Moving universities forward

Compared to London's Underground or Paris' Metro, the New York subway seems to be a mess. It's full, it's filthy, and occasionally it catches on fire.

There's a reason for this, I've been told: the European systems were largely rebuilt after World War II, thus leapfrogging New York's system which is just as old or older but has had significantly less reinvestment and reinvention.

I don't know if that's true but I keep it in mind when I look at our use of technology resources at universities. Universities in the 80s spent a lot of money putting in network infrastructure (eventually internet) that far surpassed what was available in the rest of the country, let alone the world, and they bought a lot of computers to connect to that network, too.

Now most of our students at Hofstra are coming to school with multiple computers plus, often, a game system, ereader, or smartphone, and they wonder why the network connection they have at school is slower than the one they had at home.

Some of that is simple technical information that they don't have. We purposefully slow down, for instance, traffic that we have good reason to suspect is illegal. And the internet is increasingly clogged with crud no matter where they are. We passed the point in 2009 when 90% of what traveled through the internet was spam.

But that technical information illustrates an underlying truth. What was cutting edge is now omnipresent, and necessarily, the first parts of that infrastructure that were built are kind of dirty, are really full, and occasionally catch fire.

There are huge pieces of that infrastructure that we cannot do without or else we fall off the earth. We need our large-traffic connections to the internet, and we need as much wireless access to that connection as we can get. If we want to use services that exist off campus, like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, those are the roads we need to get there. Five years ago the holy trinity was podcasting, wikis, and blogs, but we still needed our network connections to get to those places more than anything else. Before that it was Blackboard - same story, as our Blackboard at Hofstra is actually hosted in Virginia.

I find that faculty worry far more about the endpoints - the devices they will use to get on the network - than about the network themselves, whereas students are the other way round. Students live in a world that faculty are just dipping their toe in; pay attention to the different priorities. I may have a jaundiced view of things since what I mostly get to hear are complaints, but faculty are the ones who complain about how many devices they get from the University (one computer) whereas students are the ones who complain about where the wireless signal appears slow.

We still don't have a laptop requirement for students at Hofstra, so we still aren't providing for the last 1-2% of our students who truly cannot afford a computer of their own. But for 98% of our students, owning devices is really not the challenge. For whatever reason, they or their parents have chosen to invest in the devices that do what they want to do; they want us, their network provider, to make sure they can do it.

Many faculty, for whatever reason, don't own the proliferation of devices that students do. Presumably faculty live rich, full lives without a laptop, a netbook, an iPad and an iPhone. To be honest, I can't really imagine such a life, but I certainly sympathize with the lifestyle. I've been camping.

If you are such a faculty member, though, let me encourage you to sympathize with the lifestyle students are living. You may feel that they're always on, distracted, insubordinate and insufficiently deep thinkers. Oh, I know, you would never use the word insubordinate, but isn't that what you're really thinking when you insist that your students take their electronic devices all out of their pockets and bags and place them face down on the front of the desk so that you can ensure they're not using them? If you haven't done that lately, I assure you your colleagues have. And those students often think faculty are disconnected, uselessly abstract, and power-mad. No, they'd never use the descriptor power-mad - they're not crazy and they want their good grades - but they think it just the same.

We can ignore this gap in lifestyle, in living approaches. After, all the classroom is an unequal power structure and it is up to the faculty member to conduct their class as they see fit. I don't question any faculty member's right to dictate the terms of class participation, and I'm a huge fan of the sentence "Let's close the laptops; I need you to listen to me right now."

But it's worth noting that we can also address the gap. It truly is a difference in how to approach one's life. A student who is always on with a plethora of electronic devices could be at the center of a peer learning network gathering academic research tidbits as easily as they are at the center of a social network gathering data about who's dating whom. That won't happen automatically, though, and it won't happen without our intervention. If we personally don't live and research that way, it won't happen for the students.

Research indicates that we do live and research that way. A study this spring indicated that 90% of faculty are using social media for research or work. So increasingly we the faculty are also online. What are the challenges that we're really facing?

Is it that actually only a small handful of colleagues are the kind who make the students take all electronic devices out of their pockets and place them facedown on the desk?

Is it that we fear what our colleagues will think if we introduce social media into our classroom (after all, they're playing Farmville too, they know it isn't all work)?

Is it that we don't know how to bridge the gap between the way we research and what we teach?

I think it's all three but the last is the biggest challenge. If we've been teaching for a while - and I've been teaching off and on for about eighteen years - we have methodologies we were taught, or that we've developed over time, and it's an enormous amount of effort to change them.

I also find that a lot of faculty still think of the classroom as the place where students receive knowledge from the faculty member, rather than the place where students learn how to research and develop their own knowledge. (And if you follow that link: isn't it interesting to think about asking students to apply for a course, asking them what they bring to the course and what they get out of it? I know some upper level courses do this often. What if more of our courses did that? What's the difference between challenging the student and accepting them?)

This blog is supposed to be where I convey the thoughts I shared in our past Boot Camps (even if we don't get to discuss them, which is the best part). So here's a thought I often share: If you think you're teaching facts, forget it. There's little that's factual that your students can't look up. If there's a concept they really need to understand that you're sick of spending time conveying, let us help you make a learning object to address it - a video, an animation, an exercise. But don't spend too much class time on it. Students will get it or they won't, and if you have a learning object you can direct the students to it as often as you like and ask them to come to office hours if they really didn't get it (they will - give them a quiz on the concept, they'll sort themselves out fast enough). But finding out facts is now the job of Google, and no matter how you feel about Google there's not much point in trying to turn that educational clock back.

What your students don't know is how to evaluate what they see. They don't even know when "factual" is a reasonably contestable word. They don't know what's good information - or good research - and what isn't. That's the big difference between your use of social media and theirs, and we don't model our use of it enough for our students. We don't model for them how we pick the article we pick out of Google Scholar - we don't often even tell them about Google Scholar. We don't want them in our social networks but we don't explain how we use them and why we shut out undergraduates, either. And most importantly we don't direct them in how to form their own learning communities. We insist firmly that unauthorized collaboration is cheating, but we don't often direct good, productive collaboration - and we almost never model it. I know you've worked with a colleague on your last research paper, presentation, or book - at the very least you discussed it over lunch or after a meeting and that colleague probably helped you a ton even in a ten minute discussion. We don't show our students how that works.

So a productive bridge might be our own research, how we conduct it, how we write, how we collaborate, and then developing activities for our students that mirror some of that.

We might have to lower academic standards temporarily to bridge between their world and ours. We can have them conduct mini-ethnographies by interviewing people on Twitter or Facebook - and then we get to discuss the differences between that and real fieldwork. We might have to accept that Wikipedia is their starting place for a lot of research - and then explain why, and when, they need to bump up to academic articles. We might have to accept that a blog is informal writing, essentially a draft - and have them do it to get them to write that much more, to an audience, before they write any more "final" paper for us. We don't have to compromise what we think finished academic work is. But we may want to modify what the intermediate steps could look like.

Faculty sometimes think students will figure this out on their own, how to do these things. Most students won't. They order food online and are very plugged in, but we know two things about traditional college-age students: they have no idea how any of that technology works, and they have no idea how to use any of it for academic purposes.

Faculty who do should guide those students.

And if you aren't one of the faculty who's ready to try building a bridge (I recommend a small one, with plenty of failsafe supports), then that's where you need to focus your energy first: trying some of these tools for yourself. I'm right there with you in anti-capitalized revulsion for what multinational corporations have become. Still, you need to get a smartphone. Learn to text, try a new social media tool for yourself, get it under control, and find something you like. Because if you like it, if you really use it, you can model how to use it for your students in a productive, positive way. Or use the computer Hofstra provides for you, if you're lucky enough to be a full-time faculty member, to investigate those tools for yourself. Faculty Computing is always willing to help you try these things. If you intend to teach for more than a couple of years more, you really need to start at least investigating, as an observer, perhaps, the world the students are living in.

Technology tools come and go but the cycle of change in technology in a university is actually a lot slower; nonetheless, the era of more, more, more computers is over, for a lot of reasons over which the institution has no control. Almost all the students have a ton of computing devices and want the freedom to choose what they want to choose; many of the faculty have followed suit. We certainly need to reinvest in New York's subway system but it's not that clear any more that Hofstra needs to reinvest in more, more, more computers at the endpoints. Nationally the trend is toward facilitating use of computers as easily and securely as possible; this is true in private industry as well as in higher education. Try googling "byoc bring your own computer". It's not clear how much longer any large organization will need to keep purchasing such end-point devices. Ask yourself how many computers you use in a day and how many computers each of your students uses in a day. Very few computer users use only university-provided computers any more. Our focus needs to be on keeping the roads clear, keeping the connections open as best we can, and helping everyone, faculty and student, use all this infrastructure for a teaching and learning purpose. Turns out the internet is more like a highway system than a subway; I'll drive my Prius, you can drive your Suburban, and someone else will be smart enough to get a Zipcar, but if the road itself is full of potholes and blocked by downed trees, no one's going anywhere.

Our educational challenge, guiding our students to make intellectual use of the resource, is more like teaching them to read a map than memorizing place names. What can we teach that are skills they'll use throughout the rest of their lives to learn no matter what the tool du jour is?

Social Networking and classes

It's no longer possible to ignore the potential of integrating social networking with your teaching. Students actually prefer to have academic systems separate from their Facebook accounts, so when something happens like Missouri forbidding its K-12 teachers from having any contact with their students via Facebook, I don't panic too much. Yes, it sets the cause of modernizing teaching back many years, but it also helps steer clear of any confusion that can result from mixing the teacher's and the student's social networks with classroom discussion and activities.

As I've said many times, most of our students come to our institution with mixed goals. On the one hand they've been successful high school students and they want to keep doing in college what they know they were good at in high school: listening in class, taking notes, doing homework, and taking tests. On the other hand, they themselves live in social networks; I won't bother to point you to an article about this because you'd have to have been living under a rock for the last five years to miss how the under-20 set uses texting, Facebook, and other sites like Twitter as their primary means of communicating with their friends. And Hofstra faculty don't live under rocks. So I don't need to beat that drum.

So our students come to college knowing that the life they like to live happens in social media; but also that success in school comes from doing what they did in high school. This leads to the mixed messages faculty get in college classrooms: some students would love to have part of class in Facebook, some students just want to sit in the back of the class with their mouths shut for the entire semester, and you'll find every level of enthusiasm for interaction in between these two extremes as well.

This year, however, I'd say that colleges have to step it up a notch: increasingly, students are coming to us from high schools where they've had all the usual tools of modern instruction, and frankly, they've had better experiences with it than they're about to have in college. K-12 environments, if they have things like BlackBoard or SmartBoards in their classrooms, often mandate their use more consistently, and train their teachers more consistently to use those tools, than most universities can do. At a university each faculty member usually makes his or her own decisions about how to teach (for-profits excepted), and this is a benefit of the U.S. higher education system: students will be exposed to a lot of different teaching styles during their college degree. Unfortunately, to students it sometimes looks disorganized, old-fashioned, out of touch, or simply thoughtless. Most students like it when the faculty know their names; they also like it when faculty are thoughtful in their use of technology, at the very minimum using it to announce class changes in a timely and consistent way, post documents, gather assignments, and just generally keep the class running in an organized fashion.

So then how do we step it up a notch and integrate social networking in a responsible way? The pluses for it are not that new: when done right, what you want is for your students to be thinking about your class everywhere, all the time. How much would you give for your students to see the everyday pertinence of your class everywhere, all the time? Isn't this a major goal for every faculty member? In my career I've wanted students to see the everyday applicability of clear sentences and paragraphs, or understanding cultures different from that of the United States, or being able to find a responsible academic source supporting a point. I can't imagine a field we're teaching in which we don't want students to see our subject matter everywhere they look: from the calculus student who realizes that she needs calculus to find out how much water her town will need to buy to fill their swimming pool this summer, to the art student who recognizes chiaroscuro in the latest fashion ad - and realizes he could make something just as good.

I'd apply all my same rules for any class activity having to do with social networking - students need to get credit for doing it, even if it's credit/no credit; it needs to be a regular, repeated part of the class, not just a one-off for a week that they can ignore; and it should contribute to your specific goals for the class.

I'm in the same boat as all of you. I need to do SOMEthing for this year, and I have a smallish seminar to teach. So what tool to choose - and how to design an activity? There are blogs and wikis in Blackboard, and a discussion board, but as those of you who've used them know, they're a far cry from true social networking, with its democratization of discussion, ability to connect to phones (our students' equivalents of laptops), and ability to share all kinds of media and comment - all very easily.

Some of our faculty are very excited about Google+, and on the face of it, it's an excellent answer. It's just like Facebook but not Facebook, and all our faculty and students now have access to Google Apps through our portal.

The challenge with Google+ at Hofstra right now is that it isn't actually included in the base set of apps Google provides for us. You can have your students manually create Google+ accounts with their Hofstra Pride gmail addresses, though, and then manually create a circle just for them. Remember Google+ is still a beta, which is computerese for "you get what you get". Google will undoubtedly be uncovering bugs and fixing things for years to come, in that Google way. But it is a very nice option.

If you use it, be sure to log in during class for a few minutes and show students how to create a class circle and share just to that circle. Students shouldn't be posting class work to the world unless they're aware they're doing so, and while I find circles very intuitive and sensible, not every student will do so. On the plus side, at least if they're doing it in Google+ with you instead of Facebook, they're much less likely to accidentally spam all their high school friends and family with their homework assignment!

Twitter is still a great tool for these things as well. I like choosing hours of the day when students' tweets can get texted to my phone (no texts after 10 p.m.!) and how easy Twitter is. My problem there is that I follow a lot of OTHER people on Twitter as well, and some of them follow me. I may well annoy some regular Twitter friends if I start tweeting about global media any hour of the day or night; I have to make a decision about whether or not to mix my class in with my professional and personal contacts there, OR set up a separate Twitter account just for class activity to share with my students. Just like Google+, students would also have to send me their Twitter accounts - either their regular ones, or ones they set up just for my class. If I expect students to be reading each other's tweets as text messages, I should provide an option(like checking the Twitter feed once a day) for those students who, rightfully, don't want their phones beeping at them all day with class observations. (We should be so lucky!)

If you use Twitter, I recommend you agree on a Twitter tag with your students - and check first to make sure it's unique, as #sociologyclass may happen more often on Twitter than you think! Let them know only posts labeled with the appropriate tag for your class will be counted for credit. You can't be chasing all their tweets all over the place, and with a hashtag, you can set up a page that just shows that feed and follow it very regularly.

I like Ning for class interactions a lot. It looks and behaves much like Facebook, and you can try it for 30 days for free or buy a simple $3/mo account to set up a class for yourself. It's super-easy to customize and lets students share pictures or videos in ways they're used to. Because it's private, log-in accounts only, students aren't doing their classwork in "public". You set up your site - yourclass.ning.com - and only the accounts you create or allow can log into that site at all. It's a great way to have students interact with each other as well as with you, which should always be a goal. It would be a great tool for having students share, for instance, pictures of things they saw during the day that relate to the class topic, or news items, or videos from YouTube. The only downside to Ning is that you have to ask students to check it periodically (preferably every day) in addition to checking Blackboard. But this would likely be true of Google+ as well. And like all the rest of these tools, because it's a consumer tool, not a University-provided tool, you need to add and remove your students yourself from the group.

I recommend avoiding Facebook for reasons we already stated, but we do have Inigral's tool Hofstra on Facebook, which allows students to socialize in an app that's connected to Facebook but not Facebook. If you've heard about this product from your students, I would still recommend steering clear of it for teaching because it is intended for students' social purposes, not for teaching; any teaching taking place in it would be "public", meaning all Hofstra participants in the app could see it; and faculty accounts are not provisioned by default to the system. We are running this application on a trial basis; I would not want to steer a teacher towards it.

So none of the choices are perfect, but there are several choices. Of Google+, Ning, and Twitter, what suits your goal best? Twitter restricts the length of the posts pretty severely; on the other hand, a lot of social activity happens there now (news of yesterday's earthquake traveled on Twitter before any major news outlet was carrying it - people read their friends' tweets about the earthquake in Virginia, and then felt it themselves a few minutes later in Ohio or New York!). Fascinating political and social commentary is constantly being posted there as well, making it great for any social science, media, business, teaching, or communication topic. Google+ and Ning both give you great non-Facebook, Facebook-like social networks, with all the media sharing possible - great for humanities classes, writing, art, television production, and similar.

Faculty Computing Services is familiar with all these products, but to varying degrees of familiarity. If you'd like our help getting started feel free to give us a call (all our contact information is at http://hofstra.edu/fcs as always). We also have some tips and ideas for getting started at http://hofstrateach.org - I usually look something up there myself to answer my question first. But these are consumer-level products, not enterprise-level products, so to a certain extent, if you decide to use them, you're taking a leap into social networking as an individual with your particular students. It's the wave of the future, but it might feel a little deep. If you decide to take the plunge, just keep swimming!

As with any electronic tool, I'd recommend that you structure use of the tool for your class:

1. Ask students to visit or read at least once a day. Spell out in your syllabus that this is a requirement for the class and students will not pass your class without participating in this activity no matter what fraction of their final grade is made up of this type of participation.

2. Require students to contribute at least once a week. (This can be based on class reading - what questions came up for you when you did the reading? - or based on outside-of-class activities - post an example of modernist architecture you saw in your neighborhood, or a book you found in the library on this topic, or an interview you did with a friend or family member on this question.)

3. Give credit - even just a 1 instead of a 0 in the Blackboard gradebook is sufficient. Give credit every week so students can see how they're progressing.

4. Bring that class interaction back to class. I recommend participating yourself on the same guidelines, but even if you don't, when you meet with your students, if you bring back the discussion ("As we saw from Brian's interview on Ning this week"... "This photo Sheila posted demonstrates exactly what we've been talking about"...) you make your class alive, current, and happening all the time.

5. Base a test question or paper writing opportunity or capstone presentation option or any other sort of assessed exercise on material that's been shared or insights the class has reached together via their social networking discussions. If you just use the same questions you used last year, you disconnect. If you draw on the discussion your students have been having, via social networking as well as in class, you bring it all together and involve the students in the class more than you can imagine. The smallest link helps a lot. DO NOT make it an "optional" question. If you're using social networking, you're using it, and it's a required part of the class - "optional" isn't an option.

There may always be a student or two who still drops out of online discussion, just as there can be such a student who drops out class, but you need to focus your discussion on the students who are participating, enjoying, and learning. Do let such students know as soon as possible that they will not be able to pass the class until they connect.

Every once in a while there is a student who is still uncomfortable with technology, sufficiently to inhibit them in participating in such a class exercise. This fall, for the first time, you can send such students to Learning Support, a new division of Student Computing Services based out of the Learning Lab in Calkins 106. Trained student support personnel will help them. You can learn more about Learning Support at http://hofstra.edu/learningsupport - our new website will be populated by September 1!

It really would be different.

Trent Batson is a colleague who is always several steps ahead of me and I love his Campus Technology article, "10 Rules of Teaching in this Century". If we really read and understood and debated all the suggestions of this article, we would know pretty much everything we need to know about teaching with technology today.

It's a short, sweet piece, and I wonder if everyone who reads it really understands the revolutionary suggestions he is making. Right off the bat in his suggestion #1, Trent advocates "Don't just tell students the key knowledge in your field, but help them discover it through problem-based active learning." This is something lots of us feel that we do, but we're actually a skewed angle away from the reality of what Trent's suggesting.

The idea with problem-based learning is to actually replace all the class time normally spent on lectures with problem-solving activities. This is a hard one for many faculty to grasp. I have talked to faculty who say that they really must explain the material in class, otherwise the student won't really understand it the way they have to for future lessons/problems. Often the same faculty also say that students don't really apply what they've "learned" - which is really what they've heard - to the later activities in the class.

These are related problems. We must at least seriously consider giving up the model of education where we tell the student something, they absorb and remember it, and then later on they apply it. There's strong evidence that this model never really worked that well. There's much stronger evidence that in fact the learning that stays with the student is the learning they do on their own. When I ask faculty when they really "got" a key concept in their field, it was usually when they were doing the work - conducting an experiment, synthesizing research and writing up their ideas or findings, creating a piece of art for themselves, talking to a live interview subject or creating a map for themselves - it was when they were doing the work that is the work of their field. Sometimes that "aha moment" occurs early on in their educational careers, and such "aha moments" are why we value higher education where students have access to great professors, great learning facilities, small classes, field trips, and other experiences where those moments tend to happen. Sometimes, sadly, that "aha moment" doesn't even happen until graduate school, at some point where they were doing the work of their field for the first time and really caught the excitement of it because they saw that there were real questions to answer and how to tackle answering them.

It's not actually idealist to try to move that "aha moment" back all the way to the first year of college. We must give up any idea we ever had, if we had it, that first year students arrive on our campuses as blank slates ready to be filled with higher knowledge. In fact they've already had long educational careers, for better or worse, and we can ask them to build on those careers immediately by putting them to work doing the work that is the bread and butter of the field. It actually is not untoward to give them a reading assignment and then ask them to do some academic work based on what they read rather than have us explicate it for them.

No student is immediately going to intuit how to develop a thesis statement, how to evaluate a definite integral, how to titrate an acid/base solution, or how to conjugate adjectives in Japanese. But great explanations of these tasks can actually be pretty brief, and we can often re-use great multimedia materials made by others for these basics. Instead of devoting 80-90% of the semester to explanation and 10% to problem-solving, we can flip it. Spend 10% on explanation (again, using technology to help where we can) and 90% on problem-solving. Let the students get stuck, let the students fail, and then unstick them, show them how to improve. As students they really don't get why or how to improve until they've failed, and we need to give them a lot more time to do that.

Imagine a class where instead of "covering" the material for a semester and then giving the student a final paper or exam to see if they "got it", students created work - research, experiments, writing, bibliographies, presentations, movies, lessons, summaries - from the very first day. Imagine that our job as faculty was to help direct them in doing the work - "Here's how to find the resource you need; here's how to complete that task" - in a manageable way (video or audio or text once for all, not one-on-one assistance for one at a time). Imagine that they turned in the work - and it wasn't very good! And we said so! And then they did it again! And again! Imagine that by the third or fourth go-round, students were really starting to understand what it was that one did when one does math, or science, or literature, or art, or management, or film, or teaching, or any of the things we teach our students to do.

Imagine how much more they would understand the material, and how much of it they would own and take with them from the class, if we taught the class that way.

That's really the type of model Trent is suggesting, and I think he's right. We all know that you never understand anything so well as when you explain it to someone else (in your writing, your presentation, your portfolio, your anything), but previously it wasn't practical, we thought, to do something like that with every student in a class.

But that's exactly the type of thing technology really can help with. If I have 30 students in a class and I'm determined to teach this way, technology lets me share all sorts of resources with them beyond the book. Technology lets them collaborate and raise questions before class so you can answer them in class. Technology lets you do frequent low-stakes quizzes or papers so that they can just get credit for completing them and you can see who's not keeping up, with very little time and effort during the semester. Technology makes it trivial for you to record a ten-minute explanation of "Here's where most of you are going astray" as a video on a Thursday, distribute it to all your students, and have them back in class on the Monday with the next set of questions based on what you've just explained and then what they tried/thought/did.

When done well, it doesn't look like a traditional class and some faculty don't feel like they're doing their job if they don't "cover" the material - by which they mean lecture, however much the lecture might be "enhanced" with multimedia materials. But I guarantee that the students who leave such a class, even if less material has been "covered", understand more of what has been addressed during the course of the class and are more likely to retain it. When they've applied it over and over and over and over again in your class, they sure as heck are going to be (at least more likely to be) able to apply it again the following semester.

To tackle it one more way: Our current model presupposes that we tell the student everything they need to know (yes, in addition to other activities, but really the bulk of class time is spent with us telling them what they need to know), and then at the end of the semester that they prove that they know it by doing something - maybe a final exam (though the same could be true of papers, presentations, or any other type of "capstone" assessment). Faculty often cringe at the idea of students just doing the thing first they were supposed to do last, and doing it badly. Why? What could possibly demonstrate better to students that they don't know what they came to class to master? I know some creative faculty who give the final on the first day of class. One may reasonably expect everyone to fail. What if the teacher then gave the student direction on how to derive, research, create, find one or more of the answers, and then gave a similar test again? What if they took a "final" five times through the semester, each time figuring out more of how to do the work that a "final" represents?

What grade do you think they would get the last time they took that test?

And if you were the student, which type of work would you rather do?

Education and digital citizenship

For the last few Boot Camps I've made a passing mention of "digital citizenship" just to ask the question of whether or not we are addressing it sufficiently in higher education. The example I always use is to ask the question of whether or not our students are prepared to vote on questions having to do with electronic voting machines. It's a question as pertinent to the operation of democracy in our country as any in these times, and yet I can't seem to sell it as a pressing educational topic.

Yesterday I was surprised to hear an entire issue of the news program "On Point" address questions of cyberattacks and possible military responses. A little Googling and I found out at least one of the reasons why this topic bubbled to a head yesterday: Lockheed Martin suffered from a cyber-attack, and obviously that is a defense contractor of the first order. While several outlets are reporting that the attackers came up empty, others are also reporting that nonetheless the U.S. is quickly moving to consider cyber-attacks "acts of war" and deciding how and when to respond and in what fashion.

There is no clearer example of what it means to be a citizen of a 21st century nation.

And on NPR, where the story I first heard is available as a podcast, the very first of the 46 comments says "How can anyone listen to this program and have any trust in our elections where the vote counting is done in secret on electronic voting machines?"

There are a number of topics that comprise "Digital Citizenship" and hopefully some of them, at least, are going to be addressed in K-12 educational environments going forward. But are we sure we're graduating students who are at least aware these topics exist? And if we're not, how can we possibly integrate these issues into a curriculum that's already overloaded in our limited time with our students?

Some of you know what I'm going to say: we are going to have to give up something to get something else. It may very well be that we need to cut one lesson or unit from our syllabus to tackle digital citizenship questions somewhere in that same syllabus. But I suspect that we're already teaching a lot of topics that touch on these issues. It's not hard (using this particular topic list) to imagine the writing class that at least mentions digital literacy, the political science class that touches on digital rights and responsibilities or digital access (Arab Spring, anyone?), the legal studies class that addresses digital etiquette, or the economics or business class that includes digital communication as well as digital commerce. It may also be that we just need to consciously highlight those places in our curriculum where we're discussing what are for our faculty often very new topics, and make it clear that there are many open questions to be addressed.

And while I never advocate doing an exercise using electronic tools only once, it may be that doing one exercise in the course of the class on a digital citizenship topic is enough. Somewhere in our various curricula we do need to at least address these various topics.

The speed of change and mobile computing

At the first Boot Camp in 2006, recipients received laptops (presaging the laptops we were able to offer to all full-time faculty members beginning in 2007). I don't want to tell any stories out of school, because what happens in Boot Camp stays in Boot Camp, but it's fair to say that mobile computing was new for those first few Boot Campers - and actually for several groups of Boot Campers after that.

It's hard to believe how laptops have come to replace desktops in only five short years, even harder to believe for those of us who remember when there were no desktops at all.

But it's almost impossible to believe the speed with which "mobile computing" is coming to replace laptops.

I have to put "mobile computing" in quotation marks because it's an often-used phrase that still lacks general consensus on its meaning. Mobile phones that can compute are clearly indicated in there somewhere. "Smartphones" like the iPhones and Blackberries are not just phones, they're handheld devices running their own computing operating systems and therefore their own applications - harking back to the days of Palm devices, but far more omnipresent. Building for smartphones gives tech people a headache, because you can seldom build just once: if you really want to write an application that can do things, you need to write it for iPhone and Blackberry (and probably Droid, and perhaps if you really want to get ambitious, the Windows smartphone OS as well). And that means, yes, you're writing it two or three or four times.

But what really blows the mind of anyone who wants to understand "mobile computing" is the proliferation of devices that aren't phones and aren't laptops either and yet on which one expects to be able to compute. ("Compute" in this sense is almost never in the classic sense of "compute" - to have an electronic device execute your calculations for you - but in the modern sense of "compute", which generally seems to mean "access the web, SMS, and related technologies, and do things with them".)

I have sitting on my desk right now an iPad and a Dell Duo, a netbook that converts into a tablet. More than netbooks themselves (I own two, one running Windows 7 and one running Ubuntu, an open-source Linux adaptation specifically for netbooks), these devices change the paradigm of computing. The screens are bigger than phone screens, and the interface allows for a certain amount of touch control and input as well as keyboard (or "keyboard", in the case of the iPad with its virtual keyboard).

We acquired the Dell for testing, as we are looking at ways of using tablets for interactive online class meetings, and to display to the screen (instead of Sympodiums, for instance) in classrooms. We don't expect any of these technologies to become widespread any time soon - but the pace of change may surprise even us, the academic technology nerds whose job is to look into these things.

What shocks me most about the Dell Duo is that it is clearly competition for the iPad. While I applaud Apple's genius with consumer electronics, there are still a lot of Windows users who want to be able to use a tablet with Windows - and I think this convertible netbook may end up being a nicer option for them. It's a 10" netbook, with a flippable touch screen. It weighs only slightly more than this iPad here, and it has onboard USB and headphone jacks, doing the iPad one better. (Don't consider this a sales advertisement - go look into one on your own if you want to buy one. For one thing, I've logged into mine and still don't quite see how to interact with it via touch.)

My point is not that this is a cool thing (we here at Faculty and Student Computing are not ones for the toys, you know - even our per-capita membership in World of Warcraft is very low) but that this is a consumer device that runs Windows and could sincerely give the iPad a run for its money. For that matter, the iPad has a lot of money. Googling "iPads sold to date" gives me an answer of 19 million to date (as of 5 days ago). Given that the first iPads were sold almost exactly one year ago (the first week of April, and this is now the last), that is an insane number of devices circulating - and changing people's attitude toward computing.

That's why the phrase "mobile computing" sent people by the hundreds, if not thousands, to participate in EDUCAUSE's "Mobile Computing: A 5-Day Sprint". We computing people are rushing to keep up with this trend. We have the same things to worry about with these new mobile devices as we did with laptops: the costs of upkeep, the need to integrate them into our current information environment, and above all the security of our students' data.

But for faculty and students, the opportunities, I think, outweigh the challenges. I've seldom seen people as charged up about a device as some of our faculty are charged up about the iPad, and the students are right behind them. In fact, I think I only saw it once: when students and teachers started getting desktop computers of their own, in the late 80s and early 90s.

Those people were on fire with enthusiasm for the power and opportunity inside those ugly plastic boxes. They could create simulation after simulation with spreadsheets like Lotus 1-2-3 - they need never again run numbers over and over on chalkboards! They could correspond in minutes with colleagues in Europe or South America! They could connect to online library catalogs and browse whole collections without leaving their desks! The whole process of revision in writing was completely reinvented - revising could become an ongoing, fluid process, no re-typing of existing text required! Those people were excited.

Today's faculty and students are excited in different, but related ways. They have many computers - almost too many, some of them. This device goes with them anywhere, lightly and easily, even for some folks with physical challenges - and with DropBox, it can connect them to their files anytime, anywhere! It lets them physically interact with the writing surface in ways they haven't been able to since they went digital in 1990 - they can scrawl notes on the screen - and then email them to other people instantly! They can read email, by the way, anywhere and any time - but on a screen large enough to also host a fair-sized book page! And color graphics! And (almost, in my opinion) small enough to hold up and read with one hand! They can watch full-length movies on that same screen!

When I look at that list, none of those things seems as revolutionary to me as the earlier list. After all, I could do those things with netbooks, or notebooks, or my beloved Palm device, or I don't want to do them at all. But for the people who do want to do them, it's as though they've been straining upwards for years and now their wings have been freed.

I didn't want to run spreadsheets with Lotus 1-2-3 either - but then, I never had to write them out on chalkboards (and do the cascading calculations across all those chalkboards that people used to have to do when they taught or learned heavy calculation & projection topics). Since it has become possible, a lot more people use spreadsheets. What tools that are special-purpose now will become omnipresent in the future simply because they're now easy enough to use for everyone?

I consider myself a digital native even more than a nerd. I don't like playing with technology devices for their own sake - though given a task I do want to do, I get excited when a computing device makes it possible to do it. In this way I'm not that unlike our faculty and students who are diving into mobile computing with such gusto.

The challenge for IT people with mobile computing is how to support an exploding IT environment when we were used to a curve with a steady gradient for many years. We thought we understood what "computing" was. Now we have to sprint to keep up.

But the challenge for teachers and learners is to cope with an even broader yawning chasm between the people who live digitally, and the people who don't.

Recently during a "Hofstra at 75" panel, I was surprised to hear faculty discussing whether or not there was a bigger generational gap between students and faculty now than had ever existed before. These were faculty who came here to teach more than forty or even fifty years ago, faculty who had lived through student protests and shutdowns of the main administrative building (even faculty who had studied in the Quonset hut that had previously been in the same place as that administrative building). And here they were discussing whether or not there is a bigger gap between the way they think and learn and the way today's students think and learn than any gap they had ever seen before.

I was even more surprised when one faculty member disagreed by pointing out that she had been using technology tools for twenty years - and they were simple, and easy, and had great benefits, so why weren't other people using them?

There was, of course, no faculty consensus on whether or not students do fundamentally think differently these days, or whether or not it would be easy or desirable to use technology tools in our classes. The conversation, ultimately, wasn't about that.

But I do know, and I think most of those faculty would agree, that certain types of information knowledge and creation, which used to be centrally important to education, are now rendered obsolete by communications and computing technology - as obsolete as writing out all those spreadsheets on chalkboards all over the room. And I'm not sure that anything cohesive or coherent has replaced them. Some of my colleagues on the faculty are carrying out very promising experiments to address this gap, and we saw several of them at our second annual Teaching with Technology Day on April 12 (more on that later). But in the meantime, I'm paying very close attention to mobile computing, and trying to figure out what it means for teaching and learning.

I think it means that, now more than ever, learning has to equal more than information retrieval or regurgitation. Synthesizing or evaluating answers is far more important than ever. I think it means that students who are used to finding out answers in the .12 seconds it takes to execute a Google search really need to know how to ask good questions.

And maybe even more importantly, they need to have a context for deciding what a question is, and what an answer is, and when they think they've found one, or decided on one. And they need help evaluating the universe of possible answers - not just to find the one that is right, but to live with the myriad of possible answers that may exist.

I don't know why "mobile computing" is now and not five years ago. Maybe it's the price point of smartphones. Maybe it's the size and speed of the tools. (A lot of people, when asked what they like about an iPad, mention how quick it is to turn "on" and access versus a laptop.) Maybe it's the combination of the tools with cloud computing services that keep your files available to you anytime anywhere, and the ubiquity of phone chips (even in devices like Kindles) allowing access to those files anytime and anywhere. Maybe it's the cameras and microphones that finally turn all these devices, not just into consumption tools, but into production tools and even into "communicators" that far exceeded even what Star Trek promised us. (Sure, they had videophones on desktops - but the away teams didn't have video connection back to the ship. Whereas you can videocall back to your mother ship, if you have an iPhone with FaceTime video calling.)

Whatever it is, there is a huge leap forward in computing capabilities right now, which always really means a huge leap forward in communication capabilities. And there's an enormous amount of excitement about it, too.

I want to harness that excitement for learning purposes. My connections with our students this year indicate that they mostly want cosmetic improvements: they'd love it if all their faculty used Blackboard, for instance. And who can blame them? They want all their syllabi in one place - and in the cloud. But they're not really dying to revolutionize their class with these new technologies. They're perfectly comfortable using FourSquare to get discounts at Starbucks and taking the same college class that's been offered for years in the same way they've taken all their other college classes. If nothing else, we need to challenge them to ask the sorts of questions a college graduate needs to ask about the new technologies. (Do you really want FourSquare to amalgamate all that personal data about you?) But I'd like to challenge them to help faculty teach them differently, too. So many faculty and students alike are excited about these new tools and their new capabilities. I want that excitement in the classroom! How do we get there?

This year Hofstra sponsored a contest in the fall for students to vote for their favorite iPad App. Evernote won, with Dropbox a close second place, followed by iBooks and 3D Brain. This is an interesting result: the most popular apps were the ones that made living with your files in the cloud possible, followed by two apps that made it possible to do learning activities you could never do before: carry a hundred books with you, in full color, everywhere, or hold in your hand an interactive three-dimensional representation of the human brain. We need to circulate these results more widely among the faculty. How do we take advantage of such tools? Do we require students to get iPads? Can we share? How quickly will the "mobile computing" revolution reach almost everyone, how do we boost the students who need a boost to get there, and what can it do for learning, and by extension for our society?

We hope to learn more through a program we're running now loaning iPads first to faculty, then to one student in one of their classes. We hope the iPad gets used for an in-class activity. We suggested Google jockeying - the iPad lends itself well to a student looking something up, then passing the results around for others to see. But we expect we'll learn a lot from students who are trying them. As you might expect, once the glamour wears off, our students start to see that the iPad isn't a magical genie in a bottle fulfilling their every wish, either. Both the ups and downs of mobile computing should be visible to all - and examined carefully in an academic institution.

Faculty Computing and Student Computing will be sharing many new ideas from our results with these experiments! If you have other thoughts and ideas, please do share them with us.

EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative conference 2011

There were a lot of new topics floating around at this national conference in Washington, DC about a month ago. Some that you might want to know about:

*Open Source Textbooks

There are state and national initiatives to support the creation and dissemination of open source textbooks. These are important not only because they are free, but also, if they are released under a GPL/Creative Commons type license, because they are modifiable. So you can download an excellent textbook written by an excellent professor, and use only chapters 2 & 3, or rewrite chapter 6 if you'd like to.

Susan Henderson is managing both the Florida state effort at http://www.theorangegrove.org and the national, FIPSE-grant funded effort at http://www.openaccesstextbooks.org.

Interestingly, Susan presented along with Jade Roth, Vice President of Books & Digital Strategy from Barnes & Noble, our college bookstore operator (and lots of other people's). Jade was very clear that Barnes & Noble would be happy to distribute free content. They see the nook software as being their platform for distributing educational content to students on any device, be it a nook or a laptop or an iPad, and they want us to consider that our textbook distribution hub as well.

One thing I didn't yet see in the open source textbook movement is a true open source code management process. Ideally, if I rewrite chapter 6, I'd like to resubmit it for comment and review, and perhaps through a process of vetting and approval, my chapter 6 now becomes the chapter 6 of the core text. I can see why many faculty would not get excited about writing for open-source textbooks under such a model. But it may be crucial to develop something similar for such textbooks if they are to remain as current and useful as open source code is.

On a slightly different but related tack, Edward Gehringer, Associate Professor of Computer Science, North Carolina State University, presented about having his 120 computer science students "crowdsource" their textbook. The students wrote the textbook for their course in a collaboratively edited wiki. As you can imagine, this certainly qualifies as an active learning exercise, and the professor used an interesting review system to review contributions in a double-blind manner. I can't help but think that students asked to read primary material and synthesize their own textbook must have ended up understanding the material very well. One never understands anything as well as when one has to teach it - and how else could you have 120 students teaching each other?

*Open educational resources

We've long known about MIT and other schools posting free class material under the Open Courseware initiative, or OCW, begun in the 90s. A quick Google search turns up tons of institutions participating in OCW. But now there are schools posting entire courses for free on the web - something quite different from just course materials.

Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative can be found at http://oli.web.cmu.edu/openlearning and offers complete online self-paced courses in subjects that include economics, statistics, biochemistry, physics, and French. Instructors are encouraged to customize the courses and reuse them; students are encouraged to undertake self-guided learning; and some students can take the courses for credit, if their institution has arranged for them to do so.

You can "peek" into the courses to see how they work, or enroll yourself. I looked at the French class, thinking that Madame Cousine, my first-year French teacher, might be pleased if I brushed up my French. The class made me think that indeed I could do so if I wanted to enroll, though when I looked at it in Chrome, Google offered to translate it out of the French and into English for me - rather defeating my purpose. The course looks like it covers rather less material than I remember Madame Cousine's class covering back in the 80s, but if it gets me as far as ordering lunch in Montréal, maybe it's a worthwhile resource. I need to take a closer look at the statistics class.

*Mixable

Purdue gave another great session on Mixable, their class/life/online sharing system that they are piloting this year with success. I don't think you can really tell from the website at http://oli.web.cmu.edu/openlearning that Mixable is probably what a 21st century LMS should be. Students see their classes on the left, but any other resemblance to a current LMS/CMS (except perhaps Instructure's Canvas) is gone. Students can contribute to any class with any media, without the faculty member's blessing or need to organize groups. Students can take a picture of a molecular model they've been doodling out on a whiteboard with their cell phone and share it with the class immediately. The file stays in the class Dropbox, letting them share files throughout the semester. They can send messages to fellow classmates via Facebook or share a YouTube video just as easily, but students who wish to keep Mixable separate from their Facebook walls can do so. It all works on mobile devices including Droid phones and iPhones, including the Dropbox file sharing. And at the end of a class or their major, they can build a portfolio of notes or materials they've accumulated over the course of their learning - that's really learning course management.

Just this week some University of Pennsylvania students announced Coursekit, their own alternative to Blackboard, and I think these tools are just going to keep coming. It makes sense that students would be frustrated with a CMS/LMS that just lets the teacher direct discussion or contributions, and that teachers don't like having to jury-rig the tools either to allow students to contribute. Also, of course, while studies continue to show that students don't want class stuff in their Facebook, associated tools (like our new Hofstra on Facebook app from Inigral) allow students to create groups and contact others outside their personal Facebook profile and wall. I'm looking forward to seeing how these CMS/LMS contenders shake out. Adventurous faculty and dedicated students are going to love them.

*Faculty learning communities

We seem to have reached a tipping point where large swathes of the faculty population at a lot of schools want to learn about tools like blogging and eportfolios, and increasingly they're doing it together. Baylor University under the direction of the ever-creative Gardner Campbell did a great multi-institution development effort with faculty learning communities; Mercy College undertook a smaller, but very effective, approach inside their own school. In both cases, the office for instructional technology simply facilitated - primarily providing a communications infrastructure and perhaps pizza - and faculty did the teaching and learning, as they do so well.

I'm hoping to institute such faculty learning communities here at Hofstra next year. The iPad users' group meeting was well attended and productive (not their fault but mine that we haven't scheduled another meeting yet, but the ideas they generated are available for all in the All-Faculty Blackboard course at Hofstra). I'd like to see similarly motivating sharing going on between faculty interested in communication tools like blogs or Twitter, and faculty interested in data visualization tools like Google Earth or ArcView. We have people doing some great work on this here at Hofstra.

To that end, stay tuned - we are in the process of trying to arrange our second annual Teaching with Technology day, and all Hofstra faculty are invited!

A Week without the Web - going forward, not backwards

I'm going to be very interested to see the results of the experiment being conducted now by faculty and students in Hofstra's School of Communication: A Week Without the Web. I particularly like that this is a thoughtful encounter with the web; it's not just wishing it was 1990 again, it's a true educational exercise, reflecting on where we are, how we got here, and where we want to go in the future.

I'm already interested by the site's inaugural post. Clearly the School has been discussing this for a while, and clearly if they can do without the web for a week, they cannot do without cellphones.

This echoes something we've been talking about in faculty and student computing. How do we harness cell phones for learning? Can we or should we do so? I thought Liz Kolb's book Toys to Tools was an eye-opener. The book is geared for the K12 teacher and student, and it's full of exercises that students can do to create media in exercises to explore and understand. I'm always alert to what's happening in K12 - we don't want 21st century learning experiences for our students in gradeschool, but 19th century learning experiences in college. At least not all the time. Some 19th century learning experiences are undoubtedly valuable. (And I just finished Claudia Schiff's book on Cleopatra: A Life. Some 1st century BCE learning experiences might not come amiss either!)

This goes back to one of our core operational guideposts: it's not what the faculty member does differently with technology, it's what the students do differently. We all know that there can be great lectures, and great lectures enhanced with PowerPoint - but take away the PowerPoint and most great lecturers can certainly stand alone. Active learning is that in which the student does something differently - a creation exercise, or an exploration exercise, in which the student uses technology to find, create, or share in ways that they couldn't before.

This can be anything from an annotated bibliography shared and co-created via GoogleDocs to a collection of audio interviews that students peer-evaluate. And cell phones are clearly the one tool that can now do it all - and that almost no student is without.

What do you think about harnessing the power of cell phones for learning? Has the time come for your class?

Yes, VIRGINIA, I believe in college

Dear Editor:
I am 18 years old. Some of my friends say college is just a four-year hoop to jump through to get to the job I need. They say college has nothing to do with the real world. Papa says “If you see it on the web it must be true.” So tell me, Madame Blogger: should I believe in college?
---

Well, VIRGINIA, I believe in college. The United States originally conceived of its system of education as a necessary foundation for democracy, and I believe that an educated citizenry is what makes democracy work. A person who learns mathematics and philosophy, for instance, can explain why a nation cannot survive if its population constantly wants both increasing benefits of government and reductions to the size of government. That’s the sort of person ready to pick and choose what government should do, and vote accordingly.

There has been a lot of research, VIRGINIA, that what you need to be good at a job is to be able to learn new things quickly and effectively (perhaps even correctly). That you need to be able to evaluate information and make your own decisions. And that you need to be able to work with other people. College education can prepare you to be good at a job in these ways, though the connection might not be obvious. A person who studies science can learn how to use experiments to find answers to questions that are right, or at least closer to right than they were before. A person who studies history knows how to find out what has already been done. And a person who studies reading and writing can communicate a plan, or a solution, with one person, or a million people. A person who studies languages - maybe even art - can communicate that same plan or solution all over the world.

It may seem in college that not everything you do, not everyone you meet, is directly connected to your dreams. There are failures and pitfalls and shortcomings in college. These too are part of the real world. You will need to learn how to deal with failures and pitfalls and shortcomings, VIRGINIA. College is a good place for this.

Life is big and the world is big. Sometimes, confronted with the vastness of human knowledge, people become frightened, or nervous, or overwhelmed, and they pretend that it is small. College is big because the real world is big. Grasp that, and you will grasp everything.

So I think your friends are wrong. But I think your papa is wrong too. I think college is where you will learn when and how to believe what you perceive. You will learn to understand where a person comes from, what that person knows, and how that person makes his or her case, and you will factor that in to your understanding of what that person says. You will learn who you are too, and what you know, and you will learn to make your own case. More importantly, you will learn what you don’t know. And if your college is what it should be, you will learn how to learn what you need to learn, every time you need to learn something, for the rest of your life. There is always so much more to know that knowing how to learn is more important than knowing anything else.

And because of that, the best answer I can give you is that only you, VIRGINIA, can say whether or not you should believe in college. As with everything else in life, you should learn that for yourself. But I believe in college, VIRGINIA, and you should know that I do. It is a place, and a process, and a philosophy that I highly recommend.