Watch the doughnut, not the hole

The TLT Group's work has several hallmarks: taking low threshold steps forward; collaboration; and making a pluralistic, constructive approach to assessment. But arguably the most important, most counter-intuitive, and most pervasive theme of our work over the last decade has been our focus on 'activities.'

In contrast to our approach, the typical technology initiative focuses on -- surprise! -- technology. Buy new, fast, and inexpensive technology. Help faculty learn how to like and use that technology. Evaluate that technology (occasionally). And, all too soon, regret that the technology is now so old, slow, and expensive, and replace it with the technology that is newer, faster, and less expensive.

In contrast, The TLT Group usually focuses on what faculty, students and staff are likely to do with technology: how technology can potentially enable them to alter specific patterns of teaching/learning activity, e.g.,

• discussion,
  
• faculty-student contact,
  
• peer instruction,
  
• thinking through complex problems,
  
• calling up visual images and pointing to elements of those images while talking about them,
  
• integrative thinking,
  
• active learning,
  
• teaching in ways that take instructional advantage of diversity, ...

Our approaches to faculty support and course improvement, to cost modeling and time-saving, and to formative evaluation all focus on helping educators and institutions improve teaching/learning activities over time: small steps and, ultimately, larger changes.

Focusing on activities has several advantages:

• Activities drive outcomes, including learning, retention and costs. so the most direct way to change an outcome is usually to alter activities.
  
• Technology is never the only ingredient for improving outcomes; by focusing on the activity, we tend to notice the non-technological changes that also need to be made (e.g., reward systems, policies, partnerships, ...)
  
• Activities change slowly, in part because they are influenced by more than just the technology. It often takes several generational changes in technology before an activity and its outcome can be altered significantly. So plans to change outcomes need to be on a longer time scale; we help programs budget time and money in ways more likely to pay off in real improvement in learning.
  

Many of our materials and services focus on activities:

• Faculty support and course improvement (e.g., ideas for TLT sorted by Chickering and Gamson's seven principles of good practice; assessment workshop materials organized by activities in a course)
  
• Formative evaluation (evaluation questions sorted by the seven principles and other crucial teaching/learning activities, as well as technologies used for those specific activities)
  
• Learning space design and evaluation
• TLT case studies for faculty workshops, each focused on problems that can arise when faculty change course activities
• Our materials about content change are also organized around teaching/learning activities such as (digital) writing, research by students, and learning about other cultures.
  

Here's the point. In the past, our development of materials for professional and faculty development, evaluation, learning spaces, etc. has been opportunistic. While developing materials about the seven principles in one arena we might be focusing on diversity or visualization in another.

In the next stage of development of materials and services we are consider picking one or more activities and then developing a suite of faculty development workshops, evaluation templates, learning space examples, etc. needed to improve that activity. And, in true TLT Group fashion, we'd look at this 'warts and all,' studying the dangerous discussions and dilemmas that can arise in the process of making such changes.

Does that make sense? If so, which activities would be most important for The TLT Group to support at your own program or institution? if we wanted grant support for a consortial approach to such development, which activities might draw funder support?

• Teaching diverse classes and workshops?
  
• Using evidence to improve practice, in courses and services? ("culture of evidence")
  
• Digital writing Across the Curriculum?
  
• Learning communities?
  
• The 'seven principles?'
• something else?
  

Where should we work first in 2008-2009?

Organizing workshops for participants who differ in needs, excitement, ...

The TLT Group is well-known for its faculty and staff workshops. Here's one technique we've used to organize workshops for faculty who differ in many ways: in skills, in degree of excitement, and in reasons for attending.

Several years ago, the Butler University College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences decided to plan a laptop requirement for its entering students. In the 18 months leading up to the entry of the first laptop cohort, faculty would redesign their courses in order to take advantage of the new technology. The University subscribed to The TLT Group to get some help for those 50 or so faculty. We planned a day-long workshop for Butler staff. As part of that workshop, we wanted faculty to learn from the findings and experience of an expert at another university.

Usually, a workshop has to pick one of two strategies to help participants learn from an expert. The expensive option is to bring the expert to campus to be a featured speaker in the workshop. The inexpensive alternative is to have participants read an article written by the expert.

We used a technique that combines virtues of those two approaches, while also doing better than either at meeting the needs of a diverse group of faculty.

1. Before arriving at the workshop, participating faculty read an article by the expert.
2. At the workshop, we spent about 10 minutes planning questions to ask the expert. As they read this long and provocativ research report, our faculty had noticed different things, liked different things, and objected to different things. So there were lots of questions and comments. (At the time we had picked the article, we had asked the author if he would be willing to take our call at the time of the workshop so that our faculty could ask him questions. He was delighted to do so.)
3. Then we called him and began with the questions we'd planned, as faculty handed a microphone from one questioner to the next. We could hear our expert over a speaker. He didn't give a talk; he just responded to our questions and comments about his article. We actually spent far more time quizzing the expert then if he had given a talk.

Cost: just the price of the phone call.

Time-saving: People were able to read the article (which was quite long- 15 or 20 pages) in far less time than a speech would have taken. Even with the time for discussion, it was a great time-saver. : each person could focus just on those points that had excited or provoked them the most.

Impact of Class Size on Learning Outcomes?

Someone posted that question on the Professional and Organizational Development (POD) listserv this morning. I thought you might like to know how I responded:

There is no general relationship between class size and learning outcomes. (Think of a self-help book that sells millions of copies, or a PBS program on the civil war, if you'd like an analogy. It's possible for people to learn relatively sophisticated lessons even when "class sizes" are enormous. And the learning outcomes of presentation, whether delivered by book, video or by uninterrupted lecturing, aren't affected much by class size).

The research only gets interesting when you begin by specifying some teaching/learning activity and then asking about

1. the impact of class size on its feasibility, and
2. the outcome when that pedagogy is in successful use.

I call these three elements of resource/technology (class size), teaching/learning activity, and outcomes a "triad." The resource or technology offers choices. The activity is what people actually did with the choices. And the outcomes result from those activities. (That simple grammar suggests some powerful questions for the scholarship of teaching and learning in any course or set of courses.)

Some important teaching/learning activities do far better in small classes, and some learning outcomes are much easier to achieve with those activities. (e.g., seminar style discussion; activities that require personal coaching by an expert) But the threshold (the class size where the pedagogy breaks down) varies: I used to work at Evergreen where seminars of 20 students worked pretty well. But a master class in violin would certainly work much better with a 1:1 ratio than with 20:1.

Of course, if you summarize studies of class size that include all sorts of pedagogies and all sorts of outcomes, some of which involve lots of interaction, you'll find a small relationship between class size and outcomes. Which is what Pascarella and Terenzini report in their synthesis of research on learning, How College Affects Students.

Your question is an example of a larger class of questions about the relationships of inputs or technologies to learning outcomes (e.g., how does the size of the library affect learning outcomes? distance learning v. campus classrooms? highly paid profs v. low paid profs?) The role of resources in learning, even a scarce resource such as the attention a professor might pay to a student, is to create possibilities for action.

The power comes from the teaching/learning activities - what faculty and students actually do in those classes. That's why you'll see relatively significant findings on studies of learning where the independent variable is a powerful pedagogy, but not where the focus is a resource or a technology. For examples of such powerful pedagogies, take a look at the P&T book above or at the 2007 annual report from the National Survey of Student Engagement or reports from the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Steve Ehrmann

Introducing The TLT Group: Why Subscribe?

As you probably know, Steve Gilbert has been doing pioneering work on brief hybrid workshops - workshops that:

• Are only 5-15 minutes long (short enough that people will be able to find a moment to do the workshop, even on a busy day);
  
• Involve a little learning by doing and interpersonal interaction; and
  
• Are well enough supported with eClips and other materials so that peers can use them to help peers to learn something useful.

The other day Steve challenged me to create some brief hybrid workshops about The TLT Group. The notion is that these materials would be used by someone who would like to tell colleagues about The TLT Group so that they could discuss whether or not their institution should subscribe. Here's my first attempt at such a workshop: http://www.tltgroup.org/about/intro.htm

I've tried it yesterday while visiting the University of Alabama (where we just did a great workshop, one of the goals of which was to spread the word about all the different benefits of their subscription). Ideally people at our workshop can now use these materials if they want to tell other people (who didn't attend) about what their subscription offers.

What do you think? Would you use these materials to help your colleagues learn about The TLT Group? If the workshop design or materials needs to be tweaked before you'd use it, what would you like us to change?

Thanks for your help!

Faculty Learning Communities: A New Strategy

Imagine a faculty learning community - a community of inquiry and evidence - that is doing collaborative research in order to improve its members' success in 'teaching online' (or teaching with ePortfolios, or teaching with student response systems, or fostering digital writing, or teaching in a computer classroom, or any other technique or technology you choose). The TLT Group and Washington State are now beta testing a new kind of survey tool that opens up new avenues of research for such communities. The tool is Flashlight Online 2.0 and the strategy it supports is called a 'matrix survey.'

Let's imagine that the faculty learning community is going to do research together on its members' uses of ePortfolios, in order to discover ways in which its members could improve learning in their courses.

Up until now, if the community were interested in using a survey or interview protocol, members might have assumed that all students in all classes would need to be asked the same questions, so that faculty could pool their data:

• "How satisfied are you with the use of ePortfolios in this course?"
  
• "Is the ePortfolio easy to use?"
  
• "How much is the ePortfolio helping you learn?"

These are 'lowest common denominator' questions. After the community gets answers to questions, would they really understand student learning any better? would they have learned something useful for improving learning? Probably not. The questions are so sterile because they have to be conceptually broad enough to cover the wide variety of uses of ePortfolios across courses.

And there are many activities for which ePortfolios can be used, but only a few are likely to be important in any one course. Here's a list that Susan Kahn (IUPUI) and I developed:

1. Reflection as a means of deepening learning
2. Integrate/synthesize prior learning and course learning
3. Student academic self-assessment, guidance (within degree program)
4. Building a sense of professional identity
5. Personal/developmental: Each student develops/describes own goals & abilities
6. Audiences and assessors for the student’- more, better
7. Learning communities, support of
8. Department reframes major in terms of competences across courses
9. Faculty share practices, perspectives
10. Job and school applications
11. External accountability

An activity that specific is much easier to study: do the students understand the goal? what are the software's strengths and weaknesses when used for that purpose? what factors are helping and hindering the student in doing this particular thing? and so on.

Research would be much easier for a community if all its members used ePortfolios the same way. But the needs of real faculty learning communities is seldom this neat. Different faculty are likely to use ePortfolios in different ways. And that's where the matrix survey can play such an important role in supporting more focused, flexible research.

Imagine members of the community working together to develop a useful set of student feedback questions for each of those eleven activities above (assuming each of those activities was a goal for at least one of the participating faculty).

Flashlight Online 2.0 enables each faculty member to fill in a menu specifying which of those eleven activities are important for her course, automatically a student response form that contains only questions about those particular activities.

Once the students have responded:
a) the individual faculty member can get a report on how her students have responded; and
b) the faculty learning community can get a report on how all their students have responded, activity by activity, for all eleven activities. Imagine that there are 25 courses being studied. The report on activity 1 might come from 17 of those courses, on activity B from 4 of those courses, and so on. The community could use this pool of data to study each activity, searching for insights from the larger pool of data. I emphasize activity F in my course and saw something that surprised me from my own students: is that typical for courses that emphasize activity F? or unusual?

Such a survey is not just a one-time thing. The faculty learning community could use its matrix survey term after term, even if different members of the community were on different academic schedules (or even at different institutions), accumulating data.

To read more about matrix surveys, with examples of such survey questions for different uses of ePortfolios, click here.

To comment on this idea or ask questions, please post a comment below.

And, most importantly, if you are interested in working with us on developing such a matrix survey strategy for a faculty learning community (or any other purpose), please contact me.

Fostering Incremental, Cumulative Improvement

For over a decade, Steve Gilbert and I have been working on ways to help institutions foster incremental, cumulative improvements in teaching and learning with technology.

It's easier to attract attention to the opposite: big grants and top-down redesign. What's wrong with that? Nothing, but that 'big push' approach is quite limited, especially in times of tight budgets:

• It's hard, and rare, to get such chunks of time and money
• What do you do a few years later, once the initial capital has been expended? does the innovation that stagnate, regress, or what?
• Most change in higher education can't be achieved through such an approach. Most faculty, most courses, and most student learning experiences would remain untouched.
  

To foster an incremental, cumulative improvement in teaching and learning (with technology) here are some ideas, materials and tools that The TLT Group has developed for its subscribers.

As you'll see, many of these items have a common working assumption: most faculty are interested in improving their teaching, and the learning of their students, to the extent that each such improvement can be achieved without undue time or risk.

• Identify "low threshold" ideas for improving teaching and learning, and circulate them (e.g. via frequent, brief, read-at-a-glance e-mails.)
  
• Offer brief, hybrid workshops (BHWs) to faculty - each just 5-15 minutes -- to help them learn low threshold ways of improving their teaching. These workshops should be well-documented (e.g. with brief online tutorials, brief testimonials from faculty who have used the ideas in the past). If faculty participate in such a workshop (e.g., as an agenda item in a departmental faculty meeting; during a brown bag lunch), try the idea in their own courses, and like the results, they should be able to use the same workshop materials to help other interested colleagues to adapt the same techniques. In other words, a good BHW can be offered peer-to-peer, without always requiring a highly skilled leader.
• Train students to help faculty improve teaching, especially teaching and learning with technology. For years, The TLT Group has offered subscribers help in upgrading their programs for student technology assistants so that the students can provide this kind of aid to faculty.
• Help faculty use student feedback in order to figure out how to improve their teaching. The TLT/Flashlight program to develop such brief hybrid workshops is called "Asking the Right Questions" (ARQ).
  
• Support faculty who act as 'compassionate pioneers' (e.g., helping their colleagues use ideas that the first faculty member has already tried)
• Stretch and coordinate the use of scarce faculty support resources by developing a virtual Teaching, Learning, and Technology Center. In strategy for encouraging incremental, cumulative improvement, faculty have to do much of the work: identifying a need and making an improvement. But that doesn't mean they're completely unaided. So how can the institution speed help to all interested faculty when, at almost every institution, support resources are splintered among faculty development, information technology, the library, distance learning, individual departments, and other units? By having as many of those support staff as possible work (in many ways) as though they were one unit. Such a virtual TLT Center can have a single help line, a single calendar, co-planning of events, shared development of its (their) own staff, etc.
• The study done by TLT/Flashlight of the MIT/Microsoft iCampus program revealed more ways to support incremental, incremental change. For example, it is far easier for faculty member B to understand, appreciate, and implement a teaching idea from faculty member A if A & B teach the same course, perhaps with the same text, perhaps with the same academic calendar, with a similar approach, and similar concerns. In that case, B can 'grok' what A is saying almost instantly, decide quickly whether to try the idea, and (the first time) try it by copying what A did. It's a relatively low threshold process. So the trick is to find a way to pair A and B. Interestingly, the larger the universe of faculty (e.g., a big system of institutions, a statewide effort, a national professional association), the easier it is to create such pairs and small groups of like-minded faculty.

Everything I've written so far focuses on how to invest in and support incremental improvement. What about making enough such small changes, and congruent changes, so that the results are 'cumulative?" Over time, we'd like the results of all these tiny changes become apparent to instructors, and also to students, departments, alumni, accreditors, etc.

At most institutions, the job of larger entities (departments, professional associations, institutions, libraries) is to work to support all kinds of improvement (and thereby offend nobody). The job of the faculty member is 'merely' to choose.

There are real problems with that working model. Few of those larger entities can afford to support all conceivable incremental improvements. And few faculty have the time to scan all those opportunities, and then choose one.

Doesn't it make more sense for those larger entities (departments, associations, and institutions) to choose some directions for improvement, and focus on incremental improvements in those directions.

I'm indebted to Chris Alexander of Berkeley for that insight. Decades ago, in his book The Oregon Experiment, Alexander rejected the idea of campus master plans and instead argued for focused support of incremental change in the university's physical infrastructure. The goals would be agreed on and adjusted through community governance.

As it happens, The TLT Group also helps institutions organize Teaching, Learning, and Technology Roundtables. One role that such TLTRs can play is to pick some goals for incremental instructional improvement, and then help the institution maintain its focus for enough years so that the results become visible, valued, and rewarded. What kinds of goals are worth the candle? How about "learning community," "undergraduate research," "writing across the curriculum," or "building a culture of evidence"? The important thing, for departments as well as institutions, is to pick a few such goals of real importance, where systematic support of incremental, cumulative improvement can really pay off for students, faculty, the department, and the institution.

Your comments? What strategies have I missed? What resources?

Working on ARQ (Asking the Right Questions)

"Asking the Right Questions" (ARQ) is a set of brief hybrid workshop materials for faculty. The goal: figure out how to improve online discussion, or your lecture slides, or your use of clickers, or your online assignments -- some kind of teaching and learning with technology in your course -- by asking your students some pointed questions about that activity.

Each workshop module is only 5-15 minutes long, short enough to insert in a faculty meeting or brownbag lunch, or to use in a brief online workshop. The ARQ workshops can be led by faculty development or IT support staff, or by faculty who have been through the workshop previously, tried what they learned, and liked the results.

A group of us (join us!) are developing and testing these materials, and the collection grows and changes almost every week. Frank Parker tells me that ARQ materials have been tried out at Johnson C. Smith University. Meanwhile I've been tweaking the materials for improving online discussions.

I'm also using Flashlight Online 2.0 to develop new survey templates (and a new ARQ workshop) on improving the use of clickers, and another ARQ workshop (with Flashlight Online 2.0 materials) for getting more out of your use of electronic portfolios. I'm working with IUPUI on the eportfolio materials; if you like this ARQ approach and want to join in that work please let me know. I don't yet have any partners for work on the clicker workshop materials. Interested?

I'm also thinking that it's time to go after some grant money to speed up the development and testing process, and to evaluate the materials: can this approach really engage more faculty and help build a culture of evidence? Maybe an institution with an accreditation a few years off, or a consortium or association, would like to go after such a grant, and use us as a contractor to help?

Personal notes: After traveling every week since late September, I'm off the road until January. Arthroscopic surgery on my left shoulder coming up, the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. No heroic athletic injury involved: just a bone spur that's been making me increasingly sore. The surgery should clean that up.

Before that, however, Leslie and I are headed for New York City to celebrate Thanksgiving. Chris (our son) and Monique have invited us and also her parents to dinner. This is our first opportunity to meet Monique's parents. We're all pretty excited about this particular holiday.

The New York Times > E-Mail This > EDUCATION > Articles > Thank You

The New York Times > E-Mail This > EDUCATION > Articles > Thank You

Online version seems to omit paragraph I found esp. interesting in paper version: "Mr. Klein said that the cell-phone ban would apply to the students who received the phones: They would be expected to leave them at home during the school day."

Asking the Right Questions (cont'd)

We ran our first subscriber and member workshop on "Asking the Right Questions" (ARQ) last week. As you may know, ARQ is a growing collection of materials for brief hybrid workshops, all aimed to show instructors new ways to gather information from their own students in order to improve teaching and learning with technology in their courses.

Last Tuesday's ARQ workshop focused on how to gather evidence that could be used to improve participation in online discussion. The workshop teaches faculty how to frame their own questions, and also how to adapt Flashlight Online model surveys to collect evidence from their own students. The workshop materials also include an eClip to help run the session, handouts, and feedback forms.

We went through the workshop and then critiqued it; the version you can see online today is the result of that critique. I'm sure it will continue to change as we get more experience with the materials. Everyone on Tuesday said they were considering offering the workshop at their home institutions.

This coming Tuesday (Oct. 16 at 3 PM ET) we'll try a workshop on personal response systems (e.g, clickers). Here too we're going to look into how asking students the right questions can show instructors and institutions how to get more value from the PRS itself. The ARQ materials include sample Flashlight Online surveys: one to do a needs assessment of faculty, and the other for faculty to adapt for use with their own students. (If you're interested in Flashlight Online 2.0, take a look -- I used the beta test version to write these surveys.)

If you're at a TLT Group subscriber institutions or are yourself a TLT Group member, I hope you can join us! Maybe you'll get interested enough to help us develop more ARQ materials. Click the link for our calendar; the ARQ workshop is at the top - click to register. It's only open for our subscribers and members but for them (you, I hope), it's free.

Lectures & Diversity: Dialogue with Ed Nuhfer 10/12/2007

Click here for info about and interview of Ed Nuhfer.

Steve Gilbert: What kinds of differences for students can be achieved by different kinds of teachers?

Ed Nuhfer: In the faculty development that I do, I usually try to get faculty to first have the necessary conversation with themselves to know what they want to do. That sometimes involves divorcing themselves from what their favorite mentor did, finding their own strengths and being themselves. The person who is more introspective and prefers working one on one with students can structure the classroom so they can move from group to group, work one on one, and teach self reflection. A really great orator who can hold a room spellbound with a lecture--and we all know they exist-- should be allowed to do this. Like Margaret Wheatley, I have a lot of faith in people and a lot of respect for true diversity--which has little to do with gender or race but more to do with the richness we bring to education by being different. We are not in a one-room schoolhouse. Teaching is a community activity, so every teacher doesn't have to mesh perfectly with every student. The diversity will assure that "perfect match" occurs whenever teachers and students work mutually in good faith. What can be achieved depends much on the ethic of teaching and learning--we use the best tools we know from both sides of the classroom. I addressed some of this in the May issue of NTLF.

Steve Gilbert: To what extent and in what ways does it matter that students and teachers in a particular course have certain complementary attitudes, abilities, cultural background, language, etc.?

Ed Nuhfer: My idea here is that so long as the ethic is one of welcoming acceptance, good things will occur. If we demand others be like us, we may reinforce common biases rather than advance learning. The knowledge survey tool is one we are finding is telling us whether we do one or the other. If pre and post correlate highly, it indicates we have reinforced preconceptions rather than changed minds. In some cases such as having senior majors, in terms of content and professional interest there is a self selection at work that brings to the class the qualities you speak of that are very in line with the professors' interests. Such is not true in general education classes. Is there really such a thing as a terrific course without a terrific teacher? This is like asking if there can be a terrific book created without a terrific author. When we look at teachers as designers of learning rather than as dispensers or entertainers, this becomes obvious.

Steve Gilbert: If someone could design a course that meets or surpasses the expectations of most instructional designers, most faculty development professionals, and most other academic support professionals, how confident could we be that some particular faculty member could teach that course very well? Independent of student background? Etc.

Ed Nuhfer: Don't we see this kind of question answered every day in theatre? The script is the same, the design set is often even the same, but is every Shakespeare play or every Broadway hit of the same quality? One could apply technology and say---well, the best is done and it's on film--let's just show that and never feature a live production again. How satisfying might that be; what would be lost?

Steve Gilbert: Do many experienced faculty and students believe that it doesn't make any difference for traditional age undergraduate students if the course meetings begin at 7am or 11am?

Ed Nuhfer: Some of Cashin's summary research showed time of day didn't matter much regarding satisfaction ratings. I think it makes a great difference with individuals, but Cashin's summary shows it doesn't on the average. Aggregate data and individual data are useful for learning different things. Now if we gave a class at 3:00 a.m. To a world on a normal biorhythm, that would be problematic.

Steve Gilbert: If the course meeting times are 15 minutes per session or 120 minutes? If the teacher has trouble speaking English? If the campus has recently experienced a major tragedy or a major athletic victory?

Ed Nuhfer: Depends on the quality of the use of time, but wouldn't it be a trip as a student to experience what one could learn in both if these were taught by equally committed teachers?! I've gained more from a rare 15 minute presentation at a professional meeting than I've gained in many two hour seminars. What if I could count on one of these AHA moments every fifteen minute period? If you focused on "What if I had only fifteen minutes to teach my course--what would I teach?", I bet most would walk away with something more valuable from that fifteen minute session than if you rambled for two hours without any clear goal in mind for the students or yourself. On the other hand, we think--"I have two hours! What can I do in that which I could not do in fifteen minutes?", I think we have an equal commitment. Now would that yield with the 15 minute course a richer CURRICULUM than everything done in a ritual 50 minutes. Beyond those examples, there are some generally optimal limits set simply by physiology that makes it unwise to go far below (like 30 seconds?) or above those times (15 hours?). What if the instructor was simply dumb--could not speak at all--would there be a way that instructor could teach well? With the right accommodation and equipment, why not? She/he doesn't have to teach like everyone else. So, if a teacher has an accent, is the latter more limited? If an institution has a disruption of either type, isn't optimal teaching seizing that teachable moment for what it can offer rather than for what we planned otherwise to do?

Steve Gilbert: And finally, if education is as complex and profound as implied by my list of questions and my own commitment, how do we reach some conclusions simple enough and reasonable enough and plausible enough to enable us to move forward without going crazy or feeling overwhelmed by the complexity?

Ed Nuhfer: My answer is that if we anticipate that the experience is complex and profound, we can decide (see Ros Zander's Art of Possibility) first that we are going to be happy anyway, and second, that if we are not going to be happy in this, then we should be doing something else that makes us happy. We can enjoy the roller coaster ride for what it is. One conclusion that's simple in education--try to leave each person just a little better after the encounter than before.

Best,
Ed

Ed Nuhfer
Director of Faculty Development and Professor of Geoscience
California State University Channel Islands
ed.nuhfer@csuci.edu

"So far as I know, no one else has ever done this."

I can remember when I was in my 20s, writing my first grant proposal. I was writing to the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE). Somehow I knew that it was important to be able to write in my proposal, “So far as I know, no one else has ever done this before.”

1. Writing “so far as I know” was important, because I didn’t want anyone to be able to say my magical sentence was false. And, in fact, writing ‘so far as I know’ helped me justify not doing any search for existing practice. Because, if I looked hard enough, I might discover that my idea wasn’t unique.
   
2. It was important to write, “No one else has ever done this before,” because that’s what funders value, I assumed: uniqueness, newness, innovation. If someone else is doing this, I shouldn’t be wasting my time with a proposal.

My proposal was turned down.

A year later, I’d crossed to the other side of the desk, to become a FIPSE program officer, and soon realized how silly my assumptions had been. In fact, my claim might even have been a reason that my proposal had been turned down.

1. An idea that is truly unique is probably responding to a problem or opportunity that no one else has ever faced. Few foundations are interested in supporting such tiny problems or opportunities.
2. Someone who is as isolated as I was (or, worse, as isolated as I was pretending to be), has no opportunity to learn from the achievements and mistakes of others.
3. Someone that isolated is also unlikely to find it easy to disseminate the results of their work. Dissemination generally is part of what funders consider to be the payoff to their gifts or investments: wider impact and visibility for their work. That was certainly true for FIPSE.

So, the paragraph I came to look for as a funder was, "We're one of a number of pioneers in this area. Here' s what we've learned from the achievements and problems of others. Here's how we're connected with them. Here's what we want to do. And here's how those connections will help us share our experience with those pioneers, and with others who will want to adapt what we do with your money."

Can Online Activities HELP Colleges Deal with Racial Incidents?

What are some examples of using information technology in colleges and universities that help the academic community respond constructively to racial problems?
What are some examples of using information technology in colleges and universities that increase racial problems within the academic community?

"U-Md. has had two forums for students and others to talk about race since the noose was found, with about 50 to 70 people at each forum. A student group is asking people on campus to submit stories online about their experiences with discrimination."

"Either way, the incidents shock in part because many people expect colleges to be oases of tolerance and understanding. But school officials and scholars say it's natural that racial tensions sometimes flare on campuses because colleges reflect what's happening in the world around them; they're not isolated from economic and social rifts. And for many students, college is the first time they've met so many different types of people.

"Some students arrive with prejudices and stereotypes they don't even know they have, said William B. Harvey, vice president and chief officer for diversity and equity at the University of Virginia.

""the power is in the silence that surrounds these symbols," said Sherrilyn Ifill, professor of law at the University of Maryland. "We don't talk openly about why a noose is such a provocative symbol because we don't talk much about our history of lynching.""

"Schools aren't doing well at this, said Harvey, who came to U-Va. from the American Council on Education. "I don't know of a single place that's doing as well as it could be, or should be, doing.""

"Still, several professors said college is the perfect place to challenge people to talk about difficult subjects and learn about the unfamiliar. Studies have shown that students are more tolerant after they graduate, Moore said."


Colleges See Flare In Racial Incidents - washingtonpost.com, by Susan Kinzie , p. B1, B2, 9/26/2007

Downloading MP3s from Gabcast (3.5 min YouTube video)

Test of using YouTube to add a video to this blog 9/27/2007 12:46pm EDT

"The Lecture is Dead. Long Live the Lecture."

"The Lecture is Dead. Long Live the Lecture."

Role of Note-Taking

Response to previous postings "The best 'lecture' ever"

Excerpt from posting to POD listserv by Steve Gilbert Aug 29 2007.

"The Lecture is Dead. Long Live the Lecture."
That's the new title that emerged yesterday during a conversation I was privileged to have with Paul A. Lacey in preparation for a free online Webcast next Friday (Sept 7) about pedagogy.
Click here for full digital recording of this event:

Paul often referred to his experiences as the first Director of a Lilly Endowment project to support young faculty members. He described the rapidly growing movement to oppose lecturing in college courses, the over-zealous advocates of eliminating all lectures who claimed that students could learn more efficiently from textbooks, etc., and, eventually, the evaporation of this issue. All in the 1970s.

Paul noted the disappearance of note-taking by students during lectures as one of many important changes since then. He described some of his work with a variety of faculty colleagues over many years to help them improve the effectiveness of their lecture-dominated courses. He often focused on helping the faculty members to shape the students' purposes and practices in note-taking.

I want to suggest that student note-taking may be viewed as a valuable lens for focusing more clearly on the intersection of new technology options, changing educational practices, and common misconceptions about "engagement" and "active learning."

First, do you agree that most students do not arrive in most lecture-based courses prepared to take notes effectively? Is that quite different from a few years or decades ago?

Second, technology as culprit. Many teachers and learners have been seduced by the capability of recording and publishing live events in various ways, as the relevant technology has become so easy to use, available, and inexpensive. They have leapt to the conclusion that a full audio recording or full video recording of the entire event is superior to and removes the need for note-taking by individual students.

Third, the practice of a faculty member or student or other authorized person serving as official note-taker for a course is also seen as superior to and removing the need for note-taking by individual students.

The Misconceptions
I learned rather painfully by trial and error over many years that if I do not take notes myself during a lecture, presentation, or meeting I do not focus as sharply on what is being said and I do not engage as actively as when I am constantly trying to rephrase, summarize, identify main points, and jot notes - including my own questions, ideas for further actions, etc. Even if I never review those notes again, the process of writing them (by hand or by computer) makes a big difference for me. I don't think this need of mine is especially unusual. I also don't believe that everyone needs to take notes in the same way that I do. Nor do I believe that taking notes oneself is incompatible with making use of notes, guidelines, or recordings prepared by others.

Many students CAN entirely avoid engaging with what is being "delivered" in a lecture, and that is the beginning of a legitimate complaint about lecture-based courses. However, if the students are helped to take notes in an effective way or to participate using other structured activities and devices (many already described in this series of email messages), lectures can be quite effective. Students can be "actively engaged" without having to speak aloud to anyone.

Many college and university faculty members still begin their teaching careers with the tacit beliefs that all their students have career goals, enthusiasm for the discipline, and study/learning habits similar to the teacher's own. Overcoming that predilection has always been an important step on the path to becoming a good teacher for undergraduates who are not destined for graduate school or majoring in the teacher's field. With the increasing numbers and variety of backgrounds of undergraduate students, this step becomes even more important. And so does a faculty member's acceptance of responsibility for guiding students' efforts to learn in a course.

If a teacher includes lectures, the teacher may need to offer some suggestions about how and why to take notes. If the teacher decides to make some kinds of recordings or approved notes available that practice should be explained carefully. Students should be encouraged to use the other resources effectively in conjunction with their own note-taking. And, of course, students may need to know about the increasing variety of effective ways to take notes so that each students can determine which kinds of note-taking are most useful for that individual student in which kinds of courses. [Some examples of useful note-taking methods: outlining, concept mapping, drawings, verbatim phrases, indications of priority, follow-up goals, … etc.]

I'm looking forward to learning more from Paul Lacey next Friday and hope that some of you will join us. Oh, I personally prefer to include some kinds of visible interaction with students/audience/participants at least once every 10 or 15 minutes even in a "lecture" - whether that happens to be with a group of hundreds of people in a single room or in an online session.

Steve Gilbert
President, The TLT Group

SOME REFERENCES/INFO FROM /ABOUT PAUL LACEY:

Paul A. Lacey,
Emeritus Prof. of English, Earlham College
Clerk [Board Chair], American Friends Service Committee

"Boundaries in Academia: Personal, Professional, Political, Spiritual?"

"Terror and Other Threats to Humanity"
Fifth World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates, Rome, November 2004

Is the lecture dying? Should it?

"There are some students that are upset that I do not lecture. Some students say, "I'm not paying Harvard $45,000 a year to learn it all myself." At the end of each semester, students fill out a questionnaire, and a few students will write: "Professor Mazur is not teaching us anything. I have to learn it all myself.""

"Once, all professors spent entire classes talking nearly nonstop while students furiously scribbled notes. Today, a growing number of professors are abandoning that tradition, saying there are better ways to keep students focused and learning."

"time-honored college lecture course, which is undergoing significant change at some universities because of technological innovations and the desire to hold the attentions of the highly structured 21st-century student.

""If the old traditional lecture is dying, it is because we are relying so much on the template of technology to make up for the lack of content," said Michael Bugeja, director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University. "PowerPoint has done more to kill the lecture than people really are aware of.""

" clicker, ... allows professors to determine almost instantly what percentage of students have the right answer." [implies that there always is a "right answer" in a class?]

""Physics is about data. Our first intuition is not quite right. We have to modify our intuition."" - Quote from Edward Redish

"Of course, there are still some professors who can galvanize a class by using dramatic storytelling, internal structure, movement and a strong voice." [and what about thoughtful insights? impressive breadth of knowledge? caring about students? deep commitment to the topic?...]

"The problem, some educators say, is that few teachers can bring a lecture to life.

""Far too many lecturers tend to read aloud material students could readily read on their own," " Coleen Grisson

"poll of college courses would find that many professors still rely on traditional lecturing as a primary mode of instruction.

"Professors often spend their adult lives researching a particular topic and feel they have a unique synthesis and understanding of the research. ... And although the process of putting together the lectures is a creative, intense experience for professors, it doesn't always translate to students who have to sit and listen,..." Julie Reuben

SIDEBAR (Q&A with Harvard University physics professor Eric Mazur, author of "Peer Instruction" )
"...We should teach everybody to develop problem-solving skills. Lecturing is an inefficient way of doing it.

"You said that some teachers spoon-feed their students but you force them to learn the material on their own. How do your students like it?

"There are some students that are upset that I do not lecture. Some students say, "I'm not paying Harvard $45,000 a year to learn it all myself." At the end of each semester, students fill out a questionnaire, and a few students will write: "Professor Mazur is not teaching us anything. I have to learn it all myself.""

Breathing Life Into the Lecture Hall - washingtonpost.com, by Valerie Strauss
pp. B1, B2, Sept 24, 2007

Facebook culture? YouTube ethos? Cell phone cameras? Citizen journalism?

TLT Group FridayLive will extend our "friend or foe" examinations of academic uses of Instant Messaging, Cell Phones, Handheld devices to Facebook - Oct 5, 2007. We'll continue to exchange ideas about beneficial and harmful uses, timely references, and tough questions. We look for constructive answers to this question: "Can't we do something more academically useful about [insert controversial tech apps here] than try to forbid and prevent their use in our classrooms and courses?"

Consider these excerpts:

"...citizen journalism is firmly entrenched, thanks to the spread of digital and cellphone cameras and the rise of an interactive culture."

"Some stories might not exist without cellphone cameras, ...

"...citizen newsgathering is changing

"... an extension of the Facebook culture, ... and the YouTube ethos, ... sends a signal that anyone ... can be a journalist.

Howard Kurtz - Got a Camera? You, Too, Can Be A Network Reporter - washingtonpost.com
pp. c1, c7, Sept 24, 2007

Click here to register in advance (free but required) for FridayLive sessions.

Four pieces of advice on writing persuasive grant proposals

I spent 19 years reviewing grant proposals for the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) and Annenberg/CPB at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Here are four pieces of advice about writing proposals to grant competitions (internal or external) where the goal is to improve learning and where the competition is intense.

First and most important, grant proposal is an exercise in teaching at a distance. The desired learning outcome of your distance teaching is for two reviewers to meet, a day or two after they’ve each read the proposal, perhaps shortly before their review panel meets to discuss your proposal.

One panelist says to the other, “I don’t remember this proposal. What’s it about?” Panelist #2 replies, “Oh this is a good one. It’s about X and here’s why I think we should support it.” Panelist #2’s comments are no more than 60 seconds long, typically.

So what should panelist #2 remember to say about your proposal, a day or two after reading a stack of proposals of which yours was just one? That’s your challenge: teach these reviewers a few memorable things about your proposal, things that are important enough to excite the reader. If the reviewer thinks to herself, "I could borrow a couple of those ideas!" so much the better. Don't hide the good stuff.

Second, avoid passive verbs. Don’t be shy about saying “I” or “we.” It helps you use your own experience to a) explain why this is important, b) help educate the reader about whether and how much to trust your skill and insight (because you’re exposing more of your self and your experience.) Proposal reviewing is a confidence game.

Third avoid the current jargon, especially if the grant competition has an explicit goal– if everyone uses the same jargon, all the proposals sound alike.

Put those three things together, and you have the beginnings of a proposal that can persuade reviewers that you’ll be good at educating the world about what you’ve achieved with their money.

That's the fourth, and final, point. Whether far-reaching impact is an explicit goal or not, funders generally like it when other people can learn from the experience they’re paying you to gain. If you’re good at explaining (across disciplines and institutions) what you’ve learned, and being credible in the process, you’re a more valuable person/institution to fund.

Good luck, and please let us know if we can help with your proposal: evaluation planning? help you disseminate to other institutions? help plan faculty development? If you'd like to chat about grants, especially those having to do with improving teaching and learning with technology, please e-mail us at info@tltgroup.org.

PS Here's a chapter from the Flashlight Evaluation Handbook on how (not) to evaluate grant-funded technology projects.

Using Flashlight Online as a Tool for Shared Governance and Community Engagement

“Flashlight Online is one of the four or five most important collaborative technologies we use at the College,” Sandy Shugart told me. He’s President of Valencia Community College, one of the biggest users of our web-based survey system. President Shugart went on to say that Valencia’s Faculty Council frequently solicits feedback and opinions from all faculty (and he stressed the importance of including adjuncts) on policy questions. Flashlight Online, he told me, was a key way of keeping all faculty involved in shared governance.

You can understand why this was great for us to hear. Most of the ways The TLT Group serves subscribers involve helping people collaborate with one another: in improving faculty support, assessment, planning, learning space design, meditating ‘dangerous discussions,’ etc.. Flashlight Online is a web-based system shared by about a hundred subscribing institutions. It’s easy for authors from different institutions to see one another’s surveys, use one another’s items, co-author surveys, analyze data together. (Of course, authors can also keep a survey and data private, if they choose.) Previously we’d thought of Flashlight supporting collaboration by helping survey authors work together. So President Shugart’s observation was a delightful new way to see Flashlight Online.

At that moment, I realized I’d already seen another, quite different example at Valencia of using Flashlight Online to promote democracy, shared governance and collaboration. As we’ve already described in our blog, Prof. Pat Nellis has developed a Flashlight Online survey for students to vote on class rules. Pat uses public debate and secret ballots to help assure that, if there’s a rule, students follow it. This kind of practice teaches students about the strengths and weaknesses of democracy in ways that go beyond what high school civics can teach. (Click here to see a Nellis survey.)

At other institutions, Flashlight Online has already been used in a faculty union election and other forms of voting.

We can imagine using Flashlight Online as a tool to engage a whole institution's worth of students (including commuting students and 'distant learners') in governance. On what questions of policy and practice would be useful to uncover student preferences, opinions, and activities? On questions where the institution could use student input, work with student government and make it a regular practice to
a) ask students, then
b) report back to students about how their input has reshaped policy, services, etc.
Over time, I predict you'll see an increase in response rates to your surveys, student involvement, student identification with the university, and perhaps even, over the long haul, alumni giving. Over time, I predict you'll see an increase in response rates to your surveys, student involvement, student identification with the university, and perhaps even, over the long haul, alumni giving. (I admit I'm an optimist, but I believe that if you ask people questions whose answers are important to them, they'll invest a bit of themselves in responding.)

Is anyone at your institution using Flashlight Online or some other survey tool to support collaboration, shared governance, or voting? Want to know more about any of the cases mentioned above? Please let us know by posing a comment on this blog or emailing me.

Accessibility Guidelines for eClips & Brief Hybrid Workshops

Are these simple accessibility guidelines for Brief Hybrid Workshops clear, adequate, reasonable, useful? Too simple? Pls respond via Email gilbert@tltgroup.org or (preferably) comment to this post, below.

My emerging conviction is that our work with 5-Minute eClips and Brief Hybrid Workshops
(for definitions, see below) can be served best by embedding each one in a Web page that includes at least these options or versions for users:

1. Includes enough text that is manageable by screen readers for those who have vision needs or prefer to use screen readers to get enough of the information.

2. Includes enough visible text so that those with hearing needs or preferences can get enough information.

3. Accessible to people who use computers (Macs or PCs) configured in the ways most common during the most recent 3 years.

4. Accessible to people who have Internet connections of most commonly available speeds.

5. Not yet? Accessible to people who use handheld devices (smart cell phones) configured in the ways most common during the most recent 18 months?

The good news is that we now have tools that make all of the above possible more easily, quickly, and inexpensively than ever before - even for those who do not have the resources of major institutions available to them.

If you have suggestions for improving them or other comments, send via Email gilbert@tltgroup.org or, preferably, add a comment at the end of this blog posting (you can do so anonymously or, preferably, with an indication of your name and contact info so that others can respond to your contribution).

For more comprehensive information about Web accessibility, see:

http://www.w3.org/WAI/

http://easi.cc/

Definitions (from www.tltgroup.org/tlt5.htm):

A "brief hybrid workshop" (BTW)
is an activity of less than 15 minutes (preferably closer to 5!) for participants that includes the use of one or more Internet-accessible media clips AND some other files, instructions, activities, documents, plans, guidelines, etc. It is intended to help a group of people produce or learn how to do something useful to them. Participants usually interact with each other and with a leader/presenter/facilitator during the activity. (When run without interruption, all the pre-recorded media elements - the eClips - require less than 5 minutes total. Of course, some groups may find the materials so fascinating that they extend the entire sessions well beyond 15 minutes!)

A "brief hybrid teaching/learning module" (BHTLM)
is the same as a "brief hybrid workshop" EXCEPT for purpose and audience. These modules are intended to help students to learn something in a course (usually undergraduate).

Low-Threshold Approach
The TLT Group is committed to finding, developing, sharing, and publishing Brief Hybrid Workshops that reflect our longstanding work with LTAs - applications and activities that are reliable, accessible, easy to learn, non-intimidating and (incrementally) inexpensive. And we are committed to advocating and demonstrating how to use low-threshold Brief Hybrid Workshops to help others design, produce, use, and improve BTWs.

Steve Gilbert

Finding an Important Topic to Study

I'm working on workshop materials for our "Asking the Right Questions" (ARQ) program - locally facilitated, brief workshops to help academic staff at our subscribing institutions learn how to collect focused feedback from their students in order to improve teaching and learning with technology in their courses. When I say "brief," I mean that each module is only 5-20 minutes long: short enough to be an agenda item in a faculty meeting, a brownbag lunch activity, or a short online event. the workshop materials are designed so that local staff or peer mentors will have an easy time running them. We'll also offer our subscribers free online workshops to train their facilitators: staff in information technology units, faculty development units, teaching&learning centers, libraries and, of course, faculty members who would lead a peer group through a few of these workshops.

This blog entry is a draft for a workshop to help academic staff take a second step in focusing their inquiries. This workshop builds on the work participants would have done in ARQ Workshop #1.

The goal of this workshop is to learn more about identifying research questions that are most worth the effort to answer. (It takes just as much work to answer a trivial question as to answer an important one.)

In ARQ Workshop #1, participants identified a technology used persistently in their courses, a technology that seemed valuable yet in some way problematic. Then they identified an activity -- a pattern of action that was enabled or supported by that technology - that was also of obvious importance and yet somehow problematic.

What additional characteristics make an activity important to study? After we list a few criteria, we ask participants to identify an activity worth studying in their own courses. And, if they like, they can modify or add to this list of criteria. (If you have such improvements, please e-mail me! We'll improve these materials and acknowledge your contribution.)

• Focus on an activity that 's pervasive, important, and capable of being significantly improved through adroit use of technology. For example, it's important for faculty to understand what students are thinking, in order to adjust teaching on the fly and improve learning. Personal response systems (a.k.a. 'clickers', 'classroom voting systems,' 'online surveys') are spreading, and can help instructors get a more precise sense of what all their students are thinking.
  
• Focus on an activity that can be improved incrementally so that, as you learn more, you can keep improving the activity and its outcomes. That improvement usually comes from learning more and more about how to exploit the activity. For example, over time faculty might learn how to ask more powerful questions using a personal response systems, and how to use the PRS to facilitate Peer Instruction.
• Focus on an activity that is defined enough that you can actually study and improve it without making that research into a career. "Studying how to moderate online discussions" is a broader and more challenging topic than "studying how to get students to pay attention to one another's comments before they post a new comment online."
  
• Focus on an activity that is also important to other courses that these students take. Your study about how to improve that activity are more likely to be of interest to your colleagues: they could use your methods to improve their own teaching, for example. And, these kinds of incremental improvements in an activity become more accepted and effective when the change occurs 'across the curriculum.' Students learn to expect the changed activity and, as they engage in its repeatedly, they become more skilled. So faculty who teach them later on can try more ambitious improvements.
  

Your task: identify at least one such activity, one that's very important for you to illuminate by gathering student feedback.

HINT: List lots of such technology-supported activities - ten or more. Imagine asking your students questions that address your concerns as well as your hopes. Which potential study scares and excites you the most? Is there a potential inquiry that makes you think, "Now that I've thought about this, I can't not learn more about what's really going on here!" (For more on this hint, see this short essay in the Flashlight Evaluation Handbook.)

PS The outcomes of that activity, the activity itself, and the technology are what we call a "triad." 'Triads' are a simple grammar for conceptualizing some important things that go on in a course: technology, activities, and outcomes.

IM pros & cons

For more ideas, comments, resources (pros and cons) about academic uses of Instant Messaging, see our FridayLive! Google Planning Doc for September 14, 2007.

"I would say that at least half the IMs I get I'm always thinking, 'Why did you use IM for this?'" he says. "To me, it's kind of like opening someone's door and barging in and asking them a question." ...
"Just because instant messages vanish from a computer screen doesn't mean they aren't being saved somewhere. "

Above 2 excerpts are from "Instant Hit: IM Spreads in the Workplace, but Choose Your Words Carefully," Jan 2005, The Wall Street Journal Classroom Edition; Found online as of 9/13/2007 at:

http://www.wsjclassroomedition.com/
archive/05jan/care_instantmessage.htm

Info Lit Pre-College - via local newspaper?

How can colleges and universities use or influence information literacy efforts in K-12 schools and public media?

How do/can/should college and university information literacy programs build on what is being accomplished (attempted?) in pre-college information literacy activities? How do/can/should college and university information literacy programs influence pre-college information literacy activities?

How do/can/should college and university information literacy programs build on what is being accomplished (attempted?) in public media - e.g., Washington Post newspaper? How do/can/should college and university information literacy programs influence public media (e.g., Washington Post newspaper) information literacy activities?

Following is full text of brief inset excerpt from today's Wash. Post article How Can I Find Reliable Information on the Internet? - washingtonpost.com (p. c14 9/13/2007):

"Google includes a powerful way to filter Internet searches.

"Say you're doing a report on the F-15 Eagle jet. If you want to limit your results to military sites, type

"F-15 Eagle :mil ('mil' stands for military) in the search bar. All your results will have '.mil' somewhere on the page. You can do the same thing with 'edu' for education and 'gov' for government sites. Remember to include a space between your last search word and the colon.

'The site http://www.google.com/help/basics.html is an introduction to Google searching. It has a link for more advanced operators. Happy searching!"

The online version of this article also includes this list:

"There's More

"Kids.gov is a good source of online information.

"Here are a few others:

• http://www.nationalgeographic.com/homework-- Useful information about animals, history, maps, arts, places and science.

• http://www.infoplease.com/homework-- Click on 'quizzes' and see how smart you are.

• www.howstuffworks.com-- Basic explanations of how lots of things work. A good place to start your project.

• www.scholastic.com/kids/homework-- This 'homework hub' is great for finding information about writing reports."

Just Where are Institutions Going with eLearning - Note from ALT-C

I'm at ALT-C 2007 in Nottingham, England. The panel is discussing strategies for making eLearning (i.e., use of computer/Internet related technologies in ways that help improve and even transform learning) an important part of the fabric of higher education.

I make several working assumptions about any such strategy:

• An effective strategy needs to reach, influence and support "early majority" and "late majority" adapters, not just innovators and early adopters.
• Any strategy needs to be based largely on incremental, evolutionary patterns of change (with little or no funding for each little step in each course). Strategies that are based mainly on external funds going to good proposal writers are unlikely to create across the board change in a department or across an institution.
• One limiting factor on any strategy such as this is the degree to which the academic staff, department, and institution see tangible, continuing rewards coming from this approach to teaching and learning. Those rewards need to provide the 'investment' to keep the change progressing. If the change isn't viral (capable of spreading from one instructor to others without any external support), then the rewards also need to be sufficient to justify support staff, materials, etc.
  

If those assumptions are sound, solving this problem, as framed, seems unlikely (other than viral uses of eLearning, which are likely to focus on time-saving if they're to appeal to the early and late majority).

Perhaps the answer is to change the question.

For example, instead of 'eLearning," pick a (subject-specific) challenge that is so compelling that a program meeting the goal would be substantially rewarded by the environment (increased enrollment and prestige, for example) while failure to keep up would be implicitly penalized. Pick a challenge for which eLearning is crucial.

Not all challenges meet that criterion, to say the least! How about improving the ability of graduating engineers to apply scientific concepts to design problems? educating students who can apply skills of digital writing to the challenges of their profession? The biggest win would be to identify such a challenge which also could be met by incremental, time-saving changes by the academic staff. That's the kind of challenge that could leverage quite a lot of change.

To repeat, the kind of challenge I'm talking about must be one which, if met, would produce significant, continuing rewards for the department (and institution), rewards not totally dependent on some temporary government funding program. The individual instructor needs to be rewarded too, either directly (e.g., by publications or time-saving) or by transfer of some of the rewards that initially come to the program.

Such a challenge might be identified by a particular academic program or institution on its own. Meanwhile, I hope, people in national funding programs might give some thought to dealing with national challenges, using eLearning as a means to some specific ends.

eLearning as a confusor

A speaker at ALT-C, the conference I'm attending in Nottingham, England, mentioned the omni-present term, "eLearning." It's a confusor, and I've just added it to our list of confusors (http://www.tltgroup.org/resources/confusors.htm). [If people don't realize they're using the same word or phrase to mean different things, the result can be an unnecessary argument. My term for such linguistic traps is "confusors." For example, two people might argue about whether lecturing is a good way to teach, but if they don't start by agreeing what 'lecturing' is...]

eLearning is a confusor. "eLearning" can be used to mean any use of technology to support learning. Or distance learning. Or distance learning or hybrid learning. (and "hybrid learning" is another confusor).

In short, I need to remember to define terms like "learning" "technology" and "eLearning" each time I use them in conversation or a talk. With so many confusors, that's a tough order. But I don't see any shortcuts.

Postcard Stories #1

Gabcast! Postcard Stories #1

"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"

Too often, lack of conclusive evidence about a product, practice, or principle is prematurely interpreted as proof of lack of value or validity. This pattern of fallacious reasoning can be applied equally inappropriately by opponents of long-standing practices in education (such as lectures) or by opponents of new practices which are perceived as threatening (use of cell phones).

The quotation, excerpts, and article referenced below provide a better explanation of this fallacy and how to avoid it.

"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."Carl Sagan,US astronomer & popularizer of astronomy (1934 - 1996) - found on "The Quotations Page" 2007-08-15 at http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/37901.html

"dangers of misinterpretation of non-significant results"

"…we must question whether the absence of evidence is a valid enough justification for inaction."

"…we should first ask whether absence of evidence means simply that there is no information at all."

"While it is usually reasonable not to accept a new treatment unless there is positive evidence in its favour, when issues of public health are concerned we must question whether the absence of evidence is a valid enough justification for inaction. ... Can we be comfortable that the absence of clear evidence in such cases means that there is no risk or only a negligible one?"

Above 4 excerpts from:

"Statistics notes: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" [Link works as of 2007-08-15]
Douglas G Altman, J Martin Bland, BMJ (British Medical Journal) 1995; 311:485 (19 August). "BMJ is published by BMJ Publishing Group Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of the British Medical Association"

Volunteer Work New Orleans MERLOT Conf Aug 6 2007

The annual MERLOT conference last week in New Orleans was even more useful and enjoyable than previous ones. Thanks to Diane Didier from the Louisiana Board of Regents. With the support of the MERLOT Conference Program Committee, she organized a volunteer work day on August 6.

So Sally [Gilbert] and I had the privilege of joining about 30 others last Monday for a half-day of "recovery" painting on the third floor of the John Dibert Elementary School in New Orleans - which had been under water for 28 days following Hurricane Katrina.

We learned a lot about what has been happening in the public schools and other parts of New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina.

The people who are have returned to New Orleans and stayed are still working hard. They face extraordinary challenges. They are truly inspiring.

It is truly shameful that so much more remains to be done to repair and reclaim this historically important and culturally unique American city.

[I've talked with many of you about the worsening "Support Service Crisis" about educational uses of information technology for years, but post-Katrina New Orleans has a REAL "Support Service Crisis" beyond anything we have ever feared.]

This volunteer activity was available to all registrants the day before the conference opened.
For more about this school, See: http://ed.uno.edu/Faculty/rspeaker/
Dibert/DibertNet/About.html.

Our excellent, amusing and conscientious leader was Troy Peloquin, a New Orleans 9th grade science teacher.

Some stalwarts did a full day, and the most stalwart of all worked outdoors scraping and sanding in the extreme heat and humidity. [ANYONE HAVE MORE PHOTOS WE CAN SHOW?]

Has anyone already produced an eClip or BHW [Brief Hybrid Workshop] about this? A BHW is an eClip + other resources. The included eClip is less than 5 minutes and the total BHW is less than 15 minutes. More about eClips & BHWs

Seems like a wonderful idea to offer volunteer options the day before or after ANY conference in any city! Great way to learn more about the city and to develop constructive relations between visitors and locals.

------------------------------------------------------

THANKS, BEE!
Additional photos BELOW were selected from postings by Barbara "Bee" Dieu in Technorati posts and Flickr posts with the tag "merlot2007onlap" [with her "Warm regards from Brazil"]

For more about MERLOT Int'l Conf 2007, see D. W. Proctor's blog: "ProEd Portal"