Category Archives: Web Tools

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My Oversharing Adventure: Travel Notes from the Land of Millennials

I give you my word that by the end of this article, you won’t feel bad about yourself. You won’t feel behind the times because you refuse to tweet course announcements, or follow your students on Instagram, or friend them on some new app that tells you what they had for breakfast.

I care about your feelings because I understand your pain. I was born in one of those years that generation X and millennials have agreed to treat as a demilitarized buffer zone. Part of me feels a kinship with those who came before me. I share their concerns about online privacy. I’m a little worried about those NSA data bunkers and the fact that kids today don’t return phone calls. I even hesitated to list the year of my birth in this very public blog post, which is probably a sign I’m not a true millennial.

On the other hand, part of me longs to burn my gen-X passport and defect to the reckless frontier that is the Republic of gen-Y. To learn what I’ve been missing, I recently embraced my dual citizenship and spent a few weeks living as a native among the millennials. Within days, I went from shaking my fist at Miley Cyrus, with her twitpics and her twerking, to sharing artsy photos of melted ice cream and Vine videos like a true gen-Y artiste. I also created a profile on Vizify, which took my yawn-inducing data from LinkedIn and transformed it into a slick collage of photos and infographics. (For more on that, view the video below.)

I like that my Vizify profile peels back the professorly veil just a bit without leaving me overexposed. Continue reading →

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Mixed Content makes for an Interesting Course Experience

For a while now, both Internet Explorer (IE) and Chrome have been blocking “mixed content.”  In the last few weeks, the most recent Firefox release (Firefox 23) has also begun doing so.  So, what is mixed content and why should you care?

When your web browser connects to any webpage, the webpage is sent to you by another computer called a server. Your web browser and the server know how to connect by way of a set of digital rules, or a “protocol.” There are two types of protocols your web browser can connect through:

  • HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) or
  • HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS)

Secure webpages start with https in their URLs.  These sites have their connections to the webservers encrypted, making the information shared on them more secure from sniffers and man-in-the-middle attacks–in other words, from people who are up to no good.  Sounds good, right?  When you are making a purchase online, accessing your bank account, or taking an online class, you want your data to be secure.  So what then is the problem? Continue reading →

In the Cloud(s)

I still shudder when I think of standing with my father curbside watching his laptop being carried away in the trunk of an anonymous city cab. We couldn’t chase the cab, we had no recollection of which cab company it was, and my dad had paid the driver in cash. Everything on his computer was instantly, mercilessly gone. All we could do was stand there and watch, slack-jawed.

That was a decade ago.

Just last week, I had a harrowing experience of my own: I spilled water on my laptop, completely destroying it. The Macbook Pro was pronounced dead on arrival at the Genius Bar.

I felt horrible and lamented my carelessness to my partner. He just shrugged and said, “thin client; no biggie.” Continue reading →

Low-Cost Student Assessment

Student X has done the reading all term, they promise! It just happens they missed [concept covered in reading] and must’ve been [doing a good student-like activity] when you talked about [concept covered in lecture]. Now it’s finals week, Student X has no idea what is going on, and it’s going to hurt to fail them. If only there were a way to ensure they were doing the reading (or at worst, have documentation when the grade challenge comes)…

I have been working with James Riely, who teaches a hybrid Data Structures course in the College of Computing and Digital Media, to develop a series of low-value quizzes so he can painlessly assess student reading, lecture attention, and concept mastery. Not only are these quizzes useful for James, but they also allow students to self-assess their grasp of the concepts so they can reach out if need be. Continue reading →

Quick and Easy Responsive Web Design

Not so long ago it was relatively easy to give your online course content a consistent look and feel. With some knowledge of HTML and CSS you could create a sophisticated page with carefully determined layout, colors, images, and dimensions. Sure, there were some browser issues, most notably with Internet Explorer, but by and large you could create tightly controlled web pages with the comfortable assurance that your viewers would access your content on a screen with predictable orientation and pixel dimensions.

Those days are long gone. With the ubiquity of smartphones and tablets comes the need to design web content that will display properly on a wide variety of screen sizes. That means your inner artist will need to give up some control and learn to embrace responsive web design. Continue reading →

Effects of Web Fonts in Online Learning

Google Web Fonts makes it easy to customize the typeface you use in your online documents. You just search or browse through Google’s offering of fonts (there are hundreds!), then select and add them to a collection. You place some code provided by Google in the head of your web page HTML, and presto: you (and your readers) now have shared access to fonts that were heretofore unavailable. It’s an easy and effective way to control the typefaces displayed on your online content. What’s not easy is determining whether this is a good thing for online learning.

Why? Because research has shown that font selection has a demonstrable and statistically significant effect on learning and the perceived truthfulness of a text. Some of the findings are surprising.

One of the normally unquestioned principles of usability in web design is to facilitate ease of reading, and font selection is a key factor in the achievement of that end. Some fonts like Verdana and Georgia were designed for the web and are easier to read than others, making reading faster and less fatiguing. This facilitates the scanning for information that typifies much online activity.

There are also affective or branding considerations. A serif font like Times might be selected for an article on Renaissance literature because of its associations with academia and the humanities, while a sans-serif font like Arial or Helvetica might be chosen for a scientific journal. Choices like these influence how a message is perceived and evaluated, and for skilled designers they are intentional decisions.

Where things get more complicated is in online learning. While it’s generally accepted that ease of reading is a highly desirable goal in most web based applications, it turns out that this is not necessarily so for online learning, where the goal is to comprehend and retain knowledge. Research in 2010 by Princeton University psychologist Daniel Oppenheimer and reported in The Economist demonstrated that learning retention was improved by making text harder to read. In other words, choosing fonts that slow down a reader should aid in their retention of difficult material.

There’s also research on the effect of typefaces on perceived truthfulness or authority of information. Errol Morris reported in a two-part New York Times series on the results of a study designed to test whether certain typefaces influence the credulity of information. He argues that the form of writing can’t be separated from its content, and that the selection of a typeface has a direct impact on the believability of information. His study demonstrates that this effect exists and is statistically significant.

The upshot is that while web font services like Google Web Fonts (and Adobe Edge Web Fonts) provide an easy way to manipulate the typefaces used on web pages, this ability comes with an increased responsibility of designers to carefully consider the context of their use. If your goal is to make it easier for your students to remember difficult material, you should consider making the information harder to read. And if you want them to believe what you write, don’t use Comic Sans.

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Rules on the Tools: Technology Alternatives for Internet Users in China

I visited China this summer and found that many of the Internet tools that I use every day here in the United States cannot be accessed in Beijing: Google, my browser homepage, shows up blank; YouTube appears as an empty page, as do Facebook and Twitter. I felt like I was put into the experiment group of the wave-making research conducted by Harrisburg University of Science and Technology in 2010, where students were cut off from their connection with Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and AOL for a week. But that was just a week. How did the people of the most populated country in the world survive without these digital connections all the time?

After asking the locals, my puzzle was soon resolved and by attending the conference of Educational Innovation through Technology at Tsinghua University. The answer became clear: social media in China is as ubiquitous and impactful as it is in the rest of the world; however, because most of the popular tools are banned by the government, these social-networking functions are carried out through alternative technologies. While sitting in the sessions about social-media tools and their use for education, I tried to build a connection between the tools that I heard about and the tools that I used in the States. In the end, I came up with the following grid that summarizes the pairing of our social-media tools and their Chinese equivalents:

Tools

Their Alternatives in China

Google Search Engine

Baidu

Facebook

Renren

Twitter

Weibo

IM+Skype+WebConf

Weixin

YouTube

Tudou, Youku

Google vs. Baidu

Baidu is called the Chinese Google, but CNN Money said this might be an insult to Baidu. Comparing to Google’s 50% market share in the United States, Baidu dominated with 78 percent of the Chinese internet market in the fourth quarter of 2011. Before I learned from friends that I could access Google from its HongKong site, Baidu seems to be the best choice for me for conducting online search in China. Although I didn’t find an English interface for Baidu, its striking similarity to Google makes it possible for non-Chinese users to launch a search.

Although the interface of Baidu doesn’t present a problem to English speakers, the result might cause some confusion. For example, if you put in an English word in the text box, what you get as the result may be Chinese sites or Chinese translations related to the words. The engine also reserves the top finding for its own encyclopedia. A search for DePaul University, for example, will yield a top result of a Chinese version of a DePaul overview from Baidu encyclopedia instead of www.depaul.edu. This says clearly that Baidu is meant for Chinese users.

Facebook vs. Renren

Renren, a leading social network in China, looks, feels, and works like a clone of Facebook. Beside its Fackbook-like interface and functionalities, Renren, which means “everyone” in Chinese, shares the same origin as Facebook: it started as a campus networking system in 2005 and stayed that way for four years. In August 2009, it dropped its original name of Xiaonei, which means “on campus,” and began to aim at a boarder market of “everyone.” According to Financial Times (September 25, 2012), Renren claims that it has 157 million active users, which is 15 percent of the 995 million users claimed by Facebook.

Tempted to find the difference between Renren and Facebook, I created an account at renren.com. After filling in (and being strongly encouraged to fill in) my real name and personal information such as name, birthdate, profession, schools attended, and interests, I was granted an account. The look of my Renren site reminded me a lot of my old Facebook page before it got messed up by the “timeline” scheme.

One thing that I wasn’t asked to enter was my religion and political view and there was no status report on my “relationship” either. In addition to all of the Facebook-ish clickables, Renren has an icon on its upper right corner that says “write journal” (see images below). Like embedding a blog into a Facebook site, this function enables people to go beyond a quick note. Users can express themselves in-depth and with length in a blogging manner. One other thing that tells the difference between the east and the west in terms of data sensitivity is Renren’s exposure of visitors. When I logged into my Renren page the day after the account was created, it displayed a guy who had visited my page. Oh my god, do I want to know who visited me? Or do I want anyone to know that I visited him or her? No wonder there has been no English interface for Renren—no American would like that kind of exposure!

Twitter vs. Weibo

It will be an understatement to Weibo to call it the Chinese version of Twitter. As a system pushed out by China’s Internet giant Tencent after Twitter was blocked by Chinese authorities in 2009, Weibo delivered a broad array of social-network functions available in both Twitter and Facebook. Like Twitter, it creates a virtual land of fan clubs for celebrities by allowing the users to be fans or followers (see image below).

Weibo, which claimed more than 233 million registered users, launched its English Interface in Nov 2011.

IM+Skype+WebConf vs. Weixin

I was shocked by how quickly email is becoming obsolete in China. Although most of my friends still have email accounts and still check them once in a while, they almost all opted for this new app called “Weixin,” which means “micro-message” in Chinese and is called “WeChat” in English. WenXin or WeChat can be downloaded to various mobile devices or a computer. It allows users to send voice, video, photo, and text messages. By indicating your location, it can also help users find friends nearby. The group chat feature allows a web-conferencing kind of environment where a number of users can communicate at the same time.

YouTube vs. Tudou and Youku

It feels depressing and disabling not being able to access YouTube, and there isn’t one system in China that can resemble all the fame and content YouTube possesses. The role of video content sharing is shared among a number of tools, of which “Tudou” and “Youku” are the two dominant ones. Both sites are targeted specifically at Chinese viewers without any interface options for English or any other languages.

As you can see, it was quite a learning experience for me to find and experience all of those alternative technology solutions due to China’s rules on the tools. All of those wouldn’t have been necessary—at least for myself—had I known that there were tools designed to deal with the rules.

The technique of “fan qiang” which means “bypassing the firewall” is no stranger to most of the local users in Beijing, even though it was deemed illegal by the government. While to the instructors with students in China, it would be very helpful to know what can and can’t be accessed there, as a traveler, downloading an application, such as Freegate, to your computer prior to your trip to China will make you feel at home with your computer. This is something I haven’t tried, but certainly will for my next trip.

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Change Matters for Quality Matters

Quality Matters revised its online-course review standards in May 2011. A year later, I found the reasons for the change. While the Chinese would call this ma hou pao or criticizing/evaluating with hindsight, after-the-fact findings may be validating for researchers.

This belated finding, which illustrated a rationale for the QM rubric revision, was also accidental—the initial question I had in mind was: what are the standards for which the course reviewers are most likely to disagree with each other? I use “each other” because at this time, our limited resources only allow us to assign two reviewers per course. Since the Quality Matters scoring system is set up so that if one reviewer checks “yes” and the other checks “no,” it will take the “no” and mark the standard as “unmet.” I thought looking for the most disputed standards would tell me whose fault it really was: were these course-design problems or was the disagreement caused by the lack of clarity in the standard itself?

In the past five years since DePaul Online Teaching Series (DOTS) was launched in 2008, DePaul has been using Quality Matters to review its online and hybrid courses. Course review is the last of the three-stage DOTS process following training and course development. To complete the process, a DOTS course has to be reviewed internally by DePaul faculty and staff who have been certified by QM as peer reviewers.

As of May 2012, forty-seven DOTS courses have been through the QM review process. A compiled view of forty-seven QM reports indicated that a number of standards unmet by the courses were due to different choices made by the two reviewers. For some standards (e.g. 5.2, 6.4), the frequency of disagreement were as high as 100 percent, meaning for all of the courses that failed this element, one reviewer selected “yes” and the other, “no.” The following graph presented the top five split-decision standards.

The standards with the highest split-decision rates are:

  • SD 5.2

Learning activities foster instructor-student, content-student, and if appropriate to this course, student-student interaction (100% disagreement rate).
  • SD 6.4

Students have ready access to the technologies required in the course (100% disagreement rate).
  • SD 6.7

The course design takes full advantage of available tools and media (89% disagreement rate).

  • SD 4.2

The relationship between the instructional materials and the learning activities is clearly explained to the student. (88% disagreement rate).
  • SD 3.3

Specific and descriptive criteria are provided for the evaluation of students’ work and participation. (80% disagreement rate).

Now you can see that something’s not right with these standards—they must be hard to interpret or not make much sense for either the authors or the reviewers.

Having used two versions of QM rubrics allowed me to check further and see when and with what version of the rubric the split-decisions between reviewers had taken place. It turned out that for almost all of the top five spilt-decision standards, the disagreement happened while the old version of Quality Matters was used—or prior to May 2011. The following table shows changes made in the new version of QM for the identified standards.

Disagreement

Rate

Standard

Old QM

New QM

 

100%

(all for the old version)

SD 5.2

Learning activities foster instructor-student, content-student, and if appropriate to this course, student-student interaction

Learning activities provide opportunities for interaction that support active learning

100%

(all for the old version)

SD 6.4

Students have ready access to the technologies required in the course.

Students can readily access the technologies required in the course.

89%

(all for the old version)

SD 6.7

The course design takes full advantage of available tools and media.

<eliminated>

88%

(all for the old version)

SD 4.2

The relationship between the instructional materials and the learning activities is clearly explained to the student.

The purpose of instructional materials and how the materials are to be used for learning activities are clearly explained.

80%

(all but one for the old version)

SD 3.3

Specific and descriptive criteria are provided for the evaluation of students’ work and participation.

Specific and descriptive criteria are provided for the evaluation of students’ work and participation and are tied to the course grading policy.

Given the fact that the number of courses reviewed with the new rubric is similar to those reviewed with the old, the significant decrease in disagreements between reviewers strongly demonstrates the value of the revision. The changes have definitely made the standards more understandable, reasonable, and applicable. It also verified the necessity to continue the effort of collecting data, which will help to identify new issues that will surely emerge with the evolution of technology, the change of pedagogy, and the new demand of online learning.

Do you Pin?

The first step is admitting you have a problem, but if I have an addiction to Pinterest.com, at least I’m in good company. Though Pinterest has not released its total number of users, it estimates a 329 percent increase in unique visitors from September to December 2011, and social-media agency Ignite estimates over 4 million registered users. This infographic shows Pinterest’s impact in the social commerce arena and highlights how referral traffic from Pinterest is much greater than Google+. Pinterest also just won Best New Startup at the fifth annual Crunchies awards this week.

So What is Pinterest?

The site’s About page describes Pinterest as a virtual pinboard that:

…lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes.

Best of all, you can browse pinboards created by other people. Browsing pinboards is a fun way to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests.

Why Do I Pin?

So much of what we consume on the web is visual, and “pinning” an image to my board that is linked back to an original source has been a great way for me to organize different interests and areas of my life. I used to e-mail links to myself, take a picture with my phone, or in extreme circumstances print out an image. All of this information was scattered and not necessarily connected to its source if I needed further information. In addition to organizing my own life, the site helps me feel connected to my friends’ wedding plans, do-it-yourself projects, and favorite new recipes—in a more efficient and enjoyable venue than Facebook provides.

I knew Pinterest had become an extension of myself when in one day I used it:

  • on my phone to show the hair stylist a celebrity haircut I had pinned
  • on my Nook Color to pull up a healthy recipe for dinner
  • on my laptop to show my husband decorating ideas I had gathered

Does Pinterest Have a Place in Education?

While I am always eager to explore the potentials of a mainstream technology for effective use in education, I’m not yet convinced that Pinterest is a good fit, but hope to be proven wrong. Certainly for design-related coursework, or maybe a nutrition course where recipe-gathering is appropriate, Pinterest could be a natural organization solution. I am interested to know if educators are finding meaningful uses with their students, or perhaps in presenting content. I once had similar doubts about Twitter and Facebook for use in education and have since seen examples where these mainstream technologies were leveraged effectively. The way Pinterest allows users to easily connect with others who have similar passions and interests could have a place in developing professional learning networks, especially for those in creative fields. For now I will keep up my own pinning and watch to see how the increasing consumption and sharing of visual information is addressed in the education sector.

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Use EmbedPlus to Customize and Annotate Video Embeds

The most recent issue of Technology and Learning: Ideas and Tools for Ed Tech Leaders (January 2012) includes a wonderful list of their top one-hundred education websites for the classroom and beyond. While many of them are really intended for the K–12 audience, this list provides a few tools that could be of interest to instructors in Higher Ed. One in particular, a tool called EmbedPlus, seems particularly promising.

This free tool allows the user (with only the YouTube URL) to use the wizard to enhance the YouTube video by doing things like marking chapters, cropping videos, and providing the ability to view the video in slow motion.

A couple of the features that I see having real potential include the ability to annotate the video. See the example below:

Students or instructors can use this feature to provide commentary to videos. In the example above the annotated video could be embedded as the prompt in the discussion area of D2L and students could be asked to watch the video and respond to the questions posed in the video. Students could use this feature to annotate video examples demonstrating course concepts—for example the use of light in a film clip.

Another great feature is the ability to get “real-time reactions” on videos. For videos of current events and breaking news, these reactions can be used to stimulate conversation in classes. The “real-time reactions” currently come from Twitter feeds and YouTube comments. Take a look at an example from the Presidential primaries. To see the comments click on the Read icon in the bottom right-hand corner to see the comments.

I encourage folks to explore this site and see what applications you can think of. I believe this website fills a current void in the market allowing users to easily edit and share video. My hope is that more of these tools become available for other video sources (think TED videos) and that commercial providers of streaming content think about adding similar abilities to their own tool sets.