The LTD Project Blog

Towards the end of last year, Larry Ferlazzo posted an updated list of social networking sites that might serve equally well for educational networking:

• Not “The Best,” But “A List” Of Social Network Sites (2008.12.17).

Though still relatively unfiltered, the sites Larry has listed undoubtedly deserve a closer look. Thanks to Joao for pointing this out in a Learning with Computers bookmark (2008.12.21).

In an interview podcast to warm the pool by building social presence prior to an online conference, Jonathan Finkelstein prompts Rena Palloff and Keith Pratt to touch upon online assessment strategies, especially ones to use with adult learners who are likely to be learning what they need to, just in time, rather than learning what someone else thinks they need to, just in case it’s on a quiz or test.

A gem that I’m carrying away reflects remarks Paloff made about 14 of 15 minutes into the interview, about the value of social presence. Segueing from assessment to online presence, when Pratt emphasizes presence (instead of social), he’s probably referring to facilitators as much as to other online inter-actors (or course-takers). If he isn’t, he ought to be.

In turn, Palloff mentions research indicating that deliberate if not explicit developments of online presence at the onset of interactions enhance learner involvement, engagement, persistence, performance, and satisfaction. She characterizes such developments as “an extremely important component of community building” (Show #3: Assessing the Online Learner – An Interview with Rena Palloff & Keith Pratt, 2008.08.31).

Following up one of Larry Ferlazzo’s top site recommendations, I tried out Fo.reca.st, and found it relatively easy to use to create a survey – once I’d discovered the functions hidden behind all the tabs, and tried out the various ways to format surveys. I’m not sure that the format names (for example, “plugged”) or the interplay between survey default and item specific display settings are easy to understand, particularly for English language learners and the not-so computer savvy (his criteria, 2008.08.22), but the illustrations and individual item previews may serve to bridge the gaps.

One problem I encountered while test driving a survey occurred when I missed the review button on a final item by a few millimeters, and wound up posting before answering all of the items in the survey. With no final warnings or confirmation routines that I recall, asking for example, “Are you sure you want to submit those responses?”, especially on surveys set for only one go per IP (and not requiring responses on first pass), the review button location, and possibility of submitting responses before really ready may be usability issues.

Nevertheless, ease of editing, formatting, and publishing virtually unlimited numbers of surveys, and items, as well as pre-formatted displays of results, is noteworthy. So are the possibilities of adding images, sound tracks, and video files for survey item stimuli, though at present they must be stored elsewhere. One recommendation I got was to store images in Flickr (personal correspondence, 2008.08.30). However, when you go to grab a URL at Flickr, the download page reminds you that Community Guidelines for uploaded images call for links back to the originals on the Flickr site, from their new locations. If there’s a trick for backlinking from images used at Fo.reca.st, I haven’t found it, or figured it out.

If you and learners with whom you work have ready access to public file storage, for A/V stimuli to add to your surveys, and you don’t need or want to manipulate resultant data yourselves, then Fo.reca.st seems to be a good way to go.

These are “Eight Simple Rules for Engaging Learners” gleaned from Heather Ross (McToonish, 2007.07.16), who’d picked them up from a conference presentation by Ellen Wagner the day before:

1. Capture their attention;
2. Convince them to care;
3. Motivate them to change;
4. Give them choices;
5. Connect them with community;
6. Induce them to participate;
7. Enable opportunities to contribute; [and]
8. Make it an experience to remember.

That’s a tall order that I want to reflect upon further, possibly after tracking down details of Wagner’s presentation.

This post introduces a little something that I gleaned from the blogosphere today. I’m posting a hotlinked remix of a message about it that I’ve just sent to a mailing list:

Bloggers Alec Couros (Open Thinking and Digital Pedagogy, Dalton Sherman…) and Kevin Jarrett (Welcome to NCS-Tech, Every… [e]ducator… [m]ust… [w]atch…), among others, highly recommend watching the following video. So do I. I’ve watched it once, and listened to it twice.

It’s of a keynote address to a back-to-school convocation for teachers in the Dallas Independent School District (Dallas ISD). Video recordings of the speech by Dalton Sherman, a fifth grade pupil, are available from both the school district and YouTube:

http://www.dallasisd.org/keynote.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAMLOnSNwzA

The text of his speech is available from the Dallas Morning News (2008.08.25).

http://tinyurl.com/DaltonSherman-IBelieve

To find out more about the Dallas ISD, please visit the official site or Wikipedia:

http://www.dallasisd.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas_Independent_School_District

(personal correspondence, 2008.08.27)

In a Blended Learning and Instruction discussion of Social Networks, Marielle expresses belief in common and continuing desires to maintain individual spaces for online postings, and in increasing ease of cross-posting and cross-referencing from and to multiple venues. In the same post, she points out risks related to diversification of networks and multiplication of personal writing venues (blogs) diluting “critical mass that is key to their success” (Comment 18741, 2008.07.24, JST).

While Marielle recognizes strengths of networking technology that enable people with common interests to form networks, if not communities, easily and quickly; she also points out amplifications and caveats to those bent on rapid diversification of networking sites, and similar migrations from one to the next:

With the viral spread of online networks, we must take care not to dilute them so much (by rapidly migrating to new ones) that they lose their power, which derives from the quantity and quality of their membership. With the proliferation of blogs, we must take care not to get lost in a plethora of solipsistic silos, speaking without listening, reinventing rather than building upon each other’s ideas and deepening the collective dialogue.

(mpal3, So Many Nodes, Not Enough Reciprocity (Yet), 2008.07.03)

At present, lacking (or simply ignoring) great automaticity in propagating connections from one blog or network to the next, it remains a matter of choice where to establish or maintain a toehold on connected writing. For me, the choice this morning was easier done than said, or written about. Anyway, here goes – a short story long:

I’d followed Marielle’s link from Blended Learning to her blog (Authorship 2.0), previewed her post about reciprocity, and decided on the spot to bookmark it in Diigo, highlighting the passage that I’ve quoted above, sharing it with a Diigo branch of the Learning with Computers community, and sending it to a list of friends weblogging in Kumamoto. When I finished bookmarking, commenting on, and description of the post that I’d flagged, the description had grown to such an extent that it seemed almost more suited for blog commentary.

There I was, in Edublogs, ready to leave a comment for Marielle, when it dawned on me that I didn’t recall, immediately, what in a flurry of early morning activity had lead me there. Once I pasted the overflow from the Diigo bookmark description into an Edublog comment window, with no, “Hi, I found this interesting post on your blog through…” (no thanks to hot de-caf. coffee on a sweltering morning before the air-conditioning kicks in), I noticed how impersonal what I’d originally written for a bookmark description sounded as a stand-alone comment.

That inkling led to a quick poke about the Authorship blog to see who had written the post So Many Nodes… (above). However, finding little more than mpal3 on edublogs (and Bmused on del.icio.us) there-abouts; I decided that, rather than leave my names, email address, and an impersonal comment on an unknown author’s blog (if knowing an author requires knowing her name), it would be easier to dump the description I’d clipped from Diigo into a new, full-featured blog entry here, then retrace my steps backwards through multiple browsers, tabs, and drop-down histories, in order to suss out what connections I could.

In short, I got lost, and wrote my way back. The remainder of the coffee is chilling, the air-conditioning is working now; I’m heating the world, and writing solipsistically. What else is new? I’ve rediscovered, in a very personal way, what so many nodes mean. I surmise that initial connections in or via writing, whether in the head or on the web, are necessarily loose, and that virtual connectedness is just that – virtual.

It is such a pleasure to have hooked up with the Learning with Computers (LwC) group – all the more so now that the group had undertaken to explore Diigo, and is putting that free social bookmarking engine through its paces.

Messages flowing into my mailbox on a daily basis are hard to ignore, and fill a professional development gap that I’d hoped might, after I joined the EdubloggerWorld wiki and started monitoring the Tagging Standards page (along with all others on the latter site).

Actually, I cannot recall getting any notifications at all from the latter. That is why I’m so happy to be involved with the LwC crowd in a collective exploration of tagging practices.

As I sat in the cabin darkness, feasting on its deliciousness, and staring dubiously at the Cmap representation I’d included in the previous post, Another Edublog… (2008.05.20); it dawned on me: “Eh, mate! You’re going on six blogs (and um-teen other online identities)!” Yet I’ve long been in a virtual sense, if I may tweak a line from a favorite children’s story by Lynly Dodd, “all [pabey] and [pboney] like Blitzer Maloney” [add page ref. about here].

Having tired of grappling with technological demons, real or imagined, yet not of deliberation and reflection in writing; I’ve opened the locker door, and tossed moldy vestiges of identity out to air on the deck. Here is a heap that has come to light:

An earthling: “An educator and a learner, a parent and a child, a colleague and a friend” (in elgg, c. 2006); “I teach computer skills, cultur…[-al appreciation], listening, speaking, reading and writing, and promote both [language] learners’ and teachers’ development” (in Blogger, c. 2007), as an author, a blogger, and a collaborator, aka: pab, pabeaufait….

([my] Your Profile, 2008.05.29)

Tags: blogging, identities, online, stories

Making a leap, I’ve created another Edublog for language learner development purposes. Although the companion wiki is still in a conceptual development phase, I expect to use the LLD Project Blog for modeling, journaling, and filtering posts for audiences of college-aged English as an additional language (EAL) learners, Japanese university students in particular.

I don’t expect it to remain as narrowly focused as the Writing Studio Blog that I’ve been running on Blogger for a bit over a year now. In spite of familiarity with Blogger functionality, I decided to make the leap into Edublogs and blended instruction with students in an English for communicative purposes course that I resumed teaching in April this year (2008).

After reading Sue Waters clarification of the differences between categories and tags (Edublogger, What’s The Difference…, 2008.03.02), I deliberately established three initial categories that correspond to the intended purposes of the new Edublog. Those are fostering and facilitating development of learners’ computer literacy along with their language skills, and a degree (modicum?) of autonomy in their own learning (LLD Project Blog, About).

Having grown accustomed to dedicating Wikispaces to individual courses, it wasn’t much trouble to build a course wiki for the blended course before actually deciding whether to go with another blog. However, I felt an itch to consolidate resources and tutorials less directly related to course assignments somewhere they would be equally accessible to students in all of the courses that I teach, in a venue less noticeably earmarked for teachers than the Language Teacher Development Project Wiki. Hence there now is a budding Wikispaces companion, the Language Learner Development Project Wiki.

In Ongoing VCWG [Virtual Community Working Group] discussion, Carole McCulloch suggests a demonstrable difference between online communities and networks.

A community, on one hand, she suggests is “an online group where one’s absence will be noted (you will be missed).” In contrast, she suggests, a network is “an online group where one’s absence does not matter (the group will survive)” (Learning Times, Virtual Community Working Group, 2005.04.06).

Reading that led to wondering whether the WinK network is beginning to approximate a community. [Somehow, this quick post got clocked in on January 1, 1970. Since I don't recall when I posted it, I'm changing the timestamp to today (March 19, 2008).]

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Tags: communities, LearningTimes, networks, online, virtual