A Technoob's Exploration of Ed Tech Tools

Rather than using the standard introductory blurb for my discussion forums in the upcoming term, I’d like to do something different. I’ve created a video using xtranormal (a fantastic resource!) to introduce our forums instead. I hope it will create a more enjoyable, relaxed atmosphere in the forums, where students feel free to contribute, ask questions, and take the discussion wherever it leads them!

Anyone who knows me well will tell you that I have a very poor memory when it comes to… well, pretty much everything. I know what you’re thinking, and no, I wasn’t a pothead in college (not that there’s anything wrong with that!) – my brain just functions in a particular way, which I’m only recently beginning to fully understand.
Basically, all the information I take in seems to be stored in some sort of warehouse deep inside my head, which can only be accessed effectively if there’s some sort of trigger – a label or identifier which activates or illuminates the information stored there. Sound annoying? Yep, definitely! I’m the guy who frequently shakes hands with someone and says, “Nice to meet you!” only to have them say something like, “Oh, we’ve met a few times before,” or at least, “We met a few months ago at so-and-so’s housewarming party…you don’t remember me?” – In these situations, I always try to recover with a “Oh, yeah, I totally remember you!” and an explanation (you must have changed your hair!)…but typically, I don’t remember the person at all unless some specific information is presented which can trigger the memory of our meeting. I’m not sure why this is – I think my brain automatically “dumps” information about individuals and ideas I either don’t like, or don’t expect to meet again (and thus don’t really need to remember) – I like to believe that this is because my brain is saving space to store the really important stuff (I hope I hope I hope), but I don’t know if that’s the case.
SO, why am I pouring my heart (brain?) out here? Well, to be honest I’m quite concerned that I’ll forget a whole lot of the important information I learn in the MET, and as a result won’t be able to apply it to my teaching practice. I often find myself struggling to recall even concepts which I found quite remarkable – ones which altered my teaching practice significantly – in any detail, and I HATE that. So I have a solution, which I think will help me to not only understand the concepts I’m studying here more fully, but to retain them for many years to come:

In ETEC 512, we were tasked with creating a concept map of the theories and theorists we studied. At the time, I struggled with the assignment, and although I completed it (and I think I did a pretty good job), I never found a way to make it truly meaningful for ME as a learner. It’s unfortunate, because I think most of the time I worked on the project I was more concerned with how it was supposed to be done, rather than how I could do it in a way which would be most meaningful to me. Don’t worry though, this is where the story takes a positive turn 🙂

I think what I need to do is to start consolodating what I’ve learned in the MET into a sort of portfolio – a condensed version of what I’ve learned, in a format which helps me to quickly access the concepts most important to me. My plan is this:

1) Identify the most significant articles I’ve read during the MET program – that is, the articles which have impacted me in a way that changes my teaching practice. I’m thinking  of Vygotsky, Bruner, Wenger, but many many others as well.

2) Create a visual “map” of their core ideas – something which I can look at and easily be reminded of the most important ideas.

3) Include a summary – In many ways my portfolio will be like an annotated bibliography, but instead of being based on specific articles, it will be based partially on articles (for authors like Marc Prensky) and partially on bodies of work (for people like Vygotsky)…by doing this, I’ll be able to consolidate the core ideas of each theorist/author in a way that is meaningful to me and can be applied effectively to my own teaching practice.

4) Compile quotes – I want to draw out some of the more significant, “highlightable” parts of each article I include in my portfolio, so that I can easily reference exactly what these influential theorists have said, rather than always paraphrasing.

Summary) Essentially, I’ll have 2 pages (or 1 page front and back) for each theorist or article, maybe more for some of the more influential people with a broader library of work. The first page will be a concept map – a visual aid identifying the core ideas they have proposed, and their relationship to the current educational environment. The 2nd page will consist of a summary of their ideas, along with a series of significant quotes.

This project doesn’t have any particular external purpose, but I think it will significantly alter the way in which I interact with the contents of the MET program and how well I retain this information, not only for my future interactions with my colleagues within this program, but more importantly, for my own understanding of the ideas I encounter hear and the degree of effectiveness I have in applying them to my own teaching practice.
I’m still trying to decide on a format – I’m concerned that if I publish this information as a webpage, I’ll run into copyright issues. I think I may end up creating basically a printed “book” version which I can physically carry with me and flip through when I need inspiration… Any suggestions are welcome 🙂

After you have completed the wiki activity, take a few minutes to consider how the group collaboration and discussion within the wiki space differed from what you are accustomed to in an LMS standard threaded discussion space (like the one we’ve been using throughout the course in WebCT Vista).  What kinds of advantages do you see in using wikis for group collaboration?  What are some of the challenges of working with others in a collaborative wiki space?

I’ve actually been left somewhat unsatisfied after this week’s wiki activity, and I’m still trying to explore why that is. Let me explain:

Throughout this course, the most interesting and useful parts for me have been the discussions held between my classmates. The ideas, theories, and information shared between us during the asynchronous discussion forums have been highly valuable, and I find myself copying and pasting ideas into an “important: read this when you’re struggling” folder on my desktop. I’m often inspired by my colleagues for their inquisitive spirit and their wealth of knowledge, most of which comes from years and years of experience. So…why isn’t that coming through in the wiki? Well, it is, in a way. People are sharing key moments in their teaching practice which relate to a particular topic – and they’re then extrapolating on that moment to identify key issues and and strategies to resolve those issues. This is all very valuable, so I don’t want to give the impression that I don’t think the wiki format is useful.

However, I am a conversational learner by nature. That is, I need to ask questions, and then follow-up questions, and then more in-context questions, and then I’m  able to learn what I need to in a way that I’ll never forget. The wiki format in some ways eliminates the “question” from the final text – this is great if you’re just looking for the answer, and great if you include a version of the question in the final draft (as we’ve done here with the issues and challenges), but for me, I prefer to have the “authentic” question on the record. I like to see the “I really don’t get this” part of the question, because it helps me to understand the solution all that much better.

This week, I found myself wanting to really “discuss” the readings and the issues they raised, and feeling as though the format was not quite appropriate to do so. It’s quite possible that I just wasn’t confident/capable enough in the given format to contribute in the way that I’d hoped, however. I can understand that.
In my own thinking about social learning processes this week, I encountered a few core ideas which I’d like to keep in mind when engaging my students:

1) Students will always play the “getting by game.” For me, it’s important to remember not to “blame” the students for doing this – instead, I intend to work towards creating an environment in which the activities necessary to “get by” in the course are those which are most important, and which will equip my students best for the challenges and problems they will be facing in the future. (Welsch, 2007)

2) Aligning the problems of the classroom and the problems given to students in the world of academia is essential. (Welsch, 2007)

3) Social media is not the enemy. Rather, it is a powerful tool which, if harnessed appropriately, can help my students to thrive. It’s an important part of their lives, whether I choose to recognise it or not. If I work to find effective ways to incorporate it into their learning activities, everybody wins 🙂  (Welsch, 2007)

4) Social media is powerful not only as a way to communicate with others, but as a way to acquire and spread important information. (Alexander, 2006)

5) The rapidly-changing spaces of Web 2.0 require constant monitoring, and there are tools available to help understand and anticipate trends which will impact the lives of my students and the ways in which information is dispersed and shared (Alexander, 2006).

6) Web 2.0 is extremely powerful, and it’s far better to incorporate it into the learning process than to baricade students from accessing it (me ^^ )

I’ve still got a lot to learn. The articles I’ve encountered this week have been eye-opening for me, and it seems that they have been for my peers as well.

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind of activity – First authoring /preparing tests for my students, attempting to do so in a way that actually evaluates their learning instead of sticks them with a bunch of surprise “Remember when I mentioned that in class?” questions…always difficult. Then realizing as I was grading said tests that while essay/open-ended questions may be useful to evaluate understanding of concepts, they also take a really long time to mark! Same thing with essays, which I really don’t know why I had my students turn in during the final week of classes either. Ah well, live and learn – next semester will be different, and hopefully, at least partially based in Moodle.

So now that I’ve finished all my work and submitted all my grades and emailed all my students to give them a breakdown of their final mark, I have to stop and think for a second, “Wouldn’t all this have been easier if I didn’t have to do all this by hand?” The fact that I have to copy and paste the grading breakdown from my Excel spreadsheet and email it to my students is the first sign that I’m either: a) not using the tools at my disposal properly, or b) I need some new tools!! I think it’s the latter, and as per my LMS proposal, I’ll be using Moodle next semester to help me, and hopefully reduce some of the workload…once I do all the work to get the site up and running of course!

So now that I’m done with my semester here, I’m ready to get down and dirty creating my Moodle site. So far I’ve already drawn some inspiration from my colleagues regarding the visual layout, but I need to spend some time considering exactly which components of my currently 100% face-to-face course would be more effectively presented online, and then, exactly how to maximize that effectiveness.

Wish me luck~

For the fast-approaching upcoming assignment for ETEC 565, I’ll be posting a full proposal outlining for the head of my department why we need to adopt the Moodle Learning Management System (LMS), and since my department head doesn’t know anything about Moodle or any other LMS for that matter, an important component of my proposal will be about HOW to implement it.

One of the best things about Moodle is that it’s “free.” The word “free” goes in quotations because as we’ve talked about in our course discussions, much of the open-source content available on the web is free like puppies, rather than being free like beer (thank you John P. Egan) for that analogy). What is meant by that is basically that yes, you can take this program and install it on your computer and you don’t have to pay for it at Costco or Amazon or anything like that. BUT, you’d better be ready to spend some time learning how to take care of this program, because when you have a problem, you can’t call the “geniuses” or tech support to fix your problems for you, you have to figure it out on your own, or rely on your fellow Netizens to help you out of the kindness of their technophilic hards.

Despite knowing there would be some difficulties, I decided that it would be easier to write a proposal if I could say to my boss that I knew the ins and outs of installing and running a Moodle server and could handle the responsibility of doing so, if we were to begin using Moodle in our very small department. The problem with my plan is that I had never installed Moodle before, never set up a server, and had no idea where to begin.

Enter Moodle Docs, which tells poor souls like myself “everything they need to know” about Moodle. Just follow instructions, and I’ll be fine…or so I thought.

So I began my journey.

Hardware requirements…check, and check. Off and running!

Okay…PHP script, don’t know what that is. MYSQL…nope. Apache…hmmm….this may be harder than I thought. Let’s do it anyway! (brilliant, right?)

I found the installation guide for all these strange letters, and learned some more (XAMPP, CVS, htdocs), and after a few missteps dealing with ZIP files and a few unexpected successes, I had stumbled my way into setting up my computer as a server (yay!). Now what?

I created a database by following instructions carefully, then had some issues in trying to make it secure, since my version of windows is in Korean and I was worried that by messing with the user security controls I might lock myself out of the system. I decided to skip that part (I was starting to think maybe I wouldn’t be able to present myself as a Moodle expert in my proposal at this point).

At this point, I came to the line in Moodle docs which instructed, “To run the installer script (install.php), just try to access your Moodle main URL using a web browser, or access http://yourserver/install.php directly.”

Well, “just try to access your Moodle main URL using a web browser” is something that is apparently not yet part of my tech tool skills, because I didn’t know what that meant or how to do it. I searched around, I tried a few suggestions I found, but was stuck in a failure loop, continually coming back to where I started without having advanced at all. The http://yourserver/install.php address led me to an error page, and I found myself at an impasse.

The hope and excitement I’d felt earlier in this process were dissipating fast, and I found myself feeling discouraged and incompetent. I had run out of time I could spend on this side project, and needed to get back to preparing for final exam week coming up – I was reminded of this each time I checked my email to find more of my students’ final essays being submitted. I didn’t have time to learn how to install and run a Moodle server right this second. It would have to wait.

I went home and lamented to my wife how much time I’d wasted on something that wasn’t actually even part of what I needed to do for my proposal, and how frustrated I was. Being the smart cookie that she is, she asked me why I had bothered to take on such a task in the first place, and if I’d expected it to go smoothly. The truth is no, I hadn’t expected it to go smoothly. I thought it would be hard, and be a mess, and that I would fail. I thought I would fail a lot more quickly than I did actually, and that I would be able to move on. The fact that it took me a few hours before I got to a point I couldn’t get past was a small victory in itself.

This whole experience just goes to show that I have a lot left to learn, and gives me good reason to redouble my efforts. In my proposal, I won’t claim I can run the server – I know now that I’m not there yet. I’ll talk about the costs involved in getting someone else to set up and manage a server for us – minimal costs for such a small program. But that doesn’t mean I’m giving up. Being able to run the server on my own would be a great victory, and I’m still determined to do it.

After all, just because a puppy needs taking care of, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t buy one 🙂

Hi everyone,

This is my newly created e-portfolio space which, over the next few months will be filled with my musings and productions related to ETEC 565A: Selection, Design, and Application of Learning Technologies.

This is the course I’ve looked forward to the most since starting the MET (and I’m not just saying that), because I feel I have a lot to learn when it comes to awareness of available technologies (selection), constructing materials and especially learning environments for my students (design), and using the materials and technologies at my disposal in the most effective way, which benefits my students most (application). I have lots to learn, and can’t wait to get started 🙂