Keeping Current

The summer is looking be very busy with work at CDE, teaching at USF and many other irons in the fire. As I look toward trying to keep up with my professional endeavors, I am trying to find ways to mix all of my responsibilities together. Heavy on my mind is finding adequate time to address the needs of my class this semester.

I have 30 students in a completely distance based graduate level education course. Usually this course does not have this high of an enrollment. In addition, it is the short summer semester where we manage to get all 15 weeks of content into 10 weeks of time. I have some help in the form of a great graduate student (thanks Shelley) who not only wants the teaching experience, but also wants to use my class in her dissertation research. She is following along in the same direction as I did in my dissertation, so it will be quite interesting to see where it goes.

At the same time that I am working through large class load issues, I have also been trying to integrate a few new things into the class. Educational technology and distance education have been shifting regularly just as everything technology related does. Working here at CDE has offered opportunities for thought about different approaches to social learning and I have been privileged to conversations with many people who see things as I do. I would like to find a way to incorporate some of the teaching strategies and tools on the horizon while not adding even more material to a course that is already a challenge for students to get through.

Students in this course come in with some personal goals. Most are not taking this course as a required course, but as an elective for personal knowledge or because they see distance education in their future career. Students interest areas vary with many in areas of Adult Education, Second Language Acquisition, Instructional Technology and a mixture of industry, higher education and K-12.

One way I see myself accomplishing the transition for additional material is to offer different options for students within the content of the course. Students could then pick from the options to build a subset of interest. For example, I currently have some blog and wiki assignments as well as a Blackboard assignment which help demonstrate some of the tools available for teaching at a distance. Many of the students are already familiar with these tools while others are not. I may be able to expand the options for those who are already familiar with the basic tools by using assignments that incorporate newer approaches with applications like Second Life, Delicious, Flickr, and other multimedia based options such as podcasting and vodcasting.

Overall, I think this would make the class better and offer me the opportunity to really dig into the newer approaches I would like to incorporate. However, the issue becomes one of time. I have been teaching this course non stop for quite a while with usually only a week or so between offerings. This does not allow a great deal of time for revamping the materials or the assignments. To accomplish this, I hope to reach out to my network for ideas on how to implement sound pedagogical approaches with these newer applications and develop tasks that will require students to not just learn about the technology, but learn about the teaching process and why (and when) they would chose to use these newer tools for distance education.

Recently a paper was discussed on the ITFORUM list that caught my attention. It mainly caught my attention because of a chapter I am attempting to write for a book CDE is working on. The chapter is currently titled “Differences: Culture, Environment, and the Digital Divide”.

The paper that caught my attention was titled, “Cultural Competence and Instructional Design: Exploration Research into the Delivery of Online Instruction Cross-Culturally“. Once I read it I found that it had some really good information for instructional designers who may moving toward designing for diverse audiences. It also addressed the fact that we may not be giving our instructional design students the tools they need to succeed in these environments.

Here are some ideas that I especially found relevant to my writing and to my way of thinking…

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In a recent discussion with students in my class, the question arose about “Why is so little research being completed on the needs of distance educators?” With significant thought, a student in my class proposed questions (backed up by her research and the conversations with her peers of course) to the class.

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Even with all the options we have available (an overwhelming number) I find there are many times when I want a tool that I am unable to find. This is especially true when I am teaching from a distance and want to work with my students in specific ways with out large expenditures of money. So, I was looking for a way to collectively create a timeline in my class. One that we could all add to, that could hold text and linked citations, but one that would also be visual.

Initially I tried to do this in a wiki within Blackboard (what a big mistake), but it lacked the visual representation I was craving as well as having numerous other problems. Time lines need to be visual to get the whole picture in my mind.

Well, I recently saw a linklog post by Chris Lott that talked about a new blog called Dandelife. This tool is commonly used to tell life stories. OK, so maybe this will work to tell our story?…

This semester the class is trying it out. We are sharing an ID so that we can all post since it is a blog and not a wiki. We could haved used tags to link things together (a suggestion from Kelly at Dandelife), but I wanted it all to be in one place. So, we are on our way. I will post more as the experiment takes shape.

One thing I will reflect on is my role as instructor. I need to be more specific in the design of this assignment. Important lessons have been learned this semester that will just continue to make the assignment better and more meaningful.

You can check out the progress we are making if you are interested. Once we are done, hopefully my students will comment here to let me know how well it worked.