Week 12 Readings Part 2 March 29, 2010

Lisa Lane’s Insidious Pedagogy

“The fact that each technology had a specific purpose implies a goal in its design, an objective that limited or even determined its use. Today’s online technologies are no different, and create serious impacts on our teaching.” The implications of this statement are huge. Technology has a goal, just like the bomb and the microwave, we cannot get around the fact that online web sources and teaching each have their own specific purpose, for better or worse.

Lane makes the important point that many teachers teaching online are novices, maybe not in teaching and maybe not in their subject, but a lot of them are teaching novices when it comes to teaching online (not Steve of course J) but this can be bad because they may not be setting up their classrooms to the best means possible like Kevin DePew and Heather Lettner-Rust’s article pointed out. Like Lane says, we need to help guide these novice instructors in ways that a typical face-to-face instructor doesn’t necessarily need. Maybe online courses in each department should hire an online department head to make sure online courses are meeting rigorous departmental requirements and are challenging students to the same extent as in-class instructors are expected to.

Combating Myths About Distance Education

By Todd Gilman

I think it’s interesting that he points out that even teachers today still look down on distance education as “not as good as” meeting in a classroom so many days a week. Everything in our society is such a hierarchy! I think my online course this semester has been by far my hardest and most demanding, and in fact, most stressful. How can any informed teacher not know the difficulties of taking an online course??

I like his point that meeting in person isn’t always a good thing either. Students can be unresponsive, unprepared, rude, etc. more so than they can be online. When it comes to distance education, students have to respond a certain number of times and in such an intelligent fashion that isn’t required in the classroom setting. Each way of teaching has its own challenges, but they also have great benefits as well.

He says that the online course design and environment can be a lot less forgiving than a face-to-face classroom, and I agree. A student really has to stay on top of every last post and assignment and lecture and discussion and you name it, in order to feel prepared to move ahead in the class and its content. Online courses require a discipline other classes just don’t.

Online-Education Study Reaffirms Value of Good Teaching, Experts Say

By David Glenn

I think it’s interesting that he points out that the medium isn’t the important factor here, it’s the strategies used to teach the lessons to be learned. If online classes happen to be more effective than face-to-face meetings, then perhaps it is because teachers are breaking out of their old, ineffective ruts and teaching through better means. My recent book report talked about this and how teachers need to try out new means of teaching rather than sticking with the old and ineffective things they’ve been doing for the past 20 years or so. I also like that he points out that the new methods aren’t that different from the old ones. Email or video conferencing is pretty much the same as when a students comes to your office and you tell him or her to shape up or risk failing.

They Thought Globally, but Now Colleges Push Online Programs Locally

By Marc Parry

Wow, the idea of a global campus is pretty cool. I mean, I guess that’s what a lot of online classes are anyways, but to think on a global level seems like it’s way more than what EMU and other institutions have been doing. Like I said, I think it’s important for students who are working adults with families like Joel Kohlberg to be able to go to school and work fulltime, but I think schools need to make sure they are doing what they’re doing to benefit students and not just their own pocket books. If an institution is just going online to make money then the program will fizzle like they mentioned, it won’t have to same quality instructors or instruction that many universities demand. Distance education should be to benefit students who want to better themselves, not be taken advantage of.

Week 12 Readings Part 1 March 29, 2010

Mediating Power: Distance Learning Interfaces, Classroom Epistemology, and the Gaze

Regardless of what people think about distance education and its effect on learning, I think that their point that online learning allows for people to go to school who would never have had that opportunity is one of the most important things we can take away from this article. I am a big advocate of education for all, and if that means the classroom has to come to some students, then so be it. Like they said, the importance lies in the creation of course goals and outcomes and as long as students are meeting those goals and outcomes, the method in which they get there (face to face versus online) doesn’t really matter.

I mean, it’s obvious from this study and others that whether or not teachers and students ever see each other isn’t exactly important. Students can still learn and meet the outcomes from online learning, but the tough decisions come from the curriculum designers who have to decide how and what to implement when it comes to designing the class and the technology required. I wonder though, are instructors in charge of creating online courses on their own, or do they have to meet with special course developers to make sure they are meeting the needs of students through online collaboration? I am sure that for this class Steve was able to develop the course on his own because he has such a huge repertoire of online programs, but for people who don’t but still have the task of teaching online courses, do they have support systems to turn to? It’s interesting to think about because I know I am getting the most from this class because steve is so highly informed and educated on the topic and on online teaching and learning, but if other classes don’t have such tech-savvy teachers, how do they get a quality education?

As for methods of learning, sure, problem-posing methods of teaching and learning will always be more important and valuable than the banking model of learning, because students are not empty vessels just waiting to be filled with knowledge. In order to truly learn and understand, students must be able to understand a problem and solve it. I agree that the way an online course is set up and the background experience of a teacher is important for distance education, and that those instructors really need to think about the implications of everything they do much more than a face to face teacher.

Digital Underlife in the Networked Writing Classroom

Derek N. Mueller

I really liked his introductory paragraph that “The formal scene of teaching and learning ha, for everyone involved, changed: teachers are evermore frequently positioned to make decisions—to act—on digital underlife, on the distal and potentially transgressive discursive activities proliferated by emerging technologies, because their work-space hovers near a saturation point of crossed signals and converging wavelengths supported by portable electronic devices and wireless computing.” The first things that came to mind is 1) I have been there- wanting to pull the plug on my students who were messing around on chat or Google Earth or whatever program we had on the school computers and b) I’ve had a class that allowed us to go on whatever sites we wanted, but assumed we were listening as well. I’ve been on both sides of the debate and while on each side, I felt differently about what was happening. As a teacher, I wanted to pull the plug. Take students back to the classroom where they didn’t have access to such powers that they couldn’t control, but as a student who has messed around on email and facebook quickly and quietly while in class, I never once stopped paying attention to the teacher, and was actually paying more attention to the teacher while on those applications that I was in the minutes leading up to my going online.

I don’t allow laptops in my classroom. Students don’t need them and if we do need access to the Internet for whatever reason, my computer has it. We can look something up, project on the overhead screen, and get the information together. Yet, as I do this, students are on their cell phones checking their text messages, never quite satisfied with what is happening in the classroom regardless of what we are doing in class. They are so used to being entertained in five different ways at once, sometimes I think it would take a circus to keep them entertained and “on top of it all” in the classroom.

I like that article refers to the face book, texting, and iPod problem as an attentional crisis, because that’s exactly what we have on our hands. This digital underlife that pushes the rules, roles, and boundaries need to be dealt with in order for teachers and students to continue on. What must be done, like he points out, is that teachers have to embrace the digital underlife and find ways to bring it into the classroom, like the Twitter Project in Texas. We can’t just altogether ban it like the talks of banning Wikipedia, it’s not practical at this point, but we do need to find a way to make education and technology meet and assist in students learning.

Week 12 Research Update March 29, 2010

Note: this is not the “official” post for peers to comment on- that’s a few entries down

Ok, so this week I am setting goals for myself and my research project. I plan to have the majority of my work done this week. I want to have my last 10 annotated bib entries posted by Wednesday/Thursday at the latest. And then by this weekend, I would like to have the first three to five pages written. I already a working outline in my head of where my paper is going to go, but I will also have that down and “official” by Thursday as well. I know my paper is mainly going to cover issues of how to use remixing in the classroom, but I need to make sure I define digital literacy for my reader and let them know why I think this project and remixing is important to student success before I can move on to the “meat” of my paper. I am feeling energized about it and have a plan of action! If you’re looking for my official project update to comment on, it’s a few entries down on this page. This is just my informal research update for week 12 J