Videos From Conference

This link will take you to a website with videos of the featured presentations at the conference. I highly recommend, "Expect to be Disrupted," even though it is an hour and twenty-seven minutes long. I wasn't as thrilled by some of the presentations by consultants for tech firms, and found the "Grand Debate" uninteresting at best. Neither debater addressed what I would consider the important "In or Out" issues.Those of you interested in service learning, might look at "High Impact Practices." That is often a code phrase for service and community based learning.

http://events7.mediasite.com/Mediasite/Catalog/Full/9331c15ce46b477596618b323dc957cb21

List of Presentations:

Beyond the Walled Garden: New Possibilities with Learning Platforms
Wednesday, Feb. 18, 2015 - 5:30pm-6:30pm
Phil Hill, Education Technology Consultant and Analyst, Mindwires

Getting Serious: Creating a Culture of Success Online
Thursday, Feb. 19, 2015 - 8:00am-9:30am
Brenda Harms, Ph.D., Senior Vice President, Converge Consulting

The Grand Debate: In or Out: And We’re Not Talking Burgers
Thursday, Feb. 19, 2015 - 12:15pm-1:45pm
Sondra Cosgrove, Ph.D., History Professor, Department of Social Sciences, College of Southern Nevada, versus James Sigman, Vice President Readiness and Retention, Pearson Higher Education, Moderated by Michael Catchpole, Ph.D., Professor, North Island College

Expect to be Disrupted: The Next Wave of Innovations in Online Education 
Friday, Feb. 20, 2015 - 8:00am-9:30am
Richard L. Edwards, Ph.D., Executive Director, iLearn Research, Ball State University

ITC 2015 Awards for Excellence in eLearning
Friday, Feb. 20, 2015 - 12:45pm-2:00pm
Presented by Loraine Schmitt, Chair, ITC Board of Directors, and Director of Distance Education at Portland Community College

High-Impact Practices: Promoting Participation for All Students
Saturday, Feb. 21, 2015 - 11:00am-12:15pm
Jillian Kinzie, Ph.D., Associate Director, Center for Postsecondary Research and the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE)

Saturday Morning in the Airport Retrospective

Sitting in the airport. The conference is over and I’m reflecting on the conference and what I learned. My thoughts are still pretty random at this point, so I’ll simply list them, and try to make sense of them later.  

1. Got links to a lot of sites and online services. It will take me weeks to go through them all and see which ones I will find useful and which I don’t want to mess with. If you found one interesting and decided to use it, let the rest of us know what happened. You can comment to the blog or send me a report by e-mail and I’ll post it for you.
2. Came home with a contact person from Newrow. He’s going to help me set up a Newrow session for ENG 6390.OL. Marcela has already e-mailed me and said she’d like to be included. If any of the rest of you think you’d like to join us, let me know. Don’t know when we’ll meet yet, since I want to set up a time when most of the students in the class can log on. But there are only 15 of us. Since  Newrow can handle 25, I can take about 10 more participants. (See Newrow report from February 19^th.)
3. One of my goals with this blog was to provide a “class within a class,” something that provides an intense exposure to a focused area of study within the overall class. I won’t know if I was successful in that endeavor until I get some feedback.  Let me know, either by e-mail or a comment on the blog, what you got out of this blog—if anything.
4. Simply writing the blog kept me focused during the sessions, more so than usual at a conference. I was surprised to find that I got as much out of the bad presentations as I did out of the good ones, since I had to think about how I was going to report on those sessions, how much information I was going to include, as well as whether I was going to critique the session while reporting on it.
5. It’s obvious from the Vender Room—yes, it was officially referred to as the Exhibitor Room; there were more salespeople there than academics, therefore my little change of terminology—that a lot of companies that have made big money off of textbooks are looking to make big money off of online education. I found my cynicism increase every time I went into that room. Yes, I know that there are some IT services that we simply need to outsource. I guess every institution is going to decide to what extent they will outsource as opposed to what they can do in-house. On the other hand, every time I walk into our university bookstore and see how some of these publishers are gigging our students, with the compliance of many faculty, I’m concerned.

Even though the conference is over, this blog will continue, at least for a few more weeks. 

I plan on scanning some handouts I received, as well as downloading the best stuff from the “Documents” section of the conference ap. I wasn’t able to copy all the links while in sessions, so I’ll be reviewing the various handouts and documents for other interesting links. Videos of some of the major sessions are on the ap. Don’t know if the ap will allow me to download any or not. I’ll see.

So, keep an eye on this space and I’ll see what else I can add that will be useful.

What Happens in Vegas Online Stays Online: Examining your Digital Mark

What Happens in Vegas Online Stays Online: Examining your Digital Mark

“A digital footprint is a trail of date you create while using the internet. It include the websites you visit, emails you send and information you access.”

Every time you log on you leave a mark.

Two Types of Digital Footprints

Active: You are deliberately releasing information about yourself for the purposes of sharing.

Passive: Websites and/or platforms that collect information about you behind the scenes.

Scenarios:

If you are using a library computer and browsing the internet using a private browser session, are you leaving a digital footprint?

Emails that you send if your institution’s email is behind a firewall.

Teaching Students about Digital Footprints:

http://mevins.info/1AVlVUH

Cybersmart.gov.au

Digital Reputation: To some extent you can take control of your digital footprint by controlling the active part. You cannot control your digital reputation. Your reputation is long-term. You can have a good digital reputation.

How do you manage your digital reputation?

• Set up a “google alert” that allows you to keep track of online posts that are about you. You can find google alert in your google account under services.
• Clean up social media accounts. (About every six months.)
• Privacy Settings. You can set up lists of people on Facebook that you wish to share some messages with but not all.
• Facebook Legacy Contacts: If you die who has the ability to maintain your Facebook account? This is the person who has access to your Facebook account and can write a final message, send info about funeral etc., download shared photos, and close your account.

Digital Citizenship

Web 1.0 Top down; experts downloaded info

Web 2.0 More connected; get information and respond to it.

Web 3.0 Interactive web; we’re all putting information online; dynamic; everyone is an expert; Web 3.0 created “radical openness”

Information has been “democratized” due to the availability of multiple experts. Our expertise depends on our ability to analyze and evaluate expertise.

Netiquette is Citizenship

http://www.digitalcitizenship.net/Nine_Elements.html

http://stopcyberbullying.org/take_action/msparrysguidetonetiquette.html

https://www,.pinterest.com/pin/23313178186356838/

http://www.labnol.org/internet/credit-images-flowchart/18943/

http://www.pdinfo.com/copyright-law/copyright-and-public-domain.php

http://www.pdinfo.com/copyright-law/music-copyright-law.php

http://showingreality.blogspot.com/2015/02hardcopy-dealing-with-trolls-for.html

http://showingreality.blogspot.com/2015/02karis-golden-rule-for-social-media.html

http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/Evaluate.html

http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/info_literacy/

The Vender Room: Lynda

This is another company that wants to supply videos and other content. If anyone is interested in checking them out, I have some passwords that allows you to use their site free for a week. Just sent me a request and I'll send the password to you.


http://youtu.be/7BLDTG4whf4

Lynda.com

Are they flipped?

Found this flyer on a table in one of the break rooms. Sounds like they're trying to handle the content. All the teacher has to do is show up and lead class discussion.

Mid Morning Session: Active Teaching Online

Active Teaching Online                                 Dawn J. Kempe, UMUC

Typical Online Classroom: Reading—Discussion—Activity such as a paper

In effective teaching the student does most of the work and activities allow participants to acquire knowledge and skills, not simply receive them.

Most of what I’m hearing so far is interesting information about learning. I think it’s information we’ve all heard before, and I admit, it is worth hearing ever so often. Still, we all know that simply lecturing and testing doesn’t go very far. The question I have is this: how do some of these things change when the course moves from the classroom to the computer screen.

First Strategy: Introduction Bingo. 

Okay, as much as I resist ideas like this, the way she is doing it sounds like it could work. She sets up the squares so they connect to the content of the class. For instance, in a first year writing class you might ask, “Have you ever written a paper using the Five Paragraph Model?” or “Have you ever published a poem?” The goal is to familiarize students with the class content and give the instructor information about the students’ prior knowledge.

Kempe recommends the following book, from which she takes many of her activities:

Second Strategy: Guided Note taking. Not much new about this. In her example she describes an eight minute video on teaching philosophy followed by a worksheet with questions for notes about that video. For instance, “How does X idea affect how you think about the class you are designing?”

Third and Fourth Strategy: Debates and/or case studies.

At this point I’m seeing the strategies here as an example of a f2f class delivered online. In other words, I don’t see what she is describing as an online class. Whether you handed out the handout or downloaded it to Blackboard, it’s still a handout. How do we make this activity more engaging, more active, more interesting, online? Looking specifically at this activity, how do we make it an online activity?

  

Sure, I can place the directed note taking in a discussion area. This is usually what we do with discussion areas. In the past I’ve been satisfied with that. Now, I’m not. I’m wondering how “online” that discussion area actually is. So, my dissatisfaction with what she is doing is making me dissatisfied with what I am doing. That strikes me as a good thing. Maybe my dissatisfaction will force me to innovate.