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:

January 25: OpenTeachingOU News Update

Okay, it is always a colossal effort to get a new class up and running every semester. I keep making changes to the course materials (the students keep giving me so many good ideas to try!), and then there's the real effort: connecting with and getting to know all the new students, helping them to get online and start blogging, etc. I'm amazed and happy at what we have accomplished in the past two weeks, and I think the students are also very pleased — as usual, for almost all the students, it is the first time they have had a blog, and that really can be exciting... I still get excited when I make a new blog after all those years!

All that work, though, really wrecks the rest of my online life: reading, writing, keeping track of things. Luckily, though, I put a new content development plan in place that has kept me more-or-less on track, so I am REALLY happy about that. Even in the midst of all this work, I've made huge progress on the Indian Epics UnTextbook, and I've kept on publishing stories at Ocean of Stories (I finally got started on the jataka part of that project just yesterday), and I've managed to carry on with the Bestiaria Latina faithfully. At Twitter, I'm being really diligent about keeping up with following OU people (but I have not really kept up with anything else), and I've done a good job with the class Twitter stream too. In the blogosphere, I am hopelessly behind, and I have barely been keeping up even with what people are sharing at Google+. Luckily, though, both Twitter and Google+ are very forgiving and starting this week I should be able to get back into the swing of things!

What may save me, though, is this use of the #OpenTeachingOU hashtag. I'm not able to write up a news round-up today (I'm too far behind!), but I can do an #OpenTeachingOU round-up... which is better than nothing ha ha. Meanwhile, you can watch the #OpenTeachingOU feed over here on its own page, thanks to the power of the Inoreader omnifeed: Laura Gibbs - #OpenTeachingOU.

So, in order to write this OpenTeachingOU round-up, all I have to do is scroll through that HTML clippings feed, grab the best items, and add a little context. Even in the midst of chaos, that is something I can manage to do, and I think I've had #OpenTeachingOU stuff every day. I really didn't intend the use of this hashtag for my own housekeeping, but it has sure proved very useful for that. And, thanks to Cody Taylor this weekend, I am hoping that maybe ... maybe ... other OU folks will start using it as well!

Meanwhile, the notes below go back to my very first use of the hashtag. Maybe I'll be able to do bigger/better news round-ups as the semester settles down, but if I can manage to do this in the midst of chaos thanks to the hashtag, that's good enough for now. :-)

OU News:

Thank you, Cody! I was so excited that Cody Taylor used the #OpenTeachingOU hashtag for a post, and very appropriately since it was re: the very generous way in which Katherine Pandora and the DH crew are putting course materials online! (see next item)

Katherine Pandora Digital Humanities Intro. At Twitter, I learned about Katherine Pandora's DH class. Very exciting: course materials, group blogs, student blogs... such a fantastic use of create.ou.edu!

PR Pubs Goes Online! Another other great create.ou.edu experiment I learned about via Twitter is Adam Croom's PR Pubs course. You can read details here in his blog.

David Vishanoff. And via Twitter I learned about David Vishanoff blogging and teaching in the open: yes!!!

OUTechExpo. This is a link to the Twitter stream for OUTechExpo... not much Twitter, but something is better than nothing. Will the Jim Groom magic last? Will it have pulled some people into the world of open? It was Jim's visit to campus that prompted me to start using #OpenTeachingOU...!

Beyond OU:

Dealing with the Blog Flow. Fantastic post from Alan Levine about blog flow management. So fascinating to hear how other people work with this! A note about my blog workflow here and here.

How Interactive is Your Online Course? Self-Assess with this Rubric. Very helpful post from Debbie Morrison.

A shift in education: Teachers who create content, not consume. I learned about this great blog post (interview with Stephen O'Connor) via Twitter.

New Feature at Wikimedia. Helping to raise people's awareness of image sources, licenses, and citations.

21st Century Skills and Attributes. A nifty self-assessment from Jackie Gerstein.

9 Barriers to Personalized Learning And How We May Work Around Them. Very powerful and useful post from Pernille Ripp.

Modern Learning Routines. Great graphic from Silvia Tolisano via Twitter:

Teaching and Scholarship. I loved this quote from Jesse Stommel at Twitter: The scholarship OF teaching should not be limited to scholarship ABOUT teaching. Teaching is itself scholarly and a product of research.

Teach While You're At It. And on that subject, Stephen Landry has a very nice piece about teaching and research in the Chronicle.

My Blog Posts:

Indian Epics UnTextbook: Table of Contents Emerging. I am going to try to do a better job of documenting the UnTextbook this time around, esp. since I learned a lot from my mistakes with Myth-Folklore UnTextbook last time! :-)

Hashtags for curation: Saved by #OpenTeachingOU. More about this hashtag thing is working for me.

Martin Luther King Day Edition. I spent most of the day on Sunday learning more about Martin Luther King in honor of Martin Luther King Day on Monday... and making quote posters — and I ended up with about 50 of them! My favorite quote: We must always maintain a kind of divine discontent. — Martin Luther King, Jr.

Ten Reasons for Week Zero (a.k.a. Soft Start). Wow, Week Zero seems like forever ago! But here is a blog post about how important it is.

My Google+ Quasi-Blog:

Siren Song of the Deadline. Thoughts on student autonomy, and lack thereof. The ringing of the bell: Pavlov warned us about that, didn't he???!

Indian Epics Overview. I am super-happy with the changes I made to this Overview activity in Indian Epics; results so much better than last semester!

Writing Assessment: Spring 2015. The ritual update from yours truly about how the proofreading assessment went this semester. Very consistent with past semesters and, as always, I am glad to have engaged with the students re: this dimension of the class already in Week 1.

Peer Comments. I'm trying out a new series of assignments to help students develop better commenting skills. So far, so good with the first assignment!

Reading Diaries: Happy Update. I'm really pleased with tweaks to reading diary instructions. Overall, diaries definitely better this time already starting in the first week of reading: more reflection, less plot summary.

UnTextbook Reporting. And the Google Form with student feedback on the UnTextbook is filling up... with the new extra reading option, I should get feedback on a lot more units this semester!

Why I Love My Job. Just one of many great moments thanks to student blog posts... and also here and here.

Helping Students with Blog Post Images. Yes, it is worth getting into the nitty-gritty of details like this students, esp. when they run into problems with broken images as a result of remote linking.

Inoreader Update. I am SO PLEASED with the way Inoreader now updates items. That is a huge help with my students, esp. as they are revising blogs early in the semester in process of learning ins-and-outs of blogging.

Pinterest Experiment. Update on Pinterest experiment: going great!

Reading a Powerpoint Aloud. Extended and very lively discussion erupted at G+ from Stacy Zemke's share of this meme!

Notes from the Twitterverse:

Tweets about Pinterest experiment: here, here, here, etc.

Tweets about D2L Twitter widget integration: here, here, here, etc.

Thoughts on Content Development and Curation for the New Year!

The past couple of years have been a BIG transition for me in terms of my content/curation habits, so before 2015 is upon us, I wanted to share some thoughts about that.

Latin Days Officially Over. For about 10 years, I spent most of my content development time on Latin. That was partly because I had some projects related to fables and proverbs that were really important to me personally, but it was also because I hoped that I could persuade my school to let me develop an online Latin course. Those hopes led nowhere, unfortunately; the Classics department really has stuck to the vow made by the department chair back in 2001 that "Laura Gibbs will never teach Latin in this department again!" (after I resigned my job as a professor there); the departmental resentment has not lessened over the years, even though that department chair is long since retired. Over the course of those years, I wrote five books for Latin students and teachers: one book I did for a traditional publisher, but the other four books I self-published so that I could give them away for free.

You can read about my book-writing process here; it was very much a combination of content development and curation interwoven: Websites, Blogs, and Books. I also created a long-running blog and built up a big readership there: Bestiaria Latina. The blog is the one Latin project that I have kept up with, but I'm no longer doing any new Latn content development (just the occasional new Latin LOLCat) — instead, I recycle the thousands of proverbs and fables that I worked on in those years, reusing them there at the blog.

It was a really hard decision to give up the Latin but finally, two years ago, I did give it up. I was a bit adrift for a while, doing some work on English proverbs, but not really sure which way to go. Then, I came up with the idea of redoing my Myth-Folklore class with the UnTextbook, and that has led to a fabulous new phase of content development that should easily last as long as my Latin phase... or even longer! Plus, I learned a lot from all the Latin work that I did which has let me make really fast progress, learning from old mistakes as I start these new projects.

New Projects, New Tools. Another thing that has happened over the past decade is the explosion of new tools to help me do a better job with all my content development and curation. When I did my first Latin proverb book back in 2005, I had GoogleDocs to help me (spreadsheets rule my world!), and I had just started blogging, but I did not have the amazing digital libraries online that I do now; all my current projects are powered by online libraries like Internet Archive and Hathi Trust. Most important of all, I am now involved in some great social networks online, so that I no longer feel like I am working all alone. It's ironic: when I lived in Norman (where the University of Oklahoma is located) I actually felt far more alone and isolated than I do now, when I am living over a thousand miles away from Oklahoma in very rural North Carolina, but connected to so many inspiring and helpful colleagues online at Google+ and other social networking sites.

Re-Use and Wider Audiences. Luckily for me, it is very easy to repurpose the kinds of content I create (fables, proverbs, etc.) because the content comes in such small pieces! By re-using that content in different spaces (Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, etc.), I am able to reach more people. In addition, that process enables me to curate the content at the same time, correcting errors, adding links, and so on. Over the years, I've learned some really good tricks for keeping track of what content I've used and where I've used it. The main way I do that is with Blogger blog post labels, since Blogger has turned out to be my main content hub. Blogger is where I create new content and then, as time goes by, I update and republish that content while also sharing it again in whatever social networking spaces I am participating in. For 2015, it looks like those spaces are going to be Google+, Twitter, and Pinterest. I like the fact that I can use these different spaces to reach different audiences. Google+ is where I reach my own colleagues online, while Pinterest and Twitter are good ways to reach my students, connect with my school (that's why I started using Twitter), and also encounter complete strangers — Pinterest is really a new world for me that way!

Plans for 2015. My main content development project for 2015 is the upcoming Indian Epics UnTextbook, which will occupy the summer. By having decided on my summer project already, I can get my students this spring to help me find the right materials to focus on. So, I am busily seeking out new India-related books for the students to browse and comment on (growing list of books here), and I am also starting to post some Indian stories at a new blog: Ocean of Stories. Plus, just for fun, I am also doing a Doctor Who project: Doctor Who Quotes.

In terms of content re-use for the coming year, I will be republishing one of my LatinLOLCats every day at the Proverb Laboratory blog. I'm also trying to make better use of the images at my Indian Epics Resources blog by republishing those images and sharing them via both Pinterest and the Twitter stream for Indian Epics. Another re-use project is revisiting the free Kindle books that I originally collected to use in my Class Announcements two years ago; now I'm updating those Kindle book listings with additional bibliographical information based on the availability of the books at digital libraries like Internet Archive and Hathi Trust. These public domain online books are the engine that will be driving all my content development in future years, so I'm excited about revisiting these free Kindle books as a way to refocus and then expand my digital bibliography efforts.

The Evils of the LMS. As you can see, I have not even mentioned the LMS that I am supposed to be using for sharing content with my students (we use D2L BS at my school). From my perspective, the LMS is the worst possible content repository that I can think of: to put content in D2L would be like nailing it inside a coffin and then burying that coffin deep in the digital ground. Ugh. Sadly, as long as my school keeps promoting the LMS while failing to promote other kinds of tools for content development, sharing, and re-use, we are — in my opinion anyway — failing in our mission as a PUBLIC university.

So, I'm expecting great things for my own content efforts in 2015, but will we see any change at my school in terms of faculty and students breaking out of the LMS and taking advantage of the open Internet for connecting and sharing...? Sadly, I doubt it. But Jim Groom is coming to give a keynote address at the University of Oklahoma's January Academic Tech conference — and that's something I wish I were in Norman to see! If anybody can shake things up, it would be Jim Groom... so maybe he will manage to shake loose some of the cobwebs and help us break out of the darkness into the light. What a great 2015 that would be!

I'll include here the video of my favorite session from Connected Courses which features Jim Groom, along with other folks who have great ideas and energy to share about using the web as our shared educational space: Connecting to the IndieWeb Movement.

Happy reading and watching in the New Year, everybody! :-)

Pinterest: Curiosity, Collecting, Connecting!

Pinterest for Spring 2015! Because I am a total teacher nerd, I wanted to spend this lovely holiday Friday by playing with Pinterest, learning more about how to use it well, and then figuring out how to help my students play and learn with Pinterest this Spring. The result: I just finished writing up the Pinterest assignment for Orientation week in my class, along with some extra Tech Tips to help students make good use of Pinterest. I am really excited to see what will happen with Pinterest next semester. For Fall, I had encouraged students to use Twitter or Pinterest, and Pinterest was by far the preferred option. So, I will get things off to a good start in Spring by having every student create a Pinterest Board. Then, for the rest of the semester, students can continue to use their Board for extra credit... and I really hope that they will. It is a great tool for pursuing anything you are curious about, collecting the results, and then sharing what you found with others!

Pinterest Expertise. The Tech Tips I wrote up are meant to help people make really good use of Pinterest. Luckily for me, Pinterest is a really simple tool that does not have a lot of options — which is good! Someone can become a true Pinterest expert with just a tiny investment of time. Here are the tips I wrote up for my students today:

• Pinterest for Discovery and Learning. This is absolutely the most important of the tips. I really hope I can show people who powerful Pinterest is for SOCIAL discovery and learning.
• Pinning Blog Posts. This is actually two tips in one: I really need to help my students understand what it means to link to a blog post, as opposed to a blog homepage, archive page, label page, etc.
• Pinterest Buttons and Bookmarklets. This is a productivity tip: for me, having a browser button is a big part of making sure that I use Pinterest multiple times every day... it's right there in the browser bar.
• Editing Pinterest Pins. This is another two tips in one item: it's about editing pin descriptions but it is also about Pinterest search, which really depends on good descriptions.
• Share Pinterest Pins on Twitter. I cannot believe I did not have this integration turned on already: DOH! This is something actually way more useful for me than for my students, but for the students who are active Twitter users, this could be a useful tip indeed. 
• Pinterest Board Widget. It was the popularity of this tip last semester which made me focus on Pinterest this semester. Hardly any students added a Twitter widget to their own blog, but lots of them did a Pinterest widget!

I really enjoy writing up these tips because my goal is not so much a do-this-then-that type of tutorial. Instead, my goal is to relate the tool to the kinds of learning activities that will be really rewarding in the context of my classes. So, the tips are partly about using Pinterest, but they really are about LEARNING with Pinterest, i.e. using the tool to further learning goals of the class overall.

It's Personal. I mean this in two senses... two good senses! Pinterest is a "personal" tool that I use every single day, so my motivation in sharing this tool with my students is really to share the fun and excitement that I experience from using Pinterest; Pinterest really IS fun in a way that other bookmarking tools like Diigo are not. Pinterest is also "personal" in the sense that it is a tool for meeting people and for connecting with other people who share your interests. That's why writing up the Pinterest for Discovery and Learning tip was the most fun of all, showing students how they can follow a pin to a person and then see what interests they might share with that person. For the kinds of topics that we study in my classes, there are some really passionate people out there who are using Pinterest as a way to share what they love. I hope that this tool can become a new way for students to connect and share with one another, and also to connect and share with other Pinterest users.

Inoreader and Pinterest. Using Pinterest is also a part of my increased use of Inoreader in my classes, but the RSS that Pinterest supplies is dodgy at best, so I have not told my students anything about Pinterest RSS. It's VERY weird: there really and truly is Pinterest RSS for any given Board, and Inoreader has made it super-easy to subscribe to a Board — just paste the Board address into the Inoreader add box, and Inoreader will then discover the RSS for you (Inoreader is so fabulous that way!). What's weird, though, is that at least once a week, and sometimes more often, I get pin-bombed, with the RSS feed for a Board I am subscribed to suddenly having a couple dozen new pins from some OTHER Board. The pins are NOT at my Board (thank goodness!), but they do show up in the RSS for the Board.This is pretty distressing because the pins are totally random (there's truly no rhyme or reason to where they come from, although they do all come from the same Board; thank goodness I have not had anything actually porn-like... yet). Worse, once they are there in Inoreader, there is no way to remove them since Inoreader assumes (rightly so) that a feed is a feed and users should be marking things as read/unread, not actually removing items.

My efforts to get Pinterest customer service to acknowledge this problem went nowhere because... they deny even offering RSS at all! How weird is that?! I should note that the guys at Inoreader were great about helping me to troubleshoot this problem, but in the end all they could say was that there is something wrong with the Pinterest feeds, and apparently they have seen similar problems with eBay feeds.

So, I will be subscribing to my students' Pinterest Boards, and I will probably be resharing pins in a class Pinterest feed which will be really fun to make... but that will have to be manual. Because of the pin-bombing, I cannot afford the risk of automatically resharing my students' pins since the pins might not be from my students at all! I am really curious, in fact, to see how intense the pin-bombing will be when I am subscribed to 100 Pinterest Boards in Inoreader as opposed to the 10 or so Boards I am subscribed to now.

My Pinterest Routine. One thing I definitely need to ponder before the semester starts is my own Pinterest routine. In the Fall, I got in the habit of pinning every new Storybook to a board dedicated to that purpose, and I also pinned a lot class-related resources that I found as I was doing research related to the students' projects. Those were good routines, and I will carry on with both of them for sure. Now, though, with the Pinterest-Twitter integration (I just started using that today!), I think I will be doing a lot more with Pinterest, creating some more substantial overlap between Pinterest and Twitter. Last semester, I used Pinterest to archive a lot of content from Twitter, but next semester I need to think about how I can use Pinterest to generate an even more rich and stimulating Twitter feed for my classes. Plus, of course, I will be using Inoreader to watch my students' Pinterest Boards, and that is going to be really cool!

Commercial Services. One more note: I learned some great things about the Indie Web movement from Connected Courses, and that is definitely something I want to learn more about in the coming year. At the same time, I just cannot let myself pass up this great opportunity to help my students learn how to use Pinterest as a really fun and surprisingly powerful research tool. The reason that the Pinterest discovery process is so great is because there are billions of pins. The sheer quantity of data there is what allows Pinterest to make really good guesses about other websites I might want to look at. There are all kinds of people out there using Pinterest, pinning all kinds of webpages. Pinterest apparently has about 70 millions users now in 2014, and they have pinned 30 billion items at 750 million boards. Wow.

So, lots to ponder, lots to do: all good stuff! I'll label this for Connected Courses (because it's #notover)... and also for OU CTE (Center for Teaching Excellence), hoping that maybe 2015 will be the year that CTE creates a blog hub where those of us who are really keen on technology and teaching can start sharing ideas online at last!

And to those of you who are Pinteresting, happy pinning, everybody! :-)

Quick post about my Pinterest process for class

As I mentioned in a post yesterday, the discovery that Pinterest has RSS feeds has given me some big ideas about how to make better use of Pinterest in my classes next semester — Co-Learning: Bookmarking and Sharing with Pinterest. So, I'm trying to build in some systematic Pinterest routines as I work with the students on their projects, and I wanted to write that up quickly here since I just started reading a new page at a student's Storybook. Here's my routine for pinning when I am reading and responding to students' new story pages:

1. Pin story. I pin the new story to the class Board for the Storybooks. This is a semester-specific Board where each story gets pinned. I have gotten in the habit of manually pasting in the link in addition to the way Pinterest automatically links via the image. Here is the story I just pinned at the Myth-Folklore Fall 2014 Board; it's the story of the nymph Minthe.

2. Pin resource. Often, but not always, there is some kind of related resource that I can pin to the general class Board which is a Board where I pin all kinds of stuff that might be of interest to students in that particular class: Myth-Folklore Portfolio. In this case, I pinned the Wikipedia article about the mint plant which contains a section on the etymology of "mint" and its connection to Greek mythology.

3. Inoreader. Since I am subscribed to both of these boards via Inoreader, that means the new pins show up automatically at Inoreader, where I can send them back out into the world either via RSS or through an HTML clipping display, as you can see here at my consolidated feed.

So, there's lots more to say here about how I hope to be using Pinterest more next semester, but I wanted to take just a minute to document my process right now. I was not systematic about my use of Pinterest earlier in the semester, but now that I can use RSS to both harvest and then redistribute my Pinterest activity, that gives me a real incentive to make Pinterest a part of how I work every day as I read and respond to the great stories my students are including in their projects.

HAPPY.

Co-Learning: Bookmarking and Sharing with Pinterest

I just posted a new item at my Anatomy of an Online Course blog which is relevant to the Co-Learning unit: Spring 2015 - Pinterest Plans. In that post, I explain how I plan to add Pinterest Boards to the shared "space" where my online classes take place.

The spaces the students use right now — blogs and websites — are writing-intensive spaces, which makes sense because I teach writing classes! At the same time, I'd like to create a bookmarking-and-sharing space that will bring out into the open other important things that students do in the class, in addition to their written work. The Pinterest Boards will be a way for them to share their favorite parts of the reading each week, and it will also be a way for them to document their interactions with other students in the class. I also hope the Pinterest Boards will be a place where they will also document their research activities for the class, sharing materials they find exciting and/or fun and/or useful.

In the past, I had tried to get students about using Diigo, but that never went anywhere. Diigo is incredibly powerful, but it really is not fun to use. Pinterest, on the other hand, while not being powerful in the way Diigo is, can be incredibly fun... and the fun factor is huge here! I would love to get students used to the idea of bookmarking, curating, and sharing, and I think Pinterest is the fun and easy way to do that.

So, the more I think about this, the more excited I get. My own experience with Pinterest has been super-positive. I first got interested in Pinterest because it has some very nice widgets (I love widgets!), and now that I have discovered Pinterest RSS, I am sure this can be a really useful tool for my RSS approach to class management — thanks to that incredibly powerful RSS tool, Inoreader. For details, see the blog post, and I am so glad I have formulated this idea now; the next two weeks of Connected Courses will be a great way to ponder this some more and develop it in greater detail! Whoo-hoo!!!

Here are some screenshots of the Storybook Boards for my classes this semester: Myth-Folklore and Indian Epics. :-)

Connected Courses at PInterest

Well, today ran away from me (in a good way: it felt like FALL here... beautiful!), so I did not get as much done for Connected Courses as I had hoped, but I am glad to have my Connected Courses Pinterest Board up and running as a way to quickly pin things to come back to later. Next week is one of my revision weeks also, so I should have more time than I did last week; my classes alternate between weeks of original writing and revision weeks... next week is revision!

And I can attest to the power of connecting via Pinterest, because via her Connected Courses Pinterest Board, I connected with Tania Sheko in Melbourne... a woman of 30,000 pins. Whoo-hoo! Yet another a new connection to add to the many wonderful connections I've made over the past few weeks of Connected Courses.

Pinterest is a tool that I have really enjoyed learning to use in the past year, largely because I am very visually oriented. Working with images is one of the things I most enjoy about working online! Last week Debbie Morrison wrote up a post about social tools for online courses, and she included the Indian Epics Pinterest Board of one of my students as an example. I was so excited about that!

How to Develop a Sense of Presence in Online and F2F Courses with Social Media by Debbie Morrison

And I'm embedding my Connected Courses Board below... embedding being another one of the nifty features of Pinterest. :-)

Follow Laura Gibbs's board Connected Courses on Pinterest.

Online Presence: Better than Video

I've been thinking a lot about online presence lately, both instructor presence in an online course and also student presence. And when I start thinking about something a lot, well, I end up with a lot to say. So this will probably be the first in a series of posts on this top. In this post, I'll focus on instructor presence and exactly how I create an online presence for the courses that I teach online.

I'll start with this contention: online presence — both instructor presence and student presence — is the single most important element in online course design. I know that is true for my courses... and I would be curious to know what other online instructors think about that!

And here's a thought I recently had: the current obsession with talking-head video is an attempt — a badly misguided attempt — to create online presence. Video, of course, is just content, and not even a particularly robust form of content for all kinds of reasons (more on that topic). A talking head video is NOT online presence.

So, while I've taken several MOOCs that included video, even abundant video, by the instructor, those videos did nothing to make the instructor seem really present. The latest Janux course I tried, for example, represents the most extreme case of that I have seen so far in the world of MOOCs: apparently the instructor listed for the course is not participating in any way at all, except insofar as they filmed her in some videos — last semester? last year? There's no telling. In any case, the videos are not new, which means they are not responsive to the class right now and not responsive to the students in that class.

Because that's what it's really about: online presence offers the responsiveness of a face-to-face encounter, while overcoming the F2F constraints of time and space. Online presence, unlike face-to-face, is asynchronous, persistent, re-usable, linkable, searchable, discoverable, all those Internet virtues... while also being directly responsive to a given class and the needs of the students in that class.

When I first started teaching online in 2002, there was only a very limited range of tools for developing online presence. Webpages (freestanding webpages, not blogs or wikis, etc.) were really about the only tool that I had available, but I published a lot of webpages... and my students did too! From the very semester that I taught online, student websites were the heart and soul of the class, and that continues to be true of my classes today.

Now, however, there is a whole wide range of tools available for creating an online presence ... more tools than I can even hope to take advantage of. So, for the remainder of this post, I will talk about some of the tools I am using this semester, all of which I am extremely happy with... some new, some old, ALL of them fun to use!

Daily Announcements Blog. This is probably the single most important focal point for my course-related web presence. There is a new announcement post every day (I queue them up a day or two in advance), with information about course assignments and activities, along with all kinds of other content just for fun and random discovery. I embed this blog page as the homepage for each of my courses in Desire2Learn, so there is something fresh there every day, no matter what day(s) of the week the students are logging in.

Class Twitter Feed. In addition to the daily announcements, throughout the day I am updating the Class Twitter Feed, so not only are there new things every day in the class announcements, there are new things throughout the day in the class Twitter feed. I am able to embed that feed in the Announcements blog, and the Twitter widget is highly responsive: you can tweet me from right there inside the widget.

Tagboard. For course-specific content, there are the #OU3043 and #OU4993 hashtags, and this allows students to contribute to the class feed also. Tagboard will be a really handy way to develop that shared hashtag presence: #OU3043 Tagboard and #OU4993 Tagboard. In Week 2 of the class, I am going to see if I can get students interested in trying this!

Pinterest Boards. This is my newest experiment. I got hooked on Pinterest last year for my own personal projects, and then I started seeing all kinds of ways in which I could use Pinterest for my classes too. So, the Pinterest Boards are another way that I am creating online presence and, as with Twitter, I am hoping this is something the students will join me in: Myth-Folklore Pinterest Portfolio and Indian Epics Pinterest Portfolio.

Now, those are the ways I create online presence related to my classes, which is in addition to the main ways in which I maintain an online presence, which is mostly at Google+ and in my non-class-related blogs, like the long-running Bestiaria. I also have a separate Twitter account, different from the class Twitter: I'm OnlineCrsLady.

Of these tools, Pinterest is the one that is the most new to me, so I still getting my "rhythm" with that one, but for the other tools - Announcements and Twitter - they are an automatic part of my daily routine, even more fundamental than email. My guess is that if faculty try to teach online with email and a learning management system as their only tools, they are probably not going to be able to create a highly dynamic and responsive online presence. Limited to email and an LMS, I would not be able to achieve my goals as a teacher online... but with tools like Blogger and Twitter, I believe I can create an online presence that is of greater and deeper value for my students than the ephemeral face-to-face conversation we would have for 150 minutes each week in a classroom.

So, those are my thoughts for today about online instructor presence. Next time, I will try to say something about student online presence, and hopefully I will have more to say about my Pinterest adventure too. Meanwhile, I've pasted in below screenshots of the Announcements, Twitter, Tagboard, and Pinterest just to give a quick visual impression of what they are like. They are pretty cool, very attention-getting!

Better than video...? I would say so.

Twitter

Tagboard

Pinterest

Announcements

Post-Janux, 10 weeks till summer

Well, this blog took a bit of a hiatus, at first because I decided to participate in an open History of Science course offered by my university on their Janux platform, so my "free time" (note scare quotes, ha ha) was going to be dedicated to that course. After a few weeks, though, I realized that the poor quality of the software used for the course platform made it impossible for me to participate in the class; it just was not a good use of my time (details here). Last weekend, I got back into the groove of working on new materials for my students and thinking about better ways to use technology in my own courses. THAT is something exciting, unlike the Janux debacle.  So, I'm ready to start using this blog again as a way to record and reflect on those good technology adventures that are happening in my classes.

In this post, I'll provide an overview about the different kinds of stuff that I've got going on right now that I'm excited about. I'll do that in terms of the tools because those are the easiest to write about, but the reason I have chosen these tools is because I am thinking about curation and sharing a lot. I want to do a better job of curation and sharing in teaching my classes, and I also want to do a better job of helping my students see curation and sharing as a big part of what they can/should be doing as online learners.

• Pinterest. I continue to get more and more excited about how I can make Pinterest an important part of my classes. I'll save the details for a separate post, but last weekend I had a real breakthrough about using Pinterest as a kind of portfolio/diary tool for my classes, and I've started keeping a Myth-Folklore Pinterest Portfolio and an Indian Epics Pinterest Portfolio myself, while offering the Portfolio as an optional Tech Tip for my students this semester. My hope is to work on this over the summer and make Pinterest an integral part of my classes starting next fall. 
• Blogger. I've started the process of writing up Blogger Tech Tips now that will provide the core of student support materials as I transition from Ning to Blogger as the blogging platform for class next year. That is another huge change for my classes, but I am really getting excited about it because of the ways students will be able to customize their blogs, turning them into spaces of their own design, reflecting their own interests while also offering them a chance to develop their technical skills. I am glad that Blogger is javascript-friendly, which allows for good integration with other tools, like embedding Pinterest in a blog or embedding Twitter. 
• Diigo. My efforts to make better use of Diigo to facilitate exploration of the student archive of past projects has really paid off! I rewrote all my Week 2 and Week 3 project planning assignments to integrate more Diigo-tagged student projects from past classes, and also more Diigo-tagged online resources. The results were very positive! Overall, the project Introductions that students turned in for Week 4 were improved over past semesters. So, I now have a big incentive to make even better use of Diigo in the future. I used to keep a really clean, highly structured set of Delicious links; I got started using Diigo in a more haphazard way, but I can not see it is definitely worth my time to work on my Diigo library and be more systematic in my tagging. That will be a big part of my summer.
• Twitter. I continue to learn more about Twitter, and I am glad to discover that many of my students are already active Twitter users. I'm also learning that they are not necessarily adventurous Twitter users (they don't use lists, widgets, etc.), so I'm hoping that I can build some class activities that will both help students get started using Twitter as well as expanding the repertoire of students who are already using Twitter. So far, it appears that they are not using Twitter for school and do not think of it as an educational tool. I wonder if I will be able to change that...? Since my own uses for Twitter are educational and professional, I am hoping I can expand my students' use of Twitter into those realms also.

There's lots more I could write about, but I would say those are the big headers that describe what I have been up to over the past couple of weeks and which I am ready to start writing about again in this blog. 

It's funny: I was briefly paralyzed when I realized that the Ning would be gone next year, but thinking about how to adapt to that change has gotten me so energized! I spend most of my good "thinking time" right now (which, truth be told, is shower time for me - I get almost all my good ideas while taking a shower) thinking about what new things I might do with my classes next year! Exciting!

Here's a fun infographic on how teachers use Pinterest that someone shared over at Google+. For a full-sized view, see the EducatorsTechnology.com post:

My Janux Project and Pinterest

Although I am so frustrated with the Janux software, I am really excited about the new project it has sparked for me: Latin sundial mottoes. Since this is a project that has a strong visual element - the beautiful sundials themselves! - in addition to the text, Pinterest is a logical channel for me to use in sharing my project, along with my usual blog posts. So, I wanted to write up here how I am using Pinterest exactly:

1. I have a private board where I am bookmarking higgledy-piggledy the sundials that I might want to use. This is actually better than bookmarking in Diigo because I need the VISUAL cue provided by the image as I go back through what I have bookmarked and select the item I want to work on. I am keeping the board private because I am bookmarking CC-licensed images as well as images that are not CC-licensed; eventually I may decide to contact the copyright owners of those non-CC-licensed images to see if they will give me permission to use their images in a blog post. So far, though, I have plenty of CC-licensed material to work with.

2. I then created a public board for Latin sundials, and as I add new blog posts, I also pin them to the board. Here is what I have so far: Latin Sundials at Pinterest.

3. I also learned how to create widgets for individual pins! That is something new for me. You can see those in the sidebar of my Janux History of Science blog, and I've pinned one here below as an example. My plan for the blog is to have two pins in the sidebar from my two most recent blog posts. So, as I add a new post, I'll move the top pin down in the sidebar and add the new pin up top. It takes just a moment to do; you just go to a pin, click on Share, choose Your Website, and then grab the embed code. You only need the actual js script once on a page; after that, you can just grab the data line. Very impressive: I love widgets!

I am really glad I learned how to do this. It's a great use of javascript, and I think my students will really enjoy being able to integrate a Pinterest board into a blog post or into their blog sidebar. See also earlier post where I learned how to do widgets for an entire Pinterest board; it's a little bit more complicated than doing a pin widget, but not by much.

Pinterest and Repurposing Blog Content

I'm really enjoying Pinterest, using it in two ways for two of my blogs!

Gaudium Mundo. This is a blog of Latin holiday songs that springs to life every December. It's an old blog, with old content - but still useful! I don't really want to add new blog posts there (although every once in a while I do). Instead, I need to refresh, update, and improve the posts that are already there. Pinterest is giving me a great way to do that. Each day, I have picked a post and added something to it - a new image, a new video, maybe both - and then I pin it to the Gaudium Mundo Board. Some of the blog posts are thus pinned more than once (I did a first run where I pinned every post), but I think that's fine. This is a great way to prod me to refresh and update the content during the month of December. If Pinterest is still around in December 2014, as I expect it will be, then I will do the same again! Today, for example, I worked on my Puer Nobis Nascitur post, adding both a new YouTube video and this lovely image from Hildesheim Cathedral that I found at Flickr:

Latin LOLCats. My Latin LOLCats are one of my most popular creations. They used to live at a Latin Via Proverbs blog, but I switched over to an all-purpose Proverb Laboratory blog last year. I've got about 400 of them now, and I also continue to produce new ones, although not necessarily every day. What I am doing right now is adding my existing LOLCats to a Latin LOLCat Board ten at a time (that's easy to do with labels in my Blogger blog; I labeled all of them as "notpinned," and as I pin them, I switch the label to "pinned"). As a result of that process, the board will be more or less done sometime in January, and then I will continue to pin new LOLCats there as I create them. Since the LOLCats are highly visual, it makes perfect sense to have them there at Pinterest, although people need to click through to the blog post if they want/need an English translation.

Anyway, using Pinterest this way is definitely a lot of fun! The blogs are still where the content starts and where the content really stays, but if this is a way both to reach new people AND to keep track of my own content, revising and expanding it, that adds value to the whole process!

Follow Laura Gibbs Latin LOLCats on Pinterest

My First PInterest Board

I made my first Pinterest Board this weekend! I've been wanting to give Pinterest a try, and my Latin holiday songs blog - Gaudium Mundo - seemed like a good set of raw material to work with. I was right, and it was a lot of fun! Here is the result: Gaudium Mundo at Pinterest.

I'm still not quite sure if/how I will make use of Pinterest for other purposes, but it was nice to see how easy it is, and I am especially fond of the widget maker; I used this Pinterest widget builder to create the widget you see below:

Follow Laura Gibbs Latin Holiday Songs on Pinterest