Test Driving the Digital Public Library of America

Earlier this month, the Digital Public Library of America launched its website to much nerdy fanfare online. This online platform aims to provide a singular portal for searching and accessing digitized content from a wide array of American libraries, museums, and research institutions. Forty-two cultural organizations have collaborated so far, in an effort spearheaded by the Berkman Institute for Internet and Society at Harvard. Though the idea has been around for a while, active planning and implementation over the past two years have finally yielded some results. According to Scott McLemee’s column in Inside Higher Ed, the DPLA currently catalogs “about 2.4 million digital objects, including books, manuscripts, photographs, recorded sound, and film/video.” (Impressive for a brand new endeavor; for comparison, the Smithsonian has more than 130 million items1, and DePaul’s library has just over 1.1 million.2)

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GNLEs, Please

We sure love our acronyms at FITS HQ. If we’re not talking about D2L (our LMS), or DOTS, or MoLI, or our CRM, we come up with emoji to get our messages across.

My FITS colleague Jan Costenbader and I recently discovered another acronym with a much wider reach, a global reach, if you will. Globally Networked Learning Environments (GNLE). GNLEs are online learning settings in which students from far-flung countries convene as classmates to learn about the topic at hand in addition to exploring one another’s cultures.

Imagine, if you will , two undergraduate screenwriting courses: one based in the US, the other based in Ghana. Continue reading →

Techniques to Avoid Plagiarism

The following techniques can be employed to address the issue of plagiarism in an online setting. Some of the techniques are specific to Desire2Learn while some are general guidelines to consider when creating assessments.


From Flickr

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TEDx Windy City: More than Just a Magic Berry

You know those awesome, addictive TED talks that can easily absorb hours of your time if you’re not paying attention? As it turns out, Chicago puts on an annual, local TEDx conference, and a couple of weeks ago, I spent a Saturday among the brilliant people.

As expected, the day was inspiring and brain-tiring, and I left feeling sure that none of those people waste time watching The Bachelor or reading the Craiglist Missed Connections or playing a pointless “find the hidden object” game on their iPad (guilty, guilty, and guilty). But I basked in their magnificent glow for several hours, and these are the two talks that stuck with me most: Continue reading →

I Love Technology

I love technology! I am always one of the early adopters. I must have the newest and shiniest gadget or software that is still in beta. Right now, I have a preorder in for the Leap Motion Controller, an input controller that senses your individual hand and finger movements so you can interact directly with your computer. How do I plan to use it? I have no idea, but it looks “cool.” Such is my relationship with technology. Cool is good.

This obsession with the latest and greatest technology sometimes clashes with either practicality or, more importantly, common sense. As instructional designers, we are always looking for ways to help our faculty be more productive in designing and implementing blended and online courses. Likewise, we are always seeking creative and innovative approaches to improve student engagement. Continue reading →

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Hybrid courses: What Do You Digitize? What Do You Keep in the Classroom?

Let’s start this off by defining exactly what a hybrid course is. A hybrid course is the blend of face-to-face interaction such as in-class discussions, group work, and live lectures with Web-based technologies such as discussion boards and virtual chat rooms (wimba/collabortate). Since hybrid courses are still a very new concept, there is still much to learn on how to find the right balance between face-to-face and online learning activities.

The concept of going to college has been constantly changing over the years. These days, many students are trying to figure out ways to balance full time jobs, as well as family responsibilities, with classes. For these students, finding class schedules that don’t overlap with their work schedules can be very difficult. The introduction of online courses has helped these students, as well as those who have who have different learning styles. But on the flip side, there are students who find online courses to be lacking in the human connection that most students get in a face-to-face class. That is why hybrid courses are now becoming a viable third option. Continue reading →

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Learning by Annotating: A Story of My “Busy” Textbooks

On the January 21st edition of the New York Times President Obama’s Inaugural Address was published online—in a unique format. This format was described by a faculty member of DePaul’s WRD program as the way that writing was supposed to be in this day and age.

As shown in the screen capture above, this report is different from the traditional form of commentary, where comments are inserted between quotations. Instead, it took full advantage of Web technologies to include text, video, and annotation that can be delivered selectively through a click. Continue reading →

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How a Spreadsheet Helped 90 Percent of My Students Earn a Pulitzer

If you think keeping traditional students motivated is a challenge, try getting experienced, brilliant college professors to do their homework with nothing but passion and positive reinforcement at your disposal. That’s where I’ve found myself for the last few years as the lead designer and facilitator of the DePaul Online Teaching Series.

On the one hand, I love that I don’t have to evaluate the DOTS participants. The program is designed to introduce faculty to new tools and techniques and get them inspired about what’s possible as they make the transition to online teaching. As a result, the atmosphere of every workshop meeting is positive and supportive. On the other hand, this means I have to get creative when it comes to assignment design and maximizing participation.

Just before our December 2012 cohort began, I was desperately seeking a simple way to give faculty a big-picture view of everything they could accomplish during DOTS. For years, we’d been giving faculty clear assignment instructions and checklists to help them stay on track, but we lacked a single place in the course where they could see all of the assignments at a glance. This left many faculty feeling unclear on just how DOTS was going to help them get a jump start on essential course-building tasks. The pieces were all there, but with no way to see how everything fit together and track their progress, the assignments felt disconnected and faculty weren’t particularly motivated to share their latest triumphs.

To solve this problem, I wanted to tap into two commonly used elements of game design that increase player motivation: progress indicators and competition. Continue reading →

Looking Back is Looking Forward

“Television, kinescopes, and in-service education.” How can you resist a chapter title like that?

As a latent historian, digging around among old library books is a favorite pastime of mine. (Remember: books, too, are a “technology!”)

A Guide to Instructional Television (1964), edited by Dr. Robert M. Diamond, McGraw-Hill, caught my eye not too long ago. Here’s what I learned:

Kinescopes work well for in-service teacher training, says William Hansen of the Union School District, Cambrian Park, California, because presentations on live TV made at great expense could be captured and distributed widely to be reshown at any time and the price was minimal. A Kinescope, by the way, was a movie camera set up to record a live television program (pre-videotape).

Dr. George E. Bair of the South Carolina Educational TV Center reports that rural students taught algebra and geometry via TV were tested using a nationally standardized test. Mean results for the rural-television-taught students were consistently equal to or greater than mean results for the non-television students in metropolitan systems.

Dr. Diamond, in his summary chapter on the potential for instructional television reports, “Often in the comparisons of televised instruction with standard teaching techniques the teacher has simply been moved into the television studio with a minimum of change. Unless the techniques that make television teaching more effective are used… and unless enough time is devoted to lesson preparation, the true effectiveness of the medium will remain unknown.” (p. 250).

Change a few words, and these findings could be as valid today as they were in 1964!

 

Kiinescope – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinescope

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Chicago Is Our Classroom

One of the rotating banner graphics on DePaul University’s homepage boldly proclaims, “Chicago is our classroom,” enticing prospective students into a world of experiential learning in a bustling city with rich cultural, scientific, and career resources.

DePaul takes its identity as an urban university very seriously, but after the excellent Chicago Quarter program freshman year, how many DePaul instructors utilize the amazing resources of the city to teach their classes? How many instructors have even thought about what the city offers to their discipline?

Why am I bringing this up in a blog about educational technology? Because the biggest trend in consumer technology in the past five years can enable instructors to create unprecedented student field experiences and connect those experience back to the classroom. The trend I’m talking about, of course, is the proliferation of smartphones and other mobile devices.

This video shows how one instructor utilized students’ own mobile devices last year to help them engage with the city.

This is just one example of what mobile learning can do. And though the specific activities in this video are unique to the educational outcomes for this course, there are numerous possibilities for using mobile devices to help students engage with the city across academic disciplines.

Check out the DePaul Teaching Commons Mobile Learning Page for more information.