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?