Miedo creative commons licensed via Flickr by Arturo J. Paniagua

Whether you’re a student trying to finish end-of-term projects, or an instructor buried under a pile of projects that need grading, this is the time of the semester when many academics want to pull their hair out. Whatever stressful situation you might find yourself in, don’t forget to budget time away from the computer. Go for a walk, practice yoga, massage your sore eyeballs…everyone needs a break from the workload.

Some people are more affected by stress than the average person, however. According to Elaine Aron, author of The Highly Sensitive Person: How To Thrive When The World Overwhelms You, a “Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) has a sensitive nervous system, is aware of subtleties in his/her surroundings, and is more easily overwhelmed when in a highly stimulating environment” (1999).

In other words, HSPs tend to be affected by the outside world much more than those who are not HSP. This can be on a physical or emotional level.  Strong perfumes are more overpowering, busy streets are more nerve-wracking, arguments are more emotionally exhausting or hurtful. This condition affects roughly 20% of the population and can manifest itself in different ways with different people. That’s not to imply that being HSP is a bad thing, however. If five people are running towards a hidden pit, the one out of five who is HSP is more likely to notice the pattern of leaves hiding the trap and avoid falling in.

It’s possible that many professional academics–especially those in library and information science–fit the HSP description. Choosing a career in LIS, for example, is definitely easier on the nerves than, say, the military–or even an academic career in a field like law or business administration. Furthermore, HSPs tend to drift toward fields where their intellectual and observational strengths can and will be appreciated.

If any of this strikes a chord with you, or if you personally feel like the end-of-semester stress is too overwhelming, you might want to take Elaine Aron’s Self Test to see if you fit the HSP personality type. If you do, the website has links to resources that might help you cope with the stress. Ultimately, just remember to go easy on yourself, know your personal limitations (i.e., what can you do without driving yourself insane), try not to hold yourself up to the same standards of stamina as non-HSPs, and give yourself time to retreat from the world when you need to.

The Highly Sensitive Person

creative commons licensed via flickr by cobalt123

One of the more recent trends in online teaching is the use of social networking sites–outside the context of a course management-based source like Blackboard or Moodle–for course discussion activities. For example, some instructors are assigning students to create individual blogs, which they update regularly, and which the classmates are expected to read and comment on each others’. Alternately, some instructors have started using Twitter or Facebook because it limits the length of student comments.

Using these networks in addition to a course management system can lead to some great discussion experiences for you and your students, though it could also seriously raise stress levels if you all have to check multiple sources whenever you want to find updates.

The best way to get around that for blogs is through an RSS feed, if you’re not already using one. I’ve been using Google Reader to collect RSS feeds of various websites for a while now. Unfortunately, not all discussion and comment sites accommodate RSS update notifications. Some services like FriendFeed and Nomee will consolidate updates from a few specific sources but not all, and even then, it’s another window to keep open for update checking.

To see if I can get around this dilemma, I’m going to experiment with Yahoo Pipes. Supposedly this system will collect updates from various sources and feed it into an RSS. This video from their website gives a brief tutorail about how to set up a pipe system:

This all looks very slick, but my experiment is going to see how well this works in reality and report back here on its effectiveness. Specifically, I want to target those sources that don’t already forward new content into my RSS or preferred email account:

• The WISE Introduction to Online Pedagogy course via Confluence – Confluence theoretically has an RSS feature to let me know if anyone has commented on a specific page, but it doesn’t work.
• The WISE discussion forums via phpBB – Another resource that came highly recommended to me, but doesn’t send notifications of new messages.
• My Hotmail account – I’m trying to switch to Gmail as my secondary email account, which is more user-friendly and offers more services than Hotmail. However, while Gmail will forward messages to any other email address, Hotmail will not forward to any address that’s not under the MSN umbrella. If I can somehow rig Yahoo Pipes to notify me of new messages to the Hotmail account, it would make the transition easier so I don’t have to constantly check both accounts.

Anyway, this is my project for the day. We’ll see how well it works…and whether it’s worth recommending as a time-saver for instructors with multiple sites and accounts to check on a daily basis.

Yahoo Pipes

If you are already using Twitter and/or a mobile device for communicating with students, the new app Vlingo may help you save some time. This is an application that can be downloaded onto an iPhone or Blackberry. Basically, it allows you to speak a command or text message, without typing or navigating by hand. Text messages can then be sent through Twitter or Facebook. The following is the Vlingo site’s video demonstration for the iPhone (there is also a video demo for Blackberry):

It looks like it could potentially be a time-saver for people who are using status updates (or “tweets”) for frequent communication. Since I have neither an iPhone nor a Blackberry, I doubt I’ll be testing the app anytime soon, however. It would certainly be interesting to hear from anyone who has had experience with Vlingo. If you have, please feel free to share your opinions here–does it recognize your voice as accurately as it does in the demo? Does it make online communication easier?

Vlingo

creative commons licensed from flickr by poppy2323

Two exciting bits of news today:

1. The US News & World Report Rankings have released their 2009 list for the top Library & Information Science schools in the United States. Congratulations to the Universities of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and North Carolina-Chapel Hill for tying for first place! Several of the schools on the list just happen to be WISE schools, incidentally (of course this blog is not biased in favor of WISE schools or UIUC specifically). Congratulations to ALL the LIS schools that made this list!

2. The WISE Pedagogy Blog is now affiliated with the International Edubloggers Directory and eLearning Learning. You may notice the badges added to the sidebar on the right. There are numerous fantastic elearning and pedagogy blogs and articles connected to these sites, so they are definitely worth browsing if you are looking for more information about teaching online. It’s an honor to be added to their collections!

On that note, it’s now easier to bookmark this blog on your Delicious account. Look for the link on the sidebar marked “Bookmark this on Delicious” and, if you have a Delicious account, the link will be added. If you aren’t using Delicious already, this link should help you get started. It’s a major time-saver for organizing and gathering bookmarks to websites you want to remember–like this blog, of course!

In the Links menu on the right side of this blog, you’ll see a link for Delicious Links for Online Pedagogy / eLearning. This directs you to a tag bundle on Delicious that includes bookmarked sites that would be of interest to LIS online instructors. The tag bundle is part of my main account, annemck.

So far I am still looking for a way to display tag bundles as clouds–which are easier to navigate but apparently are only available for entire account tags rather than bundles. As is, clicking on the tag bundle link will go to a page with the list of bookmarks and a side-column tag menu that looks like this:

tag list for Online Pedagogy / eLearning Delicious tag bundle

If you prefer to navigate via the larger-view tag cloud (and don’t mind seeing a few tags that have less to do with online learning and teaching), you can do so through the annemck cloud. I’m considering whether the better long-term solution would be to create a separate account for WISE Pedagogy on Delicious, but for now, this will help you search for links on a wide spectrum of topics that I update daily.

Delicious Links for Online Pedagogy / eLearning

cc licensed by Thomas Hawk

First there were computers…then people started communicating to each other on their computers through that interesting lil’ network called the Interwebs, or something to that effect. Now, we have phones to replace those computers when we want to keep internetting without lugging a laptop around wherever we go.

Personally, I have not spent much energy exploring mobile learning yet. But more and more students are using phones to connect to their online courses, so it’s worth looking into. If you want to start using your iPhone/other mobile device for your courses, or learn how to teach the students who are, ASTD has put together a site of links to resources for mobile learning.

In the future there will probably be more information on this blog (and on other WISE Pedagogy sites) about the pedagogy of mobile learning. In the meantime, have you begun to use phones or other mobile devices with your students? How have you incorporated them, and what were the results? It would be interesting to read case stories from LIS instructors who have tried these techniques.

Resources on Mobile Learning

At first I wasn’t going to post about this new presentation tool, since I’m trying to put a firmer focus on pedagogical theory in this blog. But then I’ve seen at least 3-4 other blogs mention it, so apparently it’s more than just the latest cool-looking gizmo on the net.

What gives Prezi its “wow” factor is that it lets users create a presentation that zooms in and out on text and images, and move from one idea to another with a whiteboard-like flow in any visual direction, among other interesting visual tricks. This video demonstration shows how to build a Prezi presentation using its editing tools:

This tool is probably going to be most useful to those who are feeling constrained by the limits of PowerPoint. If this applies to you, and you’d like to give your right brain a bit of exercise while you prepare your next lecture or tutorial, you might give this gadget a try.

Prezi

Library Island 001 image cc licensed by Learn4Life

If you want to learn more about library and museum studies in Second Life, set your calendar for April 24-25 for the second annual “Virtual Worlds: Libraries, Education and Museums Conference” (VWLEM), sponsored by Alliance Library System. This conference will be held entirely online.

From their website, the purpose of the conference: “To provide a gathering place for librarians, information professionals, educators, museologists, and others to learn about and discuss the educational, informational, and cultural opportunities of virtual worlds.”

A few of the topics:

• The Immersive Virtual Natural History Experience
• Virtual Heritage Preservation, An Unfulfilled American Necessity
• Visual Representation of Chemical Data in Virtual Worlds
• Planning an Event in Second Life
• History-Related Sites and Museums in Second Life: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

While it’s a bit late notice for those who might be interested, registration is only $49 and helps cover costs for the operation of Alliance Virtual Library in Second Life.

cc licensed by ntr23

The Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies has assembled two lists of the Top Tools for 2009: The Top Tools for Learners, and the Top Tools for Learning Professionals.

There is a lot of overlap between the two lists, with several software programs, some more familiar than others. Each item links to a page on their website that explains its function in more detail, with a link to the host site for more information. Below are the top tools, with my own comments…

What made the top ten:

1. Delicious – Social bookmarking. Adding this tool to your browser makes it easy to bookmark websites and save them online–as well as on your computer–so you can share them with others by sending them a link to  your delicious page rather than creating static links page that needs to be updated manually.

2. Twitter – This is an overwhelmingly popular phenomenon for “micro-blogging”–i.e., posting messages of 140 characters or less. Instructors can use it to send out announcements, and there’s an option to have Twitter updates sent to users’ cell phones, which can come in handy if you need to get word out to students who aren’t online 24/7. The down side is that there are so many “tweets” passing through the Twitterverse that messages can be easily lost in the deluge. If you want to use it for the cell phone/course announcement option, you might request students to set up a separate Twitter account for class purposes. For more good advice on using Twitter as an educator, check out Laura Walker’s blog post on Nine Great Reasons Why Teachers Should Use Twitter.

3. Skype – This is the internet’s answer to free long-distance/international phone calls. Save your cell phone minutes and phone bills by using Skype for instructor/student conference calls and online office hours. Students can use it for group project conferencing, too. There’s also a video feed option for those who have web cams. As with any synchronous messaging service, however, be aware of the difference between time zones for you and your students.

4. Google Reader – RSS is an efficient way to stay up-to-date on blogs, wikis, and any other website that posts frequent updates. In simple terms, it’s like email for websites. Sign up a free account for Google Reader (if you don’t already have an account through GMail or one of their other handy services). Then, go to individual websites and select a “subscribe” option (The Common Craft video “RSS in Plain English” shows exactly how to do this). This is handy for any professional or student to keep tabs on developments in the field, news sites, or even icanhascheezburger.com–or ask your students to keep blog journals (or one general course blog) and ask them to subscribe via RSS for updates.

5. Google Docs – Google Docs let users store documents and collaborate with others. Besides course collaborative projects, it’s also handy for keeping documents online that you want people to link to without attachments or thumb drives–resumes and presentation slides, for example.

6. Ning – A social networking platform that lets you create your own social network. This one is still new to me, but it looks like it’s worth investigating. It might be a superior alternative to Facebook Groups. But then, students are already on Facebook. We’ll see…

7. PowerPoint – Need I explain what this is? Of everything in the list so far, this is the only tool that isn’t free–unless your school/office includes it on your work computer.

8. Slideshare – Another site for storing documents like PPt slides, and Word and Excel docs–with the added advantage of sharing your work in a social-networking-esque capacity. Get yourself noticed!

9. SnagIt – A tool for creating screen captures–i.e., taking a “picture” of whatever’s on your computer screen. Like PowerPoint, this isn’t free. Neither is Adobe Pro, which also takes screen captures. If all you want is to embed a screen capture onto a website, Sni.ps will let you do it for free.

10. Audacity – For creating podcast lectures, or recording audio onto your PowerPoint slides. It’s easy enough to use, and a smooth product for open-source software.

photo via icanhascheezburger.com

Steve Hargadon discusses ten trends in the changing dynamics of our relationship to the internet in his blog post, Web 2.0 Is the Future of Education. Listing information overload as the second trend, he writes:

…when people ask me the answer to content overload, I tell them (counter-intuitively) that it is to produce more content. Because it is in the act of our becoming a creator that our relationship with content changes, and we become more engaged and more capable at the same time.

This is a useful lesson for anyone who remains skeptical about the merit of collaborative learning. Gone are the days of passive education, when it was enough merely to lecture and assign readings. Our students are already participating dynamically with web content outside the context of the online classroom.

By asking them to work actively with the course content, they are thinking actively about the content–thereby absorbing more actual information than if they were to try to absorb it by reading (or listening) alone. By doing and by creating, they are learning. They are joining in an ongoing community of scholars.

Activate your students’ learning: start discussions, assign reflection exercises, form them into groups to create a document on a wiki, ask them to find relevant online resources–there are many activities that can be done with online students. The key word is activity.

What are some of the ways you’ve engaged your students through acts of creation?