Experiments in Teaching History

The Impossibility of Innovative Tech Projects at a Community College

2012-02-02T10:05:00.000-05:00

The problem is tech support (better to say the absence of it). The tech guys have to spend so much time just managing email (someone is always responding to a phishing email and bringing down the entire system) and college resources (virtual drives to store virtual documents) that they have no time to support anything that is outside of the box. Plus none of them are trained to do that. They are network and security guys and just have a hard time dealing with any kind of academic support. I have reluctantly moved project after project that I have tried to work on to locations outside of the community college, literally because it is too frustrating trying to get any support.

What about Quality, Challenging Courses?

2012-01-09T11:57:00.000-05:00

See, Jay Mathews, Washington Post, Put Spotlight on School, not Sports. (For a moment, let's disregard the enormous billions of dollars spent each year on college sports instead of academic facilities and resources.) No, what a college wants is "student success," which means higher graduation rates (or increased student retention so that students take more classes and pay more tuition). It is rare the college that is actually about quality courses with real reading and writing challenges for students. This is particularly challenging for a community college. From my perspective, the oft-quoted figure that students study maybe 12 hours a week is an inflated figure. I can come up with a class schedule that will require far less hours and still reward a student with solid grades of "A" and "B." Faculty are afraid to hold students accountable and perhaps even fail them (that's not the student success that schools are looking for).

The Blackboard Strait-Jacket

2012-01-09T10:32:00.000-05:00

We continue to be stuck with the old frame set-up of Blackboard. There are literally hundreds, probably thousands, of digital apps out there, but we have Blackboard and it's ten or so features.

New Digital History Course

2011-10-03T12:36:00.000-04:00

Right now I am working on developing a new "intro" to digital history course, which I hope to be able to offer in both online and on campus forms in the future. This has been a lot of work so far, and I still need to write up some more notes to go with the syllabus. Here is the draft course site:
http://novaonline.nvcc.edu/eli/evans/HIS295/Index.html

Push Enrollments Up

2011-08-29T14:52:00.000-04:00

The demand to increase online student enrollments is unbelievable. Somehow no one seems to make the connection between that and an accompanying demand to increase student success rates.

QEDs, SLOs, SSAs, GIGO

2011-08-29T08:17:00.000-04:00

We have been inundated with a whole slew of acronyms in recent years, all of which, in some way or another, are designations for initiatives dealing with assessment of student learning. Long gone are the days when simply a student receiving a grade of "A" or "F" in a course was indicator enough of a student's mastery of a course subject material. Now we have to develop a whole new, subsidiary system to our grading scale to determine if a student's achievement (or lack of) in a course fits with some obscure general education goals of the college.
Did a student learn critical-thinking skills from doing the work in my course? How are we supposed to measure that? It might take five courses before a student masters certain skills. How are we supposed to measure that progress.
The amount of paperwork generated by the entire assessment regime is unbelievable, and the amount of time and energy invested is also incredible.
It is also hard to figure out exactly how much of that is generated by SACS or the federal government, or how much is generated by our own college out of a perception that it is all required as a part of measuring student success.

Role of Technology in Undergrad Education

2011-08-29T08:10:00.000-04:00

I was wondering today, just what exactly is the role of technology in undergraduate education today (and probably more specifically in the intro survey courses at a community college). Just what exactly can it do? Can it do anything?

I was prompted to think about this a bit because I was considering putting together a round-table discussion on technology for all of my colleagues, and the question that I wanted us to consider was: why is no one using technology? With all of the social media out there, why is none of that being used in courses? With all of the web 2.0 and now 3.0 tools, why has none of that been adopted. And actually, we can get even simpler, why are so few people even using web 1.0 tools?

In reality, all faculty are supposed to use Blackboard--and there is no point in me getting into that here.
Many faculty use that to post a syllabus, create a discussion board and keep track of grades. Some, more adventurous faculty, will also use it to run group projects or to set up blogs. Some will also use email features, but is that the extent of our use of technology? It seems so. Technology in a box.

There is really no widespread use of web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 tools/technology at the college. There might be 1/3 of the full-time faculty who maintain active professional home pages with links to information about their courses. Then there is the 1/3 of the full-time faculty who can't even manage their email! There is probably 1/3 of the full-time faculty who have never used the instructor work-stations in the classrooms to access anything on the web. What about the entire adjunct instructor population?

Most syllabi, if you look closely at them, follow a pattern something like: read this for class on Thursday, and in class on Thursday we will discuss this topic. There is little or no technology use anywhere to be found.

Why?

despite assumptions to the contrary, students are not necessarily tech savvy
it takes time for faculty to figure out how to use tech, and there is often little incentive when the school's priorities are enrollment or something else
there are no instructional technology people available to help them
it is not clear just what critical-thinking skills can be worked on with some technology

New Academic year, but stil the same old?

2011-08-05T11:03:00.000-04:00

As a new academic year approaches, it seems like the same old issues are rearing their bones again:
(1) that would be enrollment, enrollment, enrollment--in case you haven't been reading;
(2) adjuncts, adjuncts, adjuncts, which allows more enrollment;
(3) more online classes, which require more adjuncts, which then leads to more enrollment.
(4) inability of the college to identify strengths and weaknesses of our personnel and apply correctly. To use a football analogy, if you have a skilled gap defensive tackle, then you don't use that tackle as a nose guard. The key to great management is to figure out where people/staff will have the most impact. That is something that we do very poorly at the college, both in our hiring processes and then once people are actually hired. More on this later.

Digital Archive

2011-05-02T13:52:00.000-04:00

We are also still working on our online digital archive, which is at the Northern Virginia Digital Archive. We have succeeded in getting it up and running--that was an effort in itself--and are now trying to figure how to work it into our history courses.

Digital Newspaper project

2011-05-02T13:50:00.000-04:00

Finished up my digital newspaper assignment that I will be using in future history courses.
See http://www.ctevans.net/SNews/Index.html
The assignment is based on fragments of my hometown newspaper from 1907. It is a good example of how historians are usually trying to interpret fragmentary evidence from the past. I had two students try it out this semester with good results.

The Changing Nature of the Teaching and Practice of Nature II

2011-01-06T09:19:00.002-05:00

What about something called "student-directed learning?" I fear that might have connotations about the Montessori method. I am going to do an informal survey about just how active students are in some courses. I guess that I am troubled by the predominant "information providing" role of instructors in the college classroom.
I am also, of course, bothered by an extreme preoccupation with testing the knowledge of information (KoI), which is what now drives elementary and secondary education across the country. That (KoI) seems to be at the expense of the manipulation and handling of information. This kind of KoI testing/focus seems to be percolating up to the college/university level.

The Changing Nature of the Teaching and Practice of Nature I

2011-01-04T10:48:00.004-05:00

I have been bothered recently, and not been able to directly put my finger on anything concrete, about teaching and learning in the twenty-first century classroom. What has changed; what has not changed; what should be changing; what we should be thinking about. I am wondering what I need to be doing in my history classes, both in person and online, to prepare my students for the environment of the new century--and we are already a decade into the new century.
So much of the teaching that I am aware of at my college is still centered on providing students with information and expecting them to know that information. If you are wandering the halls and listening in on classes, in most cases, 80 to 90% of the time the voice that you will be hearing is the voice of the instructor. I'm not sure that is the way it should be.
What should students be doing (notice I used the verb "doing" not "learning") in the college classroom (or the virtual college classroom).
I'll come back to this.

Content In, Garbage out

2010-11-26T11:17:00.002-05:00

That might be BB. One minute I am happily adding tests in some BB courses; the next minute that option disappears from the menus. I have no control over the users in my courses (can't delete, can't add) - I can't even get a list of them. You would think that for the amount of the contract that our state system has with BB that you could at least get some things that work.

Blackboard and the Veil of Darkness

2010-10-06T13:10:00.001-04:00

I quote from one of my recent posts elsewhere;
'Finally, while I am no big proponent of Blackboard for various reasons, one of the big problems that I have with it is the veil of secrecy that drops over everyone's courses. It is almost as if we are back to the secrecy that surrounds me teaching in a campus environment. If there are great innovative assignments or technology being used, who can find out about it. It is also hard to share information across courses. One of the great advantages of the web is its universal access and availability, and we can see what is being done in other courses. The MIT open courses, while not a great example, are a kind of good example of what can be done out there.

Online Course Design

2010-10-05T09:46:00.002-04:00

I am re-posting here some comments that I recently made re the growing emasculation of instructors with the course design process at NVCC. This is a big step backward, and it seems that we are now encroaching on the way that hgih schools use Blackboard. I am also unclear whether our admin and staff, supposedly concerned with student success, really wants to engage in a discussion of this topic.

Here is my original note:
In a recent post to the ELI discussion about student success, Thomas Mora raised a very important point, a point that several other faculty commented upon throughout the discussion:

“Being one of those faculty who do not fully follow these course design principles, I would work with the faculty member to learn what their learning philosophy is and how it is evident in the design of the course. There is an assumption that there is ONE "correct" way to design a course. I do not subscribe to this philosophy. I believe we need to respect the expertise of the individual faculty member and find ways to work with them. I have felt that I am expected to follow these design principles without question. I do not remember being asked what assistance I need, but been told I need to participate in this process even though my courses have high completion rates. I do not feel respected for the expertise I have developed over the years of developing my course and working with
students. This creates (for me at least) a level of defensiveness for I feel I need to " protect" my territory. I feel ever increasing pressure to submit to course design principles (and changes to my
blackboard site) without consulting with me.’

I have the distinct impression from my conversations with my colleagues at ELI over the past year or so, that faculty teaching at ELI have lost control of the course design process, and that course design is being forced upon them without recognition of faculty’s specific expertise, course goals and intentions. (What Tom wrote is an excellent expression of this.) And it is pretty clear that the instructional designers, many of whom have far less actual course design and teaching experience than the faculty with whom they are working, are telling faculty what they must do in their courses instead of presenting faculty with what they could be doing, i.e., some options of what might work in their courses.

I like the way that Tom Mora wrote about the issue, and I believe that this issue of faculty course control is an important issue re the design and development of ELI courses, and while I recognize that
there may (and I only say “may) be some considerations re specific “good” distance learning practices, it is also clear that there are few, if any, “rules.” It remains pretty clear to me that a faculty instructor is the one who should have the final say about instructional content and process, not a course design, or redesign, team.

I think that the nature of the faculty/designer relationship at ELI merits some discussion to clarify the issues and processes involved. That relationship used to be pretty clear, but it is not so anymore. I do not think that this is a discussion that can take place on the discussion board or via Centra.

Books and Student Success

2010-08-30T06:28:00.002-04:00

I wonder how much the simple requirement to buy books affects students in a course. What I mean is that students need to buy their books online. If a student delays signing up for a course until the day before a class begins. Then the student has to go online and buy books (often opting for mess that priority postage), it seems that they will usually not get their books until week 2 of the course. That gives them a hurdle that they are already behind.

More on Student Success

2010-08-28T13:40:00.003-04:00

One of my colleagues reminded me about the fleetingness of numbers.
Many of the students enrolled in our history courses are students enrolled at other colleges and universities; they are not here to graduate from our community college. And so they are going to bring down our numbers in terms of students successfully graduating from here. I also have a lot of teachers, or future teachers, who just need to take a specific course for their credentials or licensing. They are not here to graduate also. And some students, often adult learners, enroll in the classes just for the fun of learning about history. The have no intention to graduate either.

What is Student Success?

2010-08-28T09:27:00.002-04:00

Well, there is that mysterious term again, “Student success.” Been hearing that in all kinds of formulations from college administration these days, and I’ve become increasingly suspicious that no one really knows what it means. Everyone just assumes there is a commonly-accepted definition. Making it more problematic is that supposedly those using the term can cite statistics. Yes, data, but what does that data conceal or not reveal about student success.

Student A enrolls in my course, but student A is working two jobs, just changed jobs, and is signed up for fifteen credits. If student A withdraws from the course because of those demands (instead of failing the course), does that mean student success in the course is diminished according to the data.

Student B has also enrolled in my course, but student B is still working his way up the ESL and developmental reading ladder. Despite all the possible support in the course, student B fails the course. Now that obviously means that the student success rate in the course goes down.
But, what if Student B finishes the course and passes. How does the data reward that effort on the part of both instructor and student.

Student C, just decides he doesn’t like “history.” I guess that means that is not student success.

Student D plagiarizes in the course and, as a result fails. I guess that also is not student success.

Enrollments Again

2010-08-26T13:57:00.003-04:00

Well, more urgings from the college to increase enrollment, even though the semester is already underway. Wonder, where we are going to find the rooms, the adjuncts, etc. And what about insuring quality of instruction? Just add more and more students so that we have more and more money.

New Semester; Same Death Wish for Blackboard

2010-08-25T15:56:00.003-04:00

It is unbelievable how much stupid, time-consuming work BB brings with it as a result of poor design.
Thousands of people around the country have to spend their days fixing things, and entering data, poof. Look I followed all the nice directions about setting up new courses for the fall, copy, delete, import; but, wait, some things, likes tests, for some reason don't get copied. Now it is damage control and another ten hours in front of the computer trying to figure out things. It is nice for administrators to laud Blackboard, how it allows faculty to set up "online" "learning" environments to facilitate 24-7 education. It would be nice if some admins actually sat and tried to use BB for some time.

Enrollment Continues to spike upward

2010-08-18T12:57:00.003-04:00

We are still continuing to enroll students for the fall semester which starts next week, but enrollment continues its upward trend. I also lost a bunch of adjuncts in the last two weeks, which lent for some pretty remarkable (and lucky) scrambling to get classes filled. It is amazing how little help most of the local grad programs are!

New Blackboard Not Much Better Than the Old Blacboard

2010-08-18T12:54:00.002-04:00

The more that they seem to do with Blackboard, the less it seems that technology is saving us any time.
The course copy process is a nightmare; a simple thing such as entering grades could take forever when you get the "saving" prompt; there is no way that I can sort my courses on my "personalized" BB home page, but you can do blogs now!

Retention

2010-05-20T18:43:00.002-04:00

Yes, the "r" word in higher education. Someone always seems to be expressing concern about it; whether students will succeed; whether students will come back and keep enrolling for more courses (and paying more tuition). Sometimes, we talk in the lingo of ATD, Achieving the Dream.
Well, to address retention, you've got to think of some of the factors involved:
a) proportion of courses taught by full-time versus adjunct instructors. Sure there are some great adjunct instructors and some poor full-time faculty, but the odds are not good for a lot of active-learning techniques being used by adjunct faculty
b) skill sets of the students (in terms of, for example, reading ability, writing skills, study skills, time management ability, etc). Some of that can be addressed, but only by a careful outlay of resources.
c) institutional facilities. When libraries and testing centers are not available to students on some evenings or on weekends, then that will put further barriers to students coming back for more classes.
d) course availabilities
e) institutional psychology. Look have you ever tried to brave your way through the Novaconnect/MyNova student information system. It is so un-user friendly, that it has got to frustrate students. We can't even give students a student ID; we have got to give them an EMPLID.
There were two more points, but I can't remember them now.

Blackboard and the Compartmentalization of Knowledge

2010-04-20T08:55:00.002-04:00

Well, here is another thought that occurred to me about why Blackboard is a step-backwards on the web. I was working on some background notes for an assignment, and I asked one of my colleagues if she had any relevant information on the topic in her literature course. Turns out that she had great informative notes, but the problem was that the information is buried within her Blackboard course, and there is no easy way for me to link to that material from my course or send my students to view it in her BB course. So, the interdisciplinary sharing of knowledge and the breaking down of classroom walls, which was so lauded with the onset of the internet, is no longer there. We are now back inside walls, this time Blackboard's walls. Almost all of our course development now focuses on putting course content within the secure framework of BB instead of on the open web.

Hey, We're Getting a New Blackboard

2010-04-11T10:04:00.003-04:00

Joy, of joys. We have been told that we are updating from Blackboard 8 to Blackboard 9. This, of course, means that the whole system must go down, and when it comes back up, everything will be new and different. Just can't wait to see what tricks the BB folks will play on us this time, and what new features will be available!

Is Teaching with Blackboard Teaching?

2010-03-01T09:25:00.002-05:00

Been wondering about that. I have a lot of colleagues who spend considerable amount of time in the classroom, working with students, developing new assignments and activities, personalizing their instruction. But then they teach online with Blackboard. They create reading assignments from a textbook, set up some multiple-choice exams that are automatically graded by Blackboard, maybe have students look through some textbook-publisher-provided Powerpoints, and, oh, yes, have students post to one another on an online forum. Is that college-level instruction?

Digital Humanities Project

2010-02-08T09:16:00.003-05:00

Well, we have gotten off the ground something called the Loudoun Digital Humanities Project. Right now it is largely just a single website, but we hope to use this as an organizing focus for a series of workshops and also digital projects for the faculty at the Loudoun campus. The "problem" is going to be trying to interest/involve faculty in collaborating. I am not sure that too many faculty are ever really involved in collaborative projects, even though they pay lip service to that idea.

Enrollments Continue to go Up, Up, Up

2010-01-18T09:33:00.002-05:00

Since fall 2007, enrollments on campus in HIS 101 have gone from 312 to 440. At the same time, enrollments in the online section of HIS 101 have gone from 134 to 344. Guess what, no new full-time instructors were hired to help cover that increase. If we are funded at, say, 27 students per class in history, and a full-time instructor teaches 5 classes, then that works out to 135 students per full-time instructor.

Adjuncts

2009-11-02T13:50:00.002-05:00

Well, as I was putting together resources for my adjuncts, I discovered that I am basically coordinating the teaching of sixteen instructors between our campus and online western and world civ sequences. That, of course, means that on our campus, adjuncts are responsible for probably between eighty and ninety percent of the students being taught.

Small class v Large class

2009-09-25T09:53:00.002-04:00

Well, while I don't know the education literature, it has long been a taken-for-granted assumption that faculty preferred teaching small classes (under 20) to large classes (50 and over). While Jennifer and I were working on the second edition of of our Project Pedagogy: Some Ideas for Better Teaching (available online), we really try and give faculty some alternatives to the standard lecture course. But when we give presentations or hold discussions with faculty, we encounter all kinds of resistance to our advice to downplay lecturing. That has bothered me, ut then my experience this semester with my small class (15 students) reminded me why faculty default into lecturing--it is much easier. With the small class, I see up close the different learning styles of the students, and I can also see pretty quickly the study skills that the individual students possess (or lack). I have to work hard to engage all the students in the class while keeping in mind their varied skills and styles. It would be much easier for me to just enter class and deliver information for 75 minutes.

Budget crunch time and Enrollments

2009-09-21T13:33:00.003-04:00

Economy or not, we have had a gigantic increase in enrollments in our HIS 101-102 courses, both on campus and online, and I have been hard-pressed to keep up with that surge. It is not easy finding qualified adjuncts willing to work for what the state pays (plus you get paid a lot more if you teach for George Mason as an adjunct that what NVCC pays) and then fitting them into a schedule. Plus they also need some mentoring, ans staying in touch (and guidance through the bureaucratic tangle that is a state school). My online enrollments are enormous this semester as I didn't have enough adjuncts ready to go to help out with the online courses, and students just kept enrolling in the courses. I've got little time to really develop any content this semester as I just try and stay ahead of grading--there is a lot of writing in the courses, and a lot of students take advantage of the opportunity to submit drafts.

Summer Downtime 2

2009-07-14T15:00:00.000-04:00

How could I forget! I digitized all my old audio clips and video clips from my HIS 101 and HIS 102 courses from about ten years ago and put them all on ItunesU for the current students. Not sure if anything there is very useful, but some students like to listen to things.

Summer Downtime

2009-07-14T14:36:00.002-04:00

Well, I don't blog every day, and it is summer, but it is certainly not downtime. Despite running kids around to camps and swimming, I have managed to finish up work on a second edition of the teaching manual with Jennifer Lerner (Project Pedagogy). Most of our revisions focused on technology, and we still probably haven't ended up covering most of the new web 2.0 tools and their uses in teaching. The manual is intended to give encouragement and ideas to the hundreds of adjunct instructors that teach at the Loudoun campus.

I am also far along with the Achieving the Dream (ATD) project that looks at student success in our HIS 101 courses, both online and on campus. I've got in hand some grade data, and also some more detailed data from our office of institutional research, and now I've got to look through it all and see if I can discover any patterns. Part of the ATD thing will be setting up a central BB--and everyone knows how much I love Blackboard--site with resources for all of my HIS 101 adjuncts. I think that at the moment I am supervising something like between 10 and 12 adjuncts, both on campus and online!

There was something else that I finished up this summer for my HIS courses, but at the moment it escapes me.

Students Love Blackboard

2009-05-01T15:27:00.002-04:00

Informal polling of those students using Blackboard at our college reveals that almost 50% of those students "love" Blackboard. Maybe BB 10.1 will be better.

ATD means Achieving Whose Dream

2009-03-26T09:18:00.003-04:00

An Achieving the Dream project has swept into our college, but it looks like we are dallying around with actually implementing anything because implementing the kind of support structure that we will need to help out students who need help to work towards achieving proficiency in the skills needed to eventually graduate (reading, writing, thinking, communicating); well, that costs money. It has been difficult just to try and gather data that would help us in the process.
For example, since we are an open enrollment institution, that means that anyone can sign up for our HIS 101 course, which happens to require quite a bit of college-level writing. It should be relatively easy to correlate student success in the course (A, B or C) with the grade a student has received in English composition, or with the score that a student took on the English placement test, or with a student not having taken English, or not having taken the test. Nada, no progress.

Personal Contemporary History Assignment

2008-12-30T10:45:00.002-05:00

Well, in one of my earlier posts about a month or so ago, I wrote about a possible new history paper assignment. "Well, I've adapted to my students this semester and decided to try out a new assignment with them, by having them write up the history of the last ten years, from their own perspectives."
I was much surprised by their final projects, which all turned out to be very good--even from those who I didn't think had a chance of writing ten coherent pages. You can take a quick look at the papers: novaonline.nvcc.edu/eli/evans/campus/His135/Assignments/Links.html
I originally planned on using a wiki to set this up a collaborative project, but the free, online wikis available to me did not seem fitted to the task of long, research papers from multiple groups of collaborators. No matter how much I worked around--and I'm sure that it could have been done--but it seemed to be too much of a hassle for me to figure it out. It should have been simpler. So I settled on using google docs. Now, I could not track editing changes or specific collaborators with google docs, but the docs worked ok and it was simple. Besides, there weren't too many students who opted for the collaboration (Don't we all hate group work!), and so it just amounted to me working online with individual students.
Anyway, back to my point that students did very well. Some needed a bit of prompting, but most did a lot of work and enjoyed the paper and the opportunity to reflect on what they had seen and already lived through in the past ten years.
Most, of course, wrote primarily of things that happened in the US. That is not unusual, given that most of these students were very young with limited news exposures, but still some had overseas experience and could bring very interesting perspectives to the assignment.
Second, it was hard to get students to do supplemental research to investigate more thoroughly the events that they were writing about. This was especially the case with the use of Wikipedia. Most students are more than happy to read wikipedia, but they are not interested in looking further for more sources, nor are they even interested in looking at the notes or citations in a wikipedia entry itself.
Third, there is a problem of writing contemporary history and that is the issue of historical perspective--there is very little when covering ten years past. I worked a bit on this, but the very nature of the assignment which was kind of a personal memoir of recent history allowed me to bypass some of this issue.
Fourth, it was difficult to get students to read the other papers and produce detailed, competent critique, even though many ended up covering the same events. For example, a lot of students wrote about the Columbine Shootings, but they would not ask why one student omitted something, or point out mistakes in information in another paper.
Fifth, what struck me more than anything was the fact that when students had to work on impersonal, analytical writing assignments, such as I use elsewhere in the course, then they really struggled. They struggled with writing mechanics and style; they struggled with thesis and content. But with their personal writing and memoirs in this assignment, they wrote pretty darn well. I think that is reflective of the kind of writing that they now do in high school (I write this, I think this, I feel that, I, I , I , but that is not the kind of writing that they need to succeed in college or professional life.

New BB 8.0 Sets New Standards for Un-Usability

2008-11-22T08:50:00.002-05:00

Well, we haven't even started using a new upgrade of BB at our college--8.0 in this case--and people are already praising it to the heavens, especially the the newly-redesigned "Grade Center." Look, I wrote about this in a previous post. One of the main problems with BB is that is tries to span the teaching scale from grade 1 to college, and to do that, as is obvious, it tries to pack too much garbage into the overall package. Some of these grading features are perfect for a fourth grade teacher; not so for a college instructor, and not needed! It would be smarter if the BB team had targeted versions of BB for specific ed environments.

Even More questions about Blackboard

2008-11-07T08:14:00.003-05:00

Just realized that my son's second grade class has access to Blackboard, and so do the fifth graders (where homework assignments from the teacher are supposed to be posted). They use Blackboard in the Middle School, and it is used in the High School (where students can post and submit assignments). And we are supposed to use it on the college level. Now, someone please tell me, how this BB CMS is appropriate across all of these educational levels; is it that brilliantly-designed with so many options that can be tailored to the individual learning needs of vastly different audiences? Hardly!

Still More Blackboard Badness

2008-10-01T14:34:00.002-04:00

Well, try and do any batch-type action in Blackboard, and I promise that you will go through a lot of extra steps. For example, I had to inactivate some students from one of my Blackboard course gradebooks. This involved going to control panel, list students, check their properties, and then make the appropriate change to "not available." This had to be done student by student, with a lot of screens, submits, confirms. I could not just go down a single list of students and change the properties and submit it all. These folks no nothing about productive use of an instructor's time.

More of Blackboard as bad, bad, bad

2008-09-15T10:43:00.004-04:00

Continuing my previous post:
1. It is very difficult to link to anything within Blackboard.
2. If you don't think like the Blackboard design team--most of whom I'm guessing have little actual educational experience--than nothing will be intuitive about the system. Look, I've used a lot of Blackboard. Try and do something simple. For example, enter a grade for a student in the gradebook; it is a lot more difficult a process than you would think. I've had to write it up with about ten lines of directions for some of my adjunct instructors. Try and make a suggestion about what would work better, forget it. Changing the corners and colors of the buttons does work well.
3. Why doesn't Blackboard recognize that I am an instructor when I log in so that I have the tools that I need as an instructor available to me from my carefully chosen menu buttons?
4. I also think that BB is close to being illegal by seeming to protect instructional materials from perusal and use by the citizens of the state that have paid for those materials.
5. BB destroys the entire premise of the web which is the free access and sharing of materials across all disciplines and boundaries. If I create something for one of my history courses, other students in other courses can have access to those materials and use them if they wish. They can learn! The web is great at fostering collaboration; but not BB because you can't get to or share anything in there unless you have the magic password.

The electronic textbook

2008-09-14T10:21:00.003-04:00

Just received an email from the editors of Innovate, a journal of online education, in which the editors are seeking contributions about the future of textbooks and how they might or might not change in the electronic near future. Very interesting. I have been toying with the idea of abandoning a regular textbook in my HIS 135, contemporary history course, but I haven't yet been able to get up to do that, thinking that I need a bunch more resources online for the course before I could make any change.
It is worrisome, the thought of abandoning the text, not from the point of view of the material in there, but considering that students read so little now, and they have such poorly defined reading skills, especially when it comes to interpreting the information--not to mention actually being able to read a couple of hundred pages a week. I am not sure where that leaves us if we abandon a large part of the reading demands on them, because you can't just replace a text with an equivalent amount of online text. More thoughts on this later.

Blackboard, let me count the ways that it is bad, bad and bad

2008-09-14T10:05:00.002-04:00

1. It uses an archaic frame-page set up that was long ago abandoned by most web designers. With the current way that BB run, you get about 30-40% of a computer screen (in the target area) to design with. Boy, that is real exciting! You can really do a lot with graphics and images in a 400x400 pixel box.
2. Blackboard depersonsalizes (sic) the educational experience. When you take classes in person at any college in this country, every time you step into a different professor's classroom, you experience a different learning environment (some are good; some are not so good), but all are different. Everyone teaches slightly differently from their colleagues, even with the same course. Well, Blackboard aims for uniformity of expression' although the BB people do allow you to change the color and style of the buttons. Wow, that makes for a different classroom experience.
3. It is ugly. Enough said; oops, maybe I should say BB is really, really ugly. There is no aesthetic sensibility about it.
4. The BB setup also rewards those instructors who don't want to go beyond the technological requirements of being able to create and upload a Word document. The web and the "cloud" have a lot more potential than a black-and-white, text document.

New Semester online

2008-08-24T09:53:00.002-04:00

Along with my campus course, my online courses start this week. One of the main points in that regard is keeping track of my adjuncts--have to do that in the campus situation also--and keeping track of the various administrative due dates in the semester. I'm also trying some new assignments as extra credit options, for example the Wikipedia analysis paper, in the course to see how they work out before putting them permanently into any course course.

I am also planning to do some short videos: an introduction; how a historian analyzes a document; why proper and correct writing is so important to a historian.

New Semester on campus

2008-08-24T09:49:00.002-04:00

In my campus course, HIS 135, I will be trying out a variety of new assignments to see what works with the students. I think that I will also try a collaborative paper using a wiki just to see how that goes. I'd like to start the course by showing students a clip from the Live 8 Concert back in 2005 (so very long ago for many people) in which the Pet Shop Boys are playing on a stage set up on Red Square in Moscow. Could the same concert be scheduled for 2008? I'll write about some of my other ideas later.

Students and the Blog?

2008-05-19T08:58:00.003-04:00

Well, this spring I experimented with using a blog in my Russian history courses as opposed to the usual course-management-system discussion forums. The results were not much different than what I experienced with the forums, i.e., mixed student participation. On the plus side, the blog allowed me to offer some "spur-of-the-moment" thoughts to students as they were progressing through the course; the blog also allowed me to comment on current events in Russia that I normally would not have been able to bring to the attention of the students. On the negative side, the learning curve (however small it may have been) was a bit much for some students to handle. In addition, when students did choose to comment or post, their contributions were not always solid contributions. I think the next time that I try this, each student will have their own blog, and I'll use it as more of a reflective instrument for students to comment as they work through the course material. I think that kind of use would also work well with some kind of portfolio project.

Using Video

2008-05-12T14:04:00.002-04:00

Just finished some training in Adobe's Premier CS3--I needed it since this new upgrade was much different than my old Premier 6.1 software. I'm hoping to get started on some short videos for my online classes, but haven't decided whether to shoot with my mini-dv camera or my logitech webcam. I think that these will end up in Flash format. Also have some home video projects to attend to this summer.

Student Technology Know-How

2008-04-27T08:46:00.002-04:00

Is the newest student generation really tech savvy? Or is just the portion of the students at the high end of the tech use spectrum driving that label for all students? I've got an awful lot of students in my classes with very low level tech skills. Browsing, or searching, the web, sending an email using Word are all things that are problematic. I don't necessarily label calling with, or talking on, a cell phone a tech skill.

Interactivity (commenting on images)

2008-04-25T09:32:00.002-04:00

What I'd like to be able to do is figure out a way that students can comment throughout my course on, for example, some of the images that I use. In a blog, students can add comments to posts or images that are included in the blog. In Flickr (or other online photo sites), users can always add comments to images. Now, I've just got regular html pages, and the question is how can I make them more interactive for users. I'd like to see students build up a line of commentary on specific images that I use.

Collaboration

2008-04-20T09:17:00.002-04:00

One of the many problems that we face at our college is staying in touch. Seems simple enough! We're a large college, with five different campuses (in an area where driving any amount of distance can always be problematic), with faculty having heavy teaching loads. Plus we are all dealing with our different discipline demands. So, while technology can offer us some solutions, it is interesting that even though some of us can be pretty darn good with tech, it can be still be tough to stay up on what others are doing. The tech just doesn't enable communication as flawlessly, as easily, as it should be.

Resizing Pages

2008-04-16T11:01:00.002-04:00

It is a minor point, but one of the things that came to my mind as I was working on these course re-orderings was that I should redo my page widths. Since I first started working on the web years ago, I always designed my web pages with a define width of 600 pixels. That worked well with the low graphics resolutions and small monitors, but now I figured that I could throw caution to the wind and expand everything to at least a width of 800. That gives me a lot more design room on the pages. But it's also going to add another step in my work.

Digital Teaching Workshop

2008-04-13T13:33:00.003-04:00

Right now I'm directing a NEH-funded, year long workshop focused on teaching/studying the humanities with current and future digital technologies. I am not quite sure yet what will come out of this, but currently I am working on separating content from course assignments in all of my online history courses. It is a bit laborious to do that, but I'm hoping that this will give me more options in considering which, if any, web 2.0 applications I can begin to use in the courses. Separating out the content will also allow me to develop my content a bit more and add in a lot more images.