June 25, 2012 1 Comment

Online Office Hours in Instructure Canvas

I have been incredibly happy with the online office hours that I’ve been holding in Canvas this semester (see previous post on SAVI tools in Canvas here).  Day after day, students are showing up for office hours to ask their own questions, hear other students’ questions, and just kind of hang out while they work on problems.  It’s lovely to SEE my online students regularly and I feel a much greater connection to this summer’s students than from any prior semester.

I’m quite sure that the difference is the ease of use of the Canvas Chat tool.  There are no logins, no scheduled sessions, and there is no separate software to install.  To get into the online office hour, the student (and the instructor) simply has to click on Chat.  To share camera and/or audio, they click “Start Broadcasting” and follow the prompts.  It really does not get much easier than that.

Images of Instructor and Student Guides for Online Office Hours in Canvas. Click on image to enlarge. Follow links in blog post for actual documents.

To make it easier for other instructors to implement the practice of online office hours, I wrote two guides:

The instructor guide contains tips on:

  • Webcams: Should you require or not?
  • Scheduling sessions: When and how?
  • Syllabus considerations
  • User Limit to Chat
  • Sharing a YouTube video, with an interactive whiteboard, or a screenshot
  • Sharing a document through the link to a Canvas page
  • Taking attendance
  • Students with low bandwidth
  • Troubleshooting technical problems
  • Reducing the “echo” effect that commonly plagues SAVI tools

If you’re going to share these with colleagues or students (which is fine), please share through the hyperlink so that if I update the documents in the future, you’ll always have the current version.  Hope these are helpful to you!

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Filed Under: eLearning, Faculty 2.0, SAVI (Synchronous Audio Visual Interactions), Student 2.0, Student-Instructor Communication, TALDA (Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age), Teaching Math Online Tagged:
June 4, 2012 Leave a Comment

Collecting Learning Notebooks in an Online Course

In a prior post, I discussed how I’m using Learning Notebooks to encourage students to carefully think through the mathematical steps and notation for solving problems.

I promised that I would explain how students complete this assignment in an online course, so today I’ve made a video, Collecting Learning Notebooks in an Online Course to show you the process I’m using inside of Instructure Canvas.  The process should be similar for other Learning Management Systems (though it may not be quite this easy).

Here’s the process.  Students still complete their Learning Notebook exactly how they do in a traditional class. I encourage them to keep a Table of Contents so that they can quickly find their assignments and make sure they are complete. Again, this was discussed in a prior post. The turning in part is a bit different for an online course.

I want to collect ten random problems from the students. So first, I create a Question Bank (or test bank) of 18-20 problems.  The problems look something like this:

Example problem from the Question Bank. [click on image to enlarge

In the actual assignment, I tell the Quiz to pull ten problems at random from the Question Bank.  This is a timed assignment, and I figure that 45 minutes should be plenty of time to take 10 photos or scans and upload them, even on cruddy Internet like mine.

How do students take their photos?

  • Digital cameras
  • Webcams (I required them for this course)
  • Scanners
  • Multi-function printer/scanners
  • Cell phone cameras

How do they get the image to the quiz?  They have to get the image to their computer screen and then use Jing to create a URL for the page they want to share.

Here are a few examples [click on the images to enlarge]:

Handwritten student work shared with a camera.

Handwritten student work scanned and shared with Jing.

Handwritten work shared with a webcam and Jing. (permission granted by student to share photo)

Then I grade the quizzes. Done!

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Filed Under: Communicating Math, eLearning, Mathematics, Student 2.0, Teaching Math Online, Testing, Assignments, and Grading Tagged: ,
October 21, 2011 Leave a Comment

What skills should we be teaching to future-proof an education?

Some time last year I spent quite a bit of time reflecting on what skills we could be focusing on in higher education to “future-proof” a degree.  What skills will stay relevant no matter what future careers look like?  There are two frameworks used and endorsed in K-12 education: Partnership for 21st Century Skills and Equipped for the Future.

I felt that the lists not quite right for adults that are returning or seeking an education.  Here is the list that I developed, and a link to the Prezi that includes many video resources that correspond with the skills.

Focus

  • Manage your information stream
  • Pay attention to details
  • Remember (when you need to)
  • Observe critically
  • Read with understanding
  • Set and meet goals

Explain

  • Media literacy (determine and create the right media for the job)
  • Present ideas digitally
  • Design for the audience
  • Depict data visually
  • Convey ideas in text
  • Speak so that others understand

Interact

  • Advocate and influence
  • Resolve conflict and negotiate
  • Collaborate (F2F or virtually)
  • Guide others
  • Lead

Analyze

  • Interpret data
  • Make decisions
  • Think critically
  • Solve problems
  • Forecast
  • Filter information

Flex

  • Think across disciplines
  • Think across cultures
  • Innovate
  • Adapt to new situations
  • See others’ perspectives
  • Be creative

Learn

  • Formulate a learning plan
  • Synthesize the Details
  • Information Literacy
  • Formulate good questions
  • Reflect and evaluate
  • Know what you know

 

Future-Proof Your Education on Prezi

What do you think?  Did I miss anything important?

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Filed Under: Careers of the Future, Edge of Learning, Future of Higher Ed, Future of Learning, Futuring, Student 2.0 Tagged:
August 16, 2011 3 Comments

Sanity in the Age of Digital Overload

I often conduct a workshop called “Organize Your Digital Self” and the last section of the workshop is on staying sane in a world with so many ways to go into digital overload.  Here are a few of my favorites apps and programs for staying sane:

StayFocusd is a Chrome Extension that lets you choose websites (like Facebook or casual games sites) that you want to limit your time on.  You decide how much time is enough, and then StayFocusd will warn you when you’re getting close to your limit and cut you off for the day once you’ve surpassed it.  Sure, you can open another browser, but if the point is to be more cognizant of how you’re wasting time, it does a good job reminding you.

WorkRave is  designed to help prevent repetitive stress injuries (like Carpal Tunnel Syndrome) but it also works very well to force you to take a break.  If you’re one of those people that can sit for hours working at the computer without even realizing that an hour has gone by, try a program like WorkRave.  You can decide how long you want to work in one sitting, how long you want to break, and how long you want your “snooze” to be before you really have to take that break.  Use your break times to talk to your family, spend time with your pets, go breath in some fresh air, get the mail, etc. The point is to force yourself to get up from your computer and do something else.  I’d experiment with the optimum continuous focused work time – for some it is 45 min, for others it is 90 minutes.

RescueTime is a bit like having your very own “big brother.”  Once you install it, it can track how much time you spend where on your computer (not just the Internet, but also your desktop, Windows or Mac).  So if you think you’re spending 3 hours a day answering email, it can verify that or it might tell you that the 3 hours is actually spent in Farmville.  RescueTime can also block distracting sites, so you can kill two birds with one stone – track time and block sites that are wasting time.  If you’re into the Quantified Self movement or you want students to track some data of their own for a project, the time-tracking reports and graphs from RescueTime are great (see video RescueTime Reports).  To measure just your online activities, there is now a RescueTime Chrome Extension too.

Part of staying sane is not becoming distracted and following link after link “down the rabbit hole” of time suck.  Readability is a great little browser extension for Chrome, Safari, or Firefox.  Their mission? “With one click, turn any webpage into a clean comfortable reading view.” Not only does Readability strip out all the extra links and advertisements on an article you’re trying to read, but it allows you to set your preferences for margins, background, text color, font, font size, columns, and more.  Subscribers to Readability can save web articles for later reading, send articles to a mobile device, and sync with Kindle.  The video that follows is a 1-minute tour of Readability.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Dropbox, which is one of those programs that has changed my workflow and contributed greatly to my ease of mind.  This is one that you will have to pay for if you want more than 2 GB of space (and trust me, you will).  Here’s the idea: if you’re working on multiple computer systems, dropbox makes a file folder on each computer and a mirror image of that folder “in the cloud.”   Whatever you drop into the folder on your computer, that file is mirrored in your Dropbox account in the cloud and then on the other computers synced to your account.  The beauty of this is that you can edit a file on your home computer, close it, drive to work, and after you boot up the computer there, the new version of the file will be sitting in the Dropbox on that computer.  You can also access any of the files in your Dropbox on any computer and on mobile devices by logging in to your Dropbox account.  This is invaluable when you suddenly have to present off someone else’s computer.  The ease of mind comes from knowing that if a disaster occurs and all your computers are lost, the Dropbox with all your important stuff will still be sitting there in the cloud waiting for you.  Dropbox has gotten some negative press lately over encryption practices, but the reality is that their encryption practices are better than most of our private security practices (if your work requires a security clearance, try another system).

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Filed Under: Digital Life, Faculty 2.0, Managing the Information Stream, Productivity, Sanity, Student 2.0
July 12, 2010 Leave a Comment

World Future Society Conference 2010

This is the 3rd year I’ve attended the WFS Conference and it’s a difficult event to describe.  You might imagine a collection of Nostradamus-like individuals, making predictions about the future, and I’ll admit it; this conference does have a larger proportion of older, bearded men than most conferences I attend.  However, the vast majority of attendees are completely serious professionals who are in the business of making informed predictions and hedging bets against uncertainty.  All of us participate in futuring – at least all of us that have ever made a budget or participated in some kind of strategic planning. The difference between your futuring and the futuring that these folks do is that they’ve gone the extra mile to learn the tools of long-term foresight planning.

What follows are the snippets of wisdom (mostly from tweets) that I collected at this year’s WFS Conference.

WFS: Scenario Building Workshop (Adam Gordon, @FutureSavvy)

Scenario planning is used when your institution is not governed by “well-behaved change.”  The idea is not to make a single prediction about what will happen in the future, but to explore the options, looking for commonalities in the cone of plausibility.

  • If you’d like to see the slides from the Scenario Planning workshop, here’s a link to a 2008 version of Adam Gordon’s presentation.
  • Well-behaved change happens in predictable environments: information rich, not prone to technology upheavals, well-established markets, stable players, high barriers to entry, a stable regulatory environment, consistent demand, or no great social pressures.
  • Badly behaved change: uncertain technology evolution, uncertain demand for products/services, uncertain performance of new business models, unstable macro-economic conditions (inflation, interest rates), shifting values, shifting morals, shifting preferences, shifting regulations.
  • Scenario planning is NOT determining the most likely outcome & planning for it, it IS assuming every important outcome might occur, and planning the best business options for each case.

WFS: Education Summit

I have hopes for what the WFS Education Summit could be … but it’s not there yet.  The problem is that the Education Summit is a mix of K-12/Higher Ed folks with no clear direction about whether the discussion is about teaching futuring skills or predicting the future of education and technology related to education.  Personally, I think that many conferences look at the “edge of learning” – what’s going to happen.  The specialty at the WFS Conference should be on linking educators who teach aspects of futuring skills in their educational programs.

With that in mind, here are some resources and links about Foresight/Futuring Education that might be helpful to you or your college:

If what you are looking for is really how to prepare graduates FOR the future, or introduce skills that will withstand the rapidly-shifting job market of the future, then you might find these links helpful:

WFS: Humans 2020 (Ramez Naam, @ramez)

  • Presentation on Humans in 2020 by @ramez can be found here.
  • It is acceptable in society to bring someone who is below the human baseline up to the baseline.  It is societally unacceptable to take someone AT (or above) the human baseline of intelligence and enhance it further.
  • It is considered socially acceptable to use medical intervention to improve lower cognitive abilities or to combat loss of cognitive function (especially as you age).
  • The same biological discoveries that cure disease are also the ones that can enhance humans. Power to heal = power to enhance.
  • Our genome is basically digital – it encodes us with a finite number of “bits” (ATCG). A gene sequencing facility looks like a server farm for a data center.
  • How much of who you are is coded by your genes? See slide #39.  [really, you should go look, it's shocking!]
  • Wouldn’t it suck if your parents make genetic decisions for you (code you for an artist) … but then you’re bitter your whole life.
  • Prediction: Parents WILL readily opt to do genetic manipulation to remove diseases.
  • Shuddering at the thought of a virus to carry genetic modification in adults. At the same time, if I can have a faster metabolism …

WFS: Internet Evolution (@Pew_Internet)

  • Two-thirds of adults are now using the cloud for something in their life. 61% of those adults are on social networks.
  • Bandwidth doubles every 2 years, but I would argue that it only doubles for those that already have it. The haves/have not gap widens.
  • Bumper stickers about the future of the Internet: The cloud is the 3rd phase of the Internet. -Mike Nelson [would love the rest of these, but I couldn't catch them fast enough and there were no slides or visuals to make it easier]
  • Nelson recommends reading “Let IT rise” from the Economist (subscription required).  You can get part of “Let IT rise” (Economist article) free here.
  • The cloud is going to be the platform that enables the Internet of things.  We will have 100s of net-connected devices. -Mike Nelson [... once again, what about the population that lacks broadband internet?]
  • Most of this presentation was simply results published on the Pew Research Center website (they have an RSS feed if you click on Subscribe in the upper right-hand corner). If you’ve never read their reports, you should start.

WFS: Building the Human Mind (Ray Kurzweil)

  • Note: You’ve probably seen Ray Kurzweil on TED Talks: How Technology Will Transform Us.  If not, go watch that, this was a more up-to-date version of that talk.
  • Whether you agree with the coming singularity or not, the research is certainly interesting.  If you go to KurzweilAI you can subscribe to receive all the links to the latest scientific research that support the eventual interface between humans and technology.  Prepare for the singularitweets. ;)  #
  • So many mentions of the exponential curves of invention … it’s so nice to hear in a presentation when you teach math. #wf10 # As a matter of fact, you could easily play a game of “Math Bingo” where you count the number of times the words exponential, log-log plots, or linear are used in a Kurzweil presentation.
  • How long do you go without updating the software you use? But we haven’t updated our genes in 1000 years.
  • “If this is all going to happen anyways, why don’t we sit back, party and let it happen .. because of course, then it WON’T happen.”
  • “The tools of disruptive change, in every field, are in everybody’s hands … FB, Google, all started by couple kids with laptops.”
  • Very cool animation on “The Law of Accelerating Returns” that takes us through history of technology. Wonder if it’s on the web? Anyone know?
  • Kurzweil is using a slide deck, but many of the slides are a mix of static images with an CG animation. Seamless and very cool. However, I’m not sure if the animations are distracting … do I stop listening when there’s an animation to watch? Hmmm.
  • I wonder if Kurzweil has a graph of the average amount of information we have to process as adults in each decade of human existence.
  • “Ignoring exponential progression would be a mistake [speaking about photovoltaic technologies]
  • In 15 years, according to models, we will be adding 1 year of life expectancy every year.
  • Kurzweil slides at http://www.KurzweilAI.net/pps/KurzweilPowerPoint and in a truly old-fashioned way, they will DOWNLOAD to your computer when you go there instead of bringing you to a site where they just play.  They wouldn’t OPEN on my computer, but I can confirm that they did download.

WFS: Levers of Change in Higher Education (Maria H. Andersen, @busynessgirl)

Thanks WFS staff for letting me do a fill-in presentation for a cancelled session. I am grateful for the opportunity to reach a wider audience!

WFS: The Future of Men and Women (Karen Moloney)

  • Housework is feminism’s final frontier. Very unequal distribution in the U.S.
  • Thought experiment: What would happen if there was a sex-specific pandemic?
  • Note: I’m not sure how much information I got from the talk, but it was well-designed and entertaining.  Plus I got a book suggestion to get the information I want. :)

WFS: Future of Faith: Conflict or Creativity (panel)

  • Cosmodeism: Evolution of the cosmos creates God- not God created the cosmos-that’s the proposition advanced by Tsvi Bisk (who made me flashback to sermons I listened to in my youth).
  • Some of the graphs about religion are available at AtlasOfGlobalChristianity (go to sample pages). They are great and I wonder if they’ve considered putting the data through Gapminder?  I think all libraries should buy this book – it is a great resource, but mere mortals? It might be out of our price range.
  • Did the influence of television shift the culture of religion? Good question. We’ll have to include this in our themed studies this fall.
  • Really enjoyed Rex Miller’s part of the Future of Faith talk, where he discussed the four “Ages” of religion: Oral, Print, Broadcast, and Digital [good speaker and presentation, would recommend]
  • How will religious groups get things done in the future? For 500 years we’ve relied on the institutional structure to get things done. The new “institution” is collaboration. The adaptive challenge will be dealing with the loss of the “institution”
  • Thought: Professional organizations are built around physical institutions (at least physical conferences) What does this shift mean for them?

WFS: Future of Academia (Bryan Alexander)

  • Unfortunately, I have no tweets from this talk, which was great.  I lent my WiFi to Bryan and didn’t want to burden the signal by using it myself.
  • Five Visions for Liberal Arts Campus (Scnearios) – which is a great thought experiment for those of you planning for the future of Higher Education (the prezi is here)
  • NITLE Predictions Market

Books, etc.

Just for Fun (other suggestions)

Conversations

The thing that makes the WFS conference so unique is that you are interacting with people from all over the world and from all sorts of different disciplines and professions.  In the same room at any presentation there are educators, military personnel, scientists, technology experts, authors, press representatives, students, business leaders, religious leaders, and of course, professional futurists.  The space between presentations is roomy (usually 30 minutes or more) and the conversations that you find yourself wandering in to are incredibly stimulating.  This year, I had several conversations that will push me to do even more reading and video watching (especially at the Acceleration Studies Foundation (ASF) Archive … not even sure how to BEGIN here).

Final Thoughts

I attended three game design conferences this year, and the presenters are starting to have this tradition of making the second slide the games they’ve been playing recently.  In all seriousness, at WFS, I think the second slide should be the Science Fiction you’ve been reading recently.   After my experiences last year at WFS 2009, I wasn’t sure I would come back – the conversations and networking had been great, but the presentations in the general conference were mostly “misses.”  However, at WFS 2010, most of the presentations I attended were “hits” so I’m thinking that I’ll probably find a way to attend (and hopefully present) at WFS in Vancouver, July 8-10  in 2011.

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Filed Under: Edge of Learning, Faculty 2.0, Future of Higher Ed, Future of Learning, Futuring, Student 2.0 Tagged:
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