IT; Teaching Luddites

Gettysburg is fairly unique in that a lot of the folks in IT teach a course or two per year. Most of the upper leadership have PhDs or at least a masters in EE with a lot of real world experience, and so we do everything from Shakespeare to Astronomy labs to first year seminars. We recently gave a quick set of talks at a lunch run by our campus center for creative teaching, and it was rather amusing to note how *little* most of actually do.

I've long been a believer in only using tech where it's appropriate, but almost all of the rest of the IT leadership is in the same boat. Our associate VP, our 17th century lit guy, has his students rework a scene in an old play, then act and film it using low end equipment. Rather than build the course around this, he actually goes very slowly, uses it for only one assignment and gets feedback from the students if it's useful. Our senior instructional technologist (population studies) wanted to use full bore GIS in her last class, but ended up backpedaling and trying something much less ambitious when it became obvious that it was not going to be possible. Our VP did go through with using Kindles as textbook readers, but his senior capstone CS course is built around real life experiences in the IT world far more than the technology. The head of computing services is the sort of guy who builds remotely operated radio telescopes, but then claims he doesn't really use tech all that much in his classes...

As for me, in my FYS I use only the most up-to-date technology. When making flint arrowheads, I use pressure flaking to rework hard hammer starters. We use only the most up to date gunpowder recipies, and I even let the students use paper to paint on rather than a rock wall after they finished making earth-pigment-based paints...

The only course where surfing Facebook is not only allowed but required

...is the NITLE seminar we're hosting right now at Gettysburg on Web2.0 technologies and social software.  I'm fascinated by the folks that showed up- they skew far older than you might expect, but many have been using technology in serious ways in their classes for years.  Blogging during class?  I'm just doing my homework!

It's the simple things that get you

Now that I can finally come up for air from my course (which took far more prep time than I had anticipated) I remember why I like to be a luddite in the classroom much of the time.  

1. Getting web video to work is always a hit and miss thing.  I found some great, obscure stuff and always managed to get it to work, but it took constant checking, codec downloads and the fanatical will not to use anything but IE for video.  Add to that the fun of watching screensavers start up in the middle of a movie...
2. Cross compatibility between Macs and PCs is still horrible.  There's nothing like watching a student try to figure out why their nice PPT suddenly has no images when they put it up on the screen in class.  
3. I put the vast majority of my readings up on electronic reserve in Angel, in part to save paper, in part to save money and in part to save my butt since I rare knew what the reading would be a week ahead of time.  Those students who read them just printed them out anyway- paper would have probably been better.

Of course, lower tech stuff fails too- I never had much luck converting malachite to copper as a class demo, and that process has been around for 4000 years...

An expert Wikipedia?

Wired posted an article today on Google's latest new thing: Knol, a Wikipedia-alike with the twist that the articles are written by a single, named individual (presumably an expert) and subject only to expert moderation after that point. As an added wrinkle, if the author wants they can get ad revenue from their site if it gets hit often enough.

I have to admit I have no idea if this will go anywhere at all. If removes by far the best part of Wikipedia: that anyone can author or edit an article. This is the reason that Wikipedia has articles on virtually every topic you could ever want to read, often with copious references and a fairly decent stab at a neutral point of view. Get someone with some specialized knowledge on an obscure topic: bingo, another article!

If also removes by far the worst part of Wikipedia: that anyone can author or edit an article. The competence and neutrality of Wikipedia's editors have been challenged time and time again, as anyone who watches the Colbert Report will note. There has been a lot of discussion about the regression to mediocrity in Wikipedia articles written by true experts followed by tons of "helpful" edits by people who don't understand the topic anywhere near as well as they think.

Right now there don't seem to be a huge number of Knols (understandable since it just launched) and those that are there seem to be mostly health related. This is actually an area where other-than-Wikipedia web sites do fairly well- the featured Knol is on Type 1 Diabetes, which is great except that there are at least a dozen other sites out there with similar information. The others seem to be random bits like how to make pancakes- the areas where true experts could chime in (hard sciences especially) don't seem to be very populated.

Given that many modern student's first resort for research is Wikipedia, any additional site with quality information will be welcomed. Let's just hope it doesn't end up like Wikiepedia, which is often also the *last* place students look for research.

Are online journals damaging science?

There's a fascinating and disturbing article in Science this week. A sociologist at the University of Chicago has looked at citation patterns before and after the growth of full-text online databases and search engines. You'd think that with the enormous growth in the number of accessible journals and powerful search tools that you'd see an enormous growth in the breadth and depth of the citation lists of articles. In fact, it appears that the reverse is occuring: journals from the electronic era cite references that are overall newer than before, and the total number of articles in a specific journal that get any references at all from other articles just plummets. People can get the articles they want, but it appears that the tools are making them narrow their finds.

I'm not at all surprised at the first- i remember back in grad school when I first started using INSPEC and noting how often I would get articles from 1984-> but not before. Gee, that's when INSPEC's database started- it was so much easier to use it than to dig through paper I ended up only using the articles it gave me, and once in a while digging through a reference chain.

The latter effect is both less obvious and more disturbing. Evans estimates that 5 more years of online availability will cut the overall number of cited articles in that journal from 600 to 200. People may be citing more, but they are all citing the same articles and leaving the rest to gather dust. Why this is is unclear- perhaps losing the browsing inherent in searching a paper journal loses the "Hmm, What's this other article about" bit, or perhaps those 200 articles are just better keyworded or indexed than the others. In any case it implies that scientific consensus will happen quicker- sadly because everyone's reading the same articles, not because they are looking at lots of different ones.

Given that nobody in their right mind is going back to the good old days without search engines and full text databases, how do we deal with this problem?

What's wrong with good old fashioned drudgery?

Looking over the recent EDUCAUSE report on the future of the learning management system (LMS) and the trend towards the personalized learning environment (PLE) as shown in one of the references, I had to note some comments about current generations of LMSes (or virtual learning environments to get in another acronym). They are derided as confining, creativity-stifling, professor controlled and too tightly bound to the basic "X students will take Y course in Z semester" model. They're mostly used for basic course logistics like posting syllabi and class notes, doing basic practice testing, collecting and redistributing student work and other routine, boring operations. Not so the new, sexy PLE, made up of a conglomerate of free Web 2.0 tools like blogs, wikis and photo/video sharing sites that will allow students to collaborate, share and innovate, free from the artificial structures embedded in current LMSs like Blackboard or Moodle.

Umm, yeah. LMSes *are* primarily used as course coordination tools, usually in large lecture classes. They aren't used very much in small seminars since they are confining and not great tools for open discussion and collaboration unless you have special needs like geographically scattered students. Now, why is this bad?

Perhaps it's my background in physical science. Basic low level physical science courses like Chem101 generally are pretty similar everywhere- larger lecture based classes with grades based on tests, quizzes and homework. Collaboration? Innovation? Not so much- at this level students are busy with learning Things They Need to Know. There's a huge number of students per faculty member, so the kind of personal contact needed for serious project work simply isn't available. (Well, it is: it's called lab. This is something that will *never* be replaced by any form of virtual environment. Students need to learn that experiments fail and that things can hurt if you don't pay attention.) Perhaps your class is small enough you can do a few simple things -Teaching summer community college Chem 101 courses actually allowed this since the class size was small- but for the most part there's not a lot of discussion around PV=nRT. And yes, there is an asymmetry in the power structure of an LMS: that's because there's a knowledge asymmetry in the course in the first place. The students aren't there to discuss the meaning of the second law of thermodynamics-they are there because the professor understands it and they don't. By the end of the course hopefully that knowledge asymmetry is gone, but until then the best input students can give in this process is by asking intelligent questions. (And believe me, any decent professor *loves* getting a question that shows the student is actually interested in the material rather than "Is it going to be on the test?") The LMS can make this whole process easier- skip copying hundreds of random homework sets, give better tools to contact your class, provide a place for common discussion questions and virtual help.

And yes, the classical LMS is tied to the structure of the college: people, courses, semesters, enrollment, etc. But then again, most schools in the US (and world) use this model-if you're in the minority such as the authors of the white paper you should expect that standard tools won't fit. Can students take work from course to course over semesters? In most modern LMSes they can through various portfolio tools, so if students want they still can keep their electronic trail.

For smaller seminar courses? Perhaps a PLE is the way to go, but most people I know teaching these sorts of things don't bother since they'd rather be discussing things in class. And of course now you have the issue of "Do you have an account on X?" "What's my password- I forgot" and of course training people how to use six separate tools that all have different interfaces. Good luck with that- changing to Office 2007 has been enough campus trauma for right now. Oh, and you did clear permissions to post all that info up on Flickr and YouTube and have restricted access to your class, right? Really? Without some sort of way to deal with identity management and security you're well into pipe dream territory, and hands up everyone who's seen a good solution for those issues that is supported by Flickr, Youtube, LiveJournal, Wikidot and the dozens of other 2.0 sites out there.

The overarching concept of a PLE is a great idea. Everybody can agree that enhancing collaboration, reflection and innovation is a great idea, and existing LMSes aren't great in the 2.0 feature area like wikis and blogs. But PLE's are just a dream right now, and the VLE/LMS as it stands today is a useful tool. I don't have a fancy nailgun in my garage- perhaps I'll just use a hammer instead to stick these boards together.

P2P textbooks

With $100 textbooks now the norm, using Bittorrent to distribute pirated copies shouldn't surprise me in the least.

Somehow, I can't manage to feel too much outrage on the part of the authors. I've worked with folks writing textbooks before, and unless you're a huge name that's on one of the standard works for Bio101, you aren't going to make much given the enormous effort it takes to write one of these beasts. The publishers are the ones pushing to rev the book every year so that they can kill the used textbook market, but this has reached the point where everybody in higher ed is basically sick of it.

This is where a decent e-book reader and a few academics could really clean up. Get one or two of the "big" names in chem or biology like Zumdahl or Carey to decide to publish a direct-to-students version of the text for $20-25, half to the author and I suspect people would ditch paper in a heartbeat. The authors would probably end up clearing more as well in the end. However, this is going to need an ebook reader that can do a decent index and high-quality images, unlike the current generation such as the Kindle. Amazon seems to be at least somewhat aware of the demand here, so we can always hope...