First Day of Class

It seems to me that there is no amount of preparation that can guarantee that something will not go wrong in an online course the first day of class. I looked at my list of things to do to prepare, I looked at my course from the student’s view, I looked for typos, for dead links, I reviewed the schedule several times, I emailed students to their external emails, to their internal emails, but I can never foresee what some students will find to be awkward or unclear in the course policies or the navigation of the course.

This term I am implementing VoiceThread for the first time and earlier things not working well. I was a bit nervous about it to begin, even though I had tested the tool many times. D2L was acting up and some of the problems in VoiceThread my students experienced may have been related to that. But now I see things are running smoothly and I feel excited about using the new tool. I am hearing student’s voices! I think that is a terrific improvement for the dynamics of the discussion; student’s responses are more personal, memorable, and more human. I still hope that most students will chose to record their voice rather than type. That will be the real test!

As far as other kinks in the course, I’ll deal with them one at the time.

Cheers to a great fall term!

~Carol

In Search of a Teaching Community

It is true that online learning still lacks a meaningful social dimension for students; the same goes for online instructors. There is no copy room, cafeteria, or parking lot where one could bump into a colleague, share thoughts about a course, and have a sense of belonging to the learning community. The discussions in the Community pages, the blogs, and the annual conference are good attempts to fill the gap, and I also read somewhere that ideas about a social network for CCCO are beginning to float. So the issue is not neglected.

As things stand right now, I am most satisfied with what blogging has done for me to feel part of a teaching community. In the past I have read blogs posted in the school’s website, but I never had a method to check these systematically. As a blogger for the summer series of Faculty Voices I felt compelled to read what others were writing and found deep appreciation for the stories that so closely resonate with my experiences. And yes, I felt a sense of community—kinda.

This sense of community is only kinda, because it is fleeting and self serving. I read other blogs with attention mainly because I blog. But even so, as a temporary conversation with colleagues, blogging has been a very positive experience and I would highly recommend other faculty members to give it a try.

While I still wish and impatiently wait for the day when we could all have easy, fun spaces to socialize with colleagues, spaces that would resemble casual encounters in a campus, in the meantime I am excited to think I will meet my blogging colleagues in person at the September conference. There we will gather to conduct an informal discussion about blogging.

Blogging has given me the most significant social interaction I have had with other faculty as an online instructor. Even if the experience is brief, and the level of engagement is mostly impersonal there is a sense of connection and purpose I don’t sense in other discussions or meetings. I think this is because when you blog, you commit to think a little deeper about some things, and care a little bit more about what others have to say.

~Carol

Time to Reflect on The Summer Term

At the end of each term students respond to a few of my questions to help me gauge their impression of the course activities, work load, and genera level of satisfaction.

According to my informal survey, the most effective aspect of the course was that they had choices in terms of the questions they could answer in the assignments. They also suggested that I provide more opportunities to explore in some depth topics that interest them personally.

Because my course was a survey of art history the scope of the class is very broad, many students feel a little disappointed when they cannot delve into Impressionism or understand better the distinction between modern and postmodern art.

These students’ comments point to the notion that learning is particularly effective when information is personalized. The instructional designer William Horton refers to this idea when he writes about “connect activities," which help learners "connect what they are learning to their work, their lives, or their prior learning."
In my courses these activities could be addressed by adding more topic choices and allowing learners some freedom to explore the themes they want.

I see now that my course as a bit too structured. Following Constructivist/Interpretivism principles, I think that knowledge does not exist in the world independently, waiting to be communicated, but that it is constructed by the individual based on what he or she already knows about the world.

It should be easy to try to make some adjustments to my fall courses. I will have to see if by the end of the term I can get a higher level of satisfaction in this regard.

~Carol

Say it with Pictures and Music

To prepare my course for the fall I wanted to try to make a visual presentation for the introduction of my art history class. I used Apple's Keynote to create a standard presentation and then took screen shots of the slides, then I uploaded all the images to Kizoa and bam! in a couple of minutes I had a presentation that has music and embeds nicely in my course next to the written introduction.
You can expand the screen to see a larger image.

art history - slideshows

Thoughts on “Web 3.0: The Way Forward?”

I am not sure if Lisa or Karen posted the presentation on the Community home page but enjoyed looking at it and seeing that our jobs will become more important and interesting. I assume that some of you who saw the presentation are like me, still clueless on the issue and left with more questions than answers. The presentation packs a lot interesting and alarming data. I say alarming because I am not sure what it all really means, but at the same time I am certain that we are indeed in the middle of some huge changes in eLearning.

What are for example: Synthetic, Semantic, and Pragmatic webs? One chart explains that synthetic web or Web 1.0 connects information, Semantic web is the Web 2.0 with which we are now familiar connects people, and the Pragmatic web, which is Web 3.O connects knowledge. What does all this mean to us at CCCO?

With so many changes in technology we also encounter new terms we probably need to understand. Reading an article by Alan W. Aldrich titled “Universities and Libraries Move to the Mobile Web” found in the Educause archives, I came across a couple of other new terms and concepts that we may need to use. For example, there is the notion of analog orientation versus digital orientation. Aldrich states that analog access is the kind of linear access that we have of information when we are using our computers (I wouldn’t have thought this is linear access) and digital access is the kind of access you have to information from the mobile web.

Aldrich explains further that extensive online research using library resources such as locating information, patron-borrowing and accessing the library catalog constitute sustained research and thus analog access to information. On the other hand, a quick look at the library catalog and the journal finder to see if later one can get to the computer to do more in depth research, constitutes digital access, meaning that this is fast, ubiquitous, decontextualized access to information.

Back to the presentation posted on the home page, could we say this is digital access to information? I venture to say yes if we follow Aldrich’s model. The question for CCCO faculty is: should we search for context and nuance on our own or is this enough information for now?
I would like to read your comments and perceptions about mobile web or the notions of digital vs. analog access.

~Carol

An application of VoiceThread

Here is an example of how VoiceThread can be used in the classroom. I will embed this thread in my art history class in the fall to see how students like it. It has a map for students to use as a way to introduce themselves to the class and has six topics for discussion. If you want to post a comment in the thread using video, voice, or text, go ahead and give it a try.
Let me know what you think about this tool. It is free for the educator version and not difficult to set up.

~Carol

Wordle: Something Fun for your Course

Have you heard about Wordle? It is a web tool that creates fun arrangements of words, which are also called word clouds. I think the program is pretty cool and it is a fun thing to ask students to do or see. Here are two ideas on how to use Wordle in the online classroom. Let me know if you have tried others that worked well.

• Ask students to use Wordle to describe themselves. They can post the link to their creation in the thread, as a way to introduce themselves to the class. They can also use their favorite poems, lyrics, names of people, or favorite foods.

• Summarize the main points of a concept. Here is one that has the characteristics of the Baroque style and post it in the “News” when you are announcing a Unit, or at the end of the Unit to gather all terms students have contributed to the Discussion.


The more times you repeat one word when you are setting up Wordle, the larger that world it will be in the final composition. I heard a schoolteacher say that kids in her class use it to look for redundant words.

Wordle allows you to choose colors, fonts, and directions of how the words will display. The tool is free to use but need to give credit to Wordle.net. Check it out if you haven’t done so yet.