Opening

     The Library of Congress manages copyright issues. They have recently been putting out new rules about academic “fair use” of videos and print media.  It’s not easy reading a copyright ruling, and I’m a law school grad. 
     But here’s the future, compliments of the New York Times: 
“The Library of Congress, which has the power to define exceptions to an important copyright law, said…that it was legal to bypass a phone’s controls on what software it will run to get “lawfully obtained” programs to work.  The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights group, had asked for that exception to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to allow the so-called jailbreaking of iPhones and other devices.
     ‘This is a really important victory for iPhone owners,’ said Corynne McSherry, a senior staff lawyer with the foundation. ‘People who want to tinker with their phones and move outside of the Applesphere now have the ability to legally do that.’”   
     It is important, and not just for iPhone owners or software designers.  It is important to all of us because it is one step closer to shared knowledge and shared use. 

I’ve been reading a lot of blogs lately and snooping around social networking sites, all having to do with elearning or learning technology–truthfully I spend a fair amount of time doing this.  In addition to books, it’s how I learn about new stuff, new trends and how to “do it” better.  It’s tough to figure out how to separate the wheat from the chaff sometimes, and I’m glad I’m not a newbie to elearning and learning technology.

I’ve noticed that a little bit of knowledge transferred in a confident manner has the effect of having people who know little or nothing believe all that is said, by the person with a limited amount of knowledge.  In other words people come across as experts in the field, when in fact they may only be experts in their limited area of knowledge and experience.  We all come from our experiences and if we have limited experience I think we need to say that.  So I’ll say that I have limited experience in some areas of elearning, but I also have a lot of experience and knowledge in other areas of that subject.  The behind the scenes working with the applications is definitely not a strength of mine, and you won’t find me trying to explain that stuff, but it’s ok because my partner is quite experienced in this area.  On the other hand, the androgogy of online learning (and face to face too), the theories behind the design, educational philosophies, and how technology can be used in education are areas that I am comfortable speaking to.

To say that elearning is easy is misleading, because there are a lot of elements to it.  To say that anyone can teach a certain course online is to say that that course will not be very good–a monkey could teach it.  Think about teaching as a profession, one where individuals learn how to do something and then experiment with the process in their own creative and dynamic ways; think about outcomes and measurements; think about the technologies involved–and they are not all the same for the various forms of elearning–and think about how you get people enrolled and supported in the online environment.  There are lots of moving parts in this endeavor we call online education. Far too many moving parts to say it is easy.

Photo credit: Flickr, Mai Le

Last blog I explained how I constructed Practice Management 2 for the acupuncture school where I teach.  This time I’ll talk about Practice Management 1, which was constructed quite differently.

Half of this class was conducted face to face and half of it online.  This was an experiment necessitated by my heavy travel schedule last spring.  I used the first class period, which was face to face to explain to the students how to access the course; I gave them their log in information and then showed them how to navigate through the course.  Again, I hooked up my computer to the “big screen” so they could see what I was doing.  They then logged on using their own computers.

Practice Management 1 is a course about marketing, identifying target markets, creating an elevator speech and working with other health care professionals. And the course has more outside homework assignments than Practice Management 2.  I thought about having the students upload assignments to the course site, but I had enough face to face classes with them that I decided sharing in person would be better.   The course site housed the readings, or more often than not, the URLs to find what I wanted them to read, and of course it also housed the discussion forums.

The fun part of this course for me was that I was able to find lots of websites, blogs and discussion forums that were relevant to the topics we cover in marketing. Most had nothing to do with acupuncture per se, but were relevant to service occupations and / or health occupations, and it was easy for the students to connect the dots.  Some students decided that blogging might be fun and others thought it was worse than public speaking!  No one wanted to Tweet. The learning outcome was that they learn how to use some of the social networking tools so that they could decide what might work for them.  If they chose to engage with social media, then I required them to have a strategy for how and why they would use it.  We had some good discussions online about the need for a web presence, whether they were keen on it or not.  I mean who uses the three-inch thick yellow pages anymore?

I hope to be able to teach this course as a hybrid course next year too and eventually move it to being delivered fully online.  It is so much easier to update an online course with new information as things change in the social media marketing field, and they are changing!  I found it easier to use materials I located on the internet (all under creative commons licenses) than to have to supplement a textbook. However, I do agree that in some cases you will want a textbook–I use one for Practice Management 2 as a supplement where seeing forms, lists, and examples are useful to the student.  In this case the text becomes a supplement to the course material rather then the reverse.

If we do get to that place where the class can be fully online, then I will have the students upload their homework in a way that allows for sharing with the rest of the cohort and provide a space for them to comment on each other’s work.

What are your experiences with hybrid courses?

Photo credit: Flickr, cliff1066

From Judith McDaniel

     Okay, I am amazed. 

I’ve gone back to work on a biography that I started writing in 1990.  I quit work on the book in 2004 for a variety of reasons.  Recently I decided that the subjects of the book were timely again, and I have gone back to my original research, notes, and text.

I’m revising the chapter about my subject’s childhood, where her parents were born, just setting the stage.  I have some notes from an interview I did with relatives, and on a hunch I decided to Google the grandfather of the family.  If he had actually published a book on good government at the beginning of the twentieth century, as one of the grandsons had told me, maybe I could find some evidence of it.  That might have occurred to me briefly when I was first writing this chapter, but I hadn’t found anything useful.  When I put the title of this alleged book into the search engine, the first entry that popped up was the entire book itself on Google books.  I had the original publication date, the publisher, and I could quote anything I felt was relevant out of the original text.

And then I thought about other things I’d like to know.  When were these grandparents born, when married?  I entered a name and a city and up came the hospital records from the date of the grandmother’s birth (1845) and death (1936) and when she married, who her parents were—I mean this was far more information than I needed for my research, but I was fascinated. This woman married at age 33 and then had 8 pregnancies. That is a footnote worth having.  I didn’t have to rely on anecdotal information.  I didn’t have to go and sit in the Harvard Library and carefully turn the pages of a book published in 1909 (wearing white cotton gloves to preserve the paper).  It was all there for me.

It was not easily available to me in 1990, nor in 2004 when I stopped working on this book.  Something quite miraculous has happened in the last five or six years.  It is going to make me a better researcher and my book will be more accurate.

I am amazed.

I teach Practice Management 1 & 2 at the Asian Institute for Medical Studies.  We decided to try an experiment this past year with the delivery method of the of the two required business courses. We started with Practice Management 2 since that was on the schedule for the quarter. Half of the students lived in Tucson and the other half traveled from as far away as the Phoenix area (+100 miles up the road), so a technology-augmented course seemed reasonable.  Students also brought their computers to class so they could work as a group face to face.

Each quarter is 11 weeks in duration. The first week I spent going over the syllabus to be sure they all understood the learning outcomes for the course and then I asked them what information they wanted to have about the subjects and what activities would work best for the way they learned.

Practice Management 2 is all about the business plan, the regulations that govern acupuncture, and a few other topics that could be presented in a short period of time.  The class decided that they wanted to develop a business plan as a group in order to create a (fictitious) business that had a clinic in Tucson and one in Phoenix.  To cover the regulations and the other topics they decided to do individual presentations.  They self-selected the topics based on their individual interests and what they wanted to learn more about.  This happened to work out perfectly, but I can see the possibility of having to moderate this in the future.

I spent the next week re-organizing the learning site and posting the material on subjects they wanted to have access to, with suggestions on where to find more information.  The material was pretty much all on the site I had already constructed, I just had to move it around a bit.

During the second class one of the students set up the business plan template I gave them to work with on Google docs.  This allowed them to work together collaboratively, even from home.  (We did a fair amount of the overview in class and then they did the details outside of class). We did a tutorial in class on the use of Google docs and also on how to access the learning site, which is the Moodle platform, during this second class. The group decided who would cover what sections of the document and they got to work.  The end result was a fleshed out business plan that they could all use by just changing some of the particulars.

Ancillary readings were posted on the learning site so they could all access from their computers anytime, anywhere. Most of the readings that were posted online came from the web–blogs, websites, papers, and some ning discussion sites specifically geared toward acupuncturists.  I conducted the tutorial on this in class, demonstrating how to get into the site and navigate around it. I was able to  conduct this demonstration by using the wireless internet connection in the classroom with my computer hooked up to the projector.

I would have to say this course was quite successful.  The students really liked it and according to the course evals they learned what they wanted to learn and felt pretty confident that they could start their practice when they graduated, which of course was the ultimate goal.

Next post I’ll tell you about the Practice Management 1 course and how the technology worked in that course.

Photo credit: Flickr tsakshaug

     One of the things I really like about ethics—teaching ethics, I mean—is that we can find some timeless ethical principles that have always been with us.  These principles cross country boundaries and political systems and millennial markers.  No matter what the specific cultural beliefs of a country, a community that survives from one generation to the next does so because it adheres to one or several of these timeless ethical principles.
     The second thing I really like about teaching ethics is how quickly the situations in which we need to apply those principles change.  This combination makes teaching ethics online a perfect combination.  Let me explain–
     What are those timeless principles? 
           1.  Ethical decisions based on the greatest good.  This system of thought assumes a community whose members are joined in a shared pursuit of common goals.  The community is made up of individuals who have defined their individual good as inextricably tied into achieving the good of the whole.  The principle of this system would state:  What is ethical is what advances the common good.
          2.  Ethical decisions based on fundamental rights.  Human rights, civil rights—these are issues that have been in the news and in our daily discussion for more than sixty years.  This approach to an ethical system maintains that each person has a fundamental right to be respected and treated as a free and equal rational person capable of making his or her own decision. 
          3.  Ethical decisions based on fairness.  Definitions of ethical conduct in this system are based on how fairly or unfairly our actions benefit or burden others.  One guideline here is consistency in the way people are treated; however, consistency by itself does not ensure fairness.  There are justifiable reasons for treating people differently based on need, effort, merit, fault, disability. The principle of this system would state:  Treat people the same unless there are relevant differences between them. 
     What changes?  The context in which these principles are being applied changes every day and with every group or culture.  I am not talking about “situational ethics” but rather about the things you do that require you to apply these standards, whether you think about them consciously or not. 
     My course materials on the ethical principles never have to change; but the online format allows me to make instant changes in the discussions and problem-solving that students are doing—and I can change the scenario in a day or an hour, whatever the student/participant group needs.

I was reading a manual that George Siemens and Peter Tittenberger put together called Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning. As an aside, I took a massive open online course (MOOC) in Connectivism and Connected Knowledge with Siemens and Stephen Downes, along with 2000 other people in fall 2008.  Jennifer Mackness wrote a paper about the experience, The Ideals and Reality of Participating in a MOOC. As you can see from the presentation of this paper Siemens is definitely a futuristic thinker in education.

The manual has a lot of really good information in it, but what I want to share are some definitions that they present– because distance education has become a catchall word for any education that doesn’t happen in the classroom and is technology based.  Learning with technology can be viewed in three broad categories, and in order to have a conversation, it’s helpful to have everyone on the same page. The categories are augmented education, hybrid, or blended, education and online education.  There are of course other definitions out there but I think looking at learning with technology on a continuum is helpful, rather than divvying it all up according to the percentage of work done with technology.

Here are Siemens and Tittenberger’s definitions:

1. Augmented – the use of technology to extend a physical classroom. This may be as simple as incorporating web quests into student work, or the use of an online discussion forum.  In a traditional university, the learners still meet regularly with faculty in classrooms.  Traditional paper based courses could be augmented with online discussion forums or blogs.

2. Blended – technology partly replaces in-classroom learning. Part of the course is face-to-face and part is online. For example, the instructor may initiate a course with a series of classroom lectures, with the rest of the course held online. Resources such as video and podcasts could be added to existing materials.

3. Online – technology entirely replaces face-to-face classroom teaching or paper-based distance education. Fully online programs often employ a learning management system to assist designers and educators with managing student grades, interaction, and content delivery.

These categories work pretty well for me.  How about you?  Would you categorize differently?

Photo credit: mikebaird

     I recently came across a discussion that was a group chat that was NOT in a class setting.  Since I teach online, most of the discussions I plan and facilitate are in the context of a class that I control in some way.  I can set expectations, model good discussion protocols, insist on the use of evidence to back up an opinion—particularly a contentious opinion.
     But what standards exist for a group that comes together in a discussion that is not monitored, that exists only because this group has an interest in talking about this subject?  Is it even a problem that there are no standards? 
      It can be, if the purpose of the group is not honored.  If the purpose is a discussion of ways and means of achieving a goal, and someone in the group uses the forum to sell their product or boost their company on this very topic, what happens?  If the person doing this dominates the conversation, what happens is that interest drops to zero, the formerly interested participants stop posting, and the conversation that could have been exciting and stimulating is on life support.You might as well pull the plug. 
     What to do?  Are there any remedies?  A blog  from a couple of years ago had a useful and interesting suggestion.  As you are forming a group, remember that you are forming a community, and every community operates according to certain expectations.  Communities are more productive in every way when those expectations are explicit, when they are verbalized, written down, made available to everyone who wants to “join” the community.  Here are a couple of examples from Channel 9, the Microsoft Developer Network Community

• Be a human being…
• Learn by listening…
• Be smart. Think before you speak…
• Marketing has no place on Channel 9…
• Don’t shock the system…
• Don’t be a jerk. Nobody likes mean people.

     Another good suggestion—set your standards in the language of the community.  Are you talking about education? About golf? Or rock climbing?  Use the words and concepts of the community and you’ll be talking with the community, not at them.

I’ve been thinking about teacher training recently and I have wondered  how many teachers, of any subject, think about their educational philosophy? Not many I bet unless they’ve been through a school of education. In order to be good teachers, we don’t need to have a formal degree in education (although some sort of teacher training would certainly be beneficial), but I do think we need to know what our philosophy is and how it relates to our practice.  Our educational philosophy helps us to critically think about the teaching-learning contract.

I read an article recently by Gary J. Conti in the Journal of Adult Education that talks about this. There are 4 major schools of philosophy in the western world and Conti connects them to adult education like this:

Idealism = Liberal (or classical so as not to get political) Adult Education

Realism = Behaviorist Adult Education

Pragmatism = Progressive Adult Education

Reconstructionism = Radical (or reconstructionist so as not to get political) Adult Education

Conti developed an instrument that helps one determine a personal philosophy of education. It’s called PHIL which stands for Philosophies Held by Instructors of Lifelong-learners. I tried it on and it was accurate for me–Radical Adult Education.  This philosophy is learner-centered and helps the learner to develop problem solving skills and life long learning skills that will effect change.

You can check it out to see what category you fall into: Discover Your Educational Philosophy.  It only takes about 2 minutes.

image credit: tourist_on_earth

          Which ethical principle do you follow?  Is it about the common good?  Fairness?  Individual rights?  Or the utilitarian principle of looking at the outcome rather than the process?  This week’s issue of Ethics Newsline  looked at the headlines for the week and asked, What does an Ethical Organization Do? 
          The answer is that it helps people put ethical issues and dilemmas in a perspective that allows us to discuss them as ethical issues and patterns rather than as personal opinions.  The three issues they looked at last week were the firing of General McChrystal, the senate’s failure to pass unemployment benefits, and the further endangerment of sea turtles by the burning off of spilled fuel in the Gulf. 
     It’s an interesting exercise—taking our “in my opinion” statements and trying to see whether there is an ethical principle supporting that opinion and, if so, which principle is it and what different results would we get if we used a different principle?  Here is one example from the Institute for Global Ethics.  Those who thought the General’s firing was right probably based that opinion on a sense of fair play (no enlisted man could talk about an officer that way, why should a general?).  Those who thought he shouldn’t have been fired may have been relying on individual rights as a principle (he has a protected First Amendment right to speak his mind), but that does not work here since there are limits to the free speech right and those limits include clear violations of the law—in this case the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the United States treason laws.  What would be an ethical argument against the general’s firing is the Utilitarian argument—if it works, it is good.  This is certainly my least favorite of the ethical principles and not one I use often.  But it has at least the virtue of forcing the arguers to come up with some evidence that what the general was doing as he directed the war in Afghanistan was actually working and contributing to the common good. 
     Finding the ethical principle that supports (or is violated by) an argument would be a good exercise for the practice of public discourse in any context—politics, online blogs, the classroom.  It takes us away from those “knee-jerk” responses that are based on emotion and requires us to actually examine why we think the way we do.