Twitter and PLN

I spent part of day trying out Twitter and thinking about how it might support a PLN. Here are my observations, based on one day's experience.

1. I like sites like eduratereview. All the material is related to education, and it is like a news feed. I could see checking into this one or twice a month and scanning for articles of interest. It gives a quick title, and then links.

2. "Following" is a very mixed bag. When most tweets are about something educational, they can have some value in that I hear about new resources. Like on willrichard45 (?), I found something that took me to his blog, and there I started to learn something about Diigo.

3. I was disappointed with the gardenglen link that Eric mentioned frequently. If I am following him to learn more about education and the web, there is too much unrelated to this on the page. My time is much more valuable than following several days worth of preparation to attend a conference. Moreover, all this garbage makes me respect the site and the person less. I think the idea of following is to find people who have interesting perspectives on something of interest to you. In a similar manner, I lose respect for people on a list serve who feel compelled to respond to all to answer a very specific question. Maybe for some, knowing that a person spends more time tweeting than doing yard work makes this person a reliable commentator on education. Personally, I like the more old fashioned way of evaluating a person by credentials and references within a community. To earn my respect, I would like to follow people who respect the value of time and use the short format of Twitter to relay conciseness.

4. I am learning I am a much more private person than many that exist on-line. I don't like the idea that others can see what I am following. I don't like leaving a very open trail because I worry how it can be misinterpreted. I don't think I would post openly to many blogs or twitter sites because I don't know how the information will be interpreted. As a teacher, I am especially sensitive to what people can find out about me because there are many who might question what I look at and form an incorrect image of me which could hurt me professionally. I think it is too easy to lose context when following a web trail.

5. Following another's tweets is weird and somewhat annoying because you see the replies to earlier messages so much of the page lacks context.

6. I wonder how much effort one needs to put in to evaluate all the people someone might be following. Because there seems to be no grouping, educational technology can be right up there with the person's community tennis team. For me, so far, list serves are more useful because at least there is some agreement about what people will post.

PLN -- first comments

Over my 25 plus year career in education, I have learned a great deal from colleagues and teachers. Most of this has occurred over conversations or through workshops. Consequently, at this point in my career, I consider myself at stage 5 of the Utescht scale in many areas of my professional life. (Definitely not stage five with electronic resources) I have more than enough ideas about teaching my content area. I don't have a great desire to learn too much about some content areas because even if I learned them, I couldn't put them into place with my county pacing guide. When I taught at an independent, I had much greater freedom about what I taught, and during this time I pursued new ideas because I knew I could try them out. With my classes, the greatest area in which I am interested is in student feedback on their learning. When I need something, I usually get adequate information from the NSTA list serves.

I seek out information when I have something new to do, such as when I switched to teaching high school chemistry two years. I sought out respected sources of information that came from personal experience or reliable services, such as NSTA. I probably got the most out of attending a workshop and talking with teachers about what they did.

I like the PLN that take place during a course. Here there is a small group of people doing the same thing at the same time. I've enjoyed much of the discussion that has taken place in my MSU courses. I have to admit though, that I didn't feel compelled to keep in touch with many of my classmates. What brought us together was the class at hand.

While I haven't started my on-line PLN, I have my doubts as to how valuable it will be for me. I find that I remember very little of what I read about on-line. Even when I organize ideas and make notes on them, what I use in my classes are things I have seen. I seldom find it helpful to read someone else's lab write up on-line.

Online learning and "The Dumbest Generation"

I am slow to get to my thoughts on Twiiter and PLN this week because I daily commuted to an AP Env. Sci. training session.

I feel behind, but also don't miss the mental frenzy that goes with checking posts. During some down time and an overnight session with no laptop, I read The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Mark Bauerlein, 2008). While the ultimate argument of his book is that American adolescents spend time on screen at the considerable loss of intellectual growth through reading, he did include one chapter on studies of on-line learning that bolster his case. These might be something to consider as we contemplate Web 2.0 applications in our classes.

He acknowledges that the wired, gaming, messaging generation may develop better spatial awareness and some planning, but doesn't feel that students become better learners in the process.

A quote from Bill Joy founder of Sun Microsystems at a WEb 2.0 conference: I"m skeptical that anything has to do with learning. It sounds like encapsulated entertainment."

Overall, blogs, etc reduce student reading ability because they spend little time reading books where they might encounter more unusual words. "For most users, screen time doesn't graduate them to higher knowledge/skills levels. It superpowers their social impulses, but it blocks intellectual gains." (Bauerlein, 139)

Another section deals with research into how people look at computer screens. A web consulting company of Jakob Nielsen looks at individual responses and more importantly, monitors what user is really doing with eye movement cameras. Some of the findings:
1. 0nly 16% of uses read text on a web page in linear, word to word fashion. They scan text, fixate on interesting items and then quickly move on.
2. Readers of RSS feeds spend even less time on headlines than on the newsletter itself. Typically a reader will look at the first two words in the headline, and if nothing in those two words sparks interest, then will go to next page.
3. Most readers look at web pages in F pattern, read top line, some in the middle, and the left edge. Lower right corner often ignored.
4. Teens display reading skills, research procedures, and patience levels insufficient to navigate the web effectively.
5. Adolesecents complete online tasks only 55% of the time, compared with adults 66%. Students have short attention spans and want to be stimulated.
6. Much of the problem comes from the large amounts of time students have control over what they do with digital technology, much more than required school time. They are so grooved that efforts from school may not change them.

Ultimately, digital technology presents adolescents so much choice, that they spend nearly all of their time on sites with people who share their opinions and don't challenge them to grow intellectually.

Cooking egg-- I don't like the soundtrack so you might turn it off

I picked this because I mentioned this in a comment on Natasha's blog page as an example of using YouTube materials instead of experiments. This is the only example of this demonstration I could find with a short search. Please comment if you think you see enough of this to make it a valuable replacement of a demonstration for high school chemistry. Thanks.

Blogs, Wikis, week 1 assignment

After looking at a number of educational blogs and wikis, I can see where they can have some value to student learning.

1. Many class wiki help communicate information to students. I can't always tell from the ones I've seen how participatory they are, but if a teacher maintains it regularly it can help with learning. For example, I post assignments, worksheets, PDF readings on my class bulletin board page. The readings are especially valuable because they look better in the original multi color printing plus they save dollars and paper. Students are increasing becoming more comfortable with doing on-line reading.

2. How a class wiki could be helpful.

A. If I were able to set up an interactive wiki, the students and I could share information about assignments. I like the idea of password protecting it so it would be only for my classes, which would allow more communication with fewer risks. The route where I have to approve everything before posting won't work for me. Nothing would ever get posted or I wouldn't get any other work accomplished.

Maybe one could ask a question, and someone else could reply besides me. This would be especially valuable for those who start homework after I go to bed. With longer term assignments or some particularly confusing task, being able to respond to a question only once and future readers could see it would save all of us time.

B. I would like to use it as a place to discuss topics. For example, I might assign an online reading and then have a place to make comments. Much like with on line classes, I could require students to post a number of times per semester. If everyone posted all the time, it would get repetitive and very long with 140 honors chemistry students. Another idea is to assign one or two students to be discussion leaders for a weekly article. They make up the questions to ask or start discussion of the article. I might assess only their participation, while encouraging others to participate.

I share opinions of others that some students will comment in a situation like this where they will never say anything in class. I also know that for some students this would be great because they love to text and to chat.

C. Next year I will be teaching half the classes for a popular course that has been taught by the same person since its inception when the school opened seven years ago. I am sure there will be students who are going to feel cheated because they aren't getting the teacher they expected. I am considering recording his lectures and making them available on an internet site.

D. Students prepare powerpoints on some chemistry topic of interest as a special topic of the week. I could put this on a course wiki, and this would allow students in other classes to see them.

E. I have done web assignments where students download a template of questions or data table. Then they have to report this information back to a master template where all students can add their information. At the end we have a data table with each person's contribution. Sometimes I will also narrow their search times by providing links to where they can find the information. Two quick sources come to mind, something from SciLinks.org (NSTA service of picking best websites for teachers) or when doing environmental topics the CIA data base.

Questions and concerns I have at this moment about using Blogs and Wikis for education.

1. Reading various blogs is an up and down process; some are interesting, some are not. During a summer or this class where I have time to follow my interests, this uneven value and content is easier to live with. I don't think the nature of blogs and especially the comment section will ever be 100% useful, but here are some things I wish more would consider.

A. side bar table of contents so you could quickly get to a topic that might be of interest to you.

B. When mention is made of another web site, include some description of what is there in addition to providing the link. A descriptor can help me decide if this is truly germane or an interesting digression.

C. I wish more comment sections could be organized around by thread. Sometimes there are several areas of comment. I may only find one of them useful, but because the comment section, is chronological, reading through all of them is necessary to see which ones discuss my topic of interest. Very often, if the number of comments exceeds 10 or 20, and most were things like "Way to go." "Totally agree with you." "Thanks for posting," I move on. I know there must be a way to do this, but many blogs don't use it. For example, my wife's daughter is an ultimate (frisbee) player, and often likes to follow her daughter's tournament information. The posts on rec.sport.disc are more topical and easier to ignore some.

I am sure some of this is a learned skill. In other MSU classes, discussion is done on D2L. With this you get a menu, showing connect to thread. Because this is done by title, and if users are good with including relevant information or content summary in the title, you can see if this is something you would like to open. However, the easy path is to press the reply button. So, it looks like your post is still in response to "having trouble with lab 4" but the actual discussion is personal chat about the individual's horses. I am learning by watching what shows up in the Update section for the class posts how titles can be useful. For example, when the update shows someone added two words to the Blog post, this usually means that this is a new blog site to follow. My department members at school are getting very good at putting as much of the message as possible in e-mail subject lines. Sometimes the title is the entire message, and I've found this helps manage a file with only one look at it.

D. I still don't see how managing more information is done by creating more. To use a blog well for education, it shouldn't encourage the wondering, valuable as this can be sometimes for serendipity finds.

Thoughts on Web 2.0

I thought the article on Web 2.o as the future of education was more interesting that the two chapters in the text.

Here are some thoughts and areas I am struggling with.

1. The participatory part of Web 2.0 may increase engagement. However, is it engagement with ideas associated with education? Anecdotes: 1) students spend more time with the glitzy features of PowerPOint or Imovie, and their final product doesn't show a great level of understanding or application of the concepts. 2) Allowing students access to online materials opens up their ability to do anything else but the required task. They check facebook through channels they know that get around the network blocker and browse for cars and prom dresses.

2. Much of the internet is still about information. So you can find the information, does this make you competent in using it? For example, I consider locally produced food very desirable. All the information I can find on line is not going to give me the feel I have for when a crop is ready, when I have to implement a pest control strategy, how long I can go without watering my plants. A certain level of education is about being able to do something, and I am not sure many of the Web 2.0 offerings actually help you do something. Do want to have surgery performed by a web trained doctor? How about car repair from a person who only blogs about it. Or consider, as one of the the class people commented on her web page, she can do somethings by phone much faster than doing something by text.

3. I completely don't get the author's idea of dealing with too much information by creating more. Anyone have thoughts on this?

4. I disagreed with the author's comments that participation makes selection better. The idea was of only buying things from Amazon with favorable user reviews. I think the author mistakes the need for and value of knowing something about the person making the comment. Even the stylish "was this review helpful to you?" doesn't tell me much. I have purchased some DVD for my classes based upon Amazon comments, and I was greatly disappointed with the product. For example, one teacher review of a movie on Trash said how much she learned from it and how engaged her students were in watching it. When I got it, with more personal background with the topic, I found the information about 15 years old, large sections would have put my students to sleep, and I needed much more explanation of what was happening. At least reviews from the librarians give you some information about the reviewer.

As science educators, we have a history of science based upon peer review at risk of being damaged or destroyed by participation by the masses. Just because a large number of people believe something doesn't make it true. We have to help students understand the difference between peer review or at least review based upon qualifications and what often passes for review online. In addition, many students don't understand how vested interests can manipulate google search results, or that favorable comments can be made as many times you might like, just like on American Idol a person can vote as often as he or she may like.

My experiences with technology

I have been using technology for a number of years in the classroom. Judging by what the text book authors are saying, I am probably not an early adapter, but I am definitely more engaged than the dismal picture presented in chapter 1o. Here are some of the ways I've used technology.

1. Electronic grade book (required by current county school system).

2. Student research and oral presentations. I have come to prefer oral reports to written ones because too much of the written work is copied without any thought. A well done PowerPoint aided presentation, especially where students are limited in number of words per slide and they need to explain the pictures they choose, helps me gauge their understanding.

3. My current school allows use of TurnItIn.com to check for copying. This is useful for research reports and lab reports.

4. For one year, I used an ActivBoard in my room.

5. Participated in field testing of National Geographic programs where students collected data and shared this with other classes across the country.

6. Started using clicker systems this year for quick classroom feedback during lecture/discussion.

7. Used remote sensing information on line for Science Olympiad events.

8. Dabbled with GIS systems to deal with environmental questions when program first came out about 12 years ago.

9. Use probes, especially motion detectors and pressure sensors in lab work.

10. Am somewhat limited with how online resources can be used in school. School filter and blocking software prohibit importation of many useful resources. While wanting to use web to distribute readings, I can't assume students can access internet from home. School acceptable use policies are really designed to protect the county network more than they are to foster education. I understand how much trouble can be caused when students load unauthorized material onto the network

11. My current chemistry text has online simulation labs which look interesting but I haven't used.

Guiding principles of technology (teaching)

My goal from students is understanding of scientific processes and how these show up in their lives. When I taught middle school, the goal for the class was helping students become better, more informed travelers on spaceship Earth. With each unit, they would have to compile a Tenants Manual For Spaceship Earth for the topic.

Now that I am teaching high school chemistry, I try to help students see how the state mandated curriculum actually applies to their lives.

What I think technology in education should do?
1. Increase students understanding of material.
2. Make sharing information easier.
3. Make preparation time shorter.
4. Improve the ability of teacher and/or student to grasp a concept.
5. Facilitate communication between students and teacher.
6. Serve as a way for students to demonstrate understanding.

Guiding education principles.
1. Learning requires effort. The only person learning is the one working at it.
2. Understanding is not equal to memorizing, recalling, or writing.
3. The process of answering questions is a helpful way to gauge understanding.
4. Learning often takes place when someone explains a concept to another person.
5. Knowing information is only a portion of learning. Being able to use or interpret it completes the task.
6. Working with materials and doing something can be both a learning experience and a way to gauge understanding.

Rime photo taken around noon, 1 June 2009 Mt. Washington NH. Temperature probably around 25 F, windspeed 55 mph