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.

AI

As a new semester begins in my business communication class, I wonder where we stand in the world of artificial intelligence. I had a great discussion with some of the other faculty members about how it is important to figure out where to go with AI engines that can write better essays than students can. At what point will students be able to simply input a few facts or even questions and have the technology instantly spit out something that they could hand in and get a better grade than if they took the time to write it themselves.

We briefly discussed the possible copyright or other IP ownership issues of using AI tools. Does ownership go to the person who programmed the AI or to the person who entered some text and hit a button?

Is there a way we can use this technology to improve writing but not completely replace the humans in the process? There has to be.

The two main tools from OpenAI right now ChatGPT for text and Dall-E 2 for images.

Ignoring it and hoping it won't go away is not really an option, but how can we use these tools to our advantage and not to the detriment of students? At the end of the day, they're just tools.

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!

Syllabus Crap Detector

As I've been working recently on designing several courses, I've found some weird stuff, as usual. Part of our process is to review syllabi of similar courses being taught at other universities. We perform somewhat of the equivalent of a literature review to determine what is being taught and how, in order to determine what minimum standards need to be covered and where there may be places that we can make our programs better by filling in the holes missed by others.

The following are a few quotes that I have found interesting for various reasons:

• Regular attendance is rewarded because you will be exposed to what I think you need to know.
  
• When I talk, be quiet.
  
• Put newspapers away 20 seconds before class starts.
  
• I will clear the memory of all programmable calculators before each test.
  
• Get yourself a notebook or 3-ring binder, and start a journal to record your impressions/analysis about what you’re learning from your journalism reading. (in a class with large blogging, twitter, and social media components)

I found a particular faculty member, though, whose syllabus really takes the cake. Looking up his profile on ratemyprofessors, student comments seemed to confirm what I observed: unorganized, hard to follow, illogical, makes no sense whatsoever, don't expect straight answers to your questions, writes smart remarks back to the students, and gets off subject very easily. He seems to be the opposite extreme of the faculty who wrote the first four statements in the list above. He may be friends with the person who wrote the inconsistent final statement above.

So what is so illogical or hard to follow? Let's go to the syllabus (which happens to be in comic sans of all things), shall we?

The course has a subtitle of How to build your "Crap Detector" which is only referred to in one other place in the syllabus. I was hoping the other reference would help in understanding what he's talking about. You can probably guess that it doesn't. One of the learning objectives of the course is to "provide personally and socially meaningful responses to what Roland Barthes once called the 'question par excellence': 'Why the world? what is the meaning of things?' (e.g., design and use an effective 'crap detector')". So I looked up Barthes and found that he was a French literary theorist. Good enough, but what of this question par excellence?

I looked that up also. In talking about the difference between the technical and artisanal functions of writers and authors, Barthes discusses a paradox that occurs. "And the miracle, so to speak, is that this narcissistic activity has always provoked an interrogation of the world: by enclosing himself in the how to write, the author ultimately discovers the open question par excellence: why the world? What is the meaning of things? In short, it is precisely when the author's work becomes its own end that it regains a mediating character; the author conceives of literature as an end, the world restores it to him as a means; and it is in this perpetual inconclusiveness that the author rediscovers the world, an alien world moreover, since literature represents it as a question-never, finally, as an answer."

It's pretty deep stuff. Mull it over. Ponder. Enlighten yourself as you discover the hidden meaning of Barthes' paradox. Apply it to your own life and career. Then come back to the question at hand, and ask yourself what this has to do with a crap detector. I'm still not totally sure what a crap detector is, but if I had one, it would be going off right now, and we've got a ways to go.

In terms of inconsistency, in one area of the syllabus regarding how grades are earned, it states that you can receive an F for class abandonment, which in a different part of the syllabus he explains means more than 3 absences. In yet a third location in the syllabus talking about attendance, he seemingly confirms that excessive absences may result in unsuccessful course completion but then immediately proceeds to state that more than 3 absences will result in a reduction of one full letter grade. His syllabus also states that students may fail if they do not demonstrate mastery of writing and numeracy skills. He may fail his own class given his apparent lack of ability to think and express himself effectively in quantitative terms.

According to the syllabus, a student can be considered cheating by communicating in any way with another member of the class. This sounds like something the faculty who wrote the first four statements above might want to adopt in their classes.

There's more, but I'll end with this professor's teaching philosophy from the department's website:

I love mental spelunking. Each semester I get to take students through a dark cave of stalactite and stalagmite ideas, pointing the light at the ceiling-stuck cat or a three-legged donkey. “Over there,” I yell, turning the light in another direction. “Can you see it? Can you see it? . . . the NAKED CHICKEN, caught mid-stride in the next room?” With furrowed brows and searching eyes, students squint at the dark shadows, searching for even a hint of beak or comb. “Where? Where?” they ask. Then at last . . . “I see it! I see it!” one cries.

Then here is the really best part. She takes the light herself and points it far into the cave. “Can you see the lovely apple tree? Don’t you just love apples?” she says. My eyes follow the light, and there it is, right where it has always been, apples and all. But I SEE IT for the first time.

“Is that the tree of knowledge?” one asks. And, “was that the naked chicken of wisdom?” chimes another. “A look under the feathers.”

Then we all laugh together at our possibilities till our joyful tears form new mystery-shapes of our own on the floor, someday to be discovered . . . and I am once again blessed.

I have to say that as strange as it is, the more I read the teaching philosphy, the more I actually like it. I'm not so sure about the naked chicken; I believe the idea is a sound one, even if execution is lacking.

The extremes of the first few items in the list at the beginning of this post and of the who-knows-what-you're-going-to-get class by the naked chicken of wisdom both need to be tempered. If we bring the two components of structure and creativity together, we might come up with this college composition course based on The Simpsons. Now that's a syllabus!

Acacemia

IMing with a coworker recently, I mentioned the upcoming academic meetings, where twice a year faculty from all over the country fly in for a conference. Only instead of calling it the academic meetings, I called it the acacemic meetings. While I see the spelling and grammar missteaks I make in IM, I generally don't fix them or call attention to them based on the informal, conversational nature of IM, unless it made what I wrote illegible. This Freudian slip, however, was too much to leave on the table.

acacemic = cross between academic and glycemic

During the first such conference, I gained five pounds that week. With as much food as was floating around, I'm surprised I limited my increase to that. During the last one we did, I was able to break even by watching my eating closer and exercising more. The only soda I remember drinking was near the end of the week. I was having the hardest time staying awake so grabbed a Coke, only to find myself in the living-healthy-when-you-work-at-home-for-an-online-school session.

We went on to analyze various high-and-crash situations. Any time you get excited about some new idea, the reality of trying to implement it always seems to put you back into your place. This is all over in academia from starting a new class or degree program to graduating and trying to find a job. It doesn't slow down for professors either as they try to get tenure, wrangle for grant money, and work to save their departments from budget cuts.

Thinking about traditional schools, food (often high in sugar) is commonly used to keep the excitement going between the figurative highs and lows. What traditional college student (or assistant professor) isn't always on the lookout for free donuts, pizza, candy, coffee, soda, ice cream, etc.? Among stress, alcohol, buffet meal plans, abnormal sleeping habits, and simply lack of experience living on one's own, the Freshman 15 attacks many, holding on for a 6 year ride.

That is why WGU provides mentors for their online students, to make regular contact and ensure students can bounce out of the lows that life throws their way. I'm imagining now a deal with a nationwide pizza chain where online students can get a free pizza delivered to them, let's say 6 times per year, included in the cost of tuition. Feeling low? Click here for an instant pick-me-up.

I was exposed to yoga at the last academic meetings and have kept up with it semi-regularly. There's nothing like meeting people in person to improve the quality of virtual meetings. Setting regular goals and regularly checking them off your list is a great motivator for many.

So what are some other healthy ways of keeping the high going or at least leveling out the lows? I was going to offer a chocolate bar to the best answer, but Phillip ate it at the beginning of the post.

16 Free Tools to Create Media in eLearning

From a presentation at eLearning DevCon 2011 by Jeff Batt, a trainer with Rapid Intake.

• Video
  
  • JayCut - Online video editor
    
  • Video Spin - Desktop video editor
    
• Video Converter
  
  • Any Video Converter - Desktop video converter (batch convert, resize, etc.)
    
• Audio
  
  • Audacity - Desktop audio editor (don't forget the LAME mp3 encoder so you can export to mp3)
    
  • Aviary Myna - Online audio editor
    
  • Aviary Roc - Online music creator
    
• Images
  
  • GIMP - Desktop image editor
    
  • Aviary Phoenix - Online image editor
    
  • Sumo Paint - Online image editor (my addition, which actually bumps the list up to 17)
    
• Image Capture
  
  • Jing - Desktop image/video capture
    
  • Aviary Talon - Online image capture
    
• Animation
  
  • Vectorian - Desktop animation (Flash) editor
    
• Vector Images
  
  • Inkscape - Desktop vector image editor
    
  • Aviary Raven - Online vector image editor
    
• Color Schemes
  
  • Kuler - Online or desktop color theme picker
    
  • Aviary Toucan - Online color theme picker
    
• Course Analytics
  
  • enspark enfuse - Web analytics tool

I can vouch for Audacity, GIMP, Kuler (my new blog colors are from the Retro Package color scheme), and obviously Sumo Paint.

Now start creating!

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?

Everything is Miscellaneous

I just finished Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger. The overarching theme of the book is that all the choices we make have political implications, whether we know it or not. Even something as simple as alphabetical order can discriminate or be manipulated. Having a last name that begins with BA, I'm very aware that I end up very close to the beginning of most lists; however, I hadn't realized the extent of the controversy over the years regarding this unnatural ordering system until reading this book.

The following are a couple of quotes that I liked for one reason or another and that I was able to find again later:

College students' silverware drawers, Delicious, Flickr, the BBC, and Wikipedia are miscellaneous in different ways, except for one thing: How their content is actually arranged does not determine how that content can and will be arranged by their users.

All of the examples in the above quote were ones that the author had discussed in the preceeding pages. The author included the following by Ted Nelson, who came up with the term hypertext some 40 years ago:

People keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable, and sequential when they can't. Everything is deeply intertwingled.

Both quotes above touch on the fact that data is messy and that by freeing it from the rigid forms we like so much, it can be accessed more naturally by ourselves and by others.

For a fun example of a mashup that takes Flickr photos and combines them with chopped up corporate slogans, tied together with the tags that describe the photos, check out The Ad Generator. Some don't make sense. Some are hilarious. Overall, they are as meaningful (for better or worse) as real advertisements. They work because of all the metadata available for each picture. An interesting addition to the program would be to include location information from Flickr photos and combine that with information about where the user is located (easily gleaned from the user's IP address), and create localized ads that make even more sense for that user. Google and others are actually doing this kind of stuff when it comes to targeting ads.

Just last week, I was having a conversation about what it means to be computer literate. What can we expect students to know already when they come to USU, and more importantly, what should they know in order to be successful here? I mentioned that I thought it would be interesting to look into requiring students to show they know how to contribute to a wiki and post to a blog. The other person mentioned that they could see how the blog thing could be important, but they didn't think that being able to edit a Wikipedia page would be worth anything. If anything, I thought that would be one of the most important things we could be having students do as part of their CIL tests. By understanding how people contribute to Wikipedia, they will be able to better analyze the content of whichever Wikipedia page they find information on, since it will be the inevitable starting point for most of their papers, whatever the topics happens to be. So I really appreciated reading Weinberger pointing out that Wikipedia's openness is what makes it such a valuable resource.

In another recent conversation, it was posited that computer literacy included knowing who to go to solve a particular problem with your computer. I think it needs to go a level deeper - that technology users need to understand that everything does not always go smoothly. It's not enough to know that you can call the Helpdesk, describe the problem, and follow their directions to fix it. You have to expect that there will be problems, be prepared with a backup plan, and firmly push away the blame arrow from yourself. It's not your fault if your computer freezes up, just as it isn't your fault if you can't figure out how to navigate a company's website. It is your fault if you immediately give up. As technology becomes more and more messy, there will be issues to work through, but the results we get back will be more useful to us than ever before.

As I've read about many of the Web 2.0 sites mentioned in the book, it has been helpful that I've actually used most of them to some extent. I've generally started out skeptical with all of them. Why would I want to blog? Why would I want to upload and tag all my photos using Flickr? What's the use of bookmarking pages with Delicious? Yet once I start using each, I understand the purpose, and I connect to the community that I didn't realize was around me. It hasn't always been easy. When I first tried uploading pictures to Flickr and started troubleshooting why my appropriately tagged photos were not showing up in a conference feed like they should have, I was frustrated, but I didn't give up. I finally figured out that since my account was new, it had to be verified by someone at Flickr before my pictures would show up, and they eventually did. As I mentioned above, the key was to keep trying and not blame myself. I still haven't started Twittering yet. I don't see the purpose, but I'm getting closer to trying it. I know that at some point I'll enter the world of Facebook, but as of yet, I refuse.

Oh baby, that's a nice pen!

In about a week, a new product should hitting the virtual shelves. It has the potential to really hit it big. What is it? A pen. Specifically, the Livescribe. In addition to being a pen, it's also a computer, with an open platform to develop applications. We've all heard of products that are supposed to change the world. The difference with this particular device is that it's not supposed to change the world, and that is the exact reason that it might. Let me digress for a moment, then I'll come back to the pen, and hopefully that last sentence of mine will make more sense.

Think back a few years ago when Dean Kamen released the Segway. It is a transportation device that was heralded by some as having the potential to change the way that cities are built. Everyone in the world would want one. It would solve traffic problems, encourage walkable communities, clean up the air, etc. Fast forward about six years, and you'll maybe see an airport cop patrolling the terminal on one. A few mailmen deliver on them. There are specialty tours where you can see the city on a Segway. There are also arguments about whether the Segway should be allowed on the sidewalks since it could knock over pedestrians, but cars don't want to share the road with them either. Why isn't the Segway catching on, even though it's a wicked cool device? It requires us to change or adapt the way we do things in order to use it. It's neither a pedestrian device nor a vehicle. There's nowhere to park it. It takes about 5 hours to fully recharge after driving a maximum range of about 10 miles. It's too different, yet does not provide much benefit over a standard bicycle, other than being easier to make it up hills and harder to throw on the rack on the front of the bus.

My daughter got a doll for Christmas. (I'm still digressing, and I'm still planning on coming back to the pen.) This doll was supposed to be different than the dog my other daughter got for Christmas the year before. It's not. Both the doll and the dog are voice-activated. You talk to the dog and it does tricks or plays with a chew rope or eats a bone. You teach it to howl and shake. Well, when it understands what you say anyway, you can do all that stuff. It has to be perfectly quiet in the room, which doesn't happen much with four kids running around the house. It can't hear you if its moving or talking. You can only tell it commands that have been preprogrammed. You have to talk clearly. With high end voice recognition software like Dragon Naturally Speaking, there is a training period where it learns your voice, but it also trains you to speak more clearly. With this doll and dog, there's no training. It either understands you or it doesn't. I don't know how the experience with the dog didn't make it obvious that the doll wouldn't be a good buy either, but nevertheless it made its way to our house in Santa's bag. She plays counting games. She cries, and you have to ask her what she needs. You can feed her and make her go to sleep. Well, when it understands what you say anyway, you can do all that stuff. A good toy lets you do whatever you want with it. These voice-activated toys that don't understand what you want them to do just cause frustration, because you can only play with them how they were programmed to let you play with them.

What did all that have to do with the Livescribe? Well, it's a pen. It writes - whatever you want to write, in your own handwriting, as fast or as slow as your hand moves, just the same as any pen or pencil you've grown up with. You don't have to change or learn anything new. We've been writing so long that it would be hard to learn to write in another way. Just like the Qwerty vs. Dvorak keyboards - Dvorak is more efficient, but you have to relearn how to type, so we perpetuate Qwerty. So Livescribe simply lets you write, and while you write you can have it record audio. Later, when reviewing your notes, you can click on a word and play back the audio it recorded while you were writing that word. You can upload your notes to your computer and email them to your friends or search for certain words that you wrote down. So you still take notes the way you always have, but you now have recorded the audio that went with it. Cognitive load is decreased, because you don't have to worry about transcribing every word if you missed something. If you record a lecture using a regular mp3 voice recorder or tape recorder and you want to find the part where your professor explained a certain concept, you're going to be fast forwarding and rewinding, trying to find it. With Livescribe, you click on the word in your notes and hear the professor's voice defining it for you. Think of the uses: business meetings, field reporters, servers in a restaurant, professors grading student essays, etc.

In addition to being able to synchronize handwritten notes with recorded audio and easily share both with others, the Livescribe is an open platform, which will allow anyone to develop new applications to use the Livescribe. So really, the uses are endless and there will be little or no training required to use it. You just click record and start writing. Then you click play and point to the word where you want it to start playback from. It costs less than many iPods or cell phones, at about $200. You don't have to do anything different from what you might normally do, but you get the benefit of multiple technologies working together.

I hope it lives up to all the possibilities. The company is run by a team of experts who have collectively worked at such big names as Apple, BEA, Leapfrog, IBM, HP, Palm, GE, CNET, Chevron, and Lexar. If anyone can do it, hopefully these guys can.

Internet-based Communities

I mentioned an article about online communities and how the framework presented applies to the learning objects community. There were some other general points of the article that I thought I should follow up on.

Online communities tend to be successful or not in their own right, but well-designed software can facilitate an increase in productivity. With the many Web 2.0 tools available to us, along with pervasive connectedness, we see increased collaboration. It is becoming less necessary for communities to have to spend much time creating technology to suit their needs, other than simply choosing from many pre-existing tools and perhaps extending the tools' capabilities by mashing up with another tool. For a great matrix of tools that can be combined to form something new, see ProgrammableWeb's Mashup Matrix. For an awesome mashup example, see the Ad Generator, which combines photos from Flickr with components of real corporate slogans for moving, yet meaningless advertisements that you could spend an hour watching.

I thought it was interesting when de Souza talked about emoticons as symbols that take the place of body language and that some are close "to becoming a stable conventional symbol that can be universally understood by the computer literate population." Being involved in computer literacy myself, I would hope that the ethereal goal is not only to standardize upon symbols that computer literates can understand, but that our collective grandma could use also. That point is addressed in a way I hadn’t thought about before, when de Souza discusses how software designers communicate both directly and indirectly with their users. The direct communication is through help files and FAQs, and the indirect communication is how the designer works through the software to help users know how to interact with the system in order to achieve their goals. I might almost reverse those and call the help files indirect communication and the system interaction direct. Yes, a help system consists of the words of the designers directly handed to the user to explain what is going on; however, this communication only happens if something went wrong in the interface. The fact that someone is looking through the help means that something has broken down between the user and the tool. The user is knocked out of “the zone” and extraneous cognitive load begins to increase as the user has to try to figure out how to use the help system in order to help them learn how to use the primary system.

I’m actually interested in some of these design and usability issues as they relate to communities. The individual implications are important and factor into a lot of what I do for work, but the richness of experience that is gained through teamwork, especially as facilitated through the use of technology is very exciting with all the resources available to us now.

A Call for Mashups

Greg called for some lighthearted and creative mashups to celebrate Wiley's 10th birthday. Here's to 10 more years!


Original photo by jylcat
I should have mentioned, but didn't, that the picture in my last posting was dedicated to Erik.