Technology Inside & Outside the Classroom

I have already had several conversations with my new colleagues at VSU concerning technology in- and outside of the classroom. It's a good idea for instructors to have a policy about technology use in the classroom. In particular, I'm thinking a lot about a super section that I will be teaching this fall. It is a sophomore level course on teaching and learning with a maximum of 160 students. Right now about 60 students have enrolled. This will be the largest class I have taught face-to-face.

One suggestion for a large class is having a "laptop section" of the room... But my personal philosophy of technology in the classroom is that it's everywhere and unavoidable. I don't mind if students have their phones or laptops out in class. I see it as their personal responsibility to pay attention in class and I can't distinguish appropriate vs. inappropriate use. If they can have technology out in class and still do well on the assessments, then great. But what about other students that may be distracted by inapropriate use? I see it as their personal responsibility to move or confront this distraction.

One of my colleagues that has been teaching at VSU a long time pointed out that not all students have smartphones and technology at home. Our readings of Gray et al. (2012) made me feel at ease because most instructors surveyed expected students to access technology at school; I agree with this! I feel that I can use technology-based assessments and web 2.0 activities in my class because the technology is at least available at school.

The finding that I did not find reasonable in the study was the fact that a majority of instructors expected students to spend 11 to 20 hours on online assessments over the period of several weeks. I appreciate what Vanessa does in this class, in which she offers different tools and options and has several assignments due in a short period of time. The only way for us to get comfortable with the tools is to practice! For example, I now feel that four blog posts a week is reasonable because I feel more comfortable with the tool.

I do expect there to be a learning curve with my students when offering social media assignments. The same colleague I mentioned earlier stated that her students are online all the time, but do not know how to attach a file to an email. That is because attaching a file to an email is not necessarily part of being social on the Internet. I suggested that maybe having a background in Web 1.0 is actually part of being digital natives... This quote from our reading illustrates this nicely: "While there is no questioning the scale of young people’s engagement with the internet in general, evidence suggests that engagement is biased towards consumption rather than production... it seems they are not strongly inclined to take advantage of using them" (Crook, 2012, p.65).

I think the approach I want to take for this large class is surveying my students heavily during the first week (using Google forms). I want to know what their Internet usage is like. I want to know what tools they like to use already. Because of this EME6414 class, I'm now comfortable using many different social media tools and feel like I could quickly come up with assessments based on the students preferences. In my syllabus I will just write that there will be online assignments that will vary depending on student preferences. That should cover me… What do you think?

Crook, C. (2012). The ‘digital native’ in context: tensions associated with importing
     Web 2.0 practices into the school setting. Oxford Review of Education, 38(1),    
     63-80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2011.577946

Gray, K., Waycott, J., Clerehan, R., Hamilton, M., Richardson, J., Sheard, J., &      
     Thompson, C. (2012). Worth it? Findings from a study of how academics assess
     students’ Web 2.0 activities. Research in Learning Technology, 20(16153).
     http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v20i0/16153

IP and Diginole!

Have you discovered diginole yet? It is a repository in which FSU faculty and students can upload their published works. 

http://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/

I chose to discuss this topic because this week's focus has been on intellectual property when you publish something in a scholarly journal, you don't necessarily retain the rights to the work. You can negotiate any aspect of the publishing contract, but I never have.

The link below will take you to the two published articles that I have in the repository. As you can tell, when you download the articles and they are pre-published forms of the works. That's one way to get around this issue because you're not directly uploading the journal article copied out of the journal. You are publishing a prepress version.

http://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/do/search/?q=author_lname%3A%22Arrastia%22%20AND%20author_fname%3A%22Meagan%22&start=0&context=1950990&sort=date_desc

The person that explained this all to me is the librarian at FSU, Micah. Vanessa has already shared his Twitter account to follow. He's great! http://micahvandegrift.com/

Step 1 of FACETS: educational psychology sources

If you recall from this week's readings, the first step to curation is finding items - the F in FACETS. I know that many of my students will use Pinterest so I wanted to take advantage of that social media to curate items that will help them in educational psychology. 

To be specific, I will be taking, I mean teaching (ekk), EDUC 2130 at Valdosta State University. This class is an introduction to educational psychology for education majors, called Exploring Learning and Teaching. 

So far I have found these resources on different aspects of educational psychology. The next steps will be to assess the resources. Check out my Pinterest board here: http://pinterest.com/meaganarrastia/educational-psychology/

If you were an undergraduate student, do you think this would be helpful?

Memex to Metadata

I actually started drafting this blog last week while reading the networked information chapter of Networked in which the term human memex is introduced. After doing some Google searches, I still can't envision a human memex, networks of networks of people?

At any rate, I find the concept of metadata fascinating and wanted to highlight the history of metadata. Check out this infographic. According to this timeline, metadata dates back to 280BC!

P.S.Using this Creative Commons License suggested in this blog for the first time!


Meagan in Tallahassee by Meagan Caridad Arrastia is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at http://www.m-files.com/.

How's that schedule going?

I'm curious about how everyone else's schedules are going. This week was pretty successful to begin with because I front loaded my tasks and participation. 

Like many of my classmates I have been blogging away from home. This weekend I was in North Carolina. The region I stayed in was mountainous, meaning poor cell phone reception. To give you an idea of the poor signal, most of the vendors at the festival had to stop accepting credit card payments! Because I could not get a signal, the tweets I wanted to read and reply to wouldn't load. Can't wait to catch up when I get home. 

Overall, my schedule of completing readings on Monday really worked out for me. The tools that helped me stay organized were simply google calendar synced to my iPhone iCal. The blackboard mobile app and the blogger app were also very useful while traveling! However, I have to mention that the blogger app has limited options available and that's why I will go back and add hyperlinks to my last post about the Highland Games. 

What tools have helped you stay on track this week?

Apps for events

As I blog from the Highland Games at Grandfather Mountain NC, I'm thinking about how Web 2.0 tools aid in the facilitation of face to face special events. In the past I have had mixed experiences with apps for events, like Dragoncon and the American Educational Research Association conference. At the very least, the apps provided a map of events. Even at such an intimate event as the Highland Games, such an app would have been useful. What have you experiences with event apps been like?

We Live in Public

Remember Prodigy back in the early 1990s (the internet site, not the band)? We Live in Public is a fantastic documentary about Josh Harris an early internet pioneer that started internet radio and worked on the chat rooms of Prodigy. I used to show this documentary in my intro sociology class to talk about social construction. It's available on Netflix and iTunes. Check out the trailer:

Not only did Josh experiment with putting people in a networked bunker, he also tried to literally live in public by broadcasting his apartment filled with cameras. This blog post includes an interview (12 minutes) with Josh in 2014 in which he talks about how individuals are networked, part of the "cybership." Are you a cybercitizen?