Monthly Archives: January 2011

Avatar photo

Helping Digital Immigrants Feel at Home

If you’re an instructional designer or an educator with an interest in technology, you’ve probably heard someone use the term “digital native” to refer to young students who are innately tech savvy because they’ve been using the internet and digital technologies for as long as they can remember. You’ve probably also heard someone refer to today’s instructors—particularly older educators—as digital immigrants because they lack the same level of “fluency” in the technology skills, language, and culture that digital natives possess.

When Marc Prensky wrote “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” in 2001, he presented several spot-on observations about how some older instructors are unwilling or unable to embrace digital technology and culture in the same way that some immigrants never embrace the language and customs of a new country. While a few of his observations are lighthearted, he insists that the consequences of this trend are quite serious. To drive this point home, he claims that game-based learning can be used in all subject areas and implies that educators who reject this idea are dumb, lazy, and ineffective.

A frequent objection I hear from Digital Immigrant educators is “this approach is great for facts, but it wouldn’t work for my subject.” Nonsense. This is just rationalization and lack of imagination. In my talks I now include “thought experiments” where I invite professors and teachers to suggest a subject or topic, and I attempt—on the spot—to invent a game or other Digital Native method for learning it. Classical philosophy? Create a game in which the philosophers debate and the learners have to pick out what each would say. The Holocaust? Create a simulation where students role-play the meeting at Wannsee, or one where they can experience the true horror of the camps, as opposed to the films like Schindler’s List. It’s just dumb (and lazy) of educators—not to mention ineffective—to presume that (despite their traditions) the Digital Immigrant way is the only way to teach and that the Digital Natives’ “language” is not as capable as their own of encompassing any and every idea.

In his 2006 article “Listen to the Natives,” Prensky continues to emphasize that instructors must change their ways and place higher emphasis on engagement, stating, “As educators, we must take our cues from our students’ 21st-century innovations and behaviors, abandoning, in many cases, our own predigital instincts and comfort zones. Teachers must practice putting engagement before content when teaching.”

As someone who spent much of his childhood (and now a decent chunk of adulthood) playing video games, I love the idea of instructors integrating more games, simulations, and challenge-based learning activities into their courses. And there is mounting evidence that computer games can provide students with critical skills they need to succeed in the 21st-century job market.  A 2006 Wired article, “You Play World of Warcraft? You’re Hired!” describes how management at Yahoo! considered a candidate’s achievements as a leader in the multiplayer game World of Warcraft to be an asset that set him apart from other applicants for a position as senior director of engineering operations.

Unfortunately, what educational-game-loving scholars fail to acknowledge is that even when we can prove that students have learned something more effectively and efficiently through game-based learning, we have to consider the return on investment. And by investment, I don’t mean the amount of time students have to spend playing the game in order to master a particular number of concepts or commit a certain number of facts to memory (although this should be evaluated as well). I’m referring to the amount of time and money it takes instructors, instructional designers, graphic artists, and programmers to develop educational games—or any multimedia learning resources for that matter.

Any game designer will tell you that even a high-budget, state-of-the-art video game will look dated within a few years of its release. Even the games featured on Prensky’s own company website, games2train, are showing their age. This isn’t necessarily an indicator that Prensky and his team are poor game designers. It just confirms that games often take a great deal of time and money to build and have a relatively short window of usefulness before they need to be updated or completely redesigned.

I think Prensky would argue that at the very least, instructors could do more to engage digital natives with low-tech games and simulations that increase learner engagement. His suggestions for games to teach philosophy or the Holocaust don’t necessarily require much more than a good set of role-playing instructions or a collection of powerful images from concentration camps and a provocative discussion prompt.

If the message was simply, “Let’s rethink the design of our assessments and learning activities so they’re more interactive and engaging,” I’d be all for it. However, what I often hear (and what I hear from the faculty I train) is that instructors feel pressured to make their course material as riveting and addictive as the bestselling video game du jour.  That’s a lot to live up to, especially for a faculty member who, until recently, was feeling quite proud of herself for finally learning how to resize and crop a photo in PowerPoint.

I’m overjoyed when faculty come to me with grand visions for a multimedia game or simulation, but I know they often feel daunted when I tell them what they’ll need to contribute to the project. That’s why I typically brainstorm with them to find the most low-tech solution that meets their needs, then we build on that as time allows. I also like to look at their learning materials and ask a few questions to make sure we’re not putting the cart before the horse. Some of these questions include:

  • Are the course materials broken down into manageable segments?
  • Can students easily stop reading, listening, or watching and pick up where they left off later?
  • Is it clear to students why they should read or watch each resource?
  • Are resources prioritized? Is it clear which resources are the most important and which resources are optional?
  • Will students know what terms to watch for or what questions to ask themselves as they go through the material?
  • Are there ungraded knowledge checks to ensure students know if they’ve missed something?
  • Do some assessments require application of the concepts? Are students asked to think critically about what they’ve learned?
  • Do discussions encourage an exchange of diverse ideas and opinions? Or are students simply asked to regurgitate content from the resources and provide answers that will be repetitive and unoriginal?

This isn’t an exhaustive list, but I think it’s a good place to start. It might not generate the same buzz as turning a Holocaust lesson into a video game and accusing veteran professors of being lazy and behind the times, but at least we can rest assured that our priorities are in order and our courses are built on strong foundations. In addition, addressing fundamental course-design questions first and encouraging digital immigrants’ efforts does more than improve course quality. It provides digital immigrants with a starting point that feels welcoming and manageable—an Ellis Island of instructional design, if you will. It builds their confidence and encourages them to try new things. It replaces shame and guilt with pride and optimism.

We might not be able to completely transform an academic environment that can be hostile to digital immigrants, but we can strive to be better ambassadors of the digital culture we love. In the process, we can foster a melting pot of ideas and approaches to teaching that draws strength from diversity. And that’s the kind of immigration reform that benefits digital immigrants and digital natives alike.

Avatar photo

Teaching Online is Like Learning a Second Language

This is an analogy Dr. Carol Wren used to describe her feelings about online teaching—feelings that are shared by many participants of our DePaul Online Teaching Series (DOTS) program. “Teaching online,” as she says in the video below, “is sort of like learning a second language. You have to take what is unconscious and make it conscious. It is going from what you might call a cognitive understanding and making it metacognitive—that is, thinking about what you are doing.”

Carol’s analogy strikes me — a person who cuts across both fields as a trainer/promoter of online teaching and as a learner/instructor of a second language. Thinking about my own experience in learning (and then teaching), I believe a second language provides me with deeper understanding of how and why faculty would relate it to their feelings about teaching online. Without Carol’s permission, I am taking the liberty of adding a few validating factors to her comparison of the two dichotomies: teaching face-to-face versus teaching online and learning your first language versus learning a second language.

An Unconscious versus a Conscious Process of Learning

In learning to speak our native language, we observe, imitate, and interact. Most of these actions are taken without any awareness that we are learning. In this sense, learning to speak one’s first language is more of a natural and unconscious process, which is somewhat like how many of us get into the teaching practice in the classroom: we observed, for years and years, how it was done by our teachers, picked up the ideas, and carried them into our own classroom.

Learning to speak a second language, on the other hand, is a much more cognizant process that requires not only the intentional effort of memorizing and practicing but also a clear awareness of the learning effort itself. It takes some thinking to bring up a word and some more thinking to piece together a sentence—just like when we start to put a course online. It requires not only knowing what technical tools to use to carry the instruction but also how to conduct it. And often, what comes after the interpretation process is something that is completely “foreign:” a one-hour-long presentation is now four pieces of short videos followed by some online discussions; a term paper becomes a three-phase assignment that requires self-review, peer review, and instructor review; an in-class quiz is an online test with auto-feedback. The only difference is that instead of calling it “interpretation,” we call this process “instructional design.”

Implicit versus Explicit Rules and Objectives

While speaking a native language, one doesn’t have to think about grammar, sentence structure, and tenses. Your verbal expression follows the flow of your thinking, naturally and intuitively. Your thoughts are put forward in the form of words without any attentive effort.

When I asked my students why they would use “I have been to New York” instead of “I went to New York,” they said, “Well, ‘cause it sounds right.” But why does it sound right? Without knowing this “why,” we—the nonnative English speakers—wouldn’t know when to use which, and you—the native English speakers who are learning Chinese—wouldn’t know which Chinese word you should use.

Teachers and students both know the rules in the face-to-face class intuitively since they both grow up in this kind of environment, which is like knowing their first language, but all the “grammars” need to be clearly spelled out in the online world: what is expected, why it is expected, how to achieve the expectation, and when to achieve it.

For online students, you have to show them the ropes to avoid the drops.

The Cultural Connection

Language isn’t an independent entity. It represents the culture it stems from, and it is always attached to that culture. Isn’t it the same for online teaching? In order to teach online, you have to not only learn the skills to instruct through this medium but also prepare yourself to see the online world, which has developed (and is still developing) a culture of its own. Being open to that culture, talking to people coming from that culture (e.g. online students), and understanding the expectations of that culture become an important part of online teaching, just like when learning a foreign language. The sense of cultural sensitivity is essential to the online world where even font types can carry meanings that could impact the impressions of a viewer in front of the screen that is a thousand miles away.

The Surprising Benefit of Knowing Another

Students in my Chinese language class never thought that they would have to think more about English when they were studying Chinese. Likewise, it usually caught faculty by surprise when they realized that what they learned about online teaching was impacting the way they teach in the classroom.

Dr. Christine Reyna, a psychology professor, told us during a wrap-up interview with DOTS, “One thing that is really surprising to me about DOTS was how much it challenges me to think differently about my face-to-face class.”

After running eight editions of DOTS in the past three years, we are no longer surprised by comments like this. Examined closely, DOTS seems to be fulfilling the kind of profession education that Dr. Lee Shulman is calling for: to make the learners not only gain the skills but also the mentality and the moral of the profession they are studying for. When it comes to teaching online, what lies behind the technical skill is the pedagogical knowledge, and what goes beyond the knowledge is the virtue of being an online instructor.

So what is the virtue of an online instructor? I would say that an online instructor is the one who has the following attributes:

  • Well organized (since an online course needs to be well organized, and an organized site is a reflection of the organized mind of its instructor)
  • Advanced planning (since an online course is like an airplane that can’t be built while flying it; it takes a lot of planning prior to the launch)
  • Caring and thoughtful (since this is the moral base for any user-friendly interface)
  • Predictive (because all the foreseeable obstacles, either the logistical or the technical, need to be anticipated and addressed ahead of time)
  • Concise and focused (since this is the only way to catch student’s attention before they click away)
  • Efficient and responsive (as demanded by the pace and the turn-around time of online communication)

Now tell me, will any of these characteristics turn around to benefit teaching in the classroom?

Jing: Sharing Your Screen and Your Voice with Others (for Free)

Have you ever sat down to compose an email or make a phone call and realized that what you want to say would be better expressed by showing someone your computer screen while talking about it? Some processes, ideas, feedback, or explanations are difficult to convey with only visuals (text and static images) or only audio (a phone conversation).  In this situation, a screencast could be very useful. Screencasting software can capture the visual of what is on your computer screen—websites, mouse movements, Word documents—as well as the audio of your speech, creating a narrated video for your audience. This is actually the process that was used to create all of the helpful tutorials on the Teaching Commons Desire2Learn page.

I have found screencasting especially valuable when explaining assignments and clarifying expectations in an online course. It’s also useful for teaching my parents new tech skills when I can’t visit them in person. To discover additional ways that screencasting can make your life easier, read these screencasting success stories.

If you would like to spend hundreds of dollars purchasing screencasting software, you can. Or you can opt for a free, downloadable program called Jing. With Jing, your screencasts can be up to 5 minutes in length and can be uploaded and stored at Screencast.com. If you are using the Jing free version, you will receive two gigabytes of storage and two gigabytes of bandwidth per month. (As with most free software, there is also a pay version of Jing, which offers additional storage and features.)

The first time you run Jing, you will be prompted to provide an email address, create a display name, and choose a password. This creates your Screencast.com account, and you will use this login to access your files once they are uploaded to Screencast.com.

In the following video, I demonstrate how easy it is to create a screencast using Jing once you’ve downloaded the software to your computer.

If you want to share a video you’ve saved to your Screencast.com account, one option is to embed it in a Web page. In the Desire2Learn system, videos can be embedded anywhere you have a text editor box—for example, a News Item, a Discussion Topic description, or an HTML page. This video at the Teaching Commons site demonstrates the process for embedding a video in Desire2Learn. Screencast.com also provides a link to your video, and you can share this link with others.

Good luck future screencasters, and feel free to share your own success story with a reply to this post.