Getting my Tweet Wet

I’ve had a Twitter account for several months, and aside from occasionally checking my feed to see what’s for dinner @RachaelRayShow, I really do not use it. In preparation for teaching my online Educational Technology class, I’ve been thinking about how I might use Twitter to enhance participant engagement with the material and with one another. The prerequisite course to this course includes an activity where students create a Twitter account and think about its possible uses in education. I would like to build on that foundation and use Twitter to promote a virtual community for sharing EdTech-related resources and trends, as well as ideas (or even logistics) about the course and course material.

I started by creating a new Twitter account that will be for professional/teaching purposes only,@EdTechEJS (so no Rachael Ray retweets on this one). I then started following a few Educational Technology–related users and groups, including some folks who run the program for which I teach.

Next I decided that to facilitate students’ access to the Twitter feed, I should embed it on our course site. When discussing this with a colleague, she suggested that instead of just embedding the @EdTechEJS feed, I create a hashtag for everyone in the course to use and display a feed of tweets containing that hashtag. With this method I am not the only person contributing to the feed; it is a collaborative effort, which is more in line with how Twitter is meant to work. The hope is that students will tweet questions or comments about the course material, share useful resources they find, and benefit from reading classmates’ tweets.

While searching for “create twitter feed from hashtag,” I came across this fantastic free tool called TweetBlender. TweetBlender creates an embeddable Twitter feed widget, and you can specify which “sources” will be displayed in the feed (usernames, hashtags, keywords). With this tool, I was able to create a feed that will display all of my tweets, as well as any tweet containing the course hashtag and the program hashtag. As I become more familiar with Twitter and what type of information I’d like to appear in the feed, I will add more sources. It may even make sense to add weekly topics as keywords for the feed as the topics come up in the course.

I am excited to see how this Twitter experiment goes. I really hope it makes the course site more dynamic and student driven. One challenge with using a Learning Management System is that most of the content must be posted by the instructor. Students have the discussion boards, but that is usually their only forum for contributing. The Twitter feed allows students to add content to the course site instantly and in a highly visible way. This endeavor should also force me to become more familiar with using Twitter effectively and better able to consult with faculty who would like to incorporate Twitter into their own course.

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Teaching in Disguise: Are You Game?

My six-year-old son Grant loves school—that is, all school except the Sunday Chinese School. To him, it is boring, too hard, and no fun. Last year, after trying the kindergarten class at our local Chinese school (and being a left-behind student) for two months, he dropped out.

Being a liberal educator and a non-tiger mom, I didn’t feel like forcing him to learn something that he was not interested in—until one day he said to me, “Mommy, do you know why I can’t speak Chinese? It’s because you never taught me when I was a baby!”

As a mother, I had been used to being named the source of all faults, but this particular accusation brought me chills—I would be considered a criminal, at least by myself, if he brought up the same claim when he graduates from high school.

Ridden by guilt, I sent him back to Chinese school this fall.

On the first day of school, dropping Grant off at the first graders’ classroom was quite dramatic: all the parents and their well-behaved kids watched me struggle to break away from his clenching and screaming. But then something happened, and it made my Chinese-resenting son fall in love with learning Chinese. This something was a computer program on a CD that was given to first-grade Chinese students as a homework assignment. After learning the rhymed text in class, students were supposed to unscramble the sentences by dragging the characters to the right location. They were timed for their action and given a code to copy down to their homework booklet as proof of completion.

With his eyes fixed on the screen and his hand fiercely moving the mouse, Grant completed his weekly assignments at once and moved on to the next lesson by himself. Once in a while, he would throw his hand over his head and shake his fist, announcing with excitement “yeah, I got it in fifty seconds, Mommy” or “seriously, Mommy, I’ve got it in zero seconds before!” I know that zero-second record was a miscount because he couldn’t read the Chinese word for a minute that stood in front of zero seconds, but nevertheless, I was thrilled—not just by my son’s progress but more by witnessing live evidence of the impact of technology or, more precisely, the strategy of making learning a fun game.

When I put my instructional designer’s hat on to analyze this learning scenario, I see that this simple, computer-aided learning exercise designed by Dr. Liping Ma as part of her Chinese-language curriculum contains quite a number of gaming characteristics, even though it wasn’t branded as a game. In fact, it carries elements of all three general good-game design principles summarized by Dr. James Paul Gee (Learning by Design: good video games as learning machines):

  • Empowered Learners—It was not me dragging him into a classroom; it was he himself driving the mouse and the movement of the words.
  • Problem Solving—There is a challenge for Grant: he has to compete with himself to complete the task in shorter and shorter times.
  • Understanding—Grant has to comprehend the rules of the game as well as the foundation of it, which is the meaning of each Chinese character (even though he didn’t realize that).

Using technology as its powerful carrier, games—in all forms and shapes—are invading our lives. They are commonly viewed by parents and educators as a threat—an evil monster made with some additive ingredients that competes with us for our children’s, our students’, and even our own attention and making it hard for all of us to focus on the right things, such as learning. In dealing with this “threat,” we have tried to shut it out (can you guess how many places I have tried to hide my son’s Nintendo DS?); we have used it to incentivize (“If you finish your homework, you get to play Nintendo for twenty minutes”); and in some rare cases, we have used it as a tool to teach (such as downloading a math or a spelling game to cover up the true purpose of learning with the mask of a game).

Above and beyond these commonly used strategies, there are people who have been trying to push the battle to a whole new level: they have dived into the core of the monster to detect those ingredients that have made it so evilly appealing and addictive. They are the researchers from both sides of the battle field: learning scientists and game designers. And they found out that designing a good game follows the same instructional-design principles that have made learning happen in an effective and pleasant way:

  • it engages the player/student with the appropriate level of challenges
  • it rewards the player/student with incentives (points, scores, levels, and/or encouraging words)
  • it offers chances for nonwinners to try again
  • it provides rules and support in clear and intuitive ways
  • it fosters a sense of competition either with others or with the player him or herself
  • it puts the player/student in the driver’s seat to make choices and to control the progress
  • it offers a combination of consistent elements (so you don’t get lost) and surprises (so you don’t get bored)
  • it calls for sensory involvement of eyes, hand(s), and brain
  • it makes it possible for one to play as someone else
  • it connects the players and/or forms a community

(This list will grow longer after more ideas and practices are shared by DePaul faculty at the Annual DePaul Faculty Teaching and Learning Conference—Playing with Purpose: Apply Game Design Principles for Learning, on April 20th, 2012. Please stay tuned for the Teaching Commons announcement.)

I hope as you read through this list, you will share my feeling that it is not just games that are everywhere—those game ingredients are easy to find in our lives and in our teaching practices. The other day, when Grant got back from his Chinese school, he gestured a high five to me—“Mom, guess what, I earned eight points for my team today!” I heard my heart chirping with gratitude to his teacher who probably hadn’t noticed that she had just “game-ized” a dry character quiz.

Dr. James Paul Gee said, “Under the right conditions, learning, like sex, is biologically motivating and pleasurable for humans (and other primates).” By making it explicit, the game-design principles can offer us some clue to establish those right conditions so that the misconception of learning-as-work will be corrected by learners who then would reclassify their act of gaining knowledge as a leisure activity.

One evening after finishing my work-late day, I came home to find my husband battling with our five-year-old daughter and six-year-old son on the living room floor. With my daughter fiercely grabbing Daddy’s legs, my son pulled the pillow from his hand and jumped underneath the coffee table—“touchdown!” he yelled. As the two little ones marched on for another round of football, I heard my husband stopping them, “Grant, what was you score? OK, 38… So with a touch down, you get 6. What is your score now? What about the one point for the kick….”

As he paused to add the numbers up in his head, my little football player had no clue that he was taking a math class in disguise. But for the Daddy, he surely was game in catching a teachable moment to build some learning—thanks to that ten years spousal influence!

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What Mobile Platforms Could Do for Higher Education but Aren’t (Yet)

If you’re the type who likes to follow trends in technology, you know one of the most remarkable trends in the last few years is the pace of innovation in mobile platforms like Android, iOS, and Windows Phone. If you have a smartphone, it’s probably already become your notepad, your navigation system, and your external memory, and in a few years, it could be your wallet, the brains of your computer, and your home automation system. I have to confess that I spend more than a little time tracking each new development in the smartphone/tablet world.

And every time I see a new component, a new sensor, or a new interface method that gets added to a mobile platform, I have an idea for a use for it in higher education that would enhance learning or enable learning activities that were impossible before. But so far, very few of these technologies are configured in such a way that we can effectively utilize them in higher ed.

In the spirit of keeping an eye towards the future, I’m going to present some educational use cases that utilize the unique technological capabilities of mobile platforms. In most cases, the underlying technology to do these things exist now, but the user options in the software are too limited.

I want to clarify that I’m interested in the new affordances of these platforms. While there’s no shortage of educational “apps” in the Android Market or the iPhone App Store, they’re mostly self-contained programs that could have been made just as well for a computer, with a touch interface added. They don’t tap the new potential of the these platforms, which represent a unique convergence of technologies—portable internet access, GPS sensors and compasses, orientation  sensors and accelerometers, cameras and microphones, touchscreens—and operating systems that make it easy for programmers to utilize and combine them.

As I discuss these use cases, I’ll mostly be referencing Android, as it’s the platform I’m more personally familiar with.

Image Recognition

Imagine you’re an art history teacher. You assign your students to visit the Art Institute of Chicago and look at a special collection of paintings. Your student scans a painting with his mobile device’s camera. The software recognizes the painting and a recording you’ve made about the painting starts playing through his headphones while notes appear on the screen. The notes contain links to related information and more paintings from the artist. The student is then given a short quiz asking questions about the techniques at use in the painting, all while he’s looking at the real thing.

Why We’re Not Quite There

The Google Goggles app can scan and recognize famous works of art today if you take a picture of one—I tried it the last time I was at the Art Institute—but the best it can do is pull up web search results relating to that painting. Which is great for an independent museum visitor who wants to learn more about the artist, but there’s no way for an instructor to leverage that technology to create some custom media or applications for his class that can be played or displayed when an image is recognized—at least, not without learning how to program.

Connected Textbooks

Imagine your student is in a doctor’s office with an unexpectedly long wait. She didn’t know it would take so long, so she didn’t bring her backpack. But she always has her smartphone with her, so she pulls up an academic text that she had been reading on her e-reader. The software remembers where in the middle of the chapter she left off, so she doesn’t have to try to hunt for the last page she read on the small screen. As she’s reading, she highlights a passage and pulls up a menu to make a quick note on her smartphone keyboard. She gets home later, logs onto the book on her computer, finds the note she made and pastes it into the text of a paper she’s working on.

Why We’re Not Quite There

The big problem here is the number of academic texts available in cross-platform e-book systems is severely limited. Also, many popular e-book platforms don’t support user annotations or automatic syncing between devices, and fewer support the automatic syncing of annotations.

Note Taking

Imagine your student is reading a dense, theoretical book that she has taken out of the library for a research paper, the kind of challenging text you need to read aloud in order to grasp and unpack the author’s full meaning. She come across a passage she wants to record in her notes, but she fears that if she stops to copy it down, she’ll lose track of the point the author was making and have to re-read a few pages, and she may have trouble making out her handwriting later anyways. Instead, she takes a picture of the page with her smartphone, which uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to translate the image into editable text and sends it to the notes file on her computer. In the front of the book, the library has inserted a QR code that, when scanned by her phone, gives the full citation in MLA and APA format, which she can copy directly into her works cited page.

(I know that there are technological pessimists out there who would interpret this scenario as a shortcut that would reduce the time and depth of the student’s engagement with the text. That may be true in some situations for some students, but ussually making the process easier allows students to spend their mental resources on the content they’re trying to understand.)

Why We’re Not Quite There Yet

Right now, the Android version of Google Docs can use OCR to translate a picture into editable text that you can copy and paste directly into your research project—kind of. Consumer OCR technologies are still maturing, and the margin for error is high. Right now, Google’s OCR does well for short pieces of text on a flat surface, but it doesn’t recognize text on a curved surface, like a page that curves into the spine of a book. Also, not all smartphone cameras are created equal, and some aren’t reliable enough at capturing crisp images—a necessity if the software is going to be asked to interpret text.

Some people think that print itself is going to be phased out and that this technology will be made moot as more and more texts are published digitally in the first place, but I would guess that the OCR technology will catch up long before we’re in a position to do away with paper books entirely.

There’s nothing to stop libraries from including QR codes containing full citations with each book in their collection now—they would just need to be able to justify the cost.

Map Making

Imagine a sociology class focusing on food deserts in urban areas. As part of their field work, students go out in small teams and walk every block in a given neighborhood. Every time they come to a drug store, convenience store, or grocery store, they use their smartphone’s GPS and map software to make a waypoint that identifies what kind of store it is and to enter other quantitative and qualitative data. After every group has completed their field work, the data is combined to create a complete map, which can be made public as a layer on Google Maps.

Why We’re Not Quite There

Google Maps allows you to star a location, which will save it, sort of like a bookmark, within your Google account. But right now the mobile versions of Google Maps don’t let you combine a collection of starred locations into a map, with labels and descriptions, let alone share those points with others to create a combined map.

Getting There

These are just a few examples. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say the possibilities are endless. Of course, even if the software gets configured in such a way to make it easier for educators to tap into, we’ll still face the obstacles of actually making sure students have access to these devices.

  • Cost—Will we ever reach a point where students are expected to have mobile connected devices? Will the prices of cellular data plans drop enough that this is a reasonable expectation of already financially strained students? Will universities be able to provide assistance or lend out devices in cases where assignments require them?
  • Standardization—Will the same or similar applications be available in all major platforms? And if not, would a university or department be able to require a specific platform without putting an undue strain on students who may have already bought a different device on contract?
  • App stores tend to be geared towards consumers. Will administrators be able to buy apps in bulk and deploy them to, say, a class of students’ devices? And if you could buy apps in bulk, would you be able to disable the licenses on students’ own devices and reuse them on the class next quarter?

I can’t say what the answers to these questions will be, but if the pace at which smartphones and tablets are evolving and being adopted continues, I have little doubt that we’ll see them more and more in higher education.

Are Instructors Ready for Show Time?

Attend any conference on distance learning and you’ll hear lots of enthusiasm for instructor videos in online courses. Whether they’re DIY webcam course introductions or sophisticated in-studio productions, the general belief is that more video equals a better course. I’ve long been an advocate for increasing the use of instructor video, but lately I’ve come to the conclusion that not every instructor is ready for show time.

Why? Mostly it’s because the qualities that make for a good video require skills and attributes that aren’t necessarily found in all, or even most, faculty. Engaging images and narrative aren’t usually what’s presented in a classroom PowerPoint. Brevity is a must, but many academics lecture even when coached not to. Ease and comfort on camera are essential, but I’ve seen too many recordings that feature white-knuckled instructors gripping a podium and staring blankly into the middle-distance.

This isn’t the fault of the instructor. Writing for media and performing for video are specialized skills not part of the typical Ph.D. program. And I’ve been guilty of handing faculty a couple of video production guideline documents, offering some generalized tips, and then being disappointed when the results are less than desired.

No more. I’ve decided that I need to be involved every step of the production process, from ideation to script review to preproduction rehearsal and on-site coaching and art direction. It will be a much longer and labor-intensive process, but I think it’s absolutely necessary to get results that everyone can be proud of.

I’ve also come to the conclusion that some faculty just aren’t able to appear on camera in a way that adds value to their course. While unfortunate, it’s a fact that a stiff, sweaty delivery by a visibly uncomfortable professor leaves a poor impression of his or her abilities as a teacher and, by extension, the program or school. For them there are other ways to add social presence. I’ve worked with faculty who are clearly unsuited for video but who produce really engaging audio podcasts. It would be irresponsible for me to insist on video when using audio gives a much better result.

So are instructors ready for show time? A few are, some others can be made ready, and some will never be. The challenge is to identify which media best suits an individual faculty member, diplomatically guide them to that media, and then follow through with lots of hands-on direction and oversight.

Constructing Effective Online-Learning Environments via the Community of Inquiry (CoI) Framework

As designers developing online courses, we’re always looking for purposeful ways to ensure that the instructor, content, and student interactions are strategic, cohesive, and meaningful.

What’s more, we are also tasked with staying abreast of and introducing faculty to research, theories, and methodology associated with constructing rigorous and effective online pedagogy.

At the 27th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning, the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework was the focus of several sessions including sessions from Northwestern University, the University of Illinois Springfield, and Capella University. Intrigued by the implications of the framework, I wanted to learn more about the framework’s efficacy in higher education.

The premise of the CoI framework suggests that creating an effective online experience requires a collaborative community. The CoI framework, developed by Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (2000) is defined as follows:

An educational community of inquiry is a group of individuals who collaboratively engage in purposeful critical discourse and reflection to construct personal meaning and confirm mutual understanding.

The Community of Inquiry theoretical framework represents a process of creating a deep and meaningful (collaborative-constructivist) learning experience through the development of three interdependent elements—social, cognitive, and teaching presence.

  • Social presence is “the ability of participants to identify with the community (e.g., course of study), communicate purposefully in a trusting environment, and develop inter-personal relationships by way of projecting their individual personalities” (Garrison, 2009).
  • Teaching Presence is the design, facilitation, and direction of cognitive and social processes for the purpose of realizing personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile learning outcomes (Anderson, Rourke, Garrison, & Archer, 2001).
  • Cognitive Presence is the extent to which learners are able to construct and confirm meaning through sustained reflection and discourse (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2001).

CoI is a framework that many higher-education institutions cite to inform, and in some cases measure, the effectiveness of online-course development.

The granular elements of the CoI Framework are listed in the table below. The “categories” and “indicators” provide explicit examples of how , the CoI model elements can be interpreted by an online-course designer.

Garrison D, Arbaugh J. Researching the community of inquiry framework: Review, issues, and future directions. Internet & Higher Education [serial online]. July 2007;10(3):157-172.

In 2007, a peripheral resource, the CoI survey instrument was developed and ultimately, validated. This survey instrument correlates with the CoI framework and is being utilized in studies at some institutions as an end-of-course evaluative tool.

As a course designer, I’m always looking for ways to equip faculty with a slew of resources to get the wheels turning as they think through the course content and design.

For some professors, it can seem intimidating at the outset of development to segue from teaching face-to-face to online. It’s especially challenging to identify strategies that will translate to meaningful online teaching presence. One strategy to brainstorm ideas for not only teaching presence but cognitive and social as well is utilizing the CoI framework elements to flesh out assessments and learning activities that align with each.

For example, with social presence, the professor can structure discussions via group cohorts that are led by a weekly discussion leader. This strategy allows students to establish a rapport with the cohort members. Additionally, students are empowered and accountable for the content they are charged with leading during their respective week.

Concepts such as these would serve as an invaluable resource to faculty members, especially those new to teaching online. Creating a central repository for faculty members to share and collect resources may serve as a community for online pedagogical strategies.

RESOURCES

The Community of Inquiry website:
http://communitiesofinquiry.com/
http://communitiesofinquiry.com/methodology

Garrison D, Arbaugh J. Researching the community of inquiry framework: Review, issues, and future directions. Internet & Higher Education [serial online]. July 2007;10(3):157-172. Available from: Academic Search Complete, Ipswich, MA. Accessed August 29, 2011.

Arbaugh, J.B., Cleveland-Innes, M., Diaz, S.R., Garrison, D.R., Ice, P., Richardson & Swan, K.P. (2008). Developing a community of inquiry instrument: Testing a measure of the Community of Inquiry framework using a multi-institutional sample. The Internet and Higher Education. 11 (3-4), 133-136.

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Introducing the “Everything that FITS” Podcast

In June 2011, the FITS Department began production of Everything That FITS, an ongoing podcast for members of the DePaul community and the world at large, focusing on instructional technology, pedagogy, and teaching and learning. Podcasts may contain audio transcripts of blog entries on the iddblog.org site, interviews with faculty and staff members, or other content to be determined. We’re dedicated to helping you find your inspiration to teach smarter!

New podcasts will be added on a monthly basis, and you can subscribe to Everything That FITS through iTunes U at DePaul. Use this link to access the Podcast.

Happy listening!

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Going Analog: The Why versus the How in Instruction

Note: Listen to this entry at Everything that FITS, an ongoing podcast for the DePaul community and the world at large, sponsored by DePaul University’s Faculty Instructional Technology Services department. Tune in for tips, tricks and useful information to help you teach smarter every day.

Technology is inescapable these days. It has made some things in our lives easier, and has changed the way we communicate with the world. It serves as our portal to our homes, schools, and jobs, and is in some cases the center of our social lives. Many technology tools that we now take for granted have augmented, and in some cases replaced, older analog technologies, enabling us to streamline and simplify our tasks. In many cases we ask ourselves how we ever got along without such a resource. Consider where we are now compared to twenty years ago with technologies like cell phones, e-mail and the Internet—or even just ten years back when social networking with Facebook, MySpace, and Friendster was just beginning—and you can see how much the landscape has changed in just a few short years. Kids growing up today don’t remember not having cell phones and always-on Internet access; now social networking sites aren’t just for amusement but have become a way of life for most of us. If you do anything embarrassing while someone is filming, you can bet that it will show up on YouTube for the world to see. All of these, in varying degrees, have changed how we interact with one another and with the world.

However, as we grow accustomed to these new technological innovations, are we developing new skills to our benefit, or are we simply replacing older analog methods of accomplishing the same thing? And are there advantages to the new way over the old one, or are we “phasing out” skills that might still have some importance from time to time? Consider these examples:

  1. Although kids are still taught to read analog clocks in grade school, the majority of clocks being installed in schools these days are digital, or if they are analog, they include a digital readout at the bottom. The majority of clocks in most homes are digital too (your DVD player, clock radio, computer, etc.). As a consequence, fewer and fewer kids can read a wristwatch because they aren’t getting the practice. My wife teaches 8th grade, and she says she has a lot of kids who can’t tell time without a digital clock! This trend makes traditional wristwatches seem almost like relics of the past, but for those who still treasure these timeless pieces, watch repair services are essential to keep them in working order and preserve their charm. And for those interested in starting their collection, be sure to check out these replica watches for sale.
  2. Lots of people these days use maps from the Internet or GPS to get directions. But what if the information on the GPS is outdated, or the Internet directions are wrong? This happened to me recently in Colorado: after Google Maps led us into the middle of nowhere and off course, we pulled over and bought a state map, and that got us on the right track. However, this was only because I know how to read a map, which obviously won’t give turn-by-turn directions, and to use the compass I carry with me. We are losing the ability to navigate with map and compass, because the majority of the time you don’t have to know how to read them anymore. Many people are content to turn on their phone’s location service or their GPS and follow blindly from there, without truly knowing where they are or where they’re going; they just follow the directions and assume they’ll get there.
  3. The last time you had to do some mathematical computation, how did you do it? I bet you whipped out a calculator, used your computer or phone’s built-in calculator, or did a formula operation in a spreadsheet program. You probably didn’t reach for a pencil and paper to do some long division. Like telling time on analog clocks, they do still teach this in schools, but these days calculators are used at least as often, even on standardized tests. The state of Illinois gives aspiring teachers a Basic Skills Test that is roughly equal to the abilities in math and English of an 8th grade student. This test has a 77 percent failure rate as of 2010, and the failing scores are predominantly in math. Why? As someone who has taken this very test, I can venture a guess: calculators are not allowed, which means that test takers have to navigate that long division unaided. They are failing because they have been using calculators for so long that they have forgotten how to calculate by hand.

So what does this mean for us? Operations like telling time, navigating, and doing math haven’t changed, but the way in which we find answers in each system has, and our increasing reliance on these electronic devices is slowly removing the old ways simply because using them is easier. In most cases, the failure we are seeing isn’t the inability to choose what operation to perform; it’s the failure to do so without an electronic device’s aid. Thinking back a number of years to when we still needed road maps, we didn’t have any more trouble getting around than we do now even though mapping is available on nearly every phone. The ease of using the electronic counterpart is now overshadowing the old fashioned tried-and-true way. This may not be a problem in everyday usage, but it can be catastrophic when the technology doesn’t work. What if you don’t know how to do it the low-tech way?

This phenomenon of new technology replacing old has huge implications for the teaching world. More and more, students are coming out of K-12 and college with a set of skills that are predominantly plug-and-play; that is, they have the ability to solve a problem using a tool, but they don’t have the know-how to tell you what procedure they are following, or even why they are following the steps in that order. Instead, they know a procedure that says, “If I do thing A with tool X, I will get answer B.” There’s no intuition in this; the cognitive process has been removed altogether and replaced with an instruction manual of sorts. Problem solving cannot happen here unless the information to be plugged in is presented in the same way the student learned the procedure.

In the last decade, educational philosophy has increasingly focused on creating “authentic,” “real-world” problem-solving processes. The argument is that students need to be able to apply learned concepts to actual situations they will encounter instead of doing purely theoretical exercises. This concept is a fantastic idea in theory, but the catch to this is that many of the electronic replacements we are using are removing the theoretical portion and leaving only the process. There is no opportunity for students to see the theoretical knowledge being applied or to understand how it is being applied; they just plug in numbers and variables and get an answer. If the answer was all we were looking for, this would be enough, but obviously as instructors we are interested in students’ mastery of the theoretical, not their ability to plug and chug. We need to be sure that we’re teaching students the “why” part of the process, and not just the “how.” If you are going to use an electronic replacement for an analog activity, it is important to make sure that the resource still requires the student to do some thinking on his/her own outside of number-crunching. If there is a process that can be done by hand, the resource should be used to simplify that process rather than replacing it, and instructors should make sure that students can still perform the specified actions without any electronic help. If possible, teach the analog method first, so the tool will be perceived as a helper rather than the primary problem-solving method. For example, students learning to do bibliographic citations could be told to create citations on their own by hand, and then use an online bibliography tool like EasyBib or NoodleTools to check their work. In this way students learn to do the work on their own, and perceive the tool as a helper for difficult citations rather than as “the way to create citations.” Students learn to do the heavy lifting first, and the tool is secondary, rather than being the heavy lifter.

In this age of electronic conveniences, it’s often difficult to try and “go analog” and do things the old-fashioned way when there are so many easy ways around to do it faster, cheaper, and with less human involvement. Still, the benefit to learners has remained the same, even though the times are a-changin’. Regardless of what the electronic world can create to “enhance” our lives, there’s still no substitute for old-fashioned know-how and human reasoning, and those who don’t need electronic crutches will always have an advantage. It’s important to remember that sometimes the old way is still a useful one, even if it’s not the easy one.

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+1 Intellect: Can Experience Points Improve Student Motivation?

When was the last time you felt a sense of accomplishment so gratifying that you threw your hands above your head and shook your fists with pride and elation? This gesture has been identified by psychologists as a universal expression made by people of all ages all around the world when they feel a sense of personal triumph. Italians call this feeling fiero, and the term has been adopted by game-designers to describe one of the most essential feelings a good game should provide.

In Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, Jane McGonigal proposes that most people’s everyday lives are shockingly fiero-deficient, and I have to agree. Most of us don’t complete our workdays with a fist-shaking gesture or spontaneous dance as we revel in our daily achievements, and much of our leisure time is spent on escapist forms of entertainment. If you can remember the last time you experienced a true fiero moment, chances are it was vicarious (e.g., watching a football player score a last-minute touchdown) or of no use to anyone in the real world (e.g., defeating a challenging level in Angry Birds).

McGonigal wants to change all that. To make the case for the ambitious assertion found in her book’s subtitle, she focuses on three key points.

  1. Reality is filled with tedious obligations and overwhelming problems that leave human beings feeling bored, powerless, and isolated.
  2. Games are humanity’s most effective tools for fostering engagement, empowerment, motivation, human connection, and a sense of accomplishment.
  3. The same principles that make games so rewarding and addictive can be used to change how we feel about and tackle unpleasant and daunting tasks in the real world—from cleaning our toilets to reducing global energy consumption.

To provide specific strategies for translating the best qualities of a good game to the real world, McGonigal proposes fourteen “fixes” for reality. Almost all of these fixes can be applied to education, and I hope to eventually assemble a group of DePaul faculty to read the book and discuss them further. For now, however, I’d like to focus on one of my favorites: “Meaningful Rewards When We Need Them Most.”

To introduce this fix, McGonigal describes a talk she gave at a conference in which she lamented,

‘If I have one regret in life, it’s that my undead priest is smarter than I am.’ Technically speaking, it’s true: if you were to add up every A I’ve gotten in my real life, from junior high through graduate school, the total still wouldn’t come close to my World of Warcraft character’s intellect stat. Never mind the fact that there’s no score at all for getting smarter once you’re out of school.

McGonigal frequently refers to the motivational power of “leveling up”—a concept commonly found in role-playing games that provides players with progress milestones and encourages them to keep striving for higher levels of expertise. When a player levels up, it means his or her character has accumulated enough experience points to get improved strength, stamina, weapons, or other tools to help the player complete increasingly challenging missions.

In some games, completely leveling up a character can take hundreds of hours of gameplay. Yet players are rarely daunted by these lofty requirements because they are provided with a steady stream of smaller victories and positive feedback as they move closer to their next goal. During her conference talk, McGonigal mentioned that she wished some of this positive reinforcement could be extended to reality, allowing friends and strangers to give her experience points in recognition of her latest achievements. As a result, an audience member at the conference created plusoneme.com. The site bills itself as “gold stars for grownups,” and it provides a simple online tool that allows users to quickly recognize each other whenever someone demonstrates an admirable trait.

Initially, I thought, “What a great idea! Who doesn’t love to be recognized for their efforts? And wouldn’t it be great in an online course? This could make students feel more valued and connected without a big fuss or hokey bonding activities.” I even signed up for an account on plusoneme.com to try it out, but my blind adoration for the site was short-lived. Within a day or two, I opened my mailbox and pulled out the latest issue of The Atlantic. The headline, “How the Cult of Self-Esteem is Ruining Our Kids,” practically leaped off the page.

The text and image on the cover were promoting an article by Lori Gottlieb titled, “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy.” Based on the headline and article title, it should come as no surprise that Gottlieb is one of many pundits blaming the indulgent parenting methods of the last few decades for creating a generation of entitled, neurotic, self-absorbed kids who are now entitled, neurotic, self-absorbed adults. It’s a backlash parade with Amy Chua serving as the Grand Marshal for 2011.

McGonigal seems to agree that most people born around 1980 or later are particularly frustrated and bored with reality. However, instead of blaming parenting trends, she points out that these younger generations have grown up with engaging, empowering games, and that these games have made the shortcomings of reality more obvious and stifling than they have ever felt before. Rather than try to put the genie back in the bottle through humiliation or forcing a toddler to play piano until her fingers bleed, scholars like McGonigal ask, “Is there a way to increase motivation, productivity, and fulfillment by turning the task at hand into a game?”

In McGonigal’s world, the answer is almost always yes. In one example, she notes that she and her husband have used the website Chore Wars to turn everyday household chores into competitive challenges. In the game, chores are assigned various point values, with the most unpleasant tasks receiving the highest number of points. By default, the points that players accumulate in Chore Wars have no material value. In McGonigal’s case, the current high-score holder has the right to choose the music whenever she and her husband drive somewhere together.

McGonigal claims this simple and free reward system has changed the way she and her husband view everyday housekeeping. She says the Chore Wars over-the-top fantasy world, in which users can collect experience points every time they “conjure clean clothes” or “rid the kingdom of toilet bowl stains,” has left her home cleaner than it has ever been. While I doubt that driving-music veto power would motivate me to clean my bathtub, McGonigal does provide more than her own household as a case study. Other users claim that Chore Wars’ has turned their children into an army of competitive cleaning machines, which I’m sure most parents would agree speaks volumes to the power of a little virtual encouragement.

That’s great for McGonigal, who could probably game her way through a root canal, and for kids, who aren’t embarrassed to think of a duster as a magic wand. But what about the rest of us? Can we really use game principles to make completing our grown-up, mundane obligations more gratifying?

At the risk of sounding like an over-indulged millennial, I wouldn¹t mind a little excitement and a virtual gold star once in a while for all my hard work. And I’m not ashamed if it takes a little imagination to get others to participate. After all, fiero is in short supply in these troubled times, particularly here in the land of Scholarshire, where the shadow of the evil Lord Profitus has cast a pall of terror across the land. If all it took was a kind word of praise in ye mystical comment box below for my blogger character to level up, wouldst thou aid me in my quest? Or wouldst thou side with the dark forces and leave me to rot in a cubicle, denied any reason to throw my hands above my head and shake my fists with pride and elation?

Let’s make a game of it and see.

Learning About Word in the Mile High City

The topic of accessibility in course design is important, often overlooked, and for me a bit intimidating. So when I saw “Creating More Accessible Word Documents” as one of the breakout sessions at the Fusion 2011 Desire2Learn User Conference in Denver last week, I knew it was time to step outside my comfort zone and attend. Going into the hands-on session, I expected to be overwhelmed, but hoped to come away with a better understanding of accessible documents for online courses. The session exceeded my expectations, and I learned that designing Word documents for screen readers is actually quite simple. I also learned some really great tips about Microsoft Word in general and walked away feeling empowered with knowledge to better use Word and design with accessibility in mind. The presenter, Karen McCall, is a beta tester/accessibility consultant for Microsoft and Adobe, and you can find resources about accessible document design on her website: http://karlencommunications.com.

Here are some of Karen’s tips for creating more accessible word documents (in Word2007—directions vary slightly for other versions).

  • Screen readers cannot read any text in a text box, shape, or object , like those cute speech bubbles you can insert or an equation inserted as an image.
  • For an equation image, a screen reader needs the equation written out. For example, “Forty plus two minus twenty seven.”
  • Always supply “alt text” if you use an image. Insert alt text by right-clicking the selected image, selecting Size & Position (or Format Picture) and then typing in one to two descriptive sentences for the image.  If the image is a link,the alt text should explain where the user will be taken upon clicking the image.
  • For text hyperlinks, only link the word(s) describing where the user will be taken. Screen readers can compile a list of links in a document, and if all links start with “click here to,” the generated list will not be easy to use. If, however, “Yahoo,” “Google,” and “YouTube,” are the link text, an alphabetized list of sites will be generated.
  • Apply styles like Heading 1 and Heading 2 appropriately in the document by highlighting the heading text and selecting from the Style menu. Screen readers recognize properly-styled headings, and this creates navigational points for the user to access the text. Creating a Table of Contents from your headings is also a helpful feature. Never set a sentence or paragraph as a heading, as it will make for a confusing navigation point.

Select Heading Styles in Word

  • If you are making a list, use the bullet or numbered list button, as opposed to just hitting Enter between lines. Again, the screen reader recognizes proper lists and will provide the user with information about the list (e.g., how many items in the list).
  • Do not type using all caps. Even those without a visual disability have trouble reading words in all caps because the brain cannot use the word shape to predict the word. (Every word in all caps is basically a rectangle.)
  • To turn your accessible Word document into an accessible PDF, do not “Print to PDF.” Instead, use the Save As PDF function, or use Acrobat to convert to PDF. When using Save As PDF, check the box for “Create bookmarks using Headings” and “Document structure tags for accessibility.”

The presenter also demonstrated several keyboard shortcuts that were new to me. As someone with a visual impairment, she finds it easier to use these shortcuts and keep her fingers on the keyboard than use the mouse to make several clicks on different parts of the screen.

Here are some miscellaneous fun Word tricks

  • To quickly create filler text on a page—especially helpful when creating a template—open a Word document and type “=RAND(5, 6)” (without quotes). In this example, 5 tells Word to create five paragraphs of text, and 6 indicates that each paragraph should have 6 sentences. These numbers can be adjusted to your need. If you want Latin text, substitute “LORM” for “RAND.” Otherwise the text is randomly pulled from the Microsoft Word Help.
  • Some PC keyboards have a key near the top that functions like the right-click on a mouse.
  • To style words as Heading 1, select the words, then type Ctrl + Alt + 1. For Heading 2, just substitute a 2.
  • Ctrl+Enter will create a new page. If you do this command with the cursor in front of the first word, you will create a blank page 1 and push the starting text to page 2.
  • Ctrl+End will take you to the end of a document.
  • Ctrl+Home will take you to the top of a document.

In addition to using these accessibility tips, I would like to try using different screen reading technologies to get a better idea of the user experience. Designing for screen reader use is just one piece of the accessibility puzzle, but it is a good start.

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Building a Box to Think Outside of It: Standardizing Online Content Layout

The Article of the Future project, an initiative of Elsevier, recently released prototypes for the web-based display of research articles in six discipline areas. The templates amazed me with their thoughtful design that allows readers to easily breeze through research articles on the screen. The design is as simple as a three-pane view we usually see on a web page, with the article outline, the content, and the references section. But what strikes me the most is the design philosophy behind the project: to leverage the use of technology to make reading more convenient, efficient, and rewarding, which is the philosophy needed for online-course design.

For example, the layout prototype for a business-management research paper offers a content view with tabs that can expand the layout to include an outline on the left, a context information pane on the right, or both of them, with a single click.

In the content area, the prototype takes full advantage of the multimedia and user-control capacity offered by the web: from graphic animation and video abstracts to interactive charts and diagrams, it offers a full spectrum of options to the readers.

The idea that Elsevier has of building a standardized online layout for research paper coincides with the desire our students have expressed to have a common structure for all of their online courses. In this summer DePaul Online Teaching Series (DOTS) program, during the online student panel discussion, one faculty member asked, if there was one thing that the students could name as the most important for an online course, what would it be? The answers given were: feedback and structure.

While it is quite understandable how important it is for faculty to provide feedback to students they’ve never or rarely met, why would the structure matter?

“So we don’t have to worry about where to find stuff,” the student said.

The “stuff” is the content and the “where” is the structure. If we save students from using their mental power to seek and search for the content, they can then use that mental power for the content itself. And, as Ruth Clark pointed out in her efficacy in learning theory, one critical goal of instructional design is but to achieve the efficacy in learning by reducing the wasted mental power and maximizing its use for the instructional purpose.

Parallel with the Article of the Future project, DePaul’s Faculty Instructional Technology Services (FITS) is moving toward creating a standardized course shell for online and hybrid courses. This master course shell includes not only preloaded menu items and module structure but also built-in content such as orientation, instruction on course navigation, online learning guidelines and expectation, and where to begin with the course.

But if all the courses look the same, will it be like an attack of the clones? What about creativity, innovation, and character?

As an instructor who strives to make every class refreshing, memorable, and profoundly “unique”, the hat that I also wear as an administrator of instructional technology helps me face reality, in which, as Gerry McGovern pointed out, the formality is merely the shell, the content inside of it is the one that is winning us the competitive advantage—whether for a web site or for a course. Besides, a consistent format, as Lee Schulman pointed out during his speech at DePaul Teaching and Learning Conference, is critical for student success. Without a box, no one will be able to think outside it!