Google has released a new research tool to help students capture and cite information, images, and quotes related to a particular reseach problem. The tool is available on the right-hand side of your window when composing a document on Google Docs. 

Below is a screenshot of some research I plan on having my Introduction to Business students do in the Fall on launching a food truck business. Note that the citation is made as a footnote at the bottom of the page and only requires two clicks to create. 

I see the following advantages and disadvantages to the use of Google's new research tool in my classes:

ADVANTAGES

1. Integration: students can have research tightly integrated with their workflow, perhaps making them more likely to incorporate citations and sources into their early college work
2. Ease of use: When I created a new Google doc to try out the service, the research bar was automatically there on the right-hand side of the window. No training needed. The only thing that may not be obvious from the start is that you need to hover your mouse over an item in the list on the right in order to access the options that are available (see screenshot below)

 

DISADVANTAGES

1. Lack of citation specificity: As of 5/18/12, the only option for inserting a citation is as a footnote. Our school is standardized on APA as a research paper format, though the strictness of professors varies considerably within individual courses. I will need to decide if getting students accustomed to integrating research into everything they do will negate the negative of getting them to rely on footnotes for some of the earlier writing they do in their degree program. Though it would be just a few more steps to enter the sources into a robust citing tool, such as Zotero, I may lose some of the students along the way. 
2. Reliance on Google Docs for document composition: As a business professor, I have always required students to compose in Microsoft Word (or at least do a save-as MS Word before submitting their work). Since Microsoft's marketshare has held at over 90% of their Office Suite for years now, it seems prudent to have students learning to use that tool to prepare them for entering the workforce. However, since the capabilities of Google docs have increased so much in year's past, it is starting to seem like students would be well positioned to work with any Word Processor made available to them in the future, if they excelled at Google Doc's word processing features. 

As I explored Google's new research tool, I discovered that Google Docs' features have significantly increased in the recent past. While composing text, students have access to pre-formatted headings and subheadings, as well as the ability to create a table of contents with a few clicks of their mouse. Considering the collaborative nature of Google Docs and the group business plan project I assign to students for my introductory business class, the benefits may just outweight any negatives I've expressed above. 

More information and a review of Google's new research tool is available from MacWorld. 

Let us know in the comments what you think about the new Google Docs research tool. Do you see making use of this with your students? Do you have any ideas about how you might overcome the limitation of only being able to cite with footnotes? How important do you think it is for students to be learning on what still seems to be the industry standard word processor today, Microsoft Word? 

 

I've been on maternity leave this semester, loving the time I get to bond with our first child. As I think toward next semester, I'm working toward preparing for classes more effectively than I ever have before. I'm going to be teaching a full load and want to also continue to invest lots of time in our son's life. 

One way I can become more efficient is to build checklists as I prepare, to make future class prep faster. Those of you who are interested in learning how to develop checklists should read the book The Checklist Manifesto. It is a fantastic description of the difference they can make in our lives and how to build great ones. 

The Chronicle's ProfHacker recently reposted a link to one of their author's end-of-semester checklist, which I found to be helpful. 

What are you doing to prepare for next semester's classes? Are there any checklists you find help you be more successful?

Discover how to use technology to live happier lives and have healthier relationships at TechCouple. 

Most people don't enjoy learning to use new technology as much as I do and just want it to work "out of the box." The iPhone application, Attendance, is one of those apps that is super simple to get started with - - and keeps getting better as you learn more, and as the developer adds more features to it. 

Visit the Attendance page at:

http://www.dave256apps.com/attendance/

and get ready to make taking attendance and learning student names a whole lot easier. 

My method for taking attendance is to have students sign a sign-in sheet as they enter the class. Then, I use the Attendance app during class to randomly call on students to assess how well they are retaining and absorbing the information. After class, I enter the attendance for that day on the iPhone app. Finally, I scan the sign-in sheets for my classes either on my scanner in my home office, or via the scanning app I use on my iPhone (GeniusScan), so I have a digial copy of the signed sheet that can be accessed at a later date, if there is a question as to whether or not they signed in that day.

The first time I taught at the college level, I received a call to teach a course exactly five days before it began. I have now taught the same class seven times and each time I teach it, the objectives of the course change. Sometimes these differences have been dramatic, while other times I make a few minor changes to the wording.

Learning objectives are a crucial part of ongoing improvement to my course curriculum and teaching methodology. They steer the direction of a course and help gauge our progress throughout the semester.

What is Important to Learn?

Learning objectives help us to ask, ‘What is most important for students to learn in this class and how will I know when the learning has occurred?’ While there are many definitions used in clarifying learning objectives, the one I have found most useful comes from an expert in the corporate training world.

Mager (1997) defines a learning objective as (p 3):

… a collection of words and/or pictures & diagrams intended to let others know what you intend for your students to achieve.

• It is related to intended outcomes, rather than the process for achieving those outcomes 
• It is specific and measurable, rather than broad and intangible 
• It is concerned with students, not teachers 

Designing Course Objectives

All my course objectives are designed using Mager’s (1997) criteria for a measurable learning objective. Each objective conveys what the learner should be able to do, under what conditions, and how well they should be able to do it. I refrain from using words like ‘understand’ or ‘appreciate’ in my objectives, as they are neither descriptive nor measurable. Mager describes the three components of a useful objective as (p 53):

1. Performance. It describes what the learner is expected to be able to do. Use action verbs to ensure clarity (examples of action verbs include: describe, sort, compare, contrast, create, present, explain, list, and solve). 
2. Conditions. It describes the conditions under which the performance is expected to occur. 
3. Criterion. It describes the level of competence that must be reached or surpassed. 

Here’s is an example from one of my courses:
 

Performance: Draw an organizational chart is the desired performance, or what the student is expected to be able to do.

Conditions: In the conditions area, certain technical skills are required as part of this learning objective.

Criteria: The criteria in this case is that the org chart they draw contains at least three levels.

The Learning Objective is the Compass

Whenever I am in the process of grading an assignment, the course objectives are in front of me as I gauge the students’ ability to do what is described, under the specified conditions, and to the level of competence required. All objectives are also included in the course syllabus and referenced regularly throughout the semester.

The objectives for my courses rarely go a semester without some form of revision. It is essential that learning objectives change and grow as you teach a different student population. I particularly value:

• assessment results (completed by the student, such as exams, blogs, in-class role plays, and learning portfolios) 
• speak with industry professionals and professional associations (which often list their own competencies for professionals in the field). 
• alumni (a number of past students are now working professionally in sales and have much to contribute in terms of what is most important) and 
• other faculty (to the extent that our curriculum can build upon each others’ classes, we can more effectively build students’ knowledge and skills). 

Developing and revising learning objectives does take some thought and effort, though the payoff in clarity of focus and ease of measuring student progress is well worth it.

Get ready. It's that time of the semester. Here come the emails with requests for extra credit and explanations of how if this particular student fails your class, s/he will no longer be able to attend your university... all because of you/your class...

I encourage you to take heart, recognizing that the key learning from your course may just be to take responsibility for one's own actions and accept the consequences. Here's a quick read on the subject from The Chronicle:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/onhiring/why-do-i-have-an-f

"Part of learning to be a college student is learning to accept the consequences of your actions, especially those that hurt your grade."

By Eliana Osborn

LinkedIn just came out with an experimental feature on their site this week: InMaps, which allow you to visualize your network of connections on their site. The connectivism class I'm taking is focused on networks this week, so I found it perfect timing for this feature to be released. 

I started the first decade of my career with a global, franchised training company, represented in dark blue on my network map. More recently, I've spent seven years teaching in higher ed, with my full-time position at Vanguard University, represented in dark orange on the map. Considering the length of time at both of those institutions, it isn't surprising that they make such a mark on the map.

I also was amused by the large orange dot in the middle (shown below). That is Dave, my husband, who I met while we were both getting our MA at Chapman University. We went on many years later to get our doctorates at Pepperdine University, which is represented in light orange on the map. We have a lot in common and it isn't surprising that our network connections overlap to such a high degree.  

Here's a video with one of LinkedIn's engineer's describing this new, highly visual tool:

Check out your network InMap and share (in the comments) what observations you have about what it conveys...

We’ve probably all gotten a chuckle or two out of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon jokes. Well, at least those of us old enough to start humming the song Footloose when we see his name get some laughs... The organization Six Degrees has even put this humor to good use in raising money for causes using Kevin Bacon’s connective abilities.

I’m taking this class on connectivism, which is an emerging learning theory. Advocates describe that, “At its heart, connectivism is the thesis that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections, and therefore that learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse these networks” (http://cck11.mooc.ca/week1.htm).

Networks are a crucial aspect of connectivism and the focus of this week’s content. We can measure and visualize these interconnected relationships through a process called social network analysis.  This process helps us “to discover how A, who is in touch with B and C, is affected by the relation between B and C” (John Barnes). When we create a picture of networks and the people in them, we can see which of the participants are connecting others, who is at the center of the network, and who is more on the outside edge. Mathematically, we can also quantify the closeness of the participants in a given network.

WNYC’s NPR station produces a fabulous podcast called Radio Lab. In one episode, they told the story of Paul Erdos, a famous mathematician, who has a degrees of separation network that makes Kevin Bacon’s seem to pale in comparison. His collaborative work has been so powerful that math gurus proudly profess the smallness of their Erdos number, or just how many steps you have to take between researchers until they connect directly with this scholar. The Erdos Number Project has been established to study the research collaboration that takes place among mathematicians.

While most of us will likely always have a gigantic Erdos number (meaning it takes a lot of steps between researchers to get from any of us to this math guru), it is still staggering to think about the connections we have each made. In some ways, my undergraduate students seem to intuitively get the idea behind the power of networks. As the semester starts, they post updates on their Facebook wall indicating that they’re taking a particular class and asking who might be willing to lend them to the textbooks. I’ve observed a number of them saying that they are bored on a Friday night and asking who wants to go see the latest blockbuster movie, only to have a group of five or six ready to go in a couple of hours. However, I suspect that their requests are more indicative of being part of the me generation and perhaps not that they fully realize just how interconnected we all are.

When it comes to using tools like LinkedIn, they tend to not comprehend how the relationships they’ve created might help or hinder their job-searching efforts. I sense their frustration as they thoughtlessly pile on reference requests to every one of their connections, only to wind up without responses (not surprisingly)… Until they are in a class where social networking outside of Facebook is discussed, they don’t seem to have any idea what they might do to find and foster connections beyond those that were established for them (such as the case of who happened to be their professor, or who happened to be in their same class).

I’m looking forward to discovering even more ways that I might help students develop and then leverage their learning networks through the CCK11 class, as I no doubt find ways to do the same for myself.

Some of us celebrated, while others mourned the tenth anniversary of Wikipedia this past week. Those who were cheering likely reveled in the revolution of knowledge acquisition models and crowd-sourced quality control. Those who have been critical of Wikipedia, expressed their concerns over the lack of control over the information and presumed risk of outdated or inaccurate data.  

As I begin a class on a learning theory referred to as Connectivism, I consider how greatly our collective abilities to access to information have transformed in recent years, while our teaching methods in the university environment have barely changed at all. I ponder how much more advanced our abilities are to locate and share information, while our educational methods in the university setting have barely progressed beyond the overhead projector.

Steven Downes, one of two instructors for the Connectivism course, asserts: “knowledge is distributed across connections.” Instead of relying on a single travel agent to re-arrange their flights due to the massive delays caused by snow recently, some people took to simply posting about their woes in 140 character tweets. The airlines took notice and began addressing the complaints and helping some customers find their baggage and get booked on alternative flights. Learning, in this case, wasn’t about reading online about the process of how to change your ticket, but rather capitalizing on the connections available in the “twitterverse.”  

Instead of learning being about knowledge we attempt to pack away in the “empty hard drive space in our minds,” connectivism suggests another definition for learning. Downes tells us that learning is: “ the capacity to construct connections and the capacity to traverse these connections.”

There are two goals supported in the connectivism learning theory, according to Downes:

1.  The ability to grow and foster a network of connections.
2.  The ability to develop a successful, robust, trustworthy network.

Most of the pedagogy used in higher education today stresses a one-way network of connections. We assess our students’ ability to take in information from one connection (the professor) and then regurgitate it at some later date via an exam or a paper. Some of us grow fearful of entities like Wikipedia, since we lack control over the credibility and accuracy of the content.

When we rely on last year’s lecture notes (or more terribly, those from the last decade), we negate most of the benefits of having a subject matter expert as a professor. Knowledge does not last as long as it used to, due to something called its “half-life,” or the time between when the knowledge is passed on and when it is no longer accurate. Geoge Siemens, the second instructor of the Connectivism class, describes the challenge as he writes, “In many fields the life of knowledge is now measured in months and years.” That makes what Siemens calls the “know-where” knowledge (“the understanding of where to find [needed] knowledge”)  much more important than “know-how” and “know-what.”

Instead of being concerned that a Wikipedia entry may be inaccurate, we recognize that relying on our own knowledge and recollection in the moment is far less reliable than the knowledge of many. Instead of worrying that the experts aren’t controlling the flow of information, we can appreciate the values that have been guiding sites like Wikipedia and trust that the way the system is evolving over time, those principles will be adhered to far more than when resting on one person’s strength.

There is the valid concern of having Wikipedia being the first and only source our students go to in order to locate knowledge. Instead of fighting against their tendency, perhaps it is time for us to begin contributing to Wikipedia and adding links to those sources we wish our students would also visit in a quest to solve problems and expand their learning.

 

-Bonni Stachowiak

 

REFERENCES:

VIDEO: What is connectivism? (Steven Downes)

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/688902

 

ARTICLE: Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age (George Siemens)

http://www.itdl.org/journal/jan_05/article01.htm

 

#CCK11

I’ve met a number of faculty who suffer from some type of health issues related to the too many years they have spent working long days at computers. The role of a faculty member at a teaching-oriented institution can mean a little less time in front of a monitor than in our corporate days, but there still remains the necessary work on a computer to be done.

I found a little program called Workrave that reminds you to take little breaks and even suggests some stretches you might do during your mini breaks.

http://www.workrave.org/

From their website: “Workrave is a program that assists in the recovery and prevention of Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI). The program frequently alerts you to take micro-pauses, rest breaks and restricts you to your daily limit.”

You can customize how often you’re prompted to take what they call micro-pauses and longer rest breaks. You determine how long these breaks should be and can always skip them if they wind up arriving on your screen at an inopportune time.

Workrave has worked well for me, though I did find two issues with the program:

1.       When running iTunes, it would sometimes cause the music to distort when Workrave was running in the background.

2.       I did find that I got in the habit of dismissing the break reminders, somewhat negating the benefits of the program. This was my own lack of discipline, however, and nothing to do with any limitations in the application.

Overall, I highly recommend Workrave as a great way to keep healthy while working in a position that requires computer work.  

This seems the time of the year when the temptations to do anything except finish syllabi and other course preparation action items are at their highest. To that end, I offer the following five steps to staying focused and productive.

Turn off email

Once you’ve addressed the emails that are urgent, it is time to unplug and exit your email program. Otherwise, the emails that come in get treated with the same importance as everything else we have on our plates. Most of us think we can multi-task – but what we’re really doing is called switch-tasking, which slows us down considerably and also can increase errors in the work we’re doing.

Keep your social media in check

Many of us faculty enjoy seeing what friends are up to on Facebook, or looking at the latest articles and tools talked about via Twitter. However, this habit can turn into a serious time drain, if we’re not careful. Consider having a social media fix as a reward for accomplishing today’s goals, or at least as an incentive for getting the next big task done. At the very least, set a timer before you login, so you limit yourself to the amount of time you want to invest in these activities.

Plan for the low energy points of the day

For me, when it hits 2:00 pm, I have a hard time fighting off the urge for a nap. Some days, I let myself have this luxury and don’t worry about it. It is, after all, summertime… and we deserve some perks. Other times, I have too much on my plate that needs accomplishing and I need to stay at work, despite the low energy point. I find the following steps work well:

• Go for a ten-minute walk
• Drink a glass of water and eat a small snack (a handful of nuts works well)
• Do something mindless to give my brain a break
• Put on some energizing music

Look at the big picture

There’s a reason we do all the unrewarding stuff. Most of us feel a special call to teach and have an impact on our students’ lives. Try reading a few encouraging letters and emails to give yourself the motivation to get through the less fun aspects of class preparation.

Get a perspective on priorities

Start each day with your master to do list in front of you. Decide what is most important to get done today and figure out how to schedule things to accomplish it. If you think about other actions you need to take before the school year starts, be sure to capture those tasks while they’re on your mind. Otherwise, you’re wasting precious mental capacity trying to keep all that in mind at the same time you’re trying to be creative with class ideas. An earlier post talks more about getting things done (GTD) as a professor:

http://teachinginhighered.com/gtd-tools-for-faculty

I hope you’ll be able to put some of these into practice. Let us know what else you’re doing to stay focused and productive during this time of the year in the comments.