"Increase Proficiency. Decrease Profanity." Hash tags et al. for dummies

Simplest explanation of Twitter hash tags I've found yet!

Narrow gap between puberty and authority?

"... Siri looked at their boyish faces and noted how narrow the gap was becoming between puberty and authority." -
For some, the recession is lengthening this gap...  it takes longer to complete higher education, find and begin a career.  For others, it remains too narrow.


See larger excerpt from:  Anarchy and Old Dogs,  Colin Cotterill Category: Fiction - Mystery & Detective
Publisher: Vintage Canada
Format: Trade Paperback, 288 pages
Pub Date: August 2008
Price: $17.95
ISBN: 978-0-676-97952-7 (0-676-97952-1)

Steve Gilbert

Necessity is the Mother of Self-Deception

 INTRO/SUMMARY We are all susceptible to wishful thinking and self- deception. It can result from external pressures and self- doubt. It can lead either to rash action or to passivity – especially when making major technology decisions in difficult times.  


Necessity is the Mother of Self-Deception 
[First published as TLT-SWG-70: 4/3/03]  


We're facing yet another "New Crunch" in higher education. We're feeling insecure in our professional lives and our home lives. We need to find ways, together, of making real progress without panicking and without sacrificing what matters most to us as educators, citizens, and as responsible human beings. But there is always the danger that external pressures and internal stress can lead to self-deception. The results can be extreme: rash action or paralysis.


On most campuses budgets are tightening at the same time that expectations are rising and options are multiplying (especially for ways of improving teaching and learning with technology). Even though the technology and professional development "Support Service Crisis" keeps getting worse, more institutions are trying to engage almost all their faculty and students in increasing instructional uses of information technology. "Information Literacy" is becoming more important, but is difficult to clarify and achieve without adding resources and developing new levels of intra-institutional collaboration. Some new technologies (e.g., cell phones and instant messaging) seem simultaneously to widen the generation gap and to offer creative instructional opportunities.


More people from more age groups believe they need higher education. Competition for admission to selective colleges and universities continues to increase. Many public institutions don't have the funding or space required to meet the needs of the numbers of students they are committed to serve.


Our economy struggles to "recover" and our country is at war.


Faced with general uncertainty, mythic expectations, and diminishing resources, we are all susceptible to the temporary relief provided by wishful thinking. We are bombarded with claims and distracted by hopes that new information technology solutions can solve major educational problems. Presidents, Chief Academic Officers, Chief Information Officers, and other academic leaders are sorely tempted to believe either:


1. "This new solution MUST be possible, affordable, and available – because my institution needs it so badly. We need to get started right now." [e.g., the kinds of claims and hopes made for distance education only a few years ago.] Or


2. "This new solution CANNOT be necessary because it isn't affordable, comfortable, or clearly effective. We can just wait this one out." [e.g., the kinds of claims and hopes made that most undergraduates will use the Web effectively when doing research assignments -- on their own initiative and relying only on the Internet skills they already have.]


Part II: How to Make Small Mistakes and Real Progress
(Instead of Big Mistakes and Fail).

CrazyBusy? Join online 10/22 or visit Overloaditorium anytime

Participate even if no time to read book!  http://tlt.gs/CrzyBzyAntidotes 
Here are some prep links and a way of participating any time via the Overloaditorium.  

• Edward Hallowell's book CrazyBusy: overstretched, overbooked, and about to snap! : strategies for handling your fast-paced life 
• Brief interview of Hallowell about Crazy Busy, 
• Hallowell's blog "Tips for the Crazy Busy"

Already found ways to cope better with your Crazy Busy life?  If so, you should have an extra couple minutes to add a comment to this Overloaditorium blog posting: http://tlt.gs/CrzyBzyAntidotes

“Violation of Virgin Text”(?)

Can eReaders deepen student engagement with text?  See “wiki-italicization” etc in http://nyti.ms/cd5RMQ

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Can eReader devices enable deeper student engagement with text?  
Annotation and highlighting options are described as  “wiki-italicization” and explored by Virginia Heffernan in the article “The Medium:  E-Readers' Collective” excerpted below. Pls read it in preparation for TLTG’s 1st online book discussion session this Friday 10/22 2pm ET - _Crazy Busy_ by Edward Hallowell, because we’ll also discuss how and why to run online book discussions.

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EXCERPTS
MAGAZINE   | October 17, 2010
The Medium:  E-Readers' Collective
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
What's the use of reading in a crowd?
http://nyti.ms/cd5RMQ

“...italics added right in books, postpublication, by readers, in a kind of wiki-italicization project? These are the so-called “popular highlights” that now show up in Kindle e-books. Marked by a dotted underscore that indicates that other Kindle users have found the passages significant, popular highlights constitute crowd-sourced literary criticism. Readers, on the spot and yet collaboratively, make meaning of what they’re reading. The effect is odd — even for those of us who see literature as something readers determine incrementally and collectively.

“.... The dotted line, like the distinctive hue or underscore that signals a word is clickable on the Web, may be a new kind of punctuation that affects contemporary style.

“Readers coming to e-books freshly purchased from Amazon might be taken aback to find them
already marked up. Stumbling on a passage that other people care about, framed as though you
should care about it too, can seem like a violation of virgin text. It’s bad enough that vandals
have gotten to your “new” edition before you have and added emphases unendorsed by author
or publisher.

“...feeling alone enough to read.

“But there’s a genie-in-the-bottle problem here. As with many things on the Web, once you’ve glimpsed popular highlights, it’s hard to unglimpse them. You get curious about what other readers think,

“Reading, after all, is only superficially solitary; in fact, it’s a form of intensive participation in language and the building of common culture.

“... finding yourself one of many — can be uncomfortable.  But if you can’t handle that discomfort, you shouldn’t be reading popular books

EXCERPT FROM E-VERSION - NOT IN PRINT VERSION:
TOP OF THE POPS
If you don’t want to read a book that’s been “popularly highlighted,” but you want to get a sense
of what Kindle underliners believe is poetry, check out Amazon’s list of most-highlighted
passages at kindle.amazon.com/popular_highlights.
STACKING DECKS
Kindle devotees: don’t just complain about popular highlights, do something. Highlight your own
passage, and get your friends to do the same. As of October, it seems to take only a few dozen
highlights to win a popular-highlight underscore.
UR-TEXT
In “Is There a Text in This Class?” (1980), Stanley Fish of The Times — not that anyone owns
Stanley Fish — wrote the book on reader-response criticism. Not available for Kindle yet. Hey,
readers: respond and request.
10/18/2010 The Medium - E-Readers Collective - NY…
nytimes.

Nanovation Trumps Ideology

“If the map doesn’t agree with the ground, the map is wrong.” -  see below for sources.

Nanovation inexorably surpasses inflexible ideology.

Nanovation = Sharing small improvements in small ways - widely, intentionally, repeatedly.  

Nanovation adapts to ideology and policy.

Nanovation adapts ideology and policy.

Ideology must eventually adapt or crumble.
“His faith in the system had long since evaporated as he’d watched a perfectly good doctrine destroyed by personalities.” - see below for source.  

Effective policy depends on ideology.

More on Nanovation: http://tlt.gs/Nanovation

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1.  Sources for “If the map doesn’t agree with the ground, the map is wrong.”
Too many sources and variations to list, however, many refer to an unspecified Swiss Army Survival Guide:  “If the map doesn't agree with the terrain, in all cases believe the terrain."
And many others refer to Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart: Thirty True Things You Need to Know Now, by Gordon Livingston, M.D., Marlowe & Co., 2004

2  Source for “His faith in the system had long since evaporated as he’d watched a perfectly good doctrine destroyed by personalities.”
Cotterill, Colin, Disco for the Departed, p. 23, Soho Press, Inc., 2006

Evaluating learning spaces, and assessing the need for new learning spaces

I've upgraded our Flashlight materials for evaluating learning spaces, and assessing needs for renovating or creating new learning spaces.  (Thanks to Larry MacPhee at Northern Arizona University, one of our subscribing institutions,  for prompting me to do this.)  By "learning space" I mean both physical facilities such as classrooms and libraries, and online spaces such as course management systems and conferencing systems (e.g., Adobe Connect, Elluminate, Wimba).

If you know Flashlight, you'll already have guessed that our approach to evaluating learning spaces is based on (1) finding out what people ideally want to do as they teach and learn, and (2) assessing whether current spaces make those particular activities hard, or easy.

The biggest challenge for needs assessment: helping faculty realize that new spaces could help them teach in ways they have never experienced.

My favorite example: imagine a class session of 100 students. The instructor divides the students into 20 groups of 5, with the following instructions: one of the students in each group should select three images (or videos) relating to the day's content. The images or videos might be X-rays, paintings, architectural drawings, film clips, or pages from a book. That student shows these images to the other four students. Then the group discusses how those images compare and contrast (with students pointing to elements of the images to make clear what they each mean). After a few minutes of discussion by these 20 small groups, the whole class reconvenes, and representatives from all of the groups show images and summarize the main points of their discussion. The students then vote on the best 5 presentations, in rank order.

But:

• How would students find and display these images large enough for the other four students to see? and then large enough for the whole class to see? 
• How could a group of 5 hear one another amidst the road of all those other groups talking loudly enough to be heard? 
• How could the chairs be rearranged quickly enough to break into small groups, and then to reconvene? 
• How would the vote be conducted?

Because faculty never learned that way, and previously haven't taught that way, there's not much demand for new learning spaces to support this kind of flexible, image-intensive approach to discussion. The same thing is true of other teaching/learning activities that would be difficult or impossible in traditional facilities.

With no demand for change, expensive new learning spaces tend to be designed to support traditional teaching/learning activities. And, if the activities don't improve, neither do the outcomes.

So a requirement for effective evaluation of learning spaces is to first prepare the imagination of the people doing the evaluation. Make sure they have some idea of what could (become) easy before asking them how satisfied they are with a current learning space, or asking what they would like a new learning space to enable them to do.

I suggest that one way to do this is to pilot test new kinds of learning spaces with faculty most likely to take advantage of them. I don't mean expensive boutique spaces. Quite the contrary. I mean inexpensive new arrangements that could, if they became popular, be made available to many other faculty. For example, I'm pretty sure that the teaching-learning activity I described above could be carried out, online, with software already available to hundreds of institutions today. Once each new activity is piloted a few times, does it show signs of growing and evolving? Or does it fade? This kind of piloting of new teaching/learning activities is, I think, a crucial ingredient for the planning of renovated and new learning spaces.

Topics for research grants & dissertations related to educational uses of technology

Have you ever looked through the Flashlight Evaluation Handbook on our web site? Did you notice section II.D on topics for grant proposals and dissertations?

My own time to do research is quite limited. We're a non-profit with a mission to improve education. So, when I have an idea for research or evaluation that someone ought to be doing, I put it here. Studies at the course level are near the top of the page, while ideas for research at the institutional and national level appear lower down.

The newest entry, for example, is to study the recent history of institutions collaborating in order to offer a degree or course of study that's better than any one of the partners could have offered alone. I've seen many such efforts. Some succeeded. Many failed. What factors affect their chances for success? By studying a number of such cases, and then looking for patterns across cases, one should be able to make some recommendations for policy, practice, and technology platforms, recommendations that would increase the chances for success. To see this note, just scroll down until you see the "NEW!" at the left hand margin. There's a brief paragraph, with a link to a page long discussion that includes a few links to programs.

I've put these ideas for grants and dissertations in the 'public domain.' If you'd like to talk about any of them, please let me know.

Why does higher education suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder?

For seven years I served as a program officer for the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE). 

In 1978, my first year, I thought it must be a year of miracles: FIPSE had received about 1800 preliminary proposals that year. There were so many issues I hadn't thought about, so many strategies that were new to me!  My more experienced colleagues were not quite as impressed. As the years went by I realized why I had been more dazzled than they were:

• In each year's crop of proposals, similar problems, and similar solutions, kept reappearing. Issue A swell in importance for a few years, then subside for a few years, and, after a few more years, surge again.  Most of that second cohort of proposals were written by people who had just noticed the issue and, like me, were unaware of the previous history of work. 
• Over the decades, many issues showed little cumulative progress.  Nationally we weren't solving problems, just poking at them from time to time, exulting when the problem yielded a bit, and ignoring the fact that, once the push stopped, the problem would spring back to its former shape. 

I got interested in the technology proposals because they were something of an exception. Microcomputers could do some things that main frame computers couldn't. Email added new power. So did the Internet and the Web. Whether technology was used for collaboration in learning, understanding of science concepts, or school-college collaboration, each year's crop of technology proposals included some new strategies that were emerging because the technologies had become more powerful.

What I'm asking today, however, is not about technology. It's about why our attention to issues in higher education is so short-term. Why do we seem to suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder?   I'll suggest a few possibilities, but I'd really like to hear your thoughts.
First, it's hard to maintain attention on a single issue for more than a few years when you can't see the ultimate results of your labors. And it's difficult for any educator, especially a teacher who sees his or her work in terms of one course or another, to see the long term impact of that course.  Cohorts of students move through a program, graduate, and disappear from view.  And, even when you see how seniors have grown from sophomores, it's hard to know whether your single course had any impact on their later lives. For individuals who come back and talk, yes. But for the whole cohort of students, it's very hard to see the impact of one's own teaching. And without that point of reference, it's harder to keep focusing on a single direction for improvement, year after year.

Second, an improvement is made, it's difficult to capture the benefits and reinvest them.   Suppose your course's outcomes doubled (by any measure of that term) over the next five years.  Would that increase your department's income so that it could give you a few thousand dollars to make further improvement? Rarely. So the profit motive doesn't provide motivation to continually improve teaching.

Third, the natural distractions of higher education are reinforced by the fact that many faculty capture energy from the Hawthorne Effect.  As my Evergreen colleague Rob Knapp once remarked, many of us get a charge from doing something new.  But novel stays new for long. So, to keep getting a charge from novelty, we need to turn our attention from one new thing to the next, one new technology to another, each time getting a charge.

The cost of all this distraction: many of us may not stick with any one strategy long enough to make a lasting, sustainable difference in practice.

What do you think? Does higher education make cumulative progress in its methods and outcomes over the decades? If not, is Attention Deficit Disorder part of the problem? And, if so, what are the roots of our ADD?

We're talking about topics like these right now in an online workshop on "Improving Higher Learning by Taking the Long View: A Strategic Planning Workshop."  One session is over  but you could listen to the recording before joining us for the second session on Tuesday.  Join us!

Improving the Outcomes of Higher Learning: Ten Recommendations about Time, Money and Technology

If you're a long-time reader of this blog, you may remember a series of posts last fall-winter entitled, "Ten Things I (no longer) Believe about Transforming Teaching and Learning with Technology."

Since then, through dozens of rewrites, those thoughts have evolved into a new (still draft) PDF entitled "Improving Higher Learning by Taking the Long View: Ten Recommendations about Time, Money, and Technology."

This Tuesday, March 16, we're beginning a limited enrollment workshop to debate and develop those ten recommendations for how to slowly the outcomes of degree programs and institutions: who can learn, what they learn, and how they learn.

The workshop's goal: test and strengthen the strategy, and begin developing materials that an institution could use for strategic planning. Institutions with regional or professional accreditation ahead may find this particularly helpful.

The workshop will meet each Tuesday at 1 PM ET for an hour, for three weeks; sessions will be recorded in case you can't make the live meeting. Click here for more information and to register.  If you're a TLT Group individual member or your institution is a subscriber, the registration fee is waived.

Using data to compare institutions

A thread in the ASSESS listserv recently turned to questioning the value of collecting comparable data from comparable institutions.

For me, the biggest reason for caution about comparisons may be 'Bowen's Law' (also known as the revenue theory of costs).

Sponsored by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, Howard Bowen tested the hypothesis that higher education instruction has a production function, i.e., that there is some normal relationship between spending and outcomes. When someone remarks that "I can't run a program with that budget; it's too little money," or enviously comments about another program, "With that endowment and budget, they must be wasting a lot of money," or simply spends time collecting comparable data in order to compare their program with the norm (can we boast our results are 5% better than those achieved by other programs that have about our same budget? can we use below average budgets to justify a request for an increase?) --- all of those imply a faith in a production function.

But Bowen found no such evidence to support the belief in a production function. When he controlled for institutional type, context and reputation, he still found that spending per student at the institutions in that homogenous group was all over the map. And when Bowen analyzed how each instructional dollar was spent, that spending varied just as widely. His findings supported the revenue theory of costs:
1. Higher education institution raise all the money they can
2. Spend all the money they get
3. And spend each dollar in ways largely dictated by how they spent it last year.

To put it another way, when you see variations in spending, it's likely a function of the varying histories of fund-raising. So cost comparisons are not a rational guide for budgeting.  And I think that casts doubt on the value of seeking a norm among 'comparable' institutions in educational performance. What does it mean to say that a group of institutions are comparable?

For me, the important reasons to compare data among institutions are at the extreme ends of any distribution.

As a taxpayer, I'm interested in seeing pressure or even sanctions brought to bear on institutions that are doing a miserable job using my money to teach core abilities and skills that most institutions can teach well.

And, at the other end of the distribution, I want to know what kinds of excellence are indeed possible. One of the corollaries of Bowen's Law is that almost anything is possible, at almost any budget level, if ideas, circumstances, and strategies are appropriate and if one works in that direction slowly and methodically enough (remember element #3 of Bowen's Law - change comes slowly)  But knowing that anything is possible, and seeing that some institution has actually achieved at an extraordinary level - those are two different things.

Twenty or thirty years ago, I talked with someone at a NJ institution (Ramapo?) whose labor studies program had recently begun teaching a BA in labor studies to union members by sending faculty to teach courses in union halls.  I asked how they had started the program. He replied, "When we heard that a labor studies program at a NY university was doing it, we couldn't not do it. Of course our program is not like theirs. We had to do it our way. But that's why we did it."

Now that was a valuable use of comparisons!

What do you think? Under what circumstances is it valid to collect test data, budget data or other data to compare institutions or academic programs?

*****

Bowen, Howard R. (1980) The Costs of Higher Education: How Much Do Colleges and Universities Spend per Student and How Much Should They Spend? San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

What I Once Believed - A Summary

Back in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, I thought technology use powerful tools for active learning, faculty-student contact, student collaboration (and the rest of Chickering and Gamson's seven principles) to leverage a transformation in how students learned. The dimensions of revolution wouldn't stop at seven, of course. For example, words would be joined by images, numbers, and video as media by which students could acquire information. Students previously excluded by their location, schedule, disabilities or other aspects of situation would find new gateways to learning.

The driver of the revolution would be the power and excitement of the day's emerging technology, a technology that would enable faculty and students to do what they most wanted to do:

• Self-paced tutorials on mainframe computers promised a world in which each student would be guided toward the fastest possible individual progress through materials, at least a third faster than conventional teaching/learning activities;
  
• Microcomputers running word processors, spreadsheets, and BASIC would enable students to learn by designing, analyzing, composing, serving. The work would be creative, a different vision of individualization
  
• Videodisc and the graphic user interface would power a shift toward the visual;
  
• HyperCard would give everyone the ability to use hypertext to navigate interdisciplinary webs of knowledge and create their own maps of learning;
  
• Students siting side by side, collaborating on the same computer, would help one another to new skills and new understanding;
  
• Then email expanded cooperations that could reach across barriers of time and space;
  
• Boom! Gopher servers and then the Web put the whole planet onto our hard drives: an explosion of access to expertise;
  
• If revolutions are marked by explosions, surely a revolution was coming: the decades since 1970s have been marked a series of blasts as promising new technologies rocked higher education, one after another...
  

Of course, words, textbooks, and lectures would not be eliminated by this blitz; sometimes a good clear explanation with Q&A is just the ticket.

But, I thought, let's prepare to discard the theory that huge lecture halls and wonderful textbooks are the way to deliver learning (i.e. facts plus inspiration) while cost-effectively expanding our mass system of higher education.

In fact, whether students were on campus or off, I believed, faculty and students would soon combine to make the whole notion of 'delivering' education obsolete. “Delivery” was an image that had never matched reality – learning never has been “transmitted” into student minds by talking into their ears.

Each year, I was persuaded that the newest technology would finally be the key to unlocking all of this. The results would be greater achievement, a larger and more varied student body, and, most important of all, students who would, far more than in previous decades, be committed to learning.

This vision of transformation could be achieved, I assumed, by allowing the various specialists the freedom to do their various jobs:

• Faculty would teach their courses. But big new instructional packages and powerful tools in student hands would result in a wave of exciting changes in the nature of each of those courses.
  
• Information technology specialists would explain to faculty and students how to use each new technology. Then the faculty would take over to redesign the courses.
  
• Evaluation specialists would measure progress: percentage improvements in performance, more students (and more kinds of students), cost savings...
  
  
  

Want more? Read entries 1-13 of this series. How well does this summary describe what you and your colleagues once thought about the coming computer revolution in higher education? Was this where you were? Did you start at a different place?

Summary of what I now Suggest

What I Now Believe about Transforming Teaching and Learning (with Technology)

Stephen C. Ehrmann, December 6, 2009

This brief essay summarizes several of the most important and controversial arguments made in a series of blog posts entitled "Ten Things I (no longer) Believe about Transforming Teaching and Learning with Technology." (http://bit.ly/ten_things_table) That original set of things I now believe are lettered in the original essays. I'ved used those letters below as references [in brackets], so that this summary can easily be used as a print handout. The original essays provide more detailed arguments, plus examples to illustrate each point I've tried to make, as well as covering other components of the argument not included in this brief summary. I'd like to acknowledge and thank my colleague, Steven W. Gilbert; the thoughts that follow are at least as much his as mine. However, I take sole responsibility for how they're expressed.

This summary is in two parts. Part I may be of greater interest for faculty and others who are responsible for what students learn. Part II may be of greater interest to those staff who have responsibility the facilities and services that faculty and students use to achieve such goals.

I. A VISION WORTH WORKING TOWARD

What students should learn: Obviously in a digital age, students need to use computers and the Web in order to prepare for the world of work.

Equally important: technology often gives people choices (as workers, citizens, and individuals), if they have the wit, skill and wisdom to take advantage of selected possibilities.

Academic programs ought to use similar technologies to prepare students to make such choices and to cope with the dangers that such choices can create. One way to do that is to take advantage of technology to enlarge various forms of active learning: student research, learning by designing and composing, field work, considering how prior experiences provide evidence of changing skills,... [B]

How Students Should Learn: To support that kind of emphasis on active learning, students ought to learn to use digital tools and resources that can then be employed frequently, in college and afterward. Pay particular attention to technologies that can potentially save time on the mechanics of thought and action. Word processing, for example, was initially appealing because it saved a lot of time in making simple revisions. As revision and other elements of writing became easier and quicker, writing became more like sculpting in clay (rather than in stone); many students learned to refine their thinking by refining their writing. When computing makes the mechanics easier, the attention of faculty and students can turn to more sophisticated skills and more complex phenomena. This is just one of several reasons why these suggestions for improving teaching and learning so often mention the motive of saving time for students and faculty.[E]

Assessing and evaluating what students learn: When technology is used to diversify learning, assessment and evaluation can't merely be organized around preset goals for what all students must learn (the “uniform impact” perspective). The complementary approach to assessment and evaluation (“unique uses”) focuses on what each person actually did do with their opportunities, and why. This kind of unique uses assessment is especially important, for example, in helping faculty respond to differences among their students, in order to help all students learn. [L] (For more on how faculty can use technology to respond to student differences, see http://www.tltgroup.org/resources/diversity/.)

The interdependence of what, how and who: This approach to education requires both students and faculty to reach out outside the classroom, and outside traditional classroom hours of teaching, for fresh resources and new options for active learning. The technology used to bridge space and time for those purposes can also be used to help current students carry heavier loads and engage other students who wouldn't otherwise have had the motivation or means to learn. The goal of improving what is learned and how it's learned should be inseparable from the goal of improving who can learn. [C]

II. HOW THE INSTITUTION CAN ORGANIZE TO ACHIEVE AND SUSTAIN SUCH IMPROVEMENTS

It's not possible to achieve this constellation of improvements through great leaps forward. A three year grant to redesign each course in the curriculum won't do the trick. Staff are already too busy to spare the time, or take the risks of dropping balls already in the air. That's because, in any non-profit organization with committed staff, staff's work will already have expanded to fill available time and budget (Parkinson's Law and the Revenue Theory of Costs). Furthermore, courses that don't continually evolve will soon become outdated and then abandoned.

Therefore a promising way to foster continual improvement is for all, or most, faculty to take a large number of small, safe steps: enough of them to that staff can gradually and cumulatively improve practice and results without jeopardizing either their sanity or their institution's budget.

For this strategy to work, it's also important for the program to set one, or a few, overall directions for improvement that can be advanced through such steps.

For example, staff and stakeholders in an engineering program might agree on a ten year campaign to help students to understand climate and sustainability issues well enough so that, by the time they graduate, the students will have each learned to respond to those issues in a manner of their own choosing. Such an ambitious goal can't possibly be achieved either by a) a one time curriculum reform or b) devoting just one course to that outcome. A better way to achieve the goal is for many program faculty to gradually improvise, changing their courses bit by bit over the years so that, ultimately, students graduate with sophisticated skills and experience in this area.

It's not easy to maintain focus for the five-ten years needed to achieve visible, meaningful improvements in program outcomes. Higher education has always suffered from attention deficit disorder. And unpredictable changes in technology use in the disciplines, and in the world, makes it even harder to maintain attention on one or two directions for cumulative change. Sustained attention on a particular vision worth working toward requires:

1. a broad base of faculty and staff with a history of believing this particular goal is crucial for the program and meaningful for them personally;
   
2. stable, patient, dogged leadership;
   
3. continual scrounging around the world for the next set of small steps that each faculty member and staff member may want to try or adapt [I];
   
4. developing relationships with other organizations needed to operate and sustain the program (for example, the OneMBA and iLabs examples described in [C];
   
5. an unusual degree of collaboration and information sharing [F];
   
6. as opportunities become available, hiring and retaining staff who have the motivation and skills to make lasting contributions to the program (which will almost inevitably include an inclination to work collaboratively with other faculty and staff); and
   
7. a program of continual evaluation that helps faculty and staff detect quickly whether their small steps are adding up or not (and, if not, why not). some of this evaluation will be done in teams, some by individuals. [H]
   

A pluralistic approach to formative evaluation: One of the skills that almost everyone will need to learn over time is inquiry: assessment and evaluation. The most important function of evaluation is to help each person see what he or she is doing, and the best way to get such information is to look for yourself. So the institution must (via small steps) help each staff member with the training, tools, and support to ask the right questions about his or her own practice. This kind of inquiry will usually be carried out by individuals working alone and in small groups (e.g., faculty learning communities). [K]

Taking advantage of these improvements: It inevitably takes years for a program to gradually, cumulatively reorganize its work, the skills of its people, and its relationships with other organizations in the world. The good news: it also takes years for competing programs to catch up, if they ever do. And, especially if the program has been using evaluation to guide and document improvement, its achievements and strengths can be used to increase the program's visibility, help it attract the staff and students it wants, and also attract support from benefactors, grants and other sources. [A]

Why Invest in Info Tech in Higher Ed? 1994!

 AAHESGIT Listserv Retrospective November 21, 1994

This Google Doc:  http://bit.ly/TLTG-Why-Invest-94RETRO

"Why Invest in Info Tech?"  

• How much have/haven't conditions and rationales changed in 15 years?  
• How well are we doing?

Below is the full unexpurgated text of a listserv posting from Nov. 21, 1994 - written by the listserv moderator, Steven W. Gilbert.

[Thanks again to Chuck Ansorge for keeping and compiling the AAHESGIT listserv messages from 1994-2006!]

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1. I.  RATIONALE:  General
2. II.  RATIONALE:  Faculty
3. III.  RATIONALE:  Institutional Leaders

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WHY SHOULD A COLLEGE OR UNIVERSITY INVEST

(MONEY, STAFF TIME, BUILDING SPACE, ETC.)

IN EDUCATIONAL USES OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY?

WHY SHOULD AN INDIVIDUAL?

 

I.  RATIONALE:  General

 

o       The Transformation is Inevitable Anyway

(The transformation of teaching and learning based in part on

the integration of applications of information technology:

this transformation has already begun.  The challenge is to

direct this transition and make it less painful and more

consistent with YOUR educational mission.)

o       Students Have Already Changed

(Most institutions report significant changes in the

composition of their student bodies.  Many faculty report

that many students are more resistant to reading and don't

respond as well to traditional courses.)

o       Build More Effective Communities of Learners-Scholars

(There are already many examples of communities of scholars

that support mutual learning via the Internet in ways and on

a scale that go beyond anything that ever happened before.)

o       Regain Public Trust

(While our leading universities are still considered the best

in the world, support for many higher education institutions

has eroded.)

o       LONG (not short) RANGE:  "ACADEMIC PRODUCTIVITY"

(Whatever we mean by "academic productivity," we aren't going

to achieve it in colleges and universities in just a few more

years.)

 

II.  RATIONALE:  Faculty

 

o       Personal Productivity (Word-processing, EMail)

(Almost no one is arguing about the value of this any more.   [Clarification:  In the late 1980s and early 1990s there were serious arguments about the potential damage that word-processing would do to writing skills. By late 1994, almost no one was still arguing against using these tools.  SWG 20091201]

EMail may be the application in the 90s that brings people to

the Internet in the way that word-processing brought people

to microcomputers in the 80s.)

o       Clearer, Easier Presentation

(Using presentation and image manipulating software and

computer-driven projection devices in the classroom to

display information more clearly or easily.  Doesn't change

the basic approach to teaching or what is taught.)

o       Widen Instructional Bottlenecks

(Experienced faculty know the topics in their courses where

many students have trouble and fall behind.  Teachers develop

or find applications  of information technology that can help

meet these specific learning challenges.)

o       Better Communication with Wider Range of Students

(Use information technology to offer information in a variety

of formats to meet the learning needs and preferences of a

widening range of students.)

o       Teach New Content Better

(Emerging from the recent work of scholars in some

disciplines are some topics and approaches that can be

represented and communicated much more effectively using

information technology than using conventional print.  I've

got examples from geography/geology, American Lit., some

foreign language -- more examples welcome!)

 

III.  RATIONALE:  Institutional Leaders

 

o       Competition for Students, Faculty

("If we don't have computers in our ...., we'll lose students

to ..."

"When prospective students or faculty members visit our

campus, they always ask to see the computer facilities.")

o       Improve Quality of Teaching, Learning

(The experience base of the "early adopters" has convinced

more and more of them that information technology really can

be used to improve student motivation and learning.

Developing quantitative data to confirm this is quite

difficult.  The anecdotal evidence and public demand may

outweigh the need for data -- for a while?)

o       Better Access to Education for Wider Range of Students

(Information technology -- especially "distance education"

seems to be the ONLY way that the increasing variety of

students can have access to a high quality college education.

This applies to students whose location, finances, or work

schedules don't permit them to participate easily in

conventionally scheduled and conventionally presented

courses.)

o       Information Literacy for Students

(The library community is leading this campaign and reminding

learners and teachers how important it has become for all to

master skills of finding, evaluating, and using information

-- especially via information technology.)

 

 

 

HAPPY THANKSGIVING 2009!

M. Improve infrastructure conservatively, cumulatively

This week, we're discussing a program's foundational technologies for teaching and learning: learning management systems, suites of productivity software, and basic, semi-specialized tools that are widely used such as mathematics software and online databases. Monday's post described a traditional strategy: upgrade these utilities periodically, in order to keep up with, or pass, one's competitors by providing the best, fastest, richest tools and resources that the program can afford for its faculty, students, and staff. 

Today I would add that there's a creative tension that needs to be managed very carefully between:

• The need to help your faculty and students make progress, especially improvements in practice and outcomes selected as long-term priorities by their departments and by the institution as a whole.
• The need to avoid disrupting delicate patterns of incremental, cumulative improvement of teaching/learning skills and materials.

One way to reduce the chances (or frequency) of disruption is to consider how to minimize that risk right from day #1.  

For example, over the years, many mathematics tutorials and modeling packages have come and gone. Sometimes they disappear and no new technologies provide an escape route.  Yesterday's faculty are left to mourn now-obsolete curricular materials that had been built to take advantage of the vanished software.  Software designed for instructional purposes, especially when using proprietary materials, poses a known risk of disruption when the package becomes obsolete. 

In contrast, since about 1980, students in a variety of disciplines have been using spreadsheets to do calculations, modeling, gaming, and simulations. Any faculty member who began developing curricular materials based on VisiCalc (a spreadsheet of that period) could have made incremental curricular progress from that day to this, even though, over the decades, their tools might have shifted from VisiCalc (which no longer exists) to Lotus 1-2-3 (which no longer exists) and then to Excel , and then to OpenOffice or Google Docs.  The transitions could happen with  minimal disruption because new spreadsheets are usually able ot read the files of old spreadsheet programs and because the interfaces are usually similar. So materials and skills could develop incrementally and cumulatively, even while one technology was being swapped for another. And it's a reasonably good bet that an instructional practice based on spreadsheets will continue to have good chances for incremental, cumulative improvement as unpredictable new, more powerful spreadsheets make their appearance in future years.

Consider a current challenge to smooth progress: electronic portfolios. Some uses of ePortfolios imply that the institution will, over a period of years, store and use student works, reflections, faculty assessment, and other feedback about the student's work. These records are all linked together. So, for example, the institution will need to know for years to come which project that each comment was about, which projects were for the same assignment in the same course, and, of course, which projects were done by the same student.

Suppose, for example, a department decides today to buy ePortfolio technology #1 in order to organize, use and store all that interlinked information. That institution must be able to use those records, and add to them, even when ePortfolio technology #1 is replaced by technology #2.  Therefore the export of those files and their linkages from technology #1 to technology #2 must be easy, quick, and inexpensive.

What I'm suggesting, in other words, is that the institution think cautiously about using ePortfolios for this purpose if there isn't high confidence that they can export all those records and relationships from technology #1 and then import them easily into a hypothetical technology #2. The sustainability of the innovation and the continuity of the technology are related issues.  (Notice that this is only sometimes a problem. For example, if ePortfolios are used in courses and are finished when the course ends, one probably only needs to be able to export the web of project plus comments, without a need to import the record to any other ePortfolio system. It's the academic record uses of ePortfolios that pose a more daunting requirement for technological continuity across vendors.

Is the technology which you might buy today likely to gracefully give way to successor technologies, while not disrupting those innovative educational practices which are the justification for today's purchase?

PS That risk of disruption is the bad news. Here's the good news. Every year we have more technologies that are useful, reliable, inexpensive, and sustainable (and thus almost beneath notice).  So our options for technological foundations for sustainable educational improvements are multiplying every year.

What have you seen? Do these observations mirror what your program already does? Contradict current practice?