e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • Guess What? Teachers Still Count.

    Here’s a little gem of a study from the latest issue of Usability News. Basically, it demonstrates that student-centered teaching approaches can go too far, negatively impacting learning outcomes:

    In this study two different class formats, each with differing instructor roles, were compared. Our hypothesis was that the more student-centered the class format, the more performance and collaboration amongst students would be enhanced. Our findings contrast this idea. This study supports the notion that, in order for technological integration in the classroom to be effective, the instructor must take a prominent role in the class structure. Technology and computer-mediated instruction cannot replace what is contributed by the presence and formal guidance of the lecturer. Technology is a powerful tool for enhancing educational settings, but the instructor must guide the students when using these tools.

    The short lecture and list of objectives offered at the beginning of each “hybrid” class not only changed the teacher-student interaction and the way the technology in the class was used, but also altered the student-student interaction. The experience of all students receiving the same lecture every class period may have fostered a more cohesive group than a setting wherein a group of individuals sat in a classroom and worked at their own pace.

    Now, this study happened to focus on a live classroom with some online enhancements, but I strongly suspect that the same applies (perhaps even more than in the live class) in distance learning as well. While I am often an advocate for a more student-centered approach in distance learning, the fact is that the “guide on the side” metaphor isn’t quite right. Students need a balance; they need some guidance. I’d say “guide leading the way” is a more balanced goal.

  • Creative Commons and Learning Objects

    I just added a Creative Commons license to e-Literate. While I have always been supportive of open content, I didn’t really get how immediately important it is for higher education until I started helping my significant other start searching for ESL teaching resources on the Maricopa Learning Exchange (MLX). For those who don’t know, MLX is a Learning Object Repository–a place where teachers can share content that they have created and/or discovered that is useful for teaching.

    One of the objects that we found was a small site that a professor had created which linked to a whole bunch of external resources. Great. The trouble is that Kathy (my significant other) is teaching a non-online class and, since it’s her first semester at the urban community college where she is about to start work, she doesn’t know what computer access is like for her students. So she has to print out the resources that she finds. Unfortunately, many of the great resources linked from the web site have no published copyright policy (although many of them have copyright notices). So in order to (ethically and legally) use the content, she has to email each web site owner and ask permission. Needless to say, this could turn out to be an arduous task.

    That’s why I have added the “Creative Commons License” badge on the sidebar, which links to a simple explanation of what rights I grant for content re-use. This will apply to all content on this site, including the longer articles that I intend to eventually write and include here.

  • Categories, Themes, and Memes

    After giving it a little more thought, I have decided to use the term “site themes” instead of categories. The latter implies (to me, at least) that each post will be put in one and only one category, which is not at all how I have organized the site. “Themes” seems a little more flexible and inclusive.

    I’d love to see a tool that supports a lower-level clustering of posts for capturing memes. For example, I write about the idea of blogging as parallel play here, here, and here. It would be nice if there were some easy way to cluster those posts for my readers.

    I envision a second screen in the post submission page flow that would do this job. After you submit a post, the blogging software would scan it for permalinks to previous posts within your blog as well as similar text strings in the title. If it finds any, it would ask you if you would like to tie the posts together in a meme or, if one or more of the other posts is already labeled as belonging to one or memes, give you the option of associating the new post with the existing meme. So, for example, if I wrote a post called “Parallel Play Grows Up, Part III” and clicked the “submit” button, my blog software would show me the previous parallel play posts and give me a check box to select if I want to add this one to the “Blogging as Parallel Play” meme. (Optionally, it could also allow me to link in trackbacks and comments.) Then I could generate a “meme” list in my sidebar. Users interested in reading the meme would be able to click on a link that shows only the meme-related posts in reverse-chronological order.

    If any EE hackers are out there reading this, my birthday is August 9th…

  • Categories Are Up; Arranging Ideas

    OK, the categories are in place; you can now see only the entries for a particular category by clicking on the appopriate title in the sidebar. Luckily, the RSS didn’t change the edit dates on the feed so nobody got a feed reader full of old posts just because I mucked around with the categories.

    I think that most of the category titles are relatively self-explanatory, with one exception. I was going to call my classic KMish category “finding stuff,” since that seems to be what most of my KM posts that are not about blogging or community-ish stuff tend to be about. However, in homage to Amy Gahran’s excellent post about putting KM in human terms (found courtesy of elearningpost), I have decided to name the category (you guessed it) “Arranging Ideas.” It’s a bit broader and deeper than “Finding Stuff,” if also a bit less obvious.

  • Sakai's Okay?

    Sam Ottenhoff of the Longsight Group sent me this valuable clarification via email:

    Your criticism of the way most CLEs/LMSs do threaded discussion is absolutely valid and dead-on. But the title you use, What’s Wrong with the Sakai User Interface, is misleading. As I understand it, the work that has been happening with Sakai has almost completely revolved around architecture (Hibernate, Spring, Java Server Faces), authentication, and APIs. Because it’s an “open-open” project, they want to be public and release early and often.

    The services embedded in this release of Sakai are legacy CHEF services, developed by UMich (UMich is the only school going campus-wide live for fall). I agree completely with your criticism of the threaded discussion, but you are criticizing a legacy UMich tool and not the “Sakai User Interface” or the future of the project.

    So, while I don’t yet know whether Sakai has specific plans to revamp the discussion board interface, it’s certainly only fair to point out that the developers haven’t focused on revamping specific tools yet and, further, that one of Sakai’s widely-publicized strengths is its modularity. I guess we’ll have to wait a while longer to see whether they keep the legacy interface or blaze new trails in the default installation.

  • Course Management Systems and Pedagogical Models

    By way of edTechPost, we find this article at Dublin City University. Beyond the fact that this is a fairly large program adopting Moodle and bringing it into the big leagues, there’s this noteworthy observation embedded in DCU’s white paper:

    Another problem in adopting a commercial VLE was that it might constrain us to its inherent pedagogical model. Like many commercial products, WebCT is driven by an American/Canadian pedagogical paradigm; there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this model, but it is not entirely compatible with UK and Irish teaching and learning methodologies.

    Open source software is usually developed as a public collaboration and the source code is freely available for users to modify. Adopting an open source VLE would enable DCU to contribute to the development of the software and hence to take a leadership position in the academic development and understanding of e-learning, opportunities which would be significantly weaker if we simply deployed a closed source, proprietary, VLE.

    First, their point that interface is not instructional design-neutral is vital. These systems provide more than just URLs for locating content; they provide containers that shape both content and experience. Whether you use Blackboard, Moodle, or MovableType to host your class, you are making choices about the affordances that you can or cannot leverage as part of your pedagogy. And, of course, no system has all plusses and no minuses. This is about engineering. It’s about trade-offs and best fit between course environment and the instructional philosophies of the teachers and the institution as a whole.

    Furthermore, the DCU folks clearly realize that contributing to an Open Source platform means contributing best pedagogical practices to the educational community in form of source code. Being able to see and duplicate how other teachers set up their classrooms (whether virtual or not) is valuable to teachers.

    Good stuff.

  • What's Wrong with the Sakai User Interface

    Like many, I have been eagerly awaiting the public unveiling of Sakai, the Open Source course management system being created by an alliance of MIT, IU, University of Michigan, Stanford, and uPortal. At last the long wait is over; the first public release is available, and with it a demo portal. So I went in and kicked the tires. The first place I like to go when checking out a CMS is the discussion boards, since (a) they are typically one of the most critical and heavily used components in the system, and (b) they are often very poorly designed. Would Sakai do it right?

    Sadly, no. (more…)