SOCIAL MEDIA, DIGITAL NATIVES & IMMIGRANTS, AND COGNITIVE APPRENTICESHIP / SCAFFOLDING

Summary

In module 4 of Learning with Emerging Technologies: Theory and Practice, we studied the application, uses, and benefits of social media in educational environments. We also studied the teaching and learning characteristics of digital natives vs. digital immigrants, and explored the educational theory of cognitive apprenticeship and scaffolding. We had the opportunity to create a Facebook page that could be used as an educational tool or resource as opposed to a personal connection medium. This was a very enlightening week for me and a great experience. Below are four questions that have been posed to me in conclusion of this module.

How do you see a Facebook page as adding value to the learning environment that you are creating? Given that you would use private pages for internal postings, are there ways that you would try to encourage an ongoing community or commitment through the Facebook venue? 

I actually have two thoughts about this with each one having a slightly different application or interpretation of what my learning environment actually is. This is primarily because I kind of have two different jobs, both in education, but each with significant differences. First, as a college instructor and academic advisor, I see a lot of benefit in the use of Facebook, and possibly other social media tools. It is a great way to share content that is related to your class or program that may be outside the design of the curriculum and in a multimedia format. It’s also a great way to stay connected to students and get important information out to them in a timely manner. This is especially true considering that most students have smart phones that are linked and give instant messages when they have an update to their Facebook accounts. I used to try communicating in a similar means with e-mail and our LMS (Angel) but have found recently that students simply do not log in and check those as much as they check their FB account. Right or wrong, it is the trend. In addition, by the way I set up the Facebook page in our class assignment, I created a mechanism for current students to connect with former students and share experiences and opportunities related to our industry.

Second, as a service trainer for the Bobcat Equipment Company during my “vacation” time, I never really thought of how FB could be used. I think this would be difficult because while I do the training for the company, I am not really a Bobcat employee or representative really. To them I am considered a third party vendor that they contract with to provide a service, which happens to be training their dealers. From that perspective I am not sure if I would ever really be allowed to create a FB page that would be seen as a company initiative. Nevertheless, I think it would be a great tool for service technicians and mechanics to connect with each other on a daily basis to ask questions and get feedback about problems they are encountering. This is actually done in the form of message boards, but again, the task of logging in and remembering to check back on a post from the past is not as well practiced today as it has been in the past, and a much faster responding social media tool like FB that is almost instantaneous and linked directly to smart phones would be much more valuable. At the end of every Bobcat training course I teach, the technicians fill out an evaluation form and one of the questions they have to answer is “what are the five most valuable things you gained from the class?” In almost every case, one of the five items refers to the ability to just informally chat (at coffee break time, lunch, or even at the bar at the hotel during evenings) with other technicians that struggle with the same issues, problems, and challenges every day. It seems to me that a technician shouldn’t have to wait once a year, travel 300 miles, and spend thousands of dollars to have that opportunity. Great application for a Facebook page I think.

How would you plan on maintaining such an outward-facing social presence?

I think the key here is to link the page first to an e-mail account that is work related. This way you will have constant updates and reminders to manage updates. However, it needs to be structured more than that, suggesting that it becomes more than just a casual resource to manage when you feel like it or when you get a chance. I think it needs to become part of a daily routine, or at least something that you put on your weekly to do a list a couple times each week. No matter which way you twist it, managing a resource like this is additional work, period. For me it makes sense to incorporate it as part of my “office hours” routine. Normally, if I do not have a student coming to see me face to face during my office hours, I just work on other course preparation stuff (grading, lesson plans, lab instructions, PowerPoint modifications, reading / research, etc.). If I committed myself to updating the FB page during office hours, it would ensure the usefulness of the tool. However, it would some of the class prep work I normally do to another time (nights, weekends, etc.). Again, regardless of how you look at it, it is extra work.

Would you maintain this yourself or share the responsibilities with the learners in your environment? 

The page that I created for this class is something intended just for myself and the students that I serve, or have served, as their academic advisor. Therefore, I will maintain this myself. However, our department has discussed the possibility of having a page that isn’t limited to a certain group of students, sort of a recruitment page. This would make the question a little more difficult to answer. The first thought is that since it is for the whole department, that all the faculty would be able to contribute. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean they all have administrative rights. It seems more logical to me, for the sake of consistency and follow-through, that one person would be in charge of maintaining the page and would work with all other parties to collaborate on content. The challenge to this approach is that it creates even more work for the person maintaining the page because not only do they need to set aside time to update their own content, they have to set time aside to communicate and work with all other faculty and staff to manage their content. At this point for such an application I believe that it warrants discussion about course reduction, stipend, or some other means of recognition for the amount of time in somebody’s workload this would require.

Other thoughts?

Looking back at the way I did my page, I will probably close it out at the end of this semester and start with a new one under a different account that is not linked to my personal page. We were actually recommended to do this initially but I ignored the recommendation primarily because my personal FB page is tied to my work e-mail. That alone is probably not a good idea. Nevertheless, when I went to create a group page for this assignment, I needed to have it tied to my work e-mail so I wouldn’t miss any admin required tasks like approving members and monitoring discussion posts. As a result, this page is connected to my personal page. I do have the settings in a way that still requires members of the group page to “friend” request me to access my personal page, and my personal rule has always been to deny the request for active students but accept for alumni. However, even though I have this safety measure in place, whenever I update something on the group page it attaches the thumbnail from my personal page which I do not like. In addition, one thing I have learned about FB is that nothing is private. You can try to protect certain personal content from being displayed to people outside of your close friends, but the privacy settings in FB can be fairly complex and dynamic to the point it is hard to manage and keep up with. In addition, it isn’t always what you post, it’s what someone else may post about you, or tag you in a picture they post showing you in an undesirable manner. For that reason I am going to try and change the e-mail my personal page is linked to, or create a new personal page from scratch, and then make the account tied to my work e-mail dedicated strictly for use with my students.

MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES, INFORMATION PROCESSING, AND VIDEOS

Summary

In module 3 of Learning with Emerging Technologies: Theory and Practice, we studied the concepts of multiple intelligences which are various abilities that students may, or may not, have to perform tasks in order to learn from different types of activities, information processing which analyzes how the brain thinks, learns, and applies which is similar to the way computers perform functions, and the use of videos as a mechanism to exploit areas of multiple intelligences and information processing. We were given the opportunity to create our own videos and post them for other students in the class to see.

I first want to thank all of my fellow classmates and Dr. O’Connor for the positive feedback on the video that I created. While the end product was not what I had envisioned prior to starting the project, it ended up better than I thought. It is far from perfect and I will address this in specific questions below. The video I created was a demonstration on using a common electrical troubleshooting device in an “inappropriate” way and how it could allow mechanics and technicians to misdiagnose an electrical problem. When finished it ended up being a full 50 minute lecture / demonstration on all kinds of electrically related subjects including relays, meters, test lights, engine glow plugs, and a few other topics. After filming and editing, I then had the challenge of trying to manage the file size without compromising video quality too much, and then I had to fight with my slow internet connection to get the video uploaded on YouTube, which meant breaking the video up into three parts to reduce the file size.

Based on videos that you have created and observed, what other ways can you envision using them in your finalized learning environment or in your communication areas in general?

After completing the video I made, while longer than what I had wanted, I determined it could be used as an actual lecture / demonstration classes when I am not able to be in class (when I am away at training for example) in lieu of cancelling class, or it could be used as an outside assignment. To maximize the use of it in this way I would need to create a study guide, note sheet, or some other type of work sheet that students would complete while watching the video. This would help the students to stay focused and would help bring the main learning objectives to the forefront and avoid the risk of the students “missing the point.” My original thought was that the video would be useful as a small segment in an online basic electricity course that I would like to develop for dealer training that I do with the Bobcat Equipment Company. While this could still be done, I would most likely redo the video in a much simpler and faster way since the concept, as important as I think it is, would only be one part of a much larger topic and I can’t justify 50 minutes of time on such a small part of a course.

There were a lot of other great videos posted by students in the class. One thing I noticed is that there were a number of different screen capture and screen recording tools used. For my video I used a program called Screencast-O-Matic which worked quite well for me except I noticed while watching the video play back that the segments where I was doing schematic diagram tracing on my screen were jumpy and jerky. I’m not sure if that was from the Screen-O-Matic program itself, my computer running out of memory, or something in Windows Live Movie Maker (the editing program I used). Regardless, my classmates’ use of screen recording demonstrations gave me a lot of great ideas I can use in a course that I teach related to computer applications. In this class, students have to use a number of different programs by equipment manufacturers to find technical information, parts information, and troubleshooting test procedures. Now that I am familiar and confident with screen recording software and have seen some great examples of how they can be applied, I will be creating some demonstrations for students to watch if they get stuck while doing their assignments.

How can you keep your videos timely and engaging, without getting too cute? (Or, do you want to be cute at some times?)

I am not too interested in being “cute” but I like to try and be funny and incorporate humor where I can. I did not do that well in the video I created, but I think that will be easier to incorporate with more experience in creating videos and maybe doing a little more planning ahead of time of what I want to show and maybe even script my dialogue (not word for word, but at least have an outline to follow). If anybody wants to see a great example of how a lecture talk video can be made extremely funny while still maintaining the serious tone of the topic, see Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk video on school’s killing creativity http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html. It is an extremely interesting talk and is hilarious at the same time.

In terms of being timely, this was my biggest fear when the video was complete. My video was 50 minutes long, way too long in my mind. Sometimes mistakes can teach you something though. Due to the fact that the file size was so big and it would take a couple hours to upload to YouTube, I edited it one more time and broke it up into three chunks so I could get at least the first part posted in a timely manner for other students in the class to view and comment on. Once I had all three videos uploaded, it dawned on me that might not be a bad way of doing it. By breaking it up into segments and allowing students to progress through the total video at three different times instead of all at once, it would help reduce cognitive overload. Again, knowing now what I didn’t know then, I would make changes in the original recording and setup so that the segmenting would be more logical with each segment ending on the conclusion of a key learning objective. The way I have it now the end of the first segment leaves you hanging with no closure.

Video training can be helpful, but often you need to provide written directions too – what can you do to create multiple training formats without creating too much work for yourself? 

 I think we all learned from the video making activity that just making the video is a lot of work and takes a tremendous amount of time to get it in the professional quality you want. The great thing is that once you have it, you can reuse it over and over again without putting all of that work back into it. Therefore, in time you will have more opportunity to work at creating worksheets, study guides, quizzes, and other written materials that will help both the student maximize their information processing ability by aligning with multiple intelligences and as a teacher it gives you paper based data to use as evidence of learning (assessment), grades, and attendance. One thing that I strongly feel teachers should avoid, although I see it with my colleagues at work all the time, is to show a video and do nothing but expect the students to watch and do nothing else, then test them on what they remembered from the video, or worse yet, not use the video in any way to enhance mastery of the learning objectives of the course or the lesson. Don’t show a video on how to drive a John Deere tractor with an IVT transmission unless you actually have a John Deere tractor with an IVT transmission for the students to drive after watching the video, or unless there is something in the video that reinforces subject matter they are studying in the class such as how the transmission works or what to do when it is not working properly, in which case other written materials will need to accompany the video so students know to make the connections in their mind.

How can you create videos that truly engage the different intelligences?

It would be nearly impossible to create a video that engaged every different type of intelligence in the same video. For that reason I think it is important for teachers to do two things. First, they should try to mix it up a bit when possible. For example, if they find themselves always creating or showing video with nothing more than their own voice, they should attempt a video with music in it once in a while. If the videos are always watched by students independently and they have to complete the accompanying paperwork (work sheets, quizzes, etc) on their own, switch it up and create a group activity where each student in the group focuses on a different aspect of the video and then they work together after the video to collaborate and present a group piece to the teacher. This engages both the intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligences. Second, teachers should survey the students using an online multiple intelligence assessment tool to try and determine what the predominant intelligences might be in the class and make sure that the majority of videos used or created engage those intelligences. If it is found that certain intelligences are nearly non-existent in a class, the teacher can feel comfortable if their videos do not engage those intelligences well as they are not important in that circumstance anyways. It is also important to note that most people have multiple intelligences. In other words, most people are not isolated into one intelligence they can employ to learn, they often times can employ a few different intelligences, with preference of certain ones over others. The challenge is to make sure that there are not any students in the class who’s “few” intelligences happen to be the ones you choose to not engage. The only way to know that is to survey your students.

Week 6 Reflection

Well here we are at the end of week 6 in Learning with Emerging Technologies and this is a great time to reflect on what has been learned so far, how this all fits in with what I do, and a couple thoughts about the future. So far I have discovered and more thoroughly comprehended a tremendous amount of educational theory and how emerging technologies can be used to put those theories into practice using 21st century skills with digital media. The research is very convincing, this stuff works. Kids like it. It is engaging, immersive, and effective.

It is important for me to not lose sight on what my objectives are for this class and the entire MALET program. My intentions are not to replace the traditional hands-on skill development and training aspect that we are well known for with computer based instruction, online classes, and virtual games. Instead, I want to use these technologies to supplement what we do, strengthen it, make it more accessible to students, and allow students the opportunity to take more control of their own learning.

The most realistic virtual simulations in the world cannot replace the real world experiential learning that takes place in the classes that I normally teach. Using real tools on real systems in real machines is the best way for students to truly develop their knowledge and skills. However, that is not to say that there are not imperfections in the design of hands-on learning. Here are a few "imperfections" that come to mind. First, students are humans, and humans make mistakes. If we can reduce some of the mistakes by creating more "practice" time using emerging technologies, we can save time and money, two precious resources in post-secondary education today. Second, some students are not mentally ready for some of the hands-on activities. They may be genuinely interested in the field and want to make a career out of it but come into the program with limited experience and a timid attitude about jumping right into hooking a $700 meter into the electrical circuit of a $300,000 tractor. Educational technology such as simulations, animations, and virtual learning models can help students gain some experience and confidence in a safe and comfortable environment. Third, some students are for more advanced than others and have an internal need to be challenged and realize progression in their own learning. This is hard to do in a hands-on lab setting where the tasks and resources are structured so the objectives are achievable by everybody including the lowest level students. Creative development of learning activities and opportunities through the use of emerging technologies can create an avenue for the advanced students to pursue learning beyond the minimum requirements. Fourth, you just can't give students a hands-on task to do without structuring an environment in which they understand the concepts and theory behind what they are doing. Emerging technologies provide educators with an opportunity to redesign their lecture material that create the theoretical framework around the hands-on activities in ways that are more engaging and accessible to students than traditional college classroom lectures.

Moving forward in the class, I am excited to continue to realize more ways of incorporating emerging technologies into what we do. From research readings to ideas from other students in the class, my eyes have already been opened much farther than I thought would happen and I know it will continue. One concerning issue that is starting to weigh heavy in my mind is related to the actual technologies themselves, and my ability to work with it. Not so much from a user end as I am relatively comfortable there, but from a development end.  I knew starting this program that the main intention is to make me an effective educator, not a software developer. However, as I read and learn about great things happening in education today with the use of digital technologies, I quickly realize that somebody had to create that simulation, somebody had to build that animation, and somebody had to write the software to create the virtual environment. If that isn't something that I am going to learn how to do, then it basically spells out "collaboration project" with somebody or a group more versed in software development and graphic arts. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean time, somebody else's time, that somehow must be compensated and therefore significant monetary resources will be involved. Where will this come from? How can I justify this to my administrators? Where can I find the human resources with the knowledge and skill to build what I need? Having the creativity to structure effective learning activities within a technology is a challenge in itself, but the administrative hurdles involved with the development of the technology adds a whole new dimension.