"Social Media & Education" panel at THATCamp Austin

Last week I had the chance to attend THATCamp Austin, a regional spinoff of THATCamp at George Mason University.

I was able to attend two thought-provoking panel sessions, and I got to hear about a lot of interesting projects through the dork shorts presentations. You can read a lot about what happened by scanning through the archive of Twitter posts at TwapperKeeper.

I really enjoyed the unconference format. Instead of having the conference schedule determined by the conference organizers, the attendees voted on the proposals they wanted to see. One of these proposals suggested a discussion about the role of social media in educational practice. Below, I've posted some video from this session for those who weren't able to make it.

Rhetorical Peaks article on CCC Online

Last summer I worked with Matt King, the CWRL’s resident video game expert, on the html for an article describing the current status of Rhetorical Peaks, a video game for teaching rhetoric and writing. The article has recently been published by CCC Online. Check it out.

Mobile gaming in the classroom

Sarah Perez at ReadWrite Web has posted a short introduction to mobile gaming centered on Eric Klopfer’s book Augmented Learning: Research and Design of Mobile Educational Games. Perez does a good job outlining some of the difficulties that face instructors who want to use mobile phones in the classroom. Although the students she discusses appear to be K–12, the same issues apply for the college classroom.

Even as children get older, there are still the issues of various mobile plans and the cost of data use—details that the students may not be aware of, racking up charges that parents won’t be happy about all because the child’s teacher told them to break out their phones for today’s lesson.

Finally, the digital divide between the ”haves” and “have-nots” would become more apparent in a classroom if students had to provide their own phones. Imagine the privileged kids pullinig out their iPhones, others pulling out ancient clamshells, and still others having to raise their hands because they are without.

Humanities: In the future!

Here’s a pretty slick presentation by Richard E. Miller, the head of the English Department at Rutgers, on the future of the humanities.

I like what he has to say about new media and the humanities (I want a colaboratory), but he somewhat distressingly seems to ignore the role of rhetoric, writing studies, and technical writing in the same. The only scholars mentioned in the presentation are literature scholars, and the type of writing which Miller spotlights is creative writing. According to Miller, what the university has to offer the Wikipedia generation is

sustained study and deep understanding. when you add that to the picture you get human creativity put at the center of the humanities[. . . . The] real function of the humanities is to engage in the act of creativity moment by moment to improve the quality of the world we live in.

The talk sort of reminded me of the ridiculous hand-wringing over the death of reading, where “reading” means “reading literature,” whatever that might be—no one ever seems to get worked up over the death of email at hands of text-messaging or the sad demise of the online message board. Definitions are similarly limited in the presentation, where it appears that the goal of the English Department is to study “literature,” whatever that might be, and the only type of writing worth mentioning is creative writing.

Embed Facebook Apps on any website

Facebook has announced a set of Java tools that will allow developers to embed Facebook Apps on their own webpages. As Duncan Riley at TechCrunch notes

I’m not sure anyone saw this move coming, but Facebook may have just changed the game again by essentially becoming an application host. It’s a clever move by Facebook in a year its competitors will get more serious about offering platforms themselves.

I’ll be interested in seeing how this move affects Facebook’s use as a content management system for educators. Although I doubt that it will lead to educators creating their own static web sites, it should have interesting applications, such as adding Facebook features or connectivity to existing course pages.

Literature and Mathematics: Course trailer

I’ve created a trailer for my spring 2008 course, “Literature and Mathematics”; it is embedded below. The plan for the course is to investigate how mathematics and mathematicians are depicted in literature, particularly the ways in which these two themes are associated with delusions and insanity. I tried to emphasize these connections in the video (and make the course seem a little more interesting to prospective students).

Credits: The clips in the trailer are from MGM’s 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz, Darren Aronofsky’s Pi, Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind, and two episodes of The Simpsons, “Girls Just Want to Have Sums” and “Stop or My Dog Will Shoot.” The audio track is a modified version of Coldplay’s “Politik.”

Related: Course website design: Literature and Mathematics

Instructors make “friends” on Facebook

The Chronicle of Higher Education published an article last week on the difficulties academics face when using Facebook. While the article contained some good, commonsense advice about how instructors should interact with their students on the site, it also revealed how little understanding most instructors have of social networking culture.

Nancy Baym worries more about students’ expectations of her. A few weeks ago, a young man she did not know tried to friend her, says Ms. Baym, an associate professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas. The same student e-mailed her the next day, asking to get into a class that had a waiting list. He must have thought, “If she’s my friend, then she’ll let me into the class,” she says.

Young, female faculty members already struggle to be seen as authority figures, says Ms. Baym. It was easy to imagine what might happen: “But how could you have given me a D? You’re my friend on Facebook!”

Now, lots of people use Facebook, for lots of different reasons; however, I think it is highly unlikely that the unknown student friended her in order to enact the social code that Baym suggests: “If she’s my friend, then she’ll let me into the class.” I would guess that it is much more likely that the student perceived the interaction as an introduction, analogous to the student introducing himself to Baym at her office.

In short, I think Baym is making the mistake of thinking that being someone’s “friend” on Facebook is equal to being his or her “friend” in some other social context. I would be surprised if the average Facebook user expected (or demanded) the same commitments from his or her online “friends” as from offline ones.

Course website design: Literature and Mathematics

I’ve been working on my spring 2008 course, “Literature and Mathematics” lately, and one of the things I’m trying to do is update the course website so it is a little more aesthetically pleasing. I started with a splash image:


The inspiration for the image is the quote from Lakoff and Núñez’s Where Mathematics Comes From:

The inferior parietal cortex is a highly associative area, located anatomically where neural connections from vision, audition, and touch come together—a location appropriate for numerical abilities, since they are common to all sensory modalities. Lesions in this area have been shown to affect not only arithmetic but also writing.

I felt the connection between arithmetic and writing emphasized in the quote would be a good hook for the course, a way of building on Lakoff and Núñez’s argument that mathematics is about ideas, then connecting this claim to literary ideas and the way the two interact.

My inspiration for the aesthetic of the image is another course text, Tomasula and Farrell’s Vas: An Opera in Flatland. Here’s a sample page from that text:


Although I’m going to make some minor tweaks to the image—I don’t like the look of the line to the bullseye, for example—I’m pretty pleased with the results.

There is one thing I’m not sure how to handle, though. The image of the brain comes from Joseph Vimont’s Traité de phrénologie humaine et comparée the NIH’s “Historical Anatomies on the Web.” The bullseye is supposed to be centered on the angular gyrus in the inferior parietal cortex. While I think the positioning seems about right, I don’t think that the brain folds in Vimont’s image match up with the folds of other brain images I have seen. Based on the folds, I think the angular gyrus would be located just to the right of the middle of the image. I’m not sure if this is because Vimont’s image is incorrect, or if it is not a view from the left side, but from the left rear of the brain. I suppose it’s not a big deal, because this isn’t a neurology course.

Doonesbury on classroom communication

I found today’s Doonesbury to be particularly funny.


For me, the strip works on two levels. First, I think Doonesbury is poking fun at the way young people interact with technology, rather than suggesting that technology in the classroom is a wonderful thing. As evidence for this perspective I would suggest the joke in the throwaway panels—Zipper appears to be busily engaged in some sort of heavy thinking which overwhelms him, but this activity is revealed in the last panel to be checking his email—and the fact that Zipper is not the brightest character in the strip. I found the comic funny at this intended level: Zipper is clearly not participating in the class, and his scheme for avoiding being called out on this point makes for an ironically-exciting narrative.

(Personal note: this situation reminded me of my own college experience. When I was a freshman, I would regularly sit in the back of a large, required survey course and read the newspaper. On one occasion, I didn’t hear the professor when he called on me to recite something or other. When a friend a few rows over got my attention and let me know what had happened, I jump up to do the reading, but the professor had moved on to something else, so I stood sheepishly for five minutes until he finally acknowledged me.)

The comic also works for me at another level, one where Zip is able to use his considerable techno-savvy to deal with the age-old problem of being called on to answer a question about material you haven’t studied. Zipper is merely using his laptop—IM and Google—to provide a novel means for achieving an old solution: getting the answer from someone else. And, in this case, because he found the answer himself, it is more likely that he will remember it.

I’m generally amused by professors who don’t allow laptops in their classes because they “distract” the students too much. Do professors think that all the students without laptops are paying attention? Did they never pass notes, or sleep, or read newspapers in class? At least in Zipper’s case, he is able to use his distraction as part of the classroom environment, even though he isn’t completely engaged with that environment.

Using Facebook for course management, pt. 2

Introduction

In my last post, I discussed some reasons why instructors would want to use Facebook to manage their course communication, as well as the potential drawbacks of this move. In this post, I will cover how to set up Facebook for this purpose, giving an overview of relevant apps that are necessary for making Facebook a courseware package.

Courseware basics

A good courseware system should provide at minimum 1) a central location for course communication such as announcements and 2) file sharing. A basic courseware system of this type can be had on Facebook by adding just a few apps.

Course apps
When Facebook introduced the Facebook Platform, they eliminated their own course application, allowing users to take over this feature. I have had a good experience with two course apps: Michael Staton et al.’s Courses and Colin Schmidt and Jonathan Chapman’s Courses

• Staton et al.’s Courses allows users to find a course at their school by the department and course number or create a course themselves. Users can then invite their classmates on Facebook to join the course. When logging into the app, users view a list of courses they have joined and can access tabs that let them browse for other courses, find their friends’ and classmates’ courses, rank their courses, and adjust the app’s settings. Individual course pages have links to study groups and display a course discussion board. Individual courses can also set up course chats using Vawkr (a third-party, Flash-based program which ominously announces that if you allow it to access your computer’s camera and microphone, you may be recorded).

• Schmidt and Chapman’s Courses app offers a similar set of features. Users can add new courses, but it doesn’t seem that the system has a very efficient way of browsing for courses that have already been created. It is possible to invite friends to your courses, as well as view your schedule. Individual course pages are designed like a Facebook user page, with panes for adding course notes, a course discussion board, and a course wall. While this app has more spaces for course communication collected on the course page, they all seem to be implementations of the same, discussion-board-type messaging system. Interestingly, there is also a pane entitled “Advice from Former Students”; however, it is not clear to me how helpful this feature would be. The app seems to be set up so that individual sections of the course have their own pages, and it is not clear if advice posted to one section would be aggregated on all sections.

Update: After futher use, it seems that while this app has useful tools for managing course information, it is very difficult to connect courses with other users. For that reason, it might be wise to use the Staton et al. app for now until the collaboration features of this app become better developed.

Currently the Staton et al. app has over 32,000 users while the Schmidt and Chapman app has only 7,000. While there would normally be an incentive to go with the app with the most users in order to take advantage of the greater network effects available to that app, in the case of course communication, instructors will not necessarily be interested in those effects and can just pick the app that has the features they want and invite students to join.

Document sharing apps
• Scribd allows users to post and share documents through their Facebook accounts. Presumably the files can be in almost any format: the app’s homepage says it supports the .pdf, .doc, .ppt, .xls, and .txt formats as well “etc.” Users don’t have to create accounts with the system, and permissions can be set so that documents can be seen by everyone, friends, or only the user.

• ThinkFree Docs is an app created by the online MS Office alternative, ThinkFree Office. The app requires users to create an account at ThinkFree.com. Users can then upload documents (in the .pdf, .rtf, .dot, .pot, .pps, .xlt, .csv, .txt, .hwp formats) through Facebook, share documents, and view documents shared by other users.

There are some difficulties with this app. When I added a document, my name was not listed as the user name. Instead, the user was listed as “twha”; it seemed that this might be the default user name for documents added on Facebook. For this reason, it doesn’t seem that users can manage privacy settings: documents are either published or not. Despite these drawbacks, if instructors decide to require their students to use an online office suite and settle on ThinkFree, this app could prove useful.

• Finally, instructors can also use the Share Files app by FilesAnywhere. This app is the most robust of the three, and it requires users to create an account with the website. This account comes with 1GB of free storage and allows users to upload, download, and receive files through their Facebook profile. Users can then set up password-protected folders that they can use to transfer files with others in their class. If instructors want to do any complicated file sharing as part of a Facebook-based class, Share Files is probably the best option, for both volume and security reasons.

Additional apps
Depending on the emphasis of the course, instructors can also choose applications for blogging, videos, or practically any other new media format that is currently available.

Notify course participants
The final step in setting up a Facebook course is for instructors to notify their users of the apps they need to install to their Facebook accounts. Typically, instructors will want to add a common course app, a file-sharing app, and then any other apps that are necessary for the particular course.

Conclusion

Facebook is not yet as robust a courseware medium as Blackboard or Google Groups. It does, however, offer a simple solution that should be enough for most classroom applications. Since the Facebook Platform will continue to improve and add more apps, it is likely that Facebook courseware will become a much more robust, and widely adopted, solution in the future.

Using Facebook for course management, pt. 1

Introduction

Course management systems
The use of course management systems, or courseware, like Blackboard has become widespread in U.S. colleges and universities. With the merger of Blackboard and WebCT, however, the courseware available to most instructors and students has become monolithic, a situation which is not relieved by Blackboard’s patents. While there are a number of free courseware solutions, it may not have occurred to most people that with the introduction of the Facebook Platform, the social networking site can be used for course management.

Why use Facebook for course management?
One obvious reason for using Facebook as an alternative to Blackboard is that most students already use Facebook or are at least familiar with it to some degree. If an instructor chose to use a free system like Moodle, all of his or her students would have to create accounts at the site and learn how to navigate it and its features. With Facebook, most students will already have accounts and know how to navigate the site already, so there will be fewer barriers to their adoption and use of a Facebook-based courseware system.

Another reason that Facebook makes an attractive alternative both to proprietary sites like Blackboard and open source sites like Moodle is the popularity of the site. This popularity, combined with the functionality of the Facebook Platform, encourages developers to add more features to the site—which would happen much more slowly in the form of version releases with a proprietary system like Blackboard or less frequently with less popular sites like Moodle. The Platform was introduced in the summer of 2007, and before fall it has already introduced course tracking, document sharing, blogging, and podcasting applications. It seems likely that at this pace of development, Facebook users will keep adding applications to take advantage of new technologies, a fact which will likely keep those applications on pace with educational developments as well.

Issues to consider before adopting Facebook

Secure communication
Before deciding to use Facebook to manage course communication, instructors should carefully consider how they will use the system. One chief drawback to using Facebook for course communication is that it currently does not have many controls for securely communicating with individual students. For that reason, it should not be used to send students graded work or other sensitive information.

Instructor-student relationships
Instructors should also consider how using Facebook for official class communication will affect his or her relationship with students. Traditional courseware like Blackboard automatically grant an instructor a different status in the system, giving her or him a different level of permissions when interacting with it. This is not the case with Facebook. If you decide to use Facebook as courseware, be aware that you will have no special privileges in the system, unless individual apps allow you set those privileges. Additionally, since most students will use Facebook for purposes outside of class, instructors may find that students try to contact them through the system in ways that might be unprofessional. These issues should be thought through before instructors make a decision to move to Facebook-based courseware.

Conclusion

To sum up, Facebook has a lot of promise as courseware, allowing instructors to interact with students in an environment that they feel comfortable in. There are some risks and drawbacks to using Facebook for course applications, but if instructors weigh these risks and set appropriate boundaries with students, there should be significant benefits to using the system to enhance course communication.

In my next post, I’ll suggest some Facebook Apps that can be used in a courseware system and show how they can be assembled together to make Facebook-based courseware.

Update: Using Facebook for course management, pt. 2