Interview with Howard Rheingold

I just got back from out of town with so much to catch up on that I am not even sure where to start — and I'm sharing this with #Rhizo15 too as a promise to get caught up there soon!

First of all, though, I wanted to share this fun interview with Howard Rheingold along with a BIG THANKS to Howard for giving me this great chance to share the things that my students and I are doing at University of Oklahoma. Keyword: FUN! :-)

Teaching The Humanities Online: Blog post from Howard with lots of links and such, and here is the accompanying Vimeo video.

Laura Gibbs from Connected Learning Alliance on Vimeo.

I was so glad to have a chance to do this interview, especially as I will be attending DML2015 in LA in June and getting to meeting lots of new people who are doing great connected learning projects also! You can find out more about DML and connected learning at the DML Initiatives page. Participating in DML Connected Courses last fall was a really important event for me, and I would urge everybody to explore that DML website. It is full of inspiring stuff!

Pondering a Virtual Book Club to go with #OpenTeachingOU chats...

Thanks to a #Rhizo15 post which reminded me just how much I like the book Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi — Getting into the Flow: a post for #Rhizo15 — I got the idea that we could maybe have a rhizomatic book club and, in particular, I would really like to get something like that happening at my school (University of Oklahoma), building on the good energy we got going with our Twitter chat experiments for #OpenTeachingOU this semester.

Our Twitter chats benefited so much from what I learned by watching and occasionally participating in various edu Twitter chats over the past couple of years, and I would LOVE to get ideas and advice from people who participate in virtual book clubs about what has worked best for them!

Those Twitter chats grew out of a phone conversation that Rob Reynolds (NextThought guru, and formerly of OU), Stacy Zemke (OU OER goddess) and I had back in February... we had fun talking on the phone together, but we realized it would obviously be even more fun — and useful! — to get more people in on the conversation, and sure enough, some people from OU participated, and some other people joined in too, which was just great: by making the conversation open and online, we managed to get some people together who come from different parts of OU, and also some people who are not at OU but who were interested in the topics at hand.

So, when I was thinking about how fun it would be to read Flow together with Rob and Stacy and any/all the folks I know online who would be interested in doing that together, I got the idea of proposing an "online book club" that might even be sponsored by our Center for Teaching Excellence. They offer all kinds of great face-to-face workshops, but so far they have not done anything with online workshops that are asynchronous, taking advantage of different kinds of online spaces to connect and share. If CTE would sponsor the book club so that the OU participants could maybe get the cost of the book covered (Flow for Kindle, for example, is $9.95), that would be really cool... but of course even without such sponsorship, we could make it work! So, I'm going to just brainstorm here some of the cool things I would like to see happen as a result of this.

Here are some thoughts in no particular order:

1. Read/re-read some COOL BOOKS about learning, education, communication, etc.! I know I would get so much more out of reading books together with others. Some of the books I have read in recent years that had a big impact on me and which are of general education interest would be Csikszentmihalyi's Flow, Daniel Pink's Drive, Gleick's The Information (AMAZING book, IMO; I loved that one), etc. And then of course there are all the books I have on my book list that I have NOT read and which a book club would prod me to read, plus I would benefit from other people's suggestions about what to read.

2. Have a chance to talk ABOUT READING with people. This is something I am increasingly obsessed with as I work on my classes: I am very happy with how the writing components of my classes work, but the reading components need so much improvement. What do we do when we read? How do we read? Why do we read? It would be so great to make this both a book club and a meta-book-club about reading itself.

3. Support DISTRIBUTED CONVERSATIONS that happen via blogs and other online spaces. I have been so happy with the results from curating a #Rhizo15 blog feed (more about that) — it took so little time and has resulted in a fantastic source of stuff for me to read and explore every single day! So, I know feel really confident about using Inoreader as a way to consolidate and re-share blogs and also Twitter and Google+ content so that conversations can take place across spaces. Given the size of #Rhizo15 (there 62 feeds now), I haven't been collecting the comment feeds for the blogs also, but it is do-able of course (I follow comment feeds for my students' blogs), so I know we could build a really cool distributed network of blogs, comments and additional online presence, just with simple use of Inoreader, nothing fancy required.

4. Support faculty in building ONLINE PRESENCE. For those distributed conversations to take place, faculty need some online presence: a blog, Twitter, Google+, something that lends itself to crossplatform connections (Facebook does not do that very well). I've found it very easy to get my students up and running with blogs on the first day of my online courses, and so I am confident we could get faculty up and running too, especially with the opportunities provided by create.ou.edu which allows them to own their own domain online if they want to do that.

5. Integrate book chats into our TWITTER CHAT schedule. I am hoping that we could carry on with our OpenTeachingOU Twitter chats, and once every two week seems a good schedule for that, in which case it would be easy to fold in some book chats into the mix over the course of the semester. I am thinking the book chats would not be 100% focused on the book itself, but instead would be a chat topic INSPIRED by the book, which would go in whatever directions it goes in, but which would be of interest to anyone reading the book for the book club.
Week 2: Chat topic whatever
Week 4: Chat topic INSPIRED by Book 1
Week 6: Chat topic whatever
Week 8: Chat topic INSPIRED by Book 2
Week 10: Chat topic whatever
Week 12: Chat topic INSPIRED by Book 3
Week 14: Chat topic whatever

The idea is that people would participate in the Virtual Book Club whatever way they want with the book club: blogs, Twitter, Google+, other online sharing... and for people who want something synchronous, there would be these Twitter chats, along with support for people getting started who might never have done a Twitter chat before.

So, I am curious what people think... people who do book clubs online... people who have been participating in our Twitter chats... OU people whoever you might be! What are good strategies for virtual book clubs? What really exciting/useful books would you recommend?

Update: Thanks to a rhizo15 connection, I have found this VERY idea-filled post from Laura Gogia: A Gathering Together: My #TJC15 Connected Learning Experience.

I'm going to try to write up a proposal for CTE next week sometime (since I'll be out of town May 11-15), so any ideas, suggestions, etc. would be much appreciated! The success of our Twitter chats was so encouraging... so I am being so bold as to hope for more. :-)

DML2015: Here I come........!!!!

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So, here is some big news: for the first time in ten years (!), I am going to a conference — DML (Digital Media and Learning Research Hub) in Los Angeles, June 11-13. Hashtag: #DML2015.

Here is the conference site: dml2015.dmlhub.net

And the main DML site: dmlhub.net

I got to know some of the DML folks thanks to the fabulous experience that was Connected Courses in Fall 2014 (#ccourses).

When Alan Levine contacted me and asked me to be on a panel along with some other fabulous people, I obviously could not say no (Alan Levine!!! my hero!!!), and then it was really exciting when we found out the panel was accepted (long wait; I was thinking we had not made the cut).

Then, even more exciting, I got some funding from my school for the travel, thanks to the VERY NICE people in the Arts & Sciences Online Course program and to our wonderful Dean (yes, he's on Twitter!). That was a huge surprise; going to a conference is insanely expensive (eegad, the hotel, it makes my head hurt), so it really makes a huge difference to have my school's support in doing this!

In future posts I'll have more to say as I get ready for the conference, learn more about all the good work the folks at DML are doing, and on and on. It is going to be really fun to meet some people I have known only online, including people like Alan whom I have followed for over a decade online but whom I have never met in person. The whole Connected Courses experience last fall was such a great experience, and I am looking forward to DML goodness in June! :-)

Thoughts about SUSTAINABILITY for this week's chat

Gearing up for our #OpenTeachingOU Twitter chat on SUSTAINABILITY tomorrow morning (Friday, March 27 - details), I wanted to write up some quick thoughts about concepts and questions that come to my mind as I think about sustainability.

My guess is that when most people think about sustainability in the context of education, it is at an institutional or program level, which makes perfect sense. Sometimes sustainability is even just shorthand for costs, revenue streams, income, business models, etc.

In our chat, though, I hope we can broaden that out to think about sustainability on all levels, big and small, institutional and personal, going beyond just business models. Rather than an implicit or explicit business model, I'd like to appeal to an ecological model.

If you look at the Wikipedia article on Sustainability, here is how it opens: "In ecology, sustainability is how biological systems remain diverse and productive."

Diverse.

Productive.

As a teacher, those are concepts that resonate with me in a very powerful way, much more so than talking about just economic sustainability, although obviously the economy is part of the big picture in ecology just as it is in education.

So, if you have a few moments, I'd urge you to take a look at that Wikipedia article; it is very clear, very informative, and full of all kinds of concepts we can use to extend our thinking! For example, just look at this nifty Venn diagram which I found there:

In terms of education, thinking about our educational "environment" is a good way to ponder all the RESOURCES that we need to do our work. Everything that we do as learners and as teachers will require resources... and if we want to be able to carry on with our work, whatever our work might be is, those resources must be sustainable. That is, they need to exist in an abundant supply and/or they need to be renewable. Ideally, the resources would be renewable as a natural part of our workflow!

So, for example, there is the personal ENERGY we need just to do what we do and to keep on doing it. If we don't have enough energy, our work will suffer. We are at risk of burn-out.

Another crucial resource is TIME. I would guess that finding enough time to do our work and keep on doing it is  one of the biggest challenges of all. I know it is a challenge for me, and I can tell that it is an even bigger challenge for my students.

There are also MATERIALS that we might need. That can be content, or it might be tools, along with the spaces (physical or digital) in which we do our work.

On a systems level, we need FEEDBACK so that we can monitor and improve the system. I need detailed, reliable data to make strategic decisions about how to use all available resources.

Also on a systems level, we need to think about processes and strategies. For example: REUSE. The more reuse I can get out of anything — reuse of my work, reuse of my students' work, reuse of other people's work, etc. — the more productive and sustainable my courses will become.

As someone who has been teaching the same online courses for over 10 years, I have thought A LOT about these topics on a micro-scale (i.e. at the course-level, in terms of what the students and I are doing), and I have been constantly improving my courses to make them more productive, more resilient, etc. My goal is to design courses that are sustainable and sustaining for both me and for the students.

So... just for fun, I decided to use HTML5 Word Clouds to make a word cloud of the ideas on my mind here, a sort of snapshot of what I think about when I think about sustainability in education:

I've tried to brainstorm some questions that reflect these ideas, and if you have ideas for questions to help propel our chat on Friday, that would be super - let me know here at the planning post or here at the GoogleDoc.

And I'll see everybody on Friday, 9AM, Norman time. :-)

OpenTeachingOU: An Open Friday Twitter chat!

I'm creating this post today, Thursday, to brainstorm some ideas and strategies for a Twitter chat fest that Rob Reynolds, Stacy Zemke and I will be enjoying on Friday morning, March 13, at 9AM Oklahoma time (and that's 10AM for me in NC)... hopefully with the participation of others also. Rob's got a Google+ post here to get the ball rolling! We'll be talking about open education in general, and specifically our experiences with open education efforts at the University of Oklahoma.

Yes, I know it is Friday the 13th!!! But we won't let that get us down! :-)

I've volunteered to Storify the event afterwards, and we'll be using the #OpenTeachingOU hashtag, along with whatever hashtags emerge. We were prompted to do this in honor of Open Education Week, and that hashtag is #OpenEducationWk with the related #AllAboutOpen tag. And the #OER hashtag is always hopping!

In addition, I've set up a publicly editable GoogleDoc where we can use to store and share stuff that doesn't fit in a tweet: OpenTeachingOU Google Doc. If this turns into a recurring Twitter event (I hope it will!), we can use this document, or a series of such documents, as an ongoing repository across multiple events.

I'm not sure if we want to run this like an organized type of Twitter chat with Q1 Q2 and so on, with people responding A1 A2, etc., but it might be good to give that a try just so that we behave! If we swap questions out every 10 minutes, that gives us time for a half-dozen questions. (More ideas and tips for Twitter chats.)

Here are some I would suggest, and hopefully both Stacy and Rob will chime in with ideas about that. I'll be glad to watch the clock and tweet out the questions at 10-minute intervals if we decide to try to be that well behaved, ha ha. How do these questions sound?

Q1 How is "open" important in your work as an educator today?
Q2 Who are some of your open heroes and heroines?
Q3 How has your own open presence online evolved over time?
Q4 What specific problems can the open approach help us to solve?
Q5 What can we do to promote open education at the Univ. of Oklahoma?
Q6 Do we want to keep using Twitter chat for more open-fests?

Later today, I'll make up a new Twitter list of people doing open-related work at OU; I've got a huge Twitter list for OU faculty/staff and OU programs, so I'll run through those looking for people who are using blogs, websites, Twitter, etc. to share their teaching and learning, and I'll let them know about this chat. Meanwhile, if you have people to suggest for that list now, let me know! Just tweet me (@OnlineCrsLady) with their names and Twitter handles. That will be great!

Okay, here is first run at a Twitter list: OpenTeachingOU Twitter list. I'm sure there are lots of people I have forgotten... let me know! :-)

SEE YOU FRIDAY AT THE TWITTERS :-)

Leave comments here at the blog, at the Google Doc, or over at Google+. Here's the Google+ post embedded:

Memes from Review Week

This past week was "Review Week" in my classes, and people shared so many good memes in the posts. I picked a few of the memes out here, and you can see all the posts in this stream from Inoreader. There are so many good suggestions and ideas here that will help with next semester! For more about Review Week, see: Anatomy of an Online Course.

Be Prepared! Online Courses on Autopilot

I've been out of the loop for the past three weeks as you can see and, sadly, it is because of a family emergency: my mother, who was on hospice care, died last week. I've started a separate blog about that, both to work through the hard times of the past few weeks and also to share with others what I learn about death-with-dignity legislation: Morituris Omnibus. I've always felt strongly about each person's right to choose the manner and time of their dying, especially when facing medical calamities like my mother was facing; now that cause is much more urgent and personal, and I will be using that blog to share my involvement in this movement for change in our medical and legal systems.

Meanwhile, in this blog post for #OpenTeachingOU, I want to share what I learned about my online course design and how in some ways it was flexible enough to accommodate my sudden and unexpected absence, although I now know that I should also make some improvements for the future.

Communication. By relying on the class announcements blog along with emails, I was able to keep all the students informed about what was happening. That felt very solid; I don't think I need to make any changes there, and I was incredibly grateful to the students for their patience and understanding during this hard time. Of course, if I were really out of action completely, I would need the director of the online course program to communicate about that to my students; see note below about planning for a really serious emergency like that.

Assignment Readiness. This was the main problem I need to fix. In the past, I used to have all the assignments 100% ready to go before the semester started, but over the past two years I have been tinkering with my classes a lot, which means I have been writing up some assignment instructions and declarations during the course of the semester so that I could be really responsive to student suggestions and feedback. To accommodate emergencies like this in the future, I need to be more careful. Before the semester starts I need to have every assignment ready to go; that doesn't mean I cannot tinker with them and improve them. Instead, it just means that in case of an emergency like what I faced this semester, I would not have any doubts about the students being able to carry on in my absence. Because I did have some Internet access during this crisis, I was able to get the assignments ready this time — but in a different kind of emergency (if I were in the hospital or something myself), the students would have been missing some of the assignments that they needed.

Project Feedback. The bulk of my time each week (appx. 30 hours) is spent giving feedback to students, and the week by week assignments are structured such that the students have my feedback from the previous week in time to do their work on the next week's assignment. Over these two weeks, however, I was not able to keep that up given my limited Internet access. Out of the appx. 160 projects students turned in while I was gone, there were 25 where I could not write my reply in time, so I gave those students an extra free pass for that assignment. This strategy assumes, of course, that I have Internet access. If I were completely out of the loop, I would need a different strategy so that the students could keep on working ahead to develop their project, while postponing all the revision work until my return. So, I need to write up a kind of "emergency plan" which will explain to the students how to carry on doing the work for their Projects in my absence, catching up on the revision process later.

Administrative Coordination. I contacted the director of our online course office when I had to leave town to let her know what was happening, and because I did have some Internet access, there was really nothing that she needed to do or worry about. If, however, this had been an emergency where I was incapacitated, it would have been very hard for her to figure out what needed to be done in my classes, especially if the emergency were to occur at the end of the semester when grades are due. So, at the beginning of each semester, I need to write up an "emergency plan" not just for my students but also for the online course director so that she would be able to easily manage any emergency that might come up at any time during the semester. Besides the Projects, everything in the course is ready to run on its own, student-driven, in my absence. Even in a really dire emergency (if I were kidnapped by space aliens in Week 2 of the semester, for example), the courses would still be viable. Not optimal — but viable!

Overall, I am really pleased about how my classes are very much the result of the students' own work and their interactions with each other. So, while I am definitely a hands-on instructor, heavily involved with my students' work every week, my classes really can survive a disruption like this — and what a big relief that was over the past two weeks! I am very grateful about that: it meant that I could hang up the phone with hospice and immediately go online to get a plane ticket without a moment's hesitation, knowing that my students would be fine without me. At the same time, this is the first ever emergency I've faced in 10+ years of teaching online that meant I had to be "absent" from class for more than a just a day. So, I learned a lot from the experience, and I will be sure to do a better job in future of making my classes emergency-proof.

Yes, we can all use the help of Otto the Auto-Pilot in case of an emergency!

And here's an Airplane click featuring Otto at work:

February 15: OpenTeachingOU News Update

So, for the #OpenTeachingOU round-up this week, there is some FABULOUS stuff to report. What a great week! And for more, check out the #OpenTeachingOU Omnifeed (thank you, Inoreader!), and also previous news round-ups.

OU Folks

Rob Reynolds, NextThought CPO. Given OU's ginormous investment in NextThought, I thought this should count as "OU Folks," especially since I am so happy about it: Rob Reynolds is now Chief Product Officer at NextThought, and we can see his work already taking effect. They have a real website now, and a real blog!

Faculty Learning Community: Online Presence and Digital Identity. I was THRILLED to see that the upcoming FLC from Adam Croom already has a web presence of its own! I hope to join in even if I cannot participate in the face-to-face.

Domains Do Disney. Adam was also at ELI this week and shared this fantastic blog post with an update on create.ou.edu. There are some faculty blogs here I have to explore, so expect more goodness here in the OU section next week!

Faculty Learning Community: Teaching in a Digital Space. Another great FLC, and one that I hope will leave a digital trail also. Kevin Buck says he will blog it! Yes!!!!!! We need some good Kevin energy for D2L... the John Baker webinar was not exactly a toe-tapper this week (maybe others got something out of it; I listened attentively but had nothing to take away).

President Boren on Twitter. Yes, President Boren has a Twitter account now... so, thanks to the power of the Twitter widget in D2L, President Boren was there to greet my students when they logged in!

Beyond OU

Striving for a Pedagogy of Empowerment: Taking a Leap of Faith. Beautiful piece from Mia Zamora: "A truly wise person learns from every person he or she connects with in the most unforeseen moments. This is of course the soul of co-learning. And, perhaps it is also the seed of equity and justice."

Educators as Lead Learners. More on colearning and making learning visible, this time about our learning as instructors, from Jackie Gerstein, with a great graphic as always!

U.S. Postsecondary Faculty in 2015. This Gates Foundation report has some very discouraging numbers re: faculty and technology but the report itself had some glimmers of hope compared to the short write-up I read in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. (Thanks to Phil Hill for alerting me to check out the actual report.)

NMC Horizon Report. Great comments from Stephen Downes: "So what does it tell us about the methodology? Mostly, that it sways in the breeze. It's strongly influenced by the popular press and marketing campaigns. It's not based on a deep knowledge significant technology developments, but rather focuses on surface-level chatter and opinion. And that is why I think NMC should be obligated to re-examine its methodology."

Before You Assign That Homework — What Students Wish You Knew. Great post from Pernille Ripp with much for higher ed here too. I am esp. a fan of the strategy that we should be doing our own homework.

Critical Digital Pedagogy. Beautiful and very thought-provoking slides from Jesse Stommel.

Critical Digital Pedagogy from Jesse Stommel

My Stuff

Ugh: That Grading Article in Chronicle Vitae. Terrible and depressing article, but at least it led to a good conversation re: very important topic of grading.

Data Schmata: Midterm Grade Reports. Yep, no comments. Again. It's big data deja vu all over again!

Making Learning Visible: Power of Past Student Work. Preliminary report on the way availability of Portfolios from last semester is changing things BIG TIME in my classes this semester; I'll have more on this next week.

Pinterest Project Boards. Excited to have Pinterest Project Boards running now, and I embedded them in the Project Directories for both classes!

Student Project Comments. Exciting week coming up: students begin commenting on each other's projects. I've revamped that assignment and am hoping for even better things than in past!

Student Schedule Update. I'm continuing my "small data" project for the semester, seeing what more I can do to get students to develop their own schedules instead of doing work based on my (arbitrary) deadlines.

Inoreader Dashboard. I am so happy with my new strategy for using Inoreader's Dashboard options!

Comment Walls. Some students come up with fun graphics for their Comment Walls (they are setting up those Comment Walls this week, getting ready for comments to come). Here's one that is very fun indeed:

February 8: OpenTeachingOU News Update

So, I feel all the more strongly about my #OpenTeachingOU experiment after reading the Babson report this week. If the majority of people in higher ed still believe that online courses are not "legitimate," then those of us who KNOW otherwise need to share what we know as openly and as widely as possible. So, I will carry on with #OpenTeachingOU as my hashtag at Twitter,while also collecting #OpenTeachingOU from Google+ and my blogs over at the #OpenTeachingOU Omnifeed. (Thanks, as always, to Inoreader for that fabulous tool!)

Below is my #OpenTeachingOU round-up for this week, and you can find previous round-ups here too. I am really pleased that I managed to tag at least one item every day this week, and the beginning-of-semester rush has settled down, so I can hopefully start reading more widely. I am badly behind on people's blogs, but blogs are patient: in the coming week, I will try to catch up on some of my favorites.

OU Folks

Youth Community Informatics Studio. Wonderful, very informative blog post from Colin Rhinesmith about his new community-engagement course, "Leadership in Information Organizations" where they are working with the Moore Public Library. It sounds exciting!

Adentures in Digital Humanities. The open set-up that Katherine Pandora is using for this "dream course" means there are new things we can all see and learn about every week. The group blogs, for example, are up and running!

What is Your Motivation for Learning? Very useful post from College of Liberal Studies about students and motivation. I like the idea of thinking about motivation from different angles... because it's true: different students are differently motivated, as are teachers too of course!

PRPubs Pinterest. At Twitter Adam Croom shared a Pinterest project that is part of his PRPubs class.

I would be glad to know of other examples of open teaching going on at OU this semester!

Beyond OU

Bad News for Online Learning in Annual Report & “Unsustainable” MOOCS are Full Steam Ahead. You will find lots of write-ups of the Babson report data, but the one that got to the issues that most concern me is this post from Debbie Morrison.

Online Teaching: A New Beginning. And here's a nice counter-point to the Babson report: a guest post at Michelle Pacansky-Brock's blog about an online instructor's explorations and discoveries.

What Are Your Favorite Faculty Development Blogs? I was so glad to see Debbie Morrison and Michelle Pacansky-Brock on this list from the Chronicle's ProfHacker blog, and I look forward to exploring and finding more!

Desperately Seeking the Unique Pedagogical Characteristics of Face to Face Teaching. Excellent post from Tony Bates turns the Babson report upside down: instead of asking online to prove itself, he is asking defenders of face-to-face to please explain just what exclusive claims they have to teaching efficacy. 

Coursera Sets Sights on Universities. Yes, the megalomania at Coursera never stops: they still want us to believe that their courses are so good that universities can use them instead of teachers. I kid you not. No need for in-house expertise. Just buy Coursera. Ka-ching.

Instructure Releases 4th Security Audit. This is not about teaching but it is a nice write-up from Phil Hill about the importance of transparency, and I think it is no accident that Instructure is being transparent about its security audits, just as Instructure built an LMS that allows instructors to decide whether their content is open or not.

Ford Foundation, Open Access and Really Sharing Knowledge. Excellent post from Nancy White about openness, something to read together with Phil's Instructure post above. As I see it, the closed design of D2L, where instructors cannot share their teaching or their teaching materials even if they want to do so, is probably the single biggest barrier to our pedagogical progress. So, again: another reason for #OpenTeachingOU. We've got to get out of the D2L lockdown and start sharing more online!

Does It Matter Whether Students Recognize What We Do As Teachers? This post from Pernille Ripp also reinforces my sense of why OpenTeaching is so important: it matters to our students too, perhaps more than any other audience! 

What if Contentment is the Answer? Beautiful post from John Spencer about how contentment can lead to more and better risk-taking: confidence, not complacency.

How Medium Is Building a New Kind of Company with No Managers. Lots of good analogies for education here: this reaction against dehumanizing styles of business management would also work very well as a reaction against dehumanizing education styles as well.

Engagement: I Do Not Think It Memes What You Think It Memes. Very thought-provoking post from Terry Elliott about engagement as something that must be reciprocal and not just stimulus-response (a bit like my post about interaction from last week... but with better memes, ha ha).

My Stuff

Storytelling Posts. I really like being able to share the student blog posts in a dedicated stream; this week I shared the stories coming in from the Myth-Folklore class. I also shared their reading diaries, and it is the stories in those diaries that provide the raw materials for their storytelling later in the week. Coming soon: the Storybook websites are taking shape for this semester, as are the Portfolios!

Spring 2015: Grace Period Reminder Tracking. This is the blog post where I'll be providing an overview of my "little data" experiment for this semester, trying different interventions with students who are chronically late with work for class. The post is updated now for Weeks 3 and 4.

And as an image this week, I wanted to share this great painting of a "colporteur" (17th-century France).  It showed up in one of the book-oriented Twitter feeds I follow, and I thought it was beautiful: I feel like a colporteur for my students, singing the praises of the books... but the books I offer are free! Whoo-hoo! Long live the public domain and the open Internet!

February 1: OpenTeachingOU News Update

So, as last week, I'm using my #OpenTeachingOU omnifeed to pull together my teaching/learning highlights for the week! It would be so great if more people at OU started using this hashtag to share their teaching practices in an online conversation, but even just as a tag that I use for myself to put tweets and posts into a dedicated stream, it's very useful! (And here are my previous news round-ups.)


OU Folks

Katherine Pandora. The big open teaching news this week at OU was all the great sharing that happened via Twitter because of Katherine Pandora's dream course and the visit by Michael Peter Edson from the Smithsonian. You can follow Katherine at Twitter for more goodness to come, and, even better, you can visit the open class site: adventures in digital humanities.

Stacy Zemke shared this photo of the event via Twitter:

Beyond OU

Are Schools Failing Extroverts? Great post from John Spencer on extroverted students. As an "ambivert" (ha ha), I really appreciate how the online environment can be GREAT both for extroverts and also for introverts!

FUN: The One Thing We Forget to Plan For. Wonderful post from Pernille Ripp about fun. Sadly, so much of college teaching proclaims its rigor. I vote for fun! "Learning should be fun. Curiosity should have a place in our classrooms. Laughter should happen on a regular basis. Smiling should be a classroom rule. Fun should be one of the many pillars that supports all of the learning that we do. It should be embraced, discussed, worked on and celebrated. Schools should be filled with fun."

Questions to Ask Oneself While Designing Learning Activities. Such a great post from Jackie Gerstein and, yes, fun is one of the questions!

Helping a Perfectionist Child Worry Less and Do More. From Jessica Lahey at New York Times - I would guess that perfectionism is probably the single biggest barrier to changing how we teach... and it's also the biggest barrier to Open Teaching I suspect. A lot of academics don't want to share things openly that are less than perfect. That's not a problem for me, ha ha — I'm a recovering perfectionist, and my recovery is going very well.

A New Twist to Teaching Online: Considering Learners’ Emotions. Great post from Debbie Morrison. The emotional factor is HUGE in my opinion, which is why I find the idea of teaching machines laughable (and computers don't get the joke either). Debbies includes this very nice graphic from Rienties and Rivers:

10 Things the Best Digital Teachers Do. From Jesse Stommel over at Chronicle Vitae (which does NOT have RSS, alas)... a very good list! I esp. endorse this one: GRADE LESS. Or, even better, not at all; here are my thoughts on grading.

High Impact Online. Although I was dismayed by the idea that someone as savvy as Matt Reed had no idea what would be a high impact practice online, people chimed in with lots of ideas. I even left a couple comments there because this is such an important topic. As a result of a follow-up convo at Twitter with Debbie Morrison, I learned this great acronym: HIP, high-impact practice. I want to be an online hippie, ha ha, a "high-impact practitioner."


My Stuff

What Professors Actually Do. My response to Scott Walker of Wisconsin: if we practice OPEN TEACHING, then people would have a much better idea of what professors actually do. Especially those of us (instructors, not professors) who teach full-time!

The Potential of Online Education. Thoughts on face-to-face workshops. I just don't see how we will become confident and skilled at helping students to learn online if we continue to do all our learning in small, face-to-face groups. At my school, we are well into the second year of a big "Digital Initiative," but I have yet to see anything like a community of practice or learning network emerging for those of us who are committed online educators, eager and ready to share ideas, experiences, etc. The learning opportunities we offer faculty are all face-to-face, not online. For why this matters, see next item:

Course Evaluation Data: We're Skewing Low, Not High. And here are some numbers that demonstrate WHY those of us who are teaching online need to be sharing our ideas and experience: the course evaluations for online courses in my college skew low rather than high. In my opinion, the incredible potential of online education would mean the numbers should skew high, not low... but that is not going to happen until online instructors themselves start sharing and learning together online IMO.

Interaction Entre Nous... NOT Machines. My thoughts on the word "interaction" as prompted by a thought-provoking back-and-forth with someone in my campus's IT department.

New "Comment Training" Strategy. I am SO HAPPY with how this "Comment Training" experiment is going so far. It's something I wish I had done years ago in my courses!


And to close... here's a wonderful graphic making the rounds on Google+:

Change. If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less.