I recently came across Maria Anderson’s presentation Playing to Learn? while browsing through her Teaching College Math Web site. The layout of the presentation mimics a large game board with a flowing channel formed by consecutive progressing squares. Each forward click triggers either a panned movement or a zooming effect, which gave me the illusion of being in a video game.
“A critical part of becoming creative is being able to play—to play with ideas, with tools, and with pedagogical techniques.” This is a point made by Dr. Punya Mishra at the preconference workshop (Creative Teaching with (and without) Technology) for this year’s DePaul Annual Faculty Conference, and it is a point that I try to practice whenever I get to wear my professor hat.
As the instructor of a beginner-level Chinese-language class, I design various kinds of TPACK games and events that combine pedagogy (P), technology (T), and content knowledge of Chinese (CK). The activities I’ve designed range from celebrity-gossip sessions in Chinese (yes, I learned a lot about Jersey Shore in class), to an interactive lecture session with PowerPoint, to an online character-writing assignment on Wimba, to an all-about-my-family talk on Voicethread.
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!
“Often faculty don’t need more training on the tool, they need more training on the affordance of the tool and how to use it to support learning.” Patricia McGee, associate professor from the University of Texas, made this statement while offering tips for training faculty on teaching with technology in the newsletter Higher Ed Impact: Weekly Analysis, published by Academic Impressions.
Good-looking Web pages—the ones with stylish layouts and eye-pleasing images—are more likely to retain viewers and even get people to perform actions like buying something or submitting a form than the ones that are plain and makeup free. Is this true or false?
Some interesting research on this question was performed recently by John Broady of Omniture Digital, who ran multivariate tests on “Request for Information” forms for two online universities. For each test, the goal was to increase the number of users who completed the Request for Information form. For the same content, one site had stylized page design, “hero images” (glamour shots of good-looking people in seemingly natural settings), colored buttons, and benefits message while the other had just information in text.
Students are not fond of teamwork, especially when it’s online. That is one of the findings of my dissertation, which explores the relationship between online students’ interpersonal needs and interaction preference. Nine years have passed since I received my Ph.D., and this unfavorable feeling toward teamwork still seems to be present to a large extent for online students.
VoiceThread and Camtasia are two of the many tools that we are introducing to faculty for online teaching. For those of you who don’t know about these tools, here is a quick intro.
VoiceThread is a tool that allows you to share images, audio, and presentations online and collect comments in the form of text and audio. See the demo below, which was created within Voicethread:
Camtasia is a tool that lets you record actions on your computer screen to create presentations or training videos. With Camtasia, you can produce a tutorial, a quick Web-based demo, or a narrated PowerPoint presentation.
No one likes to read learning objectives. Okay, this might be too extreme a statement. Let me rephrase to make it sound more academically correct: no one, other than instructional designers, academic creditors, faculty/syllabus-writers, or students who are bored to tears, likes to read learning objectives—unless they are short, punchy, and, hence, super retainable!
As an instructional-design professional, I fit into the category of learning-objectives reviewers. I have a tendency to browse through the objectives portion of various documents: course syllabi, training brochures, webinar announcements, and even activity notices from my kids’ school. I look at them not to learn purpose of the events but rather to catch “violators” of our learning-objective rules: “to understand”… vague word; “to improve” … but how; “to be able to” … under what condition!
For those of us who rely on Outlook to manage our activities, trying to schedule a meeting with those who do not use the Outlook Calendar can be a pain. For me, that pain usually comes when I work with a faculty group, because many of our faculty do not have their schedules on Outlook.
That is why finding a tool called “Doodle” was like finding a painkiller for meeting schedulers like me.
Yesterday, a friend of mine sent me a link to a New York Times article written by Stanley Fish on the Power of Passive Campaigning. Being a nonnative speaker and not born to the Christian culture, I found a number of the terms and references Dr. Fish used unfamiliar. So I tried to learn the definition of these words through my usual method: highlight the word, copy it, open Answers.com, and paste the word into the search field. However, this time when I highlighted a word, a little question mark icon showed up at the upper right corner. Out of curiosity, I clicked on the icon, and guess what I found—a pop-up window with an Answers.com page giving me everything I wanted to know about the word! A closer look at the header of the pop-up window told me that this was a New York Times reference search powered by Answers.com. The word “powered” is used very appropriately here, because the function did serve to empower this online newspaper by offering users like me an easy way to access the meaning of every single word in an article.
