Mobile Learning: Reflections in Progress

This post is a "during-course reflection" for "Mobile Learning," a course in the Advanced Studies Certificate: Distance Education Professional Development program at the University of Wisconsin (Madison).

It is written in Markdown on an iPhone 6+, using the Squarespace blogging app, Byword, and DropBox, as well as the public-bookmarking site Diigo.

The "guiding question" or "essential question" that I've brought to mobile learning is, "How might mobile devices make it easier to integrate reflection/activity on a course's subject matter with other elements of one's life, generating unpredictable possibilities for unexpected connections?"

Abstract: In a constructivist view of learning, knowledge is built, or constructed, through meaning-making activities that bring previous understandings into relation with new understandings. Learning is an irreducibly "creative" act: it is created via synthesis. Does the mobility of mobile devices make it easier to facilitate the regular integration of new understandings with the understandings (already) active in the other areas of one's life: family, play, work, etc.?

This short piece on "Connecting the Army to Digital Applications," while brief and summarizing, piqued my interest simply by its intentionality. What would it be like if seminary students, accomplishing their degree programs in real-world loci of practice (churches, non-profits or other non-government organizations, etc.), were provided class activities that could be accomplished "in the field" as opportunities presented themselves? How about their pre-program orientation, their advising, library usage, and so on? What if learners received explicit instruction on using mobile devices (from flip phones to smart phones) to do so? I have found myself preoccupied by a phrase used in this piece: that the goal is to foster "a persistent learning environment."

The "Basics" page of ADL's Mobile Learning Handbook and the Upside Learning "Quick Start Guide" ebook (edit: corrected click-through) have both helped me broaden my introductory understanding and get up on the lingo. For example, the concept of "push and pull learning" (intuitive enough to coders who use repositories like GitHub, but probably not to others) provides a kind of lever by which a fan of "just-in-time learning" to plug that set of pedagogical insights and practices into a mobile-friendly course design.

Integrating that concept of "push and pull learning" into my guiding question should become part of my final project for the course, along with the idea of "interactivity" in this piece by Jesse Stommel, noting that mobile devices facilitate an "easy move between reading and content creation."

My guiding question still makes sense to me as originally written. I found another student keen to provide Spanish-language learning resources to learners in the places where trying to use that language, and became interested in expanding on that idea (perhaps in Hebrew-languages courses that I teach occasionally).

Digital Writing Month: My Plans

Today marks Day One of DigiWriMo (Digital Writing Month), in which I try to write 50,000 digital words during the month of November. DigiWriMo is inspired by the concurrently-running NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), and is the brainchild of Jesse Stommel and Sean Michael Morris of Marylhurst University.

So what are my plans for DigiWriMo? These:

• Blog posts like this one. Some blog posts I will publish, and others I will bring to Draft status and keep in the can. I also have a number of drafts already in progress that I can work at.
• Finish my self-paced online course. I am enrolled in the 10-CEU Professional Certificate in Online Teaching course (University of Wisconsin-Madison), and have been stalled on the last two projects of this course for months. So, now's my chance to treat it as a priority and finish up.
• Keep my SBL/AAR presentation in progress. This happens in only two weeks, but I'd like to do a lot of free writing on the project and see how that causes me to continue revisions between now and the day I present. Once it's been delivered, I'll record an a/v version for YouTube.
• I've had an idea for a biweekly newsletter, and have even drafted the first issue. I'd like to re-visit that first issue, then also get a bunch of features drafted for later issues. I'll feel better about launching that project if I've got several articles "in the can."
• Tweet a bunch, as usual and maybe more. Keep a hand in on the DigiWriMo Facebook page.
• Where possible, participate in events planned by the good folks at DigiWriMo.

So there are my first 400+ words (including Markdown markup), toward a daily goal of 1667+. Are you participating in DigiWriMo (or NaNoWriMo, or any other WriMo)? What are your own plans?

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[Digital Writing Month: My Plans was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/11/01. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Twitter Chats for "Introduction to the Old Testament"

Something new this year for the online Intro class: weekly Twitter chat.

How It's Done

On Twitter, you normally see the posts of people you follow, in an undifferentiating stream with the latest posts at the top. However, you can also view a Search window, and see all posts that include your search term…including posts from people you do not follow. So if a set of participating users agree to include a shared search term in their posts, then they can use that Search window as a chat forum. By convention, such a search term is proceeded by the hash sign (#), and is called a "hashtag": for example, our hashtag is the hash sign followed by our course number, #11500x. We meet Tuesday evenings 7:00-8:00 pm, CT.

Our Course

This course is "Introduction to the Old Testament," a fully online course with about 20 learners, taught by me at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. The course is completely asynchronous: there is no time at which all learners must participate together in real time. Also, our learning management system (Moodle) does not include a "virtual classroom" module. (It could, but we have not purchased one.) So, a Twitter hashtag chat allows us a space in which to have synchronous engagement with one another.

How It's Going

I am using the one-hour weekly Twitter chats to engage "big ideas" or "essential questions" that are foundational to the tasks they are accomplishing in the course; for example, "What is 'academic biblical studies'?"; "Academic biblical studies as public work"; "Biblical literature as narrative art"; and so on. Participation is voluntary, and has ranged from 10-14 learners (of my 20) to a scant 2.

Since Twitter is a public forum, our followers from outside of our class have discovered our chat and joined us. This includes my colleagues who teach biblical studies elsewhere (some known personally to me, but not all), former students, and other interested outsiders.

Each week, I have assembled a list of prompts, to keep things going or to get things back on track if necessary. I have not had to use them often, but I feel more comfortable having them ready to hand. Some "template" tweets are a good idea to keep handy though: reminding learners to use the course hashtag, announcing the chat and its topic, inviting lurkers to join in, etc.

Nearly all of my learners are brand new to Twitter. In every class I teach, whether online or face-to-face, I like to incorporate an activity that will introduce most of the learners to a new digital accomplishment of some sort. The idea is not that they should all like Twitter, but that they should have regular, guided experiences of braving new digital tasks.

Have you ever used Twitter chats as a teacher or as a learner? Are there other digital "new frontiers" that are part of your course work this year?

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[Twitter Chats for Introduction to Old Testament was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/09/27. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

See You at THATCamp Hybrid Pedagogy

It's official: I will be attending THATCamp Hybrid Pedagogy in Portland OR, on October 20-21.

Last year, I made it to THATCamp Pedagogy in Poughkeepsie NJ. I would love to see a more-or-less annual pedagogy unconference unfold, in some form or other.

More as we get close, but you can expect some live-tweeting and blogging from THATCamp Hybrid Ped.

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[See You at THATCamp Hybrid Pedagogy was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/09/13. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Free Your Twitter-Using Learners from the Car Boot? It Will Cost You

A novel and exciting business model seems to keep coming up a lot lately, one that educators using social media might keep an eye on. It's so "out there" that it might as well be fantasy or science fiction. In fact, here, I'll draw on an episode of the TV show Angel (spin-off from the better-known Buffy the Vampire Slayer) for an example; the scene is a classic ransom swap:

Italian Demon: "You give me the money, I give you the head."
(Angel and Spike stare at him blankly.)
Italian Demon: "You give me the money…I give you the head."
(Angel and Spike stare blankly.)
Italian Demon: "Money, head. Money, head."

What we expect, of course, is that the Italian Demon will make the head freely available to the protagonists, while accepting advertising revenue on the side. Naturally, the Italian Demon would then be free to negotiate with his advertisers concerning how the head might be festooned with banner ads; or whether Angel and Spike might be invited to choose their advertising experience before accepting the head (and their personal preferences sold as data to marketers). Since Angel and Spike are themselves paying nothing for the head, they are comfortably excluded from all decision-making concerning the transaction, and if they don't like the terms, they'll have plenty of friends to admonish them not to complain about free stuff.

But here, instead, Angel and Spike are paying directly for the head. By spending their own money, they become partners in the transaction, rather than passive recipients of whatever the Italian Demon and his actual partners (his advertisers) choose to deliver. (In fact, Angel and Spike will use this agency to decide to fight the Italian Demon instead of pay him, and the Italian Demon will give them a bomb on a short fuse instead of the head. But anyway.)

It's a powerful idea. Earlier this year, I moved this site from Wordpress.com to Squarespace. I did this for a handful of reasons, but one of them is that, since I pay for the service, I get 24/7 living-person customer support. ("You give me the money, I give you the head.")

I wrote last week about some troubling developments at Twitter. As most of us know, Twitter's partners are not its users, but its advertisers: as Jason Lefkowitz has said (quoting Dave Winer), users aren't even riding in the backseat, they're locked in the trunk. Most users won't care much as "promoted Tweets" by BP and KFC take over their feeds, and as Twitter rubs out 3rd-party Twitter applications in order to provide users with a "consistent (i.e., Twitter-controlled) user experience." But it won't just be nerdy app developers that lose out: educators, for example, will likely lose the ability to use Twitter in ways that they choose (like with Storify), if their pedagogical choices don't match up with Twitter's (potentially ever-changing) "rules of the road."

A group of app developers have gone off and created a Twitter alternative, "app dot net." Users pay (currently $50/year) to keep the service working and growing, and so the proprieter's business is with the users, rather than with advertisers. Whereas Twitter is chopping off the development of 3rd-party applications, AppDotNet is largely inhabited by such developers. And here's my point: if as an educator, I want to see a certain kind of user-experience for my learners, then in principle, I can create the app I want or contract with a developer to create it for me.

"You give me the money, I give you the head." It's a powerful idea.

I do love getting free and cheap stuff on the web. I willingly sit through commercials on Hulu. I grudgingly hand over my personal consumer habits to Google. It's one way to do things. But it's not the only way. And for educators who have a stake in taking ownership of the "user experience" and, and in multiplying the possibilities for the learner's ability to experience and manipulate of web content, riding locked in the trunk is not always going to be the best way.

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[Free Your Twitter-Using Learners from the Car Boot? It Will Cost You was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/08/20. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Twitter to Learners and Teachers: Run Along and Play...Somewhere Else

Twitter has published the coming changes to how it allows applications (programs) to use its service, and these changes spell debilitating problems for educators who use Twitter.

Teachers on Twitter overwhelmingly favor some form of "active learning" or constructivist pedagogy: whether in face-to-face or online courses, the idea is that students learn by doing, making, building (often collaboratively). As part of a typical learning cycle, the learner is exposed to knowledge or information or has an experience facilitated by the course designer, and then goes on to make something in response. By working (often with others) to create something (a paper, a debate, a presentation, a tool), the learner makes original connections between data points and thereby constructs new meanings for herself. The result is a perception-changing experience of the subject matter. Make sense? Making a thing > making meaning.

Twitter's changes will make it impossible for many educators on Twitter to facilitate the kinds of activities that accomplish this. For one depressing example, take Storify. Educators use the dickens out of Storify, for good reason. After a student has had some instructor-facilitated, varied experience mediated through (say) Twitter, blog posts, news articles, Facebook, and so on, she can use Storify to make meaning of that experience, and to create a digital narrative of that experience for others. But look at Twitter's "rule 5a" for Time lines:

Tweets that are grouped together into a timeline should not be rendered with non-Twitter content. e.g. comments, updates from other networks.

As far as I can see, this is a bullet in the head for the use of Storify with Twitter.

The "big picture" of Twitter's changes to its API can be seen in the quadrant at the bottom of the announcement…or even better, in Dan Wineman's improvement to the graphic. As I tweeted before, the graphic amounts to this:

• business engagement, business analytics, consumer analytics = GOOD.
• consumer engagement = BAD.

In Rene Ritchie's words, "Twitter wants to marginalize apps used by me, and maximize apps that would use me and my data."

Welcome to the Facebook-ization of Twitter, the perhaps inevitable result in services that are free to consumers and depend on leveraging their attention to advertisements. In a later post: "Welcome to App-dot-net."

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[Twitter to Learners and Teachers: Run Along and Play...Somewhere Else was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/08/17. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

First Day of School! So Hit Snooze Again, Already

Everyone brush your hair, hang your name cards around your necks, and gather outside with your best neighborhood friends while your family takes pictures: it's the first day of school!

My summer session begins today. It's on online class, six weeks in length (therefore "intensive"). The course is "Introduction to the Old Testament," essentially an introduction to historical-critical and literary-critical biblical studies. There's a separate course focusing on Bible content.

Of course, "first day" is a relative term. The learners have already accomplished some minor tasks in the last weeks: logging on, doing a one-question "Choice" about whether they plan to pre-read the textbook, and taking a diagnostic quiz called "Is Online Learning for You?"

For my part, the "first day" is--quite intentionally--a bit of an anti-climax. For one thing, I haven't slept well. I never sleep well the night before the first day. It doesn't matter whether it's a face-to-face course or online. First-day jitters, I got 'em. For another, an online course is largely asynchronous: there's no three-hour block during which we've all got to be "on" for one another. Instead, we're all "on" for one another off-and-on throughout the week.

So, I've developed strategies for the "first day":

• No hunting trips: Undoubtedly there are a few students who have not accomplished all of the pre-course activities, or whose registration is in some kind of limbo. I have been in contact with them regularly in the weeks and days before the term. It's tempting (especially to us tightly-wound types) to want to get all that buttoned down. (OMG!! It's the first day!!) Forget that. Unless they reach out to me (and it's great if they do), it can wait until the second day. Or the third. Hey, it's their course.
• Get a late start: As surprising as this is to me, most of the learners have not taken a vacation day from their employer to celebrate the first day by jumping onto the LMS at dawn. Or even at nine. A few of them will bang out their Introduction before work or on lunch, but if the earliest deadline isn't until Wednesday, why shouldn't I plan to get some additional exercise on Monday morning? Eat a hot breakfast for once? Pet the dog and catch up on my Instapaper?
• Smile before Christmas: I get the thinking behind "don't smile before Christmas." I just don't accept the costs in trust, good will, and positive reinforcement. The first day is a great time to catch students doing things right and, as publicly as possible, pasting a gold star on that and posting it to the refrigerator. A new course is like any other fear-inducing new environment (say, prison, or an alcoholic home, or the Internet): noobs will have their radar up for "cues" about what will be punished and what will be rewarded. Reward is more motivating and cleaner in its outcomes, so I try to catch good behavior early on.

What have you learned about yourself and "first days"? How do your routines reflect that?

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[First Day of School! So Hit Snooze Again, Already was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/06/25. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Blackboard Rant

I’ve taken hours of training in Blackboard. According to the level of instruction I’ve had, I am an “expert.” I like software, and am accustomed to learning new interfaces.

Yet: I cannot understand Blackboard-ese, I cannot make it do two-thirds of what its documentation promises me it can do, and when I can, I hate how it’s done.

Rosetta Stone Arabic

I finally broke down and purchased the Arabic language module from Rosetta Stone. Anybody out there already have experience with Rosetta Stone language software?

I had long considered taking Arabic in a structured way from an accredited institution, whether brick-and-mortar or at a distance, but two factors have so far conspired against me:

• My own teaching schedule is very tight, and almost always conflicts with whatever is available.


• Institutions of learning may as well throw up electrified fences with ground-glass ramparts, if they refuse to keep contact information up to date. Nobody can tell whether our web sites were published last week, last year, or ten years ago, and when you send emails to the contact people on our web sites, those emails drop into our Big Black Hole. (I don’t mean my own school when I say “our” and “we”: I’m talking about a culture-spanning problem.) No schools want my tuition money badly enough to keep their contact information up to date or answer an email, so Rosetta Stone gets it. And I get a six-month money-back return policy, in the bargain.

Let me know if you’ve had any experience with Rosetta Stone. It will be a few days before I dig in, but monkeying around with the thing at the store was more fun than I’ve had with language since I puzzled out my first liver omen.

(Obligatory disclaimer: I don’t work for Rosetta Stone, and they haven’t given me anything in exchange for writing about their software. They did throw in an extra headset-and-mike, which was pretty cool.)

Social Learning Tools: Bringing it Together on NetVibes

My last two posts showed how students’ course-related blogging can be gathered and shared by Yahoo Pipes, and how their course-related social bookmarking can be gathered and shared by Diigo. Today, I conclude by showing how these and other online student works can be “fed” to a central location using NetVibes.

NetVibes is an aggregating page, as is Google Reader or Bloglines. NetVibes allows the user to create public pages (visible to anyone) as well as private pages (visible only to the user). Within a page, the user may create multiple tabs to organize her feeds. Michael Wesch, who teaches anthropology at KSU, has an active NetVibes public page.() Here is the “Welcome” tab of my own public page in progress.

For a given course, I create one or more tabs: here is the tab for my course IPS-417. Remember the Yahoo Pipe that I talked about a few days back, the one that gathers course-related blogs entries from all of the students’ different blogs? With NetVibes, I have created a widget that shows the results of that Yahoo Pipe: you can see it in the upper left of my IPS-417 course tab (it’s named, “Blogging”). And remember that the students will all belong to a Diigo group that shares its course-related bookmarks with one another? I also have a NetVibes widget showing those Diigo bookmarks: it’s in the lower left of that IPS-417 course tab.

Since this is all done simply by gathering RSS feeds, it is easy to add other useful feeds to a NetVibes course tab. So, that IPS-417 tab that we’re looking at also has feeds from Twitter and from the course WetPaint Wiki. On Twitter, I will encourage students to use the hashtag #ips417 for their course-related tweets; using RSS, my NetVibes widget gathers those tweets (and only those tweets) into a single feed. Similarly, any changes made to our course wiki are “fed” to a widget in our NetVibes tab. This not only helps the students keep abreast of changes, it also helps me easily track which students are contributing and how much.

It’s all funneling: taking the things our students are doing all over the web, and directing them where they can be shared and assessed in one place. As Wesch has said, we are training “the machine” to bring the information to us. For me, this means that I am free to dissolve (or at least make permeable) the “firmaments” that enclose our CMS (Blackboard) and our classroom itself, allowing student collaboration to find a place in the overlapping spheres of public discourse that they are already using (or at least could be using).

Are your students (or you yourself, as a student) already collaborating online? Do you have other strategies for encouraging and managing online collaboration? What do you think of the possibilities, for bad or for good?

Notes:
I encourage educators and students alike to view Wesch’s hour-long address, “A Portal to Media Literacy.”

Social Learning Tools: Bookmarking with Diigo

Last post, I showed how Yahoo Pipes will (among other things) collect posts from different bloggers when the titles or tags of their posts share a given keyword. So, students can have their own blogs, on which they write whatever they want—but when they write course-related posts, these all can be aggregated together and sorted in real time by a Yahoo Pipe.

This post, I look at how Diigo does the same thing with the students’ bookmarking of web sites and articles.

Most of us are familiar with the idea of “bookmarking” a web site or article. Normally, users have used their browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari) to bookmark web pages; you can probably see the menu item “Bookmarks” at the top of your window right now. The problem is, you may use multiple computers, or change browsers, such that your bookmarks become unavailable you. And in any case, you cannot easily share them with others. Also, though browser bookmarks can be sorted and “tagged” with categories, it’s not really easily done.

Some readers may be using Delicious, an early social bookmarking site and still a great choice. With Delicious, your bookmarks are on a web site, available to you (and anybody else) wherever you are. You have a chance to tag bookmarks with categories when you make them. Your bookmarks are public: other users might, for instance, do a search for a given tag, like “Bible”; if you have bookmarks using that tag, they will appear in that user’s search. You can even have  “network” of friends whose bookmarks you watch.

Diigo, another social bookmarking site, takes the “social” in “social bookmarking” at least one step further. It does all the things that Delicious does, but Diigo also allows you to join with other users into groups. So, for example, I have created groups for each of my introductory courses on Hebrew Bible.

Let’s imagine that you are a student in the course. I have invited you to join our Diigo group, and you respond by opening a Diigo account and joining the group. Now, you begin bookmarking and tagging web pages that are of interest to you. Many of these will not be related to our course: sports columns, videos of kittens falling asleep, favorite political blogs. But often, you will come upon course-related web pages that you want to share with the class. Creating (and tagging) a bookmark for that web page to your Diigo account, you will also save it to our group. Then, every other student will see the bookmark when they look at our group’s bookmarks.

Tagging is a part of how we members of a Diigo group make our bookmarks useful to one another. By tagging our bookmarks with categories (like “humor”; “politics”; “archaeology” “LGBT”; or whatever), we establish a cloud of tags that describe the kinds of topics and concerns that animate our shared bookmarks. One of us might, or example, search for all of our group’s bookmarks tagged with the category “LGBT” to find all bookmarked pages that concern the Hebrew Bible and lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transexuals.

We saw before that Yahoo Pipes allows students to have their own blogs, with posts on own varied interests; when they do post course-related content, a well-made Yahoo Pipe will gather and sort those posts into a single place. Diigo, then, does the same thing with bookmarks. Students have their own Diigo accounts, where they can bookmark whatever they like to their hearts’ content. But when they create a bookmark that is related to our course, they simply save it to our group, and everyone in the course benefits.

To see an example of Diigo groups in education, see the bookmarks of Michael Wesch’s KSU course in Cultural Ethnography.

Are you already using social bookmarking in your teaching and learning? What other applications do you see? Do you think social bookmarking might find a place in other venues of adult education?

Social Learning Tools: Yahoo Pipes

It is an inverse proportion: as online collaboration becomes more authentic, it becomes less manageable. If I restrict my students’ collaboration to the “shell” of the Course Management System (for us, Blackboard), then we can all keep track of our activity, but that activity feels constricted, artifical, and forced. But if I were to encourage students to collaborate on our subject matter using tools outside the CMS—third party blog sites, Twitter, Delicious, Diigo, Wetpaint wikis—then everything is going on all over the place, and how in the world can we keep track of each other for collaboration and assessment?

Today, I look at Yahoo Pipes. In a later post, I’ll tack on public aggregation sites like NetVibes.

Yahoo Pipes’ slogan is, “Rewire the Web,” and that is exactly what it allows you to do. I’ll show an example that I think my readers can appreciate, then show its application to my fall courses. (I discovered Yahoo Pipes while persuing Michael Wesch’s website for his Digital Ethnography course).

Many bibliobloggers have been posting sporadically on the upcoming annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. I want to be sure that I don’t miss any posts on SBL. So, I have created a Yahoo Pipe that:

• collects RSS feeds from each of the blogs in my blogroll;


• filters the posts, permitting only those that use the text string “SBL” in the title or as a category/tag;


• sorts the results, listing them with the most recent on top;


• makes that list available. Here, you can see the results of my “SBL Blogging” pipe. (Tip: click the tab “list” instead of “image” for a clearer presentation; I don’t know why the less visually clear “image” mode is the default.)

What about application to my classroom?

Let’s imagine that instead of a couple of dozen bibliobloggers, I have forty M.Div students blogging about everything under the sun. Instead of collecting posts about SBL, I want to collect only their posts that pertain to our course, “Introduction to Old Testament.” No problem: I simply tell the students that, when they write a post for our course, they should tag it with our course number (“gets11500”). I will have created a Yahoo Pipe that collects their RSS feeds and selects for posts tagged with that tag. Presto: all my students’ posts pertaining to our course are collected in one place for collaboration and assessment.

This is just a fraction of what Yahoo Pipes is capable of, but this one application makes a huge difference to what I can offer my students. By folding their course blogging into the rest of the blogging that they may already be doing, they are folding their thinking about the subject matter into the rest of the thinking they are already doing: such integration and synthesis is among my educational goals for the course.

Notice that you can “clone” a Pipe that interests you, creating a copy that you look at “under the hood,” seeing how it’s built and modifying it as you please.

How might you “rewire the web,” and why?

Arabic at a Distance

My “Intro to Old Testament” Fall ’09 session will be something of a hybrid course, incorporating many elements of distance learning. My Summer ’10 session will be entirely online. I have heard it said that, if you want to learn to teach online courses, then take a course online. This makes sense, and I’ve decided that if I am going to take an online course, it will be Arabic.

Why Arabic? Well, I’m already walking around with a pocketful of Semitic research languages (biblical and modern Hebrew, Aramaic, Ugaritic, Akkadian, Syriac), so I have a good foundation for Arabic. A look at the job postings is also persuasive: I don’t plan to change my whole focus to Islam or religious politics overnight or anything, but who in Hebrew Bible is not looking for reasonable means to broaden her appeal?

Searching for a course, it is not easy to navigate past all the commercial software packs masquerading as online courses. And, as usual, navigating school’s websites is useful mostly as an exercise in controlling one’s blood pressure.

I do find that University of California has a program. The timing is unfortunate (I have a really busy autumn term planned), but the course looks good.

Readers: have you taken a course online, and what was your experience? Are you aware of opportunities for online Arabic that I’ve missed? (Accredited, credit-earning courses only, please.)

iTunes U and YouTube-Edu

Truth is, I am still researching my planned blog entry. So, as a ready placeholder, I offer a couple of resources that many readers will already know, but some will not (and should!).

iTunes U: If you have iTunes (which is free for Mac and Windows), you can go to the iTunes Store and will find there a tab for “iTunes U.” (iTunes U is a component of Apple Mobile Learning.) In iTunes U are found podcasts that come from institutions of higher education: colleges, universities, divinity schools, and so on. You can browse by category, or look at top downloads, or even browse the most frequent providers. Near the bottom of the window, a link offers an introduction for those new to iTunes U.

YouTube/EDU: Use the regular address for YouTube, but add "/edu" to the end of the URL, like so: http://www.youtube.com/edu . As with iTunes U, this yields a portal to YouTube content uploaded by institutions of higher education. You can scroll horizontally through specific institutions, or browse tabs of most-viewed content. Also, there is a search window that is limited to YouTube/EDU. This means that you can do a search, for example, for “Bible,” and get hits from the EDU portal alone (not videos uploaded by every yahoo or charlatan in the world).

Through both of these resources, you may find high-quality lectures and presentations to supplement your teaching.

Have you browsed these resources for Bible fare? What sorts of things have you found there? Feel free to offer links or search terms in the comments here.

[Addendum for Twitterers: there is a hashtag for iTunes U: #iTunesU. There is not at present a hashtag for YouTube/Edu, but a search for YouTube EDU (with space) yields reasonable if imperfect results. I plan to start using a hashtag #iTunes #YouTube/EDU. The “slash” is not recognized in regular word searches, but appears to be recognized as part of a hashtag word.]

Online and Traditional Discussions of Equal Quality, Study Suggests

Asynchronous collaboration at a distance, such as that common in an online learning environment, can produce results of the same quality as traditional, synchronous, face-to-face collaboration. This is the result of a study published in the Journal of Online Learning and Teaching. (H/T to the Teach Online blog).

The controls on the study look good to me. Additionally, the only negative comments made by the online participants involved the environment’s unfamiliarity. That problem is self-correcting, and (I would add) not limited to online collaboration: plenty of my first-year students are initially unfamiliar with the norms and practices of traditional classroom discussion.

The complete study is legible and worth a look, if only to satisfy yourself about its integrity and the details of the tabulated results.

Distance Learning Strategies in the Brick-and-Mortar Classroom (SBL 2009)

My paper proposal has been accepted for the Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies section of the annual conference of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). The working title is, “The Contribution of Distance Learning Strategies to Brick-and-Mortar Learning.”

This fall, I am again thoroughly revising my courses “Introduction to Old Testament” and “Elementary Hebrew I.” In this revision, I plan to focus on building the classes as online collaborating communities that happen also to meet for four hours each week in a physical classroom. This presentation at SBL will report on the use in the brick-and-mortar classroom of strategies still typically associated with distance learning: podcast lectures, course wikis, blogging, the use of Web resources for research and as grist for critical thinking, online groups, and so on. I am also interested in the use of existing social community platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and social bookmarking sites Delicious and Diigo, as alternatives to the more restrictive possibilities folded into Course Management Systems like BlackBoard.

As my plans come together, I will blog on the separate aspects of this plan, with a focus on how they might contribute to desired learning outcomes like critical thinking, taking ownership of learning, forming essential questions, collegiality, and the like.

In what ways do you think that the tools of distance learning offer unique possibilities for learning, beyond what has been possible in the physical classroom? How do you imagine putting such strategies to work in your brick-and-mortar or online classrooms?