[Items appear in last-to-first order and may be amended at any time -- usually when I chicken out.]
June 26, 2008
Tripping the Light Fantastic

The trouble with learning is that it is such a chore. If only we could just go fishing or read a good novel and then walk away with what society thinks we need to know. Gee, we'd say, that was easy.

I never particularly enjoyed school, although I was usually pretty good at it. I was docile enough to do what I was supposed to do, and it was a time when not doing what you're supposed to wasn't much appreciated (although Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy were about to change that). I mostly learned through a principle of fear; I'd better learn such and such or I'm going to get into trouble.

That principle of fear as a motivation for learning didn't seem right then and it doesn't seem right now. I understand the "no pain, no gain" principle, and maybe with weightlifting and sports in general, it makes sense. If you aren't hurting, you aren't building that muscle, that skill, whatever.

But I like to learn, I enjoy it. I regularly seek out things to learn. I'm congenitally curious. Why did I need to be slapped about the head and shoulders to learn the stuff I was supposed to learn? (Speaking metaphorically, of course.) Why couldn't I just let my curiosity draw me into all that stuff that teachers spent so much time and effort, and intensity, trying to force feed me?

I had these ideas even back then, and I dropped out of college a couple of times thinking, in rather defiant terms, that I would just go ahead and learn the stuff, read the stuff, that I had been coerced into learning and reading, but without all the gestapo tactics. And without that hideous grade business. Who gave these people the right to measure me so acutely in their own terms?

Of course, off on my own, I didn't read any of the books or learn any of the stuff that I was sure I would read and learn if only I got away from that darn campus. I simply tried to get jobs, find places to live, meet girls, and squeeze out a bit of life when and where I could find it. Forget the books.

College provides that structure, that discipline, and I eventually learned that. But I learned it on my own in my own way; I didn't come to believe it because somebody told me so. I had eventually given in to the prevailing wisdom, but only because it was a wisdom I had come to on my own.

That's the kind of wisdom that sticks. That's the kind of wisdom that somebody can be proud of, can show the scars, can hold close, personally. That's the kind of wisdom that schools should be allowing to occur, not trying to cram down students' throats.

For 20 years I've thought that schools could create a learning environment that encouraged such self-encountered wisdom. Not in the traditional classroom, of course, with every element shrieking out POWER! But in a managed environment, probably digitally driven, that gently compelled a negotiated understanding of what we, the society, wanted a negotiated understanding about.

Messy business, of course, and requires teachers of some smarts and entrepreneurship. Hard to find, those.
[Items appear in last-to-first order and may be amended at any time -- usually when I chicken out.]
June 26, 2008
The wiki as instructional tool

What Friedman argues in The World is Flat is that the Internet and the conflating of representational forms into digital processes that can be ported over the Internet means that knowledge workers can operate collaboratively from any spot on the globe. Anything that can be represented digitally, and that basically means any kind of knowledge outside of direct physical experience (and someday we may get there if we find that touch, taste, and smell can be digitalized), can be moved almost instantaneously and for almost zero cost from anywhere to anywhere.

This throws our notion of "presence" into turmoil. In essence, "presence" can be represented digitally through text and audio and video in a variety of ways, both asynchronously and synchronously. "Teaching" and "learning" are certainly "knowledge work," and teachers and students are "knowledge workers," depending upon the niceties of your definitions. Theoretically there should be no reason why vast corporations can operate in a globally dispersed way and a teacher and student cannot.

Unless you find something prohibitively special in the physical presence of a student and teacher in the same room at the same time. If there's something there -- two flesh and blood people in direct space-time contact -- that makes learning "realer" than in digital forms of interaction, then distance learning suffers by comparison.

Well, right now, there is something "realer" about the physical space-time, flesh and blood presence. When people are in each other's physical presence, they feel a "tension of encounter" that enhances the experience, an experience that is sharply reduced through online encounters.

Various online avatar apparatuses like "Second Life" try to replicate that "tension of encounter" by establishing visually walkable spaces and "people" represented by three-dimensional avatars, and the effort is not negligible. In Second Life, one encounters images of people (rather childishly idealized, of course) and engages in text discussions that generate a surprising amount of what one feels in meeting people in real life. A Harvard professor is attempting to teach a class in Second Life.

But it seems to me, following Friedman, that the movement from one mode of interaction to another need not try to replicate all the advantages of the first mode in the second. That is, the "tension of encounter" may not be necessary in Internet-based distance learning. The point in international economics digitally managed is not that all aspects of what one did before are replicated on the Internet, but that those highly relevant aspects of previous interactivity are replicated.

That means that people have to look at what goes on in classrooms and formal education and try to figure out what makes it all tick and can or cannot be digitally replicated. What do teachers do to get students to learn?

I've lived by Papert's astonishingly intelligent statement that "all computers are heuristic" for 20 years now; one cannot try to do something on a computer without thoroughly thinking through what one does in ways far more thorough than ever required before. The same is absolutely true with putting a human activity online. What is it we "have" in the classroom that we could "have" in the digital realm?

There are many, many people who reject out of hand that digital processes could replicate and therefore substitute for face-to-face instruction. The idea is reprehensible to many if not most classroom teachers. If one has had any experience at all in the classroom, then that is what one knows and feels comfortable with. And if one has stuck with it, that is probably what one likes to do. Sitting at a computer and flashing text back and forth with students, or, worse, strutting around in a 3-D virtual world with everybody looking like cartoon movie stars?

Well, I feel sad about it too. There is indeed something noble about braving the physical presence of 30 or so young people corralled daily at the same time staring at me with an "okay, teach me if you can" look.

But whatever the losses in this "digital encounter" element, there are huge advantages in transcending distance and time. And here is where the "Friedman effect" takes hold. He says over and over that there are losses and there are gains to the flat world. The trick is to understand what is lost and what is gained, and compare the two. If it comes out in favor of the physical teacher in a face-to-face classroom?

But it won't. Because digital interaction is sweeping the behavior of young people globally. Whatever teachers want, or the presumptions of older people, the demand of youth cannot be resisted. It may well be indeed that the Internet will dumb down society from here on out and we will all descend into a infinite pit of ignorance.

Yeah. Right. Every generation is supposed to descend into a pit of ignorance, and each generation's members always do and don't in about the same measure as has been happening since Zeus discovered he had marital problems.

So now we come to what was supposed to be the main point of this entry. Can we establish the "tension of encounter" in online processes? To figure this out we have to review what most people are doing when they teach online courses.

So here's my rendering:


Is this it? I don't think so.
[Items appear in last-to-first order and may be amended at any time -- usually when I chicken out.]
May 13, 2005
The Flat World

New York columnist Thomas Friedman has taken to calling the world "flat," mainly because all the old geographical hurdles to interaction have flattened out (mountains) or hardened (seas) and people now, through digital means, can work with each other, share their intelligence and skill and wealth, without, sorta, the barriers of old.

I write at least 50 emails a day to people in places that aren't where I am. Most are trivial, the knock-off stuff that nobody wants to brag about or have included in one's biography, and that's okay. At 50 messages a day, and maybe more, I am putting my thought out into the world at an alarming pace, and some of those messages go to email lists that have 100-to-1000 readers.

Frightening when you think about it.

But a lot of those people are doing the same, and if you try to visualize all this geometrically exploding contact, you pretty soon get a headache. Meaning? Information? Something is getting moved around a lot among a lot of people without regard to distance or replication problems.

I get this image of ideas operating not like thunderbolts cracking open new visions in a single blow, but like water smoothing pebbles. The flow of information washing over and around the information-stream participants, who themselves are contributors, represents, I think, a new way to look at the communicative value of digital interaction.

It's like what I think was happening with Sylvia Beach's bookstore in the early 1920s. These people -- and individually they may not have been all that much smarter than you or I -- bathed daily in a discursive medium that made them superior.

We can do something of that digitally. Yes we can.
[Items appear in last-to-first order and may be amended at any time -- usually when I chicken out.]
May 13, 2005
Sylvia Beach

Just read Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company again, but not since 1964. Stunned, as then, by the incredible "superstar guest list" of great writers who visited her little Paris book store during the 1920's. T.S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, John Dos Passos, Ezra Pound, Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Valery, Andre Gide, my god.

These people didn't just visit. They came, talked, set up supper arrangements, "interacted" in the best 21st-century tradition.

Okay, so I have a network philosophy. Shakespeare and Company was a sort of literary internet of its day. It was the almost daily contact point for these folks and numerous other wannabees. They physically walked to this little place and touched base and chewed the fat and somethimes set up other contacts and sometimes made important collaborative decisions. Maxwell Perkins says, backed up by Sylvia Beach's papers, that F. Scott Fitzgerald got Hemingway to get rid of his original first chapter of The Sun Also Rises to start where the novel now starts. That's not insignificant influence.

Sylvia Beach's bookstore was the internet of her day. It had a few liabilities, such as having to live in Paris right up the street. The actual internet doesn't have that liability, but it does mean you don't get to look eye to eye (and with James Joyce, it was just the one eye) with greatness, but you can ramble on in exchanges, even from -- as the naysayers of outsourcing remind us -- Bangladesh.

Not the same thing? Well, no. But something of the same thing.
[Items appear in last-to-first order and may be amended at any time -- usually when I chicken out.]
May 12, 2005
The Complaint About Technology

Recently I've heard an increase in the usual complaints about the fact that computer technology and networks are turning us into anti-social "screen-starers." Saw an interesting movie last night called "The Story of the Weeping Camel." Complicated story, and not an entirely successful movie, but interesting because it portrayed a Mongol tribe out in the middle of nowhere shepherding their sheep and camels...no electricity. And there's a problem and they send their 14-year-old son off with their 6-year-old son on a couple of camels on what looks like a 2-day journey to get a musician to play to make a mother camel accept her infant for milking...don't ask.

But the 6-year old gets to a place where there's a television set, and is fascinated. The 14-year-old just does what he has been told to do. Eventually the musician comes back to the camp, plays for the mother camel, and she accepts her previously rejected infant. And weeps. Jan didn't buy it and neither did I, but motherhood is hard to argue with. Lots of intercutting with the human mother and her newborn, fetchingly played by all.

The force of the movie, as we move along, is that these guys live an idylic life out there with the camels and the sheep and the tents and the wind, and everybody loves everybody without electricity and smokes lots of cigarettes, and why can't we all be like that?

So I was ready to write the movie off as yet another romantic return to something that never was but is always something that is supposed to be. Creative writers, who are usually a pretty dissatisfied lot as a whole, like to talk about how neat things should really be in some world that in reality couldn't really exist.

BUT, at the end, after the closing sentimental fade, there is suddenly another scene in which the 14-year-old is setting up a satellite dish outside the tent and the 6-year-old is inside the tent with a TV running off of batteries yelling out adjustment commands.

Wow. Was I surprised. Maybe a ten-second scene.

There's power in that revelation, one that many intellectuals and non-intellectuals fail to realize, one that turns the sappy mother-infant tone of the movie on its ear. There is a digital world sucking up the invisible space around us. The old folks can complain, because it sure ain't their world, and litterati will complain because it doesn't shunt the inquiring public into their cattle chute concept of 'reading.'

But, in the end, it is a fascinating world. A brave new world. In the end, all that absorption with camels and sheep and squawling babies, may have no more meaning for what IS meaning than the hacker's 20 hours banging away on a keyboard. It just depends on the predilections of the interpretor.
[Items appear in last-to-first order and may be amended at any time -- usually when I chicken out.]
May 13, 2005
Distance Testing

When one is teaching graduate courses online, one tricky problem arises. How do you test these folks? Obviously proctored exams are too clumsy and probably insulting to the students. Take-home exams are the norm in such circumstances, but there you have the problem of some students writing 1000 words in 3 hours and others writing 5000 words in 10 hours. How do you compare the two?

So I built a mechanism this week on the web that reveals the test only when the student clicks a button, and that starts a clock. The student then has to finish responding to the various items in a certain time period (three hours for these finals).

Managing it this way allows students within a certain time period (three days) to pick the time they want to start the test, but it restricts the entries to three hours. Through the wonderful miracle of computers, I can see the start time and the last save time.

It is possible for some students to copy the questions for other students, giving them as much time as they want to finish the test. Fine, but I will grow very suspicious of extremely long answers, and will probably count down for them, and, also, the person who cheats by giving another the questions in advance undercuts his own position: I grade on a curve.

It was fun to program and solve two persistent problems in distance learning: the student can take the test when he or she wants to (within a given time), and yet it remains a three-hour test and I don't have to grade somebody's 10-hour effort, as would happen on a full-out take-home exam.
[Items appear in last-to-first order and may be amended at any time -- usually when I chicken out.]
April 30, 2005
Books, books, and books

I like to read books and am usually reading two or three at any one time. I like fiction and I like history and I like current issues, I enjoyed Maureen Dowd's Bushworld and Thomas Friedman's The Lexis and the Olive Tree, and the thing about the rise of the "vulcans" and anything Brian Greene writes.

What I have trouble with is the stuff I am supposed to be reading for my professional elucidation: the books people write in my academic field, which is Rhetoric and Composition and writing program administration. They are not written particularly badly, although many of them are written quite badly, being warmed-over dissertations either plunked out by-the-numbers or so socially-constructed opaque as to require a conceptual ice-pick page by page.

But the real problem is that they answer questions that I don't think need answering. They talk about intellectual concerns that exist in a sort of metaphysical-academic pin-ball game that prove impossible to pin to the corkboard of real concerns that us working stiff writing program administrators have to slog through every day. There is a level of chatter among academics that seems like a low, cloud-level jigsaw puzzle that we all keep working on assiduously but which never floats to earth. Our problems in composition programs cycle through the same year after year, with the only solutions that we see proposed being the dreaded imposition from above, the various "nuclear" options that higher administration -- perhaps not so unreasonably frustrated -- hoists every so often.
[Items appear in last-to-first order and may be amended at any time -- usually when I chicken out.]
April 27, 2005
The Evil of Administration

One of the things that most writing program administrators don’t pay a lot of attention to is writing program administration. We concern ourselves intently with what other writing programs are doing – surveying our field with a data-gathering passion hardly seen outside the census bureau. As we look around through our binoculars, about the only significant thing we ever seem to see is other people looking back at us through their binoculars. We discuss national policy issues with fervor, quick to anger over injustice and Republicans. We often strategize (“strategerize”?) over how to prevent local administrative outrages emitting from deans and provosts who seem ever ready at the least sign of vulnerability to cut back benefits, increase class size, or force standards in some form or fashion. Every now and then we actually discuss the best way to teach freshmen how to write better, often hesitantly, clearly understanding the tenderness of the issue among our participants.

What we don’t talk about much is writing administration. That is, the managing of what is an organization of people who presumably work together under some sort of hierarchical structure with – dare I say it – systematic conditions of interaction and development. I think, as good English majors raised in the Romantic literary tradition – whether we admit it or not -- we inwardly wince at the idea of collective action of any sort other than political solidarity. Systems frighten us, organizations discourage us, and management is always the enemy, even -- or especially -- when management is us.

Social control is anathema to Romantic individualism, the principal ethic of literature for a hundred years, except in that specialized corner of life in which we can fantasize some edenic economic system in which everybody ends up with everything that anybody could ever want, without, of course, the corrupting taint of materialism. The beauty of socialism and Marxism, of course, is that both are impossible in a world of real human beings and therefore, like a beautiful person who dies young, like the young poet in Joyce’s “The Dead,” never has to be tested against the discouraging vicissitudes of human nature played out.

But an organization made up of people has, by necessity, some need of hierarchical control. Control, unless it is abhorrently idiosyncratic, must have some hierarchy of authority, and that requires information flowing up and down through the hierarchy and decisions made on the basis of that information that require behavior out of people that they may not particularly want to give. And then that, of course, requires some sort of sanctions, and there you are, right in the middle of pushing people around.

But the people you’re pushing around, in composition programs, are having a serious effect on yet a lower strata of person, the freshmen taking the composition course. Presumably, if you actually are a writing program administrator, you have a responsibility to the freshmen who are supposed to be taught in these composition programs. And, as often happens in these sorts of operations, what is good for the freshmen is not necessarily what the graduate student instructors want to do, or can do. It’s sad that there are such different vectors in organizations, that a certain group of people may have a different purpose and desire than another group of persons, but that is again human nature, and the purpose of the organization is to homogenize the purposes, goals, and benefits of everyone within the organization, to the advantage of everyone in the organization.

Administrators must then make choices about who in the organization they administer requires what management in order to serve the purpose of the organization. Who do you reward, who do you guide, who do you punish, and how do you decide about all this? If you, as an administrator, don’t administrate, it’s quite possible that everyone under your authority suffers, even those – and especially those – who resist all authority ideologically. Free spirits, indeed, who are themselves managing the fates of 50 or so younger free spirits, and maybe not always doing so under the best guidance.

So we come to the rather troubling situation in which people who don't want to manage are put in management positions over people who don't want to be managed, for purposes that the faculty, off in their own worlds, may have no idea about what is going on, and are then shocked, shocked, to find out that their favorite graduate students, who generate fantastic prose when taking their classes, are actually not capable of, or not motivated enough, to serve these freshmen hovering around the perimeter of some heated debates.
[Items appear in last-to-first order and may be amended at any time -- usually when I chicken out.]
April 26, 2005
Grading via video

I have a number of graduate student preliminary drafts to comment on today, and I am a bit undecided whether I should comment on them in my usual way or provide video feedback. My usual way is using voice recognition software (Dragonspeak) so that I can simply comment as I go through the document and do not have to turn eyes off the page to type. This way provides much more information that I was able to put out by typing. But streaming video (Microsoft Media Encoder 9) provides much more information. There problem here is that I tend to digress somewhat, get in a chatty mode, present more personality (is this good or bad?), and take too long on each document. I think I’ll do a few of each and ask the students which they prefer. There is an advantage in being able to read the teacher's criticism – manage the text as it were, but there is no doubt the video provides a lot more commentary and context. For the videos, of course, I’ll have to shave.
[Items appear in last-to-first order and may be amended at any time -- usually when I chicken out.]
April 30, 2005
E. D. Hirsch

Currently I’m reading E. D. Hirsch’s The Schools We Need, his follow up to Cultural Literacy, both an argument for a “knowledge based” pedagogy over a “tools-based” pedagogy in our schools. I find many of his points valid, although he misses the major point of his critics. If our schools are to be enculturating agents rather than developers of critical consciousness, then who decides the knowledge base for this enculturating act? Which knowledge is presumed to be foundational for a shared cultural literacy? I don’t think the stories of Washington cutting down the cherry tree or Lincoln walking eleven miles to return 16 cents (or was it sixteen miles to return 11 cents?) did much for my civic consciousness or future knowledge acquisition. On the other hand, the notion that our schools (a la Ohmann, Shor, Aronowitz) should be producing knee-jerk challengers of authority and cultural critics is not very attractive to me either. The basis of all wisdom is not seeing oppressors around every corner. Frankly, both pedagogical agendas are unappealing to me. We should be doing something with our students other than brainwashing them in the myths of the culture or turning them into bitchy critics of all they survey. In both cases, the notion of “culture” (either the comforting womb of groupthought or the oppressor’s psychological prison) is too mission-oriented. I don’t think school should be the boot camp for the shock troops of either cultural conformity or cultural displacement. Seems to me that our schools can both teach an enabling self-discipline that encourages students to work within reasonable social constraints and teach a healthy dose of skepticism toward those who would like to manipulate them. But neither teaching role should be seen, as in The Bues Brothers, as a mission from God. It is the messianic fervor of both sides that is troubling to me and ultimately deleterious to healthy change. School should be a place where students are given the opportunity to discover. I understand the urgency felt by both sides – schools are definitely in a mess – but their competing stridency simply cancels out all possibility of any change and we are left with the ship wallowing in confusion.
[Items appear in last-to-first order and may be amended at any time -- usually when I chicken out.]
April 24, 2005
Trying out the blog

Okay, Rich, I'm trying out a blog. I suspect this will be rather dry for folks. I don't intend intimate details, not that I have any intimate details, but I will be exploring on a daily basis my evolving thoughts about computers and writing and teaching. Of course, not too long ago, pushing one's best ideas out without all kinds of copyright protection would have been insane, but we have a new world of openness because of the Web and and blogs and wikis, one that I hope will rid the country once and for all of its 19th-century fear of "the machine." We'll see.

My wife and I are selling a house, so I didn't do much thinking about anything except hanging blinds and touching up wall paint. Maybe tomorrow will be more exciting, cognitively.
[Items appear in last-to-first order and may be amended at any time -- usually when I chicken out.]
February 20, 2005
Success

The solution that I thought up on Friday I was able to program on Saturday, and it works. I programmed an .asp page that has two embedded elements: a live (or recorded) video feed and an embedded call to scrolling text drawn from an SQL database (the same table in which this text resides).

By including a list of html links that reload the page with a queryline requesting various recorded feeds from the Media Server, I can stream my recorded video -- recorded at very low bandwidth to include dial-up users -- just above related text. Since the text is drawn from the database and not the video, I can present unlimited text without increasing the low bandwidth (or the storage demands).

This means that I meet the three principal conditions of this sort of effort: low bandwidth, good quality audio (and, in this case, low quality video), and related text.

Previously I had been using Camtasia to capture screen space which displayed Powerpoint slides (recounted in earlier contributions to this blog) and saving this to FLASH files. This worked well: the slides displayed in large format, clear, and the voice was clear (although there was no talking-head video). The trouble was that I could never get the bandwidth down below 100 kbps, which made the delivery problematical for dial-up users. (Even a 56 kbps can deliver a 100 kbps with buffering, because the transfer rate can fall below 56; but it can also occasionally rise above, and that's the problem.)

In displaying this capability to my faculty colleagues, I was questioned as to whether a talking head, live or recorded, works against the collaborative nature of the MOO interaction. Good question. But I've always believed in applying a variety of instructional modes and expressions. It is in deciding the mix wherein lies the problem. Too much of anything impedes the learning activity.
[Items appear in last-to-first order and may be amended at any time -- usually when I chicken out.]
April 26, 2005
Live Lecture with Text

I ran another live lecture in my English 5374 (Technical Editing) distance graduate course on Thursday, using the streaming media server, and ran into problems.

Here is the connection for another course, 5364

There are three conditions under which these lectures should take place: low bandwidth (for dial-up users), live sound delivery, and pushed text delivery simulating powerpoint slides. In the lecture on Monday, I was able to deliver a live talking head in the Encore MOO web-presentation pane with streaming video at 28 KPBS, far low enough for dial-up connections. The video was slightly pixilated and occasionally lacked synchronicity, but the voice was good, so I met two conditions of the streaming lecture, voice and low bandwidth.

In order to deliver concurrent text, on Thursday I asked the students to first enter the MOO and then open a second brower iteration and run the low bandwidth video. Then, returning to the MOO, they would still be hearing my streaming audio but I could push web pages to the MOO display. These would be my text delivery, the third condition. The problem with this setup, if it worked, would be that the text pages would not be recorded, although the streaming video would be. If students wanted to play back the lecture, I would have to figure some way to indicate web pages they should bring up separately from the video as I went along. This would be awkward, with my saying something like, "Now open http://ttopic.english.ttu.edu/manual/r.asp."

As it worked out, when a few students left the MOO to open the second browser iteration and started up the web page with the embedded video, it kicked them out of the MOO. There seemed some indication that some students (low RAM? Old operating systems? Old browser versions?) weren't going to be able to run the MOO and a concurrent video session.

It would be possible to avoid using the web page with the embedded video feed and simply have students bring up Media Player 9 or 10; whether the Media Player would work better in the background with the MOO than the video embedded web page I didn't know, but I didn't take the time to experiment, thinking that at least one or two of my students probably hadn't downloaded and installed the latest versions of the Media Player. It was my responsibility to take up as little class time as possible with technical experimentation.

I do think I have a solution, however. I am going to construct a web page that embeds the live (or recorded) video feed and a database connection to bring up text. I should then be able to enter the MOO, push my display page to the right pane, and students will see the video, hear my voice, and see the text displayed on the page. When I want to display another set of text, I simply push another page with a query string that displays the second set of text. There will be a brief blinking of the video as it reloads, but I don't think that will inhibit the presentation. I can then set up a similar page with the recorded lecture embedded and slide web links. As the students experiences the video, he or she will be orally cued to click on slide one, or slide two, etc., and then bring up the text associated with that part of the video.
[Items appear in last-to-first order and may be amended at any time -- usually when I chicken out.]
February 15, 2005
Using Streaming Media for Lectures

Last night (2/17/2005) in my distance graduate course English 5364, "The Post-Englightenment Rise of Modern Rhetoric," I experimented with the use of our new streaming media server (Microsoft Media Server) for delivering a live video feed for the purpose a audio/video lecture summing up Tom Miller's, The Formation of College English.

Using chat (MOO, Instant Messaging) and email for collaborative participation in distance courses is effective and should remain the principal action in such courses, but I have found -- as the reader of these pages no doubt has discovered -- that some content requires the support of a spoken explanation or summation. I have experimented with delivering such a spoken explanation (perhaps uncharitably called "lecture") with Akiva Webmeeting, which has proven to have several severe liabilities..
I have also attempted to deliver such oral explanations of content in saved files. Saved narrated powerpoint presentations have required too much bandwidth and storage in the past, and saved Camtasia files (FLASH), which low on storage, couldn't be cranked down to the under-45 kbps that is necessary to avoid freeze framing and buffer calls for dial-up.

But in any case, the saved narrated file format is really unsuitable for class time, which is precious in these classes and probably shouldn't be squandered by pushing recorded material. On the other hand, asking students to listen to the files beforehand -- ignoring the bandwidth problem for a few students -- is likewise unsatisfactory. The instructor wants the material to be freshly experienced, and it's hard to ensure that fresh experience with some students listening to it five days before class and others five minutes before class (of course, this is a problem with assigned reading too).

The live video feed could solve all this. Through repeated testing I have found that a live feed can be delivered at 40 Kbps, low enough for my own bandwidth tests and for those conducted by my students. I can push a 120/160 image with voice to the right pane of the MOO and talk for 25 minutes, as I did last night, with no buffering or freezing and with audio at, by all accounts, a good quality. The image pixilates a little when I move, but that doesn't detract from the content.

A problem is that the media server produces a 15-30 second (or more) variable lag between the feed and the display, which slightly inhibits student questions through the MOO. So as I'm explaining something, a question will pop up in the MOO that reflects something I said 30 seconds earlier. I don't think this drastically impedes the process, but it is a new operational problem, suddenly going back to something presented 20 seconds earlier (and you'd be surprised how long 20 seconds is in this process).

[Items appear in last-to-first order and may be amended at any time -- usually when I chicken out.]
February 15, 2005
Security problems with capabilities

Four four hybrid classes in a row I've had what I call "busted" capabilities, or something that was supposed to support internet interaction not working. One would think that once something has been established as a functioning capability, it could be presumed to be... a functioning capability.

Not so. It appears that as viruses and hyjackers proliferate, microsoft and local server jocks get more and more innovative in their protective measures. Who could blame them?

But these security measures also affect network action. Things that once worked well, such as Akiva's Webmeeting, suddenly hang on testing routines. Yahoo! Messenger now balks at the lack of pop-up ability, because, of course, everything now suppresses pop-ups. And so on.
[Items appear in last-to-first order and may be amended at any time -- usually when I chicken out.]
July 2, 2004
Webmeeting Lecture for 5368 (6/30/2004)

Used webmeeting last night for 5368 (distance) to deliver a lecture on the textbook. I originally intended to push four features: the chat textbox, my webcam, my voice, and the viewport displaying a powerpoint presentation. I kept the powerpoint in development mode so I could size the window down to prevent it from taking over the students' screens, to allow them a visual on my face and the chatbox.

I quickly learned that although all but one student got into webmeeting (eight students), various of them kept "dropping" either my webcam or the viewport. I would close these utilities and push them again, and some of the students would pick them up and then lose them again. Eventually I closed the webcam pipe in order to free up some bandwidth, and those students with dialup seemed to experience better voice quality but still not the viewport. Voice for those with dialup seemed to cut out every now and them very briefly, but I couldn't tell if it was a bandwidth problem or the full duplex sound pick-up issue I've described previously. Those with broadband had no trouble with the webcam, viewport, or voice.

I went ahead and delivered the lecture with 5 of the 8 receiving the powerpoint through viewport, and the others good-naturedly taking notes from my voice alone. I had prepared a camtasia .swf movie of the lecture previously, so they could if they wanted review the lecture through that after class, as well as the static powerpoint available through TOPIC.

So why try to use webmeeting and not just put a powerpoint movie up in a browser? Because the chatbox provides a live feedback process during the presentation, one that helps direct what I'm covering and clarify parts that are confusing. I can't do that with narrated powerpoint movies (.swf). As I talked, comments and questions would pop up in the dialogue box and it was easy to explain or clarify in response. The process is still new to the students and only a couple actually used the chatbox feedback more than once, but I think with practice they will use it more.

Of course, delivering a digital talking-head lecture hardly constitutes a pedagogical breakthrough, but this was a graduate tech comm course (not a writing course), and I think the MOO interaction alone is too thin to cover all the necessary interaction during a class session. Whether webmeeting lectures can be included without boring the students I'm not sure. I do know that text-only modes of interaction are clumsy, and much more info can be presented by voice, especially live and responding to chatbox feedback.

These are all of the comments about the voice lecture in the questionnaire I sent out after the session (only sixreturned so far):

I think the hope of getting everybody into webmeeting with complete video and voice interaction is too idealistic for now. None of the students admit to having a webcam (I think most of them would balk at having their video up on the monitor), and I'm not sure the bandwidth or audio pickup would allow much of a natural interaction. The chatbox, which provides the students a comforting 'distance,' is a fluid and effective means of providing feedback to the voice lecturer.

What I may do to get around the lack of viewport is to put the static powerpoint up online and let students access it independently of webmeeting as I talk. They can trigger the slide progression themselves. The voice and chatbox should work fine, and the independently accessed powerpoint provide simply another channel without squeezing the webmeeting bandwidth.

Thankfully, the students remain tolerant of these experiments, although we lost about twenty minutes getting people into webmeeting and figuring out what they were 'getting' and what they were dropping.
[Items appear in last-to-first order and may be amended at any time -- usually when I chicken out.]
July 2, 2004
Levels of Student Reading Responses (5/25/2004)

Plan for collaborative input
  1. Students read from the text and contribute something to a web form respecting their reaction, response.
  2. The reaction level 1 is saved with a “group” tag
  3. Instructions are provided via flash to read the reaction level 1 and respond with reaction level 2
  4. Students read the collaborative reaction level 2 and produce an individual reaction level 3, which is an interpretation of the collaborative reaction level 2

The notion here is to generate not a reaction to the reading but a reaction to how others have reacted as a group. The reaction levels are not generated as collaborative documents per se but nevertheless form a collectively derived document. The prompt that leads to reaction level 3 is not a query about the text content or even compiled first reactions but a query about the synthesized reactions to level 1, which I am calling reaction level 2. This process should take a week to generate the reaction level 3, which may require deadlines difficult to keep.

The “reading cycle” right now is a week, based upon the old idea of reading to prepare for a class meeting. In other words, the class meeting is driven by the reading assignment, conforming to what I’ve criticized in the past as the “read and discuss” pedagogy. What if the reading cycle were increased to two weeks, meaning that the course would have 5 reading cycles (ten-week course) and each cycle would include the above-described “collective-recursive examination” of the reading?

Perhaps better still, the two-week reading cycle could be broken into components. Week one requires the reading itself and the initial reaction level 1. Week two requires reaction level 2 (in three days) and reaction level 3 (after the next four days). This schedule would necessitate a greater reading load every two weeks, but students could read ahead.

The purpose is to avoid the insipidity of a MOO discussion over the reading, which often generates a hodge-podge of fairly shallow reactions tossed out into a rapidly flowing text stream allowing for a lot of quick thinking, admittedly, but not much expressed reflective or critical thinking. I’ve tried to get around the insipidity of the MOO discussion expressively confined to the reading assignment through required reading responses, and indications are that students like to read the responses of other students. But that’s where the use of these single-level responses or reactions end. The three-level managed reactions outlined here would, albeit crudely, actually exploit the reading responses to further drive the instructional tasking.
[Items appear in last-to-first order and may be amended at any time -- usually when I chicken out.]
July 2, 2004
Thinking Through Collaboratively Generated Instructional Material (5/24/2004)

The key to what I am increasingly calling "intelligent instructional systems" lies not in what the teacher or system does, but in what the system has the students do. This "tasking," as I have reported elsewhere, is usually a static business, developed well in advance of the class "meetings" and intended to provide "stages" of accomplishment, a combination both of a learning act and of an evaluation act. In graduate courses these tasks usually center upon the writing of "research papers," requiring the student to reach out on his or her own to learn more about the specifics of a particular topic or theme than could normally be covered in the usual class distribution of information, either through the textbook or recorded presentations or live "teacher talking heads."

Usually these student efforts do not contribute to what is usually assumed to be the "course content" in any meaningful way, although many teachers have sought to distribute student work in (at first) paper compilations; then digitally through local-area networks and disks; and then finally on the web, as either FTP'd papers or student-written web pages. This distributed work has usually not been formally integrated into the course content, probably because doing so would require a considerable managerial effort on the part of the instructor, and probably also because student-generated information is suspect in a variety of ways, both by teachers and students.

Yet if learning is not simply memorization but the increasingly informed application of critical judgment, then "suspect" material is valuable, for it requires the reader to judge the validity and applicability of the material one his or her own, further requiring precisely the critical consciousness apparatus that drives real learning.

What this thinking leads to (and I have to finish this up quickly because it is growing too hot out here on this North Carolina porch), is that student tasking should not simply be a product of learning but a generator of learning, not just for the individual student but for the class. A successful intelligent instructional system should bring the students into the content-generation proces traditionally left to the textbook and lecture notes. And this should occur not at significant stages in the syllabus but fairly regularly, as a continuing complement to the traditionally conceived instructional content. The only way to manage this, of course, is digitally through a web application.
[Items appear in last-to-first order and may be amended at any time -- usually when I chicken out.]
July 2, 2004
Interactive FLASH tutorials (5/11/2004)

I was talking to Miles Kimball the other day about what I call "online modes of interaction," which can be defined as the various technological "channels" that allow students and teachers to communicate in distance and hybrid instruction. A short list of such "modes" would include the following, it seems to me.

Miles opined that pushing recorded material via streaming FLASH during a synchronous distance class might be a waste of time, since such material could be accessed outside of class, and I more or less agreed. But I countered with the idea that a 90-minute MOO session had its own problems and could be tiring and draggy. The recorded material could be used to break up the long chat.

My experiences this previous semester with 8-15 minute recorded narrated powerpoints and web pages both in distance classes and strong hybrid classes indicates that students do not have the patience to gain from them, especially Category III students (see "Summing Up, Spring 2004").

However, in an earlier discussion with Rich Rice I speculated about using FLASH recorded movies in another way that might be useful as a learning activity that also breaks up the possible tedium of long MOO sessions. Here's how I think it will work.

When Camtasia records screen action as a FLASH movie, it can conclude by automatically calling another URL. Therefore it would be quite easy to build a series of very short presentational FLASH movies separated by active web pages that call for user input. This action would be something like the following:
  1. Student sees a one-minutes narrated PowerPoint or set of web pages as FLASH movie #1
  2. FLASH movie #1 calls web form #1 that asks for user input responding to FLASH movie #1. Web form #1 then calls one-minute FLASH movie #2 that presents new material and challenges in some fashion the user input captured in web form #1.
  3. FLASH movie #2 then calls web form #2 which asks for further user input, etc.

Miles might still protest that such a FLASH/input-form sequence could be invoked outside of a synchronous online class, and therefore not be specifically a synchronous class support, but the input form could generate a collaborative text and therefore validate itself as a synchronous activity rather than an asynchronous activity that simply supports self-paced engagement.

For instance, after a call for input in web form #1, web form #1 could call a compilation of several inputs from several students that are then challenged or used in some fashion in FLASH movie #2. Generating such a FLASH/input-form sequence would require a complex and subtle understanding of the instructional goals of the sequence and a sophisticated understanding of the anticipated input of the users. But such a sequence would apply FLASH movies in an interactive fashion that avoided the "shut up and listen" mode for 8-to-15 minutes and also validated use in a synchronous distance or hybrid class.

[Items appear in last-to-first order and may be amended at any time -- usually when I chicken out.]
May 4, 2004
Summing Up, Spring 2004

This text sums up my spring 2004 semester teaching English 3365 and 5374 regarding the use of digital communication technology, as well as some general speculations about the use of such technology in instruction.

First some definitions:
  1. Onsite Learning:
    1. Class is conducted in a classroom in the normal way.
    2. Class meets as often as the class credit structure dictates (i.e., a 3-hour credit course meets 3 hours a week).
    3. Students and teacher present 100% of the time.
    4. The primary "mode of interaction" is face-to-face, with some students' turning in assignments on paper or online.
    5. Instructional emphasis is heavily weighted to classroom activity as opposed to outside assignments (perhaps 70% to 30%).
  2. Moderate Hybrid Learning
    1. Class is conducted in a classroom in the normal way, students and teachers present 100% of the scheduled meetings.
    2. Class meets less often than the class credit structure dictates (though at least 50% of the time dictated by the class credit structure, to conform to SACS 50% seat-time rule).
    3. All the major assignments are listed and submitted online through a web application.
    4. Portions of peer interaction and student-teacher interaction conducted online.
  3. Strong Hybrid Learning
    1. Students meet in the classroom at least 50% of the time the class credit structure dictates.
    2. The teacher is not onsite during some or all of the assignment classroom meetings: he or she manages class through computer-mediated communications.
    3. All the major assignments are listed and submitted online through a web application.
    4. All or significant portions of peer interaction and student-teacher interaction conducted online.
  4. Distance Learning
    1. Students and teacher do not meet in a physical space but “meet” through computer-mediated communications, either synchronously or asynchronously.

According to this admittedly informal spectrum of "hybrid/distance" categories, what was conducted in 3365 was "strong hybrid" and in 5374 was "distance." The two efforts were considerably different. It seems easy to anticipate what's going to happen when the instructional encounter is adjusted in the ways described above, but in fact it is not easy. As has been detailed over the preceding contributions, the "dynamic" of student-to-student and student-to-teacher interaction involves not only the mode of presentation and connection, but the psychological influences arising out of what I have been calling, albeit crudely, "presence," "authority," and "coercion."

The normal "channel" of contact between student and teacher, I am convinced, is much less a vehicle for information movement (in the usual sense) than it is for asserting personality. We tend to think that when the teacher teaches and the students learn, the movement of information and ideas from the teacher to the students is a rather pristine operation impeded only by the "static" of improperly managed terminology, poorly organized material, or a badly calibrated level of exchange. Simply put, this notion arises from the "transmission" or "pipeline" model of teaching that I (and many others) have criticized for years.

What is actually happening in successful student-teacher encounters is less a movement of information and ideas than a mix of competing psychological pressures centering upon issues of authority and coercion mostly stemming from the hard-to-codify "presence" of the teacher. Information and ideas can be moved back and forth almost as easily and effectively through computer-mediated communication as face-to-face, but the teacher's "presence" cannot, and that lack will display itself directly proportional to the need for authority and coercion of any particular student group.

Consider four types of student groups:
  1. graduate students taking a course in their major
  2. graduate students taking a required course not in their major
  3. upper division undergraduate students taking a course in their major
  4. upper division undergraduate students taking a required course not in their major

Going from 1 to 4, as the students move further from their own perceived interest and career value, their connection with the course, the teacher, and the content will grow more problematic and require what I am calling here greater "coercion" and a greater sense of "authority" placed in the teacher.

Ironically, the students who, by this reasoning, would need the greatest sense of the teacher's authority, freshmen composition students, are mostly taught by the teachers who for a variety of reasons usually have the least of it: teaching assistants. Some of the teaching authority that the youngest and least experienced teachers, the teaching assistants, lack, however, is compensated by the instutitional authority that first-year students tend to give their teachers. Human nature being what it is, as the student becomes more familiar with being a college student, institutional authority tends to wear off and the individual authority of a teacher arising from gravitas, reputation, and apparent expertise grows greater.

Students taking required courses (service courses) outside their chosen field would most likely not respond to the authority, or ethos, of the teacher as much as those taking courses within their fields. They often experience the "this is stupid" feeling that provides a motivation vacuum that the authority of the teacher is required to fill.

Simply as a mental exercise, I'll categorize these types of students as the following:
  1. Category I: highly motivated, taking class to satisfy career and personal interests and to acquire skills, generally apples to distance MATC students who tend to be employed as technical communicators and looking for employment advantages
  2. Category II: motivated students taking classes in their major who identify with the teacher and respect the teacher's skills and knowledge, generally applies to graduate students and upper-division undergraduates working in their major
  3. Category III: under-motivated students taking required service courses whose content may not be that appealing or even seem relevant, generally applies to graduate students taking out-of-major courses such as 5360 and undergraduate students taking service courses

There will no doubt be colleagues who will reject such categorization, and perhaps for good reason, but I feel that we cannot properly calibrate or select our modes of interaction individually or in combination, or evaluate them, unless we understand the psychological characteristics of the students even as crudely as outlined here.

Often the success of a hybrid or distance approach matters much less upon the modes of interaction than upon the attitude of the students (and, of course, the teacher). An extremely clumsy mode of interaction (say, straight MOO with no @URL push) can work wonders with a group of eager students while a complex and glitzy set of modes (pushed URLS, recorded powerpoints, synchronous audio/video interaction through webmeeting) can founder in a service course that contains some proportion of relatively recalcitrant students.

That said, it would nevertheless be a mistake to assume that the students' attitude is the fulcrum upon which success and failure is determined in the hybrid/distance models. The mix of variables that affects the encounter simply has to take into account the nature of any particular group of students. An incomplete list of those variables might be the following:

A good mix of (1)content management, (2) assignment development, and (3) modes of interaction that responds to the understood nature of a particular student group can succeed with any student group. The problem lies in our lack of experience understanding, blending, and framing these variables, but it's a lack of experience that is shrinking through efforts like 3365 and 5374 this semester.
[Items appear in last-to-first order and may be amended at any time -- usually when I chicken out.]
April 22, 2004
Student Presentations through Webmeeting

Students in 3365 (Professional Writing) did class presentations through webmeeting, with me in North Carolina. The results were mixed, with some good news.

First of all, the USB extensions that I bought allowed the webcam to be positioned on a podium directly in front of the student, and that completely overcame the full-duplex problem with voice actuation in webmeeting. The students' voices were clear. The webcam was pointed toward the audience so that the speaker was not intimidated. Another webcam at the back of the class was directed to the speaker, so I saw the speaker's presentation. The screen was bleached out by the light so I couldn't see the powerpoint slides, but I'm having the students attach those to me in email.

Second, I was able to record the entire process in webmeetings recording algorithm, and the compression is so good that 45 minutes was saved in 12 megs. Impressed by that.

On the down side, Edgar reported that several times my voice broke up as I questioned the presenters. It seems that when I slow down my delivery it comes across clearly, so it could be that speed of delivery stresses the TCP/IP in some way that causes the problem, just as movement in Camtasia causes storage drain. Or, it could simply be a function of intermittant internet slowdown or the recent problems with the labs and viruses.

The 'disembodied voice'


One of my students stopped on the way out and said to me over the webcam mic that my 'disembodied' voice was disconcerting (shades of the composition meeting yesterday) and that I need a visual focal point. In discussion with Edgar afterward, we decided for next Tuesday to position the "audience" along the west wall, slide the podium slightly to the east so the speaker could view both the audience and sceen without too much trouble, and put my image on a computer slightly to the left of the speaker. Even a small image, evidently, provides that focal point that somehow validates the voice coming out of the speaker. Both Becky's comments yesterday and the student's today seem to be saying the same thing. A valuable lesson.

Edgar remarked that he was surprised by the lack of rigor of the presenters or the apparent lack of concern about the assignment. I explained to him that some of that could be explained by his unfamiliarity with undergraduate classes of this sort: 3365 is a service course and the people who take it are required to take it, and may not be all that motivated.

But much more important, I do believe that the "hybrid" nature of the course encourages slackness. I've talked previously here about the "authority of presence," and there is no doubt that my "disembodied" or otherwise voice coming out of a speaker, or my fuzzy picture on a projection screen, are nowhere near the same as my physical presence. If we must depend upon "the authority of presence" as a coercive force, then the hybrid or distance setup is going to be unsatisfactory.

The escape from coercion


Which is why we must reconceptualize pedagogy as much less coercive and much more inherently engaging. We must envisage learning as a student opportunity, and not do it in platitudinous and bogus terms but in powerfully sustainable ways. For this we will have to escape, as I've said in these pages, centuries of tradition and outmoded assumptions about the educated society.
[Items appear in last-to-first order and may be amended at any time -- usually when I chicken out.]
April 22, 2004
YAHOO! Messenger for Department Meetings

Becky, responding to a request for feedback regarding my digital attendance at a Composition Meeting, said this:

First, I think it was hard that we didn't SEE you, Fred--and because of that we didn't get the visual cues we often get when you're about to speak, etc. (or perhaps that let us feel like we didn't have to follow up--no eyes to
catch, etc.).

I think the non-regulars simply forgot you were there, thus were surprised to hear your voice from time to time.

And I think when you DID speak, it seemed like the voice of God or something--so what we got was more proclamation than dialogue. Or at least that's what it felt like.


This is kind of what I expected. I could almost sense a sort of awkwardness as I clicked back into a listening mode. Obviously the poor timing of the second or so delay is a problem, but moreso the sudden voice coming up in a different mode from those in the room. If there were five people online, and with continuing input, then the computer voice would not be so intrusive and perhaps off-putting.

Avoiding the "pronouncement" mode is difficult, because intervention at my end requires much more effort than normally would be expended to enter a comment. I have to click "mute" (or produce feedback), then click "talk," then say my piece, then unclick talk and unclick mute to hear the response. Because of the delay and all the clicking and unclicking I'm doing, I don't catch any immediate response. Knowing that, I'm definitely projecting differently than I normally would.

The video may make a difference, too, as Becky suggests, at least my picture. Being able to turn to an image, even a crude image, mitigates the "voice from god" thing somewhat and reminds the participants who is speaking. It acts as a supporting cue in a way that we may not yet understand.

What we want, of course, is to include distance presence in as unobtrusive a fashion as possible. The sound pickup in the room, for some reason, was the best it has been, I heard everything, and maybe that's a result of turning off the video, I don't know. If so, we face yet another irritating limitation in getting to where we want to go in our panaply of distance capabilities.

My voice was dropped three times when the video was on earlier, which is really unusual. Usually the cams freeze but the voice continues. Webmeeting worked well last night in 5374, and I'm trying it again this morning in 3365, but the fulll-duplex requirement makes sound pickup quite problematic. And, as an aside to Chad, webmeeting still doesn't work with MACs, and as long as that continues, it will have limited use in our distance classes. I can use it as a supplement only, not my principal delivery system, or I end up excluding two of my students.
[Items appear in last-to-first order and may be amended at any time -- usually when I chicken out.]
May 3, 2004
5374 Interesting Mix of Activities

Conducted an interesting mix of activities in 5374 tonight (4.21.2004, distance class).

  1. Entered the MOO and took roll
  2. Began with an 8-minute FLASH file of narrated powerpoint reviewing chapter 24.
  3. Followed with an 11-minute FLASH file with voice description (showing some text) engaging issues brought up over the previous week regarding the final project assignment in 5374. Used the chat feature in the MOO as a "back-channel" for questions and comments synchronously with the FLASH presentation. Some interactivity was achieved.
  4. Moved students into webmeeting and displayed "presence" through video conferencing (although none of the students had yet hooked up webcams.... I responded to questions presented in chat). The one MAC user could still not access webmeeting.
  5. Returned to the MOO. Had students go into the ADD/EDIT PERSONAL WEB PAGES feature in the class TOPIC site and generate extended questions relating to the final project
  6. Returned to the MOO in ten minutes and had various students "push" their questions to the right pane in the EnCore MOO site. I (with other students) responded to the questions.
  7. Moved the students into conferences depending upon which type of final project they were doing (those doing type 1 went into conference 1, etc.) and let them discuss with each other various problems and solutions with others doing the same project
  8. all came together in the Main MOO conference for a ten-minute debriefing at the end.

The point of all this fits in with other entries in this series of pages. Students operating online or in a hybrid environment must be "tasked" in a continuing variety of ways to overcome the limitations of the distance situation. These "tasks" may engage teacher input, but that input should be reduced to no longer than ten minutes at a stretch, if even that. Voice-over narration of powerpoint or text pages provides some relief from the extensive text presentation of the MOO or email, but not of any length.
[Items appear in last-to-first order and may be amended at any time -- usually when I chicken out.]
April 23, 2004
What students do

There are three principal things that happen in a writing class.

  1. The teacher tells students what he or she thinks they should know and how they should do what they should be able to do.
  2. The teacher requires students to write something that displays what they should know or what they should be able to do.
  3. The third is more subtle and difficult to describe, but here I go. The student acquires the ethos of writing itself.

The first may be thought of as the input. The second as the output. The output should be able to reflect the efficacy of the input, and in fact most writing in writing classes acts as a sort of test of what the student has gained as a part of the input process. Writing, of course, should not be a test but a communication, but such is the corruption of our instructional situation.

The third can be thought of as the power that drives the input-output system. This power can be thought of as motivation, or emotional validation of the effort to listen and learn from the teacher, and the desire to produce something admirable. It may arise from (1) what I'm calling the issue of presence, or the personal authority of the teacher. This personal authority may stem from the attractiveness of the teacher ("attractiveness" in a much broader sense than usually applied) or from some personal mythology of the student regarding the inherent appeal of the writing act itself. Or it may arise from (2) the system of reward and punishment generally described as "grades," but which extend through the actual grades to parental and peer approval, hopes for future success, and a large, murky realm of "winning" as opposed to "losing."

Later I will get into the notion of classroom ethos and the necessary reconfiguration of the constituents of such ethos in the distance or hybrid class.

Usually the student has gained very little as a result of the input process. The input process, most likely some variant of the teacher talking at the student, is most often unproductive, if not absurd. Students don't listen to advice about how to write better. In fact, nobody can learn to write better by having somebody tell him or her how to write better. It's impossible, just as having somebody describe in detail how to swing a bat will make the kid hit the ball.

Writing is an adaptive skill, the sort of thing that people learn by trying and getting feedback, like playing a saxophone or skateboarding. The feedback may be in the form of somebody responding to an effort ("play those notes crisper") or simply in falling down (the way we learn to roller skate or ride a bike). But the learning is inextricably tied to the attempt, and to feedback.

What students do


Student learning, therefore, is not tied to what teachers do but what students do. Education should stop concerning itself so much with what teachers do but more with what students do, although the situation is more complex that such a simple formulation would suggest.

The role of the teacher becomes less and less "telling" students what they should know or how they should act, but more and more directing them in actions that lead to learning. The teacher should be a manager of student behavior. The problem is that such management encounters the following problems.

  1. The behavior must be "accountable" in some way. In most cases, the behavior is coerced. If left alone, most students would not "do" what the teachers wants them to do. If no accountability is built into the managerial encounter, the students will avoid the behavior.

  2. Managing behavior in a face-to-face situation, and engaging accountability, is relatively simple. Teacher talks, students still still, face forward, and apparently listen. The problem is, of course, that apparent listening is not necessarily actual listening. The accountability in the situation may therefore be false accountability. We think learning is taking place, but it is not because the students are "zoned" out. This escape from coerced behavior has been learned, and most teachers know it is going on but they prefer to draw upon some denial in order to satisfy their own need for a sense of accomplishment.

  3. Managing behavior through writing, as in online or in hybrid situations, is more difficult, because instead of simply perusing rows of apparently attentive faces, the teacher must read individual product. Yet learning behavior that is displayed through writing is necessarily attentive and productive, IF genuine accountability is assumed on the part of the student. In other words, the student must believe that the writing will be reviewed and credited in some fashion, or the written work becomes as thoughtless as the apparent attention in a classroom, what I call the "myth of seat time."

Without the "false" accountability of seat time, accountability in the hybrid or distance class manifests itself in response to the student writing, in grading. The problem is that much of the document review process has been secondary to the false accountability of seat time, the assumption that students who are facing the teacher or reading the assigned material are actually learning anything. The reading of individual student product is time-consuming and demanding. As secondary to seat time, it can be relegated to a few major writing tasks and largely handled with number grades and a few comments. The "real" learning goes on during the input process, the class presentation or assigned reading, and the grading of individual student product is simply a "test" to encourage the students to pay attention and do the reading.

But in the distance or hybrid class, the myth of seat time no longer applies. Without the accountability of taking attendance or proctoring reading quizzes and exams, the input process must blend with the output process: the student writing is not simply a measure of what has been heard or read, but must become integral to the learning itself. Writing theorists have often spoken in the past about "writing to learn," but the myths of presence and seat time have kept real writing to learn assignments from becoming central to formal instruction.

Change the assignments


The writing, then, assumes much greater importance in the distance or hybrid class. But writing assignments have been composed, as I stated above, from an assumption of the input/output process that has directed pedagogical development away from the assignments to how the "material" is to be shaped and presented, either in person or through books. The presumption has been, since the traditional classroom has centered upon seat time, that what is to be learned has needed to be shaped by the constraints of seat time: so many minutes in a class, so many class meetings in a semester, so many courses in a degree. The manner in which the teacher "presents" the "material" has dominated instructional thinking.

So if one escapes the myths of presence and seat time, how does that enable this blending of the input/output processes, or creating a genuine "writing to learn"?

Two constraints apply:
  1. The grading burden must be kept reasonable. The principle of sustainability says that any required extraordinary effort will eventually flag and the system will collapse.

  2. The assignments must not "test" input but must inherently generate the input. The student, in performance of the writing act, must learn how to write at the same time. The assignment must be geared in such a way as to require learning how to write.

Sounds impossible, doesn't it? But if we can make it work, then we not only can blend the input/output efforts, but also include the third element, the instructional ethos. In other words, the value of the writing act will be evident, even self-evident.

Here we approach non-coercive learning.
[Items appear in last-to-first order and may be amended at any time -- usually when I chicken out.]
April 18, 2004
The Constituents of Coercive Learning

We attempted non-coercive learning in the early 1970s with the notion that "learning is fun." This was clearly a bogus propaganda ploy by hopped-up learning enthusiasts flowing out of the exuberant 1960s.

In fact, learning is fun, but not institutional learning. Letting a kid play around in a back yard learning about flowers and bugs suggests that all creatures learn, and want to learn, instinctively and irresistibly. And they do. But transferring that "original learning" to a situation that reflects what might be considered "institutional learning," or higher order learning, is disingenuous. There are structured packages of information and knowledge that cannot be rooted out by sheer curiosity but must be inculcated by some disciplined process.

Rousseau-ians, the state of nature people, mistrust such "disciplined processes" as limitations on intuitively perceived productive encounters with life. Responding fully to the "Romantic" inclinations in life, they resist discipline, expecially formal, organizational discipline, in favor of a presumed universal mechanism of inherent desire. Man's role is to discover that desire, in whatever effort it arises, and respond to it. Much of this resistance probably stems from a reaction to either the constraints of organized religion or coercive political forces. Katherine Hepburn, the minister's sister in The African Queen, informs Bogart, a definite free spirit and undisciplined man who has just defended his drunkenness as "only natural," that "nature, Mr. Alnutt, is what we are put on earth to rise above."

This "disciplined process" certainly first arose from combat training at the early stages of societal development, for instance the Greeks. As civilization progressed, the need for such "disciplined" knowledge in martial training insinuated itself beyond the regimentation of military learning. Students learned about "ideas" in much they same way they learned about physical development and the martial arts, at least at first.

Martial discipline was harsh, but at a time when combat was necessary and highly valued for survival, there was attached to such discipline a powerful ethos. A city or city-state did not survive without protectors. The coercion that was applied was therefore an "informed coercion," or accepted cercion. People who submitted to such discipline were publically valued and benefited from that valuation. An interesting early representation of the "discipline versus free-spirit" divide showed itself in the difference between Sparta and Athens, and even more interestingly, between what was then the supreme land power over the surpeme sea power. Speculation about the "democratic" nature of navies versus the autocratic nature of highly disciplined troops on the march seems fruitful.

As learning moved more and more from a clearly useful role into a more abstract role over a couple of thousand years, the societally supportive ethos declined. The idea of "knowledge" moved further from a societally supportive concept into a realm of its own value. The "pedant" began to be seen as a purveyer of knowledge for no value other than the simple fact of knowing something that others didn't.

Knowing something that others don't


At an early stage of "knowledge accumulation," people needed to know what the knowledge gave them. The pythagorean theorem told them how to lay our their property. Aristotle's "rhetoric" told them how to make their legal case before their peers.

Later on, the accumulation of knowledge, and the transfer through institutional learning, got fuzzier. Even Shakespeare was saying "more matter, less art." The pedantic tendencies inherent in knowledge accumulation, even as some knowledge became more and more separated from application in any way other than as futher stones in pyramids of knowledge, grew more manifest.

Literature, for instance, which obviously began as an entertainment, gradually became a body of "truths" that increasingly was defended as indeed having a direct application in life, as informing something vague but necessary, if not behavior then the status of one's soul. Romantic literature, of course, took this vague argument one step further and declared literature to be a spiritual endeavor that established a transcendent connection to something basic and pervasive in life.

As the stuff of formal learning became more and more abstracted from a clearly understood practicality, the motivation to learn it -- except for those few who manifested a psychological attachment to the sheer process of learning -- grew less, and even societal valorization declined. Anti-intellectualism has always existed, but there can be no doubt that the role of the highly educated person gains much less respect now than even fifty or a hundred years ago. There are reasons for this, not the least is the expansion of higher education to something approaching -- in the industrial world -- universality, but to go there would be a digression from the point at hand.

Those aspects of learning, or types of learning, that clearly result in vocational advantage, can still be coerced, to some degree. Students can "see" a quid pro quo operating, albeit sometimes murkily so. I call this "informed coercion." But writing instruction, so universally described as the core to achievement in even a commercially dominated world, or perhaps especially in a commercially dominated world, still attaches itself to abstracted learning, maybe because of writing instruction's connection to English departments and literature.

Teachers struggle to indoctrinate their students about the ultimate value of writing skill, and thus provide themselves the right to an "informed coercion," but many students don't buy it. The nature of what they are asked to write about dislays a debilitating arbitrariness, even silliness, that probably arises from the English department attachment to belles lettres and the nineteenth century belletristic essay. Those graduate students or literature majors who teach writing courses see writing not as a communication skill but as psychological introspection, a manifestation of world perception that borders on personal philosophy, no doubt linked all the way back to Montaigne and the birth of the modern essay.

Most of these teachers' students, of course, being very different kinds of people from English department graduate students, have not experienced and do not perceive the appeal of the essay form as articulated introspection. They do not accept the "informed coercion" of the teacher and do what is asked of them strictly because they have to. The coercion that is applied is therefore perceived as an arbitrary assertion of authority, just one more hoop students are made to jump through, another means to a grade and somewhat brainless certification.

For this reason, when such coecion is lifted, student effort for the most part goes limp. "Why don't they write simply for the pleasure of writing?" we ask righteously. Well, because such student effort has long escaped the nature of "informed coercion" and attached itself to the corrupting influence of reward and punishment through the abstractions of the grading system.

Is non-coercive writing instruction possible?


No, not the way the reward and punishment apparatus of formal education has evolved. From a Rousseau-ian or Romantic point of view it should be possible, but the formal application of education's reward and punishment apparatus is too deeply ingrained to be rooted out and replaced without a highly impractical across-the-board long-term effort. We can't get two teachers to agree on something, much less the entire education structure.

BUT we might be able to apply what I am calling an "informed coercion," or an accepted coercion, that ties itself to the student's own self-interest.

We do this through the assignment structure.
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April 16, 2004
Non-Coercive Learning

Class today (4.15.2004) was probably 70% satisfactory. I attempted yet again to manage class without Susan. The hybrid situation will never be tested adequately as long as there is an authoritative teacher in the room, no matter how much "content" is delivered online. The onsite teacher will present the authority that makes the situation work, not the technologically delivered presence.

It's like the wimp (technology delivery) standing in front of the Power (the onsite teacher). The wimp may seem to be handling things, but the Power is really keeping the students on task.

Edgar said as much in a short debriefing afterward. In the last 20 minutes of the workshop, most of my students were simply cruising online. I could tell this when I released them and almost the entire class rose immediately and left.

As I said in my previous text in this series ("Limitations of Distance Presentation"), far too much of institutional learning has grown dependent on power, on coercion, on the authority of instructor presence and grades. I believe as the coda of my intellectual life that people want to learn and we steal that away from them at an early age through the institutional process of instruction. We frame learning as a burdonsome task, a complicated series of tasks, rather than as a personal benefit or personal enjoyment.

I have probably said before in this series of writing that I believed early on and presented early on regarding a "non-coercive learning." We should not, as a general principle, be depending on a classroom "sergeant-at-arms" to make students learn, as if we were managing a salt mine. But the way the pedagogical process has evolved (and I've done considerable study in this area), the coercion of youth has become a sine qua non. If you don't make them do it, the principle goes, then they won't do it.

The Hybrid Class Presents an Alternative


The hybrid class depends upon the principle that instructional content can be delivered in such a way that students will learn without the "sergeant-at-arms" in the room. In doing so, it flies in the face of presumptions about control and coercion.

Seen this way, the "hybrid class" is not simply a technological fix, a transcending of distance problems, but a step forward in de-centering the classroom.

Solving the Problem


Seymour Papert has said you cannot put any process on the computer without completely rethinking the process. This is what happens when you create the distance class and the hybrid class. The distinction with the hybrid class is that the class expects the sort of in-class coercive control that the distance class does not. As Edgar pointed out in our debriefing, the onsite class expects a certain dynamic, and I believe that dynamic is tied up in coercion and control.

Obviously this should not be taken as a criticism of any classroom teachers. This "coercion and control" that I'm talking about is intuitive in the classroom instructional act. This is simply what happens when an older person stands up among a bunch of sitting people and asserts control. It is not at all a bad thing. But it is something that the hybrid class does not have.

Does the hybrid class compensate with other authority measures? Edgar suggested as much when he said that the students ignored him, realizing he was simply a functionary and not a teacher. Give him the authority to give a daily grade and he would probably re-assert the instructor's authority in the room, albeit as a surrogate. But that would prove nothing, except that a true hybrid model wouldn't work.

We have to develop a workshop assignment structure that will not depend upon an authority in the room to make it work. A non-coercive assigment structure.

Probably impossible at this stage, but something to work toward. We need a "mediating" non-coercive assignment structure, something that will wean students from the abject need to follow assignment orders mindlessly but only when somebody is standing over them with a whip. There is simply something wrong when students do what they're supposed to do when Dr. Lang is in the room and don't do what they're supposed to when Dr. Lang is not in the room and I am talking to them over the speakers. The assignment value should be present and understandable, and yet it isn't.

Conclusion


You may think the question silly, but it is not. As our society moves more and more to a self-paced and just-in-time instruction, the winners in delivering instruction will have encountered and benefited from what we are struggling with right now in 3365. The great majority of formal learning in America in just a few years will be by Internet, not by classroom, and in places in-between, and the value of understanding how it all works together will be clear.

We must understand more about how to deliver learning through tasking and not by physical oversight. And that tasking needs to tap more directly into people's interest than by simply being an application of authority. When people do things only because they are told to do them, and somebody is standing right there to make sure they do it, they do not learn.
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April 8, 2004
Limitations of Distance Presentation

Today (4/8/2004) I continued a two-class experiment of my trying to handle the room by myself at a distance (with Edgar, of course). When Susan brings her class in, the dynamic is considerably different from when I try to manage the presentation and tasking myself; I assumed I was in for a bit of a tough time, but we have to know the parameters of engagement.

Conclusion


I think Susan's presence in the room has given me a false sense that the hybrid process was more effective than it was. She was providing the instructor presence and possible sanctions that kept the room fairly on its toes. Also, the larger group tended to keep people focused on the presentations, whether "live" or recorded. In a large room with sixteen people and a "talking head," the focus (I guess that's the right word) is lacking. I talk a lot about the "myth of presence," but in this version of a hybrid situation (students gathered in a room but teacher distant), "presence" does provide focus and some motivation.

I don't think this is a "necessary" result. The students are, as usual, as much captives of their experience and expectations as any of us and are completely dependent, I think, on the sort of gentle coercion provided by an onsite overseer. Once they realized that Edgar was not going to be that overseer (which he is not and should not be) and that Susan was not present, and once the newness of the hybrid situation wore off, then motivation for most of them trailed off. In the MOO discussion they talked about lack of eye contact and the inability to ask questions (although they could through the MOO), but I think the subtext was the lack of direct authority. They've been conditioned -- as we've noted in so many other instructional contexts -- to respond only when there would be a specific consequence if they didn't. And I have some surprisingly honest quotes in the MOO that say just that. When I asked them to do the exercise and turn it in to TOPIC, they jumped to once again, for the accountability in that context was familiar.

The problem to be solved lies not in the lack of instructor presence in the hybrid instructional situation but in the "expectations of control" that the students bring into the room. Duh. Once they realized that I was asking them questions about them as opposed to questions about Chapter 13, they opened up and had no trouble admitting that all of it (not just my class, but my class too) was pretty boring and uninvolving.

We have to subvert this "expectation of control" in some tricky way, to engage the students beyond the need to be coerced but without pandering and lessening any rigor. This is an old theme with what used to be called "self-paced learning." We're just encountering it in a new guise. I think it is going to involve major reconceptualization of what the "classroom" is and is supposed to do. I'm working on it.
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April 1, 2004
Students writing HTML for MOO presentations

This text describes the use of TOPIC HTML developer to support student MOO presentations.

An important part of technical communication classes is the student oral presentation, but obviously distance classes must adapt student presentations to its modes of interaction. One way of doing this is have students present a paper or annotated bibliography through the MOO. MOO “slides,” however, can be limited in how information is presented and the length of text, and they require back-scrolling of the chat window to review. A better way is to “push” web pages through EnCore’s right pane, but for this the student must have the ability to create web pages and some ability to design them so that the information is presented in an accessible fashion.

In my 5374 (Technical Editing, spring 2004) my students are conducting presentations through the MOO. When I first suggested that pushing HTML pages is a superior way of presenting information, at least half the students in the class said that they either had no way to post pages to the web or the ability to write HTML.

A few years ago, for another class, I programmed a utility that was linked though a menu item in TOPIC that allowed students to write HTML in a web form, save it to the SQL database as a text file, and then call it up through an .asp page reading the applicable SQL table. Although the text existed in SQL tables, the pages could be called through a browser in the usual WWW fashion. This utility, in other words, obviated the need to (1) have web space somewhere, (2) be familiar with an authoring tool like FrontPage, or (3) know how to FTP. Further, the pages thus created are linked to another menu item in TOPIC, allowing for easy reading and archiving for other students and the instructor.

Even through 5374 is not a web development class, creating simple web pages not only supported MOO presentations but allowed me to include simple exercises relating to Chapter 22 in Carolyn Rude’s book describing web design. By pushing the information through web pages in the right pane of EnCore, the chat area is kept free for second-channel communication, usually questions or reactions to what the presenter is displaying. The ability to push pages keeps the page completely displayed while the chat stream continues to scroll and allows the presenter to control what is visible and when.

As usually happens, those students who were quite negative about being required to write simple HTML become the most excited when they actually did it. The four presentations last night were varied in format (one person did a narrated powerpoint, the others a series of web pages of quite different design), and the simultaneous discussion in chat was as vigorous as any MOO session I’ve experienced.

I myself have overcome my initial reservations about using the MOO for student presentations. I think, in some ways -- especially as a participatory medium -- it is superior to oral presentations when handled in the manner I describe above.
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March 31, 2004
Using a wireless microphone for Webmeeting

This page describes a test using a wireless microphone to create better voice pickup for webmeeting.

The problem

A problem with Webmeeting is that if the sound card in the computer is full-duplex, then the program runs in full-duplex automatically with no configuration option to turn it off.

What that means is that interlocutors in voice chat speak to each other back and forth without having to click a talk button. The problem with this is that full-duplex requires a voice-actuation mechanism that clicks on automatically when somebody starts talking. If that person has a soft voice or is standing some distance from the microphone, the voice-actuation mechanism is often late initiating. Often a person's utterance is picked up after two or three words, and this may occur at every pause, such as between sentences.

The problem happens less frequently when the talker is sitting immediately in front of the webcam (which is the microphone), but for the purposes of my onsite-distance hybrid course, I need to hear people talking in the room at some distance from the webcam (ten or fifteen feet). The microphone will pick up what almost anybody says in the classroom, but only after missing several words due to the voice-actuation mechanism.

Testing a wireless microphone

One way around this problem, Rich surmised, would be to use a wireless microphone that the teacher in the room, at least, or any students presenting oral reports, would wear. Rich knows some people over at the TLTC who let him (exclusively) check out a wireless mike, and last night (Tuesday, March 30, 2004), he and I tested out the wireless microphone.

It worked well, in a way. Apparently on the machine that was acting as host of the Webmeeting session, when we plugged in the receiver, the wireless mike overrode the webcam microphone and produced an even flow of sound that triggered the voice-actuation without interruption.

The problem was we couldn't duplicate this action on the other computers, and when we pulled out the receiver from the back of the computer, the voice pick-up did not default back to the webcam. So this technique is fragile and possibly not dependable enough to use for the hybrid classroom purposes we want it for.

Nevertheless, I think the department should invest in a wireless mike (good ones cost about $400) for further investigation. Like all things computer, it takes a lot of tinkering to make something work reliably, especially for purposes other than what the software and equipment was specifically designed for, but we can usually find an accomodating application.
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March 23, 2004
Using Camtasia for Application Instruction

This records an experience using, for me, a new web-based capability.

Camtasia provides an effective way to show users how to manage various application features. The principal need for such user instruction, in a web-supported course, is through the web. Camtasia AVI files are too big for the web and require the download of a Camtasia player on the client computer, but saving the Camtasia AVI as a Flash movie saves a lot of file space and uses a third-party player that most browsers employ.

Today I developed two Flash (SWF) files that play on browsers in order to support 3365's need to get students using sophisticated capabilities in MS Word.

I of course make no claim that this is any sort of technological breakthrough, but I include this experience as part of an accumulating set of experiences with our available technology. My long-held belief is that real innovation in computer-based instruction will not come from one or two complex technologies managed by highly skilled experts but from a pedagogically informed combination of rather simple and inexpensive technologies fairly easily managed.

These examples are crudely produced but should demonstrate what I'm talking about. The point again is not that I can do this with Camtasia, but that it can be done simply and at little digital and production cost with our materials at hand, and can contribute to many other instructional elements.

Creating Tables in MS Word

Copying Pictures into MS Word
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March 13, 2004
Video and powerpoint through IE

The best way to move a powerpoint through a browser is with Camtasia, but Camtasia will not allow integrated video files (for instance, to allow a talking head introduction).

One way to allow a WMV movie made with powerpoint slides included is to create a camtasia AVI file of the powerpoint segment that you want to show and then import it into Windows MovieMaker. Record a video from webcam, insert it into the storyboard, insert the camtasia AVI, and then save the whole thing into a 150 kbps WMV.

You then run the WMV through an ASP file using the MS Include SRC. The best size seems to be 300 x 390 for the 150 kbps and powerpoint slides.

The slide come out not nearly as good as the pure Camtasia AVI, but you can storyboard them with transitions and such, and they are viewable. I don't know how they look up on a projected image, but I'll have to test that out. The sound comes across really well, however.
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March 11, 2004
Webmeeting: Composition Staff Meeting

Reported by Fred Kemp, 3/11/2004

The Composition Staff met on Webmeeting on 3/11/2004 at 8:30 AM, Central Time.

Description

The Composition Staff held what I think is the first administrative meeting in the department using the audio-video utility Webmeeting (Akiva). Participants included the following:

Technology Effectiveness

The video worked fine. At one point we had six windows open (I was for a brief time on two panes as I used both a desktop and a laptop to test hosting and nonhosting interaction). The pictures were reasonably sharp and responsive. I counted frozen images on my computer at four for the hour, each lasting no more than 10-15 seconds. These hangups could be the result of either web traffic or the amount of RAM my computer was using (I was pushing various loads at different times).

Kicked off: Participants were booted about 38 minutes into the activity, but that was my fault. I started the meeting record feature, and evidently the record feature must be started before video/audio is engaged or participants are booted. (I actually knew this but had forgotten it.) All participants took the event in stride and were back into the video/audio within two or three minutes.

The sound: the sound occasionally broke up, but since this wasn't a usability testing arrangement, we weren't individually recording these incidences. So it is difficult to tell if the sound break-up occured across the system or for individual users, due perhaps to RAM use, type of equipment, age of equipment, and so forth. I originally was intending to ask users to keep a log, but I was simply grateful that this group of busy professionals was willing to engage in this slightly wild activity, and decided not to push the usability issues. Perhaps later, as we become more familiar with it all.

The interaction: Participant interaction I judged as poor (expectedly so), largely because of the unfamiliarity of the process and the awkwardness of the hosting mechanism, although the spirits of the users were optimistic and tolerant. As host, I must keep all the user microphones off except for one, or else the sound comes through the user's speaker and enters the user's microphone, creating a disturbing feedback effect. I was wearing headphones so I could leave my mike on all the time. It may be that headphones will help interaction in the future, but it is disconcerting to be talking and hear your voice come back in your ear about two seconds later, as years of radio call-in hosts have admonished as they tell their callers to "turn off the radio."

Users can click on a "flag" icon to indicate they want to speak, and our users did that. The awkwardness lies in the host's need to click OFF one mike and click ON another mike, in that order, or get the squeal. Also, because of the 2-3 second delay, I suspect that as I waited for one speaker to stop before closing that mike and opening another, other users were experiencing more down time than I was.

As a result, the host is constantly working the microphone system, which makes it difficult to contribute to the meeting. I felt that at least seven or eight times I started to say something and then got engaged in clicking on and off microphones and lost my train of thought. It may be an advantage to let someone more peripheral to the discussion to host the meeting.

Still a powerful medium: All this said, it was a powerful way to connect people over distance. Obviously, the strength would have been more evident if all the participants had been scattered in different locales, instead of just me. No doubt people were thinking "jeeze, all these people (except fred) could just get together in a room somewhere."

Yes, but academia is replete with people who don't try the interesting because the usual is so much easier, and as a result there's little advance beyond the well defined (and dug-in) borders of activity. The administrative product of today's meeting was obviously less than if it had been a face-to-face meeting, but all engaged with a good spirit and a willingness to try, and we learned some important things.

Conclusion

Using this process for general staff meetings of this sort is probably impractical. The current practice of bringing in fredcam and letting me engage through Yahoo! Messenger (which seems to have a better sound pick-up than webmeeting) should suffice for most staff meetings.
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March 12, 2004
3365 Meeting 3/9/2004

Just a brief note to indicate status with the hybrid 3365 Susan and I are teaching (part onsite, part projected over distance). I think most of the classes are going as well as could be expected, considering the uniqueness of the effort.

Today went well and is typical of what I think will be the workshopping potential of this process (as opposed to the presentational aspect, which is easy to do but simply a talking head). We presented a brief (12 minute) recorded powerpoint (talking head) for chapter review, and then my students broke into pairs, entered the MOO, and performed a collaborative exercise opening up a memo that demonstrated stylistic problems as defined in the chapter. The students entered questions and problems through the MOO and I responded in webmeeting as broadcast audio/video, which I think is a fairly smooth way of generating interaction with and guidance from a distance instructor even as the students are engaged in face-to-face peer interaction. The students concluded with documents that each pair uploaded to TOPIC and several insertions into a MOO session (being recorded) of what each pair considered the most egregious stylistic infelicity (speaking of pretentious diction). We plan to use some of this material in a follow-up class on Thursday.

It wasn't a perfect class, but the mix of activities blended well (recorded audio/video powerpoint, live broadcast audio/video, MOO interaction, face-to-face group work). I think it indicates the fluidity that is possible with a blend of channels as we gain experience.
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July 24, 2004
Using Webmeeting, Problems

Webmeeting has the great advantage over WebX of price: as long as high quality conferencing software is so expensive, it will be hard for colleges and universities to experiment with it in the 'real life' circumstances that establish viability with administrators.

The problem with the cheaper price is, of course, possibly abbreviated capability. I'm finding that there are two major inhibitions to using Webmeeting: MACs, and dial-up connections. Business users wouldn't encounter these problems, not having to conform to the bottom-line needs of their users. But we have to.

MACs don't work at all on Webmeeting, and dial-up users have problems with bandwidth in some ways. Although the optimum lecture configuration would have the teacher's voice, video, and "viewport" (a chunk of screen pushed to the users) available, what I've found is that all three makes too much of a demand on my dial-up users. They report that as soon as I activate one function (viewport, for instance), another (audio, for instance) goes dormant. But when I close video and viewport, they report that audio becomes "clearer" and more usable. So obviously something is clogging the pipe in deleterious ways.

But if one wants to do a voice lecture, which is what I call pushing my voice to the students along with a powerpoint stack, then one has to cut and paste technologies. This is the way I do it.

I create the powerpoint stack and upload it to the TTOPIC web project. I publish the link to the stack ahead of time to my students on the main TOPIC page. They click on the link and download the powerpoint slides. Depending on their browser and configuration, they either see the slideshow in a browser or initiate the PowerPoint program and see the actual working file in a separate process. Either way, they have the slides available.

Then I push voice only through webmeeting. I provide cues in my voice lecture that signal slide changes.

As I've said before, powerpoint lectures are hardly the most efficacious instructional dynamic, but the attempt to make distance instruction work requires a thorough examination of all modes of interaction, and this "upload powerpoint -- push voice" seems a good way, for right now, to manage complicated material.