The LTD Project Blog

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).

Stashed away hither and thither in this office are notes accumulating from various presentations attended over the ages, some of which only come to light when virtually everything must move for floor waxing.

This spring, if I may call it that even though it’s threatening to snow tonight in southwestern Japan, the most surprising find has been the last page of notes from a faculty development session a year ago, almost to the day. It is short, sweet, and to the point:

Instill “educational heart” and teaching skills will follow.

([details to rediscover and insert about here: presenter, title...], 2007.03.07)

Machine translation from the original, vernacular wording of the phrase in question, 教育マインド (kyouiku mind), produces the phrase in quotations marks above. “Educational soul” might be just as accurate for an off-the-cuff translation.

It no doubt will be an adventure to explore the connotations of “educational heart,” one requiring suspension of beliefs regarding the easy-come, laissez-faire implications regarding development of appropriate teaching practices at the university level.

This is a quick-and-dirty reaction (ultimately to be revised) of a recent Educause article suggesting technological gaps between learners and educators, analyzing challenges that educators might face, and proposing strategies for responding to such challenges and bridging said gaps. It begins with a large chunk of food for thought from the source, which ploddingly challenged readership with pdf representation through page and column formats:

… [M]any faculty members today have become so inundated with digital communications from students that it is not unusual for communication protocols and limitations to be specified in course syllabi. Most faculty members have home access to campus resources and use a course management system. But have faculty embraced and utilized technology to the same extent as students? Most evidence, though limited, indicates that this is not the case.

Students live in a separate reality from faculty members, who are typically not motivated or rewarded by institutional incentives to change their practice. However, as higher education institutions struggle with limited budgets to support faculty and to move courses online, technology seems to change daily. Given the demands of teaching, service, and (for most) research, faculty are now expected to embrace learning technologies along with everything else, challenging the institution to help them make sense of what works and how to work it.

(McGee & Diaz, 2007, p. 30)

Granted, students may have at their ears and fingertips a host of protocols and practices for high-speed communication. However, what research suggests that they are using it, easily, or could or would want to, for higher educational purposes? For example, while getting by acquiring and compiling information for personal use may be quick and easy, synthesizing it and putting it to problem-solving or conflict-resolving purposes in environmental or social domains remain challenges that only attitude, skill and value development, not tooling up, can address.

Nevertheless, McGee and Diaz (2007) suggest a host of challenges that educators might face in order to get on the same wave-length as learners - if ever they’d want to: for starters, the over-abundance of digital tools and paucity of models for effective applications of digital communication technology in education. Other challenges include:

• disintegration (if not incompatibility) of tools;
• diversity of learners’ abilities, expectations and needs;
• instability, overly rapid or slow evolution of ed-tech infrastructures; &
• discontinuity of financial and technological support.

In spite of those challenges, McGee and Diaz contend that Web 2.0 tools “hold the most promise because they are strictly Web-based and typically free, support collaboration and interaction, and are responsive to the user” (p. 31). Their typology of applications ranges from communicative to interactive, with stops at collaborative, documentative [sic] and generative. However, blogs, virtual communities of practice, and virtual learning worlds are the only “tools” listed in more than one category along their alphabetical way (Table 1, p. 32).

All in all, it seems that integration and sustainability of educational technology is likely to occur only within adaptive communities or across virtual worlds, rather than as consequences of institutional-level tool evaluations, adoptions, training and subsequent dependencies. Yet McGee and Diaz suggest that the onus is on “institutions and faculty members” to sort this all out and devote necessary resources to it:

Given that higher education finally has some technologies actually designed for teaching and learning, institutions and faculty members alike need to determine the value of these tools and how they can best support learning. It is vital that the institution provide services and resources while also supporting the range of faculty members’ skill, expertise, capability, interest, and motivation.

(McGee & Diaz, 2007, pp. 32-33)

As means to discover what’s at issue, they suggest surveys, focus groups, observations, document analyses, more surveys, interviews, software tracking, self-reporting and shadowing. That’s calling for a whack of resource commitments already, and the process of “matching pedagogical value with [theoretically and experientially grounded] teaching and learning behaviours” (p. 36) is just beginning - then throw in all the variables for technological adoption, spread and support! What large, cash-strapped research university diverts such considerable resources to sweeping introspection?

(Cutting to the chase, if I may, just to get this post out there in a blogosphere and walk home before dark, …. Oops, too late!)

In spite of recognizing learner and educator diversity, McGee & Diaz suggest values of facility in “using technology consistently across programs” (p. 36). Hmm, what next? Standardization across institutions surely would make tools easier and cheaper to acquire, and support services easier to provide, too, wouldn’t it?

If viewed in bright light, their article seems to wind down with a flurry of platitudes regarding technology selection and implementation: Educator, know thyself, those you teach, and what challenges you; keep the ends in the fore; gather information that serves as evidence for what you do, or want to; take on or assign only doable tasks, and support those who have to achieve them.

It might also be possible to interpret McGee and Diaz’s technology selection strategies from a technology-neutral or negatively biased position, for they conclude that tech-savvy, if not technophiliac, educators are beginning to ask appropriate questions, although perhaps not in the right order (rearranged for this blog post):

• Do emerging and innovative technologies actually result in an improved educational model [or improved educational models]?
• How do these technologies map to instructional problems?
• Which technologies actually improve learning?
• How are these technologies implemented and sustained?

(McGee & Diaz, 2007, p. 38)

Reference

McGee, Patricia; & Diaz, Monica. (2007). Educause Review (September/October), p. 30. Retrieved September 14, 2007, from www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0751.pdf

Blogged with Flock

Tags: tech-savvy, web 2.0, education, technology, adoption, support, digital, communication, CMC, research

The points this plans addresses derive from a Blogging for Beginners (B4B) workshop task on the B4B pbwiki (Task 1 - Looking ahead - The Challenges of blog integration into our teaching). I’m posting the plan here so I can continue to develop it at my leisure (hah!) over the next week or so; I welcome your suggestions via comments.

• BLOG NAME: The name should match the course wiki name, so there’s hardly any doubt that it will be … Writing Studio Blog.

• BLOG HOST: The host should be free, and match the blog type that students will be using - again, there’s little doubt that it’ll be Blogger blogging for them.

• Note: This is a teachers’ group decision, though I almost prefer Edublogging. Radical changes in Blogger during the next week or so could influence this decision.

• BLOG SAFETY: I will require word verification, but only retroactively moderate comments from students. By retroactively, I mean I will assert administrative privilege to delete unwanted or no longer pertinent comments. I will strongly urge students to use word verification on their blogs as well. Regarding privacy, I note that an example student blog that I’ve just retrieved (see: Evaluation, below) is publicly accessible without going through university or community sites. The public nature of such blogs may influence what students post as well as who reads them.

• OWNER[S]: I’ll launch a blog for the two classes that I teach across town starting in April, and list it for other teachers’ and their students’ reference. Other teachers and I will help students launch their own blogs. So students, too, will be blog owners.

• ADMINISTRATOR(S): This particular plan is for but one small part of a collegial and community-based blogging endeavor. As I suggest regarding the blog name (above), another small part will be a corresponding wiki. The planned blog and budding PmWiki will inform not only classes taught concurrently but in all likelihood successive cohorts, just as preceding cohorts, blogs, wikis and web pages have already done. The wiki that I administrate is provided as a courtesy of the host institution. I will join two teachers already collaborating on blogger community building, as I have joined them in writing about online educational endeavors. One of the other teachers currently exerts administrative privileges over the community website.

• WHEN WILL THE BLOG BE KEPT ACTIVE? I expect to start the planned blog within a week or so after posting this plan for peer review and announcing it in the B4B workshop blog. I will keep it active for the duration of the coming academic year (April - March).

• TOPIC[S]: The topics for the planned blog will most likely be varied. However, I expect the majority of posts to focus on:

• writing coursework and assignment details,
• language learning activities and strategies,
• extensive reading and learner blogging, &
• to the extent feasible, learned-centered blog assessment (see: Evaluation, below).

• WHO WILL POST? - On the planned teacher’s blog, though students, peers and conceivably other interested parties may comment; only the teacher is likely to originate blog posts. Students will maintain their own blogs and comment on those of their peers.

• WHERE WILL AUTHORS POST FROM? Most student posts and comments will probably originate from on-campus computer laboratories. I expect to post to the planned teacher’s blog mostly from my office before and after laboratory classes.

• Wow, this planification thing is working!

• I’ve just realized that where and when students actually do what proportions of their writing ought to become research questions for collaborating teachers.

• HOW OFTEN WILL AUTHORS POST? - Offhand, I’ll say three to five times a week, both for me on the planned teacher’s blog, and for students on their individual blogs. Students should be able to create two posts, drafts at least, during class time in a computer lab. (90 minutes per week) - especially if they come prepared with outlines, notes and pre-located references to use for in-class writing.

• WHY WILL AUTHORS POST? The course syllabus requires individual student blogging for a variety of purposes including: reflection upon extensive reading and viewing activities, sharing of learning and other informative resources, posting major assignments for peer review, and commenting on others’ blogs. As have predecessors, I will encourage and model unfettered expression in optional types of blog posts, of both filtering and journaling varieties.

• EVALUATION:
  

• Evaluation of students blogging endeavors will continue to build upon a framework of weblog assessment indices (WAIs). A quick Google search (keywords: Kumamoto, WAI, weblog, assessment, index) top-lines an example from mid-term, second semester, last year (I LOVE SOCCER: WAI: the weblog assessment index;
  November 28, 2006).
• Student blog authors will be EFL learners, so I hesitate to categorize anything that they write while learning English as “mistakes.” Instead, I prefer to think of what they say and write as approximations of communication in the target language. As time allows, in class and out - without savaging learners’ writing spaces, I expect that we’ll negotiate both meanings and forms of their approximations, in order to achieve or repair communication with target audiences.
• I intend to collect specimens to illustrate need for common repairs, and to model and suggest repair strategies.

• I may rant in class and online about repetitive oversights or omissions that I find common in drafts, essays, blog posts or comments.
• Students who continue to make such oversights or omissions may feel like they have jumped out of the frying pan into the fire!

• TARGET AUDIENCE[S]: The students will be writing to an audience including:

• themselves - to mediate and observe their own linguistic development;
• their peers: class mates, cohorts, successors - as near-peer role models and cross-commentators within an intermural community of bloggers including other universities; and,
• should students decide to make their blogs readily accessible outside the community - also to other interested parties around our blogosphere.

• Note: I’ll share this B4B advice with students: “Thinking of what kind of connection your readers may have should be important when determining what kind of content you’ll include (remember the more you embed, the harder it is for people on a slow connection to get access to your blog).”

• ADVERTISING: Rather than “advertising,” which has strong commercial connotations, I’d rather use the word, promotion. Community organizers will promote students blogs with RSS feeds in instructors’ blogs or wikis and on community web pages. I will confer with the organizers soon, and suggest an announcement of the community on Dekita.

• WIDGETS: As a minimum, on the planned teacher’s blog, I plan to include:

• a Creative Commons license;
• labels keying into types of posts and specific assignments;
• links to a course wiki and community website;
• reference tools: a calendar and a dictionary; &
• some sort of a logo.

The following is a comment that I’m cross-posting from the B4B Blog entry on Week 4 - Best Blogging Practices (task 2). It reflects in part upon another less recent entry in Edublog Insights than I wrote about in a previous entry in pab’s potpourri.

Were I to be so bold as to assert knowledge of best bloggin’ practices, I’d be stretching beyond my ken. Nevertheless, there are a couple things that sound good a mere 7-8 months into personal blogging.

First, I would like to reflect and perhaps re-spin Linda’s suggestion… regarding how to treat learners’ blogs. That seems to imply our treating their blogs with the utmost respect, as connected, interested and motivated learners, ourselves, who are focusing on emerging ideas rather than unrefined forms.

Second, since a number of preceding comments have focused on the second of the readings found on the B4B wiki [Kathy Sierra, January 3, 2006; Creating Passionate Users: Crash course in learning theory], I’d like to bounce back to a point that immediately and memorably caught my attention in the first, by Ann Davis, a week or so ago when I had a moment to read it (and before I moved on to blog another of Ann’s interesting posts):

Giving students a choice in making their own connections about their learning on blogs paves the way for blogs to be constructivist tools for learning. These attributes are compelling and powerful motivators that help us shape the pedagogy.

What Ann says about pedagogy still seems to resonate with my spin on Linda’s suggestion (above), and sounds even more suited to educational blogging with adult learners - andragogy….

Caught some good vibes reading into Edublog Insights, where Anne Davis reprises “Ellin Oliver Keene’s keynote at the TRLD conference.” That’s: Technology, Reading and Learning Diversity; I gather.

Continuing to sum up Ellin’s presentation, Anne notes several strategies for enabling learners to “dwell in ideas… in the classroom”, namely:

• Clearing time for learners “to listen to themselves think and consider subtleties”;
• Modeling “how proficient readers frequently re-read and re-think portions of text… to explore [ideas] more deeply”; &
• Teaching “about meta-cognition - thinking about one’s own thinking - and the seven most common meta-cognitive strategies.”

I wonder whether a minimum of 10-15 minutes individual, reading-related blogging per day might help fill the bill. That is, to implement some of the seven strategies that Anne recap’s:

1. Connecting the known to the new;
2. Determining importance, learning the essence of text;
3. Questioning, delving deeper into meaning;
4. Using sensory images to enhance comprehension;
5. Inferring, finding the intersection of meaning;
6. Synthesizing, discovering the contour and substance of meaning;
7. Solving reading problems Independently [capitalization in original], empowering children to move from problem to resolution.

Those metacognitive strategies go, I suppose, for adults as well as children.

In a committee report at a September faculty meeting, the director of the media center announced the discontinuation of the Language Teacher Development Project as a university supported program.

The LTD Project was a program that the media center had inherited from the the foreign language education center in April 2006, when the media center was formed by conglomerating the language center, the university library, and computational facilities.

From 2007, the university will no longer grant the LTD Project coordinator relief from teaching responsibilities (one unit per semester). The media center director explained this decision by saying that the LTD Project was primarily for members of the broader community, rather than for matriculated students, and that the program was primarily online.

This is the second time since the university became coeducational that administrators and committees have discontinued support for language teacher support projects. First it was the English Teachers’ Recurrent Seminar (1999); now, the LTD Project.

What do decisions like this say about community outreach and use of educational technology to cater to distance-impaired learners?

Here is a rough and ready tabulation of the professional development interests from 2006 LTD Project application forms:

(more…)

Today’s Language Teacher Development Project gathering was jam-packed with firsts.

• First gathering in a long time (since August 2004)!
• First time the coordinator forgot to put up signs directing people to the meeting room (at least in recent memory; my apologies to anyone who had trouble finding it).
• First live participation from overseas: Yasuyo stayed up late in Toronto, Canada, and joined the new cohort by exchanging direct messages with everyone on site. Thanks, Yasuyo - Your fingers must be tired! For some of the participants this was a first go at instant messaging (IM), in English at least, and online interviewing. Comments, please, on what you thought about IM.
• First go at wikis for most, if not all participants: Everyone got to see how wikis work, and almost everyone got some hands on. One participant who hadn’t actually contributed to a wiki in session decided to make doing so one of her project goals.
• First team of guest presenters: Thanks, Rick & Joe, for sharing your insights and ideas for using wikis, and pointing out all those spaces ready to use (podcast presentation available at iTunes Store - requires free iTunes software, first). I won’t wait five years to put them to use!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Attribute to “pab’s potpourri”.

This blog is for us, Language Teacher Development Project participants, to use for communicating hopes and needs, setting goals, making plans, finding resources, describing activities, sharing images, trouble-shooting problems, sharing and reflecting upon accomplishments, … whatever it takes to generate momentum and sustain our own development as learners and teachers of languages, and users of technology for communicative and educational purposes. I’ll be posting more about how to get started as soon as I learn how to add users to this free WordPress blog.