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Twenty-First-Century Correspondence Courses?

As I was reflecting on what we as a department do and how technology fits into that equation, I realized that so much of how we think about technology has to do with how the instructor uses the technology to push/impart information to the student. While this is a valid use, I fear that what we are creating is really just a high-tech version of a correspondence course. Is there really that much difference between a lecture delivered via a video tape and one that is streamed over the Internet? Sure there is the “cool” factor—we can make the Internet version portable so the student can view it on their iPod—but are we really offering the student anything new? I would argue that these technologies should also be used by students to demonstrate their understanding of the concepts. I would further argue that when both faculty and students are using these technologies to communicate knowledge to each other, we will have created a paradigm shift in online learning.

For example, when we think about presentation tools, we often think about the instructor using them to deliver a “lecture.” Many face-to-face courses, however, have a requirement for students to present to the class. In a face-to-face class this is easily accomplished—the student stands up and presents his or her material (often using a tool like PowerPoint) and is able to receive feedback immediately. In the online class, this process can be more difficult, and many times, the obvious solution is to have a synchronous webcast session. While not a bad solution, synchronous sessions in online classes can be tricky, because it requires all students to be available on a particular date at a scheduled time—often defeating the reason that the student took the class in the first place! The easy solution is to simply have the students upload their presentation directly into the course-management system and allow for asynchronous discussion. While this works, the personal element tends to be missing.

Instead, why not have students develop their presentations in an application like SlideBoom (see Rick’s post for more information on Slideboom) or VoiceThread. Both tools allow for easy creation and sharing as well as commenting. This is an example of a VoiceThread created by my eleven-year-old for a class project on culture: http://voicethread.com/share/264578/. This is just one example of how the same technology used by faculty can easily be used by students to complete class assignments. Other examples might include students producing podcasts to fulfill a class assignment. At a conference a couple of years ago a presenter talked about a class that produced NPR-like podcasts for a final project. In producing these podcasts, the students put together mock interviews, developed commentary, and produced a high-quality final product. The feedback from the students indicated that they not only enjoyed the project (translation: they had fun) but also learned from the activity.

As I think about what we need to do to make engaging online courses a reality, I see that there are at least two major barriers that are keeping us in a more “correspondence” mode. The first of these is technological literacy. Just like regular literacy, it is important that students who are enrolling in online classes have a common base level of technological expertise. For example, can these students upload attachments? Do they understand how to zip and unzip files? While many online programs provide students technology specifications (tech specs) for their computers, few provide students with guidelines or, better yet, screenings to see that they have the minimum technical knowledge to be successful in an online class. Secondly, student and faculty support is imperative. Many faculty hesitate to have students use technology for assignments, because they are afraid of having to provide technical support. This is a very valid concern and one that needs to be addressed at the programmatic level: faculty cannot be expected to provide technology support for their students while teaching the class. I fear that until we address these issues we will remain in a 21st century correspondence course holding pattern.

Sometimes It’s the Little Things

When my husband and I moved in together, I had no problem sharing a living space and all the items usually shared in cohabitation. Except for one—I couldn’t share my computer. I’ve always been quite attached to the computer I use. I have things set up exactly how I like them, and I don’t like others messing with it. Change, on my system, isn’t always easy for me.

This week, however, I took a leap. No, I’m still not sharing with my husband. But I did do something monumental—I upgraded to Office 2007.

While this isn’t directly tied to educational technology per se, I have learned a few things in this new system that I am finding quite valuable in managing not only my time but also my sanity. I thought it would be nice to share a few of these things with you in hopes that you may also benefit from them.

One caveat, however: these items are for PC users only. Not to turn my back on Mac folks—in fact, I love my Mac as well. But these features just don’t cross over from one platform to another.

Blogs

I am an e-mail junkie. I like everything to come in via e-mail, and I squealed with glee when I learned that my voice-mail messages come straight into my Outlook (oh, unified messaging, how I love thee). Many people know that the best way of reaching me is to fire off an electronic message, and there’s a good chance I’ll get it sooner than any phone call. It’s a push technology where items come to me, instead of me having to go find it.

This push versus pull technology is why I have such a hard time keeping up with blogs. I have so many other things going on that I often don’t have the luxury of going from one Web site to the next to see what, if anything, is new.

Outlook 2007 has changed that for me. For that, I am quite grateful. In addition to making folders for your e-mail and sent items and filing away anything you may need at some point in the future, it will also collect RSS feeds for you.

As a quick overview, RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. It’s a way of subscribing to a blog. So, for example, let’s say you want to subscribe to this blog (which I highly recommend). You would tell Outlook to subscribe to this, and when a new post was created, it would come in as a new message into your IDD Blog folder in Outlook.

You can subscribe to all of your favorite places and catch up on your reading when you’d like—from the very same place that you check your e-mail. And when you’re done, you can just delete it like any sort of e-mail message. You can also forward the message on to others if it was something that a colleague may find interesting, too!

Tasks

Now, tasks are nothing new in Outlook. But, man oh man, has the functionality increased! You can flag an e-mail and it adds it to your Tasks list. In fact, you can even flag it to be done by a certain day. And it adds it onto your calendar in the Tasks list, so you can get a quick snapshot of things you need to do in a day—items that are time scheduled and items that are not.

The crowning glory for me, however, was something I found in OneNote. Thanks to Sharon Guan, I am now a OneNote convert. I’ll let you explore the software yourself to check out its coolness in its entirety. What I want to point out to you is that you can take any item you have in OneNote and flag it—just like you can flag e-mails—with or without due dates. And it automatically adds it to you Outlook Tasks list. If you forget what the task references, it contains a direct link back to the OneNote document so you can reference the cryptic notes you may have typed in.

And with that, I will now not only end this blog article but also mark “Completed” on my Write Blog Article task.

Twelve Web Tools of Christmas — 2008 Edition

It’s time for another edition of the twelve Web tools of Christmas, back by popular demand.  Each of these is a new tool, service, or piece of software that I’ve found useful in the past year.  But, since it’s the holiday season, each of these tools is also free.

  1. www.evernote.com — Evernote is the ultimate clipping application. It lets you clip files, screenshots, text, photos, and images on any platform, including phones, and keep those clippings organized, synced, and searchable wherever you are.  Evenote’s search functionality is really quite impressive. Evernote can recognize text in images, and that makes that text searchable. Looking for that photo with your friend in the Bon Jovi T-shirt? Just search for Bon Jovi, and you find the photo. On a more practical level, I use Evernote to take photos of receipts and invoices. It gives me an extra copy for my records and makes it much easier when I’m filling out reimbursement forms.
  2. www.skitch.com — Skitch is just a really easy, simple-to-use screen-capture and image-editing utility. You can grab a section of your screen or a shot from your webcam, highlight an area, add some text and quickly make images for tutorials or other learning materials. Like Evernote, Skitch is both an application and a Web service. That means the images you create are easy to share and embed on any site.
  3. www.slideboom.com — There are lots of services that let you share PowerPoint presentations on the Web, but I haven’t found one that does it as well as Slideboom. Unlike the other PowerPoint-sharing services, Slideboom doesn’t strip out any audio or video files you have embedded in your presentation. It also keeps any transitions and animations that you have built. In addition, any notes that you have added to a slide are included in Slideboom as closed-caption transcriptions. If you happen to be a Windows user, there is a free PowerPoint plug-in that lets you upload presentations to Slideboom directly from within PowerPoint itself.
  4. www.sproutbuilder.com — Need a simple mp3 player to put into your Blackboard class?  How about adding your Twitter feed to your faculty-information page? Spout lets you do it with no programming knowledge. Sprout is a Web-widget or “mash-up” creation tool. It lets you take content from other places on the Web, like a YouTube video, an rss feed, or a Google doc and create a mini-application that combines that information into one package. Here’s an example of a fairly advanced “Sprout” I built in about an hour. Note: Its been scaled down to from its original size to fit in the blog post

  1. www.animoto.com — As a video producer, I often get asked if I can take a series of photos from an event or seminar and create a promotional video. If I ‘m pressed for time, I let Animoto do the heavy lifting. With Animoto, you upload your images, your music track, add a little text, and—presto!—you have a professional and sophisticated slideshow animated to the beat of your music. Animoto offers free, all-access accounts for educators and students. The accounts keep videos private so any video created for a class assignment is freely available for everyone in the class but blocked to the outside world.
  2. www.ustream.tv — Speaking of events and seminars, Ustream lets you broadcast your event live to Web audiences. Plug in a camera to a computer, log on to Ustream, and you are broadcasting your event. Your audience can ask questions by using the chat functionality. It’s a great way to extend the audience of events and provide the campus experience to online students. There are other tools that allow for live Web broadcasting, but Ustream’s simple interface and ease of use gives it the edge over the competitors.
  3. handbrake.fr — HandBrake has been the best DVD-ripping software for a couple of years. However, HandBrake is now no longer limited to DVDs. The latest release accepts other video files as a source, which makes Handbrake a great, high-quality video-encoding solution.
  4. www.celtx.com — Celtx is an independent filmmaker’s dream come true.  It’s a scriptwriting word processor, a storyboarding tool, and a production calendar all rolled into one.  It lets video producers keep all of a production’s documents centralized and organized. Celtx’s online repository, Production Central, allows you to collaborate on production documents on the Web with your team and share best practices with other producers.
  5. feedly.com — I love Google reader.  It’s fast and efficient—but not that pretty. Feedly is a Firefox 3 plug-in that leverages the power of Google reader and makes it prettier. Feedly allows you to browse your feeds with the look and feel of an online newspaper and magazine. Feedly also adds functionality that’s not available in Google. For example, Feedly offers a one-click tweet feature that automatically adds a tinyurl address to the article, which makes sharing interesting articles simple.
  6. www.inquisitorx.com — Inquisitor is another browser plug-in. It becomes a part of your browser search box and makes searching faster and more elegant. Once it is installed, start typing, and Inquistor will start giving you search results and options before you are through.  Inquisitor also learns from your searching history and gives you results based on your past searches. The more it’s used, the better the search results you’ll get.
  7. http://ubiquity.mozilla.com/ — The final browser plug-in to make the list, Ubiquity has the most potential in saving time and making the computing experience more enjoyable. It’s an attempt to add natural language commands to browsing. Say you want to grab an address, map it, and then send that map to a friend. Normally, you would highlight the address, open Google maps, map the address, copy the link, and then open your e-mail and send the link to your friend. With Ubquity, you just highlight the address, launch ubiquity, and type “map,” “e-mail,” and your friend’s name. Its easier to understand the power of Ubiquity by seeing in action. Take a look at the video below.


Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo

  1. http://openid.net/  — OpenID is not a tool or a service but an initiative. Ever get tired of having to sign up up for multiple services with a myriad of user IDs and passwords? The OpenID plan is to have one universal ID for all of your Web services. Once you have an OpenID account with a provider you can use that username to sign on to other sites. Google has recently become an OpenID provider so if you have a Google ID or Gmail account you are already part of the program. When asked to sign up for a new service, look for the OpenID logo and just use your Google ID to sign in. Here’s a directory of sites that already accept OpenID accounts.

Wikis, We’ve Got Wikis

Lately I’ve been building, administering, and supporting wikis for our faculty at DePaul’s School for New Learning. When I got the gig, SNL had already contracted with PBwiki, so my experience has been with that tool. Recently, though, I needed to research alternatives for our grad program. I’ll briefly share some of my thoughts on PBwiki and two other wiki tools; then in a future post, I’ll follow up with an overview of three others.

 

PBwiki

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Things I like about PBwiki

  • Easy to set up.
  • Clean, uncluttered interface.
  • Easy, intuitive WYSIWYG editor and an HTML editor.
  • Creating pages, links, and folders is a breeze.
  • Easy to add users.
  • Easy to set access permissions. Premium versions have page-level access functionality.
  • Easily customized with your logo and nine preset color schemes. Premium versions of PBwiki can choose a color scheme based on your logo colors, or you can specify a custom scheme.
  • Easy to add media with Plug-ins feature:
    • Productivity: calendars, planners, Google gadgets, address link (opens a Google map) spreadsheet, stock chart
    • PBwiki magic: equations, html, footnotes, recent changes and visitors, tables of contents, number of visitors
    • Chat room
    • Photos: Bubbleshare or Slide
    • Video: upload file or embed YouTube
  • Easy backup and retrieval of pages and files. Easy to revert to previous version of page.
  • Extensive library of academic templates.

What I don’t like:

  • Can’t add users by e-mail domain.
  • Can’t set notifications at page level.

Overall, I like PBwiki. It’s easy to use and administer and has an excellent and responsive support staff and an extensive library of how-to videos covering everything from basic editing to advanced features. It doesn’t allow adding users by e-mail domain, something to keep in mind if you want to easily make a wiki open to a large population of users but still keep it closed to the public at large. It also doesn’t allow JavaScript on wiki pages, which precludes using apps like JS-Kit’s ratings widget. But it’s a solid, versatile tool, and if you’re looking for a free, easy-to-use wiki with a good feature set, you should give PBwiki 2.0 a try.

 

Zoho Wiki

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Things I like about Zoho Wiki:

  • Clean, intuitive interface.
  • Easy drag-and-drop side-panel customization.
  • Customize top panel with your logo and text, or fully customize in a WYSIWYG editor.
  • Three wiki editing choices, WYSIWYG Advanced, WYSIWYG Basic, and an HTML text editor.
  • Customize the advanced editor with the tools you want (or the tools you want your users to have).
  • Easily add subpages.
  • Sidebar navigation automatically populates links to new pages.
  • Can customize the CSS.
  • Easy to add users.
  • Flexible access/permissions settings.
  • Can grant permission by e-mail domains.
  • Control copying ability of wiki contents.

What I don’t like:

  • Limited color palette. Can’t customize unless you know CSS.
  • Subpages don’t show as links in the parent page automatically.
  • Difficult to embed media. Need to work in HTML to format correctly, because the editor doesn’t give visual indication of where the embedded media will appear. HTML embeds appear in front of drop-down actions menu, making editing or selecting functions an exercise in frustration.

My first impression of Zoho Wiki was positive; I liked the look and feel of the interface and the ease of customizing the layout. However, it’s a real pain to embed multimedia and there’s no gadget or widget library. I also hate that Zoho adds a one-pixel border around page elements that appears as you cursor over them; this is likely considered a feature by Zoho, but I find it a distraction. Overall, you get a good feature set for free, but the kludgy editor keeps me from recommending Zoho Wiki.

 

Google Sites

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What I like about Google Sites:

  • Free. Sign up with Google account.
  • Easy, intuitive interface.
  • WYSIWYG editor, HTML text editor, and preview function.
  • Twenty-three free skins (site themes).
  • Customize colors, fonts, logo, layout, layout element sizes. Great deal of customization possible; can customize the color scheme for a given theme.
  • Editor lets you specify one or two column layout.
  • Editor makes it easy to insert Google calendar, document, spreadsheet, Picasa slideshow, presentation, video from YouTube or Google Video, Google Gadgets, as well as basic html objects like tables and horizontal rules.
  • Easy to add attachments and post comments.
  • Easy to add users and set access.
  • Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools. Get user data and make your site more visible to Google and users and increase traffic.
  • Custom domain feature; for example, mywiki.depaul.edu rather than sites.google.com/site/mywiki.
  • Preview page as viewer option.

What I don’t like:

  • Cheesy free skins.
  • Limited selection of page templates.

It’s hard to find something not to like about Google Sites. I love the ease of use and broad functionality, its integration with other Google apps is a tremendous advantage over other wikis, and I love the ability to easily change the layout. I like that I can choose to have a border around the video player without writing code for it; it makes it easy for noncoders to maintain a consistent and defined visual space for their embedded videos.

I find the twenty-three site skins a bit cheesy, but that’s merely a matter of personal taste; you could play with the settings and certainly find something to your liking. Google Sites offers more options, more functionality, more administrative features, more data resources, and more ease of use than other free wiki tools, and I recommend checking them out.

 

That’s it for this post. In a future post I’ll share my thoughts about Wikispaces, Wikidot, and WetPaint.

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Millenial Learners Are Unique, but They’re Not the Jetsons

I just attended the 2008 Lilly Conference on College Teaching where the theme was “Millenial Learning: Teaching in the 21st Century.” I enjoyed some of the keynote presentations, especially Erica McWilliam’s presentation, “Is Creativity Teachable? Conceptualizing the Creativity/Pedagogy Relationship in Higher Education.” In the presentation, McWilliam noted that creativity is not only vital in the arts, but is also in scientific disciplines where creative thinking leads to key breakthroughs.

While McWilliam believes creativity can be taught, she claimed that it cannot be done simply by giving students free reign of their learning experience. She addressed a critical flaw in the rejection of the traditional sage-on-the-stage model of instruction in favor of the guide-on-the-side approach. According to McWilliam, this trend encourages instructors to become too passive and compromises the level of rigor we traditionally associate with more structured courses and teaching methods. Instead, McWilliam proposed an approach she calls “meddler in the middle.” This approach encourages experiential learning and assignments that foster independent, critical thinking. However, it requires faculty to be actively involved along the way, setting high standards for success and rejecting the notion that all answers are valid.

While I enjoyed some of the keynote presentations at the Lilly Conference, I have to admit that there was also a thorough beating of the dead horse that is the “millenial student.” Several of the presenters rattled off the same sweeping generalizations about the millennial generation that I’ve heard so often at past conferences, including classics like, “They’re multitasking visual learners,” “They prefer to learn by doing,” and everyone’s favorite, “They’re incredibly tech savvy.”

Even if some of these statements are exaggerations, they’re not particularly harmful because most of them are based on facts or at least a relatively scientific survey. However, I find it hard to hide my annoyance when someone tells yet another anecdote about the now-famous (yet nameless) young college student who text messages her friends while listening to her latest class lectures on her iPod and updating her Facebook page—all while driving to her apartment in the sky in a flying hovercar.

It seems no educational-technology conference presentation is complete these days without the obligatory stock photo of a hip, young student with a laptop tucked under his arm, iPod headphones in his hears, a video game controller in one hand, a cell phone in the other. This photo is usually a warning that the presenter is about to describe a bleeding-edge case study that will make use of Second Life, Twitter, Facebook, or some other tool that is revolutionizing education as we know it.

The problem with this recurring emphasis on millenials and their insatiable appetite for bleeding-edge technology is that it makes faculty feel they’re always behind the times. Most of the instructors I know are excited if they can figure out how to embed a YouTube video in Blackboard or insert an audio file in a PowerPoint presentation. Now imagine how those instructors must feel when they go to a conference to discover that PowerPoint and YouTube are “so five years ago.”

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a part of the problem. I just gave a presentation titled “Beyond PowerPoint and YouTube: Making the Most of Multimedia for Language Instruction” at the fall conference for the Illinois Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. The session was packed and the attendees were very eager to learn. However, it was clear to me based on their questions and feedback that they would have been just as happy with a session titled, “PowerPoint Tips and Tricks: Making the Most of the Everyday Tool You’ve Never Had Time to Master.”

I’m certainly no PowerPoint evangelist. I like building educational mini-games in Flash, trying out new blogging and wiki tools, and encouraging faculty to use services and sites that often include the world “beta” in their logos. However, I think it’s important to admit that the simplest solution for presenting instructional material is often the best. For many professors, that solution is PowerPoint.

Occasionally, instructors might want a feature that PowerPoint can’t offer. They might want students to be able to view presentations in their web browsers and comment on them. They might want students to be able to create their own presentations with audio-narration and easily share them with others. When those needs arise, it’s important to offer them the simplest, most reliable solution that gets them from point A to point B. If a French professor wants students to create narrated cultural tours of Paris, we should introduce that professor to VoiceThread. We shouldn’t encourage her to establish an island in Second Life, hire three graduate students to build a replica of central Paris, and force her students to create avatars and chat in French inside a bad recreation of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.

If you’d like to know more about alternatives to PowerPoint and the features they provide, you can view the multimedia presentation tools comparison I put together in October of 2008. All of the sites listed feature tools I’ve actually tried myself, and I’ve included the pros and cons I discovered after creating and uploading test presentations of my own. Some of the tools I’ve highlighted (e.g., Google Docs) might not win me any awards for being on the bleeding edge of instructional technology. However, as someone who knows a lot of professors, I know from experience that it’s important not to overestimate the tech needs and wants of faculty. And as a student who is technically a millennial by some definitions, I think it’s important not to overestimate the tech needs and wants of millenials. After all, I’m living proof that some millenials are happy with a traditional, well-delivered lecture with minimal fuss. And for the record, I’ve never text messaged a friend while updating my Facebook page.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to take my hovercar in for servicing. My info console has been acting up and it won’t play my video mail or let me make online bill payments while driving at hyperspeed.

ADCL or “Do We Really Need Another Acronym?”

Acronyms are introduced regularly in many contexts, not only to facilitate repeated reference to certain terms but also to imply wide acceptance of and add an air of importance to proposed ideas, processes, or methodologies. Instructional design loves acronyms. The buzz-cronyms of the hour include BD, PBL, TBL, and LCI (or LCT) (clues below).

Contributing to this long list, and in many ways consolidating it, I propose ADCL or Assessment-Driven Collaborative Learning. Details will be published in one of the 2009 volumes of Symposium, the journal of the College Music Society. In the meantime, here is a teaser:

ADCL incorporates features of backward design and project- and team-based learning in contexts that highlight student responsibility, all materialized through a series of graded team projects and enhanced by instructor guidance and feedback throughout the project-drafting process. Such design supports a) student motivation and engagement, b) meaningful instructor-to-student and student-to-student interactions, c) instructor- and peer-led learning, and d) formative and summative assessment, by wrapping a course around a single set of manageable, self-contained, resource-supported, and interrelated group assignments. Group assignment responses are drafted and submitted online in instructor-moderated discussion forums.

Evidence, collected over two years of using this technique and formally comparing it to more traditional instructional methods, suggests that ADCL maximizes a course’s learning impact and utilizes the instructor’s expertise and time most effectively and efficiently.

So no, we may not need one more acronym, but I believe we can do with one more effort to improve our students’ learning.

More next time…

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Extracurricular Activities Online

When I began my undergrad in 2002, I was a fairly shy kid and had moved to a college two states away where I didn’t know anyone. I never would have thought that in three years I’d have been a founding member of an environmental club, vice president of a literary magazine, and the organizer of a writer’s group.

It’s difficult to overstate how much of an effect these student organizations had on the trajectory of my life. The environmental club implemented the college’s first recycling program, for which we needed to interact with college administrators and county officials. This was my first experience navigating different levels of organizational hierarchy to implement a program. We also networked with regional environmental advocacy to educate students about issues and mobilize them in petition and letter-writing campaigns, which provided me a taste of politics.

My role in this organization was one of the first items on my resume and gave me something to talk about in my first few job interviews. I likely would not have been seriously considered for my AmeriCorps position after college without it. But not only that, it provided me with leadership skills, teamwork experience, and a broad knowledge base in a subject other than my academic major.

The benefits of a traditional college experience are not limited to what students get from classes. College life provides an abundance of other enrichment opportunities, such as performances, symposia, and student organizations. And I worry that online students don’t have as much of an opportunity to tap into those activities.

Even if we accept that the majority of online students are nontraditional learners who are taking classes online precisely because they have complicated schedules that would not accommodate these activities, I wonder if more could be done to promote a well-rounded education among online learners.

Let’s look at student organizations, for example. In many ways, college campuses are unique environments as crucibles for grassroots organization, be it an activist political organization or a Frisbee club. It’s obviously easier for the first buds of a student organization to form on a traditional campus as classmates make small talk, share interests, and become friends.

But it’s important to remember that student organizations don’t simply emerge from the ether. There are physical and bureaucratic structures on every campus that promote their existence. There are designated meeting spaces for these organizations to use. There are bulletin boards used to advertise meetings and events. There is funding set aside for student-organization activities. There is a procedure in place for the college to legitimize the organization.

Without these physical and organizational elements, campuses would not enjoy the level of student enrichment they do today. And I fear that as universities expand into online classes, they’re missing opportunities to provide the full student experience to their online learners.

Of course, there’s nothing to stop online students from using third-party social-networking Web sites right now to form student organizations. Students can use something like Facebook’s Group feature to organize and Skype’s video conferencing for meetings. But the farther students need to reach outside their institution’s online learning environment to form these groups, the more initiative it takes, and the less likely they are to do it. I think we’ll only see a richness of online-student activities that approaches that of traditional students if we offer a comparable infrastructure to that of the brick-and-mortar institutions.

But how would one build a comparable infrastructure online? Perhaps each college or academic program could operate its own online discussion board, linked to existing student accounts, providing students the opportunity to share resources, experiences, and ideas.

As these discussions expose shared ideas, desires, and interests, students can form groups that meet synchronously through applications like Wimba. Tools like Blackboard Community System, a comparable software package to Blackboard Academic Suite, allows student groups to have their own uniquely branded space within the online learning environment. A student group using this as its hub could provide information, create discussions, or set up Wimba sessions for audio and video conferencing.

There are innumerable tools that could be integrated with the online learning environment in innumerable ways. But I hope that as online education progresses, extracurricular activity becomes more and more a standard part of the experience so that online learners have the same opportunities for growth that I did.

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Grasping a Definition (and a Pronunciation) through 1-Click AnswersTM

Yesterday, a friend of mine sent me a link to a New York Times article written by Stanley Fish on the Power of Passive Campaigning. Being a nonnative speaker and not born to the Christian culture, I found a number of the terms and references Dr. Fish used unfamiliar. So I tried to learn the definition of these words through my usual method: highlight the word, copy it, open Answers.com, and paste the word into the search field. However, this time when I highlighted a word, a little question mark icon showed up at the upper right corner. Out of curiosity, I clicked on the icon, and guess what I found—a pop-up window with an Answers.com page giving me everything I wanted to know about the word! A closer look at the header of the pop-up window told me that this was a New York Times reference search powered by Answers.com. The word “powered” is used very appropriately here, because the function did serve to empower this online newspaper by offering users like me an easy way to access the meaning of every single word in an article.

Answers.com is an online dictionary, encyclopedia, and much more. While visitors usually come to the site to find the meaning of a word, one can always find much more. The site offers visitors a whole spectrum of meanings, examples, related Wikipedia pages, and references.

As a first generation immigrant to the United States, I came to the country at age twenty-four. To make up that twenty-four years’ absence of both culture and language, I have to absorb like a sponge every piece of linguistic, cultural, and historical information in my daily surroundings, from Winnie the Pooh to the Keating Five. In this journey of language, culture, and knowledge acquisition, a tool like Answers.com provides me with a vehicle to ride on, and it makes this trip fun and safe.

Why safe? Because it saves me from any embarrassing language clashes. Like most English-as-a-second-language people, I learned most English words by reading them in books without hearing them pronounced. For those words, especially the odd-looking ones, I would not dare to speak them until I’ve checked with one of my native-speaker friends. And that friend, now, is Answers.com, who gives me the pronunciation of every word. I know some other online dictionaries, such as Merriam Webster, have an audio file attached to the word as well, but Answers.com also gives you the translation of the word in multiple languages. So if I’m really not getting a clue from the English explanation, I can always scroll down to check its Chinese translation as a last resort.

While writing this blog, I found some exciting new tools on Answers.com, and they’re free! One of them is a download called 1-Click AnswersTM. Once it is installed in your computer, you can Alt-click (click while holding the Alt key) any word in any program to get an AnswerTip, which is a short version of the Answers page; and if that doesn’t satisfy you, you can click “Read More” to get the full Answers.com entry. So if the publishers of the site you are reading have not become as thoughtful as New York Times, you can download 1-Click AnswersTM.

Many publishers—blog masters and Web masters—are becoming more sensible to the needs of readers like me. WordPress.org, for example, has added AnswersLink as a plug-in to allow blogger to link a word to Answers.com by simply clicking the AnswersLink button on the tool bar.

Research has shown that it takes 5 to 16 encounters for one to truly master a word. And how many words are in the English language? According to WikiAnswers, there are 171,476. Even if you only need a quarter of that for daily communication, we are still talking about 42, 869 words or 214,345 to 685,604 encounters for someone who didn’t get the words through any natural context as a native speaker. But even for native speakers, acquisition of vocabularies remains a learning task from kindergarten through adulthood. And this task becomes more demanding for any discipline that has specialized vocabularies for its own field, such as biology and physiology. So even by simplifying some of the encounters from multiple steps of copying and pasting to one-click access (I guess we can forget about flipping through the dictionaries now), thoughtful technology like 1-click Answers is making a big a contribution to boosting the efficacy of learning.

1-click Answers on a Word document

Three Things I Learned at SLATE

The annual SLATE conference was held on Thursday and Friday of last week (October 9 and 10). SLATE is the Blackboard users group for the Chicagoland area. This conference has been growing every year; this year I found participants from as far away as Kansas, Nebraska, and the St. Louis area. While a few vendors attend—primarily those providing Building Blocks for Blackboard—the conference provides a balance between technology and pedagogy (how to employ the technology to achieve learning objectives).

Here are three things I took away from this year’s SLATE conference:

  1. READI—an online test to measure a student’s readiness for online learning. This tool was presented by North Park University, where it has been employed both for their online students and as a faculty-development tool. READI, short for Readiness for Education At a Distance Indicator, provides the student with a report about his or her learning style, individual attributes, technical knowledge and competency, reading speed and comprehension, and typing speed and accuracy. In addition to the report—which also shows students how they compare to others who have taken the test—students are provided with links to helpful online resources.
  2. EQUELLA—a learning-object repository that can be used with multiple types of content management systems. Southern New Hampshire University presented on how Equella is being used for its online courses.
  3. Blogs and Wikis for Writing—Heath Tuttle from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln gave this informative presentation. While he is currently able to use the learning-objects Building Block in Blackboard, he started using Blogs and Wikis for his writing classes before that was available.

How Broad Is DePaul’s Mission?

But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
Luke 10:29 (NIV)

Recently I spent a week in small-town central Illinois, helping to support my mother and arrange her affairs after the accidental death of my stepfather, who raised Belgian draft horses that he sold to the Amish community. He, like most in the area, was a blue-collar man, working with his hands to create a life for himself and my mom in the challenging economic reality of the region to which they’d only recently relocated. Once, it was relatively simple for someone with a high school education to make a living in the factories and farms of downstate Illinois; those days have passed, their memory fading like the day’s last light over the prairie.

The cities of Decatur, Mattoon, and Charleston and the surrounding countryside are struggling to stay afloat economically, and it was impossible for me to shake the sense that rescue for them would be long in coming, if ever arriving at all. The industrial jobs that once supported the economy have been lost to globalization and outsourcing, large agribusiness corporations have swallowed up independent farms, setting prices and dictating what and how to plant and harvest, and the small businesses that supported and depended upon the larger economic engines have largely disappeared, leaving deserted storefronts and rundown homes behind. If the jobs that once supported the region are not coming back, what hope is there for the people that remain?

Education is the only hope. Only an educated people can grasp and make sense of the geopolitical and economic forces that have swept through their communities and mount informed responses to them. Only an educated populace will elect and hold accountable lawmakers that will act in the people’s best interest. Only an educated people will be able to effectively re-create their towns and develop strategies to attract and keep new industries and investment. Education alone may not be enough, but it’s the crucial foundation upon which any hopes for reinvention and revitalization are dependent.

And it will have to be online education. The need is so pervasive, the cost to travel to centers of higher education so prohibitive, and the resources so limited that classroom education cannot be the solution for adult students, who must balance dreams for a better life in the future with the pressing demands of the here and now. A single mother of three working long days for minimum wage doesn’t have the money or time to travel an hour each way to attend a night class. A farmer whose schedule is dictated by the whims of weather or interrupted by illness or injury of his livestock can’t be expected to show up every Wednesday night at six. Both, however, can learn online, asynchronously and at a distance. Up until now, I’ve been an advocate for online learning mostly on a theoretical basis; what I saw and heard downstate convinced me that what we do is essential and will only become more so as the economy worsens and global competition increases.

At the memorial service for my stepfather the pastor spoke about the nobility of hard, manual labor. I think there’s nobility too in empowering ourselves and others through education. At DePaul we talk a lot about using higher education to lift up the disadvantaged. I’ve usually thought of those unfortunates as residing in some shadowy elsewhere, but they’re all around us, sometimes just outside the reach of our vision.

But we can expand our horizons online. Online in distant, isolated, small towns and farms students log in and become our close neighbors and broaden our university’s reach and mission. While questions of how to attract and bring more of them into our community of learners and how to make our education affordable to them must be answered, my experiences of the past week have convinced me that our mission can and should embrace and uplift an ever more diverse group over an ever widening region. Just over the horizon the light has faded for many small Midwestern towns and cities, filled with people for whom online learning could bring a new dawn. It’s imperative that we work to bring about that brighter day.