I’ve been making Blackboard orientation videos for first year students for several years now. The idea is actually to provide a bit of a service to the faculty; many instructors aren’t comfortable providing any “intro” for their students, so the first idea was to box up the sort of information I would give if I went into a class to help ease first year students into the system. The concept has clearly evolved since those early days.
Here’s our orientation video for this term, made using the stop motion function on our (relatively) new HD camera. All props to Lauren Di Monte for that fantastic idea! Complete with captions, thanks to our awesome student employee, Lorena. Go team Blackboard!
If you watch the right hand corner, you can see our mobile shelving doing its thing a couple of times.
This video took about five hours to create, from start to finish. We did two takes; the first one took about 45 minutes and resulted in about a minute of video. The second took an hour and resulted in this minute and a half. We were entranced by how white chalk glowed on the chalkboard in the light of the projector.
There is, I have discovered, an imaginary wall between the teacher and the taught, and you will feel it no more strongly than when you opt not to lecture.
What I have learned in the last five years of teaching faculty how to use courseware is that my grand ideas sound really good on paper, and sound good to the ears of chairs, administrators, and even instructors themselves, but they rarely work out as planned. My grand ideas have been these: don’t waste time with fake “training” courses, encourage instructors to use the time we’ve booked to actually build their own courses, with help on hand. If asked, any instructor will tell you that they have more important things to do than sit in a lab and listen to some instructional technologist or (in my case) librarian go on at great length about best practices or feedback we’ve heard from students. They have a deadline, and it’s usually something like tomorrow or the next day, to get this course ready and online. They are often annoyed that they system doesn’t work the way they want it to/hope it will/expect it will, and have exactly 12 seconds of attention to spare. This is why I thought my grand ideas would work out: I’m not going to ask you to sit and listen to me for an hour before you go home and build your course alone. I say: forget the first part, let’s jump to the second, but do it more efficiently. You work on your course: I’ll answer your questions as required. We can learn from each other’s questions. We’ll all walk away having accomplished something.
It never worked. First off, the labs where these training/work sessions happen are built like classrooms, with a podium and a screen and desks that usually face the front. The room itself tells everyone what they should be doing, and it’s not what they want to do or what I hope they will do. Second, no one’s ever ready. We do the training a week or two before classes start, and 9 times out of 10 the syllabus is still in progress, the documents are all over the instructor’s home computer (not in the lab with us), TAs haven’t been assigned, assignments are still being sorted out. So I can book a room to get the work done, but the content is rarely with us. So what happens instead is I (or one of my esteemed colleagues) gets in front of the room and lectures. We lecture about courseware. We point out where the tools are, we walk through the clicks. Here’s how you do it, guys. We pepper the lecture with experience, feedback from students, ideas we’ve seen work well, and those that don’t work so well. We end up serving up exactly what everyone would tell us they don’t want.
So this year, we decided to throw the whole process out and start again. As with any educational enterprise, we had to sit and think about where the value in our training lies. While I can talk at great length about all the tools and how best to use them, my experience is that little if any of my grand words sink in. Of course that’s how it works: the research clearly shows that training of this nature isn’t terribly effective, and I can vouch for that based on the phone calls I get. How often do we get questions from faculty where the answers were delivered in at training session several weeks (or days) prior? About 95% of the time, easily. It’s not that they’re not paying attention; our method just doesn’t work. They feel successful at the time; we have really good interactions with faculty, they clearly understand that we know what we’re talking about, they appreciate that it is our job to help them and we will pull out all the stops to do so. Everyone walks away happy. It’s just that our training objectives (giving instructors the tools to feel confident in creating an excellent, effective online course presence) are rarely met.
We distilled the positives of our current situation down to these: we need to continue to make sure instructors know that we’re friendly, helpful, and available for them on an on-going basis. If nothing else comes across, this has to. The thing we value the very most is our one-on-one discussions with instructors about their use of technology in their courses; we want to keep that. That interaction is valuable for both of us. Beyond that, everything was fair game.
So first, we decided to stop using classrooms to conduct training. The format is too familiar and too controlled. We don’t want everyone to take a seat and stick in it. We want them to move around. A moving body learns better than a stationary one. So no claiming seats. Next, we would not lecture. No lectures. The learning that was going to happen around us would be active, not passive. We’re not going to insert answers into your head. You’re going to have to forage for your answers.
We set up four zones in a room. At the front near the entrance we have a demonstration zone, with no seating, but one very large whiteboard, a projector, a wii remote, and a IR pen. In the demonstration zone you can use the IR pen to interact with a training shell. Here we demonstrate how tools are used, where to click, how to create elements, etc. based on the questions that are coming from faculty. It’s off-the-cuff and tailored to the instructor in front of us. The advantage of the large format is that other instructors see what’s being demonstrated from anywhere in the room and come forward to interact with it (and us) if they’re interested in the topic.
The second zone is simple a table. Here we encourage instructors with their own laptops to open them up and work with a familiar machine. On the table we have our “how to get your course into Blackboard in a hurry” document, which walks you through each of the basic, necessary steps.
The third zone is the Petting Zoo, which consists of six computers each displaying a different training course shell. They’re designed so that you can play with or look at the tool in action. If required there is a laptop sitting next to the computer with the student view of the same course shell, so you can set it up/create/add content as an instructor and then see what it looks like for a student. There are printed signs on each station advertising which tool is being displayed. On the desk at each station are post it notes with ideas on them for how and why to use this tool. Next to the monitor are printed sheets with step-by-step instructions on exactly how to set up and use this tool.
The fourth zone is simply two computers against the far wall where instructors can log into their own accounts and build their courses.
The basic plan was this: we knew everyone would be a bit uncomfortable at first, not knowing what to do, so we thought we’d start with a short lecturette about some concepts rather than tools. First: the idea that the “course menu” shouldn’t remain in its default state, but rather should be understood as a table of contents for the class. We’d give them a brief dissection of the main page, so they knew where the basic elements were. After that we’d introduce the areas to the instructors, including a brief introduction about each of the petting zoo stations. Point out the instruction sheets. Encourage them to ask their questions and check out whatever stations interest them. Then we let them go.
The very first time we did this, I shuddered a little about two beats after I stopped talking. You can feel the uncertainty, the tiny bit of panic, both on our side and theirs. They expect us to edutain them. There is a silence that needs to be filled, and it should be filled with my confident voice. They (and we) expect us to do the work, the song and dance, while they observe us. This is, at the heart of it, what “learning” looks like in higher ed, doesn’t it? We are so familiar with this set up that taking it away causes real insecurity for everyone involved. But within about four minutes we had faculty playing with tools at the petting zoo, getting questions answered at the demonstration area, and talking to each other at the workstations and around the table. Rather than spend all my time going through the basic rigmarole, I was answering specific questions and brainstorming creative ways to encourage student participation. How to get students to comment on each other’s blogs, which tool to pick for a specific task, how best to tackle groups within large classes. Rather than reciting the content of our tip sheets and how-to documents, we got to spend time using our imaginations and experience. It was exhilarating.
Not only that: most of the instructors stayed longer than the booked time, took more printed paper than usual, and actually (gasp) worked on their courses. I couldn’t believe it. When we give everyone their own computer to work on, no one wants to build their own courses. I think perhaps the fact that we spend most of the time lecturing has the effect of us claiming all the air in the room. When we stop, and force everyone to become an active participant in the training, there’s more autonomy to go around. Everyone seems to take charge of their situations a little more. When instructors have to choose their spot rather than having one essentially assigned, they seem far more willing to get to work. I felt like I did more, even though I was talking to the crowd so much less.
And all those basic questions? The paper does the talking. I don’t have to worry about forgetting to mention how to make your course available, or how to upload a document. There’s a simple set of instructions for that. People with experience and imagination are far more valuable sharing that rather than the basic how-tos.
Every time we run one of these training sessions, and we’ve done five of them so far, it starts out with the same tension; everyone in the room looks at us, a little nervous, wondering what they heck we expect from them. With the librarians, they all stood in an orderly row.
“I know this is uncomfortable at first,” I said as we started. “When we don’t lecture, it breaks the fourth wall.”
“There is no fourth wall,” one of the librarians protested, clearly uncomfortable with being put in this situation. (I can always count on librarians to voice what few others are willing to.)
I looked up at them, in a line, literally forming a wall themselves. “Yeah,” I said. “There really is.”
Within a few minutes, they were all hard at work, papers in hand, discussions on-going. The demonstration area was busy. All the petting zoo stations were occupied, mostly with a pair looking at the tools and discussing them. It’s not the trainers and the trainees anymore. It’s just us, together, learning.
This is for posterity: a picture of me, after taking some ativan to calm me down, the day (today) my surgeon told me I has a hugely enlarged lymph node on the back of my head. I don’t really know what that means, but I guess whatever it means I’m going to experience it.
I’m set to have it removed, under only a local anesthetic (and some welcome valium) on September 8th.
I’m considering dyeing my hair blue.
Hopefully this doesn’t belong in my existing cancer category. I’m not going to put it there until they tell me I have to.
I work at a school, yes. But I miss being a student in one. Many people think I’m crazy, but I love being in school. I love the reading, the writing, and most of all the discussion. I’m a Harvard graduate, I know what it can be like to sit in a room full of extremely bright people and wrestle with a thorny problem. I love not knowing and struggling to understand, throwing ideas at the wall and seeing if any of them work.
But I’m a drop-out. I dropped out of a phd program at the very institution at which I am currently employed, in fact. It’s simultaneously the hardest thing I’ve ever done, the smartest decision I ever made, and the decision I am most likely to feel regret about. I don’t regret it because I want the life that would have come with finishing; I think I’m far better off as a librarian, playing with tech and managing projects and helping faculty with their courses, than I would be with a load of research and teaching to do. I adore my job, and I feel very lucky to have found this particular path. I only regret it because I’d like to do the work.
There’s nothing stopping me from going back. Not to that program, or that topic, or that department, though. I think I’ve moved into a new area now. If I were to go back, it would be in a very different way. And I wouldn’t do it in order to become an academic in the end. Not as job training. Just to improve the person that I am, and to enrich the work I’m already doing.
But you couldn’t drag me back to that style of PhD program. I was lonely, bored, confused about the purpose behind anything I was doing. I felt lost. I have discovered over time that my motivation comes from interacting with other people. This wasn’t immediately apparent all through graduate school because I was de facto surrounded by others. I didn’t realize how much my enthusiasm depended on the community. As soon as I lost that community, I seriously lost my way.
So I was thinking about it a bit, and talking to some doctoral students about the issues they’re facing, I think I’m actually on to something. I think I’ve figured out what kind of doctoral program I’d want to enter. It would go something like this.
You start a doctoral program with a group of like-minded people, interested in working together. In fact, I think the group should actually apply to a program together, be upfront about their collaboration. It’s not a huge group, maybe 4-5 people. Those 4-5 people have agreed beforehand that they want to work on an area of mutual interest. But each of them comes to the subject from a different angle, maybe even a different discipline altogether. They’re looking at maybe the same data, or the same subjects, or at historical data from the same decade, or the same region. Something ties them together, makes each other’s work interesting and appealing to each of them. It gives them a common language and common heroes.
They would all have their own advisers, potentially their own departments to turn to for support and guidance. But the group goes through their programs together, sometimes off doing their own courses and conferences, sometimes working closely together. If they’re doing data collection, the data is shared among the group. They may actually gather data together, and work from the same starting point. Sharing data isn’t plagiarism, after all; the insights you draw from it are the key part.
They discuss approaches and revelations, they have people to turn to when they are wrestling with a thorny problem. They influence each other; they also resist being influenced, or deliberately buck the trend. They read some books in common, but not all. Each brings a lot of unique insights and perspective from their own perspective, or discipline, or area. Comps would be a course (or set of courses, really) where the reading lists are created in an order that will allow all the participants to gain from each other’s thinking along the way. You read your own comps reading list, but you get insight from four others at the same time. Maybe they bring in speakers to talk to them. People to come inspire them or challenge them.
When it comes time to start writing, they have a structured plan, with key milestones and deadlines. They arrange to write their sections with commonalities at the same time, like writing a research paper for a seminar course. The writing process for the collaborative group might look like another set of courses, in fact: they take a “course” together to get each section or chapter finished, with a common deadline and requisite celebrations. They can get a mental tick mark as they complete each step, move through the process like an undergraduate moves through first, second, third, fourth year, graduation. The path of progression would be clear, manageable, collegial. The group could work together along the way to publish collected essays revolving around a theme or element of their collective work. They would meet weekly to discuss their work, their ideas, to be inspired and influenced by each other. They would work collaboratively toward independent goals that are inter-related and complementary. When they’re finished, their dissertations could be published together as a series of books, all related and referencing each other.
Chemistry already works this way, in collaborative units. I think if the humanities started doing the same, the work would be richer. And less tedious to produce.
After I thought it all through, I realized what I was considering: creating a fandom. A fandom in academia, around a topic/theme/group/region. A fandom with it’s language, traditions, communities, familiar cast of characters all re-written and re-imagined by each member. As long as it’s a fandom, it comes with a built in audience of people who are actually interested in your take on the very familiar subject. The conversations are deeper, the details and differences are more obvious. The process gains some meaning, even if that meaning is entirely about finding something to contribute to the group. Flagging enthusiasm can be bolstered up by someone else’s reinvigoration.
It’s not that it’s easier than the traditional PhD; it wouldn’t be. You’d still have to do the reading, pass your comps, do your languages if you have to, collect your data and compose your dissertation. It’s just that it wouldn’t have to be such a solitary task. I think this is the kind of PhD that could actually be fun to do. And wouldn’t the work be richer, with constant insight from others? It wouldn’t prevent you from doing solitary work. Solitary work is the foundation of most academic work, and, ironically, most fandom work too. But what is the benefit of solitary work? Don’t we learn better and think better when challenged and supported and listened to by others? Why do we cut so much of that out of the doctoral process? Doesn’t the solitary work gain meaning when it’s in aid of the collaborative? Isn’t academic inherently collaborative, with academics building on each other work, just at a relatively slow pace? From the slow process of getting an article published and the long wait for meaningful citations in future published work, it’s still highly collaborative. Just crazy slow. Would it be terribly wrong to speed it up a bit?
We went to see M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender tonight. I had heard bad things (bad like the rotten tomatoes freshness rating, pictured). I had heard about the racebending problem, wherein characters presumed to be Japanese, Chinese, Tibetan or Inuit are portrayed by white or Indian actors. I knew all this, but had to see it for myself.
Walking into the theatre today was prefaced by spending the last week forcing my spouse Jeremy to watch the entire three seasons of the Nickelodeon tv series not two weeks after watching the entire series by myself. We were primed. I absolutely love the series; it’s brilliant, well-constructed, thoughtful, complex, and peopled with three-dimensional, lovable, and sometimes terrifying characters. When I saw the last frames of the last episode, it killed me that I wouldn’t get see an adult Aang (the series ends when he is 13, presumably, since a calendar year passes and Aang is 12 when we first meet him), or know more about his adventures. I’m a sucker for magic, heroes, and heroes with exceptional, world-changing powers, so naturally Avatar: The Last Airbender is now one of my favourite shows of all time. This afternoon I felt an Aang-shaped hole in my evening, so I convinced Jeremy to come with me to the theatre.
On the way in, I said to Jeremy: “I fear that when we get in there and the movie starts, I’m going to see a kid up on the screen dressed like Aang and pretending to be Aang. But I am very very certain that I know Aang, I know who he is and what he’s about, and I will look up and see someone who is not Aang.”
Jeremy said: “We’ll call him Ian.”
Well it turns out I didn’t need to worry. Aang (pronounced “ang” in the series) is now called AW-ng, so my dearest Aang is safely protected from defilement from my experience in the theatre. Sokka, the goofy, bad-joke-telling “normal guy” in team avatar tells no jokes and is earnest and angsty. But that’s not my Sokka (sock-a)! That’s now Soe-ka, so that’s a different guy, right? (The primary antagonist through most of the series is Prince Zuko, and I swear to you at one point I thought someone said “Zuko” instead of “Sokka” and I was all turned around.) And Zuko’s uncle, the kindly, sweet, Pai Cho playing, tea-obsessed former war lord, Iroh (EYE-ro) is suddenly called Ear-Ro. And only once does he even mention tea! Why does a director make decisions like this? Why rename everyone so audibly? For fans of the series, it’s jarring and sounds all wrong. Does M. Night Shyamalan want to alienate the fan base? Jeremy suggested he wanted to “make it his own”, which frankly just angers me.
If you really, really love the original, is it ever really possible to love a film remake? Peter Jackson showed us that yes, yes we can. I am a big Lord of the Rings fan (I can recite the first 3 pages to you by heart; too many rereads as a teenager, I guess), but I adored Peter Jackson’s movies. And my heart melted all over the new Narnia movies…even the opening sequence of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe movie, which is not in the book at all, swayed me in a positive direction; it wasn’t in the book, but it could have been. It was entirely in keeping with the characters and the world, and only served to show the story I love in the best possible light on screen. A film adaptation made with love can be embraced by the most ardent fan. The Last Airbender doesn’t feel like something created with love. It feels like Shyamalan profoundly misunderstood the series and tried to “fix” it.
There has been a great deal of discussion around the casting of these characters, and I agree with the critics. This was an opportunity to make a big, beautiful movie with the kinds of faces we rarely see on screen. I would have loved to see Inuit actors play Katara and Sokka. If they couldn’t manage that, they could at least have gotten native Canadians or Americans to play them. I think Inuit would have been the best fit (couldn’t this be Katara?) but imagine how beautiful Katara would have been portrayed by an Aneshnabe woman. What, someone who looks like this couldn’t play Katara? I can’t imagine why Shyamalan thinks only a white girl could fit the bill.
The Fire Nation is portrayed in the film as Persian or Indian, for the most part, a decision which appears to have been driven by the casting of Zuko. In the film he seems to have mostly lost his character-defining scar, his ponytail and his severe hairdo, which served as an important metaphor for his rigid stance (which softens over time, highlighted by his hair growing back). I’m sure the actor in question is very good, but I think we all understand Zuko and his family to be Japanese. Jarring!
Aang. (Oh my dear Aang!) Played by a white American boy, when we generally understand him to be Tibetan. You know what? I could have lived with this casting, and I think people are too hard on him. (I’m always a sucker for the protag.) The script seems to have sucked all the fun out of this character, leaving him doing nothing but wide-eyed trembling and lots of (well-performed) martial arts. I think the poor thing did a great job with what he was given. I read tonight that Noah Ringer is a fan of the original series, and was a fan before auditioning, so I can imagine all the criticism of him as an actor and the film as a whole must be breaking his heart. In all honesty: I think physically he makes a great Airbender. There were moments (very, very short moments) where you hear his voice lift in a vaguely happy tone and you can hear the Aang that might have been. In the hands of a better director and script-writer, I think he would have portrayed a very likable and true-to-the-original Aang. He certainly has the martial arts chops for the job.
In sum: what a tragedy. Maybe some things just aren’t meant to be recreated or so radically embellished. Yep, sometimes you really shouldn’t add that rainbow. Michael Dante DiMartino & Bryan Konietzko: I salute you.
Is it true that we don’t really believe we’re going to die? We know in our heads that we will, but do we entirely believe it? I think we don’t. I think there’s a part of us that somehow believes that we won’t ever die, if only because contemplating that reality is so unpleasant and counterproductive that it’s easier to put it out of your mind altogether. It’s that thing that will happen (presumably), but it’s best to create a life based on the presumption that it won’t. And then once in a while you have a brush with death, a reminder: a car nearly swerves into you, you stare down from the 44th floor at the street from a balcony, the turbulence on the plane gets a little too turbulent, and you think, I could die right now. It’s terrifying and disturbing.
I had cancer and recovered (so far). The kind of cancer I had is entirely curable 98% of the time, and deaths from it are extremely rare and involve decades without proper medical care or the detonation of nuclear bombs nearby. I was never in the position where my life was in serious danger. Of course the moment the words “cancer” or “carcinoma” get bandied about during your doctor visit, the fear kicks in and it’s like your life goes into constant turbulence on descent. You are convinced that you will die, and you are right. You will. Not of this, but you will. How is it such a surprise? A rude surprise. Extraordinarily unwelcome.
There’s an element of trust that’s part of it; when your computer crashes or makes a sick sound for the first time, you start to trust it less. Personally, I start to mourn it a little bit. I thought it was perfect, but now it’s demonstrated that its not, it’s on its way down. I’ve started on the path to replacing it. Every time it restarts you have a question in the back of your head about whether it will or won’t. It’s proven itself to be unsound (sometimes). I will start to see it that way.
This is the same process that happens with your body. It’s one thing if you don’t like to run, your feet get sore when you stand around for hours on end, you get tired after a couple pints of beer. But when something serious goes wrong, when your body proves to you that it’s capable of aiding and abetting carcinoma, you trust it less. It’s on the path to the grave, and you can see it now. Can I take a breath and get to the end of this sentence? Or will I run out of air? No longer able to know for sure the limits of your own body, there’s the mourning of that youthful exuberance, that certainty that you know precisely what you can do. As if that means you can do nothing at all.
As with a piece of technology, you get over these fears as your body demonstrates that its recovered. You learn to forgive it for allowing something deadly to grow. You put it in context, blame the environment, extraordinary stresses, consider the ways your body protected itself, closed off the deadliest stuff. You come to terms. If you’re like me, and you had a cancer no one ever took seriously as a threat to your life or lifestyle, you don’t even get an oncologist. You’re on the lowest rung of the cancer ladder, so low it’s a wonder they even use the same word. You don’t warrant special treatment ever after. You’re back in with the regular public for everything; care, percentage chance of getting (another) cancer, potential lifespan. With time, you even see yourself that way. Average. Ordinary. Invincible, just like everyone else.
But that’s not how others see me, I understand now. Tarred with the cancer brush, I see that for others I’m a person who’s going to die, unlike them. I’m in the category of people who will die. Not today, but one day. I’ve demonstrated my ability to foster and support death, like a computer with a history of kernel failures. We know that one is going to need to go to the e-waste trash pile, it will one day crash and not come back.
I suppose it’s evidence of a) the crucial place of optimism in our daily lives. I understand that we need to hope for the best, I guess it hadn’t occurred to me until I got sick just how critical that hope is. If you know you’re going to die in 5, 10, 40 years precisely, would you live your life differently? Would you throw caution to the wind, feel freed from the shackles of not knowing, or would you mourn the reality of it? I think mostly we fall into the second camp, mourning the bare fact. But the reality is, your computer is going to collapse eventually, and you’ll have to replace it. You will die someday. It might be this afternoon while walking across the street, next week on an international flight, in two months from now of a spontaneous aneurysm, or flesh-eating bacteria, or new strain of flu. The only difference in this regard between us (the currently healthy) and those in hospice is the knowledge of what is going to kill us. Not when, and certainly not if.
I was testing out Timo, which is a sort of cross between Twitter and an open IM chat, and I discovered that not just your Twitter friends could IM you. Apparently anyone can. Then this happened:
Seriously: what? I had no idea people still said “asl”, but I guess that’s what I get for staying away from wide open chat systems.
My plan, for July, is to set up a place where we can all share the cool software, web apps, ideas and tricks that we think the rest of the world should know about via screencast. That way we have a great big searchable index of all the cool things available to us on the internet. In order to get there, first I need to share some easy ways to make a screencast. Hence the video above.
Admitedly, I’m currently addicted to screencasts. I’ve never been a big fan of them, I must admit, but these tools are so easy to use, and I can get more across in a screencast. I love text, but sometimes it’s not the best medium. And since I found all these super easy screencasting tools…there’s just no excuse not to try.
I picked four tools for this introduction: Screenjelly, Screenr, Screentoaster, and Screencast-o-matic. They all have their pros and cons, but they’re all dead easy to use. Give one of them a try, let me know how it goes.
@DeGrooteBiz Yeah, JAWS needs to fix that. Web is broken without being able to specify.September 2, 2010 11:49
@elenaspringall haha well your browser sends a line of info about itself when you load a page, right...if that could be overwritten...September 2, 2010 7:45
