Community 2.0

Sensationalism in the world of technology and pedagogy?

2012-02-14T10:43:00.004-05:00

The Chronicle's 2/12 article "A Tech-Happy Professor Reboots After Hearing His Teaching Advice Isn't Working" sounds like big news - Professor Michael Wesch of Kansas State University, renowned for his innovative, student-centered, tech-integrated approach to teaching and learning, acknowledges that what he does with students is not working for his colleagues.

The article, especially the headline, infers that Wesch, somewhat of a teaching with web 2.0 technologies guru, is now rethinking (or renouncing?) his pro-technologies approach after learning it did not work for some of his colleagues. He's also been thoroughly inspired by the teaching of a colleague, Chris Sorenson, who uses tech-free, good old fashioned lectures.

But the real story is much more nuanced than Wesch's supposed turn-around on whether technologies help students learn and professors teach. Some of that story is even more obvious in the Comments. Here's an excerpt of one from Wesch:

"Not everybody has to teach with technology, but it does need to be deeply embedded throughout the ecosystem we create on campus - and not because "that's what students want" or "that's where the students are."  The surprising-to-most-people-fact is that students would prefer less technology in the classroom (especially *participatory* technologies that ask them to do something other than sit back and memorize material for a regurgitation exercise).  I use wikis, blogs, twitter and other social media in the classroom not because our students use them, but because I am afraid that social media might be using them – that they are using social media blindly, without recognition of the new challenges and opportunities they might create.  I use social media not only as an effective teaching tool that encourages participation, but also as a way to broaden the media literacy of our students.  In this regard, we still have a great deal of work to do.  We need to embed new media literacy more deeply into the curriculum so that it isn't just this "one crazy Anthropology class" (as I have heard my class fondly referred to by students) that showed them how they can effectively use these tools in ways they had not yet imagined, while also allowing them to see a little more clearly how these tools are using them, altering their habits, sensibilities, and values as well as the larger structural contexts in which they live."      

http://chronicle.com/article/A-Tech-Happy-Professor-Reboots/130741/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Best of Class

2012-01-24T13:29:00.003-05:00

I've had many great moments this semester but I especially liked the group article project I developed for my ENG 101 class. The process was too complicated and I will definitely streamline it for future use but it ended up being a lot of fun. I describe the activity in my November 19 blog post but my favorite part isn’t mentioned – the group presentations. Students expressed trepidation at having to stand in front of the room but they all did an amazing job. Some read from notes, others had memorized their “parts,” and one group put together an impressive PowerPoint. The best part is the way they worked together to create seamless presentations. When one group realized one of its members was absent they quickly checked the class Facebook page (where I had asked them to post their responses in advance) and managed to fill in beautifully for their missing classmate. I was really impressed with them and I could tell that they were impressed with themselves. They also realized how tough it can be to stand in front of a roomful of students, asking them questions and getting them to engage in discussion. In their final class evaluations, some students suggested doing more student presentations throughout the semester, something I am definitely considering for the Spring.

Best of Class: Ximena's Believe It or Not

2012-01-09T05:33:00.008-05:00

And the winner is...[DRUMROLL]

you are not going to believe this...

END-OF-CLASS REFLECTIONS!

Now, right off I want y'all to know that I always take my end-of-semester reflections with a grain of salt. After all, 'Tis The Season to Butter up The Teacher Just before She Turns in That Final Grade.

On the other hand, this year I had two sets of classes that had 0 (zero) motivation to butter me up at this point in the semester. My Basic Writing students knew who was (or was not) going to take the CAT-W, and my Shakespeare students knew that they would get 100 points from me no matter what they said in their reflections (let me tell ya, those assured 100 points can liberate some students!).

So, why am I calling this moment the best of class? Judge for yourself:

I. Four excerpts from Shakespeare reflections

"If a student had a lot of things on his or her plate (work, school, friends, global warming, occupy wall street, etc.) I would not recommend [the Shakespeare class]. It does not make one to be less of a man to run way from this class and focus more on the essentials....this class requires a lot of hard work and time..."

"Oh boy was I happy to have you as a teacher. You gave the impression that you're goofy, have a sense of humor but are still assertive when it comes down to it. And I appreciate that, a teacher that is not too serious and knows how to teach while still enjoying what she does."

"If I had the power to put up flyers all over LaGuardia, it would state that ALL students who are required to take one English elective should unquestionably take [the Shakespeare] class"

"I wish there were a part two to [the Shakespeare class] because I would love to recommend myself to take it. If a student is really serious about learning about William Shakespeare but in a fun and unique way then this is the class to be in."

II. Four excerpts from Basic Writing reflections

"After I got over the initial shock that my classmates and students in another class could see what I wrote, it hit me I can do what I do best and that is… be nosey."

"I definitely recommend this course to other students because it will help them not only to be better writers but also better human beings."

"The shallow idea I was having about the course before I started the class, is to help one to write good English. But after several weeks of the class I made to understand that is not the only purpose of the class because it has help me to know much about society that I have no idea about."

"The most memorable moment [in this class was] thinking about reality. It’s touched my soul. We are living in the time where rhythm of life so fast that we sometime even doesn’t have time to think about some simple things."

Oh yeah, and apparently I should NOT teach using PowerPoint because I stink at it (okay, the students did not quite put it that way, but I got the hints). *SIGH* live and learn....

"Bad" Drawing

2012-01-07T15:10:00.011-05:00

Art-in-New York.

Deformation of the Figure.

Non-art resource.

I created my online activity, "Bad" Drawing, as part of the Community 2.0 seminar. Although I cannot find the site anymore (I think it was on Wiki, but I am not sure now), my students had this activity in my Art-in-New York course before the semester ended.

A. Learning Objectives.
Before my class experienced it, I created a revised "Bad" Drawing Assignment to meet my students' needs.

B. Reflective Description.
As I mentioned in my previous blog entry, Blogger was blocked in the lab that I reserved for creating student blogs although I specifically wrote that my class will use blogger.com when reserving the lab. However, LaGCC lab technicians were supportive and available during our lab time, so the issue was resolved smoothly. Nevertheless, what do you think students attempt when they cannot view their blogs in a computer lab? Yeah, right, logging on to ePortfolio. "NO EPORTFOLIO THIS WEEK! DO NOT LOG ON TO DIGICATION!!!" was the first thing I had to say on the day. This was kind of sad.

C. Conclusions.
I made ePortfolio optional for my students this time, but it was not my intention. It was just that Digication was down for that specific day I scheduled an appointment for my students to have an ePortfolio workshop. We simply switched our system. Next time, I will try to schedule it much earlier. The good news was that, though, because the class already had blogs, we were able to maintain our course schedule and my class was not interrupted too much by the accidentally-created Digication down time. At the end, Digication is just a tool for my students to learn.

The idea of this "Bad" Drawing assignment came from my "100 Drawings" assignment, which I give out in the beginning of every semester. Students often tell me they are so bad at drawing and become very nervous about losing points because of it. To tell you the truth, those students are normally best ones in class. I became curious to find out what their notions of "good" and "bad" in drawing. Moreover, I decided to "torture" them further by assigning "bad" drawings where they can lose points by creating good drawings (!!!!!)...oh well.

After the lab, a few students told me that having a sample blog entry for this assignment can help them post their own entry. I will consider that next time, but my feeling is that things like this (the first "Deformation of the Figure" entry) do not come into exist if I show them a sample work ahead of time. Also, another student made four posts, instead of one post with four pictures: (1) Non-Art, (2) Def of the Fig., (3) Art-Res., and (4) Fantastic, which I found fascinating.

And Here We Go: Copyright

2011-12-26T16:43:00.000-05:00

Canadian Faculty Union Warns That Student Postings of Lectures Could Violate Copyright Law

December 21, 2011, 1:30 pm

By Alexandra Rice

The faculty union at the University of Manitoba, in Canada, sent an e-mail message to its members this month alerting them to a popular Web site where students are sharing course materials, including what the union calls professors’ “intellectual property.”

In the e-mail, the union defines intellectual property as “lectures, course notes, laboratory materials, exams, and other works created by members for their class,” which cannot be published without the author’s permission. The e-mail encourages members to warn their students that posting any of the above materials is prohibited by law.

Students can legally share their own notes from a class, but taping a professors’ lecture and posting that to a Web site is a violation of copyright law, argued James L. Turk, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, in an article in the Winnipeg Free Press.

The Web site, LocAZu, is open to any university student in Canada with an e-mail address and is run by various students.

The union’s office is closed for holiday break so members were not available to comment.

This entry was posted in Campus Piracy, Legal Troubles, Open Access, Student Life. Bookmark the permalink.

HERE.

Am I Failing to See how This App is Different from Facebook Groups?

2011-12-18T10:03:00.000-05:00

New Academic Social Network Looks Beyond the Course, and Beyond Facebook

December 6, 2011, 1:59 pm

By Alexandra Rice

Jon Corshen, CEO of a new academic social-media network, says students don’t want to be friends with their professors on Facebook but are left with few alternatives for interacting with instructors on the Internet after class time ends. So he created a space on the Web for students and professors to “meet up” outside the classroom.

In two years, Mr. Corshen and his team have raised $7-million in venture capital, from Granite Ventures, Omidyar Network, and other investors. The Chronicle caught up with him to talk about the ideas behind the online academic platform, known as GoingOn.

The full article is HERE.

So You Think You Can Learn

2011-12-15T12:02:00.002-05:00

In a 2010 piece on HASTAC* Duke Humanities professor Cathy Davidson reflects on reality TV, authentic learning, peer grading, crowd-sourcing instruction to students, and more.

Here's an excerpt:

"I'm not a big television watcher, have almost no interest in most reality shows, but am addicted to "So You Think You Can Dance." It's not only because I love dance (although that helps), but also because it is a rare example of how excellent, rigorous feedback can contribute towards a goal of excellence, not only for the individual involved but for a larger community. It is also a rare example of people with extraordinary talents in one area learning to adapt those talents to parallel (but quite different) areas. In other words, it is a fantastic counter-model of teaching and learning, expertise and specialization, than one finds in traditional learning models, many of which I find, frankly, impoverished, enervating, uninspiring, and unproductive. There. I've said it."

Read the article: http://hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/so-you-think-you-can-learn

*HASTAC: Humanities, Arts, Science,and technology Advanced Colaboratory: http://hastac.org/

Lurking

2011-12-10T20:03:00.004-05:00

From STHEBERGE

I have been using Ning this semester for my Shakespeare class. The way it generally works is that I post a discussion and then students respond. Besides responding, there is little interaction beyond the occasional comment among them in the forums unless I specifically request it by saying something like "This Ning is worth 20 points: 10 for the response and 5 for each comment. Extra commenting is done out of the goodness of your heart."

Or so I thought until I read this week's reflections, which were specifically about using Ning/the usefulness of the Ning assignments. (By now the students know me enough to know that they can be--oh, so ever!--honest about what hey think of my methods/tools, etc.) I was happy to hear they thought the Ning was very useful overall in terms of making them think in creative ways, keeping them on track, etc.

What surprised me was that they reported reading each other's posts A LOT more than what their actual comments indicated (and I did not ask for a report about their activity in any way--it just came up when they said "it was fun to read XXX's post on YY"). In fact, if it had not been for this reflection, I would have described the Ning assignments as "Socratic dialogue" types: Me and My Pupils. But no.

This led me to wonder: Do I care too much that I can show proof that my students are engaged? Is the current focus on assessment leading my pedagogy so that I make my students jump through unnecessary hoops just for the sake of having that data, that quote to prove that something useful is going on in my class? Why can't I be just satisfied with their lurking?

Agenda 9 December 2011 10:00-01:00 B123

2011-12-08T22:27:00.006-05:00

Community 2.0 Agenda

9 December 2011

10:00-01:00 B123
Printable Version

10:00-10:10 Welcome!
10:10-10:40 Developing & Evaluating Effective Connective Learning Networks HERE.
10:40-11:30 Report-out and Discussion HERE.
11:30-11:40 Break
11:40-12:50 Twittering with Justin Rogers-Cooper

Introduction
Field Work

Group A (Justin, Vera, Michelle,Rebekah, David ): “C” Building cafeteria, 3d floor
Group B (Jason, Aaron, Ingrid, Judith): “C” Building cafe, first floor
Group C (Maria, Rudy, Ari, Luke, Priscilla) : Food vendors in front of “B” and/or “C” building.

Discussion of Twitter feed
Group Work: one-paragraph blog entry that uses the tweets but expands on them as per the previous discussion

12:50-01:00 Reminders

Next Meeting: Wednesday 2/29/12 10 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Homework:

Write a "Best of Class" blog entry.
Use the list we created together today to self-critique your activity and then revise it by the February meeting. Then post a blog entry covers the following:

What is the revised activity?
What are its goals? (use Bloom’s Taxonomy)
Describe what types of connections are being made. (Across courses, across disciplines, with the wider college community, with the world?)
How are these connections meaningful?

Be prepared for a hands-on run-through of your activity!

LAB REPORT: Blogging@LAGCC.

2011-12-07T22:26:00.005-05:00

FACT: 99% of browsers in the student computer lab block blogs.

SUGGESTION: if your class is working on blogs, please ask the lab tech to change the setting at the podium and reboot all computers (otherwise, there would be a few students who can view blogs and a few others who cannot...in a remarkably random fashion).

Flip-Class: A Short Thought following CUNY-IT

2011-12-06T16:24:00.003-05:00

http://www.australianclimatemadness.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/backflip.jpg

For many years now, I have been teaching what I considered an "inverted class", meaning what in a traditional classroom would be "classwork" and "homework" are inverted so that what would usually happen in class (lecture, small group discussion, activities, cross-evaluations, and Q&A) become "online homework" (or, now, "anywhere work") and what would usually be "homework" (primary writing, individual assignments, and revisions, and so on) become "class work" (or "lab work").

One of the presenters at CUNY-IT called this a "flip class" and they have some interesting data to support how well it works (details to follow). It seems to me that many of our recent posts are speaking to the desire to "flip class".

OK, "flip class" sounds like a work-out routine, but why not?

I think this could be one of our major focus points for the Spring seminars. Thoughts?

Good Blog, Bad Blog

2011-12-06T13:20:00.001-05:00

I have had two very different experiences with blogs in my 2 classes this semester: the Good Blog and the Bad Blog.

The Good Blog

My ESL099 class was quite active on the blog. Students practiced a variety of writing skills while using the blog, including summarizing, doing research, writing reports, citing sources, practicing key art vocabulary, and giving opinions.

Students for the most part worked on blog posts during class and lab and also worked on things they hadn't finished at home.

The Bad Blog

My ELL101 class was not as active on the blog. It seemed to be difficult to encourage students to do their blog posts, even though it is listed as 20% of their grade on the syllabus! The students sometimes seem overwhelmed by the many subtopics introduced in the course, but also seem to not do much homework outside of class, whether it is reading the text, catching up on missed work, or posting on the blogs. The one thing that prompted many students to do any work was to call it "extra credit."

I feel as though I didn't promote the blog enough, but also reacted to students' lack of engagement with it by requiring fewer and fewer posts on it. My great intentions of having interesting extensions to class through discussions on the blog seemed to slowly die and now I haven't given them a blog post assignment in weeks. I will give them one more assignment, a reflection on the blog use, and will have to see if anyone does it!

Reflection

I think that I did not have the same opportunity with my ELL101 class as I did with my ESL099 class. At the start of the semester, I had one of my two class days located in a computer lab, which would have allowed for interactive activities, blogging in class, and other benefits of having the computers. I was moved after one or two days because of a need from the office of student disabilities, so I reworked my class and modified all the curriculum I had been designing to use in the computer lab. I think that not having a lab during class makes a big difference in whether or not the students actually use blogs.

To make the blog more visible in the class, I could have highlighted student work on it and shown some of the students' posts in class. I did this during the first few weeks, but then lagged in doing that, as I assigned fewer blog posts and students were less active on the blog.

Increasing LaGuardia's Graduation Rate

2011-12-05T18:28:00.000-05:00

I have been heartened to read about your experiences incorporating technology into your classes. It seems to have a positive impact on the students who embrace it-even if somewhat reluctantly at first. As I've said in previous posts, my interest is in sharing information with my fellow 2.0ers that contribute to students' academic and career success. For many students that means graduating from LaGuardia before transferring to a senior college or entering the job market. Community colleges are the "mobility makers" in today's economy. They play a significant role in helping working and middle class people compete in an economy that is knowledge based.

President Mellow has set a goal of increasing LaGuardia's graduation rate by 80% from 26% to 47%. There are several college wide groups working to make this a reality. I am serving on two of these groups and there are a few others in the 2.0 community also involved in this effort

You may be surprised to learn what happens to CUNY community college students. For every 10 students who entered a CUNY community college in 2004, six year later: 6 dropped out; 1 was still enrolled; 2 earned an Associate's degree and 1 earned a Bachelor's degree. It's not because community colleges are insufficient in any way; we are significantly underfunded, students come to us under prepared, and students' lives are complex with competing demands for their time and attention making attending college a challenge. Embedding student-center technology in the classroom seems to both engage and challenge students.

I would like to hear your ideas-what do you think it will take to raise the graduation rate? Here is a link to the article, "Mobility Makers" published by the Center for an Urban Future. http://www.nycfuture.org/images_pdfs/pdfs/MobilityMakers.pdf

Moby Dick: An Illustration for Every Page

2011-12-05T12:53:00.001-05:00

"Because I honestly consider Moby-Dick to be the greatest novel ever written, I am now going to create one illustration for every single one of the 552 pages in the Signet Classic paperback edition."

This doesn't have to do with connecting classes, really, but upon learning of illustrator Matt Kish's project, I thought of Nozomi and her blogging art students:

http://everypageofmobydick.blogspot.com/search/label/works%3A%20moby-dick%20%28an%20illustration%20for%20every%20page%29

Community 2.0 on CUNY Commons!

2011-12-05T10:13:00.000-05:00

From CUNY Academic Commons onGoogle +

After going to the presentation about the Commons at the CUNY IT Conference yesterday, I decided to start a blog in the Commons that mirrors the work we are doing here.

If you are curious, the first draft of the blog is HERE.

Right now there is only a feed with 10 latest posts, but we plan to do a "best of the posts" summary every now and then also.

To be an author on this blog, just shoot me a mail. You will need to join the Commons with your LAGCC mail address.

Student-centered technology

2011-12-04T21:52:00.001-05:00

Last week students in my ENG 101 class reflected on the use of blogs. I have had this kind of activity before, and in the past I have tried to summarize what students report. But I am not certain anymore (in light of my recent presentation on 2.0 tools in composition) if summary is the best way to report such data.

For instance, a student wrote "I am not sure if my classmates do or not but I do go through each and everyone’s blog after we submit our writing. It is so great to read the writing that has come from the person sitting right next to you. Assignments have been pretty tricky and awesome at the same time but it is wonderful to see how everyone’s writing has progressed over the past 2 months." I could report this student as one of 25 (or maybe 3 or 4 of 25) that reads all of their classmates' blogs. She would be together with the following who stated: " These blogs gave us the opportunity to check out others' writing and view both weaker and stronger writers than ourselves. By seeing how our classmates write and reflect their thoughts can help us see how to become better writers and how we also make similar mistakes. I've visited many of my classmates' blogs and I have to say that many of them are strong writers and very intellectual people. They have the capacity to get all the points across and write a well organized essay. Their text to self and text to world connections were always on point. Unfortunately though, I didn't get as much love back, because not many people commented on my blogs. Perphaps many were too lazy and did not even bother to write or read others blogs. I mean it's understandable, who has time to do more than their own work, people have busy lives." But such reporting would miss the point, which is that these students set for themselves goals and practices not initiated by the instructor.

With no guidance or requirement to post to all others or to read all other blogs, these two turned the class into a more demanding and more rewarding experience. Granted, students can always choose to work on more than the assigned work, but this experience had the unique quality of not being teacher-directed yet still meeting the particular outcomes and objectives of the course, just at a more advanced level. They read more models for the assignments they had already worked on, provided more critique for them, and interacted with the ideas of as many peers as they wished. The student who reported that he did not get "as much love back" continued to provide feedback even after it was obvious there were not many following his example. Why he did and others did not is entirely a different (and hugely complex) issue but the key is that he set a pace for himself and because of blogs he was able to keep at that pace and on track. Students without blogs can also choose to do extra work, as I mentioned, but will that work be as relevant to class work as that already assigned? In these cases, it was. So, as I now look at these reflections, I explore more how students shaped the class for themselves rather than whether they went after the goals I had set for them.

How my students feel about Facebook

2011-12-03T09:59:00.003-05:00

Since it's close to the end of the semester and I'm in a reflective mood, I thought I would share some comments my ENG 101 students made about using Facebook in class. This was one of 7 questions I asked them to answer on a class evaluation survey. I will ask my 102 students to complete a similar survey in class on Monday. You can see the whole thing here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/DB8LQVY

Responses were overall quite positive and there are some good suggestions regarding future use (like incorporating more online interaction by having them comment on each other's posts). I was somewhat worried by the admission that they would do their homework while chatting online but I guess that's to be expected. At least they were doing their homework! The question is: Did you find our use of a class Facebook page to be helpful? If so, how? If not, what would you change?

Here are their responses:

Yes because it updates me on what i missed in class and anything i didnt have the chance to jot down on the assignments needed to be done. I dont think i would change much at first i wasnt comfortable with everyone being able to read my post but it turned out to be for a good purpose because it gave you the chance to see others opinions.

yes it was helpfull keep in contact whit the teacher if we have any questions and know about the h.w in time.

yes it was convinient for class informal writing

yes i did very helpful made me work harder because i was afraid of what others might say about my writing so it made me think more critically which is good.

yes i did because im always on facebook and having something educational to do on ity was a great experience

In the start of the course i completely hated the idea of Facebook but towards the end i learned to like it however, i think that people should comment more each others posts and and a discussion in class.

IT WAS GOOD. I THINK ITS A GOOD IDEA OF YOU, BECAUSE MANY PEOPLE SPEND A LOT OF TIME ON FACEBOOK AND USING FOR THE CLASS GET THEM TO DO THE HWS AND OTHER CLASS WORK WHILE CHATTING.

yes, it gives me a lot of informations. also i can see my classmates feedback inside so that i can learn from my classmate and develope my idea in my artical.

yes, it was easy to compare and contrast with other class mates.

i found it helpful because it was a easy way to get the articles and other news about the class more directly.

yes , and this very smart idea to do the homework . becasue almost everyone of this class spent many times on facebook .so while i was chatting i was doing the homework

our use of a class facebook page is helpful because we can share the idea.

Yes, it is more easy to learn something from other students. It is really helpful for me.

It is very much heplfull. The reason is, I did not have to be worry about submitt my work in ontime.

yes, I was able to review other classmate work.

This was helpful for the fact we were able to read each others work. This is a good idea but maybe facebook shouldn't be it because not many of us have facebook.

yes, it helped me keep up with assignments.

I didn't see much use to it, I would prefer all the online writings to be done in class. It does however offer a new learning experience, something different to students which is always a good thing.

Yes its helpful, because if you missed class you could go on the facebook page and see what homework you have for next class and what you missed.

yes i did its a good way to see each others thoughts and to compare and very easy to access

yes! it's very simple and you can share your ideas and get new interesting ideas from some one else.

Because i could learn and get ideas from other people's comment

Oh, Yeah: CUNY Commons in a Box!

2011-12-02T18:03:00.003-05:00

The CUNY Academic Commons Announces The Commons in a Box Project

by MATTHEW K. GOLD on NOVEMBER 22, 2011

The CUNY Academic Commons is proud to announce the establishment of The Commons in a Box, a new open-source project that will help other organizations quickly and easily install and customize their own Commons platforms. With generous support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the CUNY Academic Commons team will launch the free software project by assembling new and existing WordPress-based community and collaboration tools into a single installation package. The Commons team is delighted that the Modern Language Association will take part in the initial phase of development by using the new platform to create an MLA Commons for its 30,000+ members.

Over the past two years, the CUNY Academic Commons has been lauded for its creation of a robust academic social network that connects faculty members, administrators, and graduate students across the diverse twenty-three colleges in the City University of New York system. Built on the popular open-source platforms WordPress, BuddyPress, and MediaWiki, the network has cultivated a strong sense of community among its members by providing public and private spaces in which they can connect to one another and share their academic and administrative work. As the project has progressed, the development team of the CUNY Academic Commons has regularly shared its own work with the wider WordPress community, releasing highly rated extensions that have been downloaded over 100,000 times.

The CUNY Academic Commons team has consulted regularly with a range of institutions both within and outside of the CUNY system that have expressed interest in creating similar sites for their own communities. The core features of Commons-style networks enjoy broad appeal as institutions look for ways to penetrate institutional silos, to mitigate the effects of geographical distance, and to produce collaborative, public-facing scholarship that can help demonstrate the value of intellectual life at a time when funding for higher education is increasingly being called into question.

In contrast to projects that seek to build online communities through the kinds of proprietary and commercial social-networking platforms that routinely mine user content for advertising and other purposes, the Commons in a Box software will provide a framework for networks that are controlled by institutions and their members, and it will foreground the principles of open access, user privacy, and non-commercial sharing of intellectual work. Educational groups, scholarly associations, and other non-profit organizations will be able to leverage the Commons in a Box to give their members a space in which to present themselves as scholars to the public, to share their work, to locate and communicate with peers, and to engage in collaborative scholarship.

More HERE

The 9/11 Memorial Park

2011-12-01T23:02:00.008-05:00

Art in New York

A. Learning Objectives
Students will be able to:

Describe what happened in NYC on September 11th, 2001.
Explain why NYC created the 9/11 Memorial Park.
Analyze the effects of 9/11 on NYC in the context of Visual Arts.
Write about Landscape Architecture in the language of Visual Arts.
Evaluate resources on the LaGuardia Library Website for their research paper.

B. Reflective Description
The class visited the 9/11 Memorial Park before Thanksgiving. Writing about the park is one of the paper assignments for the course. We already visited a few 9/11 exhibitions and discussed artists and their artworks related to 9/11 this semester. However, this will be the first time for them to write about architectural elements, so I prepared "Tips for the Papers" on the official course blog. Square, Name, or Pool are research topics that I suggested for students, but they can also find another research point.

C. Conclusions
I booked this group ticket two months ago for the class to visit the "king" of all Arts in New York. The main concept was that students can only see this landmark now, not before, and this is something that symbolizes NYC of "our/their generation." It is new. For me, this field trip was personal, as well, because I was a LaGuardia student on September 11th, 2001 and experienced 9/11 on campus. In any case, I was afraid that the weather will be horrible and yes, that's right; it was terrible. Worse comes to worse, it was a Friday schedule on Wednesday [not to mention it started to rain as we entered the park!]. Nevertheless, students came and they mysteriously enjoyed the field trip. I also received a video from a student in this course. This monument opened on September 11th, 2011, and it is beautifully done.

FERPANUTS?

2011-12-01T22:39:00.000-05:00

An interesting discussion in the Chronicle about FERPA:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/protecting-student-privacy-without-going-ferpanuts/37437

Keitai Kids: Youth, Culture and Social Media in the USA and Japan

2011-12-01T05:48:00.014-05:00

An interesting video lecture on the World of Mobile that the seminar may be interested:

Keitai Kids: Youth, Culture and Social Media in the USA and Japan

"In the Mobile World, everything happened in Japan will happen for the rest of the world. Japan is the most leading country in Mobile. In anywhere else I present about mobile things, I will have a Japanese example..."
---Tomi Ahonen, one of the world’s leading experts on business implications for mobile technology and author of The Insider’s Guide to Mobile.

"The world will change more in the next 10 years, then it has in the previous 100 years." ---Chetan Sharma, 7 July 2011.

"Put your best people on mobile" ---Eric Schmidt CEO Google

[This sold-out lecture at Japan Society New York from last month was part of the New School summit "Mobility Shifts" Oct 10-16, 2011, and above quotations were in Ahonen's lecture; he urges all educators and change management professionals to prepare for helping their people to overcome troubles with the changes because these are biggest economic opportunities of all our life time.]

Cell phones (keitai), mobile media, and social media have transformed the lives of youth in Japan and the United States in extraordinary but very different ways. How does this impact education and youth culture in each country today, and what are the possibilities for the future? Do these issues look different in other parts of the world? Shin Mizukoshi, Professor of Media Studies at the University of Tokyo and a leading authority on digital culture in Japan, and Tomi Ahonen, one of the world’s leading experts on business implications for mobile technology and author of The Insider’s Guide to Mobile, discuss youth, education and social media. Moderated by R. Trebor Scholz, writer, artist, professor and director of the Politics of Digital Culture conference series at The New School. [Text from Japan Society Website.]

Reflection Blog Post Assignment

2011-11-29T12:08:00.000-05:00

Today in class, in addition to completing the Community 2.0 survey, I had students do a "Reflection Blog" considering their experience in this class using the blog. We will not have any more blog assignments, as students now need to focus on revising essays and preparing for the in-class essay final exam.

The Assignment (on our class blog):
http://language-of-art.blogspot.com/2011/11/reflection-blog-what-has-your.html

The students' reponses were very interesting (posted on their own blogs) and it is helpful to consider the difficulties students have had (with home computers, for instance), how they view the blogs, and what blog activities they liked. The students are very candid - some say they didn't really enjoy using blogs. Others surprised me by saying they often looked and and edited their blogs outside of class or looked at other students' blogs a lot. By and large, students enjoyed reading other students' blogs and posting comments as their favorite activity on the blogs.

Retrotech: Like Email . . . but On Paper.

2011-11-28T18:17:00.003-05:00

As we approach the end of the semester, I started to realize that I had a lot of my Basic Writing students who needed me to check special assignments I had given them, double-check essay revisions, and so on. One of the great things about an online grade book is that the students can see everything. One of the downsides of an online grade book it that students can see everything (and some obsess about it). My general answer when they ask me to look at something during class is "Email it to me."

I have decided I hate email. Email is no longer e-mail but e-everything: memos, announcements, advertisements, chit-chat, rants and raves, and a plethora of other junk I would rather not deal with. So, asking students to "email me" is rather like asking them to add their work onto a pile of other things I would rather not deal with and that, therefore, might get lost.

I decided to go retro-tech. I bought a pack of bright pink index cards. Now, when a student has an issue that does not require my immediate attention (such as double-checking a grade or re-reading a blog entry or an "off topic" question) they grab a pink card and put their name on it with the relevant information and hand it to me. When I have a chance (in class or at home) I go through the stack and respond as needed.

I must admit that I felt immediately less stressed about checking my email for student requests and the students also felt that they did not have to "follow up" every few minutes to see if I had checked my email. The card was in the "pink stack" and they knew that I would get to it.

So, back to my motto: The right tool for the task and the teacher. Like many of our students I may be "over" email as a useful communication tool (for my class especially) and sometimes, going lo-tech for what should be a simple task is the best.

Website discussing Twitter and the Classroom

2011-11-28T14:37:00.002-05:00

An interesting blog/project site I found out about from a friend on Facebook! This post discusses the use of Twitter in the classroom. The link to resources and videos looks promising, though I haven't explored all of it yet!

http://wheretheclassroomends.com/twitter-overview

There are other interesting things on this site, too. Many reviews of technology use, such as QR codes in the classroom, and thematic sets of resources on topics like Steve Jobs and Occupy Wall Street.

Writing self-efficacy, Web 2.0, Multilingual Writers, and Attention

2011-11-28T10:35:00.000-05:00

Hello, All!
As you may remember, I am conducting a study to consider how the use of Web 2.0 platforms in classes might affect (improve?) the writing self-efficacy of multilingual writers. To unpack that briefly:

Web 2.0 platforms have the potential to conflate the reader/writer dichotomy (e.g., you're either one or the other) to a reader-writer identity (e.g., you read, you respond/you write, someone else responds), my hope has been that by incorporating blogs into my coursework, students who self-identify as poor academic writers might have the opportunity to experience the satisfaction of having their own writing read and responded to--and seeing how others write, respond, and develop their own and others' ideas over the course of a course.

If there is a certain "satisfaction" or "payoff," does it translate into improved writing self-efficacy--the belief that they can approach a challenging writing task and persevere through its completion?

I say "multilingual" writers to include the traditional category of "ESL" students as well as Basic Writers who may be bidialectal (albeit, their perception of another dialect may be that it is "broken"), and resident ESLs (a/k/a Gen 1.5) whose language/literacy competencies are difficult to cleanly categorize. These are the students that populate our classrooms at LaGuardia with monolinguals in the minority. "Multilingual" in this sense is not only from a teacher's perspective (wow! look at the range of language experiences/competencies in this class!) as well as students' perspectives as they read each other's writing and make accommodations for communication.

Now that it's getting toward the end of the semester, I'll ask those of you who asked your students to fill out my questionnaire in September/October, to ask them fill it out again in December: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/FFXPZQ2

I'm excited to see the results, but already thinking about how I will tweak the study going forward to consider pedagogical issues (those rich, complex variables that fill a class each semester!) I hadn't anticipated beforehand. These have helped me to unpack my assumptions further. A big one includes attention, which I've mentioned on this blog previously, and will continue to elaborate in further posts. I don't mean this as in "Pay attention, guys!" as if it were as simple as that. But based on emerging studies about the brain, the Internet, and learning, I understand much better that asking students to use Web 2.0 platforms is not as simple as allowing students to use something they are used to in their so-called out-of-school literacies. (I know this is obvious to you guys as you have been developing and implementing and grappling with the consequences of your own amazing Web 2.0 pedagogies! But I'm beginning to understand this more deeply.)

It's been fantastic reading about what you're doing and I'm eager to talk/write/read more about how integrating Web 2.0 has challenged and addressed your own pedagogical goals. To be continued...

Thankful for the lovely "submit" and "ask" buttons on our blog!

2011-11-25T13:02:00.011-05:00

Dear Community 2.0 of fellow LaGuardians,

I originally wanted to write this post on Tuesday, but after approving the posts Rudy's MAT115 students submitted to the blog, I decided to wait until today. Why? To allow a steady stream of queued posts on our blog.... I must admit that I love the queue feature and I will certainly share its advantages and disadvantages (there are some, of course) at our December meeting just a couple weeks away. Yes, this Fall I 2011 session is flying by non-stop!

At any rate, the reason of this post is to report that the majority of the posts (see here, here, here, here and here) having been very positive, except for this one. We expect more submissions from MAT115.1592 in the next two weeks, along with the end of Fall I 2011 surveys. We have learned that a couple students want to vlog (video blog post), as well. Needless to mention, Rudy and I can't wait to use our nifty iPhone to record and post within minutes via our friendly user Tumblr app. Can you tell we love our gadgets and technology?

In the meantime, Rudy has graciously appointed himself as the one in charge to answer all "Math Questions" on our MathBlogLagCC. I would have volunteered, but I really would not want to disappoint the Intrawebs and Intranets Binomial Gods.

We hope the questions come more often as last sessions midterms and final exams are just around the corner.

Until the next post!

Mrs. De León

MathBlogLagCC

Beyoncé and Plagiarism

2011-11-24T23:34:00.008-05:00

Art in New York

A. Learning Objectives
Students will be able to:

Recognize and explain the differences between stealing someone's work and being inspired by someone.
Prepare a Citation Page by following the MLA System.
Evaluate resources on the LaGuardia Library Website for their research papers.
Cite images of artworks from museum database.

B. Reflective Description
Beyoncé was just accused of Plagiarism for her dance moves last month and I played the media coverage on the case before discussing Plagiarism with my class. Most students already knew how to cite sources since my course is a graduation requirement, but they did not know about Beyoncé's case. I wanted to introduce the MLA basics in a unique way but did not want to waste any class time for it, so I decided to do both at once. In this semester, for the first time in my teaching career, I am allowing my class to cite blogs, Facebook posts, and tweets for final papers.

C. Conclusions
Surprisingly, I think many of my students did not know about Beyoncé to begin with. Or were they confused because their "high art" instructor suddenly started to talk about a trivial pop culture phenomenon? In any case, this lecture actually worked fine as a regular art topic even though students were already experienced with the MLA System.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The State of Things...

2011-11-22T12:59:00.000-05:00

Next Stage

2011-11-22T10:52:00.003-05:00

The news is spreading about the mathblog. We are beginning to see comments and questions from students across courses. Our reponses to these questions will be very useful not just to the ones asking them but anyone who visit the mathblog site. We anticipate a greater participation from students across other courses as the words get out about the site and the inevitable finals.

http://mathbloglagcc.tumblr.com/

Blog or ePortfolio? 2

2011-11-21T23:04:00.012-05:00

Okay...I've got three arguments. Three ideas on the way to an argument about what we need to do.

1) Blogging.
Here is the first idea of a successful blogging: what it means to be a successful implement of "blogging" in a college-level course. No, not a "blog" but a condition of "blogging" among students that we are trying to create. This is what we mean by building an online community.

This semester, I required all students in all of my classes to start a blog. I wanted them to become independent thinkers. This project is unexpectedly going well.

2) ePortfolio.
The idea of ePortfolio. When you think about ePortfolio, you might think about an online portfolio that organizes uniformed contents, something like the Interfolio or the SlideRoom. This is not what I mean. I mean ePortfolio that separates a student from all others, something that helps my students stand out in a crowd.

The closest concept may be a digital artist's book. For me, the idea of blogging has always been associated with an expansion of ePortfolio, right from the beginning.

What I did not know was that my students had something else on their mind.

3) Trust and Independence
My painting students teamed up two weeks ago and told me that they wanted to continue with blogs only---no more ePortfolio---.

Let me go back to the point (1) above for a second. I worked very hard in the beginning of the semester to convert all of my students into bloggers. This project is unexpectedly going well. It IS successful---SO SUCCESSFUL that they are now protesting the use of ePortfolio.

After close discussions with them, I now have a better idea of what is going on. Yes, there is a lesson.

(Argument)
What should I do now? I would like to offer an overview of what would be pros and cons of Blogger.com in this environment. Blackboard is another system that can be replaced by Blogger, so I considered it when making the list below. Hope this is helpful.

Blogger.com

Pros:
Easy to use "like Facebook" (quoted from my student.)
Students can access their own sites forever after graduation (quoted from my student.)
A link to an ePortfolio can offer an expansion of the ePortfolio system.
Less down time during the midterm and the final.
More freedom in customizing the service.
Students will be able to evaluate and analyze two online systems on their own even before instructors ask them to do so.

Cons:
Blogs may be blocked on a corporate computer if students work at major corporations.
Textbook copyright issues.
No Grade Center.
No SafeAssign.
No Usage or Log-on Tracking.
Students can protest ePortfolio and/or Blackboard by learning a more intuitive user interface.

(Recommendation or Things that would happen in the near future)
Offer students an option of purchasing access to ePortfolio forever, even after two years of graduation. This is a business opportunity!
Develop a more intuitive user interface for ePortfolio [but I heard there was a long way to arrive the current "Digication" era].

Catching up - and Blogs about Internet Memes

2011-11-21T19:40:00.001-05:00

Catching Up

I apologize for being behind on blog posts. I was completely overwhelmed by conferences for a few weeks and then "the attack of the meetings" the past few weeks. I have perused Community 2.0 and hoped to have interesting posts about what my students were doing online, but did not do much online work with them the past few weeks.

I did some online searches for ideas and resources and saw some interesting activities on various wiki, blog, and online community sites. Slowly the rusty 2.0 gears started turning...

To get back into the swing of things, I combed through everyone's blog sites to see what you are all doing and get some inspiration! From posts by Ximena and Jason and comments by Justin Rogers Cooper, I was inspired to have students do some reflective blog-writing about blogging in our lab class tomorrow.

I also really liked some of the activities Luke is having students do in both classes. Some of his prompts made me consider what things "out there" on the Net would interest my students. And then certain Facebook posts I saw today (including ones by Maria) sparked my slumbering blog imagination...

Pepper Spray Everything, the Internet Meme

I wanted to try something edgy and follow a popular Internet meme trend - the Pepper Spray Cop! I will have students contemplate and write about the newest viral sensation, the "Pepper Spray Everything Movement" and consider whether this is art or not:

http://language-of-art.blogspot.com/2011/11/memes-and-art-pepper-spray-cop-goes.html

Stay tuned for comments on how this activity worked with my class!

How It Went:

The student posts about the pepper spray cop meme were very interesting. Their ideas about whether or not the meme images were art and whether or not it was a form of plagiarism were varied and led to an interesting discussion of what can be considered plagiarism, particulary when it is so easy to copy images found online.

Online course information - including a good explanation of plagiarism

2011-11-21T18:24:00.002-05:00

I also came across this site which has information for students who are doing online courses or using online tools. Some of the information is pretty useful. I liked this explanation about academic honesty and plagiarism:

http://www.onlinecollegecourses.com/2011/11/14/what-academic-honesty-means-for-online-students/

Has anyone used Wikia?

2011-11-21T17:36:00.002-05:00

I have just ran across an article on Wikia and how it provides semi-private college wikis:

http://techcrunch.com/2006/10/05/wikias-facebook-like-college-wikis/

Does anyone have any experience using Wikia?

Happy International Men's Day !!!

2011-11-19T14:28:00.001-05:00

2011-11-19T10:39:00.005-05:00

Learning Objectives:

comprehension, analysis

Assignment:

My 101 students connected to one another online as part of larger assignment. They were divided into small groups and each group was assigned an article that relates to our discussions of Fast Food Nation. Four specific tasks were defined: 1) summarize the article, 2) note who was interviewed for the article and decide whether or not they are "reliable" sources, 3) choose two important quotations and explain their relevance, and 4) prepare two discussion questions for the class. Group members chose their tasks and posted their work on Facebook. Once the initial assignments were posted, they were assigned "partners" and asked to read and respond to their partner's post. They were also told to prepare class presentations.

How it went:

Most of this went really well. Students did a great job with their assigned tasks and the presentations were terrific. They succeeded in dissecting and analyzing a possible research source and practiced their public speaking skills. The class got an overview of 6 resources and many have chosen to use some of the articles in their upcoming research essays. The part that didn't go so well was the online connection, mostly because the instructions I provided were confusing to them. A few did a wonderful job but most did not, which tells me that the fault lay with the prompt, not with them. Their comments were short and vague and not particularly useful. I would certainly do the larger assignment again but need to rethink the online connection. I may have been trying to force something for the sake of experimentation when it really doesn't belong and may end up cutting that part entirely.

On an unrelated note, I'm having technical issues with Blackboard SafeAssign and could use some advice. Many students trying to post are getting error messages saying that the system is overloaded. I planned to return comments on Monday so wanted to grade this morning and afternoon. Since most essay aren't up yet, I'm already several hours behind schedule and am afraid I won't have time for all of them tomorrow. So, what do I do? Give them an extension? Accept essays via e-mail (which will be very confusing for me)? Make them keep trying and hope they upload in time for me to read them?

What's a College Degree Worth?

2011-11-18T18:52:00.000-05:00

Lately I've been reading about the long-term impact globalization and technology have on today's students, particularly when it comes to achieving their career aspirations and earning potential. I'm also serving on a college-wide committee that's looking at ways to increase LaGuardia's graduation rate. These two issues are linked; students cannot get ahead if they don't have a college degree and the first step for many is graduating from LaGuardia.

In today's economy a college degree is one key to economic opportunity. A report published by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, "The College Payoff," reveals that the median lifetime earnings of those with a Bachelor's degree is $2,268,000 while those with a high school diploma have a median lifetime earning $1,304,000. Quite a difference! In addition to a college degree, race, gender and choice of major also have an impact on income and upward mobility. I have attached a link to the article-I think you will find it interesting and the information may be useful as you talk with students about their career choices.

http://cew.georgetown.edu/collegepayoff/

De León, Johnson & Kato's cool things!

2011-11-18T11:20:00.008-05:00

This exercise has been a fun and challenging way to work together. We haven't managed to meet face to face, but managed to email each other several times to complete our task.

Rebekah's cool thing is that her blog has homework descriptions right there, so students do not need to go to blackboard for details. We also like that she posted her mid-semester survey on her blog. Nozomi’s did gave her mid-semester survey in her class because her students are not tech-savvy and made it in a manner that the class can finish it in a minute. Overall, we were pleased that the three of us always prefer a student-centered approach like me.

Nozomi's cool things are the way she mixes the use of ePortfolio (ePortfolio is required for Art and Design majors) and blogger. This exchange allows her students to exchange digital images on each other's course blogs. Nozomi also asked students to do an optional museum visit and in return students began posting about their visits—all thanks to the new online exchange--blogger! Nozomi finds blogging as another platform for students to communicate with her. Nozomi was able to respond to their requests for assistance, though the downside was that some students did not reply back to her outreach posts afterwards.

Ingrid's cool thing is that she posts mathematical problems on her MathLaGCCBlog. I have never seen that before, and I think that students would find problems posted on a blog rather than in a book or on a blackboard are different and interesting, and more engaging. In addition, there is information about online tutoring and an invitation to ask questions on the blog, encouraging students to use online services to learn more.

It comes as no surprise that posting homework assignments on our blogs is a pretty darn cool idea. It provides us with freedom and efficiency to send our students straight to the task without having to worry about Blackboard’s wonky ways and high traffic during midterms and finals.

Open Invitation

2011-11-18T10:29:00.003-05:00

We have extend an invitation to all Mat 096 and Mat 115 students to join us
in open discussion on Tumblr. Students are permitted to post any mathematical
questions and are free to provide solution(s) to anyone else's question. We have
set up some guidelines for students to follow and our method of responding.

Our goal is to develop a larger group of math followers. As final exams are
approaching,we hope to see more activities on Tumblr.

Here We Go...

2011-11-17T13:22:00.003-05:00

Georgia Tech Wipes Class Wikis From Web

November 17, 2011, 12:34 pm

By Alexandra Rice

The Georgia Institute of Technology has stripped, at least for now, more than 10 years of class work from its collaborative-learning Web sites, known as Swikis.

Following a student’s complaint to the university that his name was listed on the Web site of a public course, Georgia Tech officials decided on Monday to remove all Swikis other than ones from the current semester, said Mark Guzdial, a professor in the School of Interactive Computing, who is a co-creator of the Swikis.
He reported the development on his Computing Education blog this week. (The tech journalist Audrey Watters picked it up on her blog.)

In his post, Mr. Guzdial recounts how he and two Ph.D. students created the Swiki, or CoWeb, in 2000, so that students would have a place to “construct public entities on the Web.” The Swikis served intentionally undefined purposes, such as providing a forum for cross-semester discussions and a home for public galleries of student work. “All of that ended yesterday,” he wrote, because of Georgia Tech’s concerns about Ferpa, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

In a letter to faculty, posted on the university’s Web site, Zvi Galil, dean of the College of Computing, says Ferpa “prohibits the release of student names in connection with any particular classes in which they have been enrolled.” Under the university’s interpretation, that includes the Swikis, because students’ names are listed on the Web sites. The step was taken to make sure that students’ information was protected, a university spokeswoman said in an e-mail to The Chronicle.

Steven J. McDonald, general counsel at the Rhode Island School of Design, said that because students themselves are not subject to the provisions of Ferpa, if they are the ones posting the material, and not faculty members, then they are acting outside the confines of the privacy act. It would be as if a student were to post something from class to YouTube, he said.

Jochen Rick, one of the Ph.D. students who helped create the Swikis, acknowledged via e-mail the potential privacy concerns. But “to me, Georgia Tech’s interpretation of Ferpa implies that their students are not capable of reasonably and actively managing their privacy,” he said. “That’s a pretty low assessment for a group of tech-savvy adults.”

Other people upset by the university’s decision have taken the conversation to Twitter by creating a hashtag, #FERPANUTS, to discuss the issue.

Brendan Streich, a spokesman for the College of Computing, said in a phone call that the Swiki content, while not visible to the public, is not lost forever. The university, he said, would repopulate any Web page at the request of a professor, but only after removing any Ferpa-sensitive information. Since that includes names, it remains unclear how the university would go about this under its interpretation of the law.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/georgia-tech-wipes-computing-class-wikis-from-web/34364

Spreading the Word

2011-11-17T10:42:00.000-05:00

This, apparently, is a week of presentations. Luke is going to the National Council of Teachers of English conference to present on peer evaluation using blogs and I am presenting at LAGCC's The English Language Center on ways to use web 2.0 tools for feedback. If you are curious as to what I will cover, the outline is below.

Simple Web 2.0 Feedback
Ximena Gallardo C., English Department

I. Introduction to Web 2.0 and Privacy Discussion

Definition of Web 2.0
Privacy Handouts

Handout for Teachers HERE.
Handout for Students HERE.

Degrees of Privacy

Public (Pu): Anyone in the world can see the feedback (but probably will not. Consider that on Nov .12 the Nielsen Company site BlogPulse identified the number of blogs to be over 176 million).
Semi-public (Semi): Only those in a community (a group or class, for example) can see the feedback.
Private (Pr): Only you or you and those you choose can see the feedback.

II. Hands-on Work with Tools Where Teachers Act as Students

Poll Everywhere (Pu)

Show: Poll Everywhere PowerPoint.
Work: Responding to Feedback Poll
Mention: Survey Monkey (Pr); Google Forms (Pr)

Google Docs (Pu, Semi, Pr)

Show: Google Docs in Plain English HERE.
Show: Group collaboration on annotating a CAT HERE.
Work: Commenting on student response HERE.
Show: Teacher-to-student feedback (Gradebook) for ENA099 HERE.

Ning (Semi, Pu); Blogger (Pu)

Discuss: Administrator-controlled space versus administrator-authorized network
Show: Peer-to-Peer feedback on Shakespeare Ning HERE. (I model, then feedback begins on page 3) .
Show: Peer-to-Peer feedback on Blogger

Google Docs Instructions HERE.
Sample Responses and feedback HERE and HERE (network-mates and me).

III. Q&A and Exploring Tools of Choice

Join Poll Everywhere HERE.
Join Google HERE.

Google Docs Tour HERE.

Create a Google Document HERE.

Blogger Tour HERE.

How to Create a Blog on Blogger HERE.
Create a Blog HERE.

IV. Feedback for the Day’s Work
Please complete a SurveyMonkey survey HERE.

P.S. One other interesting feedback tool: Voicethread (Semi-Pu)

Voicethread Demo HERE.

Join Voicethread HERE.
How to Create a Voicethread HERE.

Protecting the Brand at any Cost

2011-11-17T09:44:00.008-05:00

The Penn State story is a great illustration of how people will protect the brand of the company at any cost. Having worked most of my life in corporate America, I know how often it is done. This week's Community Blog ask students how they would handle protecting the brand,even if what was occurring was illegal.

As graduate of Penn State, I know the machine power of Penn State Football and the MILLIONS and MILLIONS of dollars it brings to the University. 100,000 people paying upwards to 200 dollars a ticket on a weekend to attend a game generates a lot of cash for the school. Brand protection is important and here is the assignment I ask them to consider.

The Penn State Football incident is a good perspective on how the real issue are getting lost in the chatter of lost jobs and people being fired who have had long careers.

In time you will all go to work for an company or organization and you may be ask to defend the image of your company in violation of the law. I don’t want you to address that situation because I think it is hard for you to answer that question at this time.

However, I want you to look at the Penn State scandal as an outsider and then answer there questions.

Why do think the Coach Sandusky was never arrested and brought up on charges even though witnesses has seen him molest a 10 year old boy in 2002?.

Do you think Coach Paterno should have been fired because he did the correct think legally but not morally?
Why do you think the President of the University participated in the coverup?
Who are the real victims here, the staff or the ten boys molested or even the football players or a combination?
Do you think an organization such as Penn State has the right to do what it take to protect its name even if a crime as been committed? Be aware there are many documented cases of this occurring both nationally and globally. Many hundreds of jobs have been saved by companies who have done at any costs what it takes to protect their image.

Speaking of the validity of non-internet sources, especially journals...

2011-11-15T19:58:00.000-05:00

Fraud Scandal Fuels Debate Over Practices of Social Psychology

I include a link to the whole article, but this part caught my attention--because I am not so sure if it is limited to just that field:

But one methodological expert, Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, of the University of Amsterdam, added a sociological twist to the statistical debate: Psychology, he argued in a recent blog post and an interview, has become addicted to surprising, counterintuitive findings that catch the news media's eye, and that trend is warping the field.

"If high-impact journals want this kind of surprising finding, then there is pressure on researchers to come up with this stuff," says Mr. Wagenmakers, an associate professor in the psychology department's methodology unit.

Knowledge Pools --> Social Media --> Collective Cognition

2011-11-15T12:30:00.005-05:00

Justin Rogers-Cooper

Classes that think online teach other. Students that learn from each other combine knowledge. Students that combine knowledge perform better individually, but do so while their individual work more openly 'echoes' the work of other students.

Learning Objectives

Knowledge, Comprehension, Analysis

Knowledge Pools: Assignment Description

Last Monday the students in my Language and Human Rights class wrote blogs that summarized the main elements of non-violent theory. Here's how they did it: first, each group was assigned a different essay by MLK, Jr, on non-violence. Each group summarized the main points and found/defined keywords. They all read/re-read the essays and found a consensus about the main ideas.

Then I paired each group with another group: I told them to teach other the essays they discussed in their groups. The students in one group took notes on what the other students taught them. The groups then blogged about what they were taught, *not* about the essay their group first discused.

In some cases, I joined a third group to the these new, larger groups. They all then taught each other the new material in big bunches.

Social Media: How it Went

In the next class on Wednesday, we started off with their blogs. I listed several main ideas from their blogs on the board, and then we opened the MLK text to some of the main ideas they were working with. The point of the day was to move the discussion of non-violent theory into an analysis about how non-violence actually works. So after our discussion, we watched clips from the PBS documentary Citizen King on the Birmingham March in 1963. After pausing and discussing what we saw throughout, we had a brief discussion about the main ideas.

I then told the students to brainstorm on Twitter - and an outpouring of at least 50 Tweets sparked and rippled througth the class. I had the Twitter feed on the projector and we watched the ideas water through. Some of the Tweets overlapped with each other, while others pushed new ideas into the mix. The students were writing and thinking in real-time, but sharing every thought with one another. You could see knowledge as a kind of liquid pouring through the classroom, and see it freeze into different themes.

Collective Cognition: Conclusions

As the students Tweeted, I would yell out insightful examples and exclaim out new ideas. When they finished, I told them to use the Tweets as a basis for a revised blog. Since the Tweets were full of original critical thinking, they were to comb through the ideas and match them into the non-violent theories they wrote in their Monday blogs. Students used the rest of the class time to draft paragraphs that used Citizen King as an example for them to analyze and to develop critical thinking around non-violence.

It has occured to me more frequently and more forcefully of late that the students are sharing both summaries and critical thinking with each other. Yes, each student is authentically conjuring new ideas - but some of the more compelling ideas end up finding their way into student essays (nearly everything they write ends up in an essay). Where does the border between one student and another begin and end? Since they're composing together, they cheer each other on with new ideas and add to and contest each other's work. Plagiarism be damned: this is the knowledge pool organized into social media, and then shaped into scholarship!

In all my classes I've noticed that the students learn more from teaching each other and from learning from each other than any other method.

Social media helps students become teachers.

Opening up the flood post gates... we hope!

2011-11-14T17:34:00.003-05:00

In the past week or so, Rudy and I decided to open the tumblr function whereby students ask and are able to post questions regarding any MAT115 or MAT096 issues directly on the blog.

Two students are interested in writing a text about their experience with a hybrid course experience and the ability to interact/practice homework assignments directly on the blog.

I will also be collecting mini-videos to allow student to talk to a live camera.

Lastly, I will be once again, visiting the MAT096 sections to continue encouraging this online interaction.

Our hope is to open up the doors (ask and submit a post option) and let the interaction begin a larger scale begin.

We hope for the best of course and no harsh posts, of course!

Article: "The effect of Twitter on college student engagement and grades"

2011-11-14T10:30:00.001-05:00

Though I haven't read through it yet, the study detailed in Junco, Heibergert, and Loken's "The effect of Twitter on college student engagement and grades" (Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, April 2011) shows more student engagement and higher grades. I'm looking forward to reading it, and to seeing how engagement is defined in the study.

Speaking of reflection (as Jason was) the term engagement has become almost a toss-off, as Carol Rodgers, who has written extensively about reflection in learning and teaching, explores in her work.

One awesome thing that article author Rey Junco did on his blog was summarize each section of their 14-page article in tweet form - i.e., in 140 characters or less.

The Art of Reflection

2011-11-14T09:20:00.003-05:00

Ximena and I have been seriously considering the role of reflection in our Basic Writing classes. On the one hand, we have very little time with them before the CUNY Assessment Test in Writing (the test comes in week 10), so every minute of class time is essential. Additionally, many students simply will not do homework, so we try to keep as much of the course content in the classroom. They read in class and write in class. The upside is we can see how they read and how they write. The downside is we can only really count on the 40 hours we have them in class for work. And, honestly, we do not have enough time to change their counter-productive behaviors either. A few, sure--but not all of them.

In any case, we have 4 units in our classes that run approximately 2 weeks each. I had always favored a "reflection" blog entry at the end of each unit that I would use as the basis for their evaluation. You can see our basic evaluation rubric HERE (this is its maiden voyage, so we are still negotiating the points and etc.) However, this semester the schedule seemed very tight as we changed the schedule a bit to have a preliminary unit on writing and rhetoric. We ended up dropping the reflection for the second unit at the last minute as it seemed an excessive amount of work for the students that they were unlikely to do in any case.

Epic fail. Though we did not notice at the time. We picked the reflection back up for the third unit and the students, by and large, really hit it. Overall, we were shocked by how well the students have been able to gauge their own performance in the class and in writing. We were also very impressed by the level of engagement in the course that the students demonstrate in their entries. Here are three examples from Ximena's class. I am particularly impressed with their sense of audience.

Student 1
Student 2
Student 3

We are reviewing this blog series now, so I will have a follow-up to this post shortly. But I can tell you now, I am never dropping reflection out of an instructional unit ever again.

Photo thanks to killer_muffin.

Blogging and the Arts of the Contact Zone (or what I've been learning I didn't know this semester...)

2011-11-12T08:52:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Luke for his post about blogging...
I find the student entries (see example below) in that article striking for their insight, incisiveness, and fluency in/facility with academic language/literacy. (And maybe there was a bit of cherry-picking in finding a blog post that mirrored the intention of the blog itself...)
"The use of blogs in the classroom has helped me to better articulate my ideas and interpretations of the text as well as to bond with my fellow classmates. The blog has served like a series of student journal entries, unifying our class in our quest for knowledge and understanding. The blog format has helped me to be more concise and get right to the point of what I'm trying to say. Also, the blog is significantly more informal than short essay assignments, allowing me to express my ideas in a raw form, then refine them later and make them suitable for a formal paper."
Most of my students this semester in my Intro to Language are not close to this combination of meta-awareness and academic language/literacy "fluency" (for lack of a better word).
To the community 2.0 folks: I'd be interested to know about your experiences and see samples of your students' writing. This semester I am teaching in the cluster (with Justin) and we've found that most of these students are right out of high school--and some of the poorest performing high schools in New York. They come with a sure deficit in critical thinking, reading, writing, and language skills--and this sure potential that has not been tapped and exercised in meaningful ways to make them proud and sure of their thoughts and opinions and how they shape and inform their knowledge. I've been backpedaling all semester to meet them at their point of need. But trying at the same time to locate their point of strength so they have something solid to build on. Naturally in this "community" the constellation of strengths and constellation of deficits will be just that--constellations--up close separate and burning--from far enough away--a contained shape within which we can work. It's taken a while to get a sense of that shape--of that space. Of what Mary Louise Pratt would call a contact zone.
Next semester I'm teaching an honors section of Intro to Language, so it will be a different demographic of LaGCC student. But not that different: I have still found in my honors sections students who scramble to "paper over" their deficits. This semester has taught me that next semester I want to make the focus of the blog much more about language awareness. Not the "linguistics content" kind of awareness, but the actual process of languaging that happens while blogging, while reading and responding to each other's blogs, the language in which they choose to express themselves, and the relationship to knowledge-building they notice.
I guess I'm hoping for a much more authentic experience for them and for me and it will need to begin with the blog post prompts. This semester the prompts assumed a certain "acculturation" into academic culture. I'm thinking now about what Mary Louise Pratt, in "The Arts of the Contact Zone" calls transculturation, where, to begin with, it will be more transactional.
And I'm thinking about the blogs as spaces similar to her safehouses...
I guess I assumed they'd be safe houses, but in fact, I think we need to negotiate together much more fundamentally what these spaces are that we are building...
More on that later!

Article on Blogs and composition

2011-11-11T23:42:00.001-05:00

Maybe it's my contribution to the seminar. Maybe I am just thinking this topic 24/7 as I am presenting on it next week at NCTE. :) Or maybe both--nonetheless, here is an article I found interesting on blog pedagogy. Of course the writers have a particular pedagogical model in mind (what they call the agonistic classroom) and thus favor a central multi-authored blog--such as this one--over the hub models with each student having their own which most of us use in our classrooms.

Bridging the Composition Divide: Blog Pedagogy and the Potential for Agonistic Classrooms

by Janice Wendi Fernheimer and Thomas J. Nelson

Since the emergence in 1999 of online self-publishing tools such as Blogger, blogs have grown exponentially in many arenas--political reporting, private life, and education. As many readers will know, a blog (contraction of "weblog") is a web site composed of generally brief, frequent entries arranged in reverse chronological order. The convenience of easy-to-use, form-based interfaces has led to an explosion of the so-called blogosphere. As of November 2005, Technorati.com (a search engine that specializes in blogs) indexed 21.9 million blogs in its database, and there are estimates that 80,000 new blogs are created every day (approximately one per second) (Dyrli). Though blogs have been used in many ways, they tend to exhibit certain identifiable generic attributes, including a blurring of public and private modes of writing or behavior. This article will consider how we as writing teachers might use this new genre. We will first consider how the quasi-public, semi-private generic attributes of blogs trouble the traditional divide in writing instruction between expressivist and social constructivist theories. Then, we will discuss a model for using blogs in the writing classroom to promote intellectual community and agonistic engagement in the proto-public space of the classroom. Rather than using blogs as a tool to facilitate a type of online journaling, we will focus on the implications of using a single, multiply-authored class blog as the central interface for the writing classroom.

[CLICK LINK ABOVE FOR THE REST OF THE ARTICLE]

Micro/Global/Scope

2011-11-08T10:32:00.000-05:00

Hi all! I am writing a magazine article on the New York based BioBus this week (http://biobus.org/) and ran across the founder's other project: Microglobalscope (http://www.microglobalscope.org/) which is exactly the type of thing we are trying to do. I think he has some really fantastic ideas that work for the sciences. Maybe we can get "Dr. Ben" to come speak to our group. Thoughts?

Sharing on FB

2011-11-06T16:35:00.002-05:00

We've hit the time of the semester when everyone's feeling overworked and overwhelmed (or is it just me?) and I'm hoping to use Facebook - along with group work and good ole class discussion - to accomplish several things this week.

Objectives include:

ensure students do the reading;

encourage them to consider the major issues raised in the assigned chapter,

practice introducing and explaining quotations in small groups,

practice quoting and using in-text citations,

do a peer critique as a class, and

refine and expand on their work through individual in-class writing.

Since we'll be working on "sandwiching" quotations in class, I want them to have actual quotations to work with. So, I asked them to choose one passage from the assigned reading that stands out to them, post it on FB, and write a sentence or two about why it's important. The deadline was noon today and most of them have posted good, solid responses.

Tomorrow, I'll break them into groups and ask them choose one of the posted passages to work with. Working together, they will write one sentence that introduces the main idea of the passage and one that explains its significance. We'll discuss their sentences as a class and then they'll write individual paragraphs fleshing out their ideas that they will also post on FB.

I've done this sort of thing before and I like the idea of combining different tools and activities. I hope that sharing their work online will provide a sense of accomplishment for those that do well and models for those that could do better. Ideally, this work will also help them as they revise their midterm exams and begin to draft their next formal essay.

Information Vs Knowledge

2011-11-03T23:33:00.003-04:00

This year, the advisory team of Phi Theta Kappa has been guiding the students in the research of the topic assigned by the organization's National Headquarters, "The Democratization of Information: Power, Promise, and Peril." One of the students interviewed Dr. Chaffee on the issue, and as I read the interview I found one except really relevant to what we are doing in the seminar, and I think it also highlights our future work as educators. Seems to me we have an ethical and professional responsibility to be helping the students make sense of what is available to them than to simply ask them to avert their eyes and ignore the internet and new technologies that make so much information readily available to them. Here is the except from Dr. Chaffee's interview:

Q: How does the media, press, and the internet influence the democratization of information?

Dr. Chaffee: Well, it’s interesting. On the one hand, it makes it more available. Anybody with a computer now can access any kind of information. The problem is that a lot of that information is worthless or worse, it’s false, and it really highlights this idea that information is not knowledge, information is just stuff. Information doesn’t become knowledge until the human mind acts on it, until it analyzes it and applies, synthesizes it, evaluates it, integrates it and makes use of it. But also, determines whether the information has value, and if it has value, what value and how it ought to be used. So on the one hand, there is the accessibility to an infinite amount of information, opinions and all sorts of stuff. But if the person doesn’t have the intellectual abilities, the critical thinking abilities to really sift through and evaluate the processing and make sense of all that stuff it really doesn’t have much value. In fact, it can be dangerous and destructive because people would read things or be exposed to things that they consider to be information, which then they might think is knowledge or something that has value when it doesn’t, and that can lead to dangerous and destructive actions.

Remind you of anything?

2011-11-03T17:40:00.002-04:00

‘Speed Dating’ Peer-Review Writing Workshops

November 3, 2011, 11:00 am

By Ryan Cordell

Extract from the article:

[....]
The format is pretty simple, though it requires some preparation and classroom reorganization. Here’s what I do to set up the workshop:

I ask students to bring a printed copy of their introductions to class. Because this exercise requires students to move frequently (more on that shortly), laptops can be unwieldy.
I arrive at the classroom at least ten minutes prior to the start of class. I move the chairs (and, if the room has them, tables) so that there are two concentric rings of chairs. The chairs in the inner ring should face the chairs in the outer ring. When students arrive I make sure they sit in the rings.
I also bring some music to class—a song that plays for approximately 4 minutes. I usually plug my iPhone into the classroom sound system (if there is one), but you could just as easily bring in a portable music player or some laptop speakers.
I ask students to get out their printed introductions, one piece of paper, and a pen or pencil.

After this preparation, the workshop is pretty simple. When the music starts, facing pairs of students exchange introductions. They read each other’s paragraphs and then give their partners one specific piece of advice about how to improve their introductions. This advice is delivered aurally, and students write down their partner’s advice on their papers. Hopefully they can do this before the song ends (which doesn’t always happen in the first round but almost always happens within a few rounds). When the music stops, the students in the inner ring stand up and rotate to the next partner. I restart the music and they begin the process again. In 40 minutes students get feedback from 10 of their peers.

Read more HERE

No Wonder our Students Love our Techie Classes

2011-10-29T09:03:00.000-04:00

Social Networking Affects Brains Like Falling in Love

BY: ADAM L. PENENBERGJuly 1, 2010

Photographs by Bryce Duffy

Neuroeconomist Paul Zak has discovered, for the first time, that social networking triggers the release of the generosity-trust chemical in our brains. And that should be a wake-up call for every company.

The essence of affection. The cuddle chemical. In other words, oxytocin. This hormone, produced daily by your brain and mine, is the reason I'm on my back, trying to remain perfectly still inside a magnetic-resonance-imaging machine secreted in the basement of a cheerless building at the California Institute of Technology. Even though I am cocooned by earplugs and noise-cancellation headphones, it's freakishly loud in here, a mix of jackhammer pulses and a hurricane whoosh of air. In other words, it's your typical MRI experience -- save for the Apple laptop bolted a couple of feet above my head, the mouse on my chest, and the unbearably sad video playing on the MacBook screen.

The full article is HERE.

Facebook: From the Chronicle

2011-10-28T21:33:00.005-04:00

I suppose on some fronts this may be new/s.

Students Push Their Facebook Use Further Into Course Work

October 27, 2011, 4:28 pm

By Alexandra Rice

College students are taking social media to a new level, using Web sites like Facebook to communicate with other students about their coursework, according to results of a new survey on student technology use.

Nine out of 10 college students say they use Facebook for social purposes, like writing status updates and posting pictures. And the majority, 58 percent, say they feel comfortable using it to connect with other students to discuss homework assignments and exams. One out of four students even went so far as to say they think Facebook is “valuable” or “extremely valuable” to their academic success.

Get the rest HERE.

Community 2.0 Agenda 28 October 2011 10:00-01:00 E255

2011-10-28T11:40:00.001-04:00

Community 2.0 Agenda

28 October 2011

10:00-01:00 E255

Printable Copy

10:00-10:10 Welcome!

10:10-10:20 The Coolness That is Us: Tech Demo

10:20-11:30 On the Blog and In the Room: Strengthening Our Community.
The printable directions are HERE.

11:30-11:45 Break

11:45-12:15 Working with Objectives: RadioJames Objectives Builder

12:15-12:55 JAM 1 Begins HERE (and in the links folder above)

12:55-01:00 Reminders

Reminders: December Meeting

Tool Demos
Team: Working on Connections Activities
Reflecting on the Semester
Be prepared to run-through your activity in the Spring meeting

Transforming the world, one platform at a time: Hutchison, Gazzola, Jerskey

2011-10-28T11:30:00.001-04:00

In Fundamentals of Career Advancement, the class is completely online. (David only knows what they look like from their avatar (and e-portfolio! he lurks!)). David is using the revolution at Occupy Wall Street to get students to think about how what's happening in the world today will affect their careers and their lifetime earning potential.
This is a nice segue to Judith's goal of integrating career planning into course content. (Judith is herself a LaGuardia alumna. She's Director of the Career Development Center. (more on that later.) Her overall goal is to help students make the transition from working class to middle class. One distinguishing characteristic, for example, is that these students are often the first in their family to attend college. She gets them to ask: What is that world like? How can we use the academic world to prepare them to be self-actualized, to have the self-efficacy and knowledge and skills to eventually have autonomy over the direction of their lives.
Maria's platforms, including Google Docs and Google Spreadsheet allow students to access the information more easily than either paper or even Blackboard. The platforms make students more technology savvy, which is important for their academic and career success (Maria would call this technology literacy). The platforms promote academic, linguistic, and technological literacies. These literacies are essential for the 21st century citizen! These platforms mimic the learning community in which the students are participating, but also the real world digital communities that they will surely move into as they advance in their academic, professional, social, and political lives.

How, When and Why Connect Students? Meangru, Pacht, Smith

2011-10-28T11:23:00.003-04:00

Snazzy Title (Ari, Luke, and Vera, all amazingly cool)

2011-10-28T11:17:00.001-04:00

We went over our websites--we all use blogger and we explored the benefits and limitations of commenting on posts versus writing threads. Some of the benefits of blog rolls is that they serve as a student portfolio, but at the same time the lack of threaded discussion makes an ongoing conversation difficult. Ari's blog includes a separate blog where all students are authors and contribute recipes as art, and this will be an ongoing repository of their contributions to continue to future semesters. Luke's class blogs connect students from different classes and allow interactions between them, such as this one and Vera's students have to choose a philosopher with whom they agree and comment on him in the comments section of the post.

Our Intellectual Property: Blogs, Blackboard, and Students

2011-10-28T11:08:00.007-04:00

In our group conversation we went over the relative merits of Blogger over Blackboard, discussed how students use blogs to post and comment on each others' writing, also discussed using Twitter feed and Google Groups for discussion, and finally spoke to the benefits and challenges of these tools.

Although time-consuming occasionally, we have all found blogs to be a valid tool for classroom use. Dr. X reports that her blog allows her a space to assign tasks, to communicate with students, and to provide her students with a space to grow and evolve their writing ability. Since she's working with many basic and developing writers, giving them a space on Blogger to expand their capacities for putting thoughts into words is particularly helpful. Aaron showed how he's begun leaving assignments on blogger for students to respond to, and how he hopes to begin incorporating more low-stakes and discussion-oriented activities into his class. Dr. Jrc showed how he's been "live blogging" during his writing workshops with students in class, how Twitter can feed class discussions and out of class reading, and how Blogger has generally become an outstanding tool for organizing on-going essay assignments, blog prompts, and student blogs. The blogs have also become a great space for peer evals and cross-class peer commentary.

The subject of intellectual property also came up as a key difference between Blogger and Blackboard. There is some concern about the legal ownership of intellectual property by CUNY whenever someone posts something to Blackboard. We all feel strongly that open-source content free of legal riga-ma-rool is the most ethical direction for the future.

There was a challenge about making Blogger the ultimate tool for coursework because Dr. Jrc questioned whether or not it could host PDFs. Dr. X said it could, because a blog could link to a Google Doc, and that G-Doc could be used to upload an off-site PDF. A PDF from a text that's been scanned could be merged into a G-Doc.

The challenges can literally occur in the lab itself. The computer classroom disrupts the signal to Blogger (and Twitter) and makes it hard for students to all comment at the same time.

[Image from Free Design Web]

Parking Deals

2011-10-28T09:50:00.001-04:00

Last week Prof. M was heading uptown Manhattan. He parked his car at 87th street and 2nd avenue at a lot that charges $10.50 for the first hour and a certain amount for each fractional hour thereafter. He remembers paying $33 for about 3.5 hours of parking. This week he was heading uptown again and decided to park for 4.5 hours two blocks before 87th street at a lot that charges $9.50 for the first hour and $6.50 for each fractional hour thereafter. Assume it would have cost him $0.25 to drive up to 87th street. Did Prof. M saved any money by not driving to 87th street?

Finding your passion

2011-10-27T23:28:00.003-04:00

Sometimes students discover a passion for an occupation when they take a course, read a book, meet someone on an internship or have an experience that leads them in an unexpected direction. In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Henrietta’s great-granddaughter Erika was inspired by Henrietta’s experience to study science.

Were you inspired by any of people in the book? Some readers may be inspired by
issues that people faced during the time period covered in this book. These circumstances can also bring occupations to mind.

Listed below are some of the people in the book and their occupations. A few issues are also listed. What other occupations come to mind as you read the book? Add them to the list. Select an occupation that interests you and visit http://www.nycareerzone.org/ to learn more about it. Share the occupation you selected and share some of the information you learned. Find a student who selected an occupation similiar to yours and discuss what you like and disliked about the occupation.

Mary Kubicek was a lab technician responsible for preparing and storing tissue samples.

Roland Pattillo, is a college professor at Morehouse and was George Gey’s only African-American student.

Michael Rogers is a reporter who wrote for Rolling Stone magazine.

George Gey was a researcher who worked as a carpenter to pay his way through
school.

Margaret Gey was a surgical nurse and supervised the lab where tissues were stored.

Richard Wesley TeLinde was a surgeon who conducted research into the causes of various diseases.

Gary, Deborah’s cousin was a minister, attending to peoples’ emotional and spiritual needs.

Henrietta’s children suffered from a variety of health issues. A Community Health Worker educates people on how to address a variety of health issues.

Civil Rights attorney protects peoples’ rights when they are violated.

Blog or ePortfolio?

2011-10-27T22:41:00.003-04:00

Beginning Painting

A. Learning Objectives
Students will be able to:

Optimize photos of their paintings using Microsoft Paint Tool.
Create an ePortfolio with a Fine Arts template.
Link a blog to an ePortfolio.
Explain how to add a text module and a gallery module.

B. Reflective Description
This was the most productive ePortfolio workshop ever. By the time it ended, all students had their own ePortfolio with at least one image in the gallery module under the text module, which contains the course description. Painting students are not very tech savvy, but thanks to our well-prepared lab tech, the class went through a lot in two hours! I asked my students to bring in two digital images of painting assignments but already knew few students would photograph their paintings during the workshop.

C. Conclusions
My students might need to stop blogging and start working on ePortfolio. One student was not comfortable with the idea of having her blog on her newly created ePortfolio. I also thought a blog can look sloppy when seeing it with an ePortfolio because my class uses a blog like a sketchbook; it has its own quality and value, but does putting them together benefit my students in the way I want? I first thought that it was a great idea, but I am not sure now. I am curious to find out what my options would be to use both, blogs and ePortfolios, in one class.

Blog Assignment 1

2011-10-26T19:49:00.000-04:00

http://dralbrechts-intro.blogspot.com/2011/10/blog-assignment-2.html

Peer Evaluations: ENG 101

2011-10-26T09:12:00.004-04:00

Justin Rogers-Cooper

Bloom's Taxonomy: analyzing, evaluating, creating

Class Activity

This past weekend my ENG 101 Ethics of Food (EF) and my ENG 101 Language and Human Rights (LHR) students evaluated each other's blogs. They had already practiced evaluating each other's blogs on two previous occasions. I posted about this the first time and felt disappointed by the results, both in terms of participation and outcome. I received wise counsel from this Community 2.0 network, and I decided to be patient and continue working toward these cross-class peer evaluations.

The task for the cross-class evaluation was to reproduce the kinds of evaluation that both classes practiced in previous class blog reviews, as well as in out-of-class essay peer reviews. The terms of evaluation were quite familiar to the students by now: argument, topic sentence, unified paragraph, quotation, citation, paraphrase, critical thinking, context, and directions (I define directions as the writer's technique of communiciating to the reader what is actually happening in their writing, such as, "In his blog I will discuss," or, "first I will discuss this and then I will discuss that"). I have been instructing them all along to respond to each other through the lens of these specific techniques and skills.

I left both classes directions on the main course blogs, and then paired the students up somewhat randomally with students from the other class. I left them with a name and a link. I told both classes that the assignment would detect their ability to communicate with a general audience. Would they be able to explain their ideas, their texts, and their course to an outside party? I have often discussed this "general audience" alongside the specific audience of their peers and myself, particularly on blogs.

How It Went

This went much better than I thought it would. Students worked hard to provide this "general audience" with an idea of their writing. Students left evaluations that tactfully used the writing skills and techniques we've been rehearsing in class discussion, peer review, and previous blog comments.

For example, a LHR student left an evaluation of an EF student that was longer than the blog (see here). Another LHR student expressed relief to finally see what the "other class" was learning about (here). Two of the LHR students left specific suggestions about how to revise an EF student's blog (here). We have practiced in both classes how critiques must always be followed by specific suggestions that give the writer something practical to do; in this case, the student suggests that the writer "introduce the the text by directing the reader to the context and therefore the use of quotation and citation would be very effective." Some of the comments were quite constructive with their criticism (here). There is actually too much to discuss in the little space of this blog.

From the other side, the EF students also provided good comments, although the participation in this class was less than ideal (this has been a problem class for me all semester). Nonetheless, many of the comments were specific and thorough (here). In some cases, the EF students made comments directly upon the key ideas that individual LHR students were using for their second essays; this kind of criticism becomes very valuable, then, for this reason (here). Some students were quite attentative to the idea of directions mentioned earlier (here). Again, there are too many examples to discuss individually in this blog.

Conclusion

Both classes received valuable constructive criticism from students in the other class. This activity showed me that both classes can use their knowledge of writing techniques and structures to comment upon content from a completely different course. This means that they understand the difference between those skills and simply having an opinion about content. It also means that they're internalizing those skills to a point where they feel confident enough critiquing other students. This gives me a great deal of information as an instructor.

There are few nuts and bolts issues I'd change: I provided links to student blog pages, but I should have provided links to specific blogs. There was some confusion, even though in my directions I told the students to look for the mention of specific texts to identify the correct blog. This extra step was redundant. I never would have known to go that extra step, however, because I've never done this before.

Finally, I'm going to provide time in-class for students to revise their blogs based on the comments they've received. I've explained to both classes that I will assess their blogs at the end of the semester using a different rubric than the one I've used so far. At the end, I will evaluate for polish and revision, whereas so far I have a rubric that evaluates how closely their blogs align with the assignment.

A Class Wordle

2011-10-25T19:49:00.002-04:00

Just for fun, here is what we discussed today:

Interlinking our students!

2011-10-25T13:58:00.004-04:00

What happened?

We have ventured into a major stepping stone--MAT096 to interact with MAT115 on the blog!

How?

Educo Software technology allows us to reach out to those specifics sections we targeted from the beginning of this blog, however, there were some glitches with accessing such sections and permission rights for this Fall I 2011. (It was one of those moments whereby Prof. Meangry oscillated between that “I love/hate technology” scenario). This was last Thursday, but luckily we were able to fix that glitch today.

The messages have been posted and emails have been sent to both faculty and all five MAT096 (.1558, .1572, .1589, 6528 & .6547). We will keep you posted and pray that technology doesn’t pull any tricks on us.

Here’s what we emailed:

Dear MAT096 Faculty,

Ingrid C. De Leon and I sent out a message this morning to reach out to your MAT096 students to participate and continue to enrich our MathBlogLaGCC online community of MAT115 and MAT096 students.

We request your assistance to encourage students to engage their MAT115 classmates by doing the following:

Ask students to go to:

http://MathBlogLagcc.tumblr.com and choose to answer the first three problem listed on the blog.

Here are the direct links:

MAT096 Problem #1:

http://mathbloglagcc.tumblr.com/post/11907970150/factor-over-integers#disqus_thread

MAT096 Problem #2:

http://mathbloglagcc.tumblr.com/post/11742171523/x-1-2-x-1-2-x-2-x-2-x-1-x-3

MAT096 Problem #3:

http://mathbloglagcc.tumblr.com/post/11612998063/binomial-x-binomial-foil

Students will be asked to log-in with their email address, or twitter or Facebook. We recommend that they inform us of their last name and their MAT096 section to trace back each answer/comment to you.

Should you find it appropriate, please offer extra credit incentives for posting on our blog. This type of incentive can definitely increase engagement and interactions between MAT115 and MAT096 students.

We deeply appreciate your support and encouragement to keep this online growing with active and positive interactions.

All the best,

Prof. Meangru & De León

What we learned?

Always pray and breathe deeply when assuming all of your rights certain for software are updated and that one can figure out the glitches sooner than later.

And

Students are more patient than one would think!

Half-way thorough this session and thus far this blogging experience has been a upward ladder learning experience.
Have a wonderful week!

Ingrid

Twitter and Critical Thinking: In-class Low-Stakes (III)

2011-10-25T12:16:00.008-04:00

Justin Rogers-Cooper

Bloom's Taxonomy: Analyzing, Applying, Creating

Class Activity

Besides using Twitter to create context and main ideas sentences and paragraphs, Twitter can also be useful for critical thinking. In my two ENG 101 courses I have recently emphasized critical thinking strategies for students to employ in their essay paragraphs. One of the strategies I have stressed is the "keyword" strategy. I've defined keywords as critical ideas found in the text or created to describe an important passage or idea from the text. To be a keyword, students must define it as "an idea that describes more than one thing." Therefore, to use a keyword successfully students must define it and have two examples at the ready. In my Language and Human Rights class, a keyword that arose has been "sadism," which we've used to discuss lynching. In my Ethics of Food class, we've used the key word "environmentalism," in the context of factory farms (eating meat is the leading cause of climate change, and so active environmentalists must consider food choices as more important than recycling, transportation decisions, and consumption habits).

In a recent class, I began class by asking the students to find one keyword from the text (Eating Animals, Southern Horrors). On Twitter, they Tweeted their word, the page number, and a brief definition of the term. If they created the keyword, they had to put a small phrase in quotes "like this" to act as a marker for the passage in the text.

After they Tweeted, I had two students each share the keyword they Tweeted. As a class, we listened to them explain their keyword. They read their relevant passage out loud from the text. They gave more details about their choice. Then, I had students find another example from the text that "fit" their keyword. I then explained how this verified the keyword: it must explain more than one thing.

I then explained that critical thinking means linking different passages in the text together by connecting keywords. Looking at the board (where I took notes), I asked them to identify a connecting keyword. Students then volunteered their own keywords, or that of a peer. We then connected the new keyword to the one in question.

When the students got the hang of this, I told them to go into their Twitter feed. From the Twitter feed, I instructed them to select a keyword that another student Tweeted and to "star" it. I then explained that they should "reply" to the Tweet. In the reply box, they should write down the keyword they found, add their own keyword, and then write an explanation of the relationship between the two in the reply Tweet.

How It Went

Going back and forth from Twitter to class discussion to text to dry-erase board to Twitter worked very well. I went around as students composed their Tweets, and offered suggestions about using a different economy of language; many of the students are still trying to figure out how to say a lot in such a small Tweet. Students seemed to enjoy the chance to reply to each others' Tweets as a kind of intellectual social networking. It also made the students who feel behind on Twitter more connected to it as an easy form of media. It also helped students practice critical thinking strategies in a low-stakes environment, even as I reminded them that these ideas could work in their second essays and as fodder for the midterm next week.

Conclusions

Twitter has proven extremely useful as in-class, low-stakes form of media for building class ideas, archiving student thinking, and practicing writing strategies - including critical thinking. I've had more success using Twitter in-class than out-of-class to generate student connections so far, even though both classes seem to be more comfortable and Tweeting more frequently in the past two weeks.

Invitation to five Mat 096 Classes

2011-10-25T10:03:00.006-04:00

My colleague, Ingrid, have met with faculty from five Mat 096 classes to discuss our project and get their support to encourage their students to participate in the math blog. Also these faculty have given her a few minutes of their class time to talk to their students about it.

Each week we have been posting a set of problems that are appropriate at the Mat 096 level, but with a greater degree of expectations. This week we have reached out to these students to participate in the math blog http://mathbloglagcc.tumblr.com/ through their e-mail and online learning system.

What is really going on in Zuccotti Park?

2011-10-25T09:08:00.007-04:00

Quote

Rich and successful is good, but at any cost is not good. BE RESPONSIBLE!

Second Blog Assignment Zuccotti Park Demonstrations

Educational Connection:

To create an awareness of the link between social media and the power of people demonstrating to create change.

Personal Impact:

The business community and in particular banks are under huge pressure to review their compensation packages and spread the wealth. As a entrant to the work force in the next 5 years you may find the world has changed some as a result of what is happening in Zuccotti Park.

My Overview:

I spent 5 hours with the demonstrators on Oct 24 and here are some of my discoveries. These again are only statements made to me via groups of demonstrators and in all cases would have to be further verified.

Corporation control the money flow and place profits as the number one goal.
The vast income wealth in the USA is controlled by 1% of the population.
Most industry would only do environmental protection if mandated to do it.
Banks control both political parties.
Corporations are only accountable if mandated to by law to compy.
The city’s cleanup plan was an effort to get rid of the demonstrators.

In the last month there has been a continuous demonstration called Occupy Wallstreet in Succoth Park in lower Manhattan. There has been a lot of press coverage on the event and this assignment is to ask your opinions about this Occupy Wall Street Movement. Review the questions and then investigate the internet for the answers.

DUE Date on this Assignment is October 31 at 930AM

How did it get started?
What are their expected results?
Do you feel that this is an effective way to get their point across why or why not?
Identify other cities that this movement has gone to?
Peaceful demonstrations like Occupy Wall Street were the mark of Ghandi and Martin Luther King, how effective do you think they are as opposed to the more aggressive demonstrations of the Arab Spring.
Locate one or two pictures about the protest that you think best identifies your attitude about the current economic state in the USA and the World.
What is the potential impact is something like this demand for accountability on your career?

They are A-Changin': Blackboard Goes For Sharing

2011-10-24T17:00:00.004-04:00

For the times they are a-changin'.
Even Blackboard has realized you have to share:
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/in-victory-for-open-education-movement-blackboard-embraces-sharing/33776

"...Today the company announced plans to add a “Share” button that will let professors make those learning materials free and open online...."

Virtual Minds: Sounds Like Fun to Me.

2011-10-24T11:33:00.000-04:00

Virtual Minds: Sounds Like Fun to Me.: Nudity, Pets, Babies, and Other Adventures in Synchronous Online Learning October 20, 2011, 9:01 am By Marc Parry Philadelphia —The Unive...

ENG099 Cross-Evaluation and Online Discussion

2011-10-24T10:34:00.003-04:00

Quote of the Day
"Il n’est pas nécessaire qu’un auteur comprenne ce qu’il écrit. Les critiques se chargeront de le lui expliquer." --Abbé Prévost

**Thanks to Anaitoron's Blog for the quote and the cartoon (which is from typepad.com)**

Cross-Evaluations
The new activity for the week was a cross-evaluation of a CATW style essay. Dr. X and and my students wrote a CATW essay by hand under testing conditions. (Bloom: Synthesis/Creation level).

Dr. X and I then evaluated the essays using the CATW rubric and indicated for the students the areas where they needed the most work. The students then revised the essays for their blogs with the understanding that they would have an outside peer reader or two commenting on the entry. Ximena designed a formula for the response based on our work on claims, reasons, and evidence which you can see HERE. (Bloom: Analysis and Evaluation levels).

How Did it Go?
Many students stuck to the formula, but some really did use it to make valuable commentary. You can see the cross-evaluations by going to my course blogs and Dr. X's course blogs. The responses to Maiko's essay HERE were pretty typical. The most interesting thing from my end was that we get to immediately see where the evaluators are confused. We are working on evaluating the effectiveness of this exercise now, though a straw-poll of my students using the Blogger "survey" widget showed that most students found the activity "very useful" or "useful."

Online Discussion
We also had our second online discussion, this time over The Matrix.This time we matched two of our classes together so there were approximately 50 students per group in each discussion. One is completed HERE and one goes live today HERE if anyone would like to check them out. You will need to "join group" on the right if you would like to participate. Right now, our students are just getting the hang of online discussions, though they do recognize the similarity to texting. For Basic Writers, I think written discussion is useful for them to practice with writing, especially since we ask them to post with "Claim", "Reasons," and "Evidence" clearly labeled.

Playing with Hamlet

2011-10-23T19:27:00.002-04:00

Kenneth Branagh doing his version of "The play's the thing"
from Shakespeare II-En 356

So, my Shakespeare students had to compete in the Hamlet Quote Game this week for extra credit.

The game is easy (most of what they do falls under Bloom's Knowledge and Comprehension levels):

Students send via the Ning e-mail their two favorite quotes from Hamlet. Length is (usually) irrelevant.
I classify each quote depending on how easy it is to recall if you've been paying attention in class (say, 1.4's "Angels and ministers of grace defend us!" versus 1.3's "And hath given countenance to his speech, my lord,/With almost all the holy vows of heaven"). Some I discard because they are too difficult/obscure. If necessary, I add one or two of my own (usually not).
I create 5-6 groups with 7 quotes, making sure each group gets a couple of easy quotes and a couple of harder ones to recall. I add an 8th, extra-extra credit quote. It is usually a hard one. This time around I did

Sir, his definement suffers no perdition in you;
though, I know, to divide him inventorially would
dizzy the arithmetic of memory, and yet but yaw
neither, in respect of his quick sail. But, in the
verity of extolment, I take him to be a soul of
great article; and his infusion of such dearth and
rareness, as, to make true diction of him, his
semblable is his mirror; and who else would trace
him, his umbrage, nothing more.

4. Students get in groups pre-determined by me to make sure they don't get their own quotes. They get 15 minutes (sometimes I make it 20 or 25, depending how hard the quotes are) to figure out and write down who said the words, to whom (if applicable), and what is the situation in which the words were said. They can only use print copies of the play. Whichever group finishes first gets the most extra credit points (though everyone gets some points for participating--it's hard work after all).

How did it go?
I had to do a bit of shuffling with the groups because not all students came to class or were on time, but I managed to make it so no one got her own quotes. After 5 minutes into the game everyone was completely absorbed trying to find the correct answers. Groups where everyone had a print copy of Hamlet worked faster than those that did not, a fact that I pointed out to the students and asked them to remember for the upcoming quote game on Othello. While one group finished the seven required quotes in the time alloted, a second group was the one who got quote 8 correct, so they got the extra-extra points. While everyone worked hard, I plan to up the ante the next quote game by offering ore extra credit points than this time around.

The Kids Are All Right, But Is Technology Messing with Their Ability to Learn?

2011-10-23T18:58:00.004-04:00

When I saw this image online at www.nytimes.com, a place I visit regularly, I felt like I was still standing in front of one of my classes. Not all of the students are like this, but enough to make it unsettling and disruptive.

Parents Urged Again to Limit TV for Youngest

First of all: the iPhones. It seems students can't help themselves. And why not? Studies show that the cumulative hits of dopamine people receive from checking their iPhones produce feelings similar to love. There was an opinion piece in the NYTimes (I read it online), entitled, "You Love Your iPhone.
Literally." (Fortunately, I also read the paper version a few days later and came across a letter to the editor refuting that study, signed by 60 (count 'em!) neuropsychologists.) So maybe it isn't love, per se, but it is hard to resist.
Second of all: the passive watchers. I will not bother to call them "learners." Look at this kid in pink. She represents the students who stare numbly at my PowerPoint presentations in ELL and are so difficult to move to action when the "exercise" frame comes on. It's not like I am asking them to get out of their chairs (but what if I were?). I told the students the other day: Get out your books and a notebook and take notes! Some hadn't even brought pencils/pens.

We talked about it: What followed was a discussion about how to be engaged while learning. I said, just staring at the PowerPoint is not helping you learn. Taking notes, writing your own words, and asking questions until I (or another student) explains it in a way you understand is helping you learn. Again not all the students do this, but enough to make you want to scrap the PowerPoints altogether.

This image was in Sunday's NY Times, attached to an article by my favorite what's-technology-doing-to-us-as-learners-and-to-our-brains investigative reporter, Matt Richtel: A school in Silicon Valley that eschews all technology. Executives from eBay, Google, Apple, Yahoo, and Hewlett-Packard send their kids there! What do they know?

Third of all: The under-underprepared. A majority of my students this semester are right out of high school. Several have never read a book. Seriously. They do not know how to make use of (i.e., not just read, but go back and forth to understand concepts, take notes, etc.) our textbook. One student explained to me that she never had homework in high school. Ever. And she had no problem passing. She understands now that college is different, but she's having a difficult time with the transition. Her friends feel abandoned, and the trade-off of doing a lot of work for not such great grades (at first) is hard to prefer over a good night out with your buds. From that perspective, I have nothing but respect and admiration for her; her open-mindedness in recognizing the game change in her life; and for making this effort to exercise a muscle no one ever challenged her to strengthen before.

Fourth of all: The kids are all right. But is sticking them in front of computers in a computer lab the best thing to do for them when they first come to LaGuardia? Am I of a different mindset now? I feel like one of those "old" people who scoff with disgust as people bounce off their iPhones or as students switch computer screens faster than you can say, "It's an epidemic!" (And it's not limited to students: Of course we see people at committee meetings doing the same thing all the time.) Cathy Davidson published a very optimistic book this summer called, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn. In it she extolls the benefits of multitasking, collaborative multitasking, innovative mind wandering, etc. and doesn't worry about the dangers of attention deficits. I read this as I was planning my courses! Ha! (This is too brief to do her book justice. Sorry.) I love this stuff. But I find that, anecdotally speaking, sticking kids in front of a computer when they haven't been used to reading and writing critically, is doing them, possibly a disservice.

What do you think? I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but...

This was posted on Facebook by a friend who is a textbook publisher; she found this hanging on a professor's office door.

The cult of paper

2011-10-23T18:18:00.001-04:00

As it happens, my ENG 101 students and I are in E-272 and students are about to respond to a blog question which asks that they apply their findings from last week's exploration of Oedipus the King to perspectives on truth and illusion. Previously they read Plato's excerpt from the Republic usually referenced as "the allegory of the cave" and following that they watched The Matrix, albeit at home.

Students start going over their notes, except one of them opens up Oedipus on the screen. "You must use the paper copy with your notes" I insist. The student, who is not one of those troublesome ones, responds that it will be easier to find the parts of the text he remembers apply to the prompt question if he has the "find" feature of the browser. I do not even entertain the possibility "No, it must be your text. You can't access any websites while composing" is my final verdict.

At the end of the assignment as he walks out the door, he comes to my desk and states "was there a reason we had to waste time doing it on paper?" I inform him that yes there is, and we can address it in a future class if he wishes. He informs me that he would. So I go home and start thinking about the very issue (as I see from Michelle's post, it was a week for reflecting on technology and its uses).

Granted, I do not consider myself a fan of technology despite my curiosity and willingness to adopt and become familiar with it, especially for teaching. Every Friday morning, away from work and obligations, I pick up the New York Times and go to my favorite coffee shop and I spend between two to three hours reading it, a remnant of my European upbringing. While over the week I browse newspapers articles online or on my iphone, such browsing is passing the time. The experience, the pleasure, is only the physical copy. Furthermore, one of my big concerns with technology is when it is employed to do something that could be done without it, just for show. In fact, my rule is that if something can be done the same with and wihout technology, then technology goes.

Back to Oedipus though: this was not a literature class, where I wanted students to closely read the text (setting aside the innate futility of doing so with a translated text to begin with). I wanted students to:

learn how to incorporate textual evidence into their own text
analyze textual evidence
use textual evidence to support their own argument

In short, I am not sure that the time spent looking for a quotation on paper, when a student vaguely recalled it and could have typed up a phrase to locate it electronically in a fraction of the time, was productive time. Perhaps as an English professor I attribute an atavistic quality to the endeavor of highlighting a text and making marginal notes, but even these are activities that could have taken place before (or the student could have created a google docs file with the text and his comments). I am not ready to shift my whole attitude based on this instance, but obviously I am not as certain of the right course of action as I was before this simple question arose.

Twitter as Low Stakes II: Crafting Context

2011-10-23T17:53:00.006-04:00

Justin Rogers-Cooper

Learning Objectives: Understanding, Applying

Class Activity

In both my ENG 101 classes I'm trying to experiment with using Twitter. I'm also trying to introduce them to composition skills and techniques for college argumentative essays. After evaluating their first essays, I decided I needed to spend more time teaching them "context." In my course, we've defined and discussed context as a technique connected to audience. I often rehearse the questions "what does your audience know?" and "what does your audience need to know?" when students raise texts as evidence for their arguments. Specifically, we've worked on reciting the "main ideas" of the text in addition to making an audience aware of authors, titles, and general backgrounds.

One of the techniques we've discussed is "listing" as a method to convey quickly to a reader those main ideas. For example, in When I Was a Slave students should be able to convey that the text's main ideas include "slave work cultures, white supremacist violence, master-slave psychologies, and post-war black labor."

Since we're using a new text, Southern Horrors, I decided to begin collecting a list of the text's main ideas. To do this, I also incorporated Twitter. The students began class by finding one example of a main idea from the text. Then they Tweeted that idea. For their Tweet, they put down a page number, a keyword, and a brief definition of that keyword. Then they checked their Twitter feed. They noticed what ideas other students Tweeted. They then produced a list of these main ideas. Finally, I asked them to expand their list into a full-blown "context" paragraph. In that paragraph, they introduced the text, listed the main ideas, and then wrote at least three sentences sentence explaining and/or defining three of those main ideas separately in more detail.

How It Went

The Twitter part of the assignment was interactive, interesting, and helpful. Some students were confused about keywords: should they find one in the text, or make one up? I opened it to either, but then some students had a hard time finding a made-up keyword on a page, since they had to make the connection between the definition and a passage on their own, intuited from another student's connection.

I gave the students 45 minutes to write the paragraph, but some weren't able to complete the context paragraph in that time.

Conclusions

Twitter functioned as a useful tool for gathering main ideas from a text. In the future, I'll need to define the keyword part of the activity differently -- I'll probably insist that students select a keyword from the text, and not create one to describe the text. Creating keywords should be a separate activity, and one that could probably also include Twitter.

NYTimes piece on technology in the classroom

2011-10-23T12:40:00.002-04:00

I just saw this article and thought I'd share -- it's about grade-schoolers but many of the issues we've been discussing are addressed:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/technology/at-waldorf-school-in-silicon-valley-technology-can-wait.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all

Using Technology Wisely

2011-10-23T09:57:00.002-04:00

Class goals for the week:

- continue to practice doing online research

- create a properly formatted Works Cited page

- submit an essay draft via SafeAssign

Before I get to the above, I'm feeling another reflective post this week. In the WID seminar I'm leading, we are discussing the article "Teaching and Learning with the Net Generation." It argues that Net Generation students (Net Geners) are easily bored and therefore exhibit a greater need for variety in the classroom, need more interactive and inquiry-based activities, have short attention spans and demand instant gratification, and are "shallow learners" often due to their use of technology. If this is true, do we try to combat the more negative aspects of technology by railing against it or are there ways to use technology to enhance their learning?

Our WID group has had a lively discussion about it on our blog, with some feeling that technology can end up encouraging lazy thinking, lazy researching, and lazy students overall (someone compared using FB in class to letting young kids watch Sesame Street -- it may be "educational" but it's still T.V.). Others feel strongly that in order to serve our students best, we need to adapt our pedagogy to meet them where they are and use the strengths of technology to overcome the possible drawbacks.

Another point made by the article is that Net geners seem to feel that learning must be "fun" and "entertaining" and they therefore resist lectures, workshops, or other activities that seem "boring." Do we think this is true? If it is, is it because of social media or is this just how students are (and have always been)?

One thing my WID group agreed on is that technology needs to be used wisely and with purpose. It's OK (and even necessary) for faculty members to practice and experiment (many of us are not Net Geners, after all) but using technology for the sake of using technology will produce disjointed lessons, confused students, and not-so-great results. That's why I think this seminar has been so valuable for me -- it really forces me to think about my goals for each activity so that it has substance and purpose and can be assessed for future use or revision.

One general concern I have had about technology is that we tend to assume that all our students are perfectly comfortable using Ning and Blogger and Facebook and in my experience, that has not been the case.

As I stated at the beginning of this (overly long) post, this coming week we will continue to practice online research skills, learn to create a properly formatted Works Cited page (using online resources), and submit the first draft of an essay via SafeAssign. I'm nervous about the last part for several reasons but since technology can make plagiarism so easy, I'm curious about using it to deter and detect plagiarism for a change. More on how that goes next week...

Academic Integrity Assignment

2011-10-21T16:12:00.001-04:00

This week I discussed issues of academic integrity and plagiarism with my students and then had them research a work of art from the Met and write up information, citing other sites and articles.

OBJECTIVES:

Students will be able to...
...use citation conventions to give credit to sources
...write grammatically correct citations and quotations
...paraphrase some information and quote other information (and discern how much should be quoted)
...research information on the Internet and write a summary

ACTIVITY:

Students were asked to select one artwork from Egypt, Rome or Greece at the Metropolitan Museum of Art by looking at the museum website or using the MyArtsLab resources on the collection at the Met. They were asked to read about the artwork, add an image, and write a short report on it, using citations and quotations.

http://language-of-art.blogspot.com/2011/10/practice-post-5-citing-other-sources.html

RESULTS:

Students worked on this assignment during class when we were in the computer lab. The students all selected interested artwork to report on from the correct time periods and regions. I modeled a report on an Egyptian bronze footbath and pointed the students to it when they were having difficulty.

At first, some students copied and pasted entire chunks of text from their sources, but I worked with each student to point out that they should use quotation marks for any copied text and the citation format for sentences (which we had already gone over). I also pointed out that only a few sentences should be quoted and the rest should be paraphrased in their own words. Students worked on using good citation sentence structure and putting the ideas into their own words, in addition to adding the reason they selected the artwork. The results were fairly good and I feel as though students understand the concept of academic integrity and know how to use sources now without plagiarizing.

I had been struggling with how to tackle the issue with students and I am pleased with the way the activity and the student blog posts went.

-Rebekah

Week 6

2011-10-21T10:00:00.002-04:00

Today I reserved a Mac lab for my students to take their first test and to work on an Adobe Photoshop collage project. They were able to take the test on Blackboard with fewer issues than when they take the test from home. This was also the first semester that I specifically reserved a Mac lab for the Photoshop project. Even though I have made tutorials that outline everything they need to know about using this software, working hands-on with certain students has helped alleviate any confusion.

I asked Burhan Siddiqui to permanently change our classroom to a computer lab. He was able to do this, and I feel that this will greatly benefit the students for the remainder of the semester. This way, I can think of additional ways for the class to use technologies to connect with each other during class time.

Great collection of articles on using Blogger, Tumblr, Wikis, etc. in the classroom

2011-10-19T19:04:00.005-04:00

From Graphic Arts

From the MobilityShifts Conference:

Learning through Digital Media

"The simple yet far-reaching ambition of this collection is to discover how to use digital media for learning on campus and off. It offers a rich selection of methodologies, social practices, and hands-on assignments by leading educators who acknowledge the opportunities created by the confluence of mobile technologies, the World Wide Web, film, video games, TV, comics, and software while also acknowledging recurring challenges" (R. Trebor Scholz).

Read more...

Solving a Quadractic Equation

2011-10-19T17:53:00.005-04:00

This is one of five problems posted this week on Tumblr for my students to attempt
to solve. The lesson on solving quadractic has not been taught as yet. The assumption
is that some students may have remember this from their prior classes and may be
able to come up with the right answer. Hopefully it will generate a discussion among
themselves to arrive at the correct result.

One of the solutions to the quadractic equation (x-3)(x+8)= -30 is

We have invited students from other classes to participate and have gotten a few
to join in. So far ,I have seen both incorrect and correct responses to the above question.

Finding your passion when you least expect it

2011-10-18T18:53:00.005-04:00

Students sometimes develop a passion for an occupation when they least expect it. They may take a course, read a book, see a movie or a work of art that leads them in an unexpected direction. You can never tell when or where inspiration will strike-but you can light a spark. (Think about the path you took that brought you to your current position. I read a biography about Florence Nightingale in the third grade and knew from that moment I wanted to help others even though I had no idea what that meant!)

Here's a idea for using the common reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a book that has the potential to introduce students to occupations that ignite their passion.

Provide students with a list of occupations (I will post a list) that come to light in this book. Invite them to post occupations that come to mind as they read. Ask students to select one occupation from the list that interests them and learn more about it by going to websites that provide occupational information, (these will be include on the list of occupations).

Week Five a Tad Late

2011-10-18T14:41:00.002-04:00

Last week was very good for my Intro to Art. We took a field trip to the Sculpture Center in LIC. It is a very unique space (a former trolly repair shop), and my students will write a paper about artwork that is created with a specific space in mind.

They submitted their responses to the MoMA design show "Talk to Me" and they submitted their contributions to the class food blog "Art Food Yum". The blog turned out great. They did better following the template than when I have assigned this previously through Blackboard Expo. Blogger is great since it offers more connectivity than Expo. Students can learn from each other. I can tell that students had a lot of fun doing the assignment. You can see the blog posts here: http://art-food-yum.blogspot.com/

Unfortunately, though, I am having a problem with getting all students to post their work on time. So far only half of the enrolled students have posted their food art posts. This makes it more difficult to foster the type of peer-evaluation community that I want this class to have. Not to mention, students who are not turning in their work are at higher risk of failing. I get the feeling that some students just are not checking their LaGuardia emails. If they are not checking, I can't remind them what they are missing.

2011-10-18T08:52:00.004-04:00

SO they were given their first assignment, and overall so far they are doing well. I have a few glitches as some posted on their own blog, which is not quite what I wanted yet, but flexibility in technology is always good. This class only meets every other week as it is a seminar so I won't have quite the volume of assignments that others will have.

So far so good, and I am formulating my next assignment as well as asking them to post and response to this current assignment.

First Blog Assignment My Dream JOB

If you could create your perfect dream job what would it look like. Consider the following

as parameters to work within.

1. What part of the world would you want to do the career?

2. What career field would it be in?

3. What would your manager or supervisor be like?

4. What would the work environment be like in your perfect job?

5. When you went home each day how would you want to feel?

6 When you told you family and friends what you were doing, how would you want them to react?

7 Choose an image from Google Art or other web searches that depicts this perfect career.

Create a blog no later than Oct 29, 2011

ArtInNY WK4

2011-10-17T14:40:00.014-04:00

A. Learning Objectives
Students will be able to:

Describe the notion of "Contemporary" in painting.
Evaluate paintings based on representation (aesthetics/semiotics), not just technical sophistication.
Discuss the effects of Perspective and Composition in Still Life motif.
Explain the relationship between Symbol and Metaphor in Visual Arts.
Explain what makes Art "New York."
Write about techniques of major artists in the New York School (a.k.a Abstract Expressionism) and School of Paris (i.e., Post-Impressionism, Cubism, and Fauvism).
Define cliché and the acceptable usage of the concept in Art.

B. Reflective Description
Two still life paintings with one "Contemporary" object and another "New York." This class paints very well. This virtuosity of young painters is not unusual at LaGuardia; however, it is not so common that I find them in a non-art major course. The challenge is that I do not grade them according to their painting skills and students who cannot paint well complain as if I am a "murderer" or am supposed to worship the artworks that are highly and merely technical. This situation is fascinating, though, because I can tell students that the skills do not lead them anywhere at the college level unless they understand how to put them in a context. This goes nicely with the direction of the course and with the course description that includes a visit to an artist's working studio. I need to bring their artistic brains to the next level that respect professional artists working hard to "deskill" themselves in order to underscore their concepts, like how Henri Matisse and Willem de Kooning did in the past.

C. Conclusions
It was a successful class and a good opening for further discussions in what makes the NYC art scene so special. We visited the de Kooning exhibition at MoMA in WEEK 3, so this meeting included a reflection on the field trip. Many students already read each other's blog posts by the time they came to class; they knew what to expect for the art critique. This is most likely the last painting assignment and we will move onto photography. Students in Beginning Painting will send them images of their NY Painting based on the Exquisite Corpse drawings, so those will arrive in a week and a half. This class will write about the Exquisite Corpse-NY Painting project and photography after the Midterm.

My "Art-in-New York" students benefit from learning how to paint and will be able to engage with Visual Arts from a producer's point of view. It will change how they write about art and their viewing experiences at museums. The students with developed painting skills also recognize value of Art History, Art Criticism, and English Literature as their new tools to evaluate what and how they could paint. Using the acrylic paint helps the class connect with Beginning Painting students and write about NYC-based artists, art critics, and art collectors who highly value the practice of painting, oil and acrylic painting in particular.

The experience is what we are looking for and is how students develop their eye on Art. I used to assign textbooks, but I now ask students to purchase art materials. This is also an effort to go paperless. A green classroom! My students receive pdfs and handouts. eBooks may be a future option.

Bibliography In-progress

2011-10-17T10:27:00.000-04:00

Our bibliography/webliography is currently being updated. I am working on it just about every day and you can see the link to the static version above. Once I have a solid basic version, I will be moving it to a wiki where we can all add and annotate the entries as well as comment on them.

Twitter, Low Stakes Assignments, In-class Groups

2011-10-16T23:31:00.008-04:00

Justin Rogers-Cooper

Learning Goals: Understanding, Analyzing, Evaluating

Class Activity

For my Ethics of Food class this past week, I began class with a projection of the recent student Tweets. Each Tweet corresponded to something the students tweeted in the previous few days about the reading The End of Overeating by Dr. David Kessler.

Before class, students were required to tweet a page number, a passage paraphrase, and one or two words relevant to their response while reading the passage. For class, I had the students begin the activity with a ten minute "extension" of the short Tweet they posted (if they didn't tweet, I had them select a passage from the text that they would have tweeted). Since the Tweet was only 140-280 characters (1-2 tweets), the extension would involve the students going into more detail about why they tweeted what they did.

After this, I projected directions about an in-class writing activity. They were to give context to the passage with a short summary, properly quote and cite the passage from the Tweet, and paraphrase it. When they were done, they were to practice a critical thinking brainstorm in pairs with another student. This brainstorm would involve speculating and interpreting what the passage meant. They would return to their notes from a previous class about different critical thinking strategies.

In pairs, the students compared and contrasted their selected passages. They read each other the context, quote, and paraphrase for each passage. Then, they debated and interpreted the significance of their writing. Based on the conversation, I instructed the students to write down at least three interpretations of each passage, and stressed that multiple interpretations were the key to good critical thinking passages. I also informed them that their writing would make a good potential paragraph for their second essays.

When the pairs were writing their interpretive sentences, I went to each pair group and had them read the sentences out loud. I then gave them feedback on how many strategies I heard them employ.

When two pairs were finished (and while others worked to conclude), I put them together in groups of four and had them read their writing to each other. I asked them to come up with even more connections for critical thinking by seeing whether or not they could merge ideas from one paragraph into another.

How It Went

This was the best class of the semester. The scaffolding of the assignment from Twitter to brainstorm to in-class activity worked brilliantly. This class has been behind my other one in terms of effort and success, and this activity was an enormous push forward. It was a terrific confidence boost for the students, and I ended class explaining to them that they "were the teachers today." I had never merged groups when some finished early, and I was surprised by how well the students absorbed each other and shared. I playfully pushed this by saying, so and so "has invited you over for tea and coffee. Now go join them and teach them!" Of course there was no coffee, but the students smiled through the playfulness. My one on one time with students to evaluate their critical thinking was also valuable.

Conclusions

The students had to understand each other's Tweets and writing; they had to evaluate and make suggestions to each other for the activity to improve their critical thinking; and they had to analyze the quotes in question in order to produce critical thinking. They did so with 100% participation, and they enjoyed seeing each other's Tweets on the big screen. The group work was also effective and multiplied the gains made by the pairs. I will definitely do this again, and the writing the students produced will work as supporting paragraphs in their upcoming essays.

Welcome OpenClass, Good-bye Ning!

2011-10-15T10:32:00.003-04:00

I am so looking forward to OpenClass!! (see the news release below). One of the faculty testers, Gary Ritter, offered the following praise, which has "Community 2.0" written all over it:

The biggest benefit to me has been the potential to overcome two of the biggest obstacles of the traditional LMS - the tyranny of the section and the semester. In my Moodle sections, or BB for that matter, students can only communicate with other students who are in that section. Open class provides both the opportunity to create a kind of college-wide social learning and sharing network while also allowing for a closed environment for individual classes.

For the whole comment, see HERE.

***

Pearson and Google Jump Into Learning Management With a New, Free System

October 13, 2011, 10:25 am

By Josh Fischman

One of the world’s biggest education publishers has joined with one of the most dominant and iconic software companies on the planet to bring colleges a new—and free—learning-management system with the hopes of upending services that affect just about every instructor, student, and college in the country.

Today Pearson, the publishing and learning technology group, has joined the software giant Google to launch OpenClass, a free LMS that combines standard course-management tools with advanced social networking and community-building, and an open architecture that allows instructors to import whatever material they want, from e-books to YouTube videos. The program will launch through Google Apps for Education, a very popular e-mail, calendar, and document-sharing service that has more than 1,000 higher-education customers, and it will be hosted by Pearson with the intent of freeing institutions from the burden of providing resources to run it. It enters a market that has been dominated by costly institution-anchored services like Blackboard, and open-source but labor-intensive systems like Moodle.

For more, click HERE.

Moving Scavenger-Hunters into the Application Era Using Google Forms

2011-10-14T23:11:00.001-04:00

Learning objective(s) using Bloom’s taxonomy:
Application: Students will apply what they've read in their textbook and learned in my lecture to morphology exercises.
Reflective Description, or How Did it Go?
My ELL 101 class is made up of a number of passive learners who need heavy stimulation to get the synapse paths fired up. The passivity comes, in part, from a genuine dearth of prior knowledge. Not all of them, but enough that I have not been able to rely on scaffolded groups of stronger and weaker students working together. The weaker students get some in-class exercises that forces them to lug out their textbooks and read; the stronger students need exercises to be able to apply what they've read to their problem-solving and, one hopes, model what that's like to the students who just don't seem practiced in this sort of activity.
What's a professor to do? I have to be much more nuanced as I layer in lessons of "how to read strategically."
I created a scavenger hunt in Google Forms, divided the class into groups, made it a game worth extra credit points "to the first group who submitted all of their forms with all the right answers" and set them going. They were "allowed" to collaborate within their groups as much as they wanted, but each student had to submit their own form. Therefore there was the incentive to be sure everyone in your group had the correct answer. The scavenger hunt was entirely based on their textbook and I took the opportunity to layer in lessons in citation and quoting since academic integrity has started to become an issue.
The class settled down and worked hard, mostly together. The "hunt" was almost too easy and yet some really struggled as they went back and forth in their textbook.
For those who finished, there was a morphology problem worksheet with samples from a few languages to work out. These were applications of what they had read. Knowledge-->Application. There were no empty minutes.
The results were striking. A few students had no problems finding and writing in the answers since (a) they had read the text as previously assigned and (b) they were quasi-familiar with answering questions of this sort in academic language. But many, I was surprised to see did not resource each other or negotiate an answer even though I said, "You can write the exact same thing as other members in your group, but you must fill in your own form!" As I went from group to group and student to student, I found that some students were making it way more complicated than it was. Again--a real lack of practice sorting out meaning and knowledge.
As we moved to working on the morphology exercises, I could tell that having done a closer reading and written down explanations of key terms, or even just looking for key terms had been helpful. Others could still not make sense of what a "morpheme" (the smallest meaningful unit that cannot be broken down further). I can only hope that as they watched how others read to gain knowledge and apply that to the morphology problems, that they realized that reading in college can be directed, strategic and active. It doesn't happen without effort, without action.

Conclusions:
I would definitely do the Google Forms “scavenger hunt” again, The students were engaged and it was neither to challenging for underprepared students, nor too simple for the stronger ones. I might do it in SurveyMonkey next time since Google Forms does not produce an easy-to-access report. (Unless any of you can show me differently?) Students who struggle told me they had fun--not that I'm there to entertain them, but if learning can be fun, that's half the battle. I am definitely going to use the extraordinary insights to their reading comprehension (or lack thereof) to scaffold more and more opportunities to return to the text and use it to work out problems.

Visit to Metropolitan College of New York

2011-10-14T19:30:00.007-04:00

From IQ Web at MCNY

Today, Jason and I presented on Community 2.0 at a Web 2.0 Symposium at Metropolitan College of New York.

MCNY speakers included Audrey Cohen School of Human Services professor Lynn Sally, who had the most interesting presentation on using Twitter in her classroom (we might have to invite her to speak to our group!), as well as Business School professor Rachel Yager on Social Media Intelligence (her talk so reminded me of one of the YouTube videos you submitted early this semester, Prof. Rebekah, that I will include the video again on this post), and Don Johnson, who spoke of the importance of acknowledging the paradigm shift we are experiencing in terms of knowledge production due to Web 2.0.

What we liked the most is how the presentation quickly became an interaction with the attendees asking questions about how we at Community 2.0 handle the usual issues (privacy, student resistance, tech and institutional support, etc.) and us and them grappling with some of the complex answers to those questions. There was so much discussion that we did not even have time to explain how we are using Bloom's Taxonomy in the seminar or even to break into groups as we had planned. (!)

Our hope is that the conversations we had will spark more conversations at MCNY about how to best grapple with, as Don Johnson pointed out, the inevitability that is digital learning. We know we are definitely looking forward to working with MCNY faculty in the future.

For Prof. Yager:

For Don Johnson:

Posting assignments on Blog

2011-10-14T16:44:00.002-04:00

I was originally going to use the blog for a single assignment, due to my natural abhorrence of technology that I am taking this seminar in order to overcome. However, this week I decided to use the blog in order to post reading questions on an article that my Medical Ethics students are reading on human cloning. Next, I will have them do a discussion of some of the reading questions on the blog itself. This will get them used to posting online and should make the peer-review exercise that they will be engaging in a few weeks from now less intimidating.

Reflections on Facebook

2011-10-14T10:30:00.004-04:00

I'm feeling especially reflective today since I've been drafting a conference proposal about using Community 2.0 to teach literature at the community college. I also spent last weekend reading two sets of formal essays, which raised some questions about how the online work we're doing is affecting student learning.

One thing I noticed in the essays is how many of my students went to the class Facebook page, re-read the comments posted by their fellow students, and then cited them. In-text citations were awkward (we had never discussed how to cite a Facebook post - does MLA have a protocol for that?) but they managed to make clear where the comments came from (example: "In response to Informal Writing #3, Student X wrote..."). I was initially worried that they were relying too heavily on what their fellow students had to say but most of them used those comments to support their own views, not as a replacement for them. It also shows me that the Facebook page has become a resource for them, something they can go back to when they have a question or are struggling with an idea, which to me is a very good thing.

Facebook also came in handy this past week when my 101 class did a workshop on adding analysis and developing ideas in an essay. After working in groups, I had left a good chunk of class time for sharing group findings and allotted 15 minutes at the end for students to record their thoughts as an informal writing. The discussion was so lively that I didn't want to cut it off so I let them go and was left with not quite enough time. Facebook allowed me the flexibility to assign the informal writing as homework and ask them to post their writings online. We were able to continue our valuable discussion, they'll still get the writing practice they need, and -- as an added bonus -- they can now read each other's comments and learn from them.

Friday Update

2011-10-14T06:02:00.002-04:00

Blog now complete, well for this week anyway. The assignment has now been given to the students. All have been enrolled so now it is up to them to do it. I just want to say I have a wonderful class this semester. They do their work on time and never miss a deadline. Yes I know I am bragging here about my students, but this is the first time in a long time I have had such a switched on group. This is how it makes me feel.

Blogging--on paper

2011-10-14T02:42:00.000-04:00

Thanks to the Columbus day holiday that cancelled my ENG 101 lab day, and thanks also to students in ENG 99 taking a practice CATW, there were no online interactions this week. Yet somehow the word blog still made it to the classroom. We were discussing Oedipus in ENG 101, and I wanted students to do some impromptu writing before they got into groups. Immediately they started asking me how long it has to be or whether it had to have a thesis. I told them to write it like a journal, and almost all of them looked at me as if I was telling them to use a floppy. On a hunch, I told them "write it like a blog, but on paper" and instantly they started writing. I guess this matches a lot of observations people have made in this seminar, that students see blog/online work as having fewer demands than an essay (and that does bring its own set of problems), but also showed me how using blogs is a successful way of creating a low risk environment.