There was an article in the Red Eye on Friday, October 19th about young people not wanting their parents or “creepy old people”—which includes anyone over 40—on the social networking site Facebook. (If you’re not familiar with local Chicago media, the Red Eye is a popular free newspaper. Although it’s unseemly for a librarian to be caught with one, the paper is the perfect length for a relaxing commute read.) There are a number of things that I found interesting about this article, especially as we in higher education examine ways to connect with students where they already are.
The idea that people over 40 are considered “creepy” in the Facebook world begs the question, “How do students really feel about their professors wanting to network with them?” Do students really want their professors in their social networks? Are professors and students really “friends?” I would argue that like everyone else, students need spaces where they are not “at school” the same way those in the working world need spaces where they are not “at work.” In that context, it’s easy to see why crossing these lines can lead to feelings of resentment about the infringement.
This is not to say that social networking technology can’t help build meaningful communities in the online environment. However, I would argue that what we really need to be pushing is for solutions that are integrated into the course management system (whatever that might be) or that were developed for an educational purpose. The focus should be less on what service is being used (e.g. Facebook) and more on what the technology does.
Providing social networking tools as part of the student’s classroom experience (be that online or face-to-face)—but not as part of their social experience—makes a lot of sense. For example, Ning is a free Social Networking tool that faculty can use to create a social network for their class (or perhaps for a cohort). Ning allows instructors to tap into the positive aspects of social networking technology without the baggage of being in a student’s personal space.
While there is something to be said about having everything in the same place, I would argue that we need to have lines in our lives to separate the different components. The hope, of course, is that these lines keep us grounded and more sane!
For more information on the “graying” of Facebook, you can view the original article, “73 and Loaded with Friends on Facebook,” on the New York Times website.
Running the video production team for IDD, I am often asked to include subtitles with the videos we create. However, we don’t really have an efficient workflow for producing subtitles and I am often unable to fulfill the request. I know we need to improve our ability in creating subtitles—not only to meet the demands of our diverse student body (students with disabilities, international students, etc.), but also to allow for text-based video-searching, which will increase each video’s value as a learning object.
Recently, I have asked some of our Graduate Assistants (GAs) to assist in producing subtitled tracks for our videos using a share-ware subtitling application. When you factor in software training, transcription time, proof reading, etc., it takes a GA two hours and 20 minutes on average to produce one minute of subtitled video. Once a GA was experienced with the processes and comfortable with the software, he or she could produce one minute of subtitled video in 20 to 30 minutes.
Last year, IDD produced 128 hours of original video content. In order to caption all of the videos we produced last year, it would cost us $215,050. (GAs make $12/hour.) Even if we used only experienced GAs, our annual cost would still be $30,720 and require at least two GAs dedicated to subtitling.
This past summer at the Annual Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning in Madison, Wisconsin, I was introduced to a company named Automatic Sync Technologies. The University of Nevada, Las Vegas uses Automatic Sync as its exclusive partner in creating video transcripts and subtitles. Through a web-based interface, users upload their videos to Automatic Sync receive a subtitle track and a full transcript three days later. At this point, all the video producers have to do is associate the subtitle tracks with their original videos and they are done. Automatic Sync pricing is based on the volume of videos you submit. The more you submit, the cheaper it gets. Captioning our 128 hours using Automated-Sync would have cost DePaul $17,114, a significant savings even at our most efficient production capabilities.
Outsourcing our subtitling work to Automatic Sync or one their competitors seems like a no-brainer. It’s cheaper than doing it in-house, produces a more reliable product, and lets our GAs spend time working on other valuable projects.
If your university or organization has an efficient and effective way of producing subtitles for video, I’d love to hear about it.
Depending on where you stand, education is poised to be elevated into the sublime heights of effortless and ubiquitous real-time virtual interaction and connectivity, or about to be overrun by leering mountebanks as tech-bewitched apostates unbar and swing wide the sacred doors of academia.
At least that’s my take on the current discourse regarding Second Life. I attended the University of Wisconsin’s Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning in early August, then the Second Life Community Convention in Chicago August 24-26, and was struck by the divide between those for whom Second Life is just too cool, and those who are left just a bit cold.
The debate seems unnecessarily polarized. At Madison I heard a lot of fear and loathing from some distance educators. Fear that students would fall prey to sexual predators, either by wandering outside of the purportedly safe confines of a virtual classroom or campus, or by the penetration of those defenses by a rogue’s gallery of grifters and charlatans. Fear of embarrassment as naked or hyper-sexualized avatars appear in class. And ultimately, I think, fear of the loss of control, fear of the learning curve to master the technology, and fear of the concomitant workload. For them Second Life is a cold, soulless world far removed from the warm embrace of the classroom and face to face interaction.
The true believers I met and listened to at SLCC have no such qualms. For them SL is super-cool; a democratic and easily accessible new world where anything can and should be visualized and experienced. A world where learners can experiment with identity and experience situations and encounters that would be cost or risk prohibitive elsewhere. Where participants can collaborate and connect more intimately in virtual space than would be permissible or possible otherwise. And a world where the shackles of identity are loosed, role playing becomes an unlimited learning tool, and learning becomes intuitive and fully collaborative, unsullied by the constraints of gender, age, or class.
Just too cool!
I stand somewhere in the middle of this debate. I agree SL is cool, at least the promise of it. Once you get the hang of navigating in-world, which is not intuitive unless you’re a gamer always on the hunt for the best game apps to win real money, there’s a real sense of presence that I don’t experience in asynchronous discussions, chat, or instant-messaging. When I encounter another avatar I experience the same type of social awareness I would in the real world: I’m conscious of proximity, gaze, posture, and the like. Whether this has any purely educational value is certainly up for debate, but if your goal is to increase the sense of connectedness shared by your distance learners you’d be hard pressed to find a more effective tool.
As for collaborative possibilities, one SLCC presenter talked about the virtual fashion design class she created and taught. Fashion students working with peers in art and computer science designed and produced fashions using Photoshop and Second Life, dressed and posed avatars, planned and produced a virtual fashion show, and created portfolio animations of their work. Using the 3D virtual capabilities of Second Life they were able to conceptualize and experience much of the actual work of designing, producing, and presenting fashion collaboratively in a way that would have been impossible given the school’s budget and location. And the instructor stressed that while the class was a collaborative effort, she remained in control of the direction and pace of the workflow.
So yes, it’s cool.
But it’s not the panacea or paradigm shifting agent its disciples declare either. First, it’s not an easy technology to master or fully exploit, especially if you expect to do more than roam around. Plan on devoting six intensive months or more to creating a functioning virtual campus. And that’s with a team of scripters and 3D artists at your disposal. Second, it should be no surprise there’s no shortage of skillful, antisocial nut-jobs that call Second Life home. While I think some of my fellows at the Madison conference were a bit too timid, they raised some valid concerns. Griefers abound in SL, and while you may raise defenses a skilled and determined hacker will find a way around, over or through them. Imagine your class on human sexuality disrupted by pro-life avatars wielding virtual fetuses and you get an idea of the kind of mischief that can occur in-world. And I’m sure lawyers will be kept busy for years to come defining the liability of institutions when their students experience emotional or financial trauma in a course-required Second Life session. Then there are the seemingly regularly scheduled system failures to the SL grid, which Linden Labs owned up to at SLCC with grace and good humor. Finally, while immersive virtual reality is a powerful tool for teaching molecular structure or visiting reproductions of ancient Greece, does anyone seriously think an English lit course is going to benefit by having virtual students sit in a virtual classroom listening to lectures by a virtual instructor? Aside from the novelty of seeing your professor holding court as 7-foot Seductra Maxima in stiletto heels and a rubber mini it’s hard to see any value added.
And I think determining value is what the debate really centers on. There are great ways to exploit SL, and some real problems with the technology as well. I’d be remiss to not mention the digital divide debate that attends SL as an educational tool. There are hardware and broadband requirements that currently preclude a lot of otherwise connected distance learners from participating in Second Life. Those issues will have to be addressed, as well as Linden Lab’s difficulties supplying a robust and dependable platform. But I do think we’re going to see some great things in Second Life or its successors as the bugs get worked out and more content is developed. Personally, I’d like to walk around first-century Pompeii and see if I can outrun Vesuvius’ pyroclastic flow. I’m not sure there’s a lot of real educational value in being able to.
The Educause Center for Applied Research (ECAR) recently released its fourth annual research study on the role of technology in student life, which describes their findings of the ways college students use technology and the impact this may have on instruction. In case you don’t want to leaf through the 122-page PDF, you can read Andy Guess’s article in Inside Higher Education for an excellent analysis of the study. But the ECAR report is well worth reading. The tables and stats alone will come in handy for you to whip out at any cocktail party when the discussion turns to “these kids today”.
Researchers found that as suspected, college students are using technology like crazy.
Among the interesting statistics:
73% of students have laptops (although half don’t bring them to class)
Average hours per week on the Internet: 18
81.6% of students use social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace
74.7% have music/video devices
85.1% use instant messaging
43.1 % accessed a wiki every week
Over 70% use the Internet (including library databases) for research
This study shows that student use of communication tools such as text messaging, IM, and social networking sites has increased significantly—up 11% since the last study in 2006. Students also make frequent use of Blackboard, email, and discussion boards in their academic work. But although this generation of college students has grown up immersed in these new technologies, they are not ready to abandon real-life human interaction quite yet. Researchers found “themes of skepticism and moderation alongside enthusiasm” among the students regarding the use of technology in courses, noting that 59 percent of students preferred a “moderate rather than extensive use of IT in courses.”
One theme that emerged from the study was that many students found that “the poor use (underuse/overuse/inappropriate use) of technology by faculty detracts from the learning experience.” Complaints included time wasted trying to make equipment work, poorly facilitated discussion boards, and poorly-trained faculty. It is good to know the youth of today are discerning customers. Students won’t buy into the use of technology unless a faculty member can use it well and integrate it meaningfully into the curriculum. Students know that technology alone is no substitute for good teaching practices.
Although student opinion seems to be a bit mixed about the use of technology in the classroom, the overall message of the report is clear: the times are changing and instructors must face the reality that this generation of “digital natives” has grown up with higher expectations for the skillful use of technology and has different ways of learning and accessing information. These new technologies aren’t going away and will just evolve into a Web 3.0 and 4.0 and so on. In the introduction, Harvard professor Chris Dede summarizes the entire state of affairs in one sentence: “Our ways of thinking and knowing, teaching and learning are undergoing a sea change and what is emerging is both rich and strange.” Dede recommends that educators work towards a pedagogical model that fuses the old methods and new, but as this is a bit easier said than done.
The Inside Higher Education article posed some interesting questions regarding the report that I’ve adapted a bit: “How can educators adapt their teaching methods to these emerging technologies? And should they? How are you dealing with this “sea change” and navigating through this ocean of wikis, blogs, RSS feeds, social bookmarking, and all things Web 2.0?
I took my first French class in 10th grade at a public school in a small Alabama town. The class was typical of most high-school foreign language courses. We spoke mostly in English and the assessments were designed to ensure that no one would fail the class. Vocabulary tests typically asked us to pair French terms in column A with their English equivalents in column B, like so:
____ Banane
A) Apple
____ Pomme
B) Orange
____ Orange
C) Banana
Grammar tests were only slightly more challenging and usually consisted of simple sentences with missing verbs to conjugate, as shown below:
Demain nous ___________ à la bibliotheque.
(go)
I often memorized the verb conjugations the night before (or in some cases, just minutes before the start of the test), then filled in blanks feverishly the minute the exam was in my hands. Speed was key, since my mental snapshot of the proper endings for each verb would begin to blur after five to ten minutes. Occasionally, we were subjected to some other form of memorization torture. This usually involved reciting poems or singing French Christmas carols.
That first year, I thought my French was formidable. (Or, as the French would say, “formidable.”) I could rattle off the French names of almost any object in the classroom. I could tell you exactly how to say I go, you go, and we go. (Saying where I, you, or we were going wasn’t always so easy.) The following year, I transferred to the Alabama School of Math and Science (ASMS), a rigorous magnet boarding school in Mobile. I had to take a French placement exam before enrolling at ASMS, and I knew I was in trouble when there wasn’t a single matching question on the test. My horrible score on the placement exam meant I had to start all over again with French I—along with nearly every other student who had taken a year (and in some cases, two years) of traditional high-school French.
On my first day of French class at ASMS, my teacher explained that our lessons would be built around French In Action, a series of videos designed to teach us French through total immersion. (“Videos” really isn’t the right word, since we viewed everything on gigantic laserdiscs.) As we watched the first few episodes, I was completely overwhelmed. I wondered what language I had been studying for the past year in my hometown, because it certainly wasn’t whatever those people on the screen were using to communicate with each other.
French In Action was part soap opera, part Sesame Street, and it wasn’t great at being either. The storylines were bland and the lesson recaps were repetitive. Yet, despite the actors’ dated haircuts, the overacting, the two-dimensional characters, and the ludicrous plot twists (or perhaps because of them), the whole class was hooked. We were so hungry for anything other than the usual verb conjugation tables and vocabulary memorization that we actually felt invested in the simple narratives. We cheered when Mireille’s bratty sister fell in a fountain in the park. We leaned forward with anticipation when it seemed Robert would finally ask Mireille on a date, and we laughed when our teacher tried to explain a new verb or noun through her own unique system of charades. She would flail her arms wildly, run around the room, improvise with props—anything to avoid a direct translation to English. The goal was to make us think in French, and that’s exactly what the class did.
I went on to major in French in undergrad and was the first student at the University of Alabama to participate in a semester-long exchange program with a French university. (There was another student who was supposed to join me for the adventure, but she went home when she discovered the dorm rooms didn’t offer private bathrooms.) After my semester in France, I decided to move to Germany to live with a few German friends I had made in France. I didn’t speak a word of German at the time.
By the time I left Germany five months later, my spoken German was nearly as good as my French. Of course, there were times when I wished I had learned a few basic grammar rules the old-fashioned way. I was forced to rely on my instincts when trying to conjugate a verb in a complex tense or pair the proper article with a masculine, feminine, or neuter noun. And I still couldn’t explain key differences in the four German cases—nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive—if my life depended on it. However, none of that stopped me from understanding and participating in lots of great conversations with my German friends or communicating with strangers at the grocery store or the pharmacy.
My experience learning German made me wonder (more than ever before) why student progress in learning a new language is still assessed through fill-in-the-blank tests and short essays. Before the days of YouTube, I could understand why an immersive approach to foreign language education was easier said than done. I can still recall how my class “oohed” and “aahed” years ago when one of my professors brought in a VHS tape with a few grainy episodes of Friends that she had recorded while in France. She clutched the precious black plastic cartridge tightly, hugging it to her chest as though she feared one of us might snatch it from her before she could insert it into the VCR. She told us that it cost over two hundred dollars to convert the tape to a North American video format, and we all shook our heads to express our disbelief and our gratitude.
Until recently, supplying students with a German episode of The Simpsons or a Japanese news broadcast required about as much planning and sacrifice as a cocaine smuggling operation. A devoted instructor might record a soap opera during a vacation abroad and carry the tape home like a priceless artifact from an archaeological dig. Once the tape was transported safely, the search would begin for the rare translator of foreign media formats—an elusive code breaker who could make the artifact accessible to the instructor’s students. Today, a wealth of foreign media is only a click away.
So, why isn’t everyone leveraging foreign-language media to create more immersive learning experiences? Some instructors might argue that, YouTube or no YouTube, good foreign language education isn’t primarily about learning enough to understand words and phrases used in popular entertainment and carry on an everyday conversation. The argument over what’s really important in language education (grammar, syntax, and spelling vs. general comprehension and diction) is nothing new. Yet, no matter which side you sympathize with, I think most instructors agree that video and audio can go a long way to promote thinking in a foreign language (as opposed to translation), reinforce key concepts, and burn words and phrases into long-term memory. This brings me to the critical, concluding question of my article, which I hope you will respond to by answering the survey below. (And feel free to provide further feedback by posting a comment.)
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