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.