CC licensed photo, "Digitage Web 2.0" via Flickr by ocean.flynn

WISE Pedagogy will offer its sixth annual pre-conference workshop at the January 2010 conference for the Association for Library & Information Science Education (ALISE) in Boston. This year’s theme is Keys to Successful Online Collaboration.

This workshop will be open to all interested conference attendees, especially doctoral students and new online instructors. All attendees will have an opportunity to learn more about the pedagogy of online collaboration in the context of library and information science education.

Keys to Successful Online Collaboration will be highly participatory and feature rotating stations of presentations and breakout discussion groups that address pedagogical issues in the use of collaborative learning activities in online courses:

• Demonstration of specific collaborative technological tools (i.e., wikis, blogs, social media networks, synchronous communication software, file sharing tools, etc.)
• Presentation of effective pedagogical practices for facilitating online collaborative activities
• Breakout discussion on implementation of collaborative learning goals

Call for Presenters:

Interested faculty are invited to lead discussions and present best practices for the topics listed above, particularly based on their experience with particular LIS courses and content areas.

To be considered, please submit a one-page proposal outlining your presentation to Anne McKinney by November 16, 2009. Additionally, if you plan to incorporate computer-based software into your presentation / demonstration, please be prepared to bring your own laptop or netbook.

For more information, please contact me at the email above or add a comment to this post.

cc licensed photo via Flickr by Kateweb

Unless you’ve been cut off from all news media over the past few months, most of the world is concerned about the spread of H1N1, aka Swine Flu. How will this affect online instructors?

Well, first of all, wash your hands! (As if you haven’t been doing that already…) If a vaccine is available to you, by all means be sure to take advantage of it.

The folks at Prof Hacker have come up with a more extensive list of preventive acts for the on-campus instructor, including wiping down your desk/table/podium prior to each class and carrying your own sanitized office supplies instead of using communal staplers, dry erase markers, and the like.

You may need to repeat information about flu prevention to your students, in case they have cut themselves off from news media or haven’t taken the warnings seriously (which, frankly, might be possible–especially with undergrads). If your on-campus courses incorporate some online course management system for grades or resources, you might ask students to use the course website for additional course functions and make it possible for them to keep up with assignments and announcements if they have to miss class.

Even if you teach off-campus and never leave your home in an underground bunker, however, there’s still a chance the flu could impact your courses this season if one (or more) of your students gets sick. Depending on how many days or assignments your students miss, you may need to be flexible with your participation grades and deadlines. This might be asking a lot of an instructor if you worry that some of your students might take advantage and claim false sicknesses to get extensions on their assignments.

You may have to use your best judgment here and compare the claims to the rest of the student’s behavior. If a student really does have the flu, that student may not have to worry about missing classroom attendance but the quality level of work is not likely to be as good. Would you rather have that student wait and complete an assignment when all the proper neurons are firing, or would you rather have them reach a finish line and be more lenient with your grading system?

The screencast “For Learning Technologists” (no author’s name is given on the Jing website, unfortunately) describes what online instructors should prioritize when making accommodations for sick students: chiefly, making lectures available online is not as crucial as figuring out what to do about completing or grading assignments. One suggestion offered, besides extended deadlines, is deciding if you are willing to waive any missed assignments. Again, you may have to make some executive decisions depending on what you want students to learn in your course and how badly your course is affected by sickness.

How are you bracing for flu season in your courses? Sound off in the comments section!

CDC’s Guidance for Responses to Influenza for Institutions of Higher Education during the 2009-2010 Academic Year

Myna is a free online audio editor that might give Audacity some stiff competition. As a multi-track device it doesn’t have quite as many features as Audacity, but it doesn’t require a software download and the finished recording can be linked to from their website or embedded onto your own.

Users first set up a free account, then they can record, arrange, and mix audio tracks for fast and simple podcasts. In the classroom, this could make it easier to record short assignment instructions or spoken feedback to students on graded work. The following video gives a demonstration of some of the ways you can mix spoken recordings with underlying music tracks:

Possible Downsides: Unless you already have some familiarity with audio recording software, it might be difficult to master some of the functions in Myna. The product is still in beta and there was no easy-to-find Help section. It also operates in Flash, so if you have trouble with Flash then this might not be for you, either. After futzing around for a while, I recorded the following audio clip:

There’s probably a way to combine multiple spoken recordings into one longer audio file, but I was just testing to see how quickly I could throw something together. I uploaded a song off my computer, but then it wouldn’t drag-and-drop into a track, so I used one of the pieces in their “library” instead — this worked fine for combining with my spoken recording, and after some trial and error I could copy it and paste it until it repeated throughout the spoken part…but after listening to this hyper-fast “jazz” synthesizer I cut it out at the last minute because it felt too jumpy and distracting as background music.

Anyway, if you’re already comfortable with Audacity you may find no reason to change. If you’re feeling creative and want to experiment, give it a try.

Myna

Camera snapshot of Anderson Cooper interviewing Will.i.am via telepresent technology on CNN during the 2008 presidential election coverage. CC licensed photo by l'olliepop, "wtf is this, the future???"

Educause has recently published a review of telepresence as the latest in their 7 Things You Should Know About… series. What is telepresence? Telepresence uses audio and video technology to simulate the experience of being in the same room for people who are separated by distance. From Educause:

Telepresence refers to the application of complex video technologies to give geographically separated participants a sense of being together in the same location. These systems use high-definition cameras feeding to life-size, HD displays with high-fidelity acoustics that, in many cases, localize sound to image, simulating the effect of each voice coming from the video display for each participant. In sophisticated telepresence rooms, the furniture and displays are arranged in ways that further enhance the simulation—participants sit at a conference table and see high-resolution video of participants in remote locations at similar tables, allowing participants to imagine sharing a single table.

This level of technology still carries a hefty price tag, and requires a special room designed to accommodate the equipment. At the moment, telepresent meetings are most common for larger corporations, but a few schools are beginning to incorporate the venue. For a program that would otherwise spend a sizable portion of its budget on travel to conferences and face-to-face meetings, the cost might prove to be an investment.

As the technology continues to develop, telepresence might become less expensive — and more widespread in online education. Some benefits in addition to conference-style meetings would be a wider array of possible learning solutions for online courses in arts and sciences. The software could be used to create virtual simulations for experiential learning.

It will be interesting to see what effects this technology may have on distance education in the future.

7 Things You Should Know About Telepresence (Educause summary page)

Direct link to the .pdf article

Some of the data in this video by Socialnomics09 is repeated from previous, similar videos on social media, but if you are a fan of “Did You Know” by Karl Fisch, you might find “Social Media Revolution” a useful clip to show people who think of social networks like Twitter and Facebook as fads.

Social Media Revolution