Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Skeletal outline for a backchannel interface for online classroom stuff


This is not the most beautiful mockup but it doesn't have to be.

1. Chat window. Shows scrolling text of other people speaking, can be disabled or activated to some extent by instructors; you could appoint a "student op," or have a TA do it. Ideally there would be short periods of explanation as necessary followed by open question-taking. (I figure that lecture or at least something vaguely approximating it can't be completely eliminated.)
2. Chat input window. This is where you type what you want to put into 1. which will be read and responded to by the instructor, probably verbally.
3. A bar for various options and the like, included to be somewhere fairly unobtrusive.
4. Note-taking. Auto-saves every ten or so seconds to a .rtf or similar file somewhere on the student's drives. Good for being able to jot something down on the fly, even if it may be used mostly to write down and compose questions in practice.
5. Find/replace etc. options for the word processor window.
6. Primary window; 7. secondary window
The default would have the instructor on a video camera on 6, with 7 used to display some relevant supplementary material, such as a powerpoint outline, a slide show of a more visual nature, or a whiteboard/oekaki style thing for allowing the teacher to make diagrams to answer questions on the fly. These could be reversed; for instance the teacher could appear in 7. while larger scale visuals or a movie (for a film class) appear in 6.
The teacher would have display control tools; it would be possible for them to access links provided to various content by students, or to materials they have on hand. They might be able to grant access to the "whiteboard" for students to draw an outline of what they mean, or to, for instance, indicate on a representational image which part is confusing them. Possibly there would be some sort of control mode which would go a bit like this (this being, essentially, the "prevent prankster student from drawing a penis on the whiteboard" mode):
1. Student is "called on," granted whiteboard privs
2. Student cues up image 7, which is a demonstration of the commutative property in algebra; circles sections that confuse her
3. Teacher looks at the circles and the explanation of them, authorizes display of the circled area.
4. Teacher explains issues.

In fact a "hand raise" system would probably be a good thing, perhaps with a twitter-esque field in which one can put in what you're raising your hand for -- "question re: comutative property" for instance, or "is it true geo washington was a mason?" or the like. Hand-raised students can elaborate, either aloud to the "class" or, if they prefer, directly to the teacher -- this may help those who have awkward questions or who don't want to have a speech impediment or accent picked fun of.
Ideally the teacher will then answer the question to the class as a whole (barring extremely short answers or questions to the effect of "can you go back to slide 12 for a moment").

Anyway, sessions would be recorded to disk and ideally placed up somewhere for viewing by those who couldn't make the session. I imagine everything involved in the class would be posted, excepting perhaps "Your instructor needs to go AFK for ten minutes due to a building fire drill," which could be edited over. Everything would be recorded, possibly excepting any private inquiries to the instructor; display could either be by video display of a representative "dummy screen" mode or else a literal, so to speak, log of everything that happened, which the software would simply play back. The former would probably actually be more useful.

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Vocabulary Building: Part Une

Let us look first at the concepts of distance education and distance learning.

Well, Distance Learning is probably primary, because it is literally learning at a distance, but the two terms are more or less interchangeable; "distance education" is really more about formal coursework as opposed to simply learning about something through media (newspapers, TV) as opposed to personal experience (teachers, actually doing).

Historical research using that vaunted library of factoids, Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distance_education) has told me that the concept of distance education of actual lessons was first attested to in Boston in 1728. It was in shorthand, and so were later lessons. I think there is an interesting metaphor here, because these instructions were delivered largely by the postal system, and focused on shorthand, which was after all a method of data compression and encoding - a skill one could learn in order to write down words or events quickly and thus have a more efficiently gained written record.

Anyway, the core concept is that these courses are done through mostly pre-created materials distributed to the learner at a regular interval, and then presumably returned for marking. There is a concept which must be dealt with, however, which is NOT in our list! But Wikipedia once again comes to my rescue. This concept is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_distance

An interesting concept. I thought that it made a lot of sense and was easily digested once I had reframed it in terms of things I knew; basically, it refers to the 'cycle' of a communication and the necessity of the frequency of them. Dialogue, as mentioned, is a key part of this -- namely being able to ask a question and get a quick answer on a potentially minor tidbit.
Also important, though only briefly touched on in the Wikipedia definition, was "structure." I assume this meant framing the study so that various matters were presented in a logical order that tended to build on one another, and also perhaps making sure that the materials could be understood easily. The last part, learner motivation, could be increased but is to some extent beyond one's ready control.

The topics also came up of synchronous and asynchronous learning. I had encountered these terms before in discussions of communication. Conventional classroom instructions, and its various other forms listed, which focus on things which require attendance, so to speak, at a given time are compared to "asynchronous" technologies, which are something that one can approach at one's own pace and which do not revolve primarily around immediate communication. This certainly has the advantage of not requiring as much staffing.

I did find the listing of a message board as asynchronous, and internet radio as synchronous, to be a bit odd based on my idea of the matters, but I suppose it makes sense; internet radio is usually not "recorded" and then put up as a podcast (presumably the podcast would fall under the same heading as audiocassette, and thus, asynchronous) even if it is also not at all interactive, while message boards, while interactive -- you talk to others and get replies, possibly even quite quickly -- are not fundamentally so, and the wait could be more like hours or days.

At the same time this seems to imply that there needs to be a third category. Material such as pre-made web lessons or, to be a little more iconoclastic, "books" are clearly asynchronous, but does a web forum post thread have more in common with that or with direct linked contact (as in face to face or teleconferencing)? I would be inclined to say there's a third segment here, which I will call "demi-synchronous" for want of a better term, and which I will define as "those methods of communication and learning which involve feedback within a meaningful time frame, but not necessarily instantly." Examples would be "email office hours" and message boards that are rather rigorously monitored.

Friday, June 4, 2010

Responsa to Steve Hargadon

He's got a fun name to say. It's like a dinosaur or a fantasy warrior. "Beware! Hargadon draws near!" Anyway.

This is in reply to http://www.stevehargadon.com/2008/03/web-20-is-future-of-education.html and is based on my thoughts about the trends he observes.

Trend #1: A new publishing revolution. This seems quite likely. We have a lot more ability to produce material now. I think as these things become more and more ubiquitous we will see them being more and more widely incorporated, although I expect there will be other effects - for instance, it will possibly be another pressure on or against minority languages, although I suppose it's equally possible that minority language speakers will simply make sure to adopt one of the other major tongues and keep their own mama-loshen, possibly leavening their use of English (or chinese or Russian or whatever) with that native language.

Trend #2: A tidal wave of content. I think this is true; when I read the comment threads of blogs I often see a lot of things.
Except that I don't think this is really information. So many of these are often cut from the same cookie cutter mold; in my case I tend to read the Huffington Post, and if I, to use a hoary old analogy, had a dollar for every time I'd seen a man produce the following post:
"Man, you all are just hating on $conservativeentity. You libs are hilarious, or would be, if you didn't make me sick." etc. etc.
I would probably be able to buy a new car. (Nota bene: I'm sure there are equally perpetual posting memes in other communities.)
Many people have a lot of things to say, but, this call to create content seems to be making it totemic. I am certainly, to use this very act I am engaging in as an analogy, learning about writing in a blog - though I was an early adopter of this thanks to livejournal - and it may well be very useful when I should perhaps later in life create a blog of my own. And yet, I don't feel that it fundamentally empowers me, and it doesn't grant me some new gift from the heavens to peer through a vast sea of repetitive goading comments.

Trend 3: Everything becoming participative. Yes - to an extent, I agree with him.
But then my relationship with books is different from his. I enjoy them, but generally speaking when I go to buy anything I am looking with some idea of what I already want. I do not go browsing for books to buy unless I should, say, get a bookstore gift card. That said, these factors provide information, information I have just never really thought to consult.
As for the Kindle, it has advantages, but so do the current version of books. When bookreaders are cheap enough that you can buy one for the same cost as a Gameboy or a textbook, and rugged and reliable enough that I can read one on the toilet or in the bathtub, then we can talk.
I do not think the electronic dialogue he describes is going to be productive without active moderation. I cite here two examples:
One is Roger Ebert's blog, which is directly maintained by Ebert himself. He goes through the threads and replies to people (as he wants, as he pleases; as he himself pointed out in a reply I read once, "On this blog I'm the boss.") People post the usual thing -- whenever he makes a political comment he is accused of the most perfidious of biases, whenever he makes a religious comment there is the usual churning argument over faith vs. reason etc. He replies to them.
The other is the Something Awful humor website's forum community, which is large and active and has many fields of endeavor. Many of these are dedicated to pursuits which appeal to the "goon" (as they dubbed themselves) community - for instance, private servers for online games, or discussion of those online games. And yet, in the "Ask/Tell" forum's section, a question about a new form of unusual shoe may sit next to "Tell me about nuclear power!", which will sit next to "Tell me about having children - A parenting megathread!" (Megathreads in this sense being a discussion thread that is not quite large enough to gain its own subforum.)
So how does this mess work? It's simple.
The forum is run as a small business by Rich Kyanka, the founder of the website. He has moderators, who I believe are community volunteers but are also possibly to some extent his employees. Individuals who misbehave are barred from posting for a while, and often verbally dressed down; those whose 'crimes' are more severe are banned, which is a strong disincentive as registering for the forums requires ten dollars. (Severe or repeat offenders may be "permabanned;" an individual who is merely banned may restore his account for ten dollars.)
While there are some bells and whistles that can be bought, essentially twenty dollars and not being a fool will gain lifetime access to this community. I think this is a model which may be able to expand outwards - or at least be looked at by other discussion matters.

Trend #4: The new "prosumer."
I like his concept here. I hate the word.
I think that for educational matters this could probably be useful, as a concept anyway, because individuals interested in, for instance, learning a foreign language might be able to share drills which they develop themselves and found especially useful. These tips and tricks could be shared around and put to a practical test, and further, the nature of the internet, where one can store large quantities of information fairly trivially (especially if it is simple still images and text), means that if - for instance - a man in Indiana's Japanese kanji drills are not terribly popular or useful for his classmates, they might be discovered, to great profit, by a class in South Korea two years later.

Trend #5: The age of the collaborator.
Maybe. Maybe.
Here is the thing that I believe Steve overlooks. (Other than the fact that a hundred and fifty years ago, at least in nearly all cultures in the world, a guy who can't digest milk, gets sunburned easily, and has a bum foot, would have been put to SOME use. Maybe his family come from PNG hunter-gatherer stock. I have no idea.)
His idea requires open and free communication and collaborative scholarship to be, I suppose I would say, be prone to finding the truth -- and I think it is quite possible for there to be an open and active and vibrant and energetic community dedicated, for instance, to proving that reality as we know it is in fact an illusion created by the Matrix, or that the September 11th attacks were done by the US government (or the Zionist Occupation Government), or that a certain race is in fact quantifiably superior.
And maybe this is an inevitable side effect... certainly, the fact that Mein Kampf was published on a printing press does not defame the printing press. However, it is possible for bad information, particularly if that bad information seems to fill a human emotional need or a prevailing prejudice better (and oh yes, we are all filled of prejudices; not all of them evil, either) to become "common knowledge." Chinese newspapers have cited The Onion, a comedy newspaper - multiple times. (I am sure American newspapers have done comparable things.)
And it may become ever increasingly possible to live in your own private sphere. It may even be inevitable, and it may well be that these possibilities, even if they come to fruition, will be well worth the costs they bear. But there WILL be costs in the change, as well as benefits.

I suppose then that as educators our greatest role is to teach, constantly in a thousand ways, the need to look at many views, to judge the use of evidence, and perhaps most pressingly, to teach people to seek the truth of the matter, or as close as they can get -- even if that truth may make them personally uncomfortable.

#6-10 later when it's not 5 AM! Isn't this exciting?!