Getting What You Pay For

After a month-plus hiatus, I'm back on the blogging wagon.   Not that school hasn't been constantly on my mind, between the Faculty Retreat in early September, the 4 days of Professional Development two weeks ago, and the ever-crazy first week of Fall Quarter just past.

I wanted to ease back into my writing by reflecting on an NPR story that I heard on my way to Professional Development Day #1: "Student Loan Defaults Rise, Especially At For-Profits." 

It makes sense that the default rate on repaying loans is soaring, along with all the other economic blowout we see around us.  The facts covered in the story about the exponential rate of default among for-profit students, though, surprised me.  Having four years working at one of those for-profits under my belt, you think I'd know...but really, the advising and financial aid side of things was so far removed from my experience teaching there, I had no idea what tuition even cost.  As a matter of fact, I still don't, now that I'm solely employed for the state community college.

Lots of mitigating factors explain why the for-profits are creating these numbers, and I'm not out to defame those institutions here.  (I'll save that for other posts....)  Instead, this story is a helpful reminder to me that I shouldn't let my head get stuck in the sand about what my students are paying, for the privilege of letting me have my dream job.  We instructors probably should be aware of what, exactly, college costs, and how the costs may vary among our student populations.  (One factoid from Prof. Development days: international students pay 2-3 times what in-state students pay, and they don't have the typical financial aid structures available to help out, either.) 

I'm not advocating for the student-as-consumer model, by any means.  I often consider the time costs of my classes on my students--how long certain projects should take, and striking the right balance each week to keep things on target.  I tend not to think about the monetary costs as much, especially since I don't choose the textbooks that are required for the courses.   Now's a good time to for me to start.

One final note from the NPR story: "'Whereas only about 13 percent of students at community colleges are even taking out student loans, about 97 percent of students at for-profit two-year colleges are taking out federal student loans.'"  Makes me even more amazed at what my students now must sacrifice to be in the classroom (virtual or physical) with me!

Wordle, Take 2

I discovered Wordle at Educause last fall, where it was demonstrated in a session that covered a smattering of helpful websites all at one time. I was immediately fascinated by it, and after playing with it on my own for a while, decided to throw it in my English 101 courses as a self-evaluation tool.

Wordle generates "word clouds" based on text you feed it, and the words appear larger the more frequently they show up in the text. (By default, it ignores "common" words--otherwise it would just be a giant "AND" and "THE" and that's about all.) In English 101, I ask students to run their final drafts of Essay 1 through it. The essays are Evaluation essays, where they study one of a list of a websites I give them and analyze how well that given site meets the needs of its intended audience.


Here's one I found particularly charming from my summer section:

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/2215844/Evaluation_Essay

I ask students to share their word clouds with one another in a discussion, and then offer commentary on what they see. In a discussion post, Saylor shared her thoughts on the image she created:


"I really like my word cloud. It looks like a brain to me. The funniest part of that is that it looks like my brain felt while writing this essay. It is very colorful and clustered. The words seem almost disconnected from each other. Yet they all come together to make up a description of this one, very diverse website. I love that news is the largest word and that the smallest words are all adjectives that were used to describe the site. I think it is a very fair depiction of my writing style."


I just love the thought of this being an x-ray scan, so to speak, of the writing brain!


This activity tends to get a lot of positive response from my students, regardless of whether they're happy with what the word cloud shows them. It's a fun break for all of us, because who doesn't welcome an online version of coloring after just completely stressing over drafting (and in my case, grading)?


I've since learned of a website that actually does build clouds in specific shapes...Tagxedo. That might be overly deterministic for my purposes in English 101, so I'll stick with Wordle there. I'm ready to play with the shapes for my own blog and website, though--you are warned.


And, just for giggles, here's a Wordle reflecting all of the posted content of my blog thus far. I'm pleased to see that "students" gets primary billing, since that's what this whole venture is all about.

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/2276121/TLP_v._2

Playing with Librarians

Library on Fotopedia

On Wednesday and Thursday, I attended the Librarian as Instructional Leader Grant Workshop on the campus of Seattle Central Community College.  I was invited by awesome Tacoma Community College librarian Rachel Goon, whom I've been working with in some small ways about how we can better incorporate the library into fully-online classes at TCC.  She viewed this workshop as a potential way to explore those ideas further.  Though the conference was for Washington community college librarians, particularly, each library was encouraged to invite discipline faculty along.

Rachel and I definitely got the chance to brainstorm together about ways to focus on TCC specifically, but it was also eye-opening to me just to see more about how librarians work and think, behind the curtain.  I've always been of the impression that librarians are secret magic wizards, and these two days further solidified those beliefs.

To recap, here are some things I think it's helpful for faculty members to be aware of...

• librarians have to deal with almost every assignment we create.  Of course I knew this on a cognitive level, but hadn't really considered this in a practical way.  They have to be able to figure out how to approach every assignment in order to guide students on how to complete it.   This means they know what good assignments look like, and what bad ones do, too.  Having a librarian on hand to run assignment ideas by BEFORE distributing an assignment to students would be a very, very practical matter. 
• librarians have a lot of ways to help students, even from a distance.  I've only recently become aware of "pathfinder" help guides that librarians routinely create, as a guide for researching for a specific discipline, topic, or class.  These are published online, so students can access them anytime it seems appropriate, no matter where the physical library is in relation to them.  I get the impression that at TCC, at least, librarians are happy to create specific guides upon instructor request.  How useful this would have been to know as an adjunct, as a way to harness the librarians' expertise in a meaningful way exactly when students need it.
• librarians love playing with technology to reinforce learning.  We saw demonstrations of flip camera presentations, Jing videos, Delicious implementation for academic databases, Prezi shows, and wikis.  This particular workshop repeatedly asked the question about whether standard practices of libraries and librarians encouraged "deep learning" on the part of the students they served.  In many cases, the traditional way of doing things no longer seems to provide the best outcome, since publishing information has become so wide-spread and freely available.  Showing students how to find information is no longer a problem.  How to find the BEST information is.  Technology can answer some of those challenges. 

Rachel and I will continue mulling over the possibilities that this workshop raised, and hopefully get the chance to implement some new strategies soon.  In another life, I will come back as a librarian; in the meantime, I'll continue to deeply appreciate the ones around me.

Sloan-C & Social Media

Wow, a whole month away from posting.  Finals week kicked my butt, and then I found it hard to climb back on the wagon again.  It's a shame, because I really love having this outlet for examining my teaching practices in the light of day.


So, this will be a fairly quick run to get my feet wet again.  Over the week break between Spring and Summer quarters, I took a 10-day online class through the Sloan-C Consortium.  This was the first time I've ever been a student in an online class, amazingly enough.  It was worth the whole experience just to find myself facing a new platform I was unfamiliar with (Moodle) and trying to manage navigation features, find what work I was supposed to complete and by when, and see another instructor's methodology for building meaningful discussion platforms.


The course: "Supporting and Engaging Students through Social Media."  Pretty appropriate for a blogging instructor, right?  I figured it would let me talk about Facebook, if nothing else.  The range of experience with social media in others taking the class was insightful--lots of newbies, lots of hard-core online geeks, and a few like me who fell somewhere in between.  Twitter seems ubiquitous...maybe this pushed me one step closer to joining it.  Maybe.


Here's one pretty image that I'll refer back to for personal use.  Nice graphic categorization of tools available:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jess3saves/3509300772/


I think only one or two other comp instructors were in the course.  Most others were instructors in other fields, or department managers or IT folks.  Some of the ideas shared were not very applicable to my own needs (though maybe will be worth passing along to others at TCC if the situation comes up).  I built a project submission around furthering my online group activity and taking it one step further using a wiki at WikiSpaces, which I'll continue to play with the rest of the summer.


In all honesty, I'll admit that the content of the class was fairly light (it was only a 10-dayer, after all).  I found it to be one of those get-out-what-you-put-in situations, and so I got what I needed.  It's awesome that the state pays for us to sit in on these seminars, and I'm sure I'll complete another in the near future...though definitely NOT during finals week or off week again.

Facebook Groups, what a disappointment

It's about time I owned up to something that hasn't worked in my classes.  A couple of weeks ago participation in my hybrid English 102 section started flagging, and so we spent some time in class discussing ways that we might re-energize ourselves.  One idea that came out of it was the creation of a Facebook Group page dedicated to the course. We're all addicted to Facebook, so I thought, why not?


That weekend I created a Group page, my first-ever experience in doing so.  It wasn't complicated: I just added a photo, built a couple of initial posts, and then sent out invitations to my students using their TCC email addresses.  I set the group as "private by invitation only" so the world didn't have to spy on us.


My goals were to have a forum outside of Angel that members of the class could interact, ask me questions, and be reminded (okay, nagged) towards completing upcoming assignments.  I didn't want to make anything available in Facebook that wasn't also available in Angel.  In other words, I didn't want to require anyone to participate in the Facebook experiment.


Hilarity ensued.  I immediately had two members of the class submit a request to join.  By the end of the weekend, another member of the class had somehow added himself to the group without my allowing it.  And I received several more emails saying folks were trying to join, but didn't know how to request a membership.


In class the next week, we happened to be in the computer lab for other reasons, so I spent a few minutes trying to figure it all out together.  It was true--some users simply didn't have the option on the group page, if they found it, to request a membership.  (The link that was included in the email invitations I sent everyone simply sent them to Facebook's home page, not the group page.)  Others couldn't find the group page at all, even using the exact wording I had created it under.  The ones who had successfully joined then didn't see the group status updates in their live feed, nor could they go back to the group page.  It was just gone.


I can't find a lot of other specific posts out in the world about how Facebook group pages are working for other groups, though I do see a lot of generalized angst and frustration that indicate our experience is not isolated.  Any feedback from others attempting to use the groups?


In the meantime, I'm taking another tack, and have just created a Page for "Alexis the TCC English Teacher."  You all are welcome to become fans!  This option may not allow for as much single-class interaction as I was hoping for, but at this point, if people can simply see the updates in their feeds, I'll be content.

UDL & Google Docs

Universal Design for Learning has been on my mind a lot these days.  Of course, I'm participating in a cohort of UDL experimenters this week, led by the fearless Candyce Rennegarbe, and it helped that I joined a panel discussion at the conference last week on the same subject.  (Last-minute stand in for an ill colleague.  That was ideal...didn't have time to worry about it!)

Universal Design is literally changing the way I look at the world.  Of course, it started as a general design concept: make the world more accessible for people who need special accommodations, and everyone benefits.  Classic examples include curb cuts in sidewalks and automatic door openers.  Who hasn't bumped one of those with a hip when her hands were too full to grasp the doorknob?

UDL adds the same components to course design, my new favorite thing.  Make it easier for those with difficulties to learn, and suddenly it's easier for everyone to learn.  As the great UDL website CAST.org puts it, "UDL helps identify and remove barriers from teaching methods and curriculum materials...."  It's that "remove barriers" portion that's particularly intriguing to me recently.


Ever since I first started teaching online, one of the significant problems I've faced with a small handful of students in every class is document file compatibility.  The school I was working for at the time required all students to buy Microsoft Word and use it; there were invariably those who were trying to avoid shelling out the major dough for that by using the programs that came with their computer.  It's hard to fault a college student for not having a lot of spare change lying around.


Having one standard format has grown more important to me, the more I swap files back and forth with students.  The community colleges have no Word-ownership requirement, but the net effect is still the same.  If a student sends me a Works file, I can't open it.  Likewise with some of Mac's cooler processing software, like Pages.


It goes the other way, too.  Though I know there are a lot of conversion programs out there, I always feel guilty requiring people to take an extra step (or several) in viewing documents I've posted in online classrooms.


My default way of skirting that recently has been simply to remove the document element, and post content directly into Angel, TCC's platform.  This works fine for text.   Some content simply needs to be in Powerpoint, though, and then I'm back to square one.


Many of you are already screaming the answer at me, I know.  But I've finally stumbled upon it myself, and it works beautifully: Google Documents. 

With Google Docs, everything's stored "in the cloud," and accessible from any computer.  Files can be published to be shared openly.  I'm in the process now of converting all of my class presentations to be available in both formats: Powerpoint and Google Docs' Presentation tool.  That way people can download it if they want, or view it online anytime.  

One huge barrier removed.  My next phase of implementation will be to convince as many of my students to use it as I can.  I've already laid the groundwork in English 101, encouraging my group projects to be submitted that way.  Yay for easy, simple interactivity, especially ones that don't take up tons of space on my harddrive. 

  (screenshot from my current Angel English 102 classroom)

Pacific Northwest Assessment, Teaching & Learning Conference

Returned Friday afternoon from three days in Vancouver, WA, sharing space and thoughts with community and technical college professionals from all over Washington and Oregon.  Had many, many, MANY new ideas, which I'm going to continue to mull over here in the coming days.  But to start, a fun one...thanks, Monica, for documenting our wonderful Thai dinner Thursday night!

Multimodal Me

As part of a discussion on learning styles I participated in today, I took the VARK assessment of my own learning styles.  I've always considered myself a very visual person: I like to make things look pretty, I admire the pretty works of others, and of course I spend a lot of time reading.

The test measures four aspects: Visual, Auditory, Reading/Writing, and Kinesthetic.  (Hence the scary acronym.)  One thing I appreciated about the test was that I was able to check more than one response to the questions posed, which is truly a liberating feeling on a multiple-choice test.

I was surprised by a couple of things.  One was how high my kinesthetic score was--it lagged behind the top (Reading/Writing) by only one point.  Now I flash back to how many times I've "learned by doing," especially with practical skills like knitting or cooking, and that makes sense to me.

The other surprise was just how clustered my scores were.  Auditory was lowest, no big surprise.  But it wasn't too far off from the others, and the other three were all within one point of one another.  The lovely answer that the website spit out for me was not that I fit into any one neat category, but rather I'm "multimodal."  

So, apparently, are most people: 60% of the population, according to the fact sheet of helpful explanation linked above.  Also, "One interesting piece of information that people with multimodal preferences have told us is that it is necessary for them to use more than one strategy for learning and communicating. They feel insecure with only one. Alternatively those with a single preference often 'get it' by using the set of strategies that align with their single preference."

Absolutely!  I definitely am an over-compensator when it comes to explaining things to others, or making information available.  This is very likely a strength to have as a teacher, but it's still nice to have a language to explain why I teach the way I do (other than just "wacky").

Illustration

Toy #1, subject of much discussion in FLC that I will continue to mull over and write more on soon: www.wordle.net


I'd like to keep posting Wordles of this blog, to see how if themes begin to emerge as it grows.  Here's version 1.

Is this thing on?

One factor that makes my awesome job awesome is the Faculty Learning Community that I've been participating in since Winter Quarter, 2010. This fabulous group of 12 people from various levels, departments, and perspectives on teaching & learning has been coming together every two weeks on Friday evenings at a local cafe. Who ever heard of such a large group voluntarily getting together late on Fridays? That itself says a lot about the group and its dynamics and dedication. We all wrangle with technology in the classroom, and what the appropriate levels are to optimize engagement while still getting serious work done--all with copious amounts of coffee, tea, fresh foods and treats.


Last night was my turn to facilitate the discussion, so I brought in a bunch of web tools and widgets I've been using over the past year, some with smashing success and others that I'm not quite happy with yet. I was encouraged by the rest of the group to broadcast these experiments. Yup, they told me to start a blog. And here I am.


Jo's got outcomes hammered into my brain, so I have to consider what my goals for myself and my writing here are. In no particular order of importance, I'd like to

• profile websites, widgets, and gizmos that catch my eye
• examine potential or real applications in the classroom
• share what others have been doing with similar technology
• allow lots of room for tangents

I also know that I work better with deadlines, so I'm going to try to make a schedule and stick to it. I'll aim for one post a week, and we'll see how it goes. I appreciate nudges if I fall off track.