardly got started. Only one more full week before school starts. I swear.

DATA INTEGRATION SNAFU. Earlier this week, we had a Blackboard-Archway Data Integration problem. When the data integration process was reset after software updates on network down day, two database fields were set back to default status: 1. course availability (default is NO) and 2. course title (default is Archway title field). In short, we turned off all courses and changed their titles back to Archway titles.

No content was lost, of course. All the courses are still there. Just all Yes/No switches on whether or not to appear on students’ screens have all been set to No. (sigh)

The good news for us–this occurred during one of the only two weeks of the year when there are just a handful of classes going on. So we have time to let folks know about the problem before the high-stakes first week of classes begins, when 500 classes will be live and 1,500 to 2,000 students will be logging in each day.

Of course, Chris immediately sent out an email to all instructors explaining the situation, apologizing for it, and reminding folks how to turn their classes back on. But we’ll be hitting this again. No question, first day of class there will be dozens of folks asking, “Where’s My Class?”

UPDATES. Chris has been especially busy this week, preparing for and conducting the pre-semester series of Blackboard workshops. Last I heard, she has 44 registered seats in a four-day set, which began yesterday and continues through next week. She’s been putting in some pretty long hours. Wednesday morning she was here when I got here and still here when I left sometime after 8:00 pm.

I was here late because I was participating in an online Webinar describing and discussing the Leadership in Global Enterprise program.

For the past couple of days, Anita has been working with E-Beam. She’s been learning about, supporting, trouble-shooting, and showing some faculty members how to use this interactive whiteboard classroom technology.

In my next post, I plan to write a little on a recent report put out by the Chronicle of Higher Education–“The Student of 2020.” We had an interesting discussion about it in a Deans and Directors retreat this past week.

The last couple of weeks have been busy ones (am I going to begin every post that way, I wonder?).

At the end of July, we completed our Ten Goals and Priorities for 2009-2010. If you’re interested enough to take a look, you’ll note, I hope, that the first five goals are largely informed by the new McDaniel Strategic plan.

In the past couple of weeks, we’ve been spending a good bit of time working with Mel Albin on setting up a series of webinars that promote the new Leadership in Global Enterprise Certificate program to McDaniel Alumni.   Last week, we practiced delivering the webinars using Wimba.

By the way, Wimba Classroom is an extraordinary new platform we have for synchronous video and audio connection/conversation/delivery.  Like Skype on steroids.  I’ll certainly be writing more about this in the weeks to come.

At the beginning of last week, we completed the first draft of our Academic Continuity Plan (Word doc).  The idea is that if the H1N1 pandemic actually occurs with such a severity that F2F classes are canceled, then we have a plan to use Blackboard and Wimba Classroom to keep instruction going.  Like… immediately!  Within an hour’s notice.

If anyone reading this post actually clicks the link to read the plan, please know it is a draft! Nothing on that document is officially approved or sanctioned by anyone here at McDaniel.

Yet.

At this point, it is merely InTech’s proposal of how we think we should be prepared.

Much of the rest of the week was spent constructing the Blackboard class outlined in the plan–selecting the instructions, reformatting them, uploading slides that will be the basis of real time instruction, etc.  This will likely be the project we work on (off and on) for the next several weeks, hoping, of course, we never have to use the class.  The good thing about it, though, is that with a couple changes on the css and page headers, we can convert the Continuation of Instruction class into a terrific support class where we can deliver synchronous training sessions over the Web to adjuncts who find it difficult to come to campus for F2F training.

So in the lucky event that the Academic Continuity Plan is never used, the materials and set up will DEFINITELY be used for Online InTech Workshops.  In good times or bad..

The meanings are our own–
It is a text that we shall be needing,
To be the footing of noon,
The Pillar of midnight…

It was a pretty busy week for all three of us.

Chris, in addition to her Blackboard administrative duties, was busy preparing for a training session she gave on Friday to the library staff in the use of Office 2007 AND preparing for a session of Blackboard training she will be giving to a group of education instructors on campus next Tuesday.  Those attending will be instructors who teach methods classes in the education track.

Anita, in addition to all the support functions she gives to faculty, was busy all week researching copyright.  She sent a report to the CIO on Friday.  This is an incredibly important issue for the college and for us in InTech, especially as we roll out iTunesU this fall and increasingly use (and support the use of) video for class projects and assignments.  We’ve probably not paid enough attention to copyright matters in recent years.  It’s good we have someone like Anita outlining the issues, giving us direction, and helping to push a re-establishment of institutional policy.

We’ll write much more about copyright in the coming weeks.  Here and elsewhere. Policies, forms, and procedures will probably be made available on the InTech Web site and/or our official InTech blog, which Anita writes.

I had a fun week–mostly because this was my week to work with Gretchen M. as a part of the summer institute grant series.  (For those of you who don’t know, InTech works one full week each with five faculty members on special technology projects.)  We spent most of the time thinking about how to provide additional opportunities for student collaboration in her Ancient Rome class and her Medieval Art class. When I say additional, I mean additional.  Gretchen is a strong advocate of Reacting to the Past ; she has her students act out, in class, these “games”.  She is hardly the typical instructor.

Every time I work with Gretchen, I learn more than she does.

For instance.  My typical answers (Let’s do Wikis.  Let’s do blogs.  Let’s do Second Life.) didn’t resonate with her. She kept stressing that student collaboration outside of class was fine, but she wanted whatever  ”outside class” collaborative projects we came up with to inform  ”inside class” student interactions.  A wiki project wasn’t enough; it had to set up a series of in-class activities. One possibility we talked about: have student groups use wikis outside of class to create virtual art exhibitions, then present those exhibitions to a peer review panel inside of class and have the students vote on the best one.

I kept pushing the idea of having students create virtual art exhibitions in Second Life. That may–just may–be in the future.

I also had two important meetings this week.  One meeting was with the Provost, the CIO and the Director of the Center for Faculty Excellence.  We talked about ways InTech can do a better job of working with the CFE to support faculty in the use of instructional technology.

One of  InTech’s (my) weaknesses has been to offer technology solutions where instructors don’t see problems.  We will be trying in the future to focus first on the pedagogical problem (or goal) from the faculty member’s perspective.  Then have a conversation about appropriate strategies that may (or may not) use technology.

Hard for me.  I love the technology.  Too much, sometimes…

The other big meeting was with the new graduate steering committee for online course development. We are working out the details of how best to establish a course development and management process in Graduate and Professional Studies whereby we not only increase the number of online classes, we also improve their quality and the efficiency of how we manage them.

Great meetings.  Exciting issues.   Stay tuned for updates.

Earlier this week, The Chronicle of Higher Education published the article, “When Computers Leave Classrooms, So Does Boredom,” which describes how Jose Bowen,  Dean at SMU, has ordered computers to be removed from the classrooms down in Dallas, so as  to promote more active learning in the classrooms.  The sound bite was “teaching naked.” For several days, it was among the Chronicle’s most emailed stories (I think it still is).  Certainly, it was email forwarded a lot here at McDaniel. Several of us talked about it at lunch and in meetings for the next couple of days.

At first glance, the article looks like just another anti-technology rant.  Second glance, it looks like just another slam against PowerPoint.  Third glance, an attempt to cut back on technology.  But by the time you read the entire article, you realize it is none of the above (all instructors were given laptops and it was admitted that even PowerPoint has its place–online, outside of class).

In truth,  this article (and especially the accompanying video interview of Jose Bowen) is  one of the most passionate arguments for the use of Blackboard and for online teaching and learning technologies that I’ve ever read about or heard about from someone who is promoting and arguing FOR the F2F classroom experience.  Of course, promoting online technologies is not the primary point Jose Bowen is trying to make.  But his argument for taking technology out of the F2F classroom so as to force instructors to be more interactive in the classroom rests on the assumption that you can do that because technology is everywhere else.

Glenn Platt, a professor of marketing at Miami University in Ohio is quoted as supporting Jose Bowen’s approach.

“Schools need to be thinking this way,” says Mr. Platt.  ”It’s where they’re going to prove they add value to being there in the room, and not being online.”

Interesting, huh?

Used to be, the standard place for learning was the F2F classroom.  And when online technologies came along, we started talking about the Web enhanced learning experience.  With the advance, in recent years, of online learning platforms and other Web 2.0 technologies that not only more efficiently provide “content” but also provide opportunities for community and collaboration, it now seems as if the standard place for learning has become online, and we are starting to argue for the F2F enhanced learning experience.

Intentional or not on Jose Bowen’s part, seems to me that’s what he is arguing for–the F2F enhanced learning experience.

This week marks InTech’s first anniversary in Academic Hall, 103–the office suite at the bottom right of the above picture.  If you have not yet visited  the new set of offices where Anita, Chris, and I now work, please drop by.  We’d love to see you.  And the coffee is always fresh!

Last week, Benji updated the version of Linux Red Hat that was running Blackboard’s database.  Many of you might have noticed that Bb had been going down for an hour or two every couple of weeks in May and June.  It wasn’t really Blackboard that was having the issues, however, it was the server that ran Oracle. According to Benji, the OS was having a kernel attack  (which gave some of us panic attacks).  At any rate, with this new upgrade to the Linux server, we are almost certain this particular problem has been solved.  Many, many thanks to Benji, whom we rely upon more than anyone realizes, I’m sure.

This past Saturday (July 18), Crystal P. successfully directed and managed the graduate school’s comprehensive exams.   She had students in the Foreign Language Lab, the Writing Lab, Academic Hall G1, and Arundel Mills, all taking proctored exams, all on Blackboard.  Since Blackboard’s login authentication procedure had just recently moved to Active Directory (from LDAP), we were a little bit worried there might be some login problems, especially for some graduate students who do not use Blackboard regularly.  And Graduate Comprehensive Exams are pretty high stakes events.  So we hung around all day, expecting to solve a handful of problems.  But there were none.  It all worked like a charm.  The backend work done by Benji, Chris P. and Amy paid off!