Teaching -- Learning -- Technology

On Sunday at the old Brooklyn Ferry landing I saw this thing called the Telectroscope. True to its 19th century sci-fi roots, it looks like something from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. It's a riveted brass tube with "gauges" and "dials," the end of which is a portal where people peer and are peered at via a real-time video link between the Brooklyn and London bridges. With no audio link, people on both sides wrote messages on whiteboards ("U Rock!", "Blimey!") and waved giddily.

http://www.tiscali.co.uk/telectroscope/home.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telectroscope

The "history" of the Telectroscope at its official website tells the (fictional) backstory of Paul St George, an artist who discovered the papers of his Victorian ancestor, Alexander Stanhope St George, detailing the plans and diaries of a trans-Atlantic tunnel. After a rough sea passage to view the engineering marvels of the Brooklyn Bridge, Alexander had been inspired to create a tunnel for safer travel. But instead, he became more obsessed with inventing an optical "device for the suppression of absence" called the Telectroscope. The project met several tragic setbacks that forced the workers to mutiny but Paul, after discovering Alexander's papers, completed it (sculptures of the Telectroscope's arrival preceded the exhibit in London [right] and Brooklyn). Information on how and why this was done is not provided, but the site features several period-like diagrams, workers' artifacts, and other objects that lend the exhibit an air of authenticity.

I thought it funny that a public art installation would present an old technology (videoconferencing) as a spectacle of innovation. But given the 125th anniversary of the Brooklyn Bridge, roughly contemporary with Jules Verne's novel (not that I'm suggesting an intertextual relationship), the iron-clad aesthetic really evokes that late Victorian imagination of the future of industrial and communication technologies. It helps to contextualize technologies we habitually think were invented by ouselves, when in fact they were conceived and at least partially produced more than a century ago.

According to the Wikipedia article linked above, the fictional "telectroscope" was envisioned in a New York Sun article of 29 March 1877 in terms of what we now call a web browser: a device that "would allow merchants to transmit pictures of their wares to their customers, the contents of museum collections would be made available to scholars in distant cities, and (combined with the telephone), operas and plays could be broadcast into people's homes." The article is reproduced here from papers in the Thomas Edison archive at Rutgers.

While Paul St George's project is basically a pair of webcams housed in retro-styled sculptures, its public, monumental size provokes that child-like excitement that most of us feel in the presence of a shiny new gadget. Among people participating in the exhibit, there was a giddy sense of curiosity and eagerness to communicate. I like the association of linking, bridging, connecting: bridge to bridge, a make-believe tunnel, the Internet, public expressions of goodwill.

One interesting phenomenon is the debate in some Flickr image comments about whether the portal shows pre-recorded video. When I was at the exhibit, there was generally so much chaos both at the local and remote portals that you couldn't tell if responses were being made between the participants. It could easily be a dupe, eliciting "interactive" responses based on perceived gestures. Nonetheless, people on both sides viewed each other with wonder, and that's about the best humanistic response that such technologies produce.

All photos from Flickr public commons: (top) David Reeves, (drill bit) taskerweb, (guages) David Reeves, (portal sign) crowbot, (portal crowd) David Reeves.

Taking a cue from Chris' detailed post-mortem on the CSS workshop. In return (retribution?) for running two tiny workshops at the fall tech fair, I got two full sessions this time. 27 of the 31 registrants showed (though some CSI folks were decidedly late) for my early session, and 25 of the 30 registrants appeared for my second session.

Thanks especially to security and facilities for being so accommodating on a Sunday.

:00-:30: We opened with a chat about Seminar 2, and talked about how taking photos that will be used in a web site or wiki is different than taking photos that will stand alone or only with other photographs. I ran through Lauren's great one-pager on basic photography concepts. (Attached.) In the first session I wasn't able to get the Apple TV unit working at all, so I acted out some of the ideas. I think this actually went over rather better than my examples in the second session, when (having got the TV up) I used images from my own Flickr sets. Then I gave them a scavenger hunt to do, and sent them out into the city.

:30-1:30: Photo Scavenger Hunt Activity. In teams of 2 or 3, head out into the park and the surrounding neighborhood. Collect the following photographs!

1. A simple, well-composed photo of the park, divided along the rule of thirds, which includes leaves or flowers in the top left.
2. A photo with diagonal lines.
3. A photo which includes both a natural and a manmade texture.
4. A photo of an irregular pattern in architecture or natural objects.
5. A photo composed primarily of triangular shapes.
6. A photo with 2 small objects and 2 large objects.
7. A photo which shows a contrast between human beings and their environment (the city, the park). If you take a picture of someone other than yourselves, ask permission first, and explain what you are doing.
8. A photo looking up from the ground.
9. A photo looking down from a high point.
10. A photo whose primary subject is in the far left or far right of the frame. 

I felt my students in both groups came back with some very creative responses to these challenges. One student in the early class, for example, took a close-up shot of the park map, with the hand of a teammate holding a leaf in the top left (#1). They found diagonal lines in trees, park benches, and condos (one student in the later class did a great job on a shot of nothing but windows). The quest for triangles yielded photos of both natural and architectural features.

In the second session I had some students get so caught up in taking photographs that they lost track of time and missed my wrap-up. But as that was in some ways my goal -- to try and get them excited about "seeing" differently -- I was pleased with that.

1:30-2:00: Upon returning to the basement, we threw some students' photos up on the big screen, and had others walk around and show them off of their cameras. In the first session, we took pictures of ourselves, too -- documenting the event in a very meta sort of way. This wrap-up didn't go nearly so well with the second group, and I let them go as soon as we seemed to have exhausted our options.

Assessment: My thanks to all of the students who came out on a Sunday. I think that the photography core of this workshop was a lot of fun for everyone, but it was difficult to pitch the before-and-after segments at the right level, due to the wide variety of skills and knowledge sets in the classroom. Next time, students need to be reminded to bring the cables that connect camera and computer (I completely forgot about this), and I need to set up a central uploading site in advance, so that we can look at their results together.

Also, I think a scavenger hunt should probably have prizes, and students felt strongly that a weekend afternoon workshop should come with good food. I'm not entirely in their camp, but I think that providing a snack might've been a good idea.

I just want to say thanks to Jim Groom for a highly stimulating and entertaining talk yesterday. He gave us tons of great information about the state of the instructional technology field and showed some great projects that he's been involved with. I particularly liked the way that WordPress Multi-User allows students to use their own blogs for posting to an aggregating course blog, so that their contributions occur both in the context of the course discussion and in their own web space that they use for self-development. This kind of approach makes more sense to me than an e-Portfolio tool, since students could use WordPress as a CMS for creating an attractive online resume for prospective employers, internships, grad schools, etc., but would also be a unified space for the development of their research, thoughts, creativity, etc.

A smartly aggregated, distributed system like that would be key for us in at least two ways. (1) As Jim pointed out, and I think he's absolutely right, the web is getting to the point where everyone needs to know how to manage their online presence, knowing how to push and pull what they need where they need it. We as educators should guide them in doing so effectively. (2) The distributed aggregation model is a natural analog to our own situation, since we are a centrally administered program that really "happens" on the seven different campuses. A WPMU installation, or something similar, that is aggregated by this Teaching & Learning site (or perhaps something else) could be very effective in unifying the Macaulay body. I don't think it's possible fully to heal the centrifugal/centripetal tensions, though.

What struck me as well was the way in which WPMU at WMU seems to have taken on a life of its own. I *loved* the way that students in the Asian-American literature course created a rap with samples from the WWII propaganda film about Japanese-American internment that another student had posted. One of the main pedagogical values of student-produced multimedia in a web 2.0 environment is the translation of elements and concepts from the learning object into different critical formats. The fact that the rap posting happened without the direction of the professor is even better. It shows student initiative in furthering their learning, and the availability and ease of use of open-source technology allowed that to happen.

Here is a list of some of the links and resources that Jim pointed out to us:

• John Udell's screencast about the evolution of the WikiPedia "Heavy Metal Umlaut" article. Search also for other wiki movies.
   
• In a WMU course done entirely on WikiPedia, with the goal of writing or editing several articles to get them as featured entries, an underground band called the FA-Team spontaneously offered students help in editing and improving articles in order to achieve that goal. Jim's theory is that there are open learning nuts who live for the creation and sharing of knowledge that volunteer to do these kinds of things.
   
• Cosimo and Mojidi are free video annotation tools. {{need to find spelling and links, will update later}}.
   
• DownLoad Helper is a Firefox extension for downoading YouTube videos, so you can edit and re-upload them.
   
• Digital storytelling is really hot right now, and the main technical problem there is with video codecs, compatibility, and translation between editing applications.
   
• Skreemer - Gardner Campbell - and the Gardner Writes blog. {{Can't tell from my notes what this was about.}}
   
• In support of WPMU, WMU has a documentation commons, which we've already started here and should greatly enhance as our online community takes shape in the coming year.
   
• Libravox is a great public domain audio book resource.
   
• Cogdogroo - see for its 50+ tools for digital story creation. See also the cogdogroo blog.
   
• Google Reader is a good RSS aggregator app for keeping in touch with Teaching & Learning and Instructional Technology developments.
   
• There is a MediaWiki page RSS extension (i.e. not just for recent changes). {{Need to find link to the extension; will update later.}}
   
• U B U W E B - a free resource for avant-garde multimedia.

A recent post on if:book linking to the YouTube video below got me thinking about the poetics of the screen.

I haven't beheld an Apple ][+ since I was in fourth grade (1985-6). Not only was it nostalgically moving to see that screen (I could smell the "common area" between classrooms again, where the computer lived), but seeing it termed "vintage" was strange to me. So much of the recent technology culture of 20- and 30-something creatives involves a 'going back to the basics.' The way that hipster culture fetishizes mundane objects of the 1970s and 80s (lunchboxes, plastic chairs, plastic toys, old tape players) would seem to fit this return to childhood for the possibilities of now.

Take another example. This music video, which I first saw at Sebestian Mary's blog, is made of dice (really?):

The dice function simultaneously as building blocks and pixels, creating a kind of schoolroom aesthetic to complement a current pop song.

Is there something inherent in digital culture, in the full sense of that adjective, that lends itself to a "building block" approach to creativity? After all, this website is powered by Drupal, a technology whose construction elements are called "modules," "blocks," and "nodes." And if it's the case that we think in pixel/blocks, what is it about the current generation of 20- and 30-somethings that leads us to that approach?

Also, how will our actions as teachers and instructional technologists affect the future nostalgic remembrance of our students? Perhaps it is worth considering as we design learning activities.

I just followed this headline from the Chronicle that appeared in our news feed to the right. It refers to the Open Yale Courses - a handful of seminars in various humanities and science departments that ran last Spring.

When you follow the link they give to the Open Yale Courses, what you get is a static archive of course materials and recorded class sessions. While archiving a course like this is certainly useful for faculty and even students -- it is, after all, one thing we're trying to do here -- there is nothing particularly new and sexy about it at all.

In fact, both Yale and the Chronicle seem to have fallen victim to the mindset that merely putting something online is somehow interactive (almost never the case) and progressive.

The Yale website states:

This approach [of liberal arts education] goes beyond the acquisition of facts and concepts to cultivate skills and habits of rigorous, independent thought: the ability to analyze, to ask the next question, and to begin the search for an answer.

We hope these courses will be a resource for critical thinking, creative imagination, and intellectual exploration.

While the private individual may view these course materials, do some independent reading, and ask the next question, that's a heck of a lot different from doing it in the context of a classroom, physical or online, where you actually get to do that with peers undergoing the same experience. There is no discussion space in which to conduct readings and conversation, or to present your own research.

The Chronicle quotes a university spokesman as saying "These are gavel-to-gavel presentations" where they "put everything online that [they] could," which is what makes them different from other higher ed online offerings. The Chronicle also quotes Diana E. E. Kleiner, professor of the history of art and classics, as saying that they "wanted everyone to be able to see and hear each lecture as if they were sitting in the classroom.” While I'm not going to deny the usefulness of the endeavor, in actuality, Yale has merely replicated the passive lecture-and-handout model of learning to which instructional technology contributes little.

Such an online resource would be better if it provided the tools to perform active research, collaboration, presentation, criticism, and so on. But unless managed in the structure of a course or under the constant guidance of a resident expert on the subject matter, such an environment would become unweildy and unfocused. I'm not sure it's the role of a university to provide such a resource to anyone and everyone outside its walls, digital or brick-and-mortar.

Now that I've had some time to digest, I thought I would make a few comments about the poster session. In general, I thought it went very well and that the posters accomplished many goals that we hoped they would, for example, to allow the students to communicate what they have learned and researched to their peers in an academic format other than the formal paper. Two places where I think we could improve:

One: Can we change the way abstracts are submitted? One of my team's abstracts was lost and they weren't alloted a space in the room for display. In an ideal world, there would be a submission system that tallied how many poster abstracts there were supposed to be against how many they received and there would be the possibility of checking whether something was lost in cyberspace before the day of the conference. I know most conferences use a particular abstract submission form/process, which allows one to see whether the abstract was received. Perhaps we could discuss doing the same next year?

Two: Securing the right space is really important. Two of the rooms were so cramped it was nearly impossible to walk around and look at posters. The lighting in those same rooms made it very difficult to read some of the posters. These factors should be a consideration when choosing a space. Perhaps next year the session will be at the Macaulay center?

I thought that the quality of the posters in this year's Seminar 3 common event was a little better than years past. They seemed to be more substantive and research oriented. From a compositional standpoint, I felt the communication of information was handled better (i.e. with less text, more images, and a more appropriate format with abstract, analysis of data, and visual representation).

I also thought the public service announcements created by a couple of the sections were fantastic! Would love to put those up on our website for more people to see. It struck me that changing the format of the event to include alternate projects, such as the PSAs, or perhaps websites, documentaries, and so on, could make the event more of a science fair. While that would take pressure off the necessity to resource the poster printing, it might also introduce a lack of cohesion of students' experiences of the seminar across the board.

From a logistical standpoint, there was far more chaos surrounding the printing of the posters than in years past. We are looking into buying our own printer or perhaps getting a bulk deal with a commercial print shop that everyone can go to. That way, the process will be uniform and the expectations known in advance.

Would love to hear what faculty and students thought of the project.

I couldn't stay for the entire CUNY IT Conference, but I was able to get to the first two sessions and the keynote. I don't have anything constructive to say about the latter, but both sessions I attended were valuable and intriguing.

I. E-Portfolios

The e-portfolios session, which was presented by a number of QCC faculty members from different disciplines (theatre, computer science, English, physics), ended up being more of a problem-oriented session than a solution-oriented one. The physics professor laid out a very clear theory of how e-portfolios might best be integrated into a particular course. Arguing that most technology tools are teaching tools rather than learning tools, he felt that one of the reasons technology is perceived to be of limited effectiveness in the classroom is because there is insufficient focus on the learner. By shifting one's focus from the system to its application, the instructor to the learner, and assessment to individual construction of knowledge, he felt, one could simply use previously-existing online materials to make a portfolio system which would serve as both long-term storage and a way to identify and target student weaknesses. Critiquing e-portfolios that "try to be everything to everybody," he felt that each kind of e-portfolio (be it arts, education, employment) should be structured differently.

He demonstrated how this might be done with a sample Access database.

The second half of the program was devoted to e-portfolios in multimedia and the arts. Instructors of English and theatre discussed how they had used e-portfolios with only moderate success in the past, and how they would try to do so in a joint class they'll be teaching this spring. The Epsilen system was demonstrated, and its strengths and limits discussed. The system is apparently very user-friendly for students, but occasionally less so for instructors.

The most successful aspect of this panel, from my perspective, was the demonstration of a collective online portfolio, developed for a Flash animation course. The instructor had developed a basic site template in Dreamweaver and had each student e-mail HTML files of their animation projects, then put it together into an online portfolio.

Overall, there are many efforts at QCC, with varying results. The panel seemed agreed that a one-size-fits-all eportfolio system wasn't the best way to go, but looked forward to doing more with Epsilen in the future.

Links:
Flash Animations group e-portfolio
Sample Epsilen e-portfolio from QCC faculty
Epsilen environment

II. Second Life

The Second Life (SL) panel was totally wicked. Several programming faculty from City Tech have bought an island (paying Linden Labs for dedicated server space and electricity, etc.) and have a growing virtual vertical campus in SL. While they are still exploring how best to use this new resource (the primary speaker likened SL to Pong -- it's a similarly early element of the emerging 3D Web), they are experimenting with it in a number of disciplines. A lot of time was spent exploring the site and showing how it all works.

Most notable was the presentation of two members of the City Tech Biology department, who have built a 3-D model of a cell on part of the City Tech SL island. You can fly your avatar into the cell and examine each element in relationship to the others in 3D. (I thought this was the best thing I'd seen all day!)

City Tech is also experimenting with streaming live video within SL, and using materials created by other SL groups -- such as the SL Sistine Chapel -- as teaching aids. There is apparently a very active listserv for educators using Second Life, as well as a blog and articles such as "101 Uses for Second Life in the College Classroom."

I made an account on Second Life ages ago and let it linger; now I'm going to resurrect it and do a little exploring. It seems to me that we could consider trying it out in Seminar 4... have our students build their own Virtual Future NYC?

Links:
Second Life
Second Life For Education (go here to access the wiki and mailing list; both are very active)
Blog: New World Notes
101 Uses for Second Life in the College Classroom [PDF]

A friend in the ITP certificate program attended the wiki panel and says y'all gave her tons of great ideas. She was excited by what she saw. Way to go!

I thought the CUNY IT conference on Friday 30 November went well. In the morning I attended the panel "The Role of Digital Games in the Curriculum: A Humanistic Approach," by Mary Flanagan of Tiltfactor Laboratory / Hunter College and Alice Bonvicini of Integrated Media Arts at Hunter. I decided to skip the plenary address by John M. Engler because it didn't seem relevant to instructional technology. Our two panels in the afternoon, on the use of wikis for collaborative learning and the Instructional Technology Fellowship as a model for other campuses, also went very well. Joe Ugoretz, our Director of Technology and Learning, wrote a bit about them here.

Though roughly half the conference panels were about Information Technology and half about Instructional technology, many of the instructional ones were concurrent so I was limited in what I could attend. Unfortunately, a panel with Jim Groom (a former ITF and brilliant individual), Mikhail Gershovich, and Matt Gold ran simultaneously with our late afternoon panel, and it was killing me not to be able to see them. I have some thoughts on the conference as a whole but for now I want to put down what I got out of the morning panel.

I attended the gaming panel because I don't really know much about the field of gaming pedagogy. The only instance I already knew about was the Ivanhoe Game at the University of Virginia, which involves the collaborative performance of literary criticism with classmates in a networked 3D environment.

Mary and Alice approach gaming with the premise that video games express "values" and belief structures, much like movies or works of literature. They hold that most popular commercial videogames reinforce capitalism (you have to consume all items of worth in the game environment and prevent other players from obtaining resources) or genocide (you have to remove all of something from the game environment), or both. One example they gave was that World of Warcraft can be seen to encode racism in that it allows players to negotiate, fight, or bypass any creature except "dark elves," which must be killed.

Their company, Tiltfactor, is a non-profit gaming research and design group that attempts to (a) discern the values of a game that are enacted during gameplay and (b) design games containing values that will prompt players' awareness of social justice, environmental issues, or other pedagogical objectives. In their work, they design games for junior highschool students (for example, a game based on the popular "Dance, Dance, Revolution" that teaches Java programming). They also teach game design to university undergrads.

In both their game design and the teaching of game design, they focus on reworking existing game formats. It struck me that this is very much like teaching composition -- learn to create variations within an existing genre, which inaugurates a process of analysis and awareness of the format's structure and capabilities.

Mary and Alice showed the audience several games that aim to raise awareness of social justice. For example, ICED (I Can End Deportation) is based on a popular first person shooter game, where the player is a member of an immigrant group being chased by immigration officials. In the process of gameplay, the the player interacts with members of other immigrant groups in such a way as to foreground the unfair immigration policies of the U.S. Another game, Velvet Strike, allows players to hack popular online military games like Counter Strike, an anti-terrorism first person shooter, and add anti-war graffiti to the game's environment. This activist online game intervention is designed to question the boarders between online, public, and private space -- where are they and how are people expressing opinions in them?

One prominent undergrad lesson that Tiltfactor developed was to have students design and play a 3-player version of Tetris, in which players collaborate to make shapes fit into the pre-existing blocks. The activity involved a meta component in which was studied the splitting of attention between individual and group interests.

The other major component of Tiltfactor's work is assessment, which they find the most difficult. How do you know whether a game is enacting the value you've designed into it? How do you know whether students are learning the objectives of the game? Tiltfactor does pre- and post-test focus groups to assess learning and advancement on a qualitative basis. They also do video analysis of gameplay or game design behaviors. And they get outside help from people at Hunter to crunch numbers for quantitative analysis, but Mary Flanagan was not clear on how that worked.

One example of an assessment was that the Java-teaching game based on "Dance, Dance, Revolution" did not elevate girls' programming and math skills, but it greatly raised their confidence and their perception that they did or could improve on these.

In all, I was intrigued by the presentation but somewhat alarmed by the political bent of their lessons. A few of the questions at the end asked about whether their activities taught the complex issues surrounding a controversy, implying an anxiety about political indoctrination in the classroom. Mary and Alice were clear that the purpose was to raise awareness of how indoctrination is perpetrated through gameplay by experiences that counter the predominate commercial forms.

Tiltfactor's website can be seen at http://tiltfactor.org.

A curriculum guide and other resources are located at http://valuesatplay.org.

Jeff