Monthly Archives: August 2010

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Foreclosing on Face Time: Online Learning and the Housing Crisis

Richard Florida is perhaps best known for his 2003 book The Rise of the Creative Class in which he proposed that the future fortunes of modern cities would depend on their ability to attract innovative, white-collar professionals. He labeled this group of workers the “creative class” but noted that this group extends far beyond artists and designers to include scientists, engineers, and other problem solvers who use outside-the-box thinking to overcome challenges in their fields. 

This spring, Florida published The Great Reset, which focuses on the current recession and its impact on urban development. Florida claims that the recession presents a valuable opportunity for the U.S. to scrap failed policies and move in a new direction to meet the demands of a changing economy. One of the key theories he presents is that the government subsidizing of home ownership (through tax deductions and low interest rates) has severely limited the mobility of the American workforce at a time when workers desperately need to move to find work. For expats dealing with similar issues abroad, you can read more here to understand how these factors may impact you in Thailand. Florida believes that rather than continue to encourage Americans to buy homes and put down roots in one city for the long haul, our post-recession economy should encourage renting and mobility and embrace the natural cycle of boom and bust that allows some cities and regions to thrive while others wither and die. To facilitate this shift, the availability of services like a full service residential moving company becomes crucial, making it easier for people to relocate as job opportunities arise.

While I don’t believe that we’re going to become a nation of renters overnight, I know firsthand that the housing crisis has left many members of generations X and Y questioning the value of owning a home. For the hundreds of thousands of young Americans who are unable to sell their homes and unable to find fulfilling jobs close to those homes, the carefree and unattached life of a renter certainly has a renewed appeal.

All of this is good news for online learning for obvious reasons. Distance education is designed for people who want to learn without being bound to a particular place. If the recession is forcing Americans to appreciate the value of being mobile, many people might also reevaluate their views on the value of spending years stuck in one place just to get an education.

But what if Florida is wrong? Surely many people put down roots in one place for a host of reasons that outweigh their desire to go wherever jobs are plentiful. With that in mind, it seems likely that employers will be forced to make some compromises in order to attract the best talent. One compromise that seems likely to continue to gain traction is telecommuting—allowing workers scattered across a city, region, or country to work wherever they please.

A friend of mine in Seattle runs a consulting firm that helps companies manage geographically isolated employees. In talking with him about his business during a recent visit, I kept thinking about how valuable the experience of being an online student is for anyone who ever needs to work from a distance. Online courses teach students much more than just how to be good accountants or nurses or programmers or teachers. Online learning also teaches students how to communicate, collaborate, build relationships, and solve problems without being in the same place at the same time. The future of the housing market might be difficult to predict, but it seems clear that technology continues to make working remotely a more viable option for more workers. With that in mind, I can’t think of a better way to prepare today’s students to be flexible, mobile workers than through coursework that transcends geographic boundaries and even the occasional upside-down mortgage.

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Introducing Prezi: Go Fancy for the Right Reasons

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.

 

Playing to Learn? on Prezi

The tool Maria used to create this presentation is called Prezi. It is a one-year-old Web tool created by two Hungarian designers. The fact that Prezi was brought into the United States by TED, the global advocate of creative ideas, says a lot about the value of this new tool. It allows presenters to break the convention of slide-by-slide creation; instead, it offers users a drawing board—a canvas—on which to present all the information, either all at once or piece by piece.

I was thrilled by the zooming effect between the big picture and the tiny details within it because it helps prevent viewers from losing track of the overall structure as they maneuver deeper into the presentation. This is usually the problem with PowerPoint presentations—a problem I have been trying to resolve by including the main structure on every slide or adding a quasi-zooming effect by highlighting some areas and dimming the rest.

Besides keeping track of the big picture or concept, what else can Prezi do? With this question in mind, I started to explore the Prezi site for more examples. The site has a very clean look, and it’s very easy to navigate. However, as I got into the middle of the third Prezi show, I started to get motion sickness and feel light-headed, as if I was watching a home-made video shot without a tripod. I wanted to bypass some zooming and panning transitions to see the next slide, but it wouldn’t let me.

As my excitement cooled down, I started to look at it through my instructional designer’s lens. Prezi, like all the other tech tools, was invented to serve some purposes but not every purpose. It will work well in some situations, and it may not work at all for others.

After spending a few days testing this tool, I think the following scenarios may be suited for the use of Prezi:

  1. Presenting a complicated structure or a concept map
    If you need to present a large illustration of multiple concepts that are interconnected, Prezi can be a good choice. It is the best tool I have seen yet for toggling between big and small areas of one image. It also allows the flexibility to zoom in and out during a presentation based on questions or concerns raised by the audience.
  2. Presenting graphic works (developed in other graphic applications)
    At this point, Prezi’s drawing and designing tools for content creation on the canvas are very limited: although you have a few design templates to choose from, you can’t change the font color, pick the font type, put in a new background color, or add objects (beyond the limited options given). Adobe Illustrator would be a much better choice for content creation, or you can simply draw it on paper and scan and upload it into Prezi. The most attractive Prezi shows are cartoonish presentations, and those drawings were certainly not done in Prezi.
  3. For audiences of the video game generation
    I realized that many of the Prezi presentations were created by K-12 teachers. The viewers of these presentations, I would assume, are more used to moving and rolling images on a screen. Animated transitions, when they are not used too excessively, may help young people focus.
  4. For marketing and reinforcement of a key word, a main concept, or an image
    I am preparing a presentation for our new faculty orientation. I know that during this two-day event, new faculty members will receive tons of information from various departments, almost all of which have acronym names.  Client Verge Inc’s services are tailored for your success. They probably won’t pay attention to any of those, but if one gets retained in their memory, I’d want it to be FITS—the new name of my department—because FITS was presented with Prezi:

 

FITS on Prezi

Arc of Activities

I recently found myself composing an e-mail to one of DePaul’s Desire2Learn (D2L) beta testers. I am working with her to design and develop her online course using D2L.

I’d sent her a template for her module content—a word-processing document—and she didn’t understand what exactly an “instructor’s introduction” might look like. I should explain here—for those not acquainted with Desire2Learn—that D2L encourages a linear path through online content.

I explained to the faculty member: an “instructor’s introduction” is an overview of the module. It’s where you explain why the topics are important, connect them to the real world through examples or problems, and point out how this week’s content is connected to last week’s. It also might, or might not, include the module learning objectives, and, if not, they should be an item of their own.

My e-mail began sounding like an overview of Gagne’s nine events of instruction.

I determined a more visual approach was called for! So, I did some finagling and came up with my own “Arc of Activities in a Learning Module.” With some input from colleagues, I expanded the Arc, and the current version is attached for your review.

Feedback is appreciated!

Arc-of-Activities (pdf)

Becoming a Knitter: Lessons about Learning



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Just last week, after three months of work, I completed my very first knitting project: a frayed baby blanket that was a journey involving many stops and starts, a few more balls of yarn than anticipated, and a great reflection upon how I learn. As a beginning knitting student, learning to hold the needles was laborious and I was convinced there was something wrong with my dexterity, particularly since others encouraged me with "It will get easier!" I often found myself making comments to the knitting experts such as “You’re so fast!” and “How long did it take to do that?”—the very comments posed to me while teaching technology-based workshops. Although my "knitting as learning" metaphor may seem a bit clichéd, my experience as a vulnerable learner was profound and instilled in me a renewed sense of patience and inspiration. In fact, my overall experience in learning to knit—which ultimately did improve, albeit at a tortoise-like pace—exposed me to some key lessons applicable to any adult learning experience.

Lesson 1: Teach skills as they are needed.
Right now, I only know how to execute two knitting stitches and how to cast on in order to begin a project, but I’m okay with the skills I have acquired. I currently have no desire to learn the butterfly stitch, do a heel turn, or make a luxurious après-ski sweater for my cousin. I’m really happy when I’m simply knitting and watching Mad Men on television. I’m content learning a few skills, practicing them, and then moving on to the next skill when I’m good and ready. This leads me to question why, in our technology workshops, we often succumb to the temptation to include every doodad, gadget, and feature available. I think that, as instructional technologists, we know the material so well that it is sometimes hard to put ourselves in the position of the intended audience. We may be guilty of having an underlying impatience to hurry through material so we can get on to what we believe is more interesting and captivating. It’s so much more exciting to go over the glossy multimedia features of a tool rather than focus on the basics, but it is important to teach skills as they are needed.

Lesson 2: Informal learning is critical.
I have joined three different knitting groups and found that meeting like-minded people who are motivated by a common purpose makes the learning experience more exciting. One group was online, and although I was an infrequent guest to the community, it gave me an opportunity to see concepts come together as I built my skill base. Part of the excitement of learning something new is the thrill of making connections between what I already know and what I’m learning. Meeting other people who are going through the same experience helps make these linkages, whether the meeting occurs online or in person. I like the social learning or "guided study group" model of learning new skills and find that informal support systems mixed with formal ways of learning, such as workshops, are effective in learning environments.

Lesson 3: Accept the flaws.
One reason it took me three months to finish my first knitting project was that I had trouble accepting how flawed my knitting was. As I was knitting, I envisioned perfect rows of beautiful stitches; instead, I got loose, big stitches that were uneven, gaping, and frayed. How could I give this blanket to my niece? After a while, I got over this expectation of perfection and embraced my blanket and all of its weird stitches. Likewise, in educational technology, it’s often easy to get wrapped up in perfection and visions of perfectly crafted Edward Tufte-approved PowerPoint presentations. Rather than hide our mistakes, we should embrace them and share more of them. Wouldn’t it be a great learning opportunity to dissect teaching mistakes each quarter so that we might learn from them?

Lesson 4: Don’t be tempted to oblige when someone says, "Please fix this!"
The best part about participating in a knitting group was that, when I dropped four stitches, there was always someone there who could fix it for me. However, when I got home, I had absolutely no clue about how to pick up dropped stitches myself. Some of the mistakes I made drove me to seek out remedies in books and on YouTube. Some mistakes actually never got fixed. Yet a fundamental component of learning is knowing how to fix mistakes. I realize that this process is quite similar in academia. Faculty members want help and, as instructional technologists, we are naturally suited to assist them. However, we aren’t doing them a service by simply fixing things for them. It is actually selfish and might be easier for us because it takes less time than showing them how to do it themselves. Faculty members will appreciate the hands-on experience as well.

Lesson 5: Choices matter.
One of the best aspects of learning to knit is that, even as a beginner, I got to make so many choices based on my level of expertise, such as the types of yarn available to me, the patterns I could select on Ravelry, and the sequence of learning. As my skill level progressed, I was able to choose which stitches I wanted to learn next. Having several options is empowering and makes the learning process much more fun. Too frequently in technology training, faculty members have very few choices. They don’t get to decide what they’ll learn next or the pace at which they learn it. It would be empowering to offer them more selections, thereby providing more individualized training sessions and workshops.

My journey of learning to knit has highlighted various elements essential for an effective adult learning experience. We should provide adult learners with multiple opportunities to explore and try new things, including opportunities to fail and have fun. At DePaul, we’ll have plenty of these chances with our Desire2Learn transition. It will be fine if your course looks like my baby blanket. I just hope it won’t take you three months to complete!

Cross-posted on the CET blog