Being the sports fan that I am, I have taken note of the recent outbreak of Twitter-related disciplinary actions involving athletes. Those of you who follow the NFL or NBA are familiar with the Chad Ochocincos and Gilbert Arenases of the world. And the trend has filtered down into the collegiate and high-school ranks as well. The Texas Tech football team was banned from tweeting last season, and just last week, a University of Idaho basketball player was suspended for tweets critical of his coaches and teammates. The rational for the disciplinary action is nearly always that the tweet is “conduct detrimental to the team.”

In a previous entry, I laid out this scenario:

You want to use some Web 2.0 technology in your course, so you have each student create a blog on Blogger to have them chronicle their work and thoughts through the term. As an instructor, you visit these sites and leave comments on the blog. In order for you to keep track of which student has which blog, you ask them to have their names on the front page of their blog and for them to e-mail you the URL so that you can go through them all, moving from one blog to the next. No grades are shared via the blog, and your final evaluation for the student comes in feedback that you provide within the Gradebook area of Blackboard.

A week or two ago, I sat in a meeting where we attempted to weigh the intelligence of our faculty and students. Oh, we were too polite to call it that exactly; ostensibly at least, we were discussing how we could make our wikis more user-friendly. The discussion covered a range of possible cures for the perceived disease, from more intensive faculty training to student scaffolding to more and better tutorials. All well and good, this desire to make things easier for our end users. As a fairly recent convert to Usability, I embrace its tenets and evangelize for its centrality in our design process. Still, I wonder if things are really so difficult for our users, and if so, for whom and how many? Are we looking at a usability issue or a user issue? Are we simply reacting to the squeakiest wheel?

In 1998, I had my first full-time job as a computer-graphic designer in a media center at Indiana State University. The word “computer” in my job title differentiated me from the other graphic designers in the office. While they produced print materials like banners and posters designed in Photoshop or Illustrator, I didn’t do much of the drawing and printing, because to me, the word “computer” meant but one thing—PowerPoint!

I’m a fairly typical, multitasking, always-connected member of generation Y (or a late gen-Xer, depending on who sets the cutoff date). My laptop and I are rarely apart, and I quickly run out of things to occupy my time when I’m deprived of high-speed internet access. (My parents finally upgraded from dial-up just before the holidays, and as a result, I finally agreed to stay with them for more than 48 hours.)

Back in December of 2007, Rick Salisbury (see 12 Web Tools of Christmas Post) mentioned EditGrid as one of his top tools. While EditGrid is a great tool for creating shareable spreadsheets with many advanced, Excel-like features, I have found a new use for this application in online classes—virtual sign-up sheets! More than a few times in the past few months, I have needed a tool to allow students to sign up for something—be it to lead a discussion, create a blog post, or choose a book for review. With our current learning management system (LMS), Blackboard 8.0, there is no easy way to do this, so faculty are left using some sort of e-mail/discussion work-around or simply assigning students. While these work-arounds suffice, the process has always seemed clunky and overly difficult. I recently remembered Rick’s post, and the idea of using EditGrid to create a virtual sign-up sheet was born. I am currently piloting it in my own class, and students seem to be able to sign up without difficulty, and I am able to see the results easily. A win-win in my book.

In my post from November 9th, 2009, I suggested two discussion starters—polling and pros and cons—and promised more strategies in future posts. So, here are two strategies for getting your online students talking to each other in more depth about course content.

1. Roles in a Case Study – present the class with a short case study and assign each group a part to play in that case. Each group discusses their “part” identifying primary concerns, varying influences, and possible actions for that stakeholder. Each group reports when everyone reconvenes. Discussion flows from there to identify differing approaches to the problem and possibilities for a mutually agreeable solution. I’ve seen this work particularly well using an ethical situation; it would work well in any course addressing conflicting concerns and interests.

When instructors who have years of experience teaching face-to-face classes start teaching online, it’s tempting to try to simply “port” their traditional classes into the online environment—that is, to convert their existing classes to a new medium with no modification. These instructors have developed well-tested teaching techniques, sometimes through a painstaking trial-and-error process, and are often understandably hesitant to change them.

For the Educause Learning Initiative’s annual meeting, I’ve been preparing a workshop about various legal issues to keep in mind when designing assignments for a course. Specifically we’ll look at copyright, Creative Commons, and FERPA.

Most people look at me funny when I mention FERPA. Working at different institutions of higher education, it is always mandated that I know something about FERPA. Usually it’s just that student educational records are private, that they shouldn’t be shared, and that directory information can be shared unless a student opts out. Normally FERPA is seen as the concern of administrative offices that hold what have been traditionally seen as student records (grades, registration dates, etc).

All the talk about learning management systems (LMS) around the office lately reminded me of a dataset a couple of colleagues and I put together last year. Dr. Florence Martin, Dr. Yuyan Su, and I undertook the task of validating an instrument to measure LMS self-efficacy.

Bandura (1997) defined self-efficacy as beliefs in one’s abilities to carry out a desired course of action. I’ll spare you the details of orthogonal exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses.

One of the many variables we decided to examine was whether student LMS self-efficacy was a predictor of course performance. After all, is not learning the primary motivation for using a learning management system?