Online Voting open

The Weigle Information Commons has conducted annual mashup contests for many years now. We’ve just opened up online voting for the 18 videos in this year’s Mashup Contest.

You can view the videos and vote for your favorite three mashups online through May 23.

The rules for our contest are simple – make a mashup video that is attractive, engaging, technically savvy and no more than two minutes long. All Penn students are welcome to submit entries, and the world is welcome to vote online for the Popular Choice award.

Personally, I’ve enjoyed watching the videos over the years – I find our expectations for fancy editing grow higher each year!

Overall, I thought the technology worked quite well! We received 19 responses to the first question and 23 to the second. One highlight was students giving “shout out” messages to their favorite professors. Another was the surprising depth and thoughtfulness of the texts received! Here are two examples in response to the second question:

“Its important for us to think about the power of the individual to solve the problems society faces. Democratic devolution is pivotal.”

“…highlighting the importance of lead poisoning testing for kids since the symptoms are so typical of other illnesses.”

I see this type of open-ended response as potentially much more powerful than the multiple-choice options that clickers offer. Texts could be sent in by cellphone or through a web form that worked well on the iPad from our Media Lab. With more than 60 people in the room at one point, and a browse-and-wander structure, the Poll Everywhere solution was also a cleaner one that trying to give out, and later collect, clickers. I think I will try this technology again.

We began designing this series two years ago with colleagues in SAS, Career Services and of course in Penn Libraries. I have enjoyed the discussions about what skills today’s Penn grads need for the workplace – and when tough cuts on training topics are needed – which skills look most important. We settled on eight broad topics but there was, and continues to be, a temptation to sneak new topics in here and there.  The topics in no particular order are:

1. Graphic Design and Visual Literacy
2. Web Resources
3. Files, Folders, Formats
4. Spreadsheets
5. Presentation Software (such as PowerPoint)
6. Web Design Concepts
7. Using the Web to enhance your job search
8. Collaboration and Management

We would love to involve more people with Hoesley Digital Literacy Fellows. We need your help in getting the word out to current sophomores and juniors for the March 24 deadline. We would like to bring in guest speakers for each workshop who use one of the topic areas in their jobs so students can more easily visualize why it might be worth taking time to learn about pivot tables or HTML tags.

Consider this blog post an advertisement of sorts for a great resource I think anyone interested in educational technology should be reading whenever they get the chance!

Educause Learning Initiative: 7 Things You Should Know About

The “7 Things You Should Know About…” series provides concise information on emerging learning technologies. Each brief focuses on a single technology and describes what it is, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use these briefs for a no-jargon, quick overview of a topic and share them with time-pressed colleagues.

This month’s brief examines backchannel communications, which I mentioned in my recent post on designing interactivity into live web conferences on the Adobe Connect Professional tool. While our online faculty harness the power of the backchannel to foster participation and drive lecture content, I wonder whether others here at Penn are experimenting with using backchannel tools in their face-to-face teaching.

Anyone out there using chat, IM, Twitter, or Google Wave for group participation in their face-to-face classes? If so, would you consider sharing your activity with us here?

If not, what do you think are the potential pros and cons of enabling backchannel conversations to become a part of the student experience in face-to-face classes at Penn?

Faculty and staff at the College of Liberal and Professional Studies (LPS) have been using web conferencing software for the delivery of live lectures in online courses and web-based orientation and information sessions for the past three years. As more folks at Penn start using web conferencing tools, I wanted to share some of what we’ve learned about best practice in the design and delivery of real-time, online sessions.

1. Design your presentation mindfully; plan interactive moments.

Use the interactive features of your web conferencing software to keep your audience connected to your topic and each other.

• Provide a warm-up activity. Share a map on the whiteboard and have participants identify where they’re located, for example, or have participants play a simple word game, like Hangman. Getting participants to use the interactive features right from the start helps set the “ground rules” for interactivity throughout the session.

• Design moments for guided reflection. In her undergraduate World Music course, Dr. Carol Muller plays unfamiliar music to her students and prompts them to describe in few words their initial response to that music using the direct messaging tool. As the written responses come in, she continues to speak, rephrasing student thoughts using the academic register of her field. Within a few weeks, she notices that students start to use the language of ethnomusicology in their chat sessions.

• Design question and answer sessions into your talk. While Dr. Peter Struck delivers lectures in his Greek and Roman Mythology course, for example, students are encouraged to participate in backchannel conversations with the Teaching Assistant via the chat tool. Every 10-15 minutes, he pauses his lecture, allows the TA to report on what students are commenting on in the chat, and then extends the conversations with the students via the voice and video tools before returning to his lecture.

• Design small group work into your presentation. In Academic Writing and Research Design in the Arts and Sciences, a graduate seminar, Dr. Kris Rabberman uses breakout rooms for close reading and group discussions. In these private spaces, students work with a select number of their peers on an activity aligned with instructional goals. Dr. Rabberman visits each room to provide guidance/feedback. After the group exercise, students then return to the main room to present their findings/conclusions to the larger group.

• Use polls (quizzes) to check for understanding and track participation. You can design these in advance, or create them as you deliver your content. In the LPS information session for online students, for example, we ask how many users have taken an online course before, whether or not they’ve used the web for real-time interaction, and, if so, which tools they’ve used (Skype, Google Talk, etc.). We then use that data to drive our conversations about how online courses work at Penn.

2. Create visuals that enhance your verbal delivery.

• Share your screen with users. Take participants on a web tour or show them how to use online tools. As a guest lecturer in a graduate seminar, for example, David Azzolina from Penn Libraries introduces students to key databases and resources available in Penn’s extensive library system.

• Create a whiteboard where participants can work collaboratively. Dr. Kris Rabberman uses the whiteboard to help students identify writing conventions and develop peer editing skills. She uploads samples of text to the whiteboard and asks students to use the marking tools to highlight/circle key issues.

• Pre-load images or include them in your lecture slides. In a lecture describing the history of parliamentary land enclosure in Britain in the eighteenth century for her Introduction to Romanticism course, Myra Lotto includes historic maps and images of a pastoral countryside to convey the mood of that period.

• Use PowerPoint strategically. In Calculus 2, Nakia Rimmer uses animated slides to guide students through solutions to complicated problems. Read Edward Tufte’s work if you want to learn more about the effective use of Power Point and the design of visual information. He’s bringing his one day course on Presenting Data and Information to Philadelphia on March 16, 2010.

3. Control your verbal delivery.

• Speak a little bit slower and a bit more emphatically than you might normally speak in a face-face lecture session.
• Vary the volume, rate and tone of your speech.
• Incorporate pausing to highlight key ideas, transition between points, and/or recapture the audience’s attention.
• Worried about whether or not your participants are following along? Establish techniques for collecting frequent feedback from participants. Have students use the “My Status” tools (shown on the right), for example, to let you know whether you need to speed up or slow down, speak louder or softer.

To learn more about effective practice in designing presentations using Adobe Connect Professional, visit:

RIT Online Learning, winner of the New Media Consortium’s 2008 Center of Excellence Award.

• Student Engagement Strategies
• Best Practices and Technical Tips

Adobe’s Resource Center provides tutorials on features and best practice advice:

• Read through the User Quick Guide or watch a video about how the web conference tool works.

• Best Practices for Delivering Virtual Classroom Training

Please consider sharing what you learn by submitting comments below.

I found it interesting – but difficult - to teach this way. I spent much time preparing handouts (sample spreadsheets of “before” and “after”) and worrying about pace and structure. I chose a traditional approach where I shared my screen and manipulated Excel and then asked participants to “watch and repeat” on their own computer.

The technology worked quite well and the participants all seemed to keep up, and be eager for more. But being the presenter, I had this odd sinking feeling that I was shouting down a deep, empty well.  I have presented at several conference sessions online – but I have no expectation of audience participation when I am lecturing. It felt much stranger to conduct a small-group hands-on workshop completely online. We are planning to try this again in January and suggestions for how to structure the activity to be more interactive and less didactic would be most welcome!

It’s no surprise that most of the technologies (and the pedagogies behind them) that we’re recommending  are the very same things we already advocate as effective ways to enhance teaching.  You can see a summary of these recommendations on the SAS Computing web site at http://www.sas.upenn.edu/computing/teaching_resources/flu

Hopefully, we won’t face a true emergency situation this fall.  But I am hoping that the threat of a flu outbreak will motivate more instructors to take advantage of services that are already available, and get them interested in new ways to engage with their students.

Many of the technologies we recommend are very basic, such as using Blackboard to make announcements, distribute documents or collect assignments.  Others involve more creativity, such as using discussion boards, wikis or collaboration tools.  Blackboard is the obvious first place to turn since it’s already tied into Penn’s registration systems and we’ve got good support systems in place.

But I’ll take this opportunity to put in a plug for one of my  favorite technologies which is rarely used but could be enormously useful – even when everyone is healthy.  That is, creating “screencast” movies to record basic lecture materials or technical demonstrations.

By moving some lectures outside of the classroom instructorss can free up more time for discussion and problem solving.  Those using special software such as Matlab or SPSS in their classes can record tutorials on how to perform important functions.  Screencast movies can  demonstrate how to use Library resources for research.  Basically, if you can do it on a computer, you can make it into a movie.  Details are explained at http://www.sas.upenn.edu/computing/teaching_resources/record_lecture

Facebook is particularly suited for extra language practice. During the 2008 – 2009 academic year,  I implemented a Facebook project for GRMN 101 and GRMN 102. The original thought behind the project was to have students create online portfolios for their written work which they could share with each other and comment on. In the past,  Bb’s Threaded Discussions and Blogs adequately served this purpose, but this time I wanted to expand the project to a more socially authentic environment that  most students were familiar with as a means for communicating and circulating information. It was my hope that students could then experience language practice as a meaningful exercise designed for them to become acquainted with each other in a less formal setting. Below is a screen shot of a short writing sample from one student’s post in Facebook.

click on image to enlarge

You may notice that the author of the above post uses an alias. In this instance, the alias is that of the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. For this project, students were required to choose an alias that referenced a known German artist, philosopher or scientist. Students were not permitted to invite personal contacts to join the group. Membership was limited to only students from the class.

Students frequently combined their knowledge of the personalities they adopted in Facebook with details of themselves. This combination seemed to foster a playful use of the language even at the elementary level. Furthermore, the images that students used to illustrate their ideas may have contributed to stimulating their creativity and imagination. The translation of Goethe’s post in the example above is: “When I was still young and innocent, I was amazed about a lot. I thought that this world was exceptional. I laid in the sun and had fun in the present.”

Students also posted longer writing samples. As was the case with most of their written assignments, students were encouraged to illustrate their stories through images. In the story below, the student describes a fictitious battle that he imagines between himself and the monsters floating in his cereal bowl. The story gradually develops into a modern day fairy tale.

It was difficult to prevent inaccurate uses of the language since most posts were not checked before appearing in Facebook. However, there were opportunities in class to review student posts, make suggestions and do corrections. On the whole, there were few instances in the Facebook exchanges between students that caused communication problems. More importantly, the tasks for the students in Facebook did not have a particular grammatical focus but rather aimed at providing students with meaningful and creative opportunities to communicate with each other about themselves outside the classroom.

Besides providing students the opportunity to share their written work, students were also able to notify each other in the target language about their current status. Moreover, students were able to comment on each others’ posts and ask questions;  e.g., in the post below, Goethe wrote that he “is dreaming.”  Heidi Klum asks later: What are you dreaming?” Goethe responds: “I dreamt that I was a goalie in the NHL.”  The illustration below shows other status updates and posts by students .

click on image to enlarge

In the example above, we see how students outside the classroom are able to correspond with each other about their daily activities and thus personalize their language experience. In addition to describing what they were doing at a particular moment, students also described their hobbies and personal interests in art, music and culture. Students were able to provide examples of their interests not only through images but through other forms of multimedia such as video and links to other web sites.

Facebook also provided students with opportunities to learn new vocabulary. Students could easily switch the language of the interface to German and change all menus and instructions to the target language.

click on image to enlarge

Facebook was perhaps a factor in changing some of the dynamics of the course by facilitating a peer learning environment, in which the students could teach each other content. Although German rock music was not on the syllabus, students initiated their own discussion of German rock bands by posting music videos in Facebook that they found on YouTube. On occasion, students not only exchanged music videos but also shared the lyrics for each other to read which the lengthy text in the post below illustrates

click on image to enlarge

Finally, Facebook developed a community of learners, who learned about each other in ways that may not have otherwise occurred. Frequent users of Facebook use it as a means to quickly and simultaneously connect and network with friends, family and colleagues from around the world. It was namely Facebook’s networking aspects that hopefully helped the students to change their perception of language learning from that of an individual activity to that of a more dynamic group activity.