Month: February 2009

Classroom of the Future

/ Cole Camplese / 4 Comments

Closing out the month of One Post a Day … its been a crazy experience that was even more complicated this time than when I did it back in August. It was well worth it however and I want to acknowledge those who went along for the challenge with me — Allan, Brad, Erin in ETS and several of the students in the Schreyer Honors College as well. All of the PSU One Post a Days can be seen in a tag aggregation at the Blogs at PSU.

With that said, I’d still like to explore an idea …

My colleague Allan Gyorke is leading a group looking at informal learning spaces on campus and they are doing some interesting work exploring spaces that are outside of our classrooms. With that in mind I wanted to ask what our classrooms should look like in higher education to embrace the future. I have a few ideas, but would love to hear more.

One thing I really think we should do is design a classroom that can project two sources to two different screens. This would allow faculty to teach with supporting content as they do now (typically PowerPoint, Keynote, or a web page), but would also engage in bringing the back channel to the front. I’ve done presentations and taught with a Twitter stream of a specific hashtag running behind me and it completely changes the dynamic of the room. For the most part our students have technology at their fingertips, why not work to engage them.

I see it at conferences all the time, why not classrooms? (credit, bjoern)

I see it at conferences all the time, why not classrooms? (credit, bjoern)

I’d have no problem working to socialize a tool like Twitter or the Harvard Live Question tool over the course of the first couple weeks of class. I think by doing that we’d see some really interesting things emerge. Twitter is becoming a powerful platform to do just about anything on, not sure why we aren’t seeing more teaching with it … it seems ideal as a place to engage in lots of good backchannel conversation. I think the students are ready … if you walk past any modern classroom there is technology everywhere.

Why not engage this? (credit, justin)

Why not engage this? (credit, justin)

An additional thing I’ve been thinking about is using a blog as a real time reflective environment. Invite students to comment on a post during class and see how things emerge. When we teach too many times we ask questions and get really very little verbal engagement … would that change if the conversation was seeded by blog comments? I am guessing yes.

To do any of this stuff you need a room to support it. I think a room that can project meaningful teaching materials as well as the backchannel is key to exploring this new way of teaching. What do you think?

Adequate

/ Cole Camplese / 16 Comments

The picture below can be snapped in public schools across the Commonwealth of PA. I’m guessing the teachers, administration, and students earned it given the requirements of the State standards … on some level I wonder how they feel about it when they walk by? What I am discouraged about as a parent and educator is that this and the other ones like it bearing several other years hangs proudly in the school’s entryway … D’Arcy noted on my Flickr posting that it might as well be one of the signs you see in factories that proudly tell us that there have been no injuries in the last X days.

The first things I thought when I saw it were (a) it looks like the PA Department of Transportation made it, (b) how disappointing it was that they would hang it, and (c) this is the representation of our children’s contribution to the school.

Is it possible, given all the creative and intellectual contributions our children make, the Commonwealth of PA couldn’t have chosen something other than “Adequate” to describe the progress. Why have I seemed angry? This is a big part of the reason.

ad•e•quate, satisfactory or acceptable in quality or quantity.

I filed this under WTF at Flickr

I filed this under WTF at Flickr?

Can’t Go Back

/ Cole Camplese / 7 Comments

This One Post a Day thing has been leading me down a path of near insanity this month. I can’t tell you if it was sitting and talking with Jim Groom at ELI or the “no we can’t attitude” I heard from so many people in higher education. I can’t tell you if it has been the fact that I’m taking a course this semester or if its because I am watching my daughter go through the first grade. I can’t tell you if its the way the Nation itself is completely jacked up or if its been the countless raging discussions I’ve been having every day lately. I think if I really reflect on it all perhaps it is the confluence of all these factors that have lead me to feeling the way I do. All I know is that I can’t go back to how I was feeling in January. How do I feel? Sort of pissed off.

I hope this is not the new me. I am hopeful. Just writing that makes me feel a little better. I am hopeful that I will find a way to put a lot of how I am feeling into positive and proactive energy. That the anger and angst I am struggling with will give way to intense focus, energy, and passion to do something about all the things that have me going down this path.

One thing I’ve been thinking a lot about is time. Time in a sense that it only moves in one direction. There is no sense wasting a minute of the future trying to go back … just isn’t going to happen. So with that said, with two days left in this blogging challenge, I am going to ty and come to grips with where I am headed. Thanks to everyone for helping me get to this point — I’ve needed a respite from the candyland of education and I’ve certainly needed to explore it in a place where others can chime in. I know one thing for certain, I don’t think I can go back to writing about stuff that doesn’t really matter.

The wheel is turning and you can’t slow down, you can’t let go and you can’t hold on, you can’t go back and you can’t stand still, if the thunder don’t get ya then the lightning will. — Jerry Garcia, The Wheel

Worksheet Nation

/ Cole Camplese / 7 Comments

I’ve had a tab in my browser open for a week or so now that I’ve just now gotten around to investigating. It is an emerging project built around the TED Talks series of online videos. Many of us have spent time watching TED Talks and I know we pass them around via delicious and Twitter, but they are worthy to revisit within the context of teaching. This morning I went over and watched the Sir Ken Robinson, Do Schools Kill Creativity video once again (for about the 50th time) and noticed that people are starting to build out greater depth. Each page now is an active wiki space that continues to grow. For example, on the Robinson page there are questions for discussion from the talk, links to activities, and several other videos (not from TED) embedded on the page. An excellent example of community driven content development.

While Ken’s video is outstanding, there is one particular video that struck me as being so right on when I watched this morning. It is a relatively short video featuring Alvin Toffler’s perspective on education. Clearly a man of great thought and rich contextual experiences; I was amazed how much I learned in the six and a half minutes he was speaking. I encourage you to watch it.

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. From, Rethinking the Future

I’ve come to think that we really do need to rethink our emphasis on the focus on the “industrial discipline” in our schools that Mr. Toffler discusses in the above video. That while learning how to sit and be may have been important during the turn of the century to create a society willing to participate in the industrial explosion happening within the US, times have changed. We talk of the rise of the creative culture on a global basis and that phenomenon has fundamentally changed the needs of the workplace. What I want in my schools is what I strive for in my work place — freedom to think, explore, and invent. I don’t particularly care about the rules and I certainly don’t want my children to be taught how to line up, stay in that line, and don’t march any way but the way you’re told. Just as I am not interested in a static and uncreative work environment, I hope for a new emphasis on these ideals for all ages.

I titled this post Worksheet Nation becasue I am seeing something happening across various levels of learning and participation that I mentioned this the other day … I want to revisit it once again in a slightly different light so bear with me and please feel free to chime in.

Let me start by saying the color is gone from our refrigerator at home. What that means is that instead of my first grader coming home with original artifacts she’s created, she instead brings home black and white worksheets from a state/district purchased curriculum book. Everything is photocopied and handed out to be completed in pencil. Very little of it is built around the notion of being creative in the learning process. That’s the first grade.

In higher education we spend a great deal of time asking students to read from textbooks that they purchase from a publishing company — no too unlike the curriculum books my daughter sees in grade school. Increasingly I see students then being sent online to take tests electronically as evidence of learning. That looks a hell of a lot like worksheets to me. This, like the example above is a generalization and I fully hope you realize that I do see a tremendous amount of interesting and creative things happening, but the above scenario is far more common.

At work, many of us are asked to document our progress by tracking time, filling out project summaries, or any other number of reporting tools. At 36 I feel like I am still filling out worksheets. Even in a progressive age working in what should be one of the most creative industries on the planet, education, I am filling out worksheets. That string from K-20 to the workplace is troubling.

We are educating people out of their creative capacities … we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Sir Ken Robinson.

What to do? I think one thing to consider is that much of what is getting me down is centered on the need for formal assessment. I don’t disagree with assessment in general, but I think it is time to rethink how and when we do it. I’m not sure filling out worksheets every day is preparing any of us for the fact that time moves in only one direction — forward. The fact of the matter is that the World is changing at a rate that is terribly exciting and our teaching and learning environments seem to want to ignore this fact. I am left wondering how the change happens … at least I am now starting to see that there are some very smart people searching for answers. Can we break through?

Relationships that don’t Suck

/ Cole Camplese / 12 Comments

This post is a generalization. Now that I have that out of the way, here I go … I’ve been in the instructional design/technology/etc business for over a dozen or so years and I’ve seen lots of models in place to help people get their teaching, training, and learning materials together. In the corporate space it was a very contract driven approach with Subject Matter Experts (SME) being pushed to provide content by a project manager or instructional designer. In higher education the SME is typically a faculty member and they are typically being pushed to provide content by the instructional designers — a very corporate approach to learning design. It is my thought that this relationship is, in many ways, very unhealthy. I say that only by watching what I see around me in countless course design projects.

Back when I was an instructional designer at the Penn State World Campus I worked with a faculty member to build an online Reliability Engineering course. It was made very clear to me that a big part of my responsibility was to get the faculty member to write and deliver content on some (arbitrary) timeline. I was an Instructional Designer that had been reduced to a content task master. The faculty member on the other hand was an internationally known reliability engineer whom we reduced to the notion of content provider. I can tell you the relationship was contentious at best — for lots of reasons. One of those reasons was that we didn’t find a way to build a professional relationship that centered around us talking about what our areas of focus and expertise was all about. I find it unfortunate looking back on it as I wished I would have taken the time to work to a common ground. I could tell I made him mad and he knew that I loathed his pace in the delivery of the holy grail of eLearning materials — raw content.

How disturbing is that? Raw content … it just sounds insulting, that we would categorize what this man had to offer was nothing more than several written pages of raw content. I am sorry for ever reducing the brilliance of this man’s work into a term so demeaning as that. It is no wonder he looked at me like I was nothing more than a “computer jockey” slinging his prose into some HTML container. What a crock of shit the whole thing was.

After the conversation that broke out here this week about working to see perspectives when we come together I want so badly to offer an alternative approach to what we do in a typical instructional design process, but rarely feel like we have to time to accomplish — work to come together, build a relationship, and trust the passion, energy, and expertise we all bring to the table.

On Sunday I spent some time talking with my good friend and colleague Keith Bailey about how nasty the relationship can get between an ID and a faculty member for this very reason. We work so hard to create schedules and then push faculty to just hand over some content (and we’ll take it from there) that real anger emerges. The question that emerged centered around how do we push through and learn there are many more powerful ways to go about this task?

One I’ll offer is to embrace the notion open content. What I challenged Dr. Bailey with was at the start of the next course his team in the Arts and Architecture eLearning Institute designs is to take the content outline and first go to wikipedia, wikieducator, and other open content spaces and see what exists with the faculty member as a partner. Use that moment to explore what is and isn’t there, to start the conversation about what is different and what is similar about what they discover together. It should lead to a real conversation about why it might make more sense for us to skip designing in a closed space and instead actually using what is available and contributed what we make into these open spaces? If an article about a concept doesn’t exist, construct it collaboratively and contribute it there. The idea of a Creative Commons licensed article is much more powerful than the existing lock down we place on learning materials from within the academy.

Would the overall process of working together to identify existing content and working to contribute new knowledge into the commons lead to an opportunity unlike what our current approaches provide? I’m not sure, but would like to explore that further. Any thoughts?

THON 2009

/ Cole Camplese / 5 Comments

On Sunday I was reminded of yet another reason why I think we owe it to our students to make things right. THON 2009 wrapped up yesterday after raising a staggering 7.49 million dollars to help fight cancer. The last hour is always so emotional and while we didn’t make it this year I was able to follow Twitter streams, blog posts, and the Collegian’s coverage. These are students who dance for 46 hours … 46! They do it “For the Kids” and they do it because they are all amazing.

We have this football coach here at Penn State named Joe Paterno who has seen it all — undefeated seasons, Heisman Trophy winner, National Championships, and Saturdays with 110,000 people screaming for he and his players. When he says it is his proudest moment at PSU in 58 years you have to feel humbled by the enormity of it all. I have to say, I was moved to tears and am so thankful to be a part of this community.

There are very few times in my life I’m speechless, but I am now. I wish the whole world could see and feel what’s in this room right now. Love and commitment and the dedication that just reeks from this room. In my 58 years at Penn State, I’ve never been more proud than right now.

Making Connections

/ Cole Camplese / 14 Comments

This is a rambling mess, but I’m not apologizing. You’ve been warned.

I’ve been thinking about the Twitter panel from Friday at the IST Grad Symposium and have come to see a couple of camps … one group looks at Twitter and says real connections don’t happen, that it is a waste of time, and an ego echo chamber. There is another group that sees it as full of opportunities to make real connections because it is simply a platform. There’s yet another who is like the first group, but they do participate. Seeing these three camps may be a generalization and I can deal with anyone disagreeing with me. I don’t really care too much which camp people fall into and I think I’ve arrived at a place where I’m not going to justify the technology. I’m just done with that argument — if you want to play, play. If you don’t, don’t.

What I am interested in is having opportunities to talk about the affordances and how they relate to problems of practice. I see challenges across the board in our classrooms and what I don’t see enough are people working to talk about them constructively. I hear a lot of people complain and never work to come together to do anything about them … I see way too many students sitting by themselves in classrooms not engaged, too many faculty teaching from PowerPoint, and too many administrators not pushing for reform. I’m not saying Twitter has anything to do with any of it, but don’t you think it is about time we start to really come together, make some connections, and radically do something about it all?

I can talk to the World in the blink of an eye and I know there are lots of smart people out there toiling away at what they do who are waking up to how bad it all really is. The big change here is that we can hear each other and we can change things if we want by coming together. And you know what, at the end of the day it may not be about changing the system at all, it may be about a new environment where connections happen and knowledge is shared openly. Maybe learning communities can happen without the corporate bullshit that much of our educational system is built on — I watch my first grader come home every night with nothing but worksheets from some curriculum book and I see students on campus doing nothing but reading from textbooks and taking electronic tests built from a publisher’s test bank. What kind of education is that? Why the hell do we let it happen?

I’m done with it. I’ve decided that I will work to make change happen and I’m inviting other people … anyone with a connection that wants to start a revolution knows where to find me.

Thoughts from the Twittersphere

/ Cole Camplese / 7 Comments

Yesterday I spent some time at the College of Information Sciences and Technology’s Graduate Symposium listening to Dr. Abdur Chowdhury, Twitter’s Chief Scientist give a keynote talk. I’ve written about Twitter for a couple of years now, but what is so interesting about Twitter these days is what is going on behind the scenes. While they are a relatively new company, they are really working hard to make sense of the river of data that flows through the 140 character text box they offer. Abdur was the co-founder of Summize where they used analytics to discover trends across the web … when Twitter bought it he moved over to start decoding massive trends brought about by Twitter’s user base. Later in the day I was then on a panel with him talking about Twitter to those assembled it was very interesting to hear his perspective on things and to see how he is leading the way in making sense out of all of those Twitter messages.

As an aside, one of the questions that seems to occupy lots of cycles is about Twitter’s financial model. I could tell during the question and answer period yesterday it is something that gets the folks at Twitter a little frustrated. I recently read an article in Wired where they make the claim that Twitter can go for quite some time without worrying about that and I am betting they are figuring it out behind closed doors on their own time.

One thing he spent a lot of time on was how they can pull content from peoples’ tweets and find real news trends. He referenced Mumbai several times as an example of where Twitter was able to bring the terrorist attacks to our attention even before the news. We saw it a few weeks ago with the flight that landed in the Hudson … pictures and reports came from the Twittersphere before the news had any clue. This isn’t new for people who have been paying attention, but it was a good push for me to revisit the capabilities of Twitter Search. It seems like everyone is discovering the power Twitter has to offer.

Being on the panel reminded me of how interesting the Twitter experiment Scott McDonald and I did in the CI 597C course we taught last year. I got to talking with Abdur about it and the research we had planned to do … talking about it all has made me even more interested in using Twitter to better understand what is going on in my classroom. When I did a google search on how far back tweets go, I came across Twistory. It is a site that uses the API to pull out the exact time and content of any given user’s Twitter account. What is really cool is that you can then use Google Calendar to subscribe to the output to visualize the data.

Seeing Twitter Conversations

Seeing Twitter Conversations

Now this is where it gets really interesting to me … you can put anyone’s name into it and add their twitter stream to the calendar. This set off an ah-ah moment for me. What it means is that in a class you could easily visualize the backchannel conversation between and among students. Imagine how rich the data can be now looking at what happens in class — are students passing twitter notes, digging deeper into the conversation, exchanges resources, etc? This is the first time I’ve been able to create a tangible paper trail of the interactions happening behind the scenes. I can’t wait until Spring 2010 when Scott and I teach our Disruptive Technologies course. We met this morning at the coffee shop to start talking about how we would integrate this and we’ve decided that while we are focusing on our themes of community, identity, and design that we’ll ask students to do research into how the community is coming together and evolving by mining Twitter data in this form (or another). I can’t wait to see how it goes down and to explore other ways to use Twitter and its API.