Embracing the Hybrid Future of Education

The classroom is changing. Technology is transforming education, blending the old with the new.

The Old

Traditional classrooms have a charm and nostalgia. The social interaction, the structure (physical rows of desks but also the schedule of activities and teacher rules), the chalkboard, that cleaning solution smell. But they also have limitations.

The New

Digital tools—online platforms, virtual classrooms—are breaking barriers. They offer flexibility, accessibility, and personalized learning. They don't provide visceral connections or common classmate experiences.

The Integration

The challenge is combining these effectively. Here’s how:

1. Blended Learning: Mix in-person with online. The best of both worlds.
2. Interactive Platforms: Foster engagement and collaboration beyond the classroom.
3. Personalized Learning: Tailor education to individual needs using adaptive technology.

The Mindset

Change can be daunting, but it’s essential. Educators must be learners too, embracing technology to enhance the human elements of teaching.

The future of education is hybrid. It’s about enhancing the learning experience, making it more engaging, accessible, and effective. Let’s embrace it.

MuseScore

Several years ago I was making a simple arrangement of a song, most of which was done using copy/paste and manually drawing things onto a photocopy of an existing piece of music. I found a free, open source software package called MuseScore, which was kind of difficult to get through the learning curve but seemed like a great tool in spite of my awkwardness with it. Over the years they have come out with several new versions of the software, and I have practiced with it quite a bit to where I'm much more efficient with it.

In addition to the software for writing and transposing music, it has a community which lets people share arrangements they have created with others. As the platform and community has gotten bigger, it has started gaining the attention of the music industry, and they have had to start charging to gain access to download the arrangements other users have made in order to have money to pay licensing fees to the original artists for making arrangements of their works. Some are upset with the system changing to charge for what used to be free. But the best part about it is still free - the software itself.

I think a lot of people were just using the community to download free sheet music, but taking it to the next level, using the software to create your own arrangements is the best part, because you learn to create something for yourself. I have learned a lot about music theory and about the instruments I have been arranging for by doing it myself.

Thanks MuseScore!

Small World

It's a small world. We've talked for decades now about how the world is becoming more and more flat. It's easier than it's ever been to communicate around the world. We're often more likely to be talking to someone in a different location than we are to be talking with the people in the same room as us.

Yet at the same time, there's always a little bit of a disconnect. There are always shibboleths that let us differentiate who really belongs and who doesn't. Who is the outsider vs. the insider? What are the things that we misread or mishear or otherwise misinterpret?

I was looking up information about the calories in some of McDonald's food on their website, and I saw the following:

I was totally surprised, thinking maybe McDonald's had expanded from the Travis Scott and J Balvin celebrity meals, and that they had gone out and set up a deal with Disney.

When I clicked on the large option and saw this, I realized my mistake, knowing there's not such a thing as Large World:

I was reading it as "Small World" "Famous Fries" when it should have been "Small" "World-Famous Fries". This wasn't someone trying to be tricky. It was just my mind playing tricks on me. It reminded me of an ad I heard on the radio not long ago for some event at the Utah State Fair Park. The funny thing was how the announcer strung the words together. Nothing would have sounded off to anyone unless you are local to Utah. I don't know how no one local caught it before the ad aired. Maybe they did, but it was too late.

The professional voice-over person lilted the words ever so differently than we normally do, calling it the "Utah" "State-Fair" "Park". Everyone has heard of a state fair. It makes sense that Utah would have a Utah State Fair, and we do. But it isn't the state-fair park. For whatever reason, it is the "Utah State" "Fair-Park". That is, the way we pronounce it, it doesn't emphasize that it's the park where the state fair is held (even though it is) but rather it's the fair-park for the state of Utah. Read that outloud a few times, switching between connecting the words State and Fair and then connecting the words Fair and Park. Utah State-Fair Park. Utah State Fair-Park. Say it enough times, and it sounds completely different and awkward, like you can tell the artist reading the script is definitely not from here.

Does it matter that they aren't from here? Does it matter if we can tell? There's always a way to tell, but I think it comes down to what we do with that information. Do we take the presence of an outsider as a blessing? Are we using diversity to learn and make ourselves stronger? Are we building on different experiences and making everyone feel welcome? Or are we xenophobic? Are we using the differences as a way to divide us and keep people out? Are we using dog whistles to secretly signal our intentions to our friends while keeping our enemies in the dark?

I hope we're making friends rather than enemies.

It is a small world, after all.

Conscious Capitalism

Why capitalism needs to evolve:

Capitalism has improved income, quality of life, literacy, and lifespan, but most people don't trust businesses. The invisible hand of Adam Smith has worked to increased income for many people through the industrial revolution and other changes and improvements, but the idea of shareholder maximization has had the opposite effect of decreasing efficiency and productivity.

John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods pushes back against Milton Friedman's assertion that businesses should only be looking out for maximizing returns for their shareholders. Whole foods considers a range of stakeholders that should benefit from a company's existence - customers, employees, suppliers, investors, vendors, communities, and the environment.

Mackey discusses what a common answer would be to the question about the purpose of business. The first answer is always to make money. At the same time, a doctor who is very well paid will not say healthcare's purpose is to make money. It is to help people become healthy. Of course, a hospital or doctor's office is still a business and one that shuffles a lot of money through it, but there is still an overarching purpose beyond just the money itself.

He argues that legacy companies with a different mindset will have to evolve or else they will be replaced by start-ups to have a conscious capitalism approach.

What is conscious capitalism?

The metaphor is given of a caterpillar who simply consumes as much as possible, adding no value. Eventually nature takes its course and the metamorphosis to a butterfly results in a creature of light and beauty that gives back as much as it takes.

The four tenets are higher purpose (why), stakeholder integration (what), conscious culture (how), and conscious leadership (who).

Conscious capitalism goes beyond corporate social responsibility, which only mitigates some potential negative impacts without significantly building beyond that. Other concepts such as sustainability, triple bottom line, and shared value capitalism likewise do not go far enough in terms of who can benefit from the company and how.

Raj Sisodia presents conscious capitalism as a philosphy of doing business rather than a business strategy or business model. Such a philosophy will create value rather than extract value, leading to a Win-Win, rather than a Zero-Sum result. The key is patience. Such a metamorphosis cannot happen overnight, and there will be failures along the way. Companies trying to practice conscious capitalism may fail, but that does not mean it wasn't a good idea. It just means they need to keep trying.

Just like a doctor or hospital is still a business but working towards a greater purpose of improving health, really any non-profit is at the end of the day a business. The local humane society can't fulfill its mission of taking care of pets if they don't have the money from adoption fees or donations. The thrift store can't keep the lights on if no one donates their used items. Individual owners and employees can still be paid decently personally while the organization gives back to society.

The CC Credo:

We believe that:

Business is good, because it creates value.

It is ethical, because it is based on voluntary exchange.

It is noble, because it can elevate our existence.

It is heroic, because it lifts people out of poverty and creates prosperity.

Unrest

Can't we all just get along?

This paraphrased quote from Rodney King back in 1992 still echoes 28 years later. Think of how much has changed in that time. How much has stayed the same?

Wars have been waged, the internet and mobile phones have transformed communication and how businesses operate, 5 U.S. presidents have served, reality TV shows (or unscripted dramas) have shifted the entertainment landscape, hip hop music has become mainstream music, and much more.

One of those presidents was our first African American president, and the hip hop music that has dominated the last couple decades was created by and is primarily still performed by people of color. But where has that really gotten us?

More and more people of color are killed in the streets. Riots break out across the country as part of protests against racial divisions and atrocious acts committed by police and everyday citizens. Perpetrators are rarely brought to justice. White America is barely aware of the existence of our own privilege.

A pandemic seems to have lowered defenses, opened doors, unified us against a common enemy, and squeezed out all but the essential from our lives. And in the middle of the pandemic with no end in sight we have race riots and protests, burning police cars, looting, a president who seems to provoke more than promote calm, and more to come as the disadvantaged are stressed by an economy in shambles. Race continues to divide us as the pandemic should be uniting us.

Can't we all just get along?

Local News

Over a decade ago, my old hometown paper was downsizing, but my new hometown paper seemed to be doing okay. Over the past several years, my small town has apparently caught up with the big town trends.

The local paper has been struggling for years, going from 7 day delivery to 6 day delivery for subscribers and a minimal ad-filled paper on the seventh day for non-subscribers (TMC or Total Market Coverage was the product).

My kids delivered papers, up to three routes at once at times, but the TMC products which they had been getting paid for eventually just sort of stopped showing up at our house. At one point, one route wasn't getting it at all and the other was getting twice as much as we needed.

Then they moved to ditching Sunday for a big Saturday paper, so down to 5 delivery days per week.

Near the end of that, they did a big push for the Saturday-only subscription - a one day paper that was fairly inexpensive. A couple months later, they got rid of the one day subscription, so bumped everyone who had subscribed to it up to a regular subscription. Bait and switch.

Now they are delivering three days per week, through the mail. They claim there have been issues with finding enough carriers due to low unemployment. I think they lost good carriers due to a reduction in a quality newspaper and issues with getting them out on time to the carriers (which I suppose could be back to a low unemployment thing).

It's not a good day to be in the newspaper business. I don't have the solution for it. I'm a fan of the local interest story. I like community traditions and letters to the editor from local crazies. It used to be you paid for something that was scarce, because someone had to produce and deliver it to you. Now there is no physical production, and distribution is free electronically, so how do you still make enough money to create something no one is willing to pay for?

More and more of what is delivered to us electronically is in the hands of just a few massive media conglomerates, meaning the independent voice is being stifled. I have a feeling those free stories are being sold by someone who has something more than a nice story to tell.

Facebook = AOL

I remember in the late 90s being at the house of a friend who was (and is) very tech savvy. The thing that blew me away was that he was dialing up to AOL and looking something up through their portal. Why would anyone use AOL for anything? Well, anything other than creating wall-sized art projects with all the AOL CDs they had gotten in the mail.

The problem is that it was a closed community. It simplified and filtered out the raw parts of the full Internet. It tried to create a one-size-fits-all view of the Web, and by doing so limited the interesting bits, and the potential for growth was stymied.

In the years that followed, AOL declined in favor of interesting startups that promised the world. Some lasted. Some didn't. I still miss the blogging days of about 2006-2010 when the Web seemed limitless, and everyone was so excited to be sharing information with each other. Around that time, however, Facebook opened to everyone and provided an easy to use platform that was filled with hip college students who had been using it out of sight of prying eyes.

Facebook grew, adding in messaging, unlimited picture sharing, a mobile app, and so on. It structured things more rigidly than MySpace. It became the place where everyone who wanted to communicate was on it. Only the Luddites avoided it.

Fast forward to the growth of advertising, meddling Russians, commercial adoption, and the dagger to the heart - the news feed algorithm. I think having companies on FB is not bad, as they can provide an easy way to message and provide deals to their customers. But ripping out the reverse chronological feed of simply everything posted by everyone you knew and were friends with, in favor of FB deciding what it thought you would want to see, that is to me the beginning of the end.

A former student of mine who got a job as a project manager at FB after taking my project management class (before even completing the rest of the degree program and graduating), told me that it is all numbers driven. FB knows that people who use the algorithmic news feed spend significantly longer on the site than those who use the most recent chronological feed. I think that's because they are confused and can't find what they want. Or because most of the content is hidden from the chronological view and only shown on the news feed. The news feed is the default, and I'll often see a glance of something interesting before I switch to the most recent feed, and as I scroll down through the most recent posts, the interesting item from someone who I am friends with never comes up, even when it should.

Then it hit me. We've just rebuilt AOL. We have a one-size-fits-all platform, tightly controlled by their corporate decision makers. We have control of content handed to advertisers. We have an experience that is locked down to be as simple as possible. Look only at the death of blogs for an example of this. It used to be that people would write daily or maybe a couple times a week but at least monthly. And they would write a lot. They would customize the look of the blog, although generally without getting too much into MySpace-esque horrid background designs. The most important, though, is that they would write a lot. Long articles they would work for a long time on, with curated pictures embedded right in the text where it was discussed. Bloggers would link to other blogs or posts on their own blog. The comment section would run wild. What do people write now? A couple sentences? Maybe a full paragraph? Pictures are out there sort of with no context other than a short description. If a post is longer than a couple sentences you can click on a link to show more, but if it's longer than a couple paragraphs it loads into a totally new page that people don't even wait for it to completely load to shut it down. TL;DR (too long; didn't read) becomes the name of the game. That to me is the saddest part of it. We lost thoughtful discussion and editing of deep content in favor of clicking a like button and a couple sentences of writing. The biggest innovation was the reaction buttons where you could not only like something but mark it as something you dislike or are angry or surprised about. We don't even need to write a response showing our surprise. Just click the surprised button.

My favorite part that keeps me coming back to FB every day is the memories, where it will show what you posted on that day some number of years ago. It's a fun way to relive things that have been posted over the past 10 years or so. It's a little private section of memories just for me (that I don't reshare, although some people do). But what is the majority of content on my wall? I've posted about this a couple times recently, here and here, and it hasn't changed much, so I won't do an update. But it's just curated content from big media companies for the most part.

Think about when you do see something interesting on FB, and you go to tell someone else about it (IRL), chances are they have already seen it. Everyone else has already seen the same viral video, the same breaking news story, or the same joke or meme. Think about how decades ago before the rise of cable, everyone watched the same TV shows at the same time, with some time shifting as VCRs became popular. Then cable hit, and everyone was watching different shows. Eventually we had DVRs and later ubiquitous streaming options. But we've cycled back around to everyone watching the same shows or other content. If you're behind on a series, you have to avoid FB so as to avoid spoilers, but then you miss other things, too, so you have to catch up with everyone else.

We have moved away from a creation- and sharing-oriented platform to one of consumption. It's easier to consume what others have created than to create and share our own. And who is creating that content that we are consuming? Big media that invests heavily in FB to keep our attention, because we are afraid of missing out if we disconnect.

Facebook Update

A year ago, I posted about the problem with Facebook. I took a quick sample of the last 50 posts to my wall and coded them to see how many of each kind there were. I realize some social media gurus will figure out the optimal times to post based on time zones and when people are awake, at work, on break, and so on, but I didn't take any of that into account at the time. I've done an update and didn't try to match time of day or anything.

News is still up near the top. Advertisements and status updates from people I don't know jumped way up to the top. The number of unmotivational images dropped. Status update from someone I know dropped a little.

Of course, this isn't a scientific study, but I will say that things seem to be moving in the wrong direction. It was already problematic a year ago, but to have advertisements and status updates from people I don't know overtake the top spots, just above news, and to have status updates from someone I know drop, that heightens the irrelevance of Facebook as a social media platform. It's becoming even more about advertising and big media, while throwing in some random extra stuff from friends of friends to try to make it seem like it's still personal and social. But if people I know aren't using it to post things about themselves, what's the point?

Understanding

When it comes to communicating with other groups of people, there are two general categories of understanding - language and culture. Now, with specific individuals, everyone has a little different way of doing things, but before you can get to that point, it's important to have the first two down.

In the U.S., we have a very individualist culture, for example. It's all about what can I do for myself and what can you do for me. Many other cultures are collectivist, where it's more about what I can do for others or what we can do together. Neither is better or worse than the other - they are just different. You could go from one country to the other and learn the language just fine but still have difficulty communicating if you don't have the culture figured out.

I was at Wal-Mart a while back and a Hispanic gentleman was checking out in front of me. No big deal, just rolling the cart through and paying for things. After he paid and was about to leave he realized he had put something on the little rack under the main cart. He pointed it out to the cashier. I can't remember exactly how he said it. It was in English, but either the accent or the words he chose made it a little unclear what had happened.

As the cashier was trying to figure out what was going on, she asked the gentleman, "Is that yours?" He responded, "No." This confused her a little more as I think she was maybe imagining that somehow the cart he had been pushing around had something left in it from a previous customer. Whether or not he could sense her rising confusion, he quickly followed up with, "I haven't paid for it yet."

At that point, I was set and knew exactly what was going on. The cashier was just not getting it. As they went back and forth a couple times, her trying to figure out if he did or didn't want the product that by now he had pulled out from under his cart and him somewhat indirectly answering her questions, I stepped in. I pointed out to the cashier that he wanted to purchase the item. He had put it in his cart. He just had forgotten to pull it out and put it on the conveyor belt so she could scan it. As such, it was not his yet. It would not be his until he paid for it. It was his in the sense that he had put it in his cart and was intending to pay for it. (If you want to test this one out, go grab something out of someone's cart, and chances are they will tell you, "That's mine.")

As he left, she thanked me and said something about how she wished she knew Spanish. The interaction they just had was in English, but she knew there was something missing in their understanding. Knowing Spanish probably would have helped, but maybe not as much as she thought.

I speak Spanish and at the time was trying to learn German. I mentioned the program I was using, Mango Languages, which is available free through the library. She seemed interested in it and even wrote down the name of the program. As I explained a little how it worked and how much I was learning from it, I could tell she was losing interest fast. No other customers were waiting, so it wasn't that. I could just see that it wasn't something that was going to be able to hold her attention very long.

Languages take some dedication to learn. The idea of knowing another language was interesting, but not so much the process to get there. Of course, from there, the cultural components are a whole different level, a difficult level to get through using software. Language is the first step, though.

The Problem with Facebook

I did a quick count of the most recent 50 items on my wall. It's an interesting look at why Facebook is going to fail, even if they don't know it yet. Now, I'm not a member of as many groups as some people that I know have some significant interactions through that platform. Also, I consistently load my wall with the Most Recent view, not the Top Stories view, to try to do my part to skew the numbers in that direction, since their analysis shows that people who use the Top Stories view spend significantly more time using FB than those who use the Most Recent view. I think it's because it takes so long to find what you're looking for.

Here is what I found:

There's 6 out of 50 that are text-based posts from someone I know, and 3 out of 50 that are images that weren't also posted to Instagram. 4 of the 50 were photos I've already seen on Instagram. Three-fourths of what is on my wall consists of news stories, viral videos, things posted by people I don't know (but by someone who knows someone that I know), celebrity posts, supposedly motivational messages that end up being just sappy, and advertisements.

A colleague of mine described the difference between Twitter and Facebook like this. Twitter is for connecting to random people to talk about specific things. Facebook is for connecting to specific people to talk about random things. The problem, then, is that FB has lost this differentiation in that the majority of what is there is not actually posted by the specific people I know, or even when it is, it's just a re-post of something created by a big news or content company.

Online Communication

I had an interesting comment from a student in an online course message board. Basically, the note was that face to face communication is always better. I agree with the student's premise that technology is not always the answer, but that doesn't mean that it isn't often an answer. I do disagree that a face to face classroom is always better than a technology based classroom. I've been in a lot of ineffective classrooms. My response to the meta-challenge that the discussion of how effective technology is to communicate would be proved by the fact that no one would respond to the post positing such:

I don't know that I'd totally agree with the statement that the authors believe that technology is always the answer. If used correctly and implemented well, it often can be. But it's not always. A large piece of the SDLC which the course covers deals with the need to analyze what the problem is before making a choice of how to fix it. And the course starts with several chapters related to understanding how businesses function before it gets into an substantive discussion of technology.

Even your example of the discussion we might have F2F, while true in just the right set of circumstances, doesn't necessarily work for a couple reasons. One is that how likely would it be that you would be able to get a group of people who are enrolled in the course together? Not likely, due to geography and differing schedules, which is why most of you are taking online courses to begin with.

And two is how often do you actually get a substantial conversation in a group? Does everyone actually get to participate? In many classes in a F2F environment, 90% of the students sit there and don't actually participate. Only a small handful will often dominate the conversation because not everyone can talk at the same time and the introverts like actually thinking about what they're going to say before they say it and by the time they decide what to say the conversation has moved on.

Technology levels the playing field a bit. Not everyone who uses Wikipedia contributes to it by writing or fixing articles, but enough do that it has become an invaluable resource which is comprehensive enough and accurate enough to put print encyclopedias out of business. I will fully agree that technology is often used ineffectively, inefficiently, sometimes just for the sake of using technology and not for a real business need, or using the wrong tool (a hammer when a miter saw is called for).

That, I hope, is the point of the course. If you don't have the right tool or can't speak the right language to get what you need from the IT department, you will have problems. Flip it around. It's not that technology is a hammer and actually talking to each other are the other tools but rather what are the various technology tools that can help us in a variety of situations? Thanks for the conversation starter. I'm glad that the asynchronous post you made allowed me to make an answer later since I was busy at the time you were making your initial post. How about anyone else? Examples of using technology effectively or not effectively at work or other places you spend your time?

The student's eyes were opened a bit, I think, recognizing how common it is for some people to dominate the conversation in a live group. We didn't really talk about this specifically, but as I think back on it later, I wonder how often it leads to bad, extreme ideas, simply because the extroverts who like to blurt things out without thinking about them end up directing most of the conversation. This seems particularly relevant as we are in the middle of election season. The follow-up comment by the student that the younger generation is overly involved in technology and do not know how to communicate face to face is sadly true. It isn't a reason to get rid of technology but rather a reason to focus on when and how to communicate effectively in a variety of situations.

I definitely agree with you there regarding upcoming generations who only know how to communicate through technology, even to people who are in the same room as them. Or who communicate electronically only to people who are far away and ignore the people close by them. Just look at a group of teenagers in practically any environment, and you'll see very little live interaction among them, which is sad to see. I went to Europe a couple years ago, and I was happy to turn off my cell phone for two weeks and just enjoy what was there in front of me rather than trying to stay up on the latest FB gossip. I enjoy the same when heading up to the mountains for some hiking or backpacking. Some literally go through physical symptoms of withdrawal if removed from an always-connected environment. That doesn't mean the technology is bad, just that the person hasn't learned to use other options or is bad at selecting which tool to use when.

Jersey Strong

From Paul Kiesche, a friend I grew up with in New Jersey:

Proud to be Jersey Strong, our design company, Paul Kiesche Design, LLC. created this logo. It’s just one more thing we can do to help. By working together, New Jersey will come back stronger than ever.

This logo is completely free to use, print or share. If we get enough likes, comments or interest, we will make and sell t-shirts, stickers and possibly more. Then, we’ll donate all the money we make after expenses to help the relief efforts for this disaster and future disasters.

Here are the rights-free logo files if anyone wants it to print for any reason.

Pass it around, and let @pkieschedesign know if you're interested in shirts, stickers, etc., but of course you're free to print your own if you'd like as well. You also might comment on Paul's blog.

Political Pumpkin Walk

The North Logan Pumpkin Walk is a fun family tradition. Each year they have all the scenes made from pumpkins by anyone who volunteers to create one, and then you generally end up in a kind of current events scene. A few years ago, for example, they had a scene entitled "Martha Stewart Living in Jail" that was a great hit.

This year's culminating scene was a political one, presented without comment.

OccuFry

A recent tweet asked whether it was worse that a very simple and very harmless college prank was pulled or that it made the front page, above the fold headline in the local newspaper.

I think they're both equally great.

With the amount of damage that's likely done across the country by college pranks, it's nice to see something that really didn't cause any problems other than wasting a few minutes of time talking about whether "they" were really planning on removing a sculpture from campus. It's unfortunate that a previous prank included painting the sculpture, which did require some cost to fix.

I remember when the fries showed up on campus. Several of us wondered what they were thinking. We thought about creating a large cardboard french fry container to put around it, but someone else beat us to it. It was fun to see students build a huge snow hamburger next to the fries last year. Things like this get the museum director and art faculty all excited, because whenever anyone even talks about a piece of art, whether positively or negatively, they feel like they have contributed to society by starting the conversation.

Harmless pranks and common experiences create a sense of community on a college campus. Interesting local news in the local newspaper also creates a sense of community. I subscribe to the local paper, in spite of the looks I get from people when I explain that I, a person under 60 years old, choose to actually pay for someone to deliver a physical paper to my house, because of the tangible connection to the community.

I skip past most of the stories on foreign wars and the like, since I get my fill of that kind of news through Facebook, Twitter, and other online sources. I love the letters to the editor. I was intrigued by a random picture of my neighbor changing a light bulb in front of his house for no real reason. (There was a reason to change the bulb, I'm sure, just not much of a reason to put the picture in the paper.) I enjoy learning about some of the local lore, having not grown up here locally, yet having lived in Logan for longer than I've lived anywhere else.

Simple things make a community. Not just one simple thing but many. One big thing has the potential to bring people together, but it takes the simple things to keep it going. So what communities are you a part of and how do you know you are?

<Photo by Jennifer Meyers/Herald Journal>

Facebook as an LMS

In a recent discussion on a friend's wall in Facebook, the debate was whether Facebook could be used as an LMS. The arguments from one particular professor didn't quite cut it for me. One issue he raised is that requiring students to use a particular platform, whether Facebook, Gmail, or any other social media service is problematic and naive.

Given that the state of Utah is adopting Instructure Canvas to replace Blackboard, and one of its features is the ability to coordinate information with outside services such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Docs, etc., it seems that supporting the use of these third party tools is the direction we're going, not one of continuing to lock up our courses.

Regarding requiring students to sign up for a service they may not have been using already, it begs the question what percent of college students are already on Facebook. My understanding is that it's up in the 80-90% range, if not higher. They're in there anyway. This is just bringing the class to where the students are. You can set up a private instance of elgg, but if students don't get in there, it's no better than Blackboard, Moodle, or any other LMS, even if it's slightly more social.

I talked to one class I was teaching about the idea. While the initial thought was that it might be creepy having their instructor be their friend on Facebook, they agreed it was not so creepy and they may in fact think about class more often since they're in Facebook all day, if we were in a group together and didn't necessarily have to be friends. That was a couple years ago, though, and now everyone's grandma is on Facebook, so students may be more used to authority figures in their lives connecting with them on Facebook.

The big related question that was brought up was one of security and FERPA. Supposedly this professor has seen threats to sue because the professor openly discussed a student's performance in a classroom, and the student understood the critique to be a breach of their privacy. He pointed out that misunderstandings of intent are more likely to happen in online environments where context and body language are lacking than they are in face to face classrooms.

Regarding lawyers getting involved, it seems that of anyone, a PR professor (who was the one doing the complaining) ought to be able to figure out how to take a misunderstanding and turn it into a learning experience. At least in an online environment, you have a more permanent record of discussions, so you don't have to rely on the "he said, she said" of face to face meetings. Of course, it is ironic that the example he gave of misunderstanding was in a face to face classroom, not an online environment. I tend to agree with Dave Merrill, who suggests that writing for public publishing of work on a blog or eportfolio that others can see will make the quality much better than if the student is just writing a paper that no one but the professor will ever see.

Given the content area, I would suggest that if you're taking a PR course and there's not a FB (or Twitter) component, you should consider dropping. Some other majors may be able to get away with not using these tools, but from what I understand of a field like PR, if a student is not given practice in using social media tools in a professional context, they will be at a disadvantage. Yes, they know how to use Facebook in a social context, but holding a class in Facebook gives them the invaluable experience of an organized, professional use of the platform. Yes, it is fast becoming a platform, not just a standalone site.

Trolling

Sitting in on some meetings with faculty members from several different departments, the discussion turned at one point to staying on top of student opinions, experiences, and problems they might be having.

photo by sue_elias
Various methods of keeping tabs on the student experience were discussed. One in particular was worthy of note. A faculty member shared her habit of trolling the course message boards and encouraged others to do the same. (Just to be clear, these are message boards open to anyone working on a given course, not locked down to just one section of a course inside an LMS.)

I alternated between staring in disbelief and suppressing laughter as I pictured a seemingly polite and professional faculty member taunting students in the official university message boards. I could understand if she wanted to do it under a pseudonym on a third party site. I mean, who doesn't do that, right? Right?

Obviously the behavior she engages in is lurking, not trolling. As nefarious as it sounds to be a lurker, it's really no big deal. It's just someone who sits by and watches the conversation but doesn't contribute. The real life equivalent of lurking is somewhat awkward; just sitting around watching people and listening in on their conversations is not considered polite. In the online world, however, lurking is often recommended, primarily as a way to get acquainted with a community before actively contributing in order to get a handle on the norms of that particular group and to get to know who the trolls are.

That brings us to trolling. It really doesn't have anything to do with trolls, as nasty as they are. Rather, it comes from a fishing term describing a method of dragging a lure behind a boat. The lures are often designed to mimic dying or injured fish. The idea is the troll tosses the bait out there and drags it around looking for easy prey. The victim thinks they're attacking a helpless victim, but they thus become the victim as they take the bait and are unwittingly dragged into an argument. Getting into an argument with a troll means you have lost. You are the victim. There is no way to win. The argument is what the troll is looking for. The flame war is the desired end result. Even the most glaring hole in a troll's argument cannot be addressed, because it is often simply more bait designed to keep the "conversation" going.

Chaos is only avoided by ignoring the troll or calling him or her out directly as a troll and then proceeding to ignore. I recently watched a video of a dude hitting himself in the face with a racquetball. In the comments, a troll starts an argument by claiming that the sport they were playing was squash, not racquetball. It's clearly racquetball. No logic prevails, as any evidence is simply countered by "it's squash". At one point, the troll even directly admits to being a troll and then immediately parrots back the line again, "it's squash" and the argument continues.

What's the point? Why would someone do that? It doesn't matter. Analyzing why someone would do such a thing is beside the point. The only thing that really matters is recognizing it and disengaging immediately.

Now imagine with me again the kind-hearted faculty member leaving our discussion on how to best engage with and assist our students, pulling up her laptop in some dark corner of the hallway, and leaving provoking comments on the student message boards.

A Whole New World

Last month, I mentioned how sometimes people will fight against something and by so doing cause what they were trying to avoid in the first place. Here is a similar example, this time of people arguing against something and thus making the point they were arguing against.



At East High School in Salt Lake City (yes, THE East High School), they are putting on a bilingual production of Aladdin. I think it's a great idea. Basically, half the school is Caucasian, one quarter Hispanic, and the rest other minorities. The problem is that only the white kids try out for the theater, until now.

They are coming together. They are all happy to have met people they didn't know before. They're helping each other with their languages. What a great story, too. Aladdin is all about not trying to be something you're not but loving others for what they are. Maybe next year they'll do a bilingual Romeo and Juliet.

The point I made in the first paragraph comes from the comments on the story. The more people complain about this production, the more their own xenophobia is apparent, thus reinforcing the need for such a production. Most of the first comments were people saying this was a bad thing, though it is balancing out with supporting comments as the day goes on. Some commenters claim this is a ploy to encourage acceptance of illegal aliens. One asks that we stop catering to minorities and accept each other without bringing race and culture into the conversation. Another asserts that a bilingual production won't help the Hispanic kids learn English, which is the global language of business and science. Two commenters unfold the logical fallacy that if we do things in Spanish, we'll have to start doing things in many other languages as well.

First, who knows if the Hispanic kids are illegal or not? Second, who cares? They may very well have been born here, and whether they were or were not, they likely have little choice but to live where their parents are. These are children we're talking about. How messed up is the request that we accept each other without talking about our races and cultures? If the acceptance only goes one way, from minority to majority, that is actually a request that minorities reject their own race and culture with an out where the majority doesn't have to accept anyone that's different.

When it comes to learning languages, I don't think we need to worry about whether or not the Hispanic kids are learning English. They've grown up here; they know the language. They weren't ignoring the theater because they don't know the language but because there was simply a cultural barrier that needed to be broken. It has now been broken.

It's the white kids who are less likely to know another language, like the joke (not actually a joke) that if you know two languages you're bilingual, three languages you're trilingual, and one language you're American. Learning a second (or third) language helps one understand his or own language better. And talk about the language of science being English, except that many of the terms we use come from Latin, upon which Spanish is based. A firm grasp of a Romance language makes Latin a lot easier.

I think it would be great if the slippery slope argument came true when it was put forward that if we allow Spanish, we'd have to do things in countless other languages. Okay, let's do it then. Let's mix in Arabic, Hindi, Mandarin, and Russian. We're still arguing about Spanish, when there are all these other languages that millions (even billions) of other people are speaking. We're not at risk of having the issues that China and India have with hundreds of languages swirled all over the place causing communication issues. English is already common, in spite of how poor of a language it is; we just need to add on a few more to spice things up.

The bigger question is one of culture, not language. Language happens to often be the piece that starts someone off into a better understanding of other cultures. Is there a better way to build cultural understanding than our children sharing language and song in a production about not trying to change yourself to impress others?

More On TwHistory and Social Networking

I recently posted about the top 10 things I'd learned from TwHistory, a project I've been helping with to teach history using social media. I was at a conference recently where one of the papers presented was about how social networking doesn't create learning communities or communities of practice. I'm going to do a more full analysis of it at some point, but for now, I'd like to point out that TwHistory has shown to some extent that the supposition of the paper is false or at least not completely true. I don't know if I even want to touch on their premise that you need more control than social media tools allow to facilitate a constructivist learning environment.

Social media/networking tools are just that, tools. A classroom is a tool in a manner of speaking. Blackboard, let's see if I can say this with a straight face, is a tool. (Blackboard's "designers" are tools also, if you know what I mean.)

Of course just using Twitter won't magically build a community, just as throwing a prominent researcher into a classroom won't make him or her an effective teacher and dropping a class into Blackboard won't stimulate discussion.

A couple guys who had worked together on some previous software projects to create tools for building communities around openly licensed educational materials came up with the idea. I was involved in the first reenactment on TwHistory because of something one of them posted on Facebook. An awesome high school history teacher has enhanced her method of teaching history because of that Twitter reenactment. A grant from Talis funded a sweet new twhistory.org website that will allow anyone to build and share their own reenactments because it was shown that it could be useful in the classroom. People are starting to use the new site on their own now.

A community is being built using various online tools. A common reaction from many people who hear about this community is that they are now interested in using some of these social media tools that they were never interested in before, because they see it can be useful for something more than just wasting time. They want to join in, because there is a community pulling them in.

There's more to come on this topic, but that's enough for now. If you've made it this far, here's a bonus 5 more things I've learned from TwHistory.

• To reduce the amount of complaining you have to listen to, appoint a murmurer for the group - if anyone wants to murmur, they have to get his or her permission first.
• Expect to be "taught a lesson" if you fall sleep while on guard.
• Assign a few select hunters, because if everyone in camp goes, you'll scare off all the game.
• If your ramrod gets stuck in the barrel right in the middle of battle, just shoot it out at someone and pick up someone else's gun.
• You can tell the tribe an indian is from by the shape of the moccasin print.

Twitter

I recently mentioned in a post about Facebook that I rarely see the benefit of certain Web 2.0 technologies until I actually get in and use them. I've experienced the same thing with Twitter to a certain degree.

I haven't really started following a ton of people. I only have a small handful that I follow and a small handful who follow me. I have created several accounts. One is for work to send updates to our department website. Another one is a personal account, which updates my Facebook status. You'll also see a few of my latest tweets on my blog. It's really no big deal. Except...

The coolest thing that I've been involved with when it comes to Twitter is twhistory.com. The current project is following several people who were involved in the Civil War, leading up to the Battle of Gettysburg in real time over several months' time. I've been tweeting two Confederate soldiers and a Yankee newspaper.

Louis Leon is hilarious. I seriously laugh all the time reading his journal. You can find his journal online or take a look at his Twitter posts. He carries the flag for his regiment and provides such interesting daily insights as to how the soldiers really lived. I find myself pulling for him and his regiment to beat the Yankees, even though I know that's the final result of the war. I hope that's not a spoiler for anyone.

Future potential projects include the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK Assasination, and really anything else that people are interested in. The main thing that will really facilitate this project exploding is software, which we've got someone working on, to allow volunteers to put together the tweets for people and load them into a database so the system can automatically post everything at the appropriate times. I have a hard time keeping up with just three accounts. I don't know how Marion Jensen, the mastermind of the whole thing keeps up with the dozen accounts he's tweeting.

There are two main points that make Twitter such a great platform: the power of the masses and the API. Of course, that's the same for any Web 2.0 application, so it's not a huge surprise. But some of Twitter's detractors are still talking about how much of a time waster it is without paying attention to the power that Twitter holds. Hopefully the team that runs Twitter will be able to figure out how to make Twitter sustainable, since they're running on venture capital now. When they accomplish that, some of the limits they have had to put on the number of API calls that can be made for performance reasons should go away.

Assuming the API issues will go away and the timed tweet application ends up being as sweet as I hope it will be, piles of twhistory volunteers will really be able to put together some awesome projects.

As cool as this project is turning out to be, hopefully others in the Twitter community can come up with even more applications of the Twitter platform.

Facebook

I gave in and joined Facebook a few months ago. As with most other social networking tools, I had been avoiding it. It seems that with most new technologies, once I get in and learn how it works, I wonder how I ever lived without it (blogging being the prime example of this). I am glad I never joined MySpace, but while I appreciate some things about Facebook and generally support it, I do have a few issues with it. I don't know if I could say that it's something I couldn't live without.

To start off my experiment, when I joined, I decided I wouldn't invite anyone to be my friend. Now, I actually did invite two people, but these were people who had previously invited me before I joined, so in effect I was just accepting their previous invitations. I'm not 100% sure how the friend recommender works, but I may have also invited someone to be my friend after an existing friend recommended them to me. What I've ended up with, after little or no inviting of my own, is a mass of family members, employees, former coworkers, former roommates, high school friends, a high school barely acquaintance, PhD classmates, professors, old neighbors, junior high friends, people I've served in Scouting with, and people that go to the same church as I do.

There are people from almost every phase of my life all lumped together, and that's where it starts getting strange. I've ignored a few people whose updates I don't care to see. I've deleted a comment or two of people who don't think before they post on something I've shared. But for the most part, all these people who have never met each other and have no connection other than at some point they met me, are having this mass, public, unfettered conversation with me and showing each other pictures they have of me from a long time ago. I don't necessarily have anything to hide, but in real life I'm not going to invite a couple of my employees over to my house to hang out with me and a couple people I knew when I lived in New Jersey 20 years ago, yet that's what's virtually happening. I'd like to see some of my friends from New Jersey again. I'd have nothing against having a barbecue for my employees at my house (we'll see if any of them are reading this and take me up on it). I just wouldn't do them both at the same time. There's something strange about it.

A possible way to work around this would be to allow the user to put their friends in different groups so only people within the same group can see each other's conversations. I don't know, but there has to be a better way.

The thing I do like about Facebook is the open platform that it is. It can be extended to be anything you want it to be. The groups are obvious, as a way to communicate with large numbers of people quickly without having to be their friends. The applications are where it really gets good. Well, the potential is there anyway. I don't feel a need to fill out every 'what X are you?' quiz out there, and Mafia Wars appears to be a colossal waste of time (not as much as World of Warcraft of course). It's just this limitless platform that anyone can write a program for and throw it out to the world to share. We've obviously had that open platform for awhile called the internet, but now the social component is automated.

I asked some students in one of the classes I teach what they would think of having a Facebook group for our class. At first they thought it would be kind of weird but then admitted they would keep up on what was happening in the class better, since they would be in there all the time. However, when I asked some of the non-traditional students (read older, less tech-savvy) in another class of mine, they basically replied that there would be no way they would set up a Facebook account, even if that was where we were 'holding' class. CourseFeed is one app that has potential in this area. I need to set it up and try it out.

So I have mixed feelings when it comes to Facebook. It makes sense. I can see the good in it. Like anything else in life, there's waste in it. I look forward to seeing if some killer app shows up for it. Perhaps the next UI redesign will be much more successful than the last one and it will actually become easier for more people to use instead of more difficult so they can reach a new audience. Right now, I'm just watching and waiting.