In a recent issue of First Monday, Scott Reid shares results of a study he conducted of faculty shifting traditional, face-to-face classes to an online context (Online courses and how they change the nature of class). Part of this discussion centers on faculty experiences in using the discussion board feature and the challenges of building successful online learning communities. This vexing question, of course, represents a big component of distance education research. Nevertheless, in one of the more interesting excerpts, one of his respondents speculates that part of the problem may relate to cueing:
One professor … thought some students were holding back on participating because they didn’t have cues such as body language to help determine the receptiveness of other people in the course.
What I find interesting in this relationship between cueing and the level of receptiveness is its implications for spontaneity. Spontaneity can lead to promising insights and creative ideas, but if a student is overly concerned with the degree of receptiveness, then it seems likely that the potential for that kind of stimulating environment is reduced. One way faculty lay the groundwork for better receptiveness or -cueing participation- is through a variety of orientation activities that focus on building interpersonal connections rather than immediately launching into the business-side of the course. Learning communities can’t be built without recognizing the time it takes to build the trust and understanding of different students’ communication styles.
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First Monday, Scott Reid
Filed under: Collaboration, Distance Education, Research
With the massive adoption of microblogging platforms like Twitter, there’s been talk about whether or not RSS readers are dead (1, 2, 3) . One of the recent threads in this discussion happened over at Mashable in which one of the commenters (Eric McGinnis) mentioned feedmil — something that isn’t an RSS reader or a microblogging platform. Essentially, with feedmil, you can search blogs, microblogs, and news sites. But that simplicity belies its power (at least as far as I’m concerned). It’s got numerous features, but here’s just a little smattering of what I found beneath the surface.
- Interface:
It sports an interface that foregrounds simplicity and clear visual cueing. Both of these make it very intuitive.
- Sorting:
You can sort feeds by blogs, microblogs, podcasts, and others. You can also sort by feedmil rank, relevance, or quality. It also has multi-lingual capabilities.
- The Slider: customizing search results —
One of its more distinctive options is a set of sliders that allow you to customize related keywords (what they call Topic Significance). For, for example, if I enter the term instructional technology
, one of the related keywords that will appear in the Topic Significance slider column is university
. If I then move the slider to the right to increase its significance, then my search results are automatically tailored towards higher education. (UI gift = No need to click a confirmation [OK] button.)
- The Slider: skipping through history —
When you click on a specific search hit or result, not only does it display a brief synopsis and relevant urls, but it gives you another slider tool to quickly explore the chronology of a blog without even going to the site itself. So, for example, when you move the slider to the left, it moves back through the previous entries and displays the entries for those dates. Pretty slick for doing quick historical searches.
So in my initial fooling around with it, the Slider seems to be where its real potential power lies; it pushes beyond basic keyword searches.
Am I going to toss my RSS reader? Not likely. For me, my reader (currently NetNewsWire) is still an optimum way to keep up with my favorite observers and analysts. But I definitely plan to use this as a research tool and would suggest it to students.
Filed under: Design, Research
Continuing to sit in on a grad Comp/Rhet class as a guest panelist/speaker…
Today, we spent some time talking about a piece in the NY Times that has attracted quite a bit of attention. In fact, I just checked the Times and it sits as #1 in their Most Popular listing.
Glossing the details, the author, Mark Taylor (a professor in Columbia’s Religion Dept.), argues that higher ed needs to be modernized to meet 21st century demands. While the argument isn’t new, one of his recommendations that I like is his call for more cross-disciplinary collaboration. Historically, colleges such as Evergreen and UC-Santa Cruz have made this a centerpiece of their curricular model since the 70s, but increasingly, more universities have moved in this direction (e.g., MIT Media Lab, Penn State’s Information Sciences & Technology, Stanford’s H-Star, Maryland’s iSchool). I’m somewhat surprised, he didn’t briefly allude to this relatively established trend, but still, it certainly can’t hurt to advocate for more of it.
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Penn State, Stanford University, Evergreen State College, UC Santa Cruz, MIT Media Lab
Filed under: Research, Teaching
Dspace is an open source systems that academics can use for sharing their work. It allows not only text files, but multimedia as well.
Quickly skimming the site, they list many other American universities already using it. What struck me about Dspace, especially after watching their introductory video, was that while configuration, etc. seems fairly straightforward, it might be better to route these database-oriented responsibilities to the main campus library staff who are already assuming more IT-like jobs than leaving it up to each individual department whose internal staffing resources might be already pretty constrained.
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Dspace
Filed under: Research, software
March 30, 2009 • 11:39 pm
If you’re an academic and you don’t know about Zotero, you should take a few minutes to check it out. It’s immensely useful for collecting and annotating a wide variety of web-based materials, and whenever the opportunity presents itself, I recommend it to colleagues and students. I’m not surprised at all to see that it’s now been recommended by more than 100 colleges and universities.
For those Zotero enthusiasts, they’ve put together a list of 10 Reasons Your Institution Should Adopt Zotero. Here are the notable highlights for me:
- Open Source
- Cross-platform
- Extensible (e.g., Concordia University’s Vertov)
- Synch-able across machines
- Multilingual (30 languages)
Maybe the next step, if they haven’t done so already, is Zotero swag.
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Open Source, Zotero
Filed under: Research
February 25, 2009 • 11:18 pm
I’ve blogged about Zotero before (1, 2, 3) and think it’s a great tool for researchers. A couple of recent enhancements they’ve added that make it even better for my workflow are
Syncing of course, is ideal for those instances in which you’re doing research on a machine other than the one you normally use. And for most academics this happens quite a bit (e.g., one machine at the office and one at home).
I find the saved searches to be a huge time-saver because it saves me from documenting it in a separate note or word-processing app.
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Zotero
Filed under: Research, software
February 18, 2009 • 8:35 pm
Matthew Kirschenbaum has a thought-provoking essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education on Why humanities students should learn to program.
A key part of his argument lies in doing away with the stereotype of programming as little more than cubicle-bound nerds hunched over keyboards and engrossed in incessant, tedious cycles of debugging software. He analogizes this to the same way that English Department faculty are often viewed by many on the outside as doing nothing more than correcting grammar. The push here then is to see programming as fundamentally a creative act.
But why? How? He points us to Donald Knuth’s famous tome (The Art of Computer Programming), and draws from his own experience to explain that programming is about model-making and that the rich variety of programming languages gives the writers of these programs more than one way to construct these different models in much the same way that novelists, for example, have many different ways of constructing a story line. So in programming, there are different ways to envision the model of a word-processing program or spreadsheet program (hence the historical battles between Microsoft and all its open source and proprietary competitors). Then, of course, there’s also the increasing popularity of that epitome of digital, model-making, namely, virtual words (Second Life).
Understanding these virtual worlds, he explains, requires a “procedural rhetoric, or procedural literacy.” For me, this procedural rhetoric seems like a descriptive chronology of choices and movements, or a script, made by game-players, or characters, in the virtual world. Terms like rhetoric, characters, and scripts are, of course, very familiar to those of us in English and the Humanities. And so some initial questions that spring to mind are, What are the scripts being constructed by the characters in these virtual worlds? How are these scripts being influenced by rhetorical situations within these virtual domains? How is our understanding or perception of the real and virtual influenced by the shifting back and forth between these two spaces? These questions don’t seem like the sole purview of geeks.
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Second Life, Chronicle of Higher Education, Matthew Kirschenbaum
Filed under: Research, Teaching, Tech
November 11, 2008 • 9:44 pm
Tamara Adlin over at UX Pioneers has an interview with John Carroll. New details to me were his interest in English literature and work with Noam Chomsky.
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John Carroll, Adlin
Filed under: Design, Research
September 15, 2008 • 10:41 pm
Anything with a 2.0 suffix has gotten a fair bit of grief recently as nothing more than a passing fad or gimmick. In academic circles, there have been the same types of criticisms thrown at terms such as “new media” and “Literacy 2.0.” Diane Penrod has some thoughtful contributions on this topic. In her brief article, Web 2.0, Meet Literacy 2.0 she lays out a pretty solid case for why it isn’t.
What drives Literacy 2.0 is a robust, enhanced skill
set that requires knowledge of many areas and training
in numerous activities that move beyond the ability to
read and write at a competent level for the print
medium. Academic culture needs to develop a better
awareness that, while important, traditional literacy is
no longer enough to ensure student success. To be
Iiterate in the 21 st Century, educated people must be
proficient in assimilating, transmitting, and transforming
information into new, meaningful units for contexts
and situations that, in some instances, have yet to
occur. (51)
For academics trying to sort out hype from substance, this surfaces as a good sifting tool. This also reminds me of some of Will Richardson’s good work over at Weblogged, e.g., 21st Century Literacies from the NCTE
Filed under: Online learning, Research, Teaching , 2.0, literacy
