Why I Teach a CL Course, or, Any Course

@yinbk @GoogleGuacamole @merryspaniel @Autumm absolutely. so much to unlearn before ppl can even start. why i made #ed1to1 slow/low-stakes.

— Bonnie Stewart (@bonstewart) July 16, 2015

#Students are the #heart of my work & always will be. They are our #hope. #WisconsinIdea #OurUW

— Sara Goldrick-Rab (@saragoldrickrab) July 17, 2015

 To reflect is to think, ponder, or meditate. Some people write blog reflections in double-quick time. I can't. Thinking takes time; and in my world, blog reflections consume time, which I don't have a lot of now, particularly when an online connected learning course is going on. My students' blog posts take priority. Reading everyone of them and writing quality comments take precedence over sleep, my own blogging, or any projects right now. My students are my priority. 

If I think about it, my obsession seems ludicrous. And I'm not blogging about it to make myself seem virtuous. Virginia State (my employer) does not pay me extra -- besides being an instructional designer -- to teach a 3-credit undergraduate course. I am still on the mend from the complications of last Summer. I should be sleeping more. Why then do I/we (my other Connected Learning/CL colleagues this summer) stay up late reading blog post after blog post? 

Because our students matter. They are our future.

I taught for 12 years in K12-13 schools and 3 more in the post-secondary polytechnic in Singapore. When I arrived in the USA, I thought I'd never teach again, and that I'd try something new. I couldn't. I moved from a cushy corporate job back into graduate school and slogged through a doctoral program to find myself back in education.

At the heart of me is the teacher wanting to make the most impact in my limited life for students/learners -- whether it be in instructional design or teaching.

Yes, designing and teaching a connected learning course for the first time without any TA, or co-instructor, is exhausting. It is an arduous task, trying to cajole my students to make paradigm shifts and unlearn from systemic institutional ways they have cultivated to "learn" and be "educated." I experienced first-hand for myself what it was like to dive into the sea of CL when I returned from leave in October 2014. I nearly drowned.

It took me many months to learn how to tweet and build up a learning network. In a compressed course of 7.5 weeks, I will not let my students drown in the CL sea. Initially, my course was less structured and explicitly written. But as the course unfolded, I saw and learned how much my students had to unlearn and relearn, and all these due to no fault of theirs. We may want our students to learn CL but they have never been given much or any opportunity to question, problem-find, to connect, to have freedom, and to have a voice. Do we remember or know what it is like to find our voice in the angsty years of adolescence? How long did it take you to find your voice? Are you still looking?

So I had to spend time preparing my students for CL and helping them to make the shift. This included designing more structure, more explicitness and more direct teaching of new concepts. Other factors complicated the learning. Everyone of them was working full-time (at least 40 hours). They could only connect after work or during a break. Some have partners or children to take care of. One is taking multiple courses at the same time. They were not as connected as I/we wish they were. One had no internet access at home and eventually dropped out. The small enrollment size of my course means the critical mass required to make CL work its magic was missing. Connecting them to #CLMOOC through #F5F turned flat due to many reasons, some still to be analyzed.

All these (and more to blog about) didn't detract from my desire to make this course as meaningful as it could be. Although my students couldn't be as connected as I desired, they were still learning, they were still trying. I still want them to be successful. My role as a teacher, leader, facilitator and coach is to help them overcome the odds life has stacked against them to achieve great things. I know what it means for my parents to put me through school. I was the first one to go to college in my family and a first-generation scholar. I want my students to go as far as they can, in formal or informal learning.

And I will gladly sleep less for 1.5 weeks more so that we can make the most of this time to learn together.

I'm not some fabulous award-winning teacher, but I know that what I value influences how I teach. As Parker Palmer wrote:

“Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher... Then teaching can come from the depths of my own truth -- and the truth that is within my students has a chance to respond in kind."  

Not everyone is called to be a teacher. For those who are, thank you for the courage to teach and for the courage to stand up for our students.

The Making of a Course Trailer

The course trailer is up on YouTube. Although it runs for less than 2 minutes, it entails a tremendous amount of work. Many people chipped in to help out given the tight time-frame we had to churn it out. To them I owe a debt of gratitude. Their names were not mentioned in the credits and I would like to use this space to express my appreciation to them.

Thank you, in no particular order, Alice Westerberg, Suzie Fairman, Molly Ransone, Emma Gauthier, Aditi Jain and Arianna DeCastro (both the actresses), Marcus Messner (and his students), Alana Robinson, Mr. Hunt, the cyclist who rode around the block near Lamplighter Roastery, Lamplighter Roastery for the loan of a Sharpie, Dan Silverman who earlier consented to do a voiceover, and last but not least, Max Schlickenmeyer, the videographer, concept designer, and all the roles he had to juggle to rush this trailer out. I hope this didn't ruin his Valentine's Day.

This is a quick recap of what we did to create this video. In time to come, this documentation might provide insight for future revisions.


1. Concept Design

After showing Max, my new media specialist colleague, a copy of my draft syllabus, we strove to craft a script. Since this course is not a content-based course and centers on the abstract topic of thinking, it was a challenge to consider how best to make thinking come alive.

Max came up with the concept to put thought bubbles above the actresses' heads. It was ingenious! Note, if thinking were that simple in real life, we would have less misunderstanding and better communication! But that was the best way in a video to represent thinking visually -- something which cannot be seen.

Hence, and back to the importance of making thinking visible. Visible thinking helps US to clarify and manage our own thinking; it helps OTHERS to become more aware of what we are thinking. It thus improves thinking and leads to deeper learning.

I'm an advocate for getting ideas out of our head and into some form of external representation to facilitate positive action. I'm also an avid learner of all kinds of strategies that can help individuals and groups communicate their thoughts -- using visuals (text and images), movement, sound, and learning as many languages as you can manage. However, unless you are ready to embrace certain dispositions towards thinking, the practice of visible thinking will come slower to you. I'll elaborate on this in my course. It will be an 8-week elective course for undergraduates offered this June. The course site is being developed, but I hope to get it up soon.


*February 18, 2015: There was also location scouting, which I'd earlier neglected to include. We checked out Anderson Gallery but settled on the VMFA.


2. Scripting and Storyboarding

Since we can't see each other's thoughts, Molly encouraged us to use a two-column table to script our thoughts. As I started writing, Max started to draft the storyboard. Even so, these have to be translated into moving images and edited. The first video clip that came out wasn't the final cut version. Why? Two persons can look at the same script and interpret it differently. And there is only so much that moving images can adequately describe a chunk of written text on thinking. Ever wonder how marvelous movies are in condensing a book into a two-hour film? I am more in awe of such feats now. Think of Austen's Pride and Prejudice directed by Joe Wright.


3. Animation of Still Images (and Photography)

Script, storyboard, character development, animation ...

I don't know how Max did it but all I did was help sketch out some characters and he animated them all -- characters and thought bubbles. He could sketch them all himself, much more elegantly; I'm guessing he entertained my efforts because he was too busy. Incorporating my sketches did provide me with some ownership of the video production process and product.


4. Videography (The Shoots) and Acting

VMFA shoot

Lest I forget, the actresses are amateurs who did us a huge favor. In the live shoot at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, I was glad when Molly came along, to hold the equipment (reflector and camera) and at times, to help direct the actresses on how to act.


5. Audio Recording 

Although there is minimal audio in the trailer, there was a part where I did a voiceover to briefly introduce the course. That was completed in our Jazzmosphere recording studio with Emma and Max's help.


6. Evaluation and Feedback for Editing

Several pairs of eyes reviewed it so we could fine-tune it further, including Aditi (who looked at it from the perspective of a student).

Towards the end, we wanted to give greater prominence to the student "who had taken my course" by zooming in on her notes. We weren't able to do that, unfortunately, due to time and weather constraints. We weren't able to reshoot because of poor weather today; inserting it into a scene with a notebook didn't help much either. So, here are the notes by that 'thought-full' student in all its clarity:

Thought-FULL student's notes

PDF version

I once worked in a multimedia company in Singapore in a creative team. This episode reminded me of those days, one of the best jobs I've had in my life, except that I worked in a highly specialized team as an instructional designer/content writer with a programmer, animator, illustrator, project manager, graphic designer and more. Despite this previous experience, there was still something to learn from working with Max and associates. Looking at him shoot POV (Point of View) shots reminded me about empathy in crafting instruction. Max had also invited a cyclist to ride around the block to make the scene less static. All these, and more I cannot detail fully, offered me a glimpse of the workings of an artistic and creative mind. All these learning opportunities filled my mind to overflowing last week, and in a good way!

I'm tired but thankful we made the deadline and probably set a record for producing a course trailer in 5 days, from concept to development. Of course, there is always room for improvement. For me, I was glad when our student actresses enjoyed the shooting process and one of them thanked me for bringing her on this learning adventure. Quite often, it's not about the final product, but the process. I feel privileged to be in a position to add some value to someone's life.

Online Teaching and "Body Language"

Image description: A quotation by Jenifer Ringer,
"Terry taught ballet as if it were very important and precious."

Vignette 1:

"Terry taught ballet as if it were very important and precious." - Jenifer Ringer, Dancing Through It: My Journey in the Ballet. 

Image Description: Feet clad in ballet
shoes standing on pointe position

A line in a book given to me during the early days of losing my parents; supposedly the heroine's victory over her struggles would inspire me. A short sentence fraught with meaning and implications. I especially love the second half of the sentence. The words swirled with the other info bytes in my mind from last week's learning.

[Context: Jenifer Ringer was a professional ballerina. In her memoir, she wrote that she found ballet boring until she met Terry Shields who instilled in her the important virtue of discipline combined with high standards in dancing (2014, p. 12). ]


Vignette 2:

Online Teaching 101. A graduate seminar discussion. On the projector screen were these words, "effective face-to-face teaching." I asked students to explore this phrase and make their thoughts and observations visible through words, questions and metaphors.

Working in pairs, one graduate student raised a question about the potential influence of a teacher's body language on student learning outcomes.

"Are you impressed?" (by their question).

"Yes!"


The mashup:

A weekend and four days later.

Ringer's quote and the students' question led me to think about the planning of my potential summer 2015 online course more delicately. In an online course, many students may not literally "see" an online teacher-facilitator and/or a fellow student's body language.

To be honest, what does body language look like online? Or better, how is it represented online?

First, let's be clear about what "body language" means:

Body Language "refers to various forms of nonverbal communication, wherein a person may reveal clues as to some unspoken intention or feeling through their physical behavior. These behaviors include, but are not limited to: facial expressions, body posture, gestures, eye movement, touch and the use of space." (Wikipedia) 

1. Does body language matter online? 
2. If so, how does the teacher/student display body language? 
3. What is/are the difference(s)?...

I have many questions. On top of my abundance of questions on participatory networked learning: contract grading (Cathy Davidson), avoiding resistance to contract grading, crowdsourcing grading, peer evaluation, constantly negotiated syllabus... My head is hurting.

Since online learning is mediated by communication technology - text, image (still and moving),  sound, synchronous and asynchronous communication, conveying to my online students how important and precious the subject matter is --to me-- requires meticulous design.

To answer Q2 first, the usual suspects in the technology realm for representing "voice" and "presence" are:

• Real-time webconferencing
• Biographies with visuals
• Podcasts 
• Conversational tone of text communications 

I've read blogposts by some online participants condemning real-time conferencing, in particular when a panel of facilitators are not prepared. Awkward silence pervades when panelists don't know when it is their turn to speak and students are left wondering how to respond to silence. We live in a world where quick wit is prized and silence/time to think is punished. To answer Q1, yes, it matters, especially if you are going to create videoclips and simulations of real-time teaching where your nonverbal communication cues are going to be captured.

[Note, Nov. 15, 2014: It's not the technology alone that is going to do the job; it is how you use the technology to help you express your intents and motives.]

Yet, Ringer's quote demanded more. I'd not just have to choose an appropriate technology but also, be mindful of all the elements of a course that would gel together to convey my teaching attitude: from frequency of contact with my students, to type of learning activities (Ringer got the chance to participate in real stage productions where her learning mattered), to even how my course site looks. Students care about the values teachers are imparting, like Ringer. Every detail of the course would convey if I'm fearlessly passionate about the topic. It's simultaneously exhausting and rewarding to design and teach a course.

As to Q3, is there a difference between how a teacher and a student conveys her intentions in real-time and virtual spaces? This is a difficult one.

Ideally, we are all human beings and regardless of our status, there should be no difference; we ought to treat each other with respect and dignity. But teachers are held to a higher standard as the role model and facilitator. Granted, Freire wrote that we are all teachers, at some point, and we learn from each other. This answers Q3 theoretically. But what happens often in practice?  Sometimes, we forget to prepare in advance for the learner who is legally blind or deaf or has a physical disability which holds back his/her participation in the course. We forget that that blinking multiple-images gif might not be read by the screen reader too well. And that automatic captioning by Google is hardly any captioning at all unless we are all wonderful voice talents and videographers. We don't know that sometimes a blind student might need more than one type of screen reader to access information on the web. Because we have yet to encounter a person with such challenges. Yes, teachers are held to a higher standard. We have to be vigilant of different learners with different needs and seek to make them feel welcome.

A somewhat cliched quote I'll include to end this post, but nonetheless one I often think about in teaching and relating to people:

Image Description: A quotation by Theodore Roosevelt,
"No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care."

My ex-students had indicated this to me over and over again in my life. Thanks, folks, for what you taught me. 

Help! I am teaching online

I thought about adding these 5 words (my blogpost title) to the trending hashtag in Twitter, #ScaryStoriesIn5Words. Those tweets made Halloween Day somewhat more Halloween for me, lots of drama and jokes. Scary? Not so much at the ALT Lab where I was stationed for livestreamed sessions from the Online Learning Consortium's International Conference (OLC). Which is a good thing.

The turnout wasn't ideal but a real and urgent need of some faculty or future faculty members emerged from conversations with some attendees. Some major questions were:

"I think I'm going to be teaching online. Where can I find training resources to prepare me for this role?"

"I have faculty who have been teaching face-to-face (F2F) classes but are now going to start teaching online courses. I can't train them all by myself. Help?"

"We have adjunct instructors who work fulltime and are unable to attend any of the ALT Lab's programs." 

At the ALT Lab, we have programs and events to help faculty get started with online teaching: OLE, Agora, Online Learning Summit, live-streaming of OLC sessions ... Together with the other programs and resources we offer, we hope the variety of formal and informal learning opportunities will help enhance faculty online and F2F teaching experience. 

But I will be honest and confess that I don't have an answer to all three questions above. I understand that most people lead busy and full lives. But rather than wait to learn from a formal course, I would advise new online instructors to regard informal self-directed learning as a significant learning path to professional development for online teaching. I am not going to write about the institutional support instructors must have to get started with online teaching. This blogpost focuses on individual first-time instructors of online teaching and 3 broad suggestions I have for getting started with informal learning. (Disclaimer: These are purely my suggestions and views, not my employer's):

1. Learner Empathy: Take an Online Course

Experience it for yourself, no matter how busy you are. It's about developing learner empathy (Parrish, 2006). It would help the instructor to understand what it might be like when teacher-student roles are reversed. There is an incredible number of open access online courses available. Try the MOOCs (e.g. Connected Courses). 

Face the Fear.
Image Description: A woman jumps off the cliff and dives into the ocean of online teaching. There are
people standing in the online ocean waiting to receive her.

2. Face the Fear: Start Learning and Connecting

There is much to be said about building an arsenal of digital tools and sharpening the tools you are going to be using in your online course. Online communities and communication are mediated by technology. The 3 Ws (World Wide Web) might sound scary, and overwhelming, with its infinite possibilities for learning and also, abuse. But I don't see any short-cuts to becoming an effective online teacher and facilitator. I am not one to prescribe specific steps, but joining a community of folks who share your interest might be the best place to start learning about online pedagogy and tools. For examples,

• Read, watch, listen. Articles, e-books, blogs. Hybrid Pedagogy; what better place to start than in the in-between space? Consider this article by Jesse Stommel on Online Learning: A Manifesto. If you find a chance, talk about it with some other instructors from your program. 
• Post blog comments, AND, then start blogging to share information and news with your students and colleagues from near and far.  
• Create a Twitter account (My colleague Tom Woodward shared this interesting article about Twitter, Why I Use Twitter)
• Join Google+ communities of your interests (You need a GMail account)

I believe teachers have to carve out a safe online space for themselves to experiment and learn with others continuously, thus modeling for their students what it is like to learn from a global audience. We can no longer think of learning as something that is solely confined to a classroom. Or wait to enter a formal space to learn with others. Learn what you can with what time you have. Deliberately, on the go, just-in-time. Learn to steal away for microlearning moments. Develop learning habits that suit your schedule and learning disposition.

3. Keep Learning and Tweaking Your Course: Perfection is Not a Requirement

Someone told me she wouldn't teach online until she has learned enough about online teaching.  "Enough" is a subjective term. It is wise of her to give herself time to prepare adequately for online teaching and not try to replicate a face-to-face class online. In fact, a radical change in mindset is a must for new online instructors. Armed with this readiness to embrace change and some knowledge of how to make the change, one can begin to take the plunge to decide to teach online. However, we need to recognize that no course is going to be perfect from the get-go. Although we may have a plan and a course ready by the time we are in a position to push off from the starting-blocks, the course will be subject to some minor (?) revisions as it progresses through the semester. I don't know any teacher with a heart for teaching who doesn't improvise as s/he teaches throughout the semester.

This post is necessarily a simple reductionistic post about getting started. It does not pretend to be a solution that responds to all the complexities involved in preparing faculty to teach online.

I welcome comments anyone may have to help new online faculty get started through informal learning.


Reference

Parrish, P. (2006). Design as storytelling. TechTrends, 50(4), 72-82)

Visual Language

A couple of weeks ago, a faculty member contacted us to ask for tips to help his students' articulate their ideas in more creative ways. As I responded to the request by suggesting some resources, I realized that in an unplanned way, I've spent some time trying out software and documented my playtime in my blog. I was thus able to refer the faculty member to examples of software and activities I've tried out myself or learned from others.

Here are some older blogposts I've written about my "serious play" with software and activities. I hope they will be of some help to someone:

WeVideo
Online Icebreakers
Oblique Strategies
International Groupwork
Embedding WowSlider in Blogger
Online Art Portfolio Sites
Automatic Captioning & Automatic Timing from Google
13 posts on Second Life, Games & Simulations (dated June 2007)
5 posts on Second Life & Virtual Worlds (dated December 2007)

The rest of this blogpost will focus on two enchanting software I've been fiddling with.

Visual Poetry

I got wind of this tool through #CCourses -- it comes from an interesting resource-rich site for writers (thanks to Kevin Hodgson, @dogtrax, Language is a Virus. I played with the web tool with a stanza from Paul Muldoon's poem*:

I thought again of how art may be made, as it was by André Derain,
of nothing more than a turn
in the road where a swallow dips into the mire
or plucks a strand of bloody wool from a strand of barbed wire
in the aftermath of Chickamauga or Culloden
and builds from pain, from misery, from a deep-seated hurt,
a monument to the human heart
that shines like a golden dome among roofs rain-glazed and leaden.

Image created using Visual Poetry online software.
A stanza of Paul Muldoon's poem, Incantata, was used for this exploration.

Here's how I used this tool to indicate a bit of my emotional response to the stanza.

Muldoon's stanza is extracted from Incantata, written in memory of someone he loved. It is richly descriptive and heartbreaking to read of his recollection of their times together. When I read this poem, I think of my parents. Using the software (you enter the text into the software interface, and use the mouse to outline something; if you have a drawing tablet, that would be greatly helpful!), I drew a sketch -- with my iMac mouse -- to express my longing to see and talk to my parents again someday.

I think of this tool as something a teacher might introduce to her students if she wants them to express writing in a creative and emotionally engaging way. It might seem a tad gimmicky, but teachers can facilitate discussions around students' images. Why did they draw this picture? What were they trying to express? What do the other students see in this picture? These pictures can be embedded in websites, blogs and student portfolios.

A LOT of people are either horrified by or reject the idea of using digital tools that require them to draw, something, no matter how simple :

"I can't draw -- much less draw with a mouse!"

Stick figures are drawings too and you can be very creative with these (see Dharma Comics). On hindsight, I believe I developed a visual language to communicate my ideas over time. Be patient and kind to yourself.


ImageChef

Another fun site that provides free software to make your text interesting is ImageChef. This is the same poem by Muldoon that I've fitted into two templates (limited ready-made templates available on the site but you can create your own symbol to fit text in) -- a panda and a man's silhouette:

How is this helpful and different from Wordle or Tagxedo? ImageChef allows users to include whole paragraphs of text (that are not too long) while Wordle or Tagxedo picks out words that are used most frequently for display as word clouds.  I've used the panda and man's images because I was testing the templates but you can upload your own images/photos to outline a symbol that fits the mood of the text you want to display. A panda doesn't exactly match the sentiments of the poem, but who knows what some students may think of when given the opportunity to be creative?

Till my next experiment then!