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Creativity Taught by Students

“A critical part of becoming creative is being able to play—to play with ideas, with tools, and with pedagogical techniques.” This is a point made by Dr. Punya Mishra at the preconference workshop (Creative Teaching with (and without) Technology) for this year’s DePaul Annual Faculty Conference, and it is a point that I try to practice whenever I get to wear my professor hat.

As the instructor of a beginner-level Chinese-language class, I design various kinds of TPACK games and events that combine pedagogy (P), technology (T), and content knowledge of Chinese (CK). The activities I’ve designed range from celebrity-gossip sessions in Chinese (yes, I learned a lot about Jersey Shore in class), to an interactive lecture session with PowerPoint, to an online character-writing assignment on Wimba, to an all-about-my-family talk on Voicethread.

Although most of the time, I am the one who is throwing the ball to the students, when it’s their turn to swing, they strike back hard and soundly: the breakout sessions they managed during our online meeting had better structures than mine; the tally games and activities they designed during the final prep session were fun and sweet (with cookies and treats); and the presentations they put on Voicethread make mine look nothing but dry and boring.

This quarter, some of the players are just out of control—they knock one out with a movie!

CHN103 Movie: A Sneak Peek

Take a look at this trailer of a movie made by my students.

I called it a movie since this twenty-three-minute-long video project conveys a story with twisted themes played by eight characters. In addition to a series of well-designed episodes, it includes special effects, sound bites, theme music, animation, an FBI warning at the beginning, and bloopers in the end.

 It took eight students thirty-some hours to produce it—for a project that is worth only 10 percent of the total grade. That’s right, 10 percent, since all I asked was a short presentation in Chinese delivered via electronic means like Voicethread.

“Can we do a video project? Can we?” A call was made by one and echoed by a few.

“OK,” I said, “with one rule: everyone has to play an acting role in it!”

And from there on, eight out of the twenty-one students in my class teamed up and merged themselves into this fun and crazy idea of playing Hollywood at DePaul.

An Idea for Fun

I bumped into the cast and crew while they were shooting a scene outside the library. There was laughter mixed with screams of excitement between takes and cuts, but none of them ever bothered to ask me how many words needed to be included in their project or how long it should be or where to find the assignment requirements online. Clearly, they fell in love with what they were doing.  They were not driven by a grade; instead, they were doing the work they enjoyed so much that they didn’t consider it work or an assignment anymore.  And loving what they do is the one common attribute Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi found among creative people (or people in their creative mood).

The sight of my students defining and designing their own class project reminded me of when I was a student.  Over a decade ago, I took a class on multimedia design and production, and I had a classmate who was far above and beyond everyone in the class (I secretly believed that he actually knew more than our professor). For his class project, he wowed us with an online game he designed that was not only animated but also interactive.  My professor gave his project an F, with a simple and “legit” reason: he didn’t follow her requirement of creating the animation in PowerPoint. I still remember how disappointed he looked when he told us his grade and how much time he had spent on this project.

I now know that from a professor’s point of view, this F was not just a grade; it was a message sent to a self-centered smart aleck: follow the rules and stop showing off!

I never thought there was anything wrong with that message until I became a professor myself.  Well, actually, until I became a mother, a role that forced me to explore and to understand what is going on in the little minds of my children.

Young minds are so fresh and original; they constantly manufacture crazy ideas longing to be attended.  They cry (literally) for the opportunity to show off!   Because they own the natural resource to generate creativity: the energy and brashness of youth (Malcolm Gladwell, Late Bloomers: Why Do We Equate Genius with Precocity, New Yorkers, 2008).

When creativity is budding, it also requires a safe environment to live and grow. Teachers — in day cares, colleges, and anywhere in between — have the power to either create or destroy that environment. In a classroom where creativity is cherished, the sparkles of a creative thought may lead to a beautiful moment of learning through the hand of an innovative teacher — like the one described in this new letter from my son’s day care, like the Little Learners Day Care.

A Newsletter

This is a letter prepared by Noel Sucherman, one of the teachers of my son’s preschool class. It contains updates of activities that have taken place in a classroom of three- to five-year-olds.  One of the stories goes like this:

During lunch, one friend asked another friend “what would happen if they put their apple seed in the ground.” The friend responded, “A tree will grow, with apples on it!” We talked about how some seeds are planted right outside while other seeds need to grow inside first. There were several requests to grow our own apple trees. Seeds from our apples were placed inside a bag with a little bit of water. The bag was closed to help keep the warm air inside. “We have to keep the seeds safe, a friend said.” After about fifteen days, a few sprouts were observed growing out of one of the apple seeds. “Noel, we cannot grow a tall tree in a bag. We have to put it in the dirt.” The apple seeds were transplanted into a pot of dirt for further growth. We also grew lima beans. Each child wrapped a bean inside a wet paper towel, then placed them inside a bag, watered them and taped them in various places throughout the classroom. Only two children wanted their beans in a dark place, the rest of the beans were hanging in the windows where they were exposed to more sun light. After nineteen days, the two friends beans began to sprout roots, interestingly they were the beans placed in the dark. So many of the children then wanted to relocate their beans to dark places in the room. Their beans also started growing. Once the roots started to appear, the children then planted the beans in little pots of dirt.

In this story, an interesting scientific experiment stemmed from a casual lunch chat or a crazy idea from a little kid wanting to plant a tree out of a seed—because they were well cherished and nurtured by a teacher!

Teaching is an art that lives in the moment; and most of the moments are jointly created by the teacher and the students.  After showing off my students’ movie project to the third audience group, I thought that I’d better jot down what my students have taught me about how to stimulate creativity:

  • Maintain a young and playful mind (so you will appreciate the same)
  • Give students plenty of chances to play with their own ideas (TPCK can be owned by them)
  • Join them in the play
  • Have a goal for every assignment, but unlock the rules
  • Make a big fuss about any out-of-the-box thinking
  • Seek meaningful learning outcomes from the fun of playing ( after all, their movie is in Chinese)

And last but not least,

  • Reflect by writing a blog entry or respond to the one I wrote!
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The Virtue of Consistency

A friend of mine from high school recently posted a study of his 2.5-year-old using the iPad and then wrote a blog entry about it called “What My 2.5-Year-Old’s First Encounter with an iPad Can Teach the Tech Industry.” One of the points he makes is that consistency matters. He makes the point that simple things like uniform standards for buttons and sliders are very important. This is something that has broad applications in everything from street signs to Web navigation to course-design elements. While many will argue that standardizing these things eliminates creativity, one can argue, successfully I believe, that consistency in the design means better usability.

When designing courses, should we really be concerned with creativity in button colors or navigation bars? Isn’t it better to spend our energy making sure that the content is interesting, the interactions are engaging, and the assessments are relevant? Think about what would happen if you were in an unfamiliar city, and the city planners allowed every neighborhood to design its own stop sign. Now, instead of the familiar octagon-shaped, red sign, every corner had a different type of sign. What if it wasn’t just the stop signs but all the signs that appear at intersections that were nonstandard? Would you be able to experience the city, or would you be more focused on making sure you always stopped when you needed to? While this may be an extreme example, we can produce the same effect in course design if navigation and course elements are not standard within the course, and in some cases even between courses in the same program. Sure, it may mean that the course looks more “cookie cutter,” as some would argue, but think about the physical classrooms themselves—aren’t they all the same or at least pretty similar? Isn’t it better for students to spend their cognitive energies not deciphering the course but instead interacting and engaging with the content?

Does this mean that every course needs to be the same? I would argue not at all, but it is likely that classes in the same program have similar needs, from both the student and faculty perspective. Standardizing courses in online programs can have additional benefits beyond simple usability. First, support is easier, as standard navigation and language makes it easier for help-desk staff to easily help a user resolve issues. Second, documentation can be standardized and created once for the entire program, allowing staff time to be spent on other training and support endeavors.

As we think about design in online classes, let’s look at ways we can simplify and standardize navigation and directions. Creativity should be revealed in the content and not whether you can make tiger-striped buttons.

Handing Over the Keys

A couple years ago, a colleague and I posited an instructional-design approach to improving learning and performance when utilizing Web 2.0 technologies. This approach was built upon the socio-constructivist philosophies of learning and emphasizes three dimensions in designing learning for the Web 2.0 environment—social/collaborative elements, user-generated design, and knowledge management. The motivation for this approach stemmed from the recent emergence of approaches to learning that are based on self-determination and networked contexts such as heutagogy (Phelps, Hase, & Ellis, 2005) and connectivism (Siemens, 2005), which help us understand learning as making connections with ideas, facts, people, and communities.

Learning has grown beyond mere consumption of knowledge and become a knowledge-creation process.  We sought to develop a model (so to speak) that builds upon the inherent capacity of networked communication to support improvement in learning and performance and a means to approach learning in which students engage in a process of learner-driven design. Learning in this new paradigm is derived from innovation rather than instruction. Our investigations while assembling this model reinforced the notion that learner-designed contexts have the capacity to connect the formal learning agenda of educational institutions with the personal learning goals of students.

Our contention is that the learner must be placed at the intersection of social construction of knowledge (Glasersfeld, 1995) and distributed cognition (Salomon, 1993). Thus design, particularly for networked contexts, should slide to the learner-directed side of the pedagogy-heutagogy continuum. Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (2003) identified social presence, cognitive presence, and teaching presence as the conditions for developing an online learning community.  Their finding, in conjunction with our assertions, dictates that design should now provide for co-configuration, co-creation, or co-design of learning.

That’s what we think, anyway. What about you?

If you’re interested, you can find the complete model in Wired for Learning: An Educator’s Guide to Web 2.0, Terry T. Kidd, Irene Chen (Eds.), Information Age Publishing. Charlotte, NC.

 

Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T. & Archer, W. (2003). A theory of critical inquiry in online distance education. In M. G. Moore, & W. G. Anderson (Eds.), Handbook of distance education (pp. 113–127). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Glaserfeld, E. V. (1995). A constructivist approach to teaching. In L. Steffe & J. Gale (Eds.), Constructivism in education (pp. 3–16). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Phelps, R., Hase, S., & Ellis, A. (2005) Competency, capability, complexity and computers: exploring a new model for conceptualizing end-user computer education. British Journal of Educational Technology, 36(1), 67–84.

Salomon, G. (1993) No distribution without individual’s cognition: A dynamic interactional view. In G. Salomon (Ed.), Distributed cognitions: Psychological and educational considerations (pp. 111–138). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Siemens, G (2005). Connectivism: Learning as network-creation. ELearnspace. Retrieved November 15, 2007, from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/networks.htm.

Good Vibes from Video

I just had an interesting experience related to a pure distance-learning class I am teaching. I’m relating this to broach a subject near and dear to my instructor heart. As I was getting the same old take-out sandwich at the same old Subway today, a student came up to me and said with a big smile that he was taking his first online course and that he liked it. It took a minute for things to register for me since I was right in the middle of figuring out if I wanted mustard or mayo or both . The student was talking about the course I am teaching! And it hit me that he recognized me from the short videos I make and post to establish a rapport with my students. What warmed the cockles of my heart was the fact that I was succeeding in my attempt to establish a connection with my distance-learning students with video.

I bring this up because it’s evident that far too many faculty have the idea that making a video is a Big Deal. Maybe it brings to mind that room with the green wall, big lights, microphones, and two or three technicians with huge cameras. Since it seems like such a special experience, it’s easy to put off trying video, figuring that you need to get set for your Big Experience on Camera. This is an incorrect notion, and it’s silly. It’s not silly because it might be a new experience for you. It’s silly because it’s a horribly out-of-date way to think about video, what it takes, and what its purpose is.

Making a video these days is not like it was just five years ago. Today it takes only a small digital camera like the one you probably already own switched to its “movie” mode. It doesn’t take special lighting, and it doesn’t even take a tripod if you just want to set the camera on a few books or duct tape it to the top of a wine bottle like I do. You start the camera, look into it, and talk. It’s even easier if you have a webcam with a built-in microphone on your desktop or built into your laptop (most laptops have them now). With this you can just log in to a hosting Web site like YouTube (accounts are free) and record right into the hoster’s Web site!

I use both of these techniques to make a forty-five-second or so “hi theres” to a class, a brief explanation of an important assignment, or even just an introduction at the start of a term. To make sure that everyone knows that it’s me talking to this specific class and that it’s not just the video equivalent of a form letter, I make sure I say something that clearly puts it into the timeframe of the course—such as the term, a recent class or news or sports event, or the weather.

When you stop the camera after making a “minute movie” like this, you have a choice. You can upload it as it is to a hosting service (I use and recommend YouTube), or you can do some editing on it using Windows Movie Maker (PCs) or iMovie (Macs) and then upload it. This lets you eliminate passages where you stumbled or wish you had said something differently. But don’t get hung up on the idea of editing your short video productions. Editing is not really all that necessary for these kinds of “here and now” short videos. That’s why I typically record directly into YouTube, and I don’t even plan on editing. Timing is of the essence here, not carefully planned, lengthy, and orchestrated content. Short is better. Less is more. It’s the you that video and voice convey that establishes and helps maintain a connection, not a talking-head lecture so long that it becomes tiresome.

Did you catch the notion here? This kind of connection-building video is not a major production. Its importance is in the moment, and its charm is its spontaneity. That’s what contributes to your distance-learning students seeing you as a human being rather than a name attached to e-mails. Try it. It’s easy, it’s free, and your learning-management system readily accepts its placement in a course for viewing by your students. Video delivers you in a way that people know you when they bump into you and feel connected enough to walk up and talk. Isn’t that what you were aiming for in class all along?

Wiki Spring-Cleaning Tips

Having recently done some cleaning and maintenance on several wikis to ready them for the spring quarter, I thought I’d pass on what I’ve learned. Bear in mind these thoughts represent what I’ve learned building and administering premium workspaces in PBworks; other wikis may have different features and protocols. In addition, those who are doing spring cleaning in their homes and have scrap cars around their property may consider selling it to scrap car buyers. Contact cash for cars at Austickcarremoval.com.au for the best rates. After selling your old cars, you may check out this murrieta used car dealer for some used cars.

Make sure you need a wiki. This is first in my list because sometimes (and I’m guilty here) wikis are added to a course without a compelling reason to use them. Do you have a real need for a collaborative workspace for your students? Do they need to be able to share and edit documents, images, files, and the like? Great: a wiki is just what you need. Do you want to use one because it seems like it’d be a handy way for students to submit media-rich documents? If you’re using Blackboard or another leading LMS, don’t bother with a wiki. Use the features built into your LMS; you’ll have fewer headaches and your students will be much happier.

Assume nothing. Really, just don’t. I should know better, but each term I’m surprised that some of our users are stumped when it comes to using a wiki. My online program has fewer issues with faculty use and administration since we made it policy that all faculty teaching a course that includes a wiki must show competence with the tool, but there’s still confusion among faculty and students alike about access, permissions, logins, password resets, editing, and the like that must be addressed each term. Oh, and don’t assume that every request for access to the workspace is from an enrolled student. Or that everyone you give access to the wiki will stay enrolled. You need to monitor users and their status throughout the term.

Communication is key. I can’t stress this enough. Faculty need to know their responsibilities (like adding users) and how to carry them out. Students need to be told early on how to access and log in to the wiki if it’s external to the LMS (like PBworks). They also must be made aware of whatever level of access other students will have to their work; this is a real privacy issue that can’t be overlooked. And students need to have their own responsibilities spelled out, with clear directions how to fulfill them. The wiki isn’t an add-on to the course; it should be an integrated component with its use and policies included in the syllabus. Finally, if you’re administering wikis for multiple courses (like I am), and you don’t create a new wiki for each term, you’ll need to contact faculty well before the start of the upcoming term to let them know the wiki has to be reverted to its original state for reuse and to determine who will be responsible for doing so.

Wikis can be a valuable part of an online course, but they need more care and feeding than other components, especially if they’re external to the LMS. If you make sure you’re using your wiki appropriately, don’t make assumptions about your users (or your design), and communicate objectives and responsibilities with all stakeholders, you’ll create a less stressful and more productive online learning environment.

How Are Tomorrow’s College Students Learning Today?

Take a look at the list of finalists in the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Competition. Each entry listing includes a description of the project entry, and some have an explanatory video. Public commenting ends April 22 and public voting will be held in early May.

“But why write about this K–12 competition in a university blog!” IDDBlog readers may exclaim. First, there actually are some college-level entries.

But the main reason is simple: We look to the K–12 experience because these students will be our students very soon.

We already know our university students use Facebook; that they order clothes, textbooks, and computers online; that they download their music and TV programming. But what do we know about their educational experience?

Take one of the MacArthur competition projects: digital fabrication. You see a five-year-old design a box on a computer and then print, cut out, and tape together the box he designed. It is a project that moves mathematical modeling and engineering design into primary grades.

The digital fabrication project exemplifies how STEM education can be made accessible to even the youngest learners. It nurtures creativity, problem-solving, and critical thinking skills while introducing them to the exciting world of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Experts in the field of education like Kamau Bobb agree that this early exposure can lay a solid foundation for future STEM learning and potentially inspire a lifelong interest in these fields.

How does a university redesign its curriculum to engage students who have been creating, designing, and integrating for twelve years, who have been using computers in the classroom throughout their formal education, and who’s primary formal learning experiences have been project- and inquiry-based?

Food for thought!

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The Death of Flash or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the iPad

In case you haven’t heard, Steve Jobs has been waging an increasingly wounding war for years on Adobe’s Flash platform. It all began with Apple’s initial release of the iPhone, which was conspicuously lacking Flash support. At the time, hardcore techies poked fun at Apple’s iPhone ads that promoted it as the smartphone that finally offered “all the parts of the Internet.” The phone’s lack of support for Flash (and Java) even prompted Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority to label the ads as misleading and insist that Apple stop airing the ads in the UK.

While some hardcore iPhone naysayers continue to cite its lack of Flash support as a major shortcoming of the device, many users stopped caring the minute Google began offering a customized version of YouTube for the iPhone. More recently, Google has gone a step further, experimenting with the emerging HTML5 standard and its support for embedded video without the need for third-party plug-ins like Flash. Some predict this experiment is a key step in a larger plan at Google to abandon Flash completely.

Today, Adobe has even more to worry about than being locked out of the massive iPhone audience and the potential loss of visibility on YouTube.com. With iPads currently flying off the shelves and Jobs making increasingly catty comments about Flash to the press, geeks everywhere are quick to proclaim that Apple is driving another nail in Flash’s coffin. Adding insult to injury are the big-name online video providers following Google’s lead. ABC has already created the ABC Player for iPad and rumors abound that Hulu will eventually release a similar application.

So why does any of this matter to instructional-design professionals? While Flash won’t die out overnight, its waning popularity is a very immediate concern for anyone involved in the development and distribution of instructional media. Obviously, anyone who specializes in Flash development has to wonder if it’s wise to continue to tie his or her fortune to a platform that might be obsolete in five to ten years. Similarly, anyone who creates content that might rely on Flash for distribution might need to re-examine how they deliver content to students. This is particularly true if you want students to access that content on an iPod Touch, an iPhone, or an iPad.

One major ray of hope in the Flash deathwatch has been Adobe’s promise to add an iPhone application compiler in Flash CS5, which was just released on April 12. This compiler is supposed to allow Flash developers to create native iPhone applications, and Adobe has already uploaded many examples to the App Store. However, iPhone developers have already begun citing recent changes to the iPhone Developer’s Agreement, which now states, “Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine.” In other words, don’t use some other program with some other language to create iPhone apps.

This is all very bad news for Flash developers. However, it’s really a loss for software developers everywhere. Flash might not be perfect, but it is beloved by a cultish following of developers for one key reason: it keeps things simple. Now, I know what you’re thinking. Simple? Isn’t this the same tool that brought the world useless animated introductions with spinning logos and the never-before-needed “skip intro” button? Yes, it’s true. Flash allowed some awful people to do some awful things, but Flash doesn’t kill users. Designers do. When used for good, Flash has simplified life for many programmers by allowing them to create sophisticated applications that look and function consistently across all major browsers on all major operating systems.

Without Flash, designing a Web site that looks tolerably consistent in Internet Explorer versions 6 through 8 can be a major headache, let alone trying to make that same site play nice with Firefox and Safari. And for the real masochist, you can try to accommodate Chrome and Opera users too. Now, add to these hassles all of the variables that come with designing for mobile devices—seemingly infinite variations in screen sizes, unpredictable data connections, and controls that range from numeric keypads to full QWERTY keyboards to touch screens where every link needs to be big enough for a grown man’s fat, sausage-like index finger to click without clicking three other items in the process.

Flash promised to spare developers many of these heartaches by letting us build once and deploy to any browser and even create a desktop version any user could download and run via Adobe’s AIR runtime environment. And with CS5, we finally thought we were getting somewhere. We could finally create a single app that could run on the Web, on the desktop, and on any iPod Touch, iPhone, or iPad. Unfortunately, it seems Apple isn’t too keen on Flash developers sullying its beloved App Store with inferior code converted with an inferior compiler. So for now, it seems developers and anyone else with a vested interest in mobile learning are still stuck with a difficult decision: stick with Flash and hope for a cease fire, or try to play catch up with developers who’ve spent years mastering programming for Mac operating systems. I, for one, am keeping option three on the table: abandon technology altogether and start working on a Ph.D. in history. Because no matter how many iPads he sells, Steve Jobs probably won’t force me to relearn the events that lead up to the Treaty of Versailles.

Podcasts, Predictions, and Pedagogical Productivity

The November/December, 2005, issue of Educause Review carried an article titled “There’s Something in the Air: Podcasting in Education” by Gardner Campbell. He predicted that podcasting would assume great prominence in higher education. Describing a scenario in which students subscribed to prelecture course materials, Campbell pictured these learners eagerly listening to warm-up materials as they skipped merrily to an in-person class session. Podcasting generated interest for a time and many faculty began to think about recording classes or talks and sought devices to accomplish this (we found that the Sansa Clip, at a six-hour recording capacity and a cost of under 25 dollars became a favored item). But by 2010, it doesn’t seem to be a prophecy fulfilled. As Bugs Bunny would chomp on a carrot and ask, “What’s up, doc?”

What’s up is that several factors shine the light of reality on a premise that seems to have been formed in the dark! Here’s why:

  • Faculty learned that there’s no free lunch in creating quality listenable audio. Just recording classroom audio isn’t enough. It takes time to edit out gaps, noises, and uninteresting segments. (If this weren’t the case, cassette recorders would have become a classroom staple beginning in the 1960s when they became commercially available.)
  • An audio recording device doesn’t necessarily pick up both student questions and answers—giving you the equivalent of the sound of one hand clapping.
  • It takes more work to copy audio from a sound recorder, transform it into mp3 format, and upload it to an accessible place than many people thought.
  • And maybe Campbell’s idea wasn’t very accurate in the first place!

To be sure, our iTunes University Web site has accumulated some types of course-supporting audio material. Available statistics show that the most listened-to recordings are those that either are required listening for some assignment or in some way support an assigned textbook—for example, an audio version of a textbook for use by students with reading difficulties. But we suspect that Campbell’s happy scenario has suffered from some of the realities of life. For one thing, anecdotal comments of students indicate that they regard iPods and their ilk primarily as entertainment devices, not learning tools. Then too, technology may have already passed plain audio by—sites like YouTube are much more interesting since they provide video as well as audio. In addition, the options for how students spend out-of-classroom time have greatly expanded with cell-phone texting and social networking sites, both of which now consume ever greater amounts of attention—and how many hours in the day does a person have anyway? And quite likely most important of all, technical or detailed lecture content that demands focus and concentration is just not the same as music when it comes to listening and doing something else. You can miss a few bars here or there in a tune and still catch the vibes. Miss a few phrases or sentences in a lecture on some complicated concept and you may pretty well be lost for all that follows.

What’s the point? The point for faculty interested in moving ahead with technology is that you need to choose your shots wisely. Don’t invest your precious time and energy based on assumptions about a technology that looks like it simply can’t miss. Get some help on your forays into teaching technologies from course designers who can help you benefit from what’s out there to enhance your pedagogy and make your class-prep and in-class time—and your student’s out-of-class time—as productive as possible. If your institution has the foresight to provide access to course designers who can help you, make use of their expertise and assistance. They’re not there to tell you what to teach or how to teach but to help you channel your efforts into techniques that are optimally productive for your specific requirements. And they might even show you some things that you didn’t even know existed!

To be honest Dr. Gardner, we felt your 2005 scenario rocked! But it’s 2010 and the world seems to be marching to the beat of a different drum.

Conduct Detrimental to the Team?

Being the sports fan that I am, I have taken note of the recent outbreak of Twitter-related disciplinary actions involving athletes. Those of you who follow the NFL or NBA are familiar with the Chad Ochocincos and Gilbert Arenases of the world. And the trend has filtered down into the collegiate and high-school ranks as well. The Texas Tech football team was banned from tweeting last season, and just last week, a University of Idaho basketball player was suspended for tweets critical of his coaches and teammates. The rational for the disciplinary action is nearly always that the tweet is “conduct detrimental to the team.”

One of the great challenges and opportunities in online teaching and learning is the capacity to leverage the medium to take a distributed environment and create community. One needs only a moment to see the proliferation of social networking as evidence for the ability of the Web environment to support community. Clearly, not all tools work as envisioned, nor do all courses benefit from the use of certain tools. Yet, does a compelling argument even exist to not make use of such technologies in online learning? But what is the appropriate action when a discussion board is hijacked or a class blog goes up in flames?

Classroom management is not a subject often discussed in online-learning circles. With the increasing socialization of our online courses, is conduct detrimental to the team an issue? And what can be done about it?

We all agree it is imperative to continue striving to improve each student’s learning experience while maintaining an equilibrium that promotes the use of social tools and the establishment of an environment of respect.

The question is how?

I am curious to learn about strategies for dealing with, or better yet, preventing such conduct from this community.