Cartoon from Paul Silli's blog post "Why Should School Districts Invest in Technology."

James Hoff, a Fellow at the Schwartz Communication Institute, just posted to the Institute’s blog a provocative argument against teaching with technology entitled “Back to Basics: Resisting the Allure of Web Technology in the Classroom.” Bellow is a snippet.

As a profession we seem to have thoughtlessly embraced the idea of technology precisely because we see it as a way of making learning easier and more accessible for more of our students. Obviously—the logic goes—our students are comfortable using the Internet and social networking tools, so why not allow them to use those skills to learn? This kind of thinking is common among instructors who embrace popular culture because they think it will help their students “relate” to the course material. These are the same teachers who spend class time screening Hollywood versions of Shakespeare because students are supposedly incapable of understanding Elizabethan English or who teach rap lyrics or song lyrics as poetry, because it’s easier for students to get the difference between a tenor and a vehicle when it’s Tupac or Bob Dylan speaking than when it’s Dylan Thomas or Langston Hughes. But our calling as educators extends beyond merely providing our students with opportunities to learn material. As educators we are also responsible for providing our students with experiences which they would not otherwise have access to, such as the experiences that result from finding solutions to difficult problems, engaged and thoughtful conversation, and collegial argument. But even more than this, it is important that we offer our students alternatives to the kinds of experiences provided by the technology of mass media. If we are going to insist on teaching them how to get by in the corporate world they’ve been given, we need to at least teach them that other worlds are still possible.

You can read the entire post and comment on it here.

It recently occurred to me that very little has been written about the Schwartz Communication Institute’s most ambitious and potentially most promising project, our Video Oral Communication Assessment Tool, or VOCAT. I have presented on VOCAT a number of times over the years (most recently at the 2009 Computers and Writing conference in June), but have not yet written about it in any kind of real detail. So it’s high time to remedy that.

VOCAT is a teaching and assessment web application. It is the fruit of a collaboration between the Schwartz Institute and mad genius code-poets at , Cast Iron Coding, Zach Davis and Lucas Thurston. It is still very much in development (perpetually so) but is already in use in introductory speech communication and theater courses as well as a number of assessment projects. Our career center used it effectively a few semesters ago as well. To date, approximately 3200 Baruch students have used the tool.

VOCAT was developed in recognition of the principle that careful, guided review of video recordings of their oral presentations (or of any performance, for that matter) can be remarkably effective for aiding students in becoming confident, purposeful and effective speakers. It serves as a means for instructors to easily provide feedback on student presentations.  It enables students to access videos of their performances as well as instructor feedback and to respond to both. It likewise aggregates recorded presentations and instructor feedback for each user and offers an informative snapshot of a student’s work and progress over the course of a given term or even an entire academic career. Presentations can be scored live, as students perform, or asynchronously once the videos have been uploaded. (Our turnaround time at this stage is between one and seven days depending on how many sections are using the tool at once — once some of the key steps happen server-side, turnaround time will not be as much of a concern.) Built on the open source TYPO3 content management system, it is a flexible, extensible and scalable web application that can be used at once as a teaching tool and as a means of data collection for research or other assessment purposes. (Screenshots are available here. I am also happy to share demo login info with anyone who would like to take a look — please email me at mikhail [dot] gershovich [at] baruch [dot] cuny [dot] edu.)

While VOCAT is quite feature-rich at this early stage, especially when it comes to reporting, data export, and rubric creation, we are always thinking about ways in which the tool can be made more robust and flexible. Currently, we are playing around with adding a group manager feature for group presentations, tagging for non-numeric assessment, moving from QT to Flash video, video annotation, as well as server-side video processing and in-line video and audio recording. We are also considering allowing users to choose to enable social functionality to take advantage of web 2.0 tools for sharing and commenting on one another’s work. And since, at its core, VOCAT is a tool for aggregating and responding to anything that can be uploaded, we’re thinking about other uses to which it could be put. It could easily, for example, be adapted for writing assessment. And someone once suggested that it could be useful for teaching bedside manner for medical students. Adapting VOCAT for these purposes is hardly a big deal.

The platform on which VOCAT is built is open source but the tool itself is not yet open. Right now, it is Baruch’s alone. Whether it should stay that way is a question much discussed around here. Here at the Institute we face several critical issues around open education, not the least of which is conflicting views on student access of Blogs@Baruch. In regards to VOCAT, however, the one thing constantly on my mind is the tension between an internal drive to share the tool as an open-source web application and build a community around it (there are no shortage of interested parties) and the pressures (or maybe a pernicious institutional common sense) that seem to compel us to keep VOCAT proprietary and use it to generate as much revenue as possible. I have heard arguments that VOCAT should be Baruch’s alone — that we should charge for its use and seek private funding for its deployment and development. This is a business school, after all, and I’m sure promoting and marketing VOCAT could be an interesting project for an upper division Marketing course.

Yet, I am inclined to believe that VOCAT should be shared freely and widely with other institutions and that other developers should be encouraged to develop for it.  A great many more students would benefit and development would certainly be accelerated as more and more schools add features they need that could then be adopted for use here. Were VOCAT open, in other words, it would evolve quickly and probably in ways we haven’t even imagined. And that is very exiting.

In the coming months, I hope to continue to present on VOCAT and to gain insights into the roles it can play in communication intensive courses or in a communication-focused curriculum of any sort. More importantly, I would like to move towards opening it up and will work with our developers on the features and functionality that facilitate sharing. I hope also to draw upon the tremendous expertise of my friends and colleagues involved in the open education movement and learn from those who have worked with and developed various open source tools for teaching and learning. Listening to others’ ideas for VOCAT has been invaluable to thinking through what this web app could ostensibly do with the right sort of development.  could be and how to best realize its full potential as a teaching tool — both in terms of deployment, training, and development.

As I hear rumors that Blackboard is likely to remain unreliable with periodic outages, I’ve quietly been setting up workarounds so the show can go on. Below are some of my tricks; apologies for undoubtedly provoking the ire of some of my friends in corporate IT. And Kevin Wolff in BCTC, everyone says you are a miracle worker. Seriously. Thanks from all of us in the faculty.

Question 1: True or false? Baruch offers a service so you can post items on the web, even when Blackboard is down.

True!

Faculty can sign up for their own blog with Baruch’s Bernard L. Schwartz Communications Institute (the sponsors of this blog). The blogs are easily formatted to have the look and feel of a web page (example). Post away! (Another option is the eReserve.)

Question 2: True or false? When Blackboard is down and you want to post a giant file, you can send emails with large attachments (say, up to 1 gigabyte) for free?

True!

There are several free services—my favorites are www.dropsend.com (1 GB max) and www.YouSendIt.com (100 MB max). These services send an email to your recipients with a link to download the file.

Question 3: True or false? You can (easily) send an email to the entire class from your  baruch.cuny.edu email account even when Blackboard is down.

True!

The easiest way I know is via Gmail, though other email packages allow you to set up broadcast groups as well.

Step 1. Create a new Gmail email account (or use the one you already own).

Step 2. Download the class email list from the Baruch eRoster (select the “download roster” option and save as XLS file).

Step 3. Go to Gmail > Contacts > Export to download your contacts as a “Google CSV” file. This gives a nicely formatted Excel spreadsheet into which you copy-paste the names/emails you downloaded in step 2. Save as CSV format.

Step 4. Go to Gmail > Contacts > Import, and select the CSV file you updated in step 3. Be sure to check the box “Also add these imported contacts to new group.”

Now send an email to the group. As a bonus, Gmail allows attachments up to 20 MB in size. But wait, there’s more! Go to Gmail > Settings > Accounts > “Send Mail As”, and enter your baruch.cuny.edu email address. Even though you are emailing from gmail.com, students will see baruch.cuny.edu, and replies will go there too.

For those interested in other computer tricks, the following NY Times and WSJ articles may be helpful.

P.S. A week after I wrote the above, Dennis Slavin forwarded a note from Arthur Downing: “The BCTC has launched a new Blackboard status page that posts the current availability of the system along with the status messages received from CUNY: http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/blackboard “. There’s some good stuff here too.

Fast forward to 2005. One of my international graduate students showed me a website hosted in his home country (in a language not based on the Roman alphabet, therefore not easily searched by most westerners). Students post homework, exams, and solutions for many North American universities, indexed by class and professor.

I was happy to see that the Wall Street Journal wrote about these issues in their 9-April-2009 article “Do Study Sites Make the Grade?” by A.M. Chaker, pp. D1-D2. [1] If you aren’t aware, online study sites give students access to homeworks and exams posted by hundreds of thousands of registered users. They are the old sorority/fraternity files in the Internet age. According to the article, solutions to 225 textbooks are also now on the web. Furthermore, students post and answer questions from fellow users around the globe.

According to Chaker, arguments for such sites include: “With the Internet, the sites say, it’s inevitable that all this information will be available to students anyway. It’s up to the schools, they say, to come to terms with modern times. ‘We’re just putting things out in the open,’ says Koofers’ Mr. Rihani, who says his site is making old tests previously accessible only to fraternity members, available to more students. Mr. Rihani notes that putting old tests online can help force more professors to refresh their old exams periodically. The study sites are likely to propel schools to rethink the way they teach.”

When NYU’s Aswath Damodaran spoke in our Master Teacher Series on 24-April-2007, we learned that he writes every exam from scratch and posts all old exams with solutions on his website. I think there’s evidence in the above article that more folks should consider Damodaran’s model, or at least rethink the way we embrace the technology.

—

[1] If the link to the WSJ article does not give the full-text version, use this Google search instead.

Have you noticed that textbook publishers are promoting web-based homework systems such as Prentice Hall’s Grade Assist (PHGA), McGraw-Hill’s Homework Manager and Wiley’s eGrade?

All 20 sections of Finance 3000 are using the McGraw-Hill product. Students do homework online and receive instantaneous feedback (with solutions), professors enjoy automated grading, and the coordinator appreciates bolstered grading fairness across sections. No two students get the same question due to randomized seed numbers (e.g., student 1: “solve X + 219 = 567″; student 2: “solve X + 98 = 673″). If a student doesn’t like his/her score, the entire problem set may be redone, with new seed numbers, and the professor’s grade report includes the score of every attempt.

I trialed PHGA with 80 MGT 3121 students, spring 2008. Students complained that they often reasoned correctly, but made errors inputting numeric answers in the software, and thus redid entire assignments (with new seed numbers) to get the points they felt they deserved. In some cases I had to agree with the students—the software is not perfect. My larger concern is that none of the types of questions that promote deep learning are available in the software. Rather, standard “textbook” questions—questions with a single correct answer such as “determine the reorder point and reorder quantity” or “forecast demand on day 150″—lulled students into deep comas. It’s about as exciting as the computerized SAT test.

Worried that web-based homework trades richness of student thinking for my convenience, I stopped using the software.

While some studies find that web-based homework leads to improvement in grades (see Heizer et al. [1] for a survey), I’m worried that improvement in grades is not the appropriate metric. Has anyone seen a study that shows that web-based homework promotes profoundly deep learning or the ability to apply the course content in unfamiliar contexts—the type of learning that is more likely with open-ended questions?

Andrea Pascarella [2] found that web-based homework encourages college physics students to abandon careful reasoning in favor of a guess-and-check approach due to the multiple-try option. She says

“Based on the feedback literature, it is known that corrective feedback combined with multiple tries can lead students to adapt a trial-and-error strategy with a focus on completing the assignment versus learning the fundamental principles underlying the material. … One way to help achieve the goal of making web-based homework systems more valuable learning tools would be to cut down the number of tries each student has to get the correct answer.” (p. 7)

Jay Heizer (the lead author of [1]) sees multiple tries as an advantage. He told me he now sees the majority of his students redoing entire homework assignments multiple times (some as many as 4-5 times) to obtain a high score. Naturally, we want our students to rework the problems they get wrong… or is this further evidence of Pascarella’s concern? Not sure.

Another study failed to show any web-based homework benefits. After controlling for teacher experience and student “academic competence” in a college statistics class, Palocsay and Stevens [3] found that “the technique used to deliver homework makes little difference in student success.” At least web-based homework doesn’t hurt our students.

I want to excite students about my discipline but perceive web-based homework as counterproductive in this regard. Am I being stubborn, ignorant, or both for refusing to adopt?

—

[1] Heizer, J., B. Render, K. Watson. 2008. Web Based Instruction Improves Learning. Decision Line, forthcoming.

[2] Pascarella, A.M. 2004. The Influence of Web-Based Homework on Quantitative Problem-Solving in a University Physics Class. Proceedings of the NARST 2004 Annual Meeting, Vancouver.

[3] Palocsay, S.W., S.P. Stevens. 2008. A Study of the Effectiveness of Web-Based Homework in Teaching Undergraduate Business Statistics. Decision Sciences J. of Innovative Ed. 6(2) 213-232.

Setting up the remote is dead simple. There are usually two parts to the remote: a receiver unit that looks like a flash drive and is plugged in to any USB port on the machine you’ll be using and the remote itself, which is usually about the size of a thick highlighter pen. Once you plug in the remote, the computer will take a few moments to recognize just what kind of a device you are setting up and then let you know you are good to go.

Getting the hang of clicking while you walk about is easy and, ultimately, an act of liberation.

I decided to try PowerPoint (known by its .ppt file extension). I slogged through the program, determined to make slides for three lectures. I compiled some nice illustrations of sound waves and musical instruments, discovered pleasant fonts and colors, added some zippy effects, and spent a lot of time trying out the various bells and whistles. In the end, I found the product ossifying. Something about the slides made them impossible to “riff off of,” as musicians might say. I was disappointed in the software, but figured, “It must be me,” since I was age 50, and this was a new technology that demanded a more malleable brain and a youthful receptiveness to the “new media” I suppose I had lost.

Over the last few years, I’ve had the opportunity to see two, much younger colleagues teach on straightforward music-historical topics using PowerPoint. The first instructor presented a mess of slides, filled with typos and formatting inconsistencies, quite an unstructured piece of work that was hard for me to follow. The second instructor was worse. Besides using a historically inappropriate illustration (a saccharine, late 19th-century rendering of Martin Luther), the second colleague provided too much information. Each of the slides comprised long lists of seven or eight bullet points with a mass of detail. Furthermore, he was incapable of reading the muddle of facts. The student seated next to me was furiously copying the useless text (e.g., “Luther married a nun, Katherine von Bora when he was 42 and she was 26″–remember, this is a music class). My other experiences viewing ppt presentations have not been much better than these.

Hmm. At that point I knew something was wrong. I knew it wasn’t me.

At the end of last semester, I came upon John Medina’s book Brain Rules. In it he discusses ways of keeping your brain operating at maximum efficiency. In the online chapter on “Vision” (his Rule #10), he states the following:

Toss your PowerPoint presentations. It’s text-based (nearly 40 words per slide), with six hierarchical levels of chapters and subheads—all words. Professionals everywhere need to know about the incredible inefficiency of text-based information and the incredible effects of images. Burn your current PowerPoint presentations and make new ones.

The online film for Rule #10 does make reference to the business applications of pictures and points up the potential failure of wordy ppt slides. This is not to say, of course, that illustrations and graphs shouldn’t be used. On the contrary, Medina makes it clear that the use of pictures increases our understanding and reinforces our memory. Therefore ppt pictures should be primary, superseding any verbal information on the slides.

My own feelings about ppt include the lack spontaneity it engenders. The instructor can’t very well follow the flow, the lead of the class, since the slides and their order have to be determined beforehand. To my mind, there’s something substantially different between underlining or circling a handwritten word with a marker and highlighting a term with a mouse or making the words flash. The intimate contact with the class that an instructor tries to achieve (especially in a large class) is rendered cold and distant when mediated by ppt technology. I think it’s much more useful, in a classroom situation, to write out words or sketch out graphs and symbols by hand, with the dynamism of a high school geometry teacher rather than rely on last night’s (or last year’s) bright idea.

I suppose I have three main problems with ppt: 1) it’s sometimes (often?) sloppily done; 2) it’s too frequently wordy; and 3) its use often further separates the instructor from the students.

So I ask you, is there a proper use for ppt? In my opinion, pfft!

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLpjrHzgS...[/youtube]

I’m no luddite, really. I willingly volunteered to blog about teaching. I check my e-mail frequently. I occasionally carry the cell phone my friends bought me… and as a rhetorician, I appreciate the deliciously rich communicative context of this and other e-exchanges. But there is something curiously wonderful about pretending that a tiny piece of molded plastic is “grass” or “brick” or learning where the thread goes to make a needle sew (i.e., the first question I get every time my PUB 1250 students make sock puppets for our productions of the Allegory of the Cave).

As we embark on this exchange about teaching, my inner-laggard could not resist the opportunity to invite ironic participants to engage in a discussion of low or no-tech teaching methods under the “Using Technology” heading. So, fellow “dancing animals” (a shout-out to Vonnegut), what sorts of low technology thrills you and engages your students? And if you expertly code-switch between the worlds of wired and unplugged, how do you decide when to engage electricity and when not to flip the switch?

For how and why I incorporate low-tech teaching into my courses, read more…

Nearly three years ago, I attended my first Teaching Professor conference and was wowed by an hour-long presentation on using low-tech activities in the college classroom. The presenters made their case brilliantly – they gave us lego to play with. Listening to fellow Ph.D.s laugh out loud as they constructed brilliant, surprising, physical answers to problems and tasks, I realized that my courses could benefit from highly-tactile, low-technology activities.

BREAKING DOWN BOUNDARIES AMONG GRADUATE STUDENTS

I use lego as an ice breaker with public affairs graduate students enrolled in my “Communication in Public Settings” class. I assemble them in teams and ask them to make ideal governments or nonprofits or inventions, depending upon the focus of that semester’s class. For example, if I’m teaching Ev Rogers’ “Diffusion of Innovations” and the semester focuses on communicating social change, I’ll have my students invent things that would positively improve the lives of some group of constituents and then talk about how they’d get people to start using their inventions. The students build impressive – possibly patentable – things out of lego. More importantly, they talk to each other as they’re creating. They “get out of their heads” for a minute and succumb to whimsy or frustration (e.g., why don’t they make more round lego?!) or both and let down their guard with their teammates. They laugh, they roll their eyes, they do all the things I need for them to do if they’re going to be comfortable taking risks with each other later in the semester.

FLIPPING THE SCRIPT ON UNDERGRADS

With my Learning Communities students, I interject old-fashioned needle-and-thread sewing a month into their first semester at Baruch College. By that time, we’ve plowed through nearly 200 pages of The Republic. No student likes The Republic – ever. A particular idea might be interesting, and – because they engage in a month-long role-playing game set in 403 B.C. Athens – potentially useful in the course, but The Republic is not fun. The students who excel in the discussions and quizzes related to The Republic are those that have mastered the art of traditional Western-style academic reading and regurgitation. However, they are frequently terrible seamstresses, as we all discover during puppet-making day.

I devote an entire class to making puppets for several reasons. First, by that point in the semester, my students are really burnt out – by The Republic and the hundreds of pages they’ve ingested in other classes. The puppet-making day is a surprising break that reinvigorates most of them. Second, by that point in the semester, the struggling students are beginning to lose faith in themselves. A month in to their college careers, they self-diagnose as “too stupid” to continue. Watching their fellow classmates struggle reminds them that we all face challenges and have the potential to persevere. It might sound silly, but puppet-making day is a great equalizer and some of the students really need that. Third, I figure everyone should know how to thread a needle and pull off a simple stitch. It’s a basic life skill and I’m willing to devote an hour to seeing that my students don’t leave Baruch without it. (OK. Finally, I really enjoy puppet shows).

In both my graduate and undergraduate courses, I use technology a great deal – from Blackboard to PowerPoint to assignments that require blogging. I thrill at the visuals I can harness to bolster my claims via the Internet. I am grateful that I can transport my students to other places and times via DVDs. I wouldn’t trade technology-centered pedagogy for a mountain of lego… But I have seen low-technology activities break down barriers and build up confidence in profound ways. For that reason, I will continue to cart tubs of lego, pipe cleaners, embroidery floss, and more, through the halls of Baruch College.

Some days, we just need to dance in the sunlight.