The Group Badge below represents a Diigo group forming in Kumamoto to animate, promote, and study blogging initiatives and leadership within an expanding online community. The acronym WinK, for Weblogging in Kumamoto, indicates the group’s geographic focus, though not its initial tertiary education nexus.
The group description in the badge should be self-explanatory. If not please feel free to ask for additional information or clarification in comments on this post. Keywords for the Diigo group include: blogging, collaboration, community, education, leadership, technology, and writing.
A graphic representation for the Diigo group, to replace the default avatar, is in the works. We’ll stew on shortening the group name to fit badge width.
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.
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.
On Wed., Jan. 16, 2007, I had a first go at running a Zoomerang survey, using the service package available for free. Although the survey was easy to build and implement, severe limitations of free services made extracting the results a major pain.
As a peer had warned me almost a year ago [add ref. about here], when I first explored the possibilities, Zoomerang allows for free neither data exports, a very enticing Pro functionality, nor access to survey data after 10 days. Pro functionality isn’t cheap: 350 USD/year or 99 USD/3 months for educational uses (Zoomerang Support, 2008.01.18).
Fortunately, I had planned a simple survey – only three items: two unique item selection type items, and one free response item. The simplicity of the survey made responses relatively easy to represent from temporarily available Zoomerang data collections.
Soon after I had closed the survey, Zoomerang made collective and individual responses available on a website. I quickly endeavored to record response data manually in a location where I could retrieve and use it, ten or more days on, on my computer.
The gut nuts of this review are:
For survey development and implementation, Zoomerang is easy to use;
For free service-based data extraction, Zoomerang is a pain in the a….
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.
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.
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?
In a brief review for the June 2007 issue of TESOL’s Essential Teacher (Vol. 4, No. 2, p. 42), Susan Kelly expresses preference for SurveyMonkey as a tool for custom-designed assessments that help her optimize teaching practices before standard semester-final evaluations, which she asserts “occur too late and feature questions that don’t fit my [her] needs.” She finds that free SurveyMonkey services (registration required) suit her needs, and suggests that intuitive site design enables advanced EFL students to create their own surveys, though only premium services (19.95 USD/mo.) allow direct exports of survey results to spreadsheets for presentation and reporting purposes.
This post introduces a new logo for pab’s potpourri, smile-e (2007), created with Omni Graffle Pro.
The concept is actually about three years old, but has come a long way since 2004. It has survived two trans-oceanic relocations: one on paper, another on disk.
The yin-yang design represents blending of face-to-face and online communication. The smiley on top of the “e” indicates preference for face-to-face communication.
This post, I’m labeling “b4b” because when I announced this blog in the Blogging for Beginners (B4B): Links: Participant’s Blogs list, I characterized it as an experiment in labeling. While this experiment has surpassed the duration of the B4B workshop by a week or so, I am anxious to flag and share the results.
Just as the blogroll that I assembled had grown too long, so too had the list of labels (I’ll work on the blogroll later). In the past few days, I have combined labels and re-affixed the combined labels to blog posts which bore original, spontaneously derived labels. What follow are a few memorable examples of the past few days’ work (ABC…). The left-most items are current labels derived from items to the right:
AudioPodcastsVideo: Audio/Video
This concatenation derives from recent wiki reorganization which reflects the intersection of audio files, blogs, podcasts and videos.
BloggingCommentary: Blog/Comment
CognitionReflection: Meta-cognition and Reflection
I’ve decided to use CamelCase, instead of slash marks, and to spell items out rather than acronym-ize them (ExtensiveReading rather than ER, on another blog). I’ve also decided to use plural forms of countable nouns: tools and wikis, rather than tool and wiki (same pluralization for del.icio.us bookmarks, when I get around to it).
In Camino, the Mac browser that I prefer, revisiting and editing posts and labels was easy because I could click on a label. Then the pencil icon on each post with labels that I wished to edit offered one-click access to the posts and their labels. For example, I could select a label like “GlobalIssue” and immediately revise each post so labelled to “GlobalIssues.”
However, in Firefox for Windows, I have been unable to display the editing icon (pencil) on any post, in spite of toggling off and on the settings for easy editing (Blogger: Dashboard: Settings: Basic: Show Quick Editing on your Blog? Yes). Clicking on a label concatenated target posts. Yet I’ve had to use the Dashboard: Edit Posts view, and repeatedly scroll down through the list of posts to visually search for labels to redefine.
Once I got to the end of the first 25 posts or so displayed, I had to scroll down and then select Older Posts, before continuing to scan for labels to redefine. Scrolling down and then reselecting Older Posts was necessary after every label update.
How did Neil Young put it in his song, “Piece of…?”
I’d better stop now, before this report and reflection turns into a rant.
Whilst announcing a wonderful interview on her blog, MaryH suggests that she’ll try podcasting interviews “in the future” (B4B Message 1503). In response, Gladys points out a recording tool – blog sharing link-up (Podomatic: Blogger) that used to work for her, yet expresses a preference for “text in blogs” (B4B Message 1534, PS).
Elsewhere on the B4B list (forgive me, please, for relying here upon our memories rather than citations), contributors note challenges related to bandwidth limitations, making it difficult if not impossible to download media- (audio or video) rich blogs. They also may face restrictions on downloading media players or browser plug-ins to play back A/V blog elements.
Though I’ve begun listening to, and earmarking podcasts of interest, I prefer text in blogs, too, for reasons beyond downloading and playback difficulties. Granted, A/V podcasts are of great interest to educators who are intent upon presenting material that will help learners to develop listening and viewing skills.
However, for time-challenged educators and learners, sitting through podcasts is hardly a viable option. Attention spared while driving or cycling, I argue, is insufficient for uptake of ideas, intents, structures and vocabulary. Under such circumstances, note-making and cross-referencing are virtually impossible – unless you have a clip-board or keyboard mounted on your steering wheel or handlebars (or are concurrently recording your own commentary). Moreover, for city-dwelling pedestrians, traffic noise may well defeat listening at anything less than hearing threatening playback volumes on mp4 or mp3 players.
Rather than rant on about the drawbacks of podcasting, and before I develop a fuller argument for properly framing podcasts to develop learners’ listening skills and vocabulary, I’d better point out the LearningTimes Green Room and suggest that you check it out before the folks there quit providing nearly complete transcripts in show notes on their website as a prelude to their podcasts.
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