Sarah “intellagirl” Robbins - “Battle Lines: Is Academica at War with Technology?”
Posted by: nooccar
Teaching and Learning with Mobile Technologies
Posted by: Biray Alsac
Presented by Gary Marrer (GCC)
In the Fall of 2008, I was on sabbatical investigating the feasibility and uses of mobile technology in teaching and learning. During my sabbatical, I was able to create, investigate and utilize various mobile technologies. From that research, I have identified several mobile technologies which can be utilized today. See Sabbatical Portal at: http://sites.google.com/site/mobiledotsite/ Blog at: http://mobiledot.blogspot.com/ and NING at: http://mobiledot.ning.com and http://mobiledot.net
Marrer uses mobile technology to:
- Content delivery (syllabus, class schedule)
- student retention (Flash cards)
- active learning (video/camera/audio capture, role play, non-verbal communication-group assignment)
- General marketing
But some constraints:
- Cost of technology to student/institution (smartphones are expensive, some cell phone plans don’t have unlimited text-messages, etc)
- it’s portability (display size, memory, processing)
- still experimental
- Cell phone business models regarding applications
Most teachers want mobile devices to be turned off… Marrer wants to take advantage of this technology because students are much better at multi-tasking. They like short, asynchronous bites of information. Gary is trying to take this into consideration while still meeting the objectives of the classroom.
ACTIVE LEARNING:
- Capturing information with a mobile device - be it audio, text, video to be more involved with the real world. He hopes that these types of assignments will help students be more interactive as well as build a repository of information for the students.
STUDENT RETENTIONS SCENARIOS:
- Uses Twitter (SMS) for assignments, tests, final grades
- These are ways to keep students in check and connect with class/instructor
He notes that this is all experimental - it gets students engage with the technology and of course, he uses these technologies as a teaching point because he teaches a business management/tech courses.
There are other sites that link to mobile technologies - like Textmarks, Polleverywhere, Facebook, Twitter, MLEX (mobile learning experiment).
A take-home message: Take advantage of the computers in their [students] hand. And keep the focus on the teaching and learning - not necessarily the technology.
Harold Rheingold KeyNote
Posted by: nooccar
Getting ready for the Harold Rheingold, our morning Keynote. He’s thanking the teachers in his life, and said he is from AZ. He’s talking about his relationship with his 5th grade teacher. When he was asked to interview the principal he decided to become a writer. The year after he was sent to Art, and his mother was the teacher. This is where all of the misfits hung out. He began writing by using a typewriter, but then realized there was something called a computer. He bought his first modem in the early 1980s and it cost him $500.00! He hoped to get tons of information online, but there wasn’t much. Instead he found a community.
He realizes that the tools kids use today is far beyond where we were 25 years ago, but these are the descendents of the BBS of 1982. He’s talking about his daughter telling his wife that “Daddy’s talking to his computer again!” When his daughter got to middle school and used search engines to write papers, things clicked. His daughter and the web came of age at the same time. His slides are hilarious with links to Lycos, Alta Vista, and Infoseek. He talked to his daughter about using books to check your facts; putting terms into search engines is not guarantee that what you get back is factual. Authority use to reside in the author and publisher, but not the reader/consumer needs to ask questions about the information you find online.
A critical attitude kids today need when using the web is to always question what they find online. For example, search the name of the author of things. Teach kids critical thinking skills. Rheingold went to his daughter’s school and realized that critical thinking was a way for kids to question their teachers. School is a plot to encourage kids to question authority.
Education media literacy wise is largely happening after school now, or when “the teacher isn’t watching”. These digital natives teach each other, while schools remain a place to stick our kids when we’re at work and where society can train their citizens.
In 1995 we had this fear of internet porn show up. This moral panic over internet sexual predators could’ve led to all ISPs to censor everything down to a 12 year old. The ACLU court hearing where Rheingold testified was shot down fortunately. Kids are pretty good at spotting phonies. The predators are in the neighborhoods in real life, not necessarily online.
Today we have to harness the enthusiasm of children and teens today to develop a public voice that they care about. Media available today from camera phones, laptops, FB, Youtube is where it is today. There is an economic divide but smaller than you think. Even if they don’t have access…we need to get them using it to be succesful in the 21st century.
Digital media is continuing to change, and physical public spacing is more and more closed to kids. They are moving political movements online. This is all leading to a broader participatory culture, that include RSS, social bookmarking, video sharing, mashups, etc etc etc… all have 3 common characteristics. All broadcast & receive from and to everyone, the are all social where power comes from the people and they enable faster, cheaper collective action. He said computers are mind amplifiers. Young people creative as well as consume online. They are no longer passive… they seek, adopt, appropriate and invent.
What is new is that the population of digital natives carry mobile devices, know how to use them and the internet is NOT a transformative new tech. It’s always been there like water and electricity. This all comes natural to them. Internet media is not a disengagement, and he doesn’t think they are disengaged. This is powerful tool to engage in their own voices with issues they care about. The net lets them connect to things they care about. Teachers can show them how to use these tools, contest claims, organize, etc… Media production differs from other sorts of products that have the power to persuade, power, educate, inspire movements, civilizations, etc… He’s talking about Jenkin’s new work about teaching to the 21st century. There’s a shift to how our community now works.
When his daughter came home from school, she didn’t like school because they rang bells, lined kids up in rows, etc… He has now been teaching how to been more of a community, a rhetoric of blogging. Check out http://www.socialtext.net/medialiteracy.
What does civic engagement mean to us today? I think this is the largest question that he is asking of us and we’re asking of our administrators. This is the question, and people aren’t looking to this question. They aren’t thinking globally. They are thinking about standards, objectives and not leaving those kids behind. This is the wrong way to go about things.
Rheingold’s discussing http://socialmediaclassroom.com/ his website. This is a site to review, check, and engage in. When he began talking about social media, message boards and blogs flattened authority in the classroom. Create wireless creative classroom circles. There is no back row in a circle! Rheingold teach social media, so he can’t ask the students to turn off the computers…so we have to work around issues of authority in the classroom.
Don’t just keep up with the technologies. Keep up with the literacies. Beautiful. Pure beauty.
Mission Possible #10: Utterli
Posted by: Biray Alsac
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to create live podcasts via Utterli from your phone. Utterli is a website for mobile multimedia discussion. You can take pictures, create audio-based (podcasts) and video-enhanced content directly from the web (or via your phone - which is the best part), then comment and share this content with others.
The popularity of mobile devices (cell phones, iPhones, Blackberry, etc.) allow people to capture and catalog information and distribute content to audiences in real-time. Imagine your student attending an off-campus guest lecture for extra credit. Instead of having him write a reflection paper and/or get a signature from the speaker (for confirmation), why not have the student do a quick audio recap of the session or interview the presenter using his cell phone directly after the presentation? And then, share his media with the other students via the web, a (class or student) blog, Facebook or Twitter! Most students are equipped with cell phones and are generally very mobile-device savvy… So why not take advantage of their strengths and create assignments that require them to collect and create content via their favorite tech-toy: cell phones.
How To:
Before the Conference
1. From the web, go to http://utterli.com
2. Create a free account.
3. Go to PROFILE tab, Click on “Account Settings”, then Click on “Mobile” tab to sync your cell phone number your Utterli account
4. Once everything is authenticated, record your first voice utterli. (It will require you to call 1-650-644-1331 and simply follow the prompts). Say “Hi, this is (insert name) and I’m recording my fist utterli podcast from my phone!”
5. Go back to your Utterli account on the web and label your utterli. Be sure to tag it with “Maricopa Tech” so when others search Utterli for Maricopa Tech podcasts, they will find what you’ve saved for everyone!
Additional steps:
6. Click on the GROUPS tab and click “Find Groups”
7. Search for the word “MaricopaTech”
8. Join the Group “MaricopaTech”
9. Go back to your Home page, click on “sent utters” (where you can see your latest Utterli posts).
10. Click on the podcast you’ve just created and send it to group - select MaricopaTech group (This way, all of the groups posts can be included in one location).
Below are instructions on how to create utterli groups for your classes so your students can create podcasts and send them to the ‘class’ group on Utterli.
At the Conference
1. Meet with new colleagues and faculty from the sessions and discussions.
2. Ask them about their thoughts on a session or the conference.
3. Ask them if they wouldn’t mind sharing their thoughts via podcast
4. Take your phone out, call Utterli, use phone as a microphone and begin the interview.
5. Go back to the web later and label and tag your utter and, of course, send it to MaricopaTech group.
That is your mission. This message will not self destruct, instead it will linger forever as a ghost on the web.
Are You Attending the MaricopaTech Conference?
Posted by: soul4real
Well, you should be. Join us for Maricopa Community College’s Teaching & Learning with Technology Conference, May 19th, 2009 at Glendale Community College. Register at http://mcli.maricopa.edu/techconf
Mission Possible #9: Delicious.com
Posted by: nooccar
Mission Impossible #9: Delicious
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to share your favorite Web world via Delicious.
Every day we’re texted, tweeted, emailed, and given web addresses to anything from the new Chinese restaurant that delivers to your office to the link to that tea pot your partner wants for your upcoming anniversary. These addresses are on our phones, iTouches, scraps of paper, text files (without much else & saved as “Document”), or in volatile memory. A day later, a week later, a month later you need that URL and you don’t have it. Or you saved it on your home machine but now you’re at work. Or worse case scenario, you have them all saved in a file on your machine and the hard drive crashes. What do you do?
Well Dear Readers, I’ll tell you. And the answer to that is simply delicious. Delicious.com that is! Delicious.com (formerly Del.icio.us) is a social networking system that is housed entirely online for free. This system seamlessly syncs to your FireFox browser and has several tools built in to organize the locations of all online information you’ve found of some value over time.
While you’re prepping for Maricopa Tech and find some nifty Web 2.0 tool online, why not try using Delicious? Bookmark it. But, Devon, how is this social, you ask? Well, let me tell you. This is where it gets really powerful! You can save URLs directly through any computer you’re on anywhere in the universe by logging into Delicious.com and clicking on the Save New Bookmark. Or, more powerfully, you can install an add-on to any computer where you have administrator privilege. (If this is multiple computers, Delicious will automatically sync all bookmarks for you all of the time.) Everytime you save a URL, you have different options:
Title It! Give the bookmark a title that makes sense to you. Perhaps “gwaacesd.tempek12.az.us/mail/g/m/12229822″ makes no sense to you, but “Work Email” means everything, so change the name. You can do it! It’s your bookmark.
Describe It! Describe what is at the link. You have ____ max characters. This is an effective way to annotate your online research project sources.
Tag It! Add as many tags as you want. For example, if the site saving is your favorite sports, The Pittsburgh Steelers, you could tag that as “Steelers, Stillers, Pittsburgh, PA, NFL, AFC, Hometown, Best Team Ever, etc…” All of these tags work. You know why? Because You choose! It’s up to you and no one will ever tell you that you’re wrong. Go ahead and tag away!
Share It! You can share any link (and it’s data) with colleagues. Just click on their name in your tag cloud. For example, do you want to share a great new link with me? (Perhaps your favorite Steeler website?) Just tag that link with For:Nooccar.
Hide It! Maybe you want to save a link, but you don’t want the world to know about it. Maybe it’s a link to your church, and you teach public school. Go ahead and click on the Hide box when saving your link. You need to be logged in to see these links when you return.
Well, that’s it really. Just five easy to remember steps.
The Network
So now you’ve saved your links, named them, tagged them, and shared them. Once you save this information, you will see a number off to the right that represents how many other people have saved the same link. Click on that number! Go ahead, it’s ok. Now you will see a long list of people who’ve saved the same link, with their descriptions of those links. You can also click on those people to see what else they’ve saved or to add them to your network. Very cool.
Groups
The easiest way to set up groups is through a tag. If we all agreed to use a certain tag (for example “Maricopa Tech”) then if you run a search for that term in Delicious everything anyone has tagged as such will appear in your search results.
How To:
Before the Conference
1. From the web, go to http://delicious.com
2. Create a free account.
3. Install Delicious icons on your own computers (through the account setup process, you will receive the directions for this step)
4. Play with Delicious by saving some bookmarks, tagging them, and sharing them with others.
5. Tag it “Maricopa Tech” so when others search Delicious for Maricopa Tech links, they will find what you’ve saved for everyone!
Below is a video Liz. B Davis made on an overview of how to use Delicious and also post in Delicious. I will warn you that with Web 2.0, stuff changes all of the time, so even if her interface looks a little different the ideas are the same.
At the Conference
1. Learn about new tools you can use in your classes, life, and research.
2. Save them in Delicious
3. Annotate them
4. Tag them as “Maricopa Tech” so we can all enjoy them!
Mission Possible #8: Ning Social Network as a LMS
Posted by: soul4real
Your Mission, should you chose to accept it, is to explore Ning social networks.
Ning is an online platform for users to create their own social websites and social networks. Your social network can be for anything and anyone, even your classes. So why would anyone want to create their own social network when we already have Facebook and MySpace? Simple. It’s yours, and you can invite only the people you want to join and make it look and function the way you want it to. This is perfect for a classroom. First, we have to be conscious about FERPA regulations, so with your own social network in Ning, you can keep it private or make it public. Secondly, students are already using Facebook and MySpace, and many don’t want to mix business with pleasure. And as an instructor, I’m not too anxious about seeing photos of my students indulging in their pleasures. A Ning social network helps make it clear that this is class, but adds the features that help build community in the class.
Below is a presentation on how I use Ning as a LMS replacement for my hybrid and online courses at South Mountain CC. Check it out.
There are many great features built into Ning that make it a great site for online courses. A few of my favorites are the built in chat that is displayed at the bottom of each page. Students can see when others are present and interact with them if they choose. And the ability to embed widgets on any page and add your own tabs is great. My motivation for using a social network like Ning in my classes was spurred on by my desire to create community among students in my distance ed courses. Here’s another presentation I created on using Ning for that purpose.
So now it is your turn.
How to:
Go to http://classroom20.com
Check out one of the largest Ning sites out there. Classroom20.com, the social network for those interested in Web 2.0 and collaborative technologies in education. Register as the site by clicking the Sign Up button at the top of the page.
Then visit the MaricopaTech group on the Classroom 2.0 Ning site by clicking this link: http://www.classroom20.com/group/maricopatech. Join the group and add us as your friends, so we can keep in touch.
Mission Possible #7, Social Networking #2: LinkedIn
Posted by: rrodrigo
Are you Linked In?
Your Mission, should you chose to accept it, is to make professional connections!
LinkedIn is Facebook ’s more “professional” cousin. The purpose of LinkedIn is to make professional connections, as opposed to the more “personal” connections in Facebook. (I don’t know about you, but Facebook is very “professional” for me as well.) One of the professional activities you can engage in with LinkedIn is to “Recommend” someone.
Like the Facebook mission, your mission is to be professionally social:
- Join LinkedIn
- Make friends with soem folks at your school or in the district (those of us writing the Mission Possible posts all have LinkedIn accounts: Alisa Cooper, Devon Adams, Biray Alsac, Lisa Young, and yours truly Shelley Rodrigo);
- Write a recommendation for your friend;
- Join the Maricopa Tech LinkedIn Group ;
- Participate in the discussion about “What technology do you want to “play” with this upcoming summer?” and
- Submit a link under the “news” tab.
So go to LinkedIn.com, start an account, and be social!
This message will not self destruct, instead it will linger forever as a ghost on the web.
(cc) image “HUGE LINK” posted at Flickr by Elephant Wearing Striped Pants
Mission Possible #6: Social Networking #1-Facebook
Posted by: rrodrigo
Your Mission, should you chose to accept it, is to be social.
If you haven’t heard of Facebook, where have you been? I’m confident readers of this blog have at least heard of Facebook; however, you may have wondered, “why Facebook?” Or more importantly, why social networking?
There are a variety of social networks out there: MySpace , Facebook , LinkedIn , etc. Technically even YouTube is a social network; all users have their own page (aka, channel) and can connect to other channels. You can even make your own social network using Ning.
Specifically, Facebook allows you to make friends, communicate with them in a variety of ways, start groups, organize events, graffeti one another’s walls, through stuff at one another (virtualy of course on these last two), as well as tons of other stuff.
Specifically for this mission possible, your mission is to:
- Join Facebook;
- Make friends with some folks at your school or in the district (those of us writing the Mission Possible posts all have Facebook accounts: Alisa Cooper , Devon Adams , Biray Alsac , Lisa Young , and yours truly Shelley Rodrigo );
- Write on your new friend’s wall;
- Write on your new friend’s wall;
- Join the Maricopa Tech Facebook Group ;
- Participate in the discussion about “new” technologies;
- Unofficially RSVP whether or not you’ll attend the conference (it’s an event associated with the group ).
So go to facebook.com, start an account, and be social!
This message will not self destruct, instead it will linger forever as a ghost on the web.
Mission Possible #5: To Tweet, or Not to Tweet?
Posted by: mjmfoodie
Yes, I know, Twitter has already been done (See Mission Possible #2 for lots of great how-to-get-started tips for Twitter), but as I was lying in bed this morning with a cat rubbing on my face, NPR Weekend Edition Saturday ran a great piece that begs the question: Why Tweet?
OK, sorry folks. For the newly initiated, in Twitter-ese, a “Tweet” is the 140-character maximum for any single comment that you post. 140 characters is fairly short, hence a “Tweet” – but I think you’ll find that a lot of 140-character interactions add up to significant communication!
Anyway, host Scott Simon talks to Daniel Schorr about Twitter, and the boiled-down version of the question that they fling into the Twitterverse is: “Why do you Tweet? “ The answers start ROLLING in immediately, with a wide range of rationale being represented:
· Practical: “Because my school work is boring … ”
· Snarky: “No offense, but that’s kind of a dumb question. Rephrase as: Why do you communicate at all? Just one more method of doing so.”
· Philosophical: “I tweet for the same reason I read — to know I’m not alone.”
Why do I Tweet? I have to admit, I was skeptical at first; Twitter seemed to me to be just one more time sink that I couldn’t afford, especially when I needed to spend my time online doing much more lofty things, like finding yet another Web 2.0 tool that would allow me to . . . (fill in the blank). Do you know what I discovered? I don’t need to be the Web 2.0 Master of Everything. There is a collective intelligence lurking behind Twitter (or any other part of the social web, for that matter) that has the knowledge I seek. By following Twitter, I get leads for conferences, answers to my tech problems, a sounding board for pedagogical questions, tips on good restaurants, and sometimes free therapy.
I’m an economist, folks, and to me that sounds like a lot of benefit for a measly 140 characters.
Don’t forget to look for me, mjm_foodie, on Twitter at May’s Maricopa Tech conference!
Delicious Links- PhotoPeach: Telling stories over photos.
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