Our presentation set for 9/28/11 was to focus on the ECAR Study of Undergraduate Student and Information Technology 2010 and The Horizon Report 2011. Beth and I met on Skype Video Chat to discuss what we thought we should cover and how we should cover it during our time as discussion leaders. We ended up going into areas in the reports that we thought were interesting when we were reading to develop discussion questions. This seemed to be the most effective way to approach it simply because of the vast amount of information in both of the studies. We tried to make sure that the questions we were asking led to discussion of access (the current issue we're discussing) and thinking technology issues and usage in the classroom. We thought it was important to connect our experiences with technology to what is being said about undergrad experiences and to kind of see all that in action. This all led to our focus on usage, perceptions of IT in coursework, and the Navigator exploration.
We originally planed to include a 10 minute traditional freewrite on personal technology usage and perception, but decided to incorporate those question into the discussion questions when it was decided that class would be asynchronous. The purpose was to get our classmates thinking about their usage in preparation for the discussion questions we were asking. Our decision to use the Discussion Forum was based on a couple of reasons: 1. neither one of us are there, which makes other types of presentation difficult when using Skype as a platform. 2. it was a format that is typically used asynchronously, but can also be effective in synchronous classroom settings (something I've seen as a student, but never tried as a teacher). Our decision to use Worlde to tie everything together came from the desire to see the words most used to describe these activities. We were hoping it would give a clear glimpse into the language being used.
Using the discussion forum effectively took some playing around. We had to post a test topic (which we later deleted) to see what it would actually look like when discussion was happening. Beth's whole page was in Spanish (we later found out it was because of her browser-it's amazing how much difference a browser can make. Right now, the version of Blackboard I have to teach with isn't compatible with Explorer 9 and it's been wreaking havoc on my students).
I suppose it worked out well that we used the discussion forum since we ended up having to do class asynchronously this week. That's something that you just have to "roll with" and that attitude is exactly what saved us I think. Neither one of us panicked. We just adapted what we had to an asynchronous environment. We both teach at a distance, so that wasn't a huge stretch. The adaptation included creating videos and overall more instruction than the original lesson plan. We had to consider what students would have accomplished in the amount of time given in the class, which led us to our word counts and number of responses. Something else we considered was the fact that the students were graduate level. We didn't feel it was necessary to require more than one response in each discussion.
The experience was time consuming, but I suppose that's the nature of technology. In the process of converting the lesson plan, we got to work with pushing a Jing video to Youtube and weebly.com-two things neither one of us had done before.
Overall, based on the Wordle Clouds, we seem to have focused mostly on students, technology, the classroom, usage, competency or knowledge, and mobile and gaming devices. I would imagine this is would have been true even if the whole class had participated. I was disappointed to only see about half. That is a known issue when teaching distance courses asynchronously, and the synchronous discussion would have made it a non-issue. Something to think about when teaching distance courses: could we have done something differently?
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