jtmorello.org

Spending the semester learning about the variety of instructional technology applications has been interesting and daunting.

So far, I’m troubled by the fact that my idea for making video content available for my class next semester has progressed very far. But, I have had some decent results exploring the use of MediWiki.

I set up two wikis this semester to support group tasks I was involved with, and these devices have seemed to be a useful way to facilitate group collaboration. One project involved the creation of a new undergraduate research course, and the other is an on-going project involving review of general education requirements at UMW.

Before this semester, I’d been to the Wikipedia only a few times and had never set up (or even thought of setting up) a wiki. So, the exposure to that technology has been quite useful. While I haven’t thought of how to apply this in a class, I can imagine there are lots of uses. In fact, I’m thinking that this might even be a bit more functional than a blog on certain types of class tasks and projects.

As part of our discussion on assessment, the TLT Fellows group looked at a few readings, including Steve Greenlaw’s post on some thoughts about the distinction between grading and teaching. His viewpoints are available here.

As we talked about some of the issues he raised, it struck me that many of them are terribly sensible . . . but perhaps a bit hard to manage. The notion of open ended revisions until a student was satisfied that he/she could do no more (or didn’t want to do any more) seems workable for some assignments, but not others, and manageable for some classes, but not others.

I guess the answer is to “think more creatively” but I’m not so sure that always works. For example, scheduling a second round of oral presentations so that students could improve them might not always be possible. And while a teacher might be just as attentive to a revised paper each and every time, that might not always be so for a class audience that was hearing a revision of an earlier talk or group presentation.

Then there’s the complication involving incentives. If grading is a poor incentive for learning, and I don’t necessarily disagree, what’s the incentive for a student to revise a work repeatedly before it’s graded? Learning . . . or improving the grade? But if the grade is a weak incentive for learning, but it is the incentive the urges a particular student to undergo extra revisions before the grade is given, does grading yet again get in the way of learning? Or does learning happen in spite of grading if the experience is structured in a particular way.

I wish I knew . . .

I have other goals for the class that go beyond the learning spaces idea.  Students in this class do presentations analyzing pieces of political communication, and I like to do a better job of using technology to support the goals of these presentation tasks. 

For example, last year I prepared a sample of political commercials that the class was to use as material for presentations analyzing political rhetoric in commercials.  I put these on several computers in a computer lab, and the students were given the task of going to look at these.  Well . . . most never really did that until the last minute, claiming it was hard to free up the time to get to the lab.  Maybe I can learn better ways to make this material available to them “on demand” as they are preparing these talks. 

Then, maybe there’s a better way to enable the students to show selected features of this visual rhetoric as they present the talk analyzing the political message.  Having the class see what the student is analyzing makes the analysis far more cogent and effective, but to do that requires a way to efficiently incorporate visual clips into the talk.  Maybe there are better ways to do this than having a DVD or a VHS tape that students pop in and out of the machinery in the classroom.

Another issue for me is to spend some time thinking about how to help students incorporate technology effectively into an oral presentation.  This is a subject that I do not believe has been very fully or carefully explored so far, and the result is that students are often flying blind as they make decisions about preparing for a talk.  Sometimes, the students end up creating material that just gets in the way, or is riddled with technological breakdowns that cause them and the audience frustration.  So, learning how to help students use the available technologies effectively in oral presentatiions is another goal for my course.

I hope I’m not setting too big of an agenda for myself.  Being able to manage the changes will be an important consideration for me.

Our second meeting of the TLT Fellows began with a demonstration of some “learning spaces” that other faculty at UMW had designed for their courses, with the assistance of the Instructional Technology Specialists.  The demonstrations focused on the design of the learning spaces grew out of the instructor’s goals for the course.  Following the demonstrations, each of us was to talk about the goals for our courses in the interests of starting to think about technological applications that might help advance thoser goals.

 Seven of us should have talked about our goals, but we got through only three people.  Here’s an immediate application of the notion of a blog space as a teaching tool.  The rest of us agreed to post our statements of goals, and to comment on each other’s ideas.  Having a blog set up for students in a course provides a similar opportunity to finish a class discussion that wasn’t completed when the clock signaled time was up.  Likewise, maybe the availability of a class blog could get a discussion started before class, so everyone didn’t come in to the day’s topic totally cold.  In this way, you might use it as a “warn up” strategy for class.  So, I guess one goal for my class is to discover ways to make the available technologies work to assist in-class discussions.

In the past, I’ve often posted a question or a task as an announcement on “Blackboard,” or I’ve sent a class email with the material, or I’ve announced it at the end of the class as a task to prepare for the next class.  Maybe a class blog would be a better way to try this.

Also, since my class focuses on political communication, I’m often asking students to watch a major communication event and come to class prepared to talk about it.  Sometimes, these class chats work out OK but other times they’re a bit sketchy.  So, maybe I’ll have the class watch the communication event, then blog about it, and then we could follow that up in class (depending on the directions started on the blog).  Also, since there are lots of websites and blogs out there that offer political commentary, I could also add the task of finding a place where someone else made a comment about the piece of political comunication I had asked the class to watch and talk about.  An example would be, say, the state of the union speech — watch it, comment on the class blog, post something you find somewhere else that was commenting on the speech.  Then, we dig through some of this in class.

At least, that would be the hoped for result.

This is obviously a first post from someone who is both new to blogging and at the start of what should become an interesting adventure. I’m working with several others to explore the application of teaching and learning technologies to a group of courses to be taught at the University of Mary Washington.

Our task is to “narrate the process” of revising a class through the application of an assortment of teaching technologies. Faculty from six different departments, along with a group of Instructional Technology Specialists, are working together on this project (which is actually several projects since each person is working on a different course). I got involved initially because I was asked to convene the group to get this process started and, since I had to do that, I thought I would pitch in and work on “updating” the course I’ll be teaching in the spring semester. The class is called Communication in Political Campaigns, and it should be possible to involve any number of new teaching and learning technologies in this course.

But, first, I need to discover what some of the options are . . . and as those are presented in the group meetings we’ll be having, I’ll be in a better position to decide how to proceed. One step at a time . . .