Reflections on teaching and learning reflection

by Dr. Sue Pieper, Coordinator of Assessment

I recently read A Life in Bits and Bytes: A Portrait of a College Student and Her Life With Digital Media. The article portrayed a college student who, like many of her generation, is immersed in digital media. Katie Davis interviewed Anna, the student, asking her about the use of digital media in her life, her goals for using various digital media, and what opportunities and drawbacks she experienced from her daily media use.

Anna’s most striking observation came near the end of the interviews. She told Davis that while she appreciated being constantly connected to information and friends through her computer and her phone, at the end of the day she felt like she’d been “everywhere and nowhere.” Davis concluded that Anna’s portrait “highlights the need for and value of nurturing youth’s reflective practices and providing them with spaces for sustained reflection and authentic connection.” Others agree, including David M. Levy in No time to think: Reflections on information technology and contemplative scholarship (.pdf). In our current world of more-faster-better, he asks, “Where does one get the time to look and to think?” More specifically, how can you, as a college instructor, give your students time and space to think?

We might be able to solve this dilemma by using the same technology that created the dilemma in the first place. For college instructors, this can mean using technology to encourage reflection. Tools such as blogs (.pdf), wikis (.pdf), digital storytelling (.pdf), podcasting (.pdf), and even microblogs (.pdf), such as Twitter (.pdf), allow students to reflect as individuals and as part of a larger learning community.

The blog, a personal online journal that is shared on the Web, has become an increasingly popular tool for promoting student reflection. Blogs provide a venue where students (and instructors) can reflect on and write about course concepts, post their thoughts and any related links and media, and receive feedback and commentary from each other. Most course management systems have a blog tool that can be used by instructors and students. Alternatively, a number of free blogging services are available, including Blogger (part of Google), Movable Type, and WordPress, among many others.

How can blogs be used to promote reflection? A recent study (.pdf) by Shih-Hsien Yang described the use of blogs among student teachers training to teach English as a Foreign Language in Taiwan. Students in two classes were required to post their thoughts on a blog following each class meeting as well as to voluntarily respond to their peers’ messages. The instructors teaching the classes commented on their students’ postings and asked questions to challenge their thinking. The authors found that all students were reflective in their comments and some went beyond description to demonstrate critical thinking about their teaching and learning experiences. They also found that all students considered the blog a useful tool for reflecting and communicating with each other.

No matter which technology tools and strategies you use to promote and support reflection in your class, it’s important to remember that reflection is most effective when it is thoughtfully designed and integrated into course activities and assignments. Jan Harrington and Ron Oliver illustrated effective design for reflection in their article Designing for Reflection in Online Courses (.pdf). In one example, the authors incorporated a reflective journal in a Graduate Certificate in Online Learning course. Students in the course were asked to play the role of a college instructor and redesign a unit that they were currently teaching face-to-face for online delivery. They were also asked refer to the pertinent literature and to keep a journal of their thoughts about the differences between face-to-face and online delivery, including the strengths and weaknesses of each delivery mode. Finally, students were asked to submit a plan for an online unit, their edited journal, and a short article from an instructor’s perspective on the process of redesigning a face-to-face course for online delivery. The reflective journal became an integral part of the students’ course redesign task—not just an add-on to the assignment.

Can college instructors provide students with time to think? Levy concluded his article by calling for those of us in higher education to lead the way. By carefully designing for reflection and choosing tools and strategies that support reflective practices in your classes, you can do just that.

What are you doing to promote reflection in your own classes? Which tools and strategies have been most successful? Please share your ideas in the comments.

Reblogging: Plagiarism, Flattery, or the Next Big Thing?

by Lorraine B. Elder

I just had my first encounter with reblogging and am trying to sort out what I think about it. I discovered that someone had pulled most of a post from this blog into his own blog, displaying the post as if it were part of his site. Here’s my thought process so far.

Thought 1: Eek, I’ve been plagiarized!

However, the reblogger did properly attribute the work to me and included links to my university department’s web site and to this blog, where the article was first published. The reblogger included my department’s logo on his site, although the logo has been enlarged inappropriately to the point of being unattractively pixelated. The reblogger’s very slight alterations to the original article don’t sit entirely well with me, but they aren’t offensive or disrespectful.

Thought 2: I’m flattered.

The ego kicked in and I felt flattered that the reblogger thought enough of my post to make it more widely available. But I wondered why he didn’t take the time to add value in the form of commentary or insight of his own. Given the type of work the reblogger does, he certainly should be aware of netiquette and should know better than to just post the work of others on his own site. Worse, on a second page on his site, he has posted a well-known list of good practices for teaching, but he doesn’t attribute them to their source. Do I detect a trend?

Thought 3: OMG, what if he’d been a pornographer instead of an educator?

Okay, it’s not likely that a pornographer would reblog anything of mine (whew!). But the thought made me aware of my differing standards depending on who is pilfering my work. I suspect this reblogger is just getting started in the blogging game. His site is pretty sparse (which is no excuse for swiping other people’s stuff, mind you). Because he appears to be in education and not multilevel marketing or Viagra sales, and because he did provide proper attribution, I’m trying to cut him a little slack, and I’m mindful of the concept of fair use. If his site had been sleazy or salesy, I’d probably have sent him a take-down notice, perhaps beginning with the salutation “Dear Thief” or “Yo, Scumbag.” Instead, I’m blogging about him, more or less politely.

Thought 4: He’s wasting web resources and skewing my analytics.

It would have been more efficient from a web resources standpoint for him to simply link to the original post rather than redisplaying a significant portion of it on his site, and that would have been more polite, too, in my opinion. By posting my stuff on his site, he makes it harder for me to get a good picture of this blog’s readership.

Thought 5: Is reblogging the long form of the Twitter retweet?

On Twitter it’s common practice for people to repost information originally posted by others. In fact, redistributing others’ tweets is expected and rewarded. Does reblogging extend that practice to forms of writing longer than 140 characters? If so, I can see why the news wire services are miffed about the practice. But is this where some portions of the web are headed? Really, how different is reblogging from embedding a YouTube or Vimeo video? Those sites even provide the handy code for the embeds.

Thought 6: Am I a hopeless geezer mired in an old worldview?

Honestly, how hard would it have been for him to ask if he could republish the material? Or was his pingback in fact his way of asking? I’m fairly new to WordPress myself, so I haven’t yet entirely figured out common practices surrounding pingbacks and trackbacks.

Plenty has been written about differences between how Boomers and Gen Xers view ownership and attribution (respectively, “It’s mine and you must pay for it” and “It’s mine but I’ll share it with you”) as compared to the view of Gen Yers (“Everything belongs to everyone for free”). That translates, roughly, to copyright vs. Creative Commons vs. public domain. Does my initial reaction to his reblogging mean I am just an old-timer who hasn’t caught up with the current thinking?

Decision: Take a Creative Commons view

Although no copyright notice nor Creative Commons license was displayed on the original blog post (now rectified), ultimately I decided to act as if I had posted the article under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. This version of the CC license allows for derivative works, and I decided to treat his reblogging of my article as a derivative work.

I’m not sure this is the best reaction, but I’m trying it on for size. I’m pretty sure my decision would be different if the original article were longer, say the length of a scholarly paper, or if my income depended entirely on my blog posts. And my decision might change if the same person makes a habit of grabbing content from this blog rather than posting comments here or writing his own thoughts at his blog and linking to content here. Still, I’m almost grateful to the reblogger because he has forced me to reconsider my positions on the topic of reuse.

Your thoughts?

I’d like to hear about what you think of reblogging. Is it common? Do you like it? How do you handle it? Are rebloggers lazy sponges, or are they discerning connoisseurs of information? What is proper reblogging etiquette? Does it vary depending on the source of the original material (say, a commercial site) and the use of the material on the reblogger’s site (say, an education-oriented site)? Are rebloggers the new spammers, or is reblogging a good way to redistribute information to a wider audience? Will it soon be common for each piece of original online content to be reblogged multiple times, and will this be viewed as a public service rather than infringement?

This blog post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

A Tweet a Day Keeps the Swine Flu Away

by Lorraine B. Elder

Okay, Twitter is not really the new Tamiflu, but educational technology and social media are useful tools in combating the effects of sweeping illness. The World Health Organization has declared a flu pandemic, meaning widespread human H1N1 infection is occurring. Many colleges are bracing for large numbers of flu-related absences among staff and students. Wise faculty members are planning ahead to ensure continuity of classes in the event that either they or their students are felled by flu. Here are some steps you can take.

Use Officially Supported Tools

First, try using officially supported tools at your campus. At Northern Arizona University, we recommend using Blackboard Vista for posting class materials, iTunes U for distributing podcasts, Elluminate for live web conferences, and classlists.nau.edu for sending bulk emails to all students enrolled in a class.

Use Social Media

Then in addition to those tools, consider using social media—your blog, a class wiki, Twitter—to communicate frequently with your students if you or a large number of them are ill and can’t come to class. Just be sure to tell students which social media you’re using. Blogs are good for pushing information out to students while also giving them a mechanism for offering comments and feedback. Wikis are especially good for allowing students to complete group projects even if one or more group members get sick, and by collaborating online, sick students reduce the risk of infecting their classmates. If you designate a hashtag for your class, Twitter can serve as a chat tool and discussion board.

Use File Formats Accessible to All Students

Students don’t all have access to the same versions of software that you do, so avoid posting your class materials in formats that require proprietary software. For example, you might have the latest version of Microsoft Word, but your students might have an older version or no version at all, which means they won’t be able to open your .docx files. Instead, convert your class materials to web pages that students can view in a browser. In a pinch, you can convert documents to PDFs, which students can view using Adobe Reader or other free PDF viewers. But keep accessibility in mind for students who use screen readers or other assistive technology.

Record Short, Targeted Podcasts or Webcasts

While we don’t advocate recording entire class-length lectures, we do suggest scripting and recording short (no more than 5–10 minutes each) talks or demonstrations focused on a single key point or topic in your course. Audio recordings are fine for some subjects. Others, particularly demonstrations, lend themselves to video recordings. Be sure to include transcripts, and tell students where to find the recordings. If you have access to iTunes U, post them there. If not, post them in your learning management system or on your blog.

Communicate

At the outset of your class, tell students how you will communicate with them if you become ill, and tell them which communication channels they should use to let you know when they’re sick. Take a look at the Communication Toolkit for Institutions of Higher Education. Above all, be flexible and understanding with your students. Remember that the H1N1 virus seems to affect younger people more strongly than older people, so instead of giving students grief for missing class, send them some virtual chicken soup.

Ask for Help

Most campuses have support organizations that can help you figure out which kinds of educational technology are appropriate for you and your students. Don’t hesitate to ask for guidance.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

We’re blogging!

To kick off the Fall 2009 semester, the e-Learning Center (ELC) is introducing our new blog. Various authors from ELC will post on topics that tickle their fancy, and we encourage the NAU community to join the conversation, either by commenting on the posts or contacting us to write guest posts. We’ll focus on educational technology, teaching and learning, instructional design, assessment, educational media, upcoming training and workshops, issues in higher ed, and the like. Some posts will be informative, some provocative, and some just for fun. Sometimes we’ll tweet about blog topics, too (we’re NAUelearning on Twitter). Or we’ll tell you about interesting things that we’ve bookmarked on Delicious.

The look of the blog will change over time as we add and refine features. If there’s something — content, features, or whatever — that you want us to add, just let us know in the comments.