Colleges Struggle to Keep 'Smart' Classrooms Up to Date? Not at Trinity!

Recently (10.17.08), the Chronicle of Higher Education reported on the frustration professors in many colleges and university are feeling about the lack of maintenance and upgrades to the so-called “smart” classrooms that were built a decade or so ago. Carl Pletsch, assistant professor of history at the University of Colorado, says the situation has gotten so bad that administrators "are now discouraging faculty members from using technology because they can't predict if it is going to work." Another professor quoted in the article noted that "The smart classrooms are now dumb.They have not been upgraded or adequately maintained."

Trinity’s commitment, by contrast, is impressive. Classroom computers and software are routinely and effectively updated. In our classroom, for example, we were experiencing a software problem. I requested help, and one of our IT staff was there, in person, in minutes. This reflects both a philosophical attitude and financial investment in providing the best for Trinity students.

Last week, my students paid a visit to the updated AT&T Center for Learning and Technology, which is available to all students. Their blog entries reflect the kind of impressive information literacy opportunities Trinity offers.

“It still completely astonishes me when I look around and see how technically advanced Trinity University is. Sure, it is a university and should be able to offer its students the best technology for their own personal educational advancements, but it has truly gone beyond that expectation.”
~Angel Dominguez, First-Year

“The Technology Classroom (Library 310) seats 27 in a three-tiered semicircle. Each student workstation has a computer connected to a switching system that allows the instructor to take keyboard, mouse & monitor control of or all student computers as desired.”
~Jen Wight, First-Year

“Each station is comprised of a group of computers, and each station has a different focus. This is the area primarily available for student use. Here you will find the latest hardware and software. All of the computers here are equipped with the full Adobe suite for all kinds of projects. For video editing, the Apple computers are equipped with iMovie and the PCs are equipped with Sony Vega. There isn't much one couldn't do in the studios to make an impressive presentation. I could use these studios to create and/or edit a video or multimedia presentation for this or another class.”
~Jordan Enloe, Junior

Web 2.0 and the New Semester

The new semester is almost here. I’m excited, anxious, and looking forward to working with new students, new colleagues and new challenges.
When I started teaching at Trinity five years ago, I did not incorporate blogs, wikis or any other aspects of Web 2.0 as part of the Computer Skills curriculum. I had not heard of podcasts or You Tube (which apparently didn’t really exist until April of 2005).
Now, one of the first things we do is to set up our class blogs in order to share thoughts and reflections about the class content, lab activities, and material from guest presenters. We also use the Class Wiki almost immediately to add to the body of knowledge that we’re developing.
Brad DeLong, Professor of Economics at Berkeley, has described has described the academic blogosphere as a kind of Invisible College. Students (and instructors) who blog and contribute to wikis within a higher education environment should probably keep this in mind. It’s not Facebook, although Facebook is definitely another way to share information. In fact, some professors are apparently using as part of a classroom experiment ("Academic Facebook: Lessons learned so far")
Our classroom blogs and wikis are here to stay. We are part of a dynamic academic community, and we’re all in this together.

Collage: Art or Theft

I recently came across an interesting blog developed by Peter Friedman and the students in his Legal Analysis & Writing classes at Case Western Reserve University of Law during the spring 2008 semester. The posts navigate the tricky waters of Fair Use and artistic license to parody, incorporate and generally use existing material in a new and original manner.

As a graphic designer, I often incorporate snippets of existing images into digital collages for personal and commercial work. Is this theft? The image used as an example in this discussion is a collage by Robert Rauschenberg that combines (possibly copyrighted?) partial images to make an artistic statement about the political and social turmoil of the 1960's (on right).

The blogger says, "Artists who routinely appropriate, on the other hand, are not attempting to profit from the marketability of their subjects at all. They are using elements, fragments, or pieces of someone else's created artifact in the creation of a new one for artistic reasons. These elements may remain identifiable, or they may be transformed to varying degrees as they are incorporated into the new creation, where there may be many other fragments all in a new context, forming a new 'whole'. This becomes a new 'original', neither reminiscent of nor competitive with any of the many 'originals' it may draw from. This is also a brief description of collage techniques which have developed throughout this century, and which are universally celebrated as artistically valid, socially aware, and conceptually stimulating to all, it seems, except perhaps those who are 'borrowed' from. "

It seems that this could be taken further, perhaps past the realm of two-dimensional collage to multimedia productions of various kinds which use parts of existing video, music or still photography in combination as part of an "original" project.

I don't know how I'd feel if my own work were borrowed and transformed - it's an interesting question, and one that probably produces more controversy that it does answers.

“Clicking in the Classroom” Delivers

In a March 28 commentary in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled How to Find What Clicks in the Classroom , Judith Tabron writes, “I'm surprised at how low the adoption rates of technology really are. Colleges and universities have ended programs that rewarded early adopters for trying the latest gee-whiz thing. At the same time, many of my IT colleagues still give presentations on gee-whiz technologies that they built in the hope that someone would come.”
Tabron, director of faculty computing services at Hofstra University, finds that not much has changed since the mid 90’s when universities spent a lot of money adopting class management systems such a Blackboard. Their bit for Instructional Technology was done. But as Tabron points out, these systems do not facilitate true academic interaction. Basically, they deliver the course content on a computer screen with the same old instructions – read it, absorb it and review it.
In order for this to change, she says, “IT-staff members with teaching experience and an understanding of the mission of liberal-arts education need a place in which to demonstrate the latest technologies. And they need both space and time to help professors develop new types of lessons, assignments, and grading methods that can fundamentally change how teaching and learning happen.” Unfortunately, they often end up fixing printers.
It would be tempting to quote her entire commentary – it’s that good. Here, for example, is her final thought in this short but inspiring article:“Our students live online. They fall in love, they shop, they order pizza on the Web. Their iPods, TV's, and Xboxes are sophisticated technologies. They instant-message their blogs from their cellphones, and they can't picture college having a place in any of this, because we haven't shown them that it can. It will be a dismal future if the only thing our graduates cannot do online is learn.”
Read How to Find What Clicks in the Classroom – and you will be ready to listen, talk, challenge, answer, try, fail, try again.

Gimmick or Godsend?

From The Wired Campus, February 5, 2008:

“The smart pen that Wired Campus flagged back in May was unveiled last week at a technology conference in Palm Springs, Calif. The company behind it, LiveScribe, has been aggressively marketing the device to college students with the slogan ‘Never miss a word.’”

I took the link and watched the demo video. It looks impressive, it looks like fun. It’s basically a combination recording machine and camera. Students can take lecture notes while a minirecorder, embedded in the pen, records whatever is being said. Later, the user can touch the pen to a specific spot on the notes page and listen to a recording of the instructor speaking those words. A tiny camera links what is being written to what is being recorded.

The comments following the article are definitely worth a read – how well does it work, what are the ethical implications, and, my favorite, “Reading course materials and paying attention in class are the right solutions, unless the problem is to show how rich your parents are.”

On the other hand, as an educator who worked in special education for many years, I can see that it might be a useful tool for students with learning disabilities who need additional resources to process and review information.

Take the link, watch the video, and see whether the smart pen is for you! It will apparently be available just in time for this year’s fall semester.

Unlocking the promise of open educational resources

This short notice in The Chronicle of Higher Education's Daily Report caught my attention last week, and I’m very glad it did.

January 23, 2008

Open-Access Activists Publish Declaration

The founders of Wikipedia and Connexions, an open-access source for educational material, revealed their Cape Town Open Education Declaration in the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday.
The declaration grew out of a September 2007 meeting to spur the open-education movement. The goal is to create more educational resources that anyone can freely access and contribute to. Members of the Open Society Institute and the Shuttleworth Foundation, which support education, attended the September meeting.
Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) and Rich Baraniuk (Connexions) write that open education “promises to turn the textbook-production pipeline into a vast dynamic ecosystem that is in a constant state of creation, use, reuse, and improvement.” —Hurley Goodall

The opening paragraph of the Capetown Delcaration is promising and exciting:

“We are on the cusp of a global revolution in teaching and learning. Educators worldwide are developing a vast pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for all to use. These educators are creating a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. They are also planting the seeds of a new pedagogy where educators and learners create, shape and evolve knowledge together, deepening their skills and understanding as they go.”

After reading the declaration, I realize that I am woefully unaware of the growing pool of open educational resources. But I intend to become a proactive learner and discover more about how I can integrate the practice of creating and using open resources in my own classroom. It’s an exciting notion.

Click here to read the entire declaration and follow the related links, and here is a link to the FAQs.

See Mark Shuttleworth as he introduces the Cape Town Open Education Declaration:

Flying Without a Safety Net(work)

On weekends, I rely heavily on the Trinity network to check email from students and colleagues, and even (gasp) to get some work done for our Computer Skills class. Imagine my surprise, which quickly turned to panic, when I logged on to the network Saturday morning and found that my account was “no longer valid and has expired.” Nothing helped, not retyping my password, not using the Trinity webmail exchange. I wrote the HelpDesk, even though I knew it was closed. Monday was a holiday, and my next class was 8:30 Tuesday morning.

I drove over to a virtually deserted campus to try to log in from my office computer. No luck. I was still “expired.” So I took a quick look at the class syllabus to see what advice I had for my students who found themselves in a similar situation:

What if the Computer Network is down?
Plan to complete assignments before they are due. Unforeseen computer problems sometimes occur. Due dates will be changed if the server is down for a significant period of time. Due dates will not be changed for personal computer problems.

What if you don't have a computer or your personal computer isn't working?Computers are available for you to use in many locations on campus. Anticipate problems and complete your work well before deadlines.

Fortunately, I had completed most of my notes for the Tuesday class in advance – taking my own advice about completing work before it is due was a good thing - but I was still out of touch with my students. What if they needed me? How would they survive?

Well, or course, I underestimated their self-reliance and overestimated my own importance. When Heather from the HelpDesk blessedly fixed the problem Sunday afternoon, I had exactly two messages from students, both friendly and neither urgent – my students were just fine.

But the experience made me thing about terms such as Internet Dependence.

I turned to – where else, the Internet – and checked out Dr. Sanity’s Blog to test myself. Did I exhibit any of the following symptoms of withdrawal from my network??

Withdrawal, as manifested by two or more of the following occurring after cessation or reduction of heavy prolonged internet browsing:
(a) autonomic hyperactivity such as sweating or heart rate in excess of 100 beats per minute
(b) hand tremor and an intense desire to type rants
(c) nausea or vomiting when re-entering the real world from the virtual
(d) transient visual, auditory, or tactile hallucinations
(e) psychomotor agitation
(f) anxiety that something will happen and YOU WON'T KNOW ABOUT IT!
(g) grand mal seizures or perhaps just tics as you longingly look toward the shut-off computer

Whew! So far so good (well, maybe I did experience a bit of Symptom F), but I did “re-learn” two big lessons from flying without my safety network:
· Get the work done in advance. You never know when you’ll be cut off from your network. If it happens, relax, go to a movie, enjoy the weekend knowing that you’re ready for class
· Your students are more resourceful than you think – and the best thing you can teach them is how to get answers for themselves!

Academic Blogging?

A short article in today's Chronicle of Higher Education caught my eye this morning, particularly since I'm thinking about ways to make my students' blogs meaningful to them and to the things they will be learning in our Computer Skills class. The title of the article was Blogs Are Increasingly Venues for Scholarship, Librarians Are Told. It's fascinating to follow the links in the article and read some of the discussion and academic arguments the entry in question produced.

I don't pretend to understand specialized botanical comments such as "I think my main point is that the authors need to have considered more complex (i.e. realistic) evolutionary genetic situations before they proposed an alternative method of molecular heredity. I think the most important data that is missing is the actual biochemical function of the hothead gene. Knowing that would really help to figure out what is occurring in the double nulls." However, the spirit of academic give-and-take is lively and fun to read. Some commenters can't resist correcting spelling errors, and one in particular has strong feelings about a certain journal:

The papers that are published by bigshots that are completely crap (I’m thinking about a particular journal family- one can guess) are the ones that bug me the most.

Blogs seem to have the potential to provide an informed yet informal forum for academicians and students of all fields and generations. Here's what Carlton Clark of Collin County Community College has to say.

"By reading and occasionally commenting on my students' blogs and by making mine available to them, I hope to establish a greater rapport with my students. I can establish a dialogue or sense of trust, which I would expect to carry over into the classroom. Although my teaching philosophy statement contains a few sentences on the importance of developing a sense of rapport with my students, I've found that, in practice, establishing this rapport has always been a great personal challenge."

His comments and more on the topic of academic blogging can be found at Lore: An E-Journal for Teachers of Writing.

I am excited about a new semester and new blogs that allow us to share our thoughts and ideas in an academic, but nevertheless, fun and creative setting.

Remix Culture?

I recently completed a design project for a client that included stills from classic films, and I thought a lot about copyright issues regarding photos of iconic film stars and movie set photographs. It’s complicated. One of the new sites I found, The Center for Social Media at American University, explores some of these new concerns, specifically the Fair Use aspects of “transformative” treatments of copyright material. Here is a short description of their findings:

“The study, Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video, by Center director Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, co-director of the law school’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, shows that many uses of copyrighted material in today’s online videos are eligible for fair use consideration. The study points to a wide variety of practices—satire, parody, negative and positive commentary, discussion-triggers, illustration, diaries, archiving and of course, pastiche or collage (remixes and mashups)—all of which could be legal in some circumstances.”

The most entertaining part of the report is a wild, funny and thoughtful list of videos in each of the “gray” categories. My personal favorite so far is Evolution of Dance, but there is so much original splicing and cutting and reuse in each of the examples, and each of them may or may not fit in the category of Fair Use. At the end of this page is a video with further videos that are designed to generate discussion and debate.

There is much creativity in the user generated space, and much of it builds on unauthorized uses of copyrighted material. In this new era of participatory media, where should the line be drawn between infringement and fair use?