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Below is an example of the kind of free coverage
of conferences and industry events found within
LearningTimes.org. Join
today to enjoy real-time access to a growing
repository of knowledge shared among a network
of colleagues worldwide.
In this "Audio
and Photo Blog", LearningTimes member
Dan Balzer shares perspectives,
images and audio interviews from leaders in
the community college world with educators
in LearningTimes.org, live from the League
for Innovation's "Conference on Information
Technology" in
Tampa, Florida. |
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Audio-Photo Blog: Conference on Information Technology
(CIT) from Tampa, Florida
Excerpted
from the community at LearningTimes.org.
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this and other resources (it's free).
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#1 - |
Dan
Balzer Live from the League CIT 2004 |
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Reply |
Date: November
8, 2004 7:11 PM
From: dbalzer |
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LearningTimes.org member Dan Balzer at the LearningTimes studio in Tampa, Florida - home of the 2004 Conference on Information Technology.
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Welcome to sunny Tampa, Florida where approximately 3,000 community college educators have gathered for the 20th Annual Conference on Information Technology November 7-10, 2004 organized by the League for Innovation. While here I decided to capture my experience by sharing some of the sites, sounds and insights from the conference with the larger community of educators.
As an instructional designer, I am always looking for teaching strategies that really work whether they involve a technology tool or not! I approached this like a private investigator, trying to uncover the hidden nuggets in every session I attended.
So here is my "as it happens" audio blog.
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#2 - |
Computers
and Developmental Language: A Clustered Approach
to Learning - Paula Velluto |
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Reply |
Date: November
8, 2004 7:22 PM
From: dbalzer |
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Paula Velluto of Bunker Hill Community College is a computer information systems instructor who has teamed up with a Developmental Writing and a Sociology instructor to teach computer skills in what she calls a "cluster model". Students enroll in all three courses and take them simultaneously. She's piloting a unique approach: All the assignments integrate content and skills from all three courses - a fascinating concept. For example, the Reading instructor uses Paula's textbook on how to use Microsoft Word as the content for the writing course. So students format Microsoft Word documents and then submit the final product to the Writing Instructor for assistance with grammar and organization.
The instructors share the course load and cross-fertilize all the skills. A powerful combination for a wholistic learning experience. Student retention in the courses went from 60% to 80%.
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#3 - |
Impressions
of the conference from Patrice Hess |
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Reply |
Date: November
8, 2004 7:23 PM
From: dbalzer |
| Patrice
Hess is an Instructional Technologist from Illinois
Central College in Peoria, IL. She is a frequent presenter at teaching and learning conferences such as this one. She gave me her candid observations of the conference so far! Obviously she thinks it was worth the trip from central Illinois to Tampa. Especially since it's
snowing in Illlinois. :)
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#4 - |
Designing
Online Group Projects - my roundtable discussion |
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Reply |
Date: November
8, 2004 7:28 PM
From: dbalzer |
I
facilitated a roundtable discussion on designing
online group projects. The session featured activities from a scenario-based online professional development course that we offer to faculty. This was hands-on and interactive with participants exploring the do's and dont's of designing online group projects. The participants pointed out that the most frustrating aspects of implementing online group projects in their courses is the difficulty of keeping all students actively engaged in the groups and evaluating them fairly. On the positive side, several faculty said that it's worth the effort because group work is an essential skill for today's students as they enter the marketplace. We laughed, we worked hard on some case studies and we shared our dreams about creating more effective online collaboration. I
enjoyed it, so yes it was worth the trip.
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Mary Barnam gave her insights after the workshop:
Also pictured are session participants Daryl Peterson, Director of Valencia
ScenariosOnline and David Hosman, a faculty developer from Valencia Community
College discussing how to encourage faculty to incorporate collaborative
activities in their courses.
Daryl Peterson and David Hosman. |
Dan Balzer speaking with Mary Barnam, a participant in
his workshop on designing online group projects.
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#5 - |
General
Session: The Honorable Jeb Bush, Governor of
Florida |
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Date: November
8, 2004 7:32 PM
From: dbalzer |
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[Governor of Florida] Jeb Bush was quite impressive - mainly because of his candid and approachable style and strong praise for the work that community colleges do. He invited educators to email him at jeb@jeb.org to share their ideas about enhancing education "if it isn't going anywhere in your state". :) Jeb drew our attention to the realities of the 21st century and what he called the "new economy" - namely, the emergence of self-employed entrepeneurs who can work from anywhere in the world to make a living. To illustrate his point he stated that a recent study showed that 350,000 people make a fulltime living selling on eBay! Wow, that was a revelation. Judging by my own increasing use of eBay I'm glad to be contributing to someone else's livelihood.
The Governor lauded community colleges for consistently being adaptable to changing social and economic forces to train and retrain today's workforce. He also fielded about 10 questions from the audience (of 3,000) and gave his perspective on several education-related issues in the responses. In response to a question on assessment in higher education he simply replied, "If you don't measure, you don't care." The audio clip here gives his most poignant and hopeful response to a question about the future of community colleges in the US.
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Gov. Jeb Bush (Florida) following his speech at the CIT 2004 conference in Tampa. Dan Balzer got in close for the shot above, and positioned himself well for the bird's eye view below.
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#6 - |
Poster
Session: Copyright Tools for Educators - Jeff
Bathe |
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Reply |
Date: November
8, 2004 7:37 PM
From: dbalzer |
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Jeff Bathe is a colleague from Illinois and works as the Director of Instructional Technology and Alternative Delivery at Kankakee Community College in Kankakee, IL. He put together an impressive Poster Session on copyright issues designed to assist educators who wrestle with what they can and can't do in their courses. Jeff was handing out CD Roms created for this project which feature roleplays of faculty and students confronted with tough copyright issues. He is clearly taking a complex topic and putting it into a format that is readily accessible AND understandable. This is someone to keep an eye on for further user-friendly materials on this tough issue.
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Jeffrey Bathe with his impressive poster session on copyright issues.
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#7 - |
Beyond
Google - Debbie Robinson |
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Reply |
Date: November
8, 2004 8:26 PM
From: dbalzer |
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Debbie Robinson, US Naval Academy
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This session came at the end of the second day and was a breath of fresh air. Debbie is on the staff at the Nimitz Library at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD. The subtitle of Debbie's topic was Pushing Quality Information Resources to Students via Course Management Systems. That's a mouthful but basically she is exploring creative ways to make research links and tutorials available to students when they need it - just enough, just-in-time and just-for-them. She explained that is has been an uphill battle to develop partnerships with faculty to include her as a team-member in bringing the best library resources and research techniques to the students during their courses.
At this point in the session she said, "I decided to make lemonade out of these lemons." |
Her vision is to make the resources available in a Blackboard course management system. But rather than just posting pages of links and tutorials in the online environment, she challenges her faculty (and us) to use the tools in Blackboard to customize the information for the students. Here's an example she gave: Two weeks before the US elections, she posted an announcement in an American Government course with a link to a database on the electoral process. The URL she posted coincided with an assignment they were to complete about the elections. Rather than burying the link in a Resource List for the course, she pulled out just that one citation for the students at the moment they would most need it. It was relevant to current events and assisted them in completing the instructor's assignment.
From my perspective, Debbie is taking a familiar tool - Blackboard - and seeking to maximize its potential, not just use it to emulate what we do in the face-to-face classroom. That was refreshing - like a glass of fresh-squeezed lemonade. |
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#8 - |
In
the exhibit hall - a chat with Rena Palloff
and Keith Pratt |
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Reply |
Date: November
8, 2004 8:29 PM
From: dbalzer |
Authors Keith Pratt and Rena Palloff, the LearningTimes squirrel, and Dan Balzer at the LearningTimes.org studio at CIT 2004 in Tampa, Florida. |
As I strolled over to the LearningTimes studio in the exhibit hall, I had the fortuitous opportunity to meet Rena Palloff and Keith Pratt. Well-known for their books on Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace, we naturally became engaged in a lively discussion about their latest book-writing projects. Here they are to tell you about them...
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#9 - |
A
Tapas Moment with Jonathan Finkelstein |
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Reply |
Date: November
10, 2004 9:40 AM
From: dbalzer |
An unexpected turn of events (namely, a meeting that didn't happen) turned into a rare occasion for me to share a Tapas style dinner with Jonathan. Like many of you, I had only worked and interacted with Jonathan virtually. Now I got to sit and chat about where we came from, how our past has influenced our present perspectives and where we hope to head in the future in this ever-changing field of virtual reality.
Jonathan Finkelstein and Dan Balzer at the LearningTimes studio at CIT 2004.
Jonathan grew up in New York and recalled listening to his parents, both school teachers, share the challenges and successes of life in the classroom. Then he described how a brief meeting with a Superintendent in New York City has now burgeoned into a dynamic online professional development program that is transforming how teachers learn and how they teach in their classrooms. One critical key to the success: deliver what you promise! The consistent, timely and quality customer service that LearningTimes delivers for the school district is something the schools seemed not have experienced in a while. Myself heavily involved in the professional development of educators, it made me reflect on how well I deliver what I promise - particularly, do I model the learning strategies in my training, that I am suggesting others use in their teaching? Hmmm...
I asked Jonathan, "What is your vision for the next 2-3 years?" After a pensive moment, Jonathan spoke about his dream of LearningTimes.org being a community where participation is a seamless experience for the community member with any tool (audio, video, discussion threads) easily integrated by the member. Then he spoke his plan to reorganize the online community around themes/concepts rather than tools to facilitate finding what each member is interested in. And finally, we discussed avatars and the possibility of choosing an avatar as you enter the community and then carrying that persona while in the community.
I found that Jonathan listens well and when he speaks, each word is carefully crafted and well-chosen. I'm not sure how he does it, but he has a way of inspiring risk-taking - this blog being evidence of that. Thanks, Jonathan, for a delightful evening and for mastering the audio and photos in the blog! |
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#10 - |
Building
Community and Peace – Steve Gilbert and
Jonathan Finkelstein |
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Reply |
Date: November
10, 2004 10:31 AM
From: dbalzer |
In
this Special Session, Steve Gilbert, President
of the TLT Group and Jonathan Finkelstein,
President of LearningTimes used the Elluminate
Live virtual classroom tool to connect the
dozen or so participants in the session with
guest presenters in three places in the world. (See
link to recording of the actual session under "Related
Content" (must be logged
in to LearningTimes.org.)
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We heard fascinating stories from three people who are themselves using technology in creative ways to link people together for important causes. Lorraine Leo, a K-6 technology integration teacher at in Massachussets, told us about how she linked her students via the virtual classroom (live audio and powerpoint slides) with Damian Damianopolus, an EFL teacher in Corfu, Greece, and with Dr. Steve Salisbury, a paleontologist in Winton, Queensland via audio and e-mail. Lorraine said:
"My students tracked Skipper Rich Wilson, on a trimaran as he sailed three record-breaking voyages via the sitesalive.com web site and satellite phone. During his Transat 2004 voyage he called my students from a satellite phone in the North Atlantic. I used a speaker phone to connect his audio to vClass. While my students asked him questions about his voyage, the live session was available to others in vClass."
Boy, I wish I was in her fourth grade class! Buthaina Al Othman, an ESL teacher in Kuwait, described how she participates in the Webheads, a group of ESL/EFL teachers around the world who support each other's teaching efforts through Yahoo Groups and the virtual classroom. And finally, Erwin Boschman and Joel Fath, shared their work with the Peace House in Indianapolis and its efforts to train young people in the practices and models of peace-building.
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At this moment during the session, Steve Gilbert addresses the face-to-face participants in Tampa, while Jonathan Finkelstein interacts with online attendees.
Lorraine Leo (on screen) from the Jackson School in Newton, MA, shares some of her community-building student activities with both online and face-to-face participants, while Jonathan Finkelstein acts as facilitator and the bridge between both groups.
Dan Balzer caught up with Steve Gilbert after the session. Listen here:
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This
session gave the conference a global perspective as we heard from
these grassroots innovators. The session was a great example of a multiple
venue production (see the webcast on MVPs under "Related Content"; must
be logged in to LearningTimes.org).
Steve Gilbert's
vision is to give shape to an online community that brings together peace-building
initiatives with people who are skilled in information technology. In
this session we got to see the first baby steps of community-building
in action! |
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#11 - |
Judith
Boettcher: "We don’t want standardized
brains" |
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Reply |
Date: November
10, 2004 10:35 AM
From: dbalzer |
Judith Boettcher signing a copy of her book while conversing with Dan Balzer after her keynote address at League CIT 2004.
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Judith Boettcher gave the keynote address on the third day of the conference. She has just released the second edition of the highly popular Faculty Guide for Moving Teaching and Learning to the Web. I got to sit down with her for a moment while she signed my copy of her new book. I asked her to share an insight with the LearningTimes community. Her comment was poignant: "We don't want standardized brains. As we teach, our students should become more different, not all the same." I found this to be a somewhat counter-cultural challenge to create learning experiences that move each student into their area of strength and giftedness, not simply into compliance with a given standard or competency mandated by the educational system. |
| A quote from her address
is also worth capturing: "Learning is intrinsically rewarding and enjoyable.
[It's] work, but rewarding and stimulating. We might say, 'It's hard fun'." I'll
have more to say on that notion in my Concluding Reflections. |
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#12 - |
Intercultural
Videoconferencing for ESL – Bert and
Mary Kimura with Koji Nakajima |
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Reply |
Date: November
10, 2004 10:40 AM
From: dbalzer |
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This dynamic trio led a well-organized, cohesive session on their adventure in linking community college students in Hawaii with Japanese students at Osaka Gakuin University through IP-based videoconferencing. They styled the session in the genre of a Japanese quiz show and added Japanese wafers to round out the cultural experience. This session by far had the best prizes - a Jumpdrive and cellphone cleaner for the winners of the quiz questions (No, I didn't win anything!).
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Koji Nakajima, Mary and Bert Kimura.
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Initially they had set up the
videoconference simply to give the Japanese students an opportunity to
practice their English-speaking skills in a real life context but to
their surprise it became much more than that. The students took
charge of their own learning, increased their expectations of what they
wanted to learn and followed up by email and text chat with their peers
in Hawaii after the videoconference sessions were over.
I was reminded of a long-standing tenet of mine about how
to design learning events - immerse students in a real life situation,
where they are confronted with authentic problems to solve (in this case,
being able to communicate in English) and the learning becomes relevant.
Mary Kimura closed out the session saying, "It was difficult,
but we had fun." |
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#13 - |
Creativity
meets ADA Compliance – Clarence Dobbins
and Sherry Aaker |
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Reply |
Date: November
10, 2004 10:44 AM
From: dbalzer |
Sherry Aaker and Clarence Dobbins, right after ther session. |
This was the last session I ws able to attend and it was a great way to end my experience at this year's
CIT. These two individuals were confronted with decreasing resources and an increased demand for services for hearing impaired students. Their solution was brilliant. After trying many software packages and the use of sign language interpreters, they harnessed free software from http://www.realvnc.com with Microsoft's
Reader, loaded it on two wireless laptops in a peer-to-peer setup and then hired a notetaker at $7/hour to take notes for hearing-impaired students during each class session. The
software allowed the hearing-impaired student to actually ask questions
during class, with the notetaker being the "voice of the student". The result: A savings of $60,000 in the first year and much higher participation and success of the hearing-impaired students.
Inspiring!
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#14 - |
Concluding
Reflections |
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Reply |
Date: November
10, 2004 10:54 AM
From: dbalzer |
| In Carol Twigg's keynote address on the first day she shared the history of two innovations that have changed our lives - the ATM and the telegraph. She pointed out that the first ATM was located, you guessed it, in a bank. And the Pony Express's response to the telegraph was to hire better riders and faster horses. It wasn't until ATM's were moved "out of the bank" that they really transformed consumer habits. And as we know, the Pony Express became obsolete.
She challenged us to "move the ATMs out of the bank" by redesigning courses so as to increase quality, reduce costs and increase access.
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View from the Tampa Convention Center in Florida, home of CIT 2004. |
In looking
back at the sessions that I attended, I can
see that her vision is becoming reality. The
grassroots, creative efforts of educators
like Clarence and Sherry, Lorraine Leo, Buth
and Erwin, Paula and a host of others are
testimony to the fact that we have moved
well beyond creating digital replicas of
face-to-face classrooms. And these
grassroots stimulators are accompanied by
the on-going probing and support of the more
well-known practitioners like Steve Gilbert,
Judith Boettcher and Carol Twiggs. Rather
than asking, "How can I do what I do in the
classroom in the online environment", I heard
educators asking, "What can I do with these
tools to address this problem that I am facing?"
I wonder, "How do we learn to see and embrace the new synergies, approaches and combinations of tools that dramatically change the way we teach and the way our students learn?"
I am convinced that where the synergies have emerged, we find people who have worked hard at designing engaging learning experiences with the tools available to them. And as we heard, in this conference, they tell us that they enjoyed it because they grappled with significant issues.
In a particularly pensive moment in the midst of these dynamic movements, I realized that much of this forward-moving energy is deeply rooted in the American value that "change is good and we can evolve to become smarter, making life better and easier." That's not a bad thing, it's simply an acknowledgement of a primary value that drives our desire to experiment and implement. And that's a space in which I gladly accept to live for a while.
So I join Mary Kimura in saying, the CIT 2004 was hard work, but it sure was fun! |
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| CONTINUED - |
SEE
FULL BLOG AND FINAL ANALYSIS |
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JOIN! |
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The
above posts were excerpted from the
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