Patting the ego on the head

This is a little off topic... Every year, the faculty participate in a merit review of what we have accomplished over the last year. One of the lenses we examine our work through is impact on the profession and community -- this is something we value very much. There are many ways to look at this, but here are a few fun ways:

• Go to http://scholar.google.com/ and plug in your name or the title of one of your articles, presentations, and so on. This search brings up all of the other articles, presentations, and so on that reference you and your work.
  
  
• Set up a Google Alert using your name or specific article/work as your search term. Google Alerts will then send you a report (daily, weekly...whatever you select) showing you recent references on the Web relevant to your search terms (in this case, your name or specific article/work).
  
  
• If you have a blog like this one, install a counter. I use Site Meter, which sends me a nightly report showing me who (well, not who exactly, but where) has accessed my blog, how much time they spent, what they looked at, and how they got to my blog.
  

Cheating and plagiarizing and bears, oh my!

I attended a very interesting conference last week sponsored by eCollege -- CiTE. The conference was focused on designing and teaching in eLearning environments. One thing that surprised me was how many presentations about plagiarism and cheating were delivered. Even the presenter of a session I attended on serious games used the cheating/plagiarizing issue as the context for demonstrating a serious game! I have rarely had this issue with students (at least to my knowledge), so I do not have any war stories to share as many of my colleagues do. There was the time when I assigned a book review and received one that has been "lifted" from Amazon.com...but I digress.

Awhile back, I was asked to share guidelines for discouraging university student cheating and plagiarism (particularly in eLearning environments). These are the ideas I came up with, sorted into three categories: general class management, refocusing student work, and using quizzes and exams.

General class management

1. Reference the university’s policies (as well as your own policies) on cheating and plagiarism, and clearly state the ramifications of not following these policies.
   
   
2. Use a tool such as http://www.google.com/ to check submitted work -- you can simply copy and paste excerpts of text from the paper into Google and see what comes up (check out Plagiarism.org for access to a lot of fantastic resources on this issue, including other detection suggestions). Note: Use the Measure of Software Similarity site to detect plagiarism in students’ software programs.
   
   
3. If you suspect plagiarism, look carefully at the paper and gently confront the student with your concerns. Sometimes, the student may not realize the infraction, and needs some instruction on the topic (see next bullet).
   
   
4. Provide students with some instruction on cheating and plagiarism. Besides the instructional benefit for students, they will realize that you know how to detect problems and will be less likely to cheat or plagiarize. Plagiarism.org -- mentioned above -- provides access to very helpful materials for instructing students on this topic.
   

Refocusing student work

5. Use different assessments throughout course – projects, quizzes, papers, products, and so on.
   
   
6. In using papers or reports, focus on the process of writing. Require a project/paper proposal, an annotated bibliography, an outline, an abstract, drafts, and so on. It is hard to find work to plagiarism for these intermediate steps, and once students do all of this work for themselves they might as well write the paper/report.
   
   
7. Avoid “choose any topic” papers. Tie the topic to the goals of the course. This helps make the paper topics unique to your course, and therefore more difficult to find readily available as a pre-existing final product.
   
   
8. Require students to use material from class lectures, presentations, discussions, and other class activities in their graded assignments. This makes finding papers to plagiarize or swipe more difficult. 
   
   
9. Require students to use original data/information in their papers/reports. For example, have them conduct an original survey or interview as part of the assignment. The survey or transcripts of the interview are included as an appendix.
   
   
10. Require a description of the project/research process with the final draft.
    
    
11. Get to know your students. Require a writing sample during the first week of class. Have the students do this in their “best written style” and make it personalized and customized to them. Keep these samples on record for comparison purposes as the semester progresses.
    

Using quizzes and exams

12. Use problems and case studies rather than questions that require memorization only.
    
    
13. Change quiz and exam questions each semester.
    
    
14. Give different questions to different students.
    
    
15. Limit the amount of time the test is available.
    
    
16. Use proctored exams.
    
    
17. Follow-up exams with random synchronous discussions with individual students to verify their understanding of the content.
    
    
18. Consider using quizzes and exams for student self-assessment purposes instead of points towards final grade.
    

Using blogs for educational purposes

“We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.” ~ Herman Melville

While preparing a workshop on the educational uses of blogs -- online, Web-based journals in the form of frequent, chronological publications of thoughts and ideas, typically within a specific theme or area of interest -- for the Center for Faculty Development at UC Denver, I've been reflecting on my own use of blogs in my role as an educator. I started blogging for several reasons:

• To be heard, have a voice on issues of my choosing (e.g., my thoughts on teaching), and disseminate ideas.
  
  
• To engage with the subject area as a lifelong learner.
  
  
• To connect with others who have similar interests, and build a network of colleagues and collaborators.
  
  
• To share and test ideas and perspectives that might otherwise not see the light of day (via a formal presentation or journal article).
  
  
• To collect and organize ideas to support my teaching and my scholarship (for example, I have an article under review now that started because of ideas I was sharing via my blog).
  
  
• To engage with Web 2.0 technologies in a relevant and meaningful way that supports my practice (in other words, my blog has become my base camp/homestead on the Web).
  
  
• To establish a reputation as a source of ideas for postsecondary and online teaching practices (and to establish a reputation, if I can do this well, for my online MA program and for the Center for Faculty Development).
  

In terms of using blogs with students, I have primarily had students use blogs for reflective journaling -- summarizing class discussions, reflecting on what they learned during a class activity or project, sharing ideas for applying what they have learned to their own practice, and so on. In addition, I have used blogs with students to accomplish the following objectives:

• To encourage students to articulate their ideas and perspectives, make their thinking visible, and be brave and bold about their contributions to the greater discourse. (Note: This goes both ways. I create a course-specific blog where I share my thoughts about the course as we are in progress (see my IT 5130 Design Ideation Journal for a current example). This allows students to see how I am thinking about what works and doesn't work, what I want to do next time, ideas that occur to me because of our in-class discussions, and so on. I used to do this privately, in a course notebook for my eyes only. Now, with a course blog, students get to see my thinking, and I effectively -- hopefully -- model reflective practice in the process.)
  
  
• To engage students in reflection on the subject, requiring them to critically analyze ideas. Because student blogs are linking together in our course community, there is a social context that supports a unique caliber of thoughtfulness, very different than the private reflective journals I've used in the past. [Update 10/29/08: Here is a good Blogging Rubric developed by Ryan Bretag that gets at things like critical reading and critical thinking.]
  
  
• To encourage students to see themselves as participating and contributing members of a professional community of practice, using their blogs as (1) avenues for garnering feedback on ideas from course and community colleagues and (2) opportunities for collaboration with colleagues.
  
  
• To help students express themselves and share their ideas and perspectives in an articulate way; to write, organize their writing, and develop a habit of writing.
  
  
• To have students use Web 2.0 tools as vehicles for self-expression, inquiry, construction, and collaboration; and to learn to use these tools to support their lifelong learning endeavors. (And to take advantage, for educational purposes, the Web 2.0 tools they are using themselves in their personal -- and often professional -- lives.)
  

For me, those are the main positive reasons for using blogs and blogging for educational purposes. I also have some thoughts about the pitfalls:

• Maintaining a blog is a time-consuming proposition. For it to be valuable, you need to be active -- reading others' blogs to continue to learn about the topic and connect with others, and contributing new posts to your own blog.
  
  
• Unless your blog is set up to be private (so that only those invited have access), a blog is very public. When having students set up blogs, it is important to help them understand this, and act accordingly.
  
  
• Blogging tends to reinforce a more casual, informal writing style. I actually like this because a more informal writing style can be more inviting to the community, allowing community members to feel more comfortable participating in the conversation. However, that sort of writing style is not appropriate for all activities or projects, so it is helpful to keep this in mind when you involve students with blogging.
  
  
• Recently, I saw a photo of a gentleman wearing a t-shirt he received as a gift from his wife. Stenciled on the shirt was, "My blog has an audience of 2." It is certainly desirable to have more than an audience of two for your blog. To achieve this, you have to strive for a balance between the intrapersonal (personal reflective journal) and interpersonal (connecting with others in discussion) aspects of blogging. This means that it isn't enough just to post in your blog -- you have to read and connect with other blogs, linking your posts to others, and so on.
  

In terms of tips, besides the ones that are embedded throughout this post, I have a few obvious ones to share:

• Select a very specific, unique focus for the blog.
  
  
• Do not ask students to share anything publicly that may do them harm.
  
  
• Establish a blogging schedule -- for example, Stephen Downes has a great blog called Half an Hour -- with the title referring to the amount of time he spends each day (or, at least tries to) sharing with the community via his blog.
  
  
• Pursue opportunities to connect and collaborate with colleagues. When people connect with your via your blog, respond. When you go out searching others' blog, make a connection to your own.
  

The use of blogs for educational purposes makes me think of Dewey, and the idea that the "impulses" of the child -- the impulses of communication, construction, inquiry, and expression -- are the true resources of a school. The power of blogs, and other Web 2.0 tools, is that they can support students' communication, construction, inquiry, and expression activities. This is what turns me on about this genre of Web tools, and blogs in particular.


Note:
If you are interested in blogs for educators, check out --

Blogs in Education
2c Worth
Weblogg-ed
4RxT
Conversations About Teaching

Creating digital stories with VoiceThread

I have a couple of different posts about digital stories and digital storytelling in this blog. The first digital story I ever created -- to help enhance my teacher presence in my online courses (see Storytelling for presence) -- was done using Premiere, which is a fantastic tool. I have also experimented with iMovie and FinalCut, also great tools. But, the issue I come back to over and over is how long it takes to create a final product with those tools. I am an impatient person when it comes to technology.

When I have students create digital stories, I am mostly interested in the stories themselves, and the way the students have pulled together words and still or video images (and even music) to express their point of view or idea. And, although learning to use the tools mentioned above is helpful if they are going to use those tools with regularity for professional and personal endeavors, if the focus of their work with me is on self-expression through the articulation and sharing ideas and perspectives, I want them to use tools that allow them to achieve that goal with as little plug-into-the-wall technical effort as possible.

In my previous post about Flickr, I shared a digital story created in Flickr called Her first word. In the example below, I used VoiceThread for the same story, for comparison purposes.


Keeping in mind I already had the photos and text for the story in Flickr (and VoiceThread allows you to easily import your photos from Flickr, your computer, Facebook, and so on; or import documents from Word, PowerPoint, pdf, and so on), I was able to create this digital story in less than 10 minutes using my Mac with its internal microphone (the voice track would be a lot smoother with an external microphone -- like a headset -- but the quality is still good).

Other things I really like about VoiceThread is that I can use it to create how-to videos, showing students how to set up a blog or change setting in Moodle; the video doodle feature is especially useful for this. Another creative use is to have students share a design (for example, my students design websites and web pages) and then use the voice track to explain why they have made certain design decisions, or to share their work on a math problem and use the voice track to explain their work.

Another great feature is that you can have students share their work and ideas, and then other students -- or you, as the instructor -- can make their own text or audio comments. [Note: When you create a voicethread, you can choose to make it publicly accessible, or you can just make it available to a subset of folks you select. In this way, you can just involve your students in voicethread sharing and commenting, and not have to worry about moderating external commenting.] So, this is a great way to provide feedback on students' papers.

VoiceThread allows folks to create three voicethreads for free. If you decide you like the tool enough to use it frequently, you can pay a minimal annual fee.

Now, what do you lose if using a tool like this instead of Premiere, FinalCut, iMovie and the like? You lose all of the great editing tools and multitracking functionality those tools provide that help you create a professional quality product. For example, in the VoiceThread digital story I share here, I am not able to add a separate music track, or to do fade ins and outs with the images, or edit the audio (I can delete the audio and start again). All of those are incredibly useful features, and if I am creating a digital story or product that I know has a longer shelf life and a wider audience (e.g., beyond a single course or presentation), it is worth the time and effort to use those tools. But, for so much of my work or what I ask students to create and share, I prefer that our time and effort be spent on the content instead of the technology.

Bottom line, check out VoiceThread if you are looking for an easy way for you and your students to share stories, ideas, work, instructions, and so on.


Related posts in this blog:
Storytelling for presence
Flickr photo sets

Flickr photo sets

I have three new Flickr photo sets:

-- Kids...

-- Attempted Creativity

-- Her First Word
Note: This is an example of how to use Flickr for digital storytelling.

I've been thinking about the various ways to use this tool with students. You could have students take photos on a particular topic and set up a Flickr site (an individual can set up 3 sets for free). For example, given that MLK Day is right around the corner, students could set up a Flickr set illustrating how the fight for freedom and equality has been manifested (or not) in their lives, or what "honoring diversity" means to them. Or students could work together sharing photos that illuminate what it's like to be a student at their school, or what it's like to be their age. Or, if students cannot provide their own digital photos, you could provide students with a large set of photos, and have them select a sub-set that tells their story or a story they want to tell.

Since Flickr allows the inclusion of some commentary, the tool can be used for digital storytelling and self-expression (my "Her First Word" Flickr set is an example of a digital story)...which can be very empowering. And fun.


Related posts in this blog:
Storytelling for presence
Creating digital stories with VoiceThread

Bullet points make me crazy

PowerPoint/Keynote (presentation software, in general) makes me crazy. I am a classic user and abuser -- bulleted slide after bulleted slide...YAWN. So, now, I try very hard to avoid building slideshows to support presentations and use alternatives instead (handouts, flipcharts, photos, etc.). But, I still end up occasionally using it, and not very well when I do (there are a couple of examples in this blog related to my AECT presentations...again, YAWN).

It turns out that I am not alone in my feelings about PowerPoint/Keynote/etc. These tools -- specifically the overuse and misuse of them -- make some folks down-right angry! My instructional goal, however, is not to have people discontinue using these tools, but to use them wisely and creatively (don't do what I do!). Here are a couple of "presentations" I use to launch discussions about how we should use presentation tools. I find that these clips help us begin to explore ways to effectively communicate via these tools, and encourage us to use a critical eye when creating presentation slideshows. [As an aside, I really like the message shared via the "Death By PowerPoint" slideshow, but I believe communicating the message with 61 slides violates effective use.]

Related posts in this blog:
My legal separation from PowerPoint (and other presentation software tools)

Thinking about our audience....

This YouTube clip really got me reflecting on our changing university audience and their use of technology (and our use of technology and teaching strategies). I plan on using this clip to start a discussion with students in the spring about both of these topics. Check it out. [Update 10/29/08: Dr. Michael Wesch recently posted an entry to his blog,
Revisiting “A Vision of Students Today". I suggest you watch the video and then read his blog post, written more than a year after creating the video.]



And I plan on using this clip when talking with my Education colleagues about the importance of integrating technology more fully and creatively in our work with teacher candidates and in-service teachers -- to help prepare them to engage, inspire, and empower our digital-native students.