cccc’s posterous

Leslie Whitaker, a guest blogger for Wired Campus, is a lecturer in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. Previously she worked as a reporter for Time magazine.

My first experience with blogging’s potential as a teaching tool occurred last week. I am teaching a class on blogs to English majors this semester, and I asked them to blog immediately after watching a live broadcast of President Obama’s address during the memorial service for those killed at Fort Hood, in Texas. I gave them about 10 minutes and then asked them to read aloud what they’d written. I figured we’d brush up against the limits of blogging, with its inherent pressure to process and post as quickly as possible. Even though I have a thoughtful bunch of students, I didn’t expect to hear much worth saving.

I was wrong.

The first several students reacted to the murders on an emotional level. Some mentioned their grief at learning that one of the shooting victims had been pregnant. Others wrote more like reporters, recounting highlights of what Obama had said.

A handful of students wrote things that stand out sharply in my memory. One young woman had family members in the military. She wrote a prose poem that started every sentence with “I hate.” One line I remember in particular. “I hate that my brother lost six years of his life in the Army.”

A young woman who is Muslim had to be persuaded to read her post because she considered it controversial. She raised questions with an eye toward understanding this horrific event in a larger historical perspective. An even more cautious student refused to read anything, noting that she had friends in the Army and didn’t want to publish anything stupid. A young man who was proud of his Italian heritage and yet was also proud to be American wondered how the accused killer, a U.S. citizen with a Muslim background, could shoot his fellow countrymen and -women.

The last student, who noted that he had no experience either with violence or the military, posted a confession of sorts: “I have never witnessed the horrors of a murder. To the best of my knowledge, neither has anyone I know. I cannot approximate nor rationalize nor understand the emotions involved, and pretending otherwise seems false. So I am detached.”

Hearing these students’ reactions, shared with each other, made the experience of watching President Obama far more meaningful than it would be if I had done it in my usual way: by myself or with my family. When the female student who had relatives in the military and the male student who felt detached addressed each other, civilly, I felt as if the class was giving voice to the widely divergent views that exist in our country, as well as to the sorts of confusing contradictions that sometimes occur inside our own heads.

Is this what blogging at its best offers us as a society, the chance to put the various slivers of reaction to any complex problem side by side? Or is the process I stumbled upon simply a standard educational model of requiring students to think, write, and then discuss? Was 10 minutes too short a time to process a reaction to such a complicated situation? Or is 10 minutes longer than we usually get?

Categories: Teaching, Social-Networking

Startup PBWorks, which was formally known as PBwiki, specializes in helping businesses, non-profits, and educational institutions collaborate via wikis. The startup has steadily added innovative, real-time features to its platform, most recently integrating Twitter-like microblogging.

Today, PBworks is entering the stream by adding real-time functionality and voice collaboration within the application. PBWorks is adding four new features to its suite.

Online programs are generally profitable. But despite the buzz about Web 2.0, the education they provide is still dominated by rudimentary, text-based technology.

Those are two key findings in a recent report, “Benchmarking Online Operations: Snapshots of an Emerging Industry,” produced by the consulting firm Eduventures.

Online education has grown in popularity, yet it remains dependent on learning-management systems, with content-delivery built around text, says Richard Garrett, an Eduventures managing director.

“The underlying delivery model or pedagogical model hasn’t really changed much in the last five, 10 years,” Mr. Garrett says.

The survey of 96 institutions, which is not publicly available online, was released to Eduventures members and subsequently to The Chronicle. Mr. Garrett describes it as the first attempt to benchmark online-specific operational activities across a large number of schools --- activities like technology, outsourcing, and marketing. Data were collected in the fall and winter of 2008-09. The Campus Computing Project is expected to soon release an expanded, updated version of the survey.

The study found that nearly all programs were either profitable or breaking even. Overall, 65 percent reported that their online programs were profitable. For for-profits, 100 percent were profitable; for nonprofits, 62 percent were. (With nonprofit colleges, “profit” is used in the sense of a surplus, with revenues being larger than expenses. Universities have various systems for handling the surplus).

The profitability findings underscore how the recent -- and widely publicized -- demise of University of Illinois’ online Global Campus program does not reflect the typical experience, Mr. Garrett says.

The finding “gets away from any notion that online is somehow a flash in the pan, or it’s all up-front investment and no return, like the Illinois Global Campus,” Mr. Garrett says.

But when it came to technology, the Eduventures survey found that the widely used tools are email, text discussions that don't happen in real time, physical textbooks, and word and pdf documents.

That contrasts with what you find on the programs of distance-learning conferences, where the talk is often about Web 2.0 technology that allows students to interact with the content or the provider in tangible ways. Those tools might be social-networking platforms or wikis or virtual worlds.

“Any innovation is really on the periphery in terms of the odd synchronous session, or the odd video clip, or the odd simulation,” Mr. Garrett says of online programs. “But those are really to supplement what is still a pretty rudimentary core.”

Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.
In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold—services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate—in ways we can only begin to imagine.
We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone. The always-on connection, in turn, has created a host of new ways to communicate that are much faster than email, and more fun.

Video Blogging is Still in its Infancy

Robb Montgomery, CEO of a public charity that promotes journalism education called Visual Editors, said in an email interview that web video consumption overall is a booming phenomenon but maintains that we are still at the beginning of an emerging art form and story form with video blogging and it may be too early to generalize about long-term effects.

It may seem surprising that video blogging hasn’t take off considering how cheap the equipment has become and how easy it is to shoot, edit and post video online. According to Adam Singer’s Future Buzz blog, some reasons it hasn’t include: it’s time consuming to produce compelling video, video is not searchable, and pros still have an advantage.
But the demand is there. In August, more than 161 million viewers watched an average of 157 videos per viewer, according to data from the comScore Video Metrix service. A whopping 81.6 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video and the average online video viewer saw 9.7 hours of video in August.

Web Video Puts People on Equal Footing

Video on the Internet does two things — it puts people on equal footing versus the top-down communication of broadcast media and it allows for direct talkback from the audience.

Michael Rosenblum, CEO of Rosenblumtv, said in an email interview, that the only reason people used to differentiate between average person and journalist is that access to the equipment and the ability to publish was just too complicated and too expensive. He said that went away with the web, which gave anyone the ability to write or publish whatever they wanted.

“Now that freedom comes to video — as the cost of cameras goes to next to nothing and the web carries video with the same fluidity that it carries text,” he said. “What we are looking at here is the true democratization of video — a real ‘free press.’ This, I think, is a very positive thing.

“The move to video blogging, just getting started, is to my mind the same as the move to writing books post-Gutenberg. It took the printing press to liberate writing from the few literate monks; now the web will liberate video from the few ‘video literate’ TV types,” said Rosenblum, who just launched an online video training site called the New York Video School.

Lights, camera, learn?

Did you know that many of today’s online classes come equipped with video lectures from your instructor? When I was enrolled in an online topics of mathematics course it was especially helpful to see the instructor solve the problems. The video lecture library was a godsend for me. The best part was I could cue up the lectures whenever I wanted during the week. It was a completely different learning experience from my traditional classroom days.

When I was in a traditional classroom I would take shorthand notes at a fever pace and even bring in a recording device to capture what I missed. But the most critical element was what he or she was putting on the board, and that was the one piece I didn’t have. I had the notes and the sound but not the video to guide me.

Now I’m not here to tell you that sitting in a traditional classroom is bad, or that taking online classes is the only way to go. But what I will say is that they both serve a purpose. They both educate you. You should try both and see which one suits you better. If you don’t you’re just doing yourself a disservice.