On Steve Hargadon’s Blog-servations

I actually wanted to comment on his first point: You don't really know what social networking sites you create will take off or succeed.

See, it never occurred to me that one might create a social networking site “just to see if it would fly.” (I know, duh.) But as I read along, I quickly learned that Steve has done this dozens of times.

“They” always say that the most successful entrepreneurs are not afraid of failing & I think there’s something to that. According to this philosophy, it would seem that you would try and try and try, throwing various things up against the Velcro wall -- some will stick, some won’t.

This has important implications in just giving an SNS-oriented assignment a try in your classes and not giving up if they don’t work one semester with one class. The idea here is that you give it a shot, analyze the process during and after, trouble-shoot what seems to work and what seems to be going awry. Then you fine-tune over the break and try again.

Hargardon’s other points were intriguing and astute: the quality of the SNS depends on the quality of engagement, particularly as exemplified by the early adopters… and that the SNS must have a compelling need or serve a real purpose or it will fall flat.

You know, as I think about my (lack of) involvement with Facebook, the final points are key. It does not serve a real purpose for me. Yes, I have gotten in touch with a few key people, but I am not an “active.” Some people think it’s the greatest thing evah, but the real test is whether it’s compelling enough for you? And if not, then what is? Is there another SNS out there that might be? That is the question… Maybe I need to invent one ;-))

Non-friend of Friendster (NFOF)

I’ve chosen to examine Friendster for this week’s activity. I vaguely remember hearing about it in 2003, but was in my own little obsessed world of a new faculty member, so paid little attention to anything other than TiVo as the time ;-)

The target audience for Friendster was basically anyone who was internet-savvy and interested in meeting others for dating, friendship, something more, etc. It was launched to compete with match.com, with a basic premise that you’d have more luck meeting “sound” FOFs then just blindly searching online for unknown others as potential romantic partners.

One interesting factoid: Friendstar launched in 2002 and was initially popular among gay men, Burning Man attendees http://www.burningman.com
(which as a sociologist, absolutely delighted me, lol ;-) and the random bloggers of the universe at that time.

The problem was, it grew to such popularity so quickly that the site regularly crashed, frustrating users, plus there were no filtering devices, so friends and bosses and classmates were all hanging together as “friends.” Another key factor that led to Friendster’s demise was the rush to be “most popular” and collect countless friends. In fact, some enterprising collectors set up fake sites and for some reason, these “Fakesters” outraged the company.

The convergence of all of these issues led to Friendster’s demise, but while it crashed & burned in the U.S., it surged in popularity in the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

If I had been on top of my game, would I have considered creating an account and using it? Most likely no, for I am a late adopter ;-)

Sticky Wiki

I like the idea of trying a wiki to allow my Psy 101 students to collaborate on a project in small groups that highlights differences in personality typing. Although I often have students of diverse ages in my courses, even among traditional college-age students, most have experienced at least one “workplace challenge” with a boss or coworker. Often that quintessential difficult person is a colleague with a personality type that opposes the student’s type, or at the very least, is someone who exhibits personality traits that are “annoying” or otherwise push the student’s buttons.

The intention of this activity is to heighten students’ awareness that these differences are not “wrong” or “abnormal” (well, let’s just stick to that theme for now ;-) They’re just different. And if they understood where that “difficult person” was coming from, his or her perspective, prevalent attitudes and behaviors, my students might not get “triggered” so easily.

So… in this activity, students will take a mini-version of the Colors Personality Inventory to deduce their dominant color (or personality) type. They will then jointly create a wiki page in class to address the following:

1. Describe five attitudes and/or behaviors that you value in coworkers.

2. Identify and explain five attitudes and/or behaviors that cause you stress and/or frustration in a work setting.

3. Develop five strategies FOR OTHERS WHO ARE UNLIKE YOU to more effectively work and play well with “your kind”…

My expectation for my students would be to collaborate on the wiki n class. (If need be, we might relocate class to a classroom with individual computers or the computer lab.) My thought is to start in a controlled environment so that I can “force participation” ;-) If it works well, I might expand the wiki collaborative effort to another group project…

Here’s a link to my wiki… http://colors-at-work.wikispaces.com/

(Hopefully I have the settings set correctly so that you can actually look at it ;-))

Dueling Instructional Design Models

I’m just having a great time tonight. The link I’m supposed to go to does not exist, so I need to guess on which one I’m supposed to use instead. I just clicked on a few things & now I’m in Google Hell.

So I’m just going to do my own thang with the Google searches, as is my way this week. At least a have a few names to search on…

1-2) How are the two models of instructional design similar to one another? And how are they different?

In searching on the Dick & Carey Model, I was immediately drawn to Walter Dick’s article, “The Dick and Carey Model: Will It Survive the Decade?” Ah, controversy! Ah, but somewhat incomprehensible at first glance of the abstract – no details on what this is.

And then my Google search turned up many links to the book I could purchase on the Dick and Carey Model, but no overview on the model. And the clock ticks away. More Google searching.

Ah, the glory of edutechwiki! Eureka!

Okay, so it appears that you start with your goal (or learning outcome), then follow their handy flow chart to figure out how you’re going to assess it (yawn!) And also, duh. Then analyze how that’s workin’ for you after the fact & revise if necessary. (Again, duh, who doesn’t do that?)

So the ADDIE Model had better be something truly new, different and revolutionary or I will be bored to tears. (Oh and if this is covered in pp. 41-53 of Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning, well I couldn’t open that link on Blackboard either.)

Now the moment of truth: can I open a new window in my Cavegirl Laptop, or will the whole thing crash?

Yes and yes! Straight o’ wiki this time…. And OMG this is insufferable! (Stacey you actually completed a degree in this??) When do we get to the good part?

Okay, so the assignment (where is the eyes-glazing-over emoticon? ;-) The similarities are that they’re both models of instructional design and seemingly contain the same elements. The important difference, as my wiki points out is that,” In the ADDIE concept, each step has an outcome that bleeds into the subsequent step.

Analysis > Design > Development > Implementation > Evaluation

And wow, here it seems you start with analysis… and carry it all the way through, rather than sticking with the flow chart in Dick & Carey. Also, it seems this one is favored over Dick & Carey because, “This is the idea of receiving continual or formative feedback while instructional materials are being created. This model attempts to save time and money by catching problems while they are still easy to fix.”

So if you’re analyzing all the way through, every step of the way, you figure out before you assign something that it would be not to go with potentially problematic assignments/assessments. I’m on board with that. But sometimes we simply can’t know a field work assignment will go dramatically off the tracks until it does…

3) Define the process for starting the design phase for a specific lesson you can use in your own curriculum. You should describe your potential audience (general characteristics, prior knowledge, demographics, and motivations). List any societal factors that may affect your lesson as well.

Well, I’m using the ADDIE model, so I would start with the Analysis phase:
• Who is the audience and what are their characteristics? College students of all ages who are bored easily & are taking the class to meet a requirement and for personal interest.
• Identify the new behavioral outcome. Um, the new behavioral outcome, that they not be bored? That they’re actually engaged in the material?
• What types of learning constraints exist? The allure of so many other more fascinating things, such as the text they just received and their own cognitive wandering?
• What are the delivery options? Online via a discussion board and video clip; in-class via a discussion and video clip.
• What are the online pedagogical considerations? Well, if I’m going to use a video clip, I need to upload it to our streaming server to make sure everyone can access it. I might also see if it (or something similar) is available on YouTube…
• What are the Adult Learning Theory considerations? Learners are most likely to be engaged if the topic is personally relevant.
• What is the timeline for project completion? If online, one week; if in class, one class period.
Now, as for societal factors, the only thing I can think of for this assignment is that I need to warn my students that the clip contains language that may be offensive so some people.

So here’s the assignment (in case you were looking for that):

A link to the dinner scene from Little Miss Sunshine +

Reflect back on your childhood or adolescence and think of a particular holiday meal... Please analyze a "typical" family dinner in terms of behaviors, interactions, and communication styles that occurred. (You may compare and contrast family dinners between/among households, if that was your experience.)

If you've seen the movie, Little Miss Sunshine, consider the dinner scene at the beginning of the movie (click on the link above to watch) and ponder the following...

How has your family background influenced your values, beliefs, and assumptions about family, gender roles, stereotypes, power, and individual rights within the family? How did the interactions that you experienced around the dinner table influence your communication patterns today?

Address five of the following questions:
Who bought the food? Who prepared it?
Who set the table? Cleared the table?
What were some of the foods/dishes that your family ate regularly? Why did you have these foods?
What was the conversation like? What was the mood or feel at the table?
What attitudes/values were conveyed through family dinner practices?
What gender roles were evident?
What conversations about the day did they bring to the table?
What practices do you continue from these early family influences? Which have you discarded? Why?


P.S. This assignment could be set up as a blog entry (since that’s the topic we’re on this week) or just a class discussion board. And the learning outcome that it addresses in Soc 140 Sociology of Intimate Relationships & Family is LC 2: Discuss the diverse customs, attitudes, values and expectations (by gender, race/ethnicity, social class, etc.) that affect our relationships with others.

On Richardson's Blogging Views

Being a student in a completely tricked-out online class (technologically speaking) has been an extremely valuable and eye-opening experience for me. Why you ask? Because nothing opens on my fine college-issue laptop with Internet Explorer (yes, with good ol’ version 7).

Let’s start with the YC main portal. Once I log on, rather than seeing the ever-helpful Electronic Student Services, My Services and YC Hotlinks, I get nuthin’. Just a message in each of the boxes that “this browser does not support inline frames.” Whateva, who cares, not needed in this moment.

So then I log in to the course I’m taking -- EDU 255 -- and I can’t open the Class Wiki (or any links in the class Blackboard site, for that matter). Instead, every time I click on any link, I get the message: “Navigation to the web page was canceled” and “What you can try: retype the address.” Well thank you very much, but I’m never given the URL, just the tricked-out link that I will click on & it will get me where I need to go. Yeah right.

Now, when I first logged on to my course and realized that this was happening, I did call the Help Desk because “maintenance” was done on my fine laptop before summer break. I actually spoke with the “maintainee” and he assured me that “nothing was done that would affect my Internet Explorer,” he “had no idea what the problem could be” and that I “should just download Firefox.” Thank You!!

So now when I try to do anything with the course, I need to have Internet Explorer and Firefox open at once because I can’t open a new tab in Firefox on my laptop. And Firefox seems to be so large that it just crashed my system and I had to start all over. My mistake, I was trying to read the Richardson blog, too.

So…to complete this assignment, I have my behemoth pc going and this ragtag laptop… And using my strategy of running back and forth between them with a flash drive, I’ll complete my assignments for the week, yay!

Seriously, now I know how my students feel when all of this tricked-out technology doesn’t work for them. And the lame-o suggestion to “come to the computer lab” is not really an option (well, for me, because I live in Phoenix) for anyone who lives say, more than 20 minutes away, has a full-time day job, a family and/or relationship, not to mention extracurricular activities. “Who has time for this nonsense,” I can hear them saying. It has really increased my sensitivity to “technology issues” in a very significant way.

So before I go trotting out a completely tricked-out class – or even tricked-out assignments – I have to really think through whether it’s “necessary,” to make sure the assignments are accessible in multiple ways, and that I even have back-up systems in place like listing URLs in case the “clickable links” don’t work. Now I generally do that, but now I know I must have these back-ups in place without fail. It is extremely frustrating otherwise and now I am keenly aware of it.

Which leads me to Point #1 in Will Richardson’s Blog:

“The other day, I was having a conversation along these lines with a good friend who serves as the Director of Technology at a local school. We were talking about change, about how hard it is, and how long it takes. While he’s done a great deal to move his school forward in terms of open source and social tools and technology in general, from a pedagogy standpoint, he had been racking his brain trying to figure out how to support individual teachers in these shifts. Finally, he came to the conclusion that the only way to do it was to create an individualized learning experience for each teacher, to take them where they are and mentor them, individually, to a different place. He’s in the process of surveying each teacher to determine what technologies they currently use, what their comfort levels are, and what they are most passionate about.”

Uh, yeah, how great would that be to have a “consultant” or mentor work with us on an individual basis and help us trouble-shoot our technology issues and make sure our students don’t experience technological frustrations and then decided to drop my class. This “consultant” experience actually happened for me with Todd Conaway when I debuted zoho.com for my final presentation E-portolios It was an invaluable contribution, because all of this technology is absolutely useless if students become too frustrated in their efforts to use it and just give up. (Yes I have had that happen!) Great job security for TELS folks, too ;-)

This, though, is an overly simplistic statement from Will Richardson for my Point 2:

“Teachers are learners. If they’re not, they shouldn’t be teachers.”

Hel-LO – not everyone wants to learn about technology… Isn’t that crystal clear by now? (And yes, Will Richardson, it pads your bottom line as a consultant to make these claims), but look at the composition of our class – the flier went out college-wide and how many continuing-contract faculty members signed up for it?

No matter how much Richardson wants to proclaim as what teachers “should” be learning, not everyone will embrace technology (much like, “not everyone will embrace change”).

Still, tying the two points together, the best way to entice teachers to learn about technology is showing faculty what it can do for them, what’s in it for them. But then, I’ve been beating this horse since giving those Blackboard Bootcamps all those years ago when I was a probationary faculty member.

People will show up for what they show up for, teachers will learn what’s interesting and “worth learning.” And it almost takes marketing campaign to sell them on what technology can do for them – while being realistic about the very real downsides (e.g., not going so far into pimping this class that you lose half the class because they can’t open what you’ve uploaded and/or follow the “advanced” content).

P.S. Oh and my favorite, I can’t just copy & paste this from Word into my blog. Yay for me! Like I don’t already have enough going on to suddenly discover it just won’t work. Well, I remembered it from last week, but forget to say anything/ask about that. Yes, in the 11th hour, as is my way ;-) I have to switch to some Edit Html nonsense and then re-format. Bliss!

They Asked About My "Teaching Philosophy"

Hmmm, this week I was asked to describe my “personal teaching philosophy,” so rather than reinventing the wheel, I decided to unearth a previous request for my “personal teaching philosophy” (an SOP – standard operating procedure -- when applying for faculty positions ;-)

Naturally, although I searched diligently, I had nothing already typed & ready to cut/paste, but I managed to dig this little ditty out of a file – it was from my application package for my faculty job here at the college!

So here we go, from way back when, what, six years ago?

I’m always looking for new ways to bring technology into the classroom, and with my diverse student population, I tend to “pull out all the stops” to capture their attention! (In fact, I’m known in my department for my video library, as I love to play short video clips in class to spark student interest.) I must confess, I’m constantly “searching the satellite” (and newspapers and magazines and textbook CD-roms for intriguing applications). I think back to when I was a student in their shoes and the most boring thing in the world to me was a dry lecture!

I find that the best way to elicit creativity from students is to model it. My emphasis is on applied learning, so I do everything I can possibly think of to make topics hit home and “light up” for students. In my 200-level courses, students keep application journals and portfolios, which they contribute to weekly, using examples from their daily lives. In my 101 courses, I give students specific projects, like describing the “role-playing” (dramaturgy) or their work settings, or describing the primary “agents of socialization” in their lives. Because I emphasize visual illustrations, I find that they’re very creative in their own presentations. Everyone wins, because students strive to creatively demonstrate learning, their classmates display great interest, and (hopefully!) some information will be retained a few years into the future.

This is actually quite endearing and adorable to reflect back on the Karly from six years ago – I’m still the same WYSIWYG girl (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG) … And I’m still a fan of the approach I described above (imagine that?!) only I’ve bumped up my technological tools a notch or two. My videos were converted to digital files (by TELS and mainly me! over the last several years) which I can just click and play in my classes (for educational use only ;-) My students no longer complete PowerPoints for their final projects, but thanks to Todd Conaway’s guidance and expertise, they complete e-portfolios which they can share with their classmates on http://zoho.com/. I’ve recorded all of my lectures on Tegrity (http://www.tegrity.com/) which students can download to their iPods for their viewing/listening enjoyment at times that are convenient for them. We bring in guest lecturers via Skype http://www.skype.com/. And thanks to YouTube, my students and I can now engage in “dueling video clips” – kind of like Battle of the Bands on who has the best video clip to relate to our topic of the day.

Finally, I know I’m on the slow bus here, but I uploaded all of my music to my brand spankin’ new iPod (well, since Christmas) and made mP3 copies of all my fave songs before casting my CDs to the wind. These, of course, are organized on my external hard drives (yes I now have three mirrored drives ;-) with my video clips per class topic/chapter. So I can now play a “song of the day” that’s related to my class content as my students saunter in. And mock me for playing songs by The Cars and such ;-) Btw, my high school bf (who recently found me on Facebook, no less) collaboratively determined with me via email that Dangerous Type belongs squarely in the Psy 101 Mental Health file http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmALL-V74Po. Thanks Marky Mark!

I Am Now a Blogger?

It was one of those things I resisted (pulling-the-covers-over-my-head-style), until I finally realized that maybe, just maybe, it might not be all that scary... That perhaps it might even be useful in one of my classes? Somehow?

Now Twitter -- I can't imagine using that, evah! Like anyone would want to follow lil ol' me anyway...