AcademHack Inteview: Part II
October 17, 2007 5:02PM
Without further adieu, the second part of the interview with Dr. David Parry!
In terms of planning class lessons and schedules, is there any software or site you would recommend?
I already mentioned this above, but first up is edublogs. This site will let you host your class blog, which takes care of your course management needs. (I personally maintain my own site, but this is just because I like to play around with the technical aspects . . . if I wasn’t doing this I would definitely use edublogs.)
A good second place to start is Digital Campus, a podcast that is done every other week out of George Mason University (you don’t need an iPod to listen you can just listen from their site). Each week they cover one specific area of interest to educators as it relates to technology, discuss education-technology news, and at the end highlight some useful tools that you might want to try. The hosts do an excellent job of presenting the material in a thorough way without engaging in “tech speak,” thus making it accessible to anyone. If you simply make the shift to using a blog and listen to this podcast, I can almost guarantee that your tech-education life will become so much easier.
Using Google Calendar can be tremendously productive as you can keep track of your schedule there and access it from any internet connection. Additionally you can share part of the calendar for students to see (say class times, office hours, and events that might interest them). This is another place where publicly available tools trump anything the campus course management software people have made (again like WebCT or Blackboard). I am still waiting for a really useful syllabus design program; I talked to someone about six months ago who was working on this but haven’t heard anything since.
One final note here: Google is a great reference for syllabi. Because “syllabus” is a rather specific term—one does not hear it outside of academia very often—it makes a useful search term. Sharing information, having access to the way that other academics have organized their class, easy and for free, this is what the web is about. For example, when I taught House of Leaves for the first time, I wanted to get a sense of both what other texts professors had used with it, and how they situated it in relation to those texts. So, I typed in “House of Leaves” plus syllabus, and got a host of useful courses that were using this novel. (You can also add .edu to the search so you only search education websites, but this can eliminate some really useful results so use it only if the first search return is too high to manage).
For academics uncomfortable or unfamiliar with most technology but word processing and email, what web-based hacks will give them the biggest bang for the effort in their research?
I talk to my students all the time about how literacy specifically, but more generally knowledge creation and dissemination, have changed, are changing. Where it used to be that those who were “wise” or “knowledgeable” knew the most “stuff,” I think this is no longer the case, or at least has begun to shift, and now the key is knowing how to manage and sort information. The amount of information that we encounter is simply too great to remember, so it is a matter of knowing how to navigate, sort, and deal with all of it. (If you are interested in this you might read Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger).
In this regard the most important technology/tool is a good RSS Reader. We really don’t have the time or space here to go into what RSS is or how it can change your life (I am not exaggerating here), but I will summarize it this way, I read close to 200 online sources a day—this includes personal blogs, news sites like CNN or the BBC, tech updates, and sites specific to my academic discipline. Without RSS this would be impossible. There is a video by The Common Craft Show that does a good job of explaining this, and Google Reader is a great place to get started. I wrote about using it for a rhetoric composition class as well, so you can read some of my longer thoughts there.
The other simple to use tool is online bookmarking. Most faculty I know bookmark sites by selecting “Bookmark” in their browser. If you look at people’s bookmarks there are often something like 300+ sites marked that are or are not sorted, but never in a useful way. There are web services that work by allowing you to collect your bookmarks online. This has several advantages, one is it makes them easier to sort, because you sort them by “tags” not by folders. So in other words I bookmark a page that has something to do with politics and technology that relates both to a class I am teaching and a conference paper. Instead of having to decide which folder to put it in I give it a tag of “politics” “technology” “undergrad” “conference,” and then when I am looking for the information I can find it by any of these terms. The second major feature of these online sites is that you can see what others have bookmarked. Now tags are not consistent across users, so searching by tags is not so useful (if I search conference I am likely to get a ton of links to Web 2.0 conferences and business meetings), but I can see who else has bookmarked a particular site, and see what else they have bookmarked in the same category. This often leads me to discover many useful sites that I never would have. Public bookmarking can also help your students, as it is a much easier way to group links for students to visit. (You can even create a tag for each class.) There are two major sites that do this: delicious and magnolia (it is really a matter of preference—although more people use delicious). As a side note Blackboard tried to copy this feature, and it didn’t work out so well, mainly because you want an open public way to manage this information, not a closed Blackboard system.
One small thing everyone can do to improve their online “experience” is to start using bookmarklets. I did a run-down here of what they are and how to use them. But basically they allow you to modify web pages in any number of ways. For example you can strip out all the ads, automatically download all the images on a page, or change the colors (really useful for sites that are unreadable due to color choice), all this with just one simple click. Trying to surf the web without bookmarklets is like trying to read books by candlelight.
I know your question asks about web-based tools but I thought I would throw in one extra here that is a desktop application, and that is DevonThink. There are many brain-in-a-box software applications out there. Devon helps me to sort, organize, and search through all the journal articles etc. that I come across (think of it as a wicked good iTunes for articles that lets you store all your information and then lets you intelligently search them). Getting a program like this is worth the investment. Devon only works for Mac (there is also Yojimbo for the Mac), but there are several similar programs for the PC like OneNote.
There is a great deal of writing about Web 2.0 and technology in teaching. What is one of the most common oversights or misinterpretations you see?
Web 2.0 is a fairly ubiquitous term at this point, so ubiquitous that I think it starts to lose meaning as people stretch it to talk about a whole host of phenomena that are so varied and complex that they are hard to group together under one term. I prefer to think about how the barrier to entry on the web has drastically changed. While once you needed a fairly high technical literacy in order to publish or change information on the web, that level of literacy is now pretty low. This goes for everything from creating a web page for yourself to making YouTube videos. What this means for teachers is that while once you would have to spend hours producing online content for class, now the process is not only simple, but making it available to your students is equally as easy. Want the class to watch a video clip? Load it onto YouTube. Want them to take a quiz? Make an online one. Want students to share work? Use Googledocs. You can make online slide shows, or host pictures . . . the possibilities are pretty endless for opportunities to supplement your class.
In the same sense I wouldn’t want to overstate the case for technology here either. There is a great deal of useless Web 2.0 applications out there — it seems that a new one pops up every day. And many people talk as if Web 2.0 is going to radically change education, dismantle the system, make education free to everyone. I don’t see this happening anytime soon (to be sure there have already been some disruptions—but not far enough yet), for the most part I think we are talking about online supplements for education. Sure these supplements make it possible to teach in ways not available five years ago, but they still require thoughtful teachers and a commitment to pedagogy. Often I see those responsible for computer technology in the classroom treating it as a magic tool that will suddenly add value to the classroom. Sean Pollock had an interesting article on Academic Commons recently about this issue that’s worth reading. This is all part of the larger discourse wherein technology is seen as the answer to all social ills, if we just have the right tools, and the right attitude things will suddenly be fixed. I don’t think it is that simple, and we should keep that in mind with “Web 2.0.”
What do you know now that you wish you knew when you started teaching?
Get the right tool for the job. Tech can make your life so much easier it’s just a matter of finding the right program. If you want to be able to do something there is probably a software program or web utility out there that does what you want. If you don’t like what you are using look around, find someone who knows the technology and ask them for recommendations. This goes for everything from word processors (you know, Microsoft is not the only choice, in fact it is one of the worst, and don’t even get me started on PowerPoint) to complex processes like monitoring and mining data or compiling and searching information. I get emails all the time from other academics who say they are having trouble because they have been using program “x” and it never works correctly, my answer is usually well, switch to “y.” Oh, and backup your data frequently (at least once a week). Buy an external hard drive and use it, you will thank me when your hard drive crashes and you discover you do not have to in fact retype your whole dissertation.
Again there is a tool for pretty much anything, and most are easy to use it is just a matter of a little experimentation (and if you don’t know where to start just ask someone who does). . . except for a syllabus creation tool, that one doesn’t exist yet . . . hopefully soon though.
