Archive

Tag Archives: Work

Flipped Classroom Benefits – My Summary

2013.03.28
education, Work
Leave a Comment

Flipped Classroom BenefitsFor anyone who’s interested, here are the Prezi slides from my “Flipped Classroom” presentation in the Library this week: Flipped Classroom Benefits.

The 2010 University of Illinois study I refer to near the end of the presentation, shows final exam gains of between 10% and 18% after their largest physics course was flipped.

Here’s the outline:

“A flipped classroom is a reversed teaching model that delivers instruction at home through interactive, teacher-created videos and moves “homework” to the classroom. Moving lectures outside of the classroom allows teachers to spend more 1:1 time with each student. Students have the opportunity to ask questions and work through problems with the guidance of their teachers and the support of their peers – creating a collaborative learning environment.”

Benefits of the Flipped Classroom:

  • Students can move through the materials at their own pace. They can revisit materials they have not mastered.
  • Students learn through activity in the classroom instead of listening to a largely passive lecture.
  • This frees up the lecturers time for more 1:1 time with students who need the most help. Peer tutoring facilitated.
  • Can be implemented so that the instructor has a good idea who is prepared for class, along with which students are struggling and what concepts or tools they are struggling with.
  • Students who have mastered the material can be paired up with students who are struggling. Difficult materials can be reviewed.

Drawbacks of the Flipped Classroom:

  • Equity: all students need access to computers and internet (libraries can help with this).
  • Students need to be motivated to get the pre-class work done. If not they will struggle to keep up in class (much like with doing class readings now).
  • While flipping is a great pedagogical tool, it is not necessarily the best tool in all situations… But it is an excellent strategy for all teachers to have in their toolkits.

A Case Study: UVic Law Advanced Legal Research and Writing Class.

  • Was guest lecturer for Knowledge Management Tool class for 3+ years… decided to flip the lecture in order to engage students more fully and give them hands on experience with.
  • Show pre-class Zotero video from: http://richmccue.com/2012/12/13/a-flipped-class-knowledge-management-research-software/
  • Show Intro Quiz – Gmail question
  • Review Evernote Exercise – Install evernote on mobile device & desktop. Take picture of wite board with phone; sync to desktop; upload photo from desktop to Moodle (or Facebook if LMS not available)
  • Back to Prezi: Review feedback from students. Only 10% preferred the traditional lecture over the flipped lecture. 80% of students agreed or strongly agreed that they were more confident with the KM tools after the in class exercises than they would have been with a traditional lecture.

University of Illinois Physics experience:

  • Significantly better results on exams.
  • A – level students viewing videos gaining 15%. non viewers staying the same. B – level students gaining 19%.  C – level students gaining 10%.
  • Fewer students rating the course at very difficult.
  • Great study by University of Illinois Physics department to check-out: http://research.physics.illinois.edu/per/details.asp?paperid=130
  • Their method for large classes includes a multiple choice question or two after every video along with an open ended “why did you answer the way you did”, so the teachers can get a feel for why each student answered the question right or wrong.

A Flipped Class: Knowledge Management Tools & Research Software

2012.12.13
education, Google, Open Source
5 Comments

For the past four years I’ve taught the session on Knowledge Management tools for Law Students in an Advanced Legal Research a Writing class. In an effort to help the students get more out of the session, this year I “flipped” the class.  Instead of lecturing and demonstrating software for 80 minutes, the students watched the short instructional videos I prepared and installed software on their laptops in preparation for the class. This took them between 40 and 60 minutes depending on their technical ability.

Then in a shortened 40 minute class, I put the students together in groups of 2 or 3 and had them work on some exercises.  This allowed them to practice using the using the tools they learned about in situations approximating how they’d be used in legal research.

The feedback from the students on the new class format was very positive.  83% of students preferred the blended class style to a traditional lecture, and 75% said that they felt more confident using the tools covered in class than they would have with a traditional lecture. At the end of both classes, most of the students stayed behind after the class was dismissed to continue playing with the new software tools.

Below, exercises A to H are to be completed before the class. The in class exercises are at the bottom. These materials are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License to encourage their use and re-use. In plain english this means that anyone can modify the materials, as long as they share the modifications back to me, and the materials can be used for commercial purposes.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

——————-

A. Introduction:

We’re going to look at 7 different tools that will help you develop a more efficient research work flow. It is not expected that you’ll use all the tools, but most students find that they’d have a hard time living without two or three of them once they see how the tools make their research lives easier.

  • The tools we’ll look at are:
    • Desktop Search,
    • Zotero for citation management,
    • Evernote for saving general notes, capturing web pages and pictures for future reference,
    • JotNot Pro to take the place of a photocopier,
    • Google Drive for collaborative document editing,
    • Google+ Hangouts for online meetings and document co-editing, and lastly
    • backup options so that your digital life is safe.

Before you move on, please make sure that you have a Gmail account, and have signed up for Google+, as you’ll need access to a Google account for the exercises in this module (and in the next class). If you don’t have an account, you can sign up here: http://gmail.com

B. Desktop Search

Exercise:

  1. Using your desktop search tool, see if you can find a paper you wrote last year.
  2. Also using your desktop search find all the emails you’ve received from a friend. How many were there? (if you don’t see any emails in your desktop search you’ll need to add your webmail account to your desktop email program).

Read More

Railroads, Libraries & Change…

2012.11.05
education, Work
Leave a Comment

This weekend I thought back to a story I heard years ago about the railroad industry. As people and products started using highways for transportation, most rail road companies did not diversify into those new modes of transportation because they saw themselves as railroad companies, not transportation companies.

It’s never easy to make big shifts when technology opens up new opportunities. Looking back in time it seems obvious that big, successful railroad companies should have been able to make the transition (or diversify) into new modes of transportation, but generally speaking they did not. How come?

  1. Change is difficult and scary at the same time. Bureaucratic inertia makes it difficult to change the direction of most large organizations, along with the fear of dislocation and not knowing how to do a new job.
  2. Another major consideration is that the “new direction” that is obvious to us know, is generally not obvious at the time. Mistakes will be made in technological transitions. There will be ventures down dead ends, before the new best practices become well worn paths.
  3. In the case of academic libraries, we are a service “department” inside of larger organizations. Out of necessity we support the direction of the University in the best way we can, and do not necessarily have the power to change the direction of the university no matter how certain that our version of the future is correct.
  4. Lastly, larger, consensus based, democratic organizations (like Universities) generally change more slowly than smaller organizations that have strong central authority to dictate to their direction (like Corsera, et al.). This is a double edged sward. On one hand we are not as nimble as smaller start-ups. On the other hand we have resources and prestige that can allow us to be very competitive if we can create a consensus to move in the “right” direction in a timely fashion.

Trying to figure out what is the “right” direction is the tricky part, and what I think we’re headed towards in the Strategic Planning process at the library where I work. One point to remember is that railroad companies survive to this day, but they are much less important than they were a century ago, in large part because they were unable to recoginize the importance of new technologies, and integrate them into their businesses.

P.S. Here are two great articles on the future of libraries by Seth Godin & Clay Shirky as food for thought:

Is the MOOC / Coursera Model the Future of Higher Education in Canada?

2012.10.04
education
2 Comments

A lot has been written about the rise of Coursera and MOOC’s (Massive Open Online Courses) over the past year.  Increasing numbers of prestigious universities are offering online courses for free to anyone in the world with an internet connection, spare time and motivation.  Is this the direction that higher education in Canada will take?  I don’t think so. Except for a small number of courses on the fringes of academia, MOOC’s will not go mainstream in Canada.  Why not? Because hybrid classes – a mix of web based recorded lectures and exercises, so professors can spend more time in class interacting with students – are more effective and less costly than traditional lecture based classes. Here are three reasons why MOOC’s will not become main stream in Canadian Higher Education:

#1 As far as I can tell, there is currently no evidence that MOOC’s are as effective as traditional lecture based classes or hybrid classes.  The two positive things we know for sure about MOOC’s as they are currently being run, is that they are much less costly, and are more accessible to people who do not live close to universities.  My sense is that eventually studies will show that MOOC’s as they are currently run, are less effective at achieving learning outcomes than hybrid courses, and lecture based courses.

#2 Student interaction, socializing and networking are something that MOOC’s will have a hard time replicating.  Friendships and relationships formed in by students are they earn their degrees can be as important to the success of students in the long run as the degree itself.  In addition, while hard to quantify, I believe that a significant amount of learning at Universities happens between classes and in social settings on and off campus.

#3 Hybrid classes (or flipped classrooms), in at least some disciplines, are significantly more effective than traditional lecture based classes. From wikipedia: “Flip teaching [or a hybrid class] is a form of blended learning which encompasses any use of Internet technology to leverage the learning in a classroom, so a teacher can spend more time interacting with students instead of lecturing.” Hybrid classes are not only more effective, but in the long run will cost less for universities to run because of the lower use of classroom time. There will still be papers and assignments for professors and teaching assistants to mark for each student, but less time in classrooms mean that universities and colleges can serve more 50-100% more students without adding additional classroom space.  Hybrid classes are not yet common in higher education, so there is significant room for disciplines to take advantage of the cost savings and learning outcomes.

Universities in the US and Canada are currently under enormous pressure to reduce the cost of educating students. The extremely low long term costs associated with running MOOC’s must be tantalizing to university administrators.  While tantalising, they will not work as well as hybrid courses, or even lecture based courses in most disciplines, especially where lab time and experimentation are important.  There is also the issue of how universities can make money while running MOOC’s. One option is to offer the MOOC’s for free or low cost, and then charge fees for testing and credentialing to pay for the courses.

MOOC’s are currently being experimented with at major universities around the world, however I believe that they will only displace traditional lectures at institutions where cost constraints are so severe that they have no other choice. Fortunately most Canadian universities and colleges are not in that position. That is why I believe they will pursue the Hybrid or Flipped classroom model, as they offer the potential to reduce the cost of higher education (for governments at least), and improve learning outcomes for students.

Links:

  1. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/04/opinion/brooks-the-campus-tsunami.html
  2. http://nation.time.com/2012/09/04/mooc-brigade-will-massive-open-online-courses-revolutionize-higher-education/
  3. http://chronicle.com/article/How-Flipping-the-Classroom/130857/
  4. http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/the-flip-turning-a-classroom-upside-down/2012/06/03/gJQAYk55BV_print.html
  5. http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/05/06/got-a-computer-get-a-degree/the-promise-of-lower-costs-and-quality-education
  6. http://www.sr.ithaka.org/research-publications/interactive-learning-online-public-universities-evidence-randomized-trials
  7. http://edcetera.rafter.com/the-hybrid-classroom-just-as-effective-as-in-person-lecturing/

UVic Law Student Technology Survey 2012

2012.09.28
education, Google, iPhone, Work
2 Comments

Introduction to the Survey Results

In addition to the technology questions we’ve been asking UVic Law students over the past ten years, we decided for the first year to ask more detailed questions about student use of tablets and e-readers for academic use, along with questions about their usage of “cloud” services for file storage and collaboration. This survey was completed by 126 incoming and transferring law students, which is a strong 90% plus response rate.

Executive Summary:

  • 89% of incoming law students own “Smart Phones” that can browse the internet (up from 84% last year and 50% two years ago), with 48% of the total being iPhones, 29% Android and 11% Blackberry (Blackberry usage down from 27% last year).
  • 31% of students own tablet devices or ebook readers, up from 19% last year.
  • When it comes to reading school related documents, students report reading those documents in bound books 46% of the time, on laptops 35% of the time, on laser printed pages 16% of the time, and on tablet devices 3% of the time.
  • 99% of students own laptops.  49% of laptops are Mac’s, and 48% Windows.
  • The students’ average typing speed is 49 wpm.
  • 68% of all students bring their laptops to school most days.
  • 75% of students use laptops to take class notes, 63% use pen and paper, 6% use tablets and 3% use their cell phones.
  • 53% of students use Gmail as their primary email account, 7% use UVic email and 20% Hotmail.
  • 33% of students identified Google Drive as their favorite tool for collaborative document editing. 22% favor DropBox, 4% Apple iCloud and 3% Microsoft Sky Drive.
  • 95% of students use Facebook (down from 97% last year, but up from 91% two years ago), 34% user Twitter, 21% Linked In, 10% Google+ and 4% no online social networks.


Smart Phone / Cell Phone Ownership

89% of students own “Smart Phones” or phones with built in web browsers that allow them to surf the internet on their cell phones.  That is up significantly from 84% last year, and 50% of smart phone owners two years ago.  Blackberry ownership dropped significantly from 27% last year to 11% this year.

On the other end of the spectrum, 4% of students do not own a cell phone at all which is up from 2% last year. This is still significantly lower than the 11% of our sample of all law students who reported no cell phone in the spring of 2010. Just as laptop owner ship has been close to 100% since 2007, cell phone is now almost 100% as well.

From the library and faculty’s perspective this is an important area to watch, as there are a number of interesting new technologies (like QR Codes, NFC, Mobile websites and Adaptive websites) that could potentially enhance the services that depend on library patrons having access to the internet on their mobile devices.

Read More

Google+ Hangouts Meetings More Productive Than Face to Face?

2012.06.19
education, Google
Leave a Comment

I’ve used Google+ Hangouts for several meetings now out of the necessity of bringing together three other colleagues from across North America to collaborate on a day long seminar.  I was pleasantly surprised at how well it worked, not only as a group video conferencing tool, but also as a document collaboration platform (using the embedded Google Docs functionality). For me these two features combined made it almost easier to conduct our meeting remotely from the four corners of North America than it would have had we all been in the same room.

 

In preparation for our meeting I initially assumed we’d be using Skype for the meeting, and wondered if anyone had a paid account so we’d be able to use the group video conferencing feature (person to person video is free on Skype, but multi-person video is only available if one of the participants is a paying customer).  When I realized that the main focus of the meeting would be to prepare the outline for our seminar, I remembered reading something about the collaborative document editing feature in Google+ Hangouts.

My suggestion to use Hangouts was agreed to, and the meeting was very productive.  The video and audio quality were excellent, and the ability to co-edit a our outline document, and see who is editing the document in real time, was extremely useful.  The ability to take and share our notes speeded up the meeting considerably, as once a point was typed out, if everyone agreed, we simply moved on. If there wasn’t agreement, we discussed further and the point was edited. No misunderstanding, no rehashing who agreed to what days later.  Here is a short video (with no audio) demonstrating the co-editing feature of Hangouts.

That said, I highly recommend you give Google+ Hangouts try for an upcoming meeting, even if the participants are local!  Here are the pros and cons of the software from my perspective:

Google+ Hangouts Pros:

  • High quality video and audio for up to 10 users.
  • Cross platform: Windows, Mac, Android, iOS.
  • Collaborative document editing.
  • Screen Sharing.
  • Sketch pad capabilities.
  • Hangouts on Air feature allows more than 10 users to view the meeting.

Google+ Hangouts Cons:

  • Everyone has to use a google account to participate.

eBook Publishing Made Easy: Google Docs + Sigil + Calibre

2012.06.06
education, Google, Open Source, Work
3 Comments

How hard could it be?  Those are usually the last words I utter before descending into a quagmire of technical pain as I work through how to use and master a new technology. Fortunately this time, making an eBook and related hard copy book turned out to be a straightforward and fairly easy process to master… once all the appropriate tools were identified and lined up, that is. An added bonus is that all the software is free to download and use on both Windows, Mac and Linux computers.

This project started a couple of months ago when a coworker kindly suggested that I write a paper based on a presentation I give to classes of law students on software tools for research and collaboration: Research & Collaboration Tools for Students, Staff & Faculty: Creating a Modern Memex. With that encouragement I started writing with my current favourite writing tool, Google Docs.

Related YouTube Video: eBook Publishing Made Easy

Step 1 Google Docs: Google Docs is particularly good for collaborative document editing but it is also capable enough for academic writing. This means that it supports footnotes, endnotes, bibliographies, tables of contents, inline images, and style sheets among other things. For the purposes of this project, it also does a great job of exporting all of these features and formatting into a HTML document, which is exactly what we need for the next step of our project… creating an ePub file in Sigil.  If you use Microsoft Word or OpenOffice instead of Google Docs, you can still save your document as an HTML file and then import it into Sigil.  Note, you should not proceed to the next step until you have completed writing, editing and revising your document. This is because if there are any changes you need to make after this point, you’ll need to redo steps 2 and 3 every time you “edit” your document.

Read More

Research & Collaboration Tools for Students, Staff & Faculty: a Free eBook

2012.06.04
education, Google, Open Source, WebApps
Leave a Comment

I’ve just finished creating eBook and paper book versions of a paper that I recently wrote called, “Research & Collaboration Tools for Students, Staff & Faculty: Creating a Modern Memex“.  It should be helpful for anyone doing research, but especially for high school students, university students, teachers and faculty. At 55 pages in paper book format, it is a short but informative read.

As a personal learning project, I’ve made the book available in multiple formats, so that it is accessible to everyone who is interested in reading it. Feel free to send a link to this page to anyone who you think might find this short book helpful. I’ve published it using the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

If you have an iPad, be sure to download the “iBooks for iPad only” version, as it is a multi-media edition, that includes embedded videos that unfortunately the other formats do not yet support.

Please let me know if you have any questions, concerns, comments or suggestions for the book.  If you read a free version of the book, please leave a review in the Kindle Store, as I suspect this will help others discover the book.

Enjoy!

creative_commons_share_alike

My Love-Hate Relationship with eBooks

2011.10.21
education, Work
Leave a Comment

I have been an advocate for eBooks for a couple of years now, but in spite of the the flexibility and features that eBooks provide, my relationship with them is not always as loving is it could be.  Let me start by listing all the things I love about eBooks:

  1. Portability: Being able to take a dozen books with me when I go on trips is wonderful (and taking them without breaking my back).  Being able to have my book with me whenever I have my iPhone with me is great, especially when I’m stuck in a doctor’s office, or on a bus.
  2. Ease of Purchase: No need to travel across town to go to the book store.  I can buy books on my iPhone or computer, and then have instant delivery to all my devices.
  3. Instant Dictionary Access: With some books in particular, being able to simply click on a word and instantly get a dictionary definition has made a high difference in my reading comprehension and enjoyment. Last summer I read the 20 book Master and Commander series, and found the dictionary feature to be invaluable as I was introduced into all sorts of archaic English and old nautical terms.
  4. Ability to see where other’s have highlighted parts of the book (in the Kindle app): This is a great flag to let me know when I should slow down and really pay attention when I’m reading.  This would be particularly helpful when reading text books.
  5. Syncing bookmarks between devices. As a person with multiple reading devices (and iPad and iPhone) being able to switch back and forth between the two, and have them both keep track of where I am in the book is an extremely handy feature.
  6. Lastly as a person who’s eyes are starting to grow older, I can envision a day when I will appreciate the ability to increase the font size of the books I’m reading, without have to purchase a large text book.

In summary, eBooks have a lot of great things going for them.  What is there not to like? Unfortunately a few things… Now for my list of complaints that turn my relationship with eBooks rocky from time to time:

  1. DRM is Evil! Most of my complaints below would go away if Digital Rights Management (DRM) software was not used when publishing eBooks.
  2. Cannot copy and past a paragraph into an email or to Facebook.
  3. I cannot choose the eBook reader I want to read my eBooks in.  If I buy an eBook from Amazon, I have to read it in the Kindle reader. If I buy a eBook from Apple, I can only read it in the Apple iBook reader.  I should be able to choose which app I want to read my books in no matter what store I’ve purchased it in.
  4. I can’t put my eBooks on my bookshelf at home to show off to visitors what books I’ve read, and what some of my interests are for (I guess that is what GoodReads.com is for).
  5. Apocalypse protection:  If I’m away from civilization for some reason, and cannot charge me electronic devices, my beautiful eBook readers turn into pretty paper weights.
  6. For some people the color screens on tablets are hard on their eyes.  For them, color eBook readers are a no go.

So yes, I do love my eBooks, but as in most relationships there is definitely room for growth and improvement.  While I’m waiting for eBook vendors to improve I’ll enjoy reading books on my iPad and iPhone and try to ignore the shortcomings.

QR Codes Make The Physical World Linkable

2011.08.09
education, iPhone, Work
1 Comment

You can’t put a hyper-link on a poster, sheet of paper or bookmark, but you can put on a QR Code. It is a much easier and more accurate way to link to a web page than to type a URL into your smart phone.

How can I use QR Codes?

Using a QR Code reader on your smart phone (like the Google App on an iPhone or Android phone) you simply take a picture of the QR Code and the reader redirects you to a mobile web page or some other resource on theinternet. Depending on what you download, you’ll be able to:

  • Read a web page with text and pictures
  • Watch a video
  • Listen to an audio file
  • Download an app
  • Register for an event or buy tickets

QR Codes are commonly used on posters, in print ads, on bookmarks, on business cards and even on web pages.

My current favourite QR code reader for the iPhone is the Scan by QR Code City (search for “Scan” in the App store). For all other smart phones, I’d suggest trying the free Neo Reader.

Enjoy!

P.S. Here is handout with QR Code information. Here is a bookmark sheet to go along with the handout.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

%d bloggers like this: