EduGeek Journal

If you have worked in education long enough, chances are that you have had to deal with student threats. A typical scenario in online courses usually unfolds like this: a student disappears from class for a while and misses several assignments. This student appears again after the last day of class and begs to be allowed to make up the missed assignments to bring up their score. The instructor sticks with class policy and the student’s grade stays the same.

The student then proceeds to write an intense email letter that threatens to give the professor a very bad course review if he or she doesn’t raise the grade. Or the student goes to another site like Facebook to start a group to spread stories about how “bad” their professor was.

Instructors in this situation are justified in being a bit concerned because student evaluations affect pay and eventually tenure. Anything from evaluations to ratemyprofessor.com could be used to get back at a professor for just doing their job.  Not to mention the fear that some student might get mad enough to come back with a gun.

Of course, student reactions are not the only concern here. Their parents can be just as threatening - especially at the grade school level. The scary truth about cyberbullying is that anyone can bully or be bullied.

Most schools have policies that somewhat deal with physical threats to instructors. These policies need to be expanded to deal with electronic means of communication and the cyberbullying that can occur through those. Now, I don’t think that these policies should be so strict that students are afraid to respectfully disagree with their professors. The goal should be to create a system that deals with malicious libel, slander, or misrepresentation of events through any electronic means, whether these actions are actually carried out or just threatened.

I would also then suggest that schools create an anonymous web page where anyone (students, instructors, or community members) can submit links to specific instances that they think are inappropriate. We shouldn’t just make instructors or students responsible for self-reporting these incidences. Empower students and even people that have no connection to your school with the ability to stop threatening activities. Whether it is students witnessing other students bullying each other on Facebook, or a random web surfer finding malicious threats against a professor in a discussion forum – give these people the power to do something about it and report it to officials at your school.

The good news is that we are starting to see more openness to mobile devices in classrooms. Teachers are more open to leveraging mobile devices and administrators are starting to relax their knee-jerk reactions to the dangers. The bad news is that you still have to cobble together systems and websites to start using mobile devices – and those tools might be different from one classroom to the next.

But what if all of the mobile devices – as well as laptops, desktops, and other devices – could communicate with each other, no matter what they are or what software they are using?

Apparently, this is a problem that emergency responders have also had. So researchers at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies (in partnership with many other universities) have developed a set of tools that will let people communicate with each other using whatever device or operating system they want.

The details are in the article and they sound promising. This is what we will need in the classroom of the future – the ability to connect all of the different devices students could bring in and let them communicate with each other. Even if the Internet connection goes down, students could still connect and network. Obviously, future web apps and programs will need to be able to adjust to this new technology seamlessly. But the educational potential is very interesting.

This morning I was pondering what impact Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) would have on the overall landscape of education. Most people involved in education that I speak to haven’t even heard of them. Many people (myself included) drop out of them before they really get started. So the question we have to wonder is: do they really matter if they aren’t going to be the next big thing in education?

Many educators certainly seem to have an obsession for searching for “the next Google” or the next “Facebook for education” or the next big thing to change the face of education.  Some think that MOOCs will be that next big thing, others think they are going nowhere.

The problem is not the with MOOC, but with the question. We don’t need one specific thing to the be THE end-all big thing for education. We have suffered too long in systems that want to have one cookie-cutter answer for everything. Want to teach an online course? Into the LMS box you. Want to blog? The LMS box has that for you, too.

I am starting to talk to more and more students that never read the syllabus of their online course. They feel the courses are becoming too similar and predictable – so why bother re-reading a cookie-cutter syllabus? If students are getting so used to online courses that they are going on cruise mode to take them, then it is time to shake things up a bit.

For most of us, the importance of the MOOC format is not the idea itself, but the fact that it represents a different way of teaching a course or idea or skill. We don’t need it to become the next big thing – we need it to become one of many new formats that online courses can be taught in.

And we need many other formats out there to spring up and gain traction. We need to offer a greater variety of formats and options, just like you see in face-to-face courses. Do you teach Science labs with the lecture method? Do you sit Art students down in the self guided labs and hope they figure out how to create art? Face-to-face courses have different formats (even though some do need to break out of the one or two they are stuck in), so online courses need to follow suit…. maybe even blaze new trails.

So even if you can’t stand MOOCs, you should at least follow their development and support their existence, or else it will be back to the cookie cutter for us all.

One of the biggest problems I have with Google doing anything new is that the whole world goes Google Gaga. Of course, the same happens when Apple releases anything new. While I love G+ and iPads just like any other good EduGeek, I want to still hear about all of the other things that are going on in EdTech circles.

Like those things called virtual worlds. Anyone remember them?

I can’t seem to find much movement or news on the Second Life front, especially sine they decided to cut off the education discount. Did anyone manage to create a good iPhone/iPad app for Second Life? One that actually feels like the desktop browser and not some text-based role-playing game from the 80s?

Encouraging news is that the Sloodle project seems to be still moving forward – releasing projects that work with OpenSIM as well as Second Life.  But what else is happening out there in the virtual worlds… um… world?

The front page of Second Life now makes me feel like it is “eHarmony 2200″ back from the future to show us what romance will look like in 200 years. So I am a little scared to log in myself and see…

Well, that and I think the island I left my avatar on fell victim to a budgetary axe a while back. So no telling what I will see when I log in.

Blackboard recently announced that they have melded the two video conferencing services they bought (Wimba and Elluminate) into one service. The new service is being called a new version of Blackboard Collaborate. The usual language accompanied this news – they took the best of both worlds, tested it with universities, got feedback, etc. Blackboard always promises these kinds of things and delivers mixed results (at best). The thing that bothers me is that I never, ever heard a single person make a comment like “wouldn’t it be great if they mixed Wimba and Elluminate and kept the best of both services to create something awesome?”

And how do you mix the “best” of two services that do a lot of the same things?

I’m going to go out a limb and say that the people that went with Wimba probably went with it because they liked the way it worked over Elluminate, and those that went with Elluminate were the same in regards to Wimba. Mixing the two will probably just make everyone upset because now no one is getting what they originally wanted.  The problem with Collaborate is that you are forcing a product on the market that nobody wanted. That has never been a good idea. Anyone remember New Coke?

When Google releases a new service, they usually do a decent to excellent job on the design and interface. You can rarely fault them on their ideas. Even if a particular idea isn’t your cup of tea, you can at least see where others might like it.

But having said all that, it is still getting harder and harder to get excited about new Google services.

Its not that they are boring or pointless. It really just has to do with not wanting to invest in a new tool to only have it canceled in less than a few years.  Many people point to the untimely death of Google Wave as the main cause for their lukewarm response to Google+, but those of us that have been following Google for a while know that there were many other disappointing closures before Wave.

But if it can make it, Google Plus has some great ideas that could be very useful in Education. Or at least I think. Very few of my friends are on it yet, despite me sending out invitations… so it is hard to get a good feel for truly how well it works. But here are some initial thoughts:

• As many have said, the ability to only share certain information with certain groups of friends is a great idea. It was a great idea when ELGG and Facebook first came up with it, of course – but Facebook kind of never really bought into the idea once they added it (and the average online user has never heard of ELGG). After all, they were trying to monetize your connections, so why make it easy to reduce the number of connections and interactions you can make?
• The killer app to many people seems to be the free group video chat. I haven’t had a chance to use it yet because of my limited circle of friends that are in Google Plus, but the early feedback sounds positive. But I know that this is a feature and price point that many educators have been looking for.
• Am I supposed to say G+, Google+, or Google Plus? What is the official spelling?
• Programmers are already writing browser plug-ins. Sure, Facebook has apps, but not until years after FB was created, and none of them seem to be able to change the core functionality of how Facebook looks and operates.  Maybe there are some out there and I don’t know it. The Facebook + Google Plus integration was pretty nice, even if it was a little basic (there were concerns over it being malware, so I uninstalled it). It added a button on your G+ page that let you open your Facebook stream right there in G+.
• The true measure of whether G+ will be successful or not depends on how well the people in charge understand networks. George Siemens wrote a recent post examining the importance of this.  Siemens also comes to the conclusion that Google just doesn’t get it. That may be so, but I would also say it may be too early to really tell. The user base for Facebook is so huge while the base for G+ is incredibly small. Facebook will probably seem to work better just due to its size, while G+ may appear to fall short due to how new it is.  I think it also depends on what you look at. Siemens looks at Facebook friends suggestions, something I usually ignore completely. Unlike Siemens, over half of the friend suggestions I get on Facebook are the “way out there” kind.  So I have to admit that I have been ignoring that feature in G+ because I also ignore it in Facebook. Besides – I don’t need and algorithm figuring out for me who I need to connect with. I prefer to do some research on my own and find my own connections. Maybe Siemens is right about Google recommending only “power users” to him, or maybe he doesn’t realize that he probably qualifies as a power user himself (much more than myself or most people I know) and the possibility is that since Google sees him in the same category as these people that it is also recommending them to him. So, ultimately, the success of G+ will probably be more in the eye of the user, based primarily on how well they do the specific things each user is interested in.
• It is probably a given that most Google services will integrate with G+ at some point, but how long will it take for the ones that haven’t already been connected? I can’t seem to find a way to share anything from Google Reader with my circles – other than the old school way of copying and pasting a link. But I could already do that in Facebook. In order for me to switch from Facebook, I am going to need to see integration with the things I already use.
• Google also says that Plus pages for companies (like Facebook fan pages) are coming. In reality, they are already there in the form of Google Sites, Google Groups, and even Blogspot. Once all of that is brought together into a page for companies or classes or whatever in Google Plus, that will be pretty cool. Cooler even than Facebook Fan Pages… if there are enough users on G+ to take advantage of it.
• I like the idea of Sparks, but I am wondering how to make them more useful. For instance, I like music. But not all music. But there are a large number of bands I follow. Do I have to start a hundred Sparks to follow them all? Sounds daunting. OR will it be possible to start a Spark on a broader topic and then go in and specify what parts of the broader topic you want to see?

Overall, an interesting new product that could go many different ways. Something for everyone to keep their eyes on.

News is starting to spread about the new Google+ Project.  While most people are comparing it to Facebook, I also look at it and see how it is taking on everything from Foursquare to you name the latest niche social network flavor site. It seems like they are going after it all: social networking, location services, conferencing, recommendations, etc.  But two important features will make it something to watch for educators: the focus on creating small groups to share with and a focus on privacy.

If you can create your own “Circles” as they call them, and then share what you want with them and even do video chats – you pretty much have the beginnings of a Learning Management System.  If they integrate Circles with other services (like Blogspot) – that would make it even more interesting. You could make a blog private and then with one click allow access to one circle (course).

Like Google Wave, invitations are limited (and will probably be highly sought after for a while). But will the failure of Google Wave make people too cautious to try this? And when was the last time Google had a big hit idea on their hands? Who will want to start using this and then have it canceled in a year or two?

Okay… I do want to give it a shot. And you probably do to. But Google Wave (and Lively and…) all showed us that major interest from the educational world is not enough to keep a Google project going. Which is one reason why I tend to doubt we will ever see a Google LMS.

I have been using RockMelt as my main browser for a few months now. Not sure why I switched over from straight up Chrome – I guess I wanted to see how Rockmelt would change my usage of Facebook and/or Twitter. Not a whole lot, but I do like the integration of different websites into a seamless experience. Now I am wondering if the future LMS or PLE should really be a website or not. Maybe it should just be a set of browser plug-ins and mobile apps? I have pondered that before, but now I am becoming more convinced that this is a better route to go.

Breaking down the walled garden will still leave us contained in the garden if that is still where the “learning” is supposed to happen. Many LMS providers make it easier to import content from services like WordPress and YouTube – so in many ways the walls are gone or at least have more openings. Or maybe it is more accurate to call them one-way passages – you can bring more content in (or at least easier than it used to be). But you can’t as easily get that learning out into the wild for others (your PLN) to join with you in exploring and expanding it.

A recent article on ExtremeTech made a case for Firefox to create their own OS. Reading that article makes me realize how radically different the online world will be in just a few years. Will the LMS/PLE/VLE/etc be there in this strange new world, or will it be sitting along side MySpace as a nostalgic relic of a bygone era?

By now, most educators have probably at least glanced at the New Media Consortium’s Horizon Report on the top 6 emerging technologies in K-12 education. An interesting list, full of technologies that I would love to see take hold in education.

But some things are still on the list from 2010 – like cloud computing. How many years will they let cloud computing be listed as emerging in one year or less? As others have noted, the word “cloud” is becoming an overused cliche (like “social” and “___2.0″ before it) – so we may not even be able to tell if or when this one actually emerges. After all, some people still debate whether Web2.0 is old news or still around the corner.

In many ways, K-12 kind of serves as a litmus test for whether trends have substance or not. I used to be a junior high teacher, and I found that most teachers don’t get overly excited about new technology just for the heck of it. Those of us that do (like me) tend to go into different lines of work.  The rest just want to know “will this work?” If you can’t prove that it will help students learn better/faster/easier/etc, they won’t touch it. Sometimes this suspicion keeps grade schools lagging behind, and other times it saves them from wasting time on pointless hype.

But it also means that if anything catches on, it probably has some merit. K-12 teachers usually don’t have the time to experiment on their students like (some) college professors do.

So some of these predictions I see as wishful thinking. Yes, I too wish they would emerge – but I don’t see it happening in five years or less.  Mobile devices and educational games? I love them myself, but too many educators are still suspicious of them… and they still cost money (money that many states don’t have for the next few years at least).  Open content? Love the idea, but content still rakes in big money for some companies – so expect push back against that one. Learning analytics? Sounds too much like administrative-ese to many, so expect a hard road on that one. Cloud computing? I do a lot of it myself, but how many IT Directors do you know that love releasing that much control.? Anyone? Anyone? Yep.

The problem with most of these emerging technologies is that so many of them rely on administrative decisions – districts have to decide to allow cellphones, or to switch to cloud computing, or to fork over money for games, etc.  The main one that actual teachers have the most control over is the Personal Learning Environment – assuming they can choose tools that their school fire wall allows that is.  But even with restrictive firewalls, you can always use them after hours from home to extend student learning. If the idea catches on, then we will possibly see this one emerge.

Don’t get me wrong – I want to see all of these emerge as soon as possible (used properly, that is). But we need to be aware of the obstacles for their emergence as much as we are of their existence.

Although this has been up for a bit, I finally got a chance to read Tedd Curran’s guide to creating your own personal learning network.  This is a great guide for beginners – I highly recommend it if you are new to PLNs or are just not sure if you are doing everything you need to cultivate yours. I was reminded to set-up Google Reader folders by reading this – something I always mean to do but keep forgetting.

Hopefully in the near future, we will see more classes that have a guide like this for a huge chunk of the syllabus. Maybe there will be a few required items, blogs, etc to add to each student’s PLN, but a large part of it will be left up to them to find their own.  Class discussions and assignments could then be based on dynamic content online rather every student trying to figure out how to re-write the same information over and over again without plagiarizing what has been said a million times already.

Someday we may even see entire departments or schools that would have a PLN guide like this for their orientation.  Just like we now make all new students go through and set-up a school email account, some day they might also set-up a PLN.  Each course they enroll in would then have a set of resources to add as a folder to their PLN (or maybe it will be added for them).

The missing link that I see is the software – there needs to be something that makes it easy for instructors to share relevant parts of their PLN with students, as well as students to share good resources with each other. Well, something a bit more advanced than emailing links to everyone. Maybe Google Reader already does this and I need to explore it more?