Formative assessment

Exciting title, no? I learned this phrase from the teams building our new medical school, though I'd already experienced the need for the term.

Summative assessment, as it turns out, is the type most of us are used to. We give an exam, or a paper, and we give a grade. Bam, the student is supposed to understand how well he or she did.

Problem is, usually with a summative assessment, that's it, the end of the road. We give those exams or papers at the end of the semester, and if the student didn't do as well as they (or we) had hoped, well, too bad, better luck next class.

I experienced the need for a different type of assessment during the painfully bad presentations my students gave the first time I taught my class on global media. Even in the midst of watching presentations that were sadly lacking in research, application of any of the theory we had supposedly learned through the semester, or even coherence, I realized that it wasn't the students' fault. It was my fault. Because no one gets something right the first time they do it. Even though those students had undoubtedly done presentations at some previous point in their lives, they hadn't done presentations for me, and they hadn't done presentations on global media.

Enter the idea of formative assessment. It's pretty simple, really: with this type of assessment, the student has opportunity and direction to improve. It happens a lot more frequently, and is followed by the opportunity to do better.

I like this much more than the habit of some of my colleagues to let students rewrite and rewrite a paper, for instance, until they get the grade they're shooting for. Of course students should be able to improve. But somehow rewriting a paper over and over always seemed like way too much work for me and not much payoff for them. Did they ever really understand what they were trying to do with the paper? Or did they simply apply what I asked them for in the notes until they got the grade they wanted? Plus, without a grade on the earlier drafts, there were no stakes to the work. I have noticed that students who know they will get a chance to (or be required to) rewrite papers repeatedly turn in papers that ... don't demonstrate a lot of pre-existing work.

Grades are stakes. Students understand that. But grades given more often, with therefore slightly lower stakes, can be an inducement to improve.

When I reworked my global media class, I had students give presentations almost every week. Not every student could do it, but every student had at least one opportunity to do it - and they were not only graded by me, they were graded by their colleagues, right there in the class. Want stakes? There's stakes. Students had a strong inducement to improve - and opportunity to do it. (The first students who presented got a chance to do it again later in the semester if they chose to do so. All of them chose to do so!)

I'm not even sure that formative assessment is that much more work for the professor. Low-stakes quizzes or short writing assignments (even informal ones, such as blog or discussion board posts) can be prepped ahead and even reused. Usually you're not trying to prevent cheating; you're just trying to give the student a signpost as to how well he or she is doing before he or she smashes into the brick wall of the end of the semester summative assessments.

I read an article this fall in which the author pointed out that most of the students we are now teaching are very familiar with one type of formative assessment: video games. At the end of any round in which you don't succeed, you die. Picture how students deal with this type of feedback, as opposed to the attitude with which they receive grades on smaller quizzes or papers. Do they ever try to negotiate with the game to re-do the round? No; they know they can, but they lose points/experience/time by losing the first time around. They seem to understand that they are getting tools, experience, and resources in the earlier rounds that they can use in the later ones, towards the climax of the game. Do they understand that about their educational experiences?

I'm not one who thinks that video games can be a part of any college class. But this analogy interests me, and I try to follow it when I think about formative assessment. Got an F on the quiz? Yep, well, you died this round; do better next time, or you might never make it to the end!

It also helps me to have really clear goals for the class. Ideally, of course, I'd like my students to remember something from the class about the relationship between economics and content in popular culture products worldwide, and maybe even remember a few salient facts about what's popular in Japan or Australia and why. But what I really want is for them to remember how to do research on their own and start stitching it together into their own analysis. I am, after all, still a recovering composition teacher: I want them to formulate a hypothesis and support it with research.

So to that end, I gave up most of my lectures about international media. As it happens, I got out pretty much everything I wanted to say about it in my reactions to my students' presentations. (Not too surprising.) And in hearing what I had to say, not as a lecture, but as a response to one of the students' presentations, I really think it had more import and more interest. They themselves asked the questions and set the stage. They created their own need to know. By responding, I gave them everything I really wanted them to know about, and probably more.

Their presentations, by the way, were really, really good. I am now a believer in formative assessment!

So if you want your students to accomplish something specific, I recommend giving them multiple chances to do it in a semester; attach stakes to the attempts; and give as much feedback as you can (though even just a letter grade is a good marker of success or failure) every time, to let them know how well they're doing and give them a chance to change direction whenever it's necessary.

Presentations, hot and not

Everyone knows I think computers are evil and that they wait for the perfect moment to turn on us. That moment is often when one wishes to give a presentation.

Some thoughts about being prepared for presentations, and some newer ideas in presentation:

1. Turn on and log into your laptop before you need to start presenting! All you should have to do is wake your computer from sleep.

2. If you are hooking your laptop up to a foreign projector, try to make sure it works before you have to present. Just a few minutes before the "show" can save a lot of heartache when you present. At the very least, you'll know when you stand up that you don't have the visuals you planned on and can adjust your talk accordingly.

3. When at all possible, use the computer that's already there rather than hooking up yours. I usually have a Mac and the moment when I need to hook up my Mac to a regular VGA connector is the moment that the special Mac adapter goes missing - and the adapter is sufficiently different for different models and years that I can't guarantee someone else in the audience will have one. When I travel, I try to use a computer that's already there and set up for other presenters.

4. Suspenders, belt, and another belt. I put a backup copy of my EDUCAUSE presentation on a USB drive as well as uploaded one to a totally different Google account from the one in which it was living (my presenters and I collaborated on the presentation in GoogleDocs). Come hell or high water, I want to have at least one copy of the slides to show. Of course at that point version control is your issue. If you make changes up to the last minute, you won't have backup copies if you need them. Finishing BEFORE the last minute is therefore recommended.

Personally I hate PowerPoint and I hate bullet-text slides. Lots of people who've heard me say this over the years probably know I just gave a talk at EDUCAUSE with bullet-text slides (at least we built it in GoogleDocs). I feel like for a one-time talk, certainly for a conference, slides are forgivable because you do have talking points you don't want to forget, and usually data (even who you are and what school you're from) that you don't want to have to repeat or even say out loud but which are worth showing on the screen.

In the classroom, however, I strongly feel that bullet-text slides should be used sparingly, if at all. Graphs and images, by all means. But bulleted text is almost an instruction to the students to read, not listen to you; and if you darken the room at all, some tuning out, if not outright snoozing, is bound to follow.

I saw two innovations in presentation technology at EDUCAUSE that I thought were used to good effect:

First, several presenters used Prezi, the new tool that lets you build a presentation from a larger mind-map type of collection of text and images. I don't know why this is so much less boring than bullet-text slides, but it is. No matter how you focus, you know there's more image, more information or ideas, outside the frame of the screen at any one time, and somehow that's exciting. Plus just the movement indicates more of a physical relationship between the ideas than the linear march of slides. I really enjoyed the Prezi presentations that I saw and I intend to try this tool myself.

Another idea was a format, not a tool. Shelly Rodrigo's "You Are 3.0" panel used Ignite presentations to good effect. I think they were actually going more for a Pecha Kucha effect. Speakers spoke for just a couple of minutes each, with automatically advancing slides moving (sometimes with them, sometimes pushing them along, I will admit). This was almost a performance art style of presentation. The images and info on the screen amplified or illustrated what the presenters said, and added depth and interest to the presentations rather than flattening them out. The speed, while a challenge to follow (and probably a challenge to deliver), also contributed to the sense of receiving a rich but high-level idea - concepts or words stood out, not a flow of connected sentences that built together to form a cohesive linear whole.

I'm a big fan of sentences building on one another to form a cohesive whole, but in the same way that a picture of Ahab will not give me the entire substance of Moby Dick, a presentation seldom conveys everything interesting or valuable about what a presenter knows. I find I still want to read their papers or books, however, after an idea grasps me from a Prezi or Ignite presentation - and that doesn't always happen with bullet-text slides.

Peer feedback using clickers

Some of the Boot Camp participants have already heard me describe how I used clickers this past spring for peer feedback on presentations in my global media class. It was based on an idea I got from Ling Huang, a colleague from the chemistry department and also a Boot Camp graduate. He had students use clickers to effectively "grade" each other on presentations they gave on laboratory methods. I had students "grade" each other (using a 5-point Likert scale) on how well the student's presentation had tackled the fundamental questions of the class.

Apparently this idea is going around, because the ProfHacker column in the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a story this week from Derek Bruff, a math professor teaching a writing course for the first time, who used clickers to have his students give each other anonymous feedback on their essays in class.

I think everyone who's using it finds similar benefits: the feedback is anonymized but immediate, and it's quantified, which gives a reassuringly impersonal feel to the feedback even as the instructor can direct the discussion towards improvement right then and there. If more than half rate the thesis statement of an essay as unclear, for instance, the discussion can turn towards making it more clear without getting bogged down in whether or not any one individual thinks it is clear.

As a faculty member who's planning to try this told me, too, an instructor can gauge whether or not he's been clear on the topic at hand by whether or not the student responses are the same as his. If the entire class rates a thesis sentence clear, and it is NOT clear, then the instructor knows there's more work to be done there.

To facilitate trying out clickers in class, Faculty Computing Services is offering a "Happy Meal" try-it program with few choices and all the service provided by us. We will bring the receiver and clickers to your classroom, gather the data, and either show it on the screen for all to see or give you one of our new handheld receivers that lets you see the results in your hand. Separately from the try-it program, we are also arranging for students to be able to rent clickers from us, to make the cost of using clickers regularly in class the same as the cost of using the clicker-enabled smartphone or laptop software, if you decide to use clickers regularly.

As always, you can ask FCS more at the Faculty Support Center, in phone, by email, or in person. The use of the clickers themselves is simple; the exercises one can do with the clickers, however, have a lot of variation. And I think the variation where students give each other immediate feedback is one of the most exciting.

A very slow worry

I often think of the beginning of "A Midwinter's Tale" when Michael Maloney talks about his nervous breakdown as a long slow buildup. Some nervous breakdowns come quickly, catastrophically, he says; others have more of a slow build. He, he says, is 33 years old and this nervous breakdown had started when he was 7 months old and was just starting to really get a grip.

I've been worried about higher education's relationship to communication technologies since, oh, about 1994. Clearly not every class needs a technology component; clearly technology should only be used to serve the class' learning goals. But how much is too much, and how much is not enough? Not every faculty member needs to be able to communicate using 21st century methods. But how many should? Not every student needs guidance in being a digital citizen. But how many is the right number?

The Chronicle and other reports on higher education are filled with fear and numbers. How many credit hours will be required for students to get financial aid? How much profit is for-profit education making? At what age should professors retire? How much does it cost a student to earn a degree versus how much will they earn in the career they get after they earn it?

Few ask the overarching questions. Politicians don't like such questions because they don't lead to good soundbites and faculty don't always like them either. I hear way too many people on campuses responding to these questions with the answers "everyone knows" - unexamined. They're uncomfortable questions when they seem like challenges to the status quo. What is the purpose of higher education? If it is to educate workers and not citizens, what should our curricula look like? Likewise if it is to educate citizens and not workers? What should a college-educated person know or be able to do? What are our responsibilities as faculty to change higher education in general?

And then the technology-related subquestions: what should a college graduate know about networking or digital security? What should they know about digital privacy? What will the educated citizen or worker do with the technological resources available to him or her through the rest of his life? How should college be preparing our students to do those activities?

Then here's the real kicker: How long can we ignore these questions?

Most leading colleges and universities are struggling with the same questions and activities that we are. We have many digital resources - but not an infinite amount. To what should we be allocating our resources? This always leads me back to the same questions I ask myself: How many classes using technology is the right number? How many faculty should be tweeting, how many should be wiki-ing, how many should teach students what code looks like, how many should expect students to demonstrate the ability to write a lucid blog post? How many should touch on media literacy, video composition, local and global inequities in technology resources, or the ethics of Photoshop? If we have 600 classes posting syllabi online but only 50 using discussion boards actively, is that enough? Do our students feel that learning is a 21st century activity and are we equipping them to do it for themselves for the rest of their lives?

To me there are a lot of reasons to use technology in teaching, and I've already blogged about some of them: more time on the task at hand outside of the classroom, more writing and reading experience, more opportunities for feedback, more accommodation for different learning styles. But there's one compelling reason I keep coming back to figuring out what to do next: because our students practically live online, but they don't learn there. It would be a shame (yes, I said this in The Chronicle years ago, I'm still recycling the line,) it would be a shame if the only things our students couldn't do online is learn.

The right number of teachers using technology and the right number of technology-enhanced classes is whatever number it takes to make sure that all of our students have a chance to learn how to learn using these tools. The right number is whatever number it takes to convince them that learning is a 21st-century activity, not a 19th-century one. The right number is whatever it takes to get them engaged and active now and not thinking that a class is just a hurdle to jump over.

I don't know what that number is, but I have been worrying for more than 15 years that we're somewhere below that number, and the worry is juuuuuust starting to get a good grip.

Compute for critical thinking

I really enjoyed Michael Bérubé's visit to Hofstra yesterday to discuss the future of liberal arts. I love his presentation style - I am a recovering English student, I love presentations sprinkled with Searle and rescues of Habermas. But more importantly I always find Dr. Bérubé to be a clear-minded thinker, as clear about the value of separating social facts from brute facts as he is clear about the problems facing grad students when it comes to employment and the adjunctification of our universities.

If there is an intersection between what I've studied and what I do - and I'm not saying there is one - the intersection is precisely where liberal arts instruction becomes practical. We all want to graduate students who can express themselves clearly in writing, for instance. That's a classic liberal arts value and while I don't know how far back it dates I do know that it is found everywhere in higher ed from the Ivies to the community colleges. Students will neither get nor keep jobs if they can't express themselves in writing.

I don't know if you've noticed, but the blogosphere runs on writing.

Why not have more informal as well as formal writing opportunities for our students? If we want them to be able to write a lucid email, blog, or Twitter post, shouldn't they be trying it out in our classes?

Or if you'd rather spork yourself to death than admit you want your students to write a lucid blog, don't you suspect that if they spent more time writing blogs that garnered them feedback, they might develop better habits of clarity, organization, and persuasion that would leak over into their essays?

I suspect it. When I use discussion boards in my classes I am sneakily providing a venue for increased informal writing that nonetheless gets feedback and ultimately a grade. It may well be that students are consistently better at compartmentalizing their writing tasks than we are at assigning them, and that just because they do, over the course of a semester, learn to write a lucid, even persuasive discussion board post, they may well still write texts to one another that consist of "@lib where u@?".

That doesn't bother me. I think of the delightful contrast between very high-culture poetic rhetoric and street swearing that we saw in the TV series "Deadwood", for instance. David Milch, the award-winning screenwriter, purposefully played with that opposition in his dialog, as he felt that people of the 19th century who had any education at all read things like Shakespeare and that their language was indeed a salty combination of iambic pentameter and words that would make a sailor blush. Dr. Bérubé's own rhetoric, I think, is made all the more effective by alternating between extremely targeted summaries of extremely rich texts like Contingencies of Value and Internetisms like "YMMV" (your mileage may vary). When I went to school, admittedly a million years ago in a land far, far away, it was expected that education would enable us to be able to switch registers from formal English to the sort of English we heard around us every day and also spoke. That doesn't mean that Shakespeare doesn't get discussed in the language of Pennsylvania farmers - or high school students. It totally does. To insist that Shakespeare only be discussed in a register befitting Shakespeare is to lose much of the value of studying Shakespeare: his language enriches ours and understanding his stories enriches our understanding of our own. Add your own discipline's core text here.

So let's toy with the idea that having students communicate electronically and informally about their classes is a valuable rhetorical exercise rather than the end of the liberal arts as we know it. Maybe they are spending less time on homework; certainly they are spending more time working at jobs; but if, in the twenty minutes they have to spend on it, they write up a blog post about the topic of your class that they spent some of their work shift thinking about, isn't that a net win for education?

Our instructional designers and technologists can help you come up with any number of exercises that can take advantage of students' omnipresent ability to add their thoughts to the Internet via text. We'd be happy to help you. And if you have an exercise you love, please let your nearest FCS staffer know about it so we can write it up as a case study and share it with other Hofstra faculty!

Mini-Catalyst Boot Camps!

Since 2006 we've been offering four-day workshops we call Catalyst Boot Camp every spring right after commencement and right before spring classes start.

We're right to call it a Boot Camp because it's pretty intensive. For five hours a row every day we show faculty almost every technology in broad usage in American higher education. The technology comes in groups - in-class technology, audio & video technology, Things that Plug Into Blackboard, more cutting-edge tools like virtual reality or data visualization - and we try to surround each session with some discussion of why these tools (or any particular tool) might or might not be useful for a particular faculty member.

Each Boot Camp has a wrap-up session and they often say very similar things: why didn't we know all this was available to us? And they report the discussion about how and why to teach this way was more useful than the review of the tools. We always ask the same question: how do we involve all the rest of the faculty in this program? And so we've come up with this blog and these mini starter sessions.

We've had more than 75 graduates now of our Boot Camp program but of course we'd like all faculty to be able to take advantage of it. So I'm pleased to say that this fall we're offering a couple of meetings - just an hour and a half each - where we'll talk about the basic rules of thumb of Boot Camp, rules of thumb that can help an instructor choose a technology that matches her pedagogical goals, won't be out of date in five minutes, and won't kill her with a ton of extra work. I'm sorry to say that in that time frame, I'll probably do most of the talking, but hopefully you'll get some good ideas from other colleagues who attend too.

I'm also blogging here about lots of these topics. So if you aren't able to join us for the mini-Boot Camps this fall, I hope you'll be able to get some use from the posts here. I'm a lot more directed when I have specific faculty in front of me teaching specific classes and we can talk about your specific teaching goals. You can get the same kind of service when you visit our Faculty Support Center, where if you tell one of our professionals what problem you're trying to solve (students don't keep up with homework? don't talk in class? don't understand a key concept? We have apps for that,) we'll help you find an appropriate solution. If you want an instructional technology consultant to advise you about that specific goal, just give us a visit. If you want to really become tech-savvy, up-to-date instructors familiar with the field of instructional technology, then sign up for the full Boot Camp. If you're not sure if the whole four days will be worth it, I can tell you that many of your colleagues think it was, but perhaps if you attend one of these mini starter sessions, you'll get a better sense of whether or not it will work for you.

The mini-Boot Camp sessions will happen at the following times and we'll take up to eight participants to each one (please don't attend if we haven't confirmed we have space for you!):

* Thursday Sep. 23 2 p.m. - 3:30
* Friday. Oct. 29 11:30 a.m. - 12:45
* Wednesday Nov. 3 11:30 a.m. - 12:45

All Boot Camps run on food. We're big believers in food here in Faculty Computing Services.

If you'd like to sign up for a mini-session, please RSVP to my assistant, Jackie Waxon, at 3-6070. If you can't attend this fall we will do more in the spring.

Happy fall semester!

A Starting Point

Happy new fall semester! Our students are back and while parking is a little tougher, I love the energy and freshness of the campus when classes start again in the fall. It's a whole new year.

So let's start the year on this blog with a more in-depth discussion of the tool with which I encourage everyone to start if they've never used a technology tool in their classes: the discussion board.

There are many discussion boards but when we say "the discussion board" we mean the Blackboard discussion board. There are many good reasons just from a housekeeping point of view to start with a Blackboard tool. More than 80% of our students have an active Blackboard class each semester, so chances are most of your students already know how to use it. It's easy to learn, for first-year students who might not have used it before. And because our Blackboard system is tied in with our student administration system, students and faculty can just click on the "Bb" icon in the portal at my.hofstra.edu and be taken directly into Blackboard.

Blackboard is far from an ideal pedagogical tool. Its reliance on the idea that teaching consists of giving handouts and collecting papers, for instance, annoys me almost every day except for those days on which it offends me. The discussion board is the finest of 1999 design, and students sometimes find it confusing that they either don't see posts once they've read them, or that they do see them all and have to move to the new ones. Once you give in and get used to the quirks of Blackboard's discussion board, though, you can use it very easily to do some very serious work.

I always prefer to introduce new tools by giving the students asynchronous work, that is, work that they're going to do outside of class. This is partly because computers are evil and will turn on you when you have your class staring at you. I prefer to give all the students a chance to work out their own technology issues for themselves. I refuse to become the Help Desk. Cries for password resetting help or fixing your computer's network connection need to be directed to the Student Computing help desk, not to the teacher. But you can help that process along by realizing that computers turn on the students occasionally too, and giving them, say, several days to complete an assignment online (such as contributing to a discussion board) is very helpful to all involved.

I also give every class an "I didn't see you swing". Students should get a shot at a practice post which doesn't count just to make sure they can get all the buttons under control. There may well be one or two students for whom web discussions are new (there are still a few students for whom this is new) and they need a chance to figure it out and perhaps go to Student Computing to get help before being required to do it for class. That said, however, the deadline on the second post is firm. Otherwise students may start to feel that the work isn't necessary for the class and let it go.

When I was in college I had a chance to take a year-long course with the wonderful Katrin Burlin, who asked us to turn in reading response journals every week. I know many of our faculty do something similar. It became clear to me as a student that other people were writing interesting things in their reading responses, and I wished I could read them. Photocopying all those journals is really inefficient (though there are some people who do it). But having the journals posted instead to a discussion board is very simple.

So no matter what I'm teaching, I ask the students to write a reading response post in the discussion board every week, usually by 10 p.m. a day or two before my first class of the week. I try to follow in Katrin Burlin's footsteps. She did an excellent job of preparing short lectures, and more importantly discussion, based on what had inspired or concerned students the most in their reading responses. I try to do the same.

Moreover, I ask students to respond to their colleagues as well as post their own response. In my classes it has not worked well to ask them both to post a statement and to post a response to at least one other person's statement. It seems to follow their inclinations better to just require them to post, and to discuss in class how to respond substantively with one another. ("I agree" is not a substantive post; "I agree for the following reasons..." may well be substantive.) Students who prefer to state their minds first do so, and other students who prefer to riff off of discussion tend to respond. My students know they only need to post once a week, but on good weeks (especially after midterms) discussion gets quite involved, and sometimes even tangents that we don't get time to explore in class may be followed by students who have the freedom of the electronic forum in which to do it.

I don't respond to everyone's posts after the first week or so, and even those first responses from me are just to get everyone steered in the right direction. Students know that they need to raise questions or points of interest, that they can respond to each other in an academic fashion as much as they like, and that I will be basing classroom discussion on what they discuss. They also know, because it's in my syllabus, that posting will be a certain percentage of their grade (usually something relatively low, like 10%), and that posting is required to pass the class. (I spell out that last part for the occasional student who figures she or he is going to ace the rest of the class so they can just ignore the pesky discussion board and they'll still have their 90.) The discussion board grading tool in Blackboard makes it easy to collect each student's posts for the semester, count them (if you are so inclined) and see them all in one place so as to grade the student's work. I just give credit for doing the assignment, and the grade falls each time they fail to post - four weeks without a discussion board post and they've basically opted out of an important part of the course, so I don't mind giving a 60 for it. (I tend to use 100-point scales for grades in my class.) But if a student fails to post for a week or two I do reach out to them and make sure they know how it's affecting their grade and ask if there's anything I can do to help.

I find this is a very effective way to use technology to get students thinking about the assigned work outside of class and to make sure they're keeping up with it all, as well as to give me pointers regarding what they find interesting and how to prepare for the week's classes. I don't know if many students nowadays would even regard this as much "technology" in the class. No Twitter, blog, podcast or clicker; but still, I think, a pretty effective use of technology for my pedagogical purposes.

I don't even think faculty should feel like a discussion board is "just" a place to start and that they must thereafter graduate to ever more current uses of technology. The discussion board tends to get contributions from students who are otherwise quiet in class, keeps all the students moving forward together, increases the time spent on classwork each week and increases interactions between students rather than with you. It meets all my requirements for a very up-to-date use of teaching technology. There are a zillion other ways to go if you want, but if you only used the discussion board effectively in your classes, I would think that you could consider yourself an instructor using teaching technology very effectively.

New tools make video integration easy

For fall 2010 we've acquired two new tools at Hofstra that we think faculty will find very useful.

All faculty now have access to VoiceThread. VoiceThreads can be embedded right in your Blackboard course. In a VoiceThread, there's something that takes center stage; it can be a video, a chart, a photo, a document, an equation, a proof, anything. Students comment on the center stage and their comments form a frame around it. Students can comment in video (using the built-in camera and mic on almost every new laptop or desktop), audio (they can even use the phone to post a comment), or just typed text.

We've seen faculty use VoiceThread to generate online discussion outside of class on varying performances of King Lear; on student presentations; on laboratory demonstrations; on mathematical proofs; on foreign language videos; or comparing J.S. Bach and Paul McCartney.

The discussion board in Blackboard is still the fastest, easiest way to generate outside-of-class discussions. Make posting a structured, graded activity and participation will shoot up. (Plus I'm always a fan of getting students to write more!) But VoiceThread is a great option if you want to get to know your students better or have them get to know each other better, or if you think the visual material on which you want them to comment deserves visual responses. Students seem to enjoy seeing each other's responses, and because the responses are tied to a moment in the presentation on the center stage, you can hear/see/read the comments in order of response. If you think written responses tend toward the incivil because they may be more anonymous, see if you can get your students to give honest but professional feedback to each other with VoiceThread.

In addition, we have added a limited number of licenses for Echo360 Personal Capture. I personally am very excited about this product because I used it in my class in the spring to create a short video on how to do library searches, and it only took me about half an hour. I assigned the students to watch the video and then follow the guidelines presented in the video to find a book on their research topic and send me the listing - and they did pretty well! Echo360 Personal Capture records both you (in audio or preferably video and audio, again through the camera built in to your desktop or laptop), AND what is happening on your screen, then it automatically combines the two recordings into one video and publishes it for you. You don't get to make a lot of editing choices with Echo360 - only where to stop or start the video. But it does a great job of deciding when to show you (primarily when you're talking!) and when to show the screen (primarily when you're typing or mousing!). You can even re-use the resulting videos from class to class - in fact we'd hope you would, since then you don't need to spend the time to create the video over and over again.

Both Echo360 Personal Capture and VoiceThread integrate into your Blackboard course, which as always is the launching pad for any online activity for your class at Hofstra. If you'd like to try one of these new tools, perhaps in a pilot capacity this semester (or in a much more core capacity for the spring), please visit us in the Faculty Support Center in McEwen 215 and let us help you get started. We will need to activate the account for you.

We're looking forward to seeing you this fall! As always we're available at 516-463-6894, or you can email the fcshelp account at hofstra.edu for fastest online services.

Do you really want to be your own hacker?

I find the ProfHacker columns at the Chronicle of Higher Education both useful and disturbing. Useful because they do often contain info on the newest tools, tips you can use (backup your files and TEST your backups!), and pointers to great resources that faculty don't often find on their own.

They're disturbing to me as well, though, because I have a belief that faculty don't want or need to be techies. Maybe I'm wrong, but I really don't think most faculty have the time to try all these new tools and methods, and it creates an unnecessary sense of stress to imply that they should. Other articles the Chronicle of Higher Education and other news sources frequently (and unnecessarily) frame the division between faculty who do use technology and faculty who don't as combative. If it's combative, it's at least partly because some faculty feel defensive about the fact that they don't spend whatever spare time they have testing out the latest Zotero features or loading up an iPad. And they shouldn't have to feel defensive about it, because they shouldn't have to do it. It's not their area of expertise.

In our Faculty Computing Services department we try almost everything. If we read about it, we try it, limited only by the time we can squeeze from all our other responsibilities. And we're nerds; we like testing new technology products.

When we find something that we think is stable, mature, widespread, affordable, cross-platform, easy to use, and useful in more than one academic discipline, we take it to our faculty to try it out. We ask for pilot volunteers, we show it at department meetings, we send out flyers, we offer our support services for it. Some products take off and some don't. But I think of us as advocates for our customers, trying out all the latest so that they don't have to. We're frequently wrong about what our faculty will actually want. I was surprised in one Boot Camp that the mathematician didn't care about the SmartBoard at all (finally!, I thought, a way to write but save equations! She didn't care. She had a working method already,) but the musician was very excited at the idea of an infinite supply of new staff paper, also savable for future classes. So we try to show you more than we think you will care about. But we try to limit ourselves to things we know will work.

Moreover, we try to focus on things that give the students new learning experiences. We never want to increase administrative overhead for our faculty. There are a lot of tools that can support the inevitable record-keeping function of teaching, and we try to support those. We have many faculty who ask us how to do weighted grading in Excel, for instance, or do quizzes online to reduce the time to collect and return them. But we try to focus on tools that let the student, more than the instructor, do something new. The faculty member may have been to the Louvre - but for a student the online tour is still new. Students blogging, we think, is more instructionally relevant -if it's core to the course and graded - than faculty members blogging. Having students create a shared research database is perhaps more to the instructional point than a faculty member's own Zotero database - though that tool is great for its own purposes as well.

So I guess I'm saying that I certainly see why some profs want to be their own ProfHackers. If that's your thing, I hope you'll let us know in Faculty Computing when we can spread the word to your colleagues that some particular tool or methodology is super-great. I try to gear our services toward the faculty who have new teaching ideas but aren't as interested in the techie side of how to do what they want to do, and we help them with that. I hope none of our faculty feel like they aren't up-to-date as teachers if they aren't testing Twitter dashboards or PowerPoint alternatives. And if you want to develop your own personal OpenCourseware Strategy, I hope you'll call upon the consultants in FCS to help you with that. We can loan you tools, help you wade through copyright issues, and perhaps even suggest resources to include. We're the nerds. We're like that.

We're always here for when technology doesn't make sense.

I try to make sure that I and my staff spend most of our time teaching faculty some basic rules of thumb that don't change. We try to be less about what button to push than about the meta discussion. Does the tool increase student interactivity? Then try it. If it doesn't, ignore it and focus on something that does. The bigger discussion often gets lost in many IT departments (or in many service calls) where the customer comes in with a question about pushing a button but what they're doing is actually not going to achieve their goals.

Sometimes, though, the tool just doesn't make sense, and then our job becomes overcoming the usability barrier for the customer. I suppose I could look at this as job security, but I don't. I just get angry that the tool isn't easier to use. Twenty years into the computer revolution, a lot of software still isn't as good as it could be.

The question I just got was about iTunes. A frustrated user (and I assume a "user" is "someone who has things to do other than fighting with the computer") had spent hours just trying to put some songs on an iPod. I knew what the answer was and went over to show them. If you can't or don't want to sync your entire music library to an iPod, then you have to make a playlist - at least one, though you could make more - and then click on the iPod device, the Music tab, click "Sync selected playlists", and click the playlists you want to sync.

From a technical perspective there are two problems with this. One is that it is stupid to assume by default that the user wants to sync the entire library. Music libraries are so large now that Apple might want everyone to upgrade to the largest possible iPod to hold it all, but that's not a practical option for most users. Also, people don't always want to be immobilized by freedom of choice on their iPod - maybe they just want to listen to an album this week, and next week have a different album. (Remember when albums were important?)

Second, even assuming that interface needs required the creation of a playlist to be the subset of the music library that is synced, the user should be able to drag and drop that playlist on the device. Everything else on the Mac works by drag and drop. Why not this? It's perverse of the designers to force you to click on the device, then the Music tab, then the "Sync selected playlists", then the playlists. That's four clicks for what should be one drag-and-drop. OK, Apple, you're pissed we didn't buy a bigger iPod, but is this really fair retaliation?

I have other gripes about iTunes. Even though Apple engineers claim to my face that it is 508 compliant, it can't actually be used by the blind to, say, create playlists. You can use it to play individual songs, if you're willing to scroll through all the songs and find the one you want one by one, but that's about it. You say you should be able to type a few letters of the song's name to go right to it? I agree with you - what's the keystroke that toggles between the playlist frame and the search box? Oh. Yeah. There isn't one. That's not usability.

But I'm really only talking about iTunes as an example in the field. Not all software is great - in fact, some software is pretty crappy - and we still all use it for something or other. NPR reported this week that Facebook scored with the cable company and airlines in customer satisfaction. Yet people use it - a LOT of people use it. In fact all the social media sites scored pretty low. Yet "everyone" uses them (not everyone, but a large percentage of the population).

Software shouldn't be bad. People shouldn't need technical assistants to get over shibboleths that keep them from doing what they need or want to do. My staff shouldn't be spending their time helping people over these barriers to entry. But we do, and we have to, and I'm right to be cranky about it - because software among all other things doesn't have to be bad. It is a product of the imagination. Barring some actual constraints (bandwidth and processing power are not infinite), software should be elegant and easy. Obviously, enough people find iTunes and Facebook easy to use that the companies and their products have big market shares. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't or couldn't be better.

Meanwhile, my staff are happy to explain the secret doors and weird handshakes. We will help you make a magical playlist and get it to sync to your iPod. As long as our faculty are willing to meet us on the way - as long as they do learn the things they need to do to be productive - we will always be here to help with that. Some faculty, a very few, want "digital servants" to just use the tool for them. We can't do that - we will never be able to do that - because it doesn't scale. No college or university can afford digital servants for all their faculty. But a college or university who wants faculty to innovate in teaching has to provide staff who can talk about the big picture - pedagogical goals - and still have time to explain how to get the thing to do what you want it to do, especially when that isn't clear at all.

That's what we're here for. Feel free to call us up and ask us how to sync to your iPod. And then tell us how we can help you with the class you're teaching this fall.

Do online work outside of class

My favorite rule of thumb: Anything to do with technology that has to happen for your class should happen outside the classroom. Inside the classroom you want to use that precious time to have your students talk to each other and to you. Sometimes you even want to talk to them. If you have them do online journaling or reading responses before class, or take a computer-graded quiz (for low stakes, but required,) then they tend to hit the ground running and the classroom discussions are awesome.

I love this quote from a recent news article about a faculty member making her class hybrid (some class time online, some class time face to face): "And by putting slides and videos online instead of trying to show them in class, she no longer had to worry about classroom tech glitches that took time away from teaching." (http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/2010/jul/18/um-system-aims-close-gaps/)

We work like crazy to make sure technology in the classrooms always does work. But invariably that one time it doesn't is the time I have all my students sitting there staring at me. Computers are evil and out to get us humans, and classroom systems still are a bit too complicated to perfect no matter how much time and money you spend. I love getting the technology interaction outside the classroom. I still use in-class AV, of course, especially when I'm talking or when students are presenting (which is a lot in my classroom), but it isn't as crucial as the activities students do outside of class, not to their understanding or even participation.

Personally I have always added the online component asynchronously to my classes. I never have trouble filling class time; there's always more the students want to say and I want to say. And I have homework expectations. I don't think it's that onerous for a student to read some material to prep for class, then write a (brief, informal, online) reading response and perhaps take a 15-minute self-graded quiz. It keeps us all on track, including me, since I can tailor what we talk about in class to what students liked or didn't get about the readings.

But the hybrid model deserves attention too. When your students really do a significant amount of work online, a hybrid model makes sense. How much "significant" is, and whether or not your department will allow hybrid courses, is a topic for discussion with your department and school colleagues. And more and more information is trickling out that it may be the most "effective" learning experience - whatever that is - of the three options. Turns out perhaps all face-to-face or all online aren't better after all! I love compromise.

Word clouds, timelines, and mind maps

There's a lovely article in one of the New York Times' blogs from this weekend about consumer tools to use in the classroom. I shouldn't even call them consumer tools, as they're programs available to everyone for free. But they're not tools that we in faculty computing need to set up or authorize for you - they're out there and you can use them whenever you like.

There are some great ideas for using wordles/word clouds, especially to help students visualize the main concepts of a piece of prose or to identify words to look up. And the timeline tools are new to me. I can think of some great uses for building a timeline with a class. I know Professor Cox, for instance, has his students build a short history of psychology in one of his classes - perhaps a timeline would be useful to them, in addition to or instead of a wiki. I can imagine all sorts of patterns turning up if students were able to collaborate on a timeline, adding what they thought were pertinent points of development as they go and seeing each other's contributions. I don't know if any of these tools allow for collaboration.

But I do think they left one of the best tools out of the mind map/brainstorming category. I have long used Inspiration myself and I've shown it to some Boot Camps as well. They have a new product Webspiration which I believe is free and which this article doesn't mention. Inspiration itself is well worth the purchase price (and I don't say that about much software) for any student or for that matter faculty member who needs to organize ideas or research into writing. I love the feature that, with the click of a button, turns your mind map into a linear outline that you can continue to edit in Word. This tool helped me throughout graduate school and beyond and I can't imagine that any other writer wouldn't also it useful. The Webspiration version has all the key features and seems to work well.

One other tool I'll mention for the writing crowd, since I know we have a number of filmmakers and journalists over in our School of Communication: Scripped, at http://scripped.com, is the GoogleDocs of screenwriting. It's free and your documents live online and you can collaborate live with others as well. I used the standard film script format and it worked flawlessly for me. Worth checking out before you invest in a paid product if a student is just going to try one scriptwriting class.

Publicizing our faculty wherever we go

I've been struggling to figure out how to publicize what we do at Hofstra in the area of instructional technology more. It's hard to have regular "publicity" that doesn't sound like it's all about Me or even all about My Staff. To me the revolution is what happens every day. Like many schools, we have fantastic forward-thinking faculty who are leaders in the area of teaching with technology, but I think it's a failure if those faculty are our only actively innovating faculty. I'm really pleased with the percentage of Hofstra faculty who aren't just using basic tools in a way that replicates old teaching methods (here's your handouts in Blackboard, yawn), but are really teaching in a twenty-first century way.

To me (me again!), that's about communicating with our students and constantly connecting them with new material or new ideas. This is the information age. Computers are great for communicating. Most faculty keep up to date with late-breaking news in their field with online tools... but few faculty show that activity to their students. Even fewer ask students to then make the next great leap: connect the new idea with good solid research or reflective synthesis. Integrate what you know into your knowledge base into an academically responsible way!

Here's a video of Terri Shapiro, one of our psychology professors, talking about using Twitter with her class.

(You'll notice that Terri makes the choices that make learning a new tool worthwhile: it's fundamental to the class, it's graded, and it's essentially reusable - she could do what she's doing with any class she teaches.)

Now I don't want to damn Terri with faint praise by saying she's not necessarily a techhead. She's an involved, innovative teacher who uses many of our services here at Hofstra Faculty Computing Services. But I wouldn't call her an early adopter. I'd like to think she's not even that far ahead of the curve in relationship to other Hofstra faculty. This is the sort of customer that I hope represents many if not most of our faculty: someone who's trying something new and using it to make her class more alive, more clearly connected to the world at large.

These are the people who are making a difference. It's them, not us.

Remote support for classrooms, better services for faculty, smarter inventory

I'm pleased to report that Hofstra's Media Engineering group has deployed Extron's Global Viewer product to enable remote support for all the University's technology-enhanced classrooms. When a faculty member calls the Faculty Support Center we will be able to see if their projector is on or off and turn it on or off for them, as well as select an input source. This will tremendously shorten the response time for such calls at the beginning of the semester when faculty are returning to the classroom. The system will notify us via SMS text and email if an AV controller freezes and needs a hard restart, and also when projector bulbs reach their end of life. We will also be able to collect data on when and how our technology classrooms are used, helping us to plan better for these resources as well as target new idea suggests for faculty who may want them.

I'm incredibly proud of Joshua Daubert and his staff, who suggested and then implemented this exciting project. I'm looking forward to all the great results this will bring. Thank you, gentlemen!

What Not To Do This Summer

It's been rather unreasonably hot here in Long Island of late, and as July approaches I am as concerned as any faculty member with my summer productivity.

As faculty we tend to make lists for ourselves for the summer: the research we will do, the articles we will write or submit, the reformatting of the bibliographies of the articles from last year that we need to RE-submit, and so on and so forth.

For your fall classes, I'm sure you're reading new material, revising your syllabus and assignments (I'm sure you're doing this now, right? You would never leave this till the last week of August!), and perhaps revising your Blackboard courses.

If you're interested in technology, perhaps you want to use this summer time to learn something new - a new tool, like Twitter or the Sympodium, or a new way of using the tool, like moving review sessions online and reserving class time for new material.

So let me give you my rules of thumb that will help you decide what NOT to do in learning new technology tools for your classes. Because honestly, if I can give you a reason NOT to do it, that's best for everyone, isn't it? Many's the time I've helped a faculty member spend an absolutely terrifying amount of time doing something with technology for his or her classes. And it doesn't always produce a result; sometimes there's no result at all. Far better that you not waste your time on technology stuff that won't have any effect on the class. Trust me. There's not enough time in the summer for that!

1) WIll it be a fundamental part of the class?

So often faculty are nervous about technology and they want to dip their toe in. It'll just be for the last week of classes, they tell me, or it'll be optional. Don't bother then, I respond. If you're not making a fundamental change in the way you teach your course, then you're doing something ancillary. And students have a keen eye for the ancillary. They can spot it from 100 yards and they won't go anywhere near it. They're not in your class to do extra things; they want to take the class, get the grade, and get gone, for the most part. (Perhaps on a less cynical level, they're in the class to learn something about European Romanticism, or international marketing, or television production. Even in that delightful situation, they're not in the class to mess with technology tools that aren't contributing clearly and directly to that goal.)

That doesn't mean you have to do something huge. But you do have to do something fundamental. Something that will happen every week (so students will get a chance to learn how you want it done and see how it contributes to the class). Something that will achieve a specific goal you have in mind. It can be small but it needs to be repetitive and it needs to be core.

Students aren't keeping up with the homework? Have them do a self-scheduled online quiz each week before they show up. It can't be for no credit (it has to be fundamental, it has to be core), but you can keep the percentage of the grade low enough that it won't much matter if they cheat - if they get the answers to the questions in ANY way they may keep up better than if they didn't do it at all. And if they're computer-gradable, you don't even have to manually grade them. It helps them keep up, or see if they aren't keeping up.

Students aren't contributing in class? Have them turn in reading responses online before the class meets. Your classes will be directed to where they are right now in the material and you can just give them credit for turning them in.

Students aren't getting a key concept? Give them a learning object that covers that concept in detail, let them review it as often as they want, and make sure somewhere later in the course you assess whether or not they got it. Students who need more repetition, or who need the material in a different format (to see it rather than to hear it, for instance) will be helped by this.

All of these suggestions are fundamental - you will change how you actually do your class. That's scary, but remember, it's also a work in progress. You might change what you do or how you do it as you go forward teaching with technology. But if you don't use a technology tool in a way that's fundamental to your class, I recommend you not do it at all. It's too much time and trouble to do something extra just for the sake of doing something extra.

2) Is it the first time you're teaching the class?

If you're teaching a course for the first time, now is not the time to try a bunch of new technology tools as well. Trust me on this one. You'll spend enough time getting the material you want to teach under control and figuring out how much work to assign, what are the types of work that get the best results, and how much you can cover in a class, a week, a semester. Don't figure you might as well throw some podcasting or Blackboard quizzing or something else in there on top of it all. If you're comfortable with those tools, by all means, incorporate them. But don't try them for the first time while you're teaching a particular class for the first time. You won't be able to separate how well the students are doing with your course material from how well the technology tool serves the course material. And you may just explode from the sheer volume of work to which you find yourself committed as well.

3) Is it reusable?

Are you trying something you can use in future iterations of this class or in another class? Then go for it. But don't dive into building a film of, say, the movements of the armies at Gettysburg when you're never going to teach the Civil War again. And don't spend the time building a list of web links that pertains to this year's student interests that next year's students may or may not be interested in at all. You can go down a lot of time-consuming rabbit holes with this sort of thing but you may not come out again.

4) Is it graded?

This one can be a killer. I'm not proposing anyone up their grading work. But if you can't honestly give some sort of a grade for the work, even if it's just pass/fail, then the work isn't fundamental to your course and you probably should skip it.

Your LMS - like Blackboard - has good tools for giving the students a numeric grade, or a letter grade, or even a pass/fail mark. Contributions to a discussion board, for instance, can be counted, and credit given if a student just makes a certain number. More complex tools or more complex assignments may need a rubric attached and expectations clearly conveyed. Students doing video essays with FlipCams, for instance, should know if they need to keep and submit drafts, or if they'll be allowed to revise, just as they would do with a text essay. And they should get a grade that reflects the amount of work that went into the assignment. That sounds commonsensical but again, when faculty are afraid of committing to the use of technology they sometimes assign students a lot of work without giving them concomitant credit for that work. Make sure the work counts, and you'll be much happier with the result.

There, there's four rules of thumb that can help you avoid a lot of work. Feel better? Honestly, if the thing you want to do isn't fundamental, isn't reusable, or isn't graded, or if this is the first time you're teaching the course, I highly recommend passing on the technology integration for now.

When you want the rewards that you can get out of integrating technology into your teaching, then you should tackle learning the tools and reworking your class to integrate them. It's a commitment, but when you get over the hump of the first-time learning and the first-time using and you get fluid and comfortable with the tools and you get back the student work that you want to be seeing, you'll be glad you didn't fritter away your time on smaller things. The time you invest will pay off.

Grading and using blogs

There's a good ProfHacker post at the Chronicle today about grading student blogs. I like the idea of having two student blog grades - one an overall "I did this" grade, and one a grade of perhaps the two best posts, (perhaps revised and) submitted for review. I love portfolio grades in writing classes, and getting students to explain in their own words why they should get the grade they say they should get on their writing is one of the most effective assignments I've ever given.

When I teach in general, though, I use blogs (or discussion boards) as reading responses. I ask my students to raise a question or to point out something really interesting, and then I highlight the best points when I next see my class. Sometimes I put the blog/board up on the screen to discuss; sometimes I quote the best responses and put them in a handout. I agree with the ProfHacker post that sharing the best work with the class gets you better quality work. Some students might feel left out - I've had students ask me "Why don't you ever quote me in class?" But to my mind that's a good incentive for a better student, and I welcome the chance to talk to them about their blog posts. It might not be that there's anything wrong with their posts, but perhaps other students put the same idea more succinctly or more vividly. Or that they came up with something more insightful, perhaps calling back to previous work! Am I the only one who sometimes has a hard time getting students to realize that there's a whole world of work above the "adequate" category?

Sometimes a student will post a long, interesting entry on something only tangentially related to the topic at hand. Last semester I had a good student (who never spoke in class) post a long entry about how much she learned by trying to track down an Nollywood film in a local retail store. I made sure to respond to her on the board. We wouldn't have time in class to spend on such a tangent - but it was a very educational tangent, related to the topic of the class, and I was thrilled that she shared it.

I don't usually grade anything about the quality of blog/board posts because how would I reflect the credit that student deserved adequately? It was a once-in-a-semester event and I treasured it but didn't try to shoehorn it into any kind of a grading structure. Most of the students weren't so enterprising and most of them wrote perfectly reasonable, interesting entries raising a question or a point of observation each week and I gave them credit for doing it. With very little grading overhead on my part I get a class that's going on through much of the week and a bunch of stepping-off points for discussion in each new week's class meetings.

ProfHacker proposes that humanities scholars should learn digital tools. I disagree.

I like the idea proposed on this site for "The Humanities and Technology Camp", otherwise titled "Project "Develop Self-Paced Open Access DH Curriculum for Mid-Career Scholars Otherwise Untrained"". And I'm still thinking about it even though I already posted a comment disagreeing with it (which contained a typo, which according to academic blogosphere etiquette automatically disqualifies my thoughts).

It's my personal belief that faculty for the most part should spend more time on figuring out HOW they will change their teaching (or for that matter their research) than WITH WHAT. The "with what" changes so frequently and faculty who are interested usually can pick up the "with what" with minimal help, or on their own, once they know why they should bother.

This proposed camp sort of posits the opposite idea: that mid-career scholars are being held back by their lack of knowledge in FTP, HTML or CSS, and web server administration.

I have a strong prejudice against turning faculty into low-grade web designers or server administrators. A light gloss of technology skills doesn't necessarily help you really understand the technologies you're working with, or how to spot the revolutionary ones. In my opinion, RSS is revolutionary as it changes how people get information and travel the web and interact; CSS is not because it doesn't really affect any of those things (in fact almost by definition RSS supersedes it). Without a doubt there should be scholars prepared to argue such things; but I don't think the question pertains to most of us who just want to teach and research and survive. I think universities should provide technology specialists to work WITH the faculty and help support their interrogation, but I don't see that a lot of faculty themselves need to have (or be able to fake) those technology skills.

I also have a prejudice against this because faculty who do know how to modify a style sheet or install a PHP app with a pushbutton GUI think that's all we technologists do. There are huge differences between near-consumer-level technology skills and the skills of a professional technologist. But faculty who know enough to serve themselves in this area often don't want to understand how different it is to provide tools or services for 15,000 people instead of just one.

If I show a faculty member three ways they can integrate electronic discussion into their class, and some ways in which that can achieve some specific pedagogical goal (getting the quiet students to talk, increasing time spent on homework outside of class, or increasing time spent on critical thinking writing), that idea is going to be the same down through generations of technologies. I've used electronic discussion in my classes since 1992, and I have weathered VMS discussion boards, mailing lists, Blackboard and blogs. The basic idea is the same and as a teacher I only want to know about the technologies to the extent that they do or don't facilitate my teaching goals.

But I could be wrong. We could certainly offer more classes for faculty at Hofstra in such topics as web server administration. It's a skill that is certainly useful, and it's easier than ever now, when hosting solutions make everything push-button and hardly technical at all. Is that something we should be teaching our faculty? Do people who don't have those skills want to gain them?

More news, in small bites

Just a few weeks ago we completed the ninth Catalyst Faculty Boot Camp, an intensive pedagogy and technology workshop. At the end, as we always do, we asked the participants for their feedback and ideas on how we could educate the rest of Hofstra's faculty about their technology and teaching options.

As usual the participants suggested that one way to increase participation would be to avoid the four-day time commitment of Boot Camp. Could you have had the same experience if you hadn't spent these days here with your colleagues discussing each other's teaching as well as hearing about the technology tools, I asked? No, they all agreed. But, they added, they would still have liked to hear some of the ideas about teaching with technology, even if they had not had the same luxury of discussing and developing them with each other.

I try to act on what my customers tell me. Clearly not everyone can commit to the full four days of Boot Camp, but if our faculty feel there's a benefit to getting some of that information in nuggets unrelated to a surrounding workshop, then I absolutely will convey what I can.

To that end Faculty Computing Services at Hofstra intends to publish many more case studies, ideas, and news nuggets in the coming year than we have previously done. I am always leery of contributing to information overload for our faculty, and I never want FCS to be one of the groups whose messages are deleted unread because of sheer overwhelming volume. But I realize that our department is often a clearinghouse for information about which Hofstra faculty are doing great, creative things with teaching technologies, and as such we need to disseminate what we know.

This blog will be updated periodically (not more than once a week) with ideas on teaching with technology, and I hope you'll give me your feedback if there are things about which you'd like to hear more. In addition, my own stream of bookmarks of interesting news or tidbits on teaching with technology is always available at http://delicious.com/jtabron/bootcamp; feel free to check it out or subscribe.

As always, FCS stands ready to help you with your own investigations into your own best way of using appropriate technology tools in your teaching. Visit http://www.hofstra.edu/fcs for more info on how to use our services.