Educational Twitter Problems

Twitter has and has had tremendous promise for use as an educational tool but bringing it into broad educational usage is fraught with challenges, some that have to do with students, the administration, and faculty…and some with Twitter’s own policies.

Added in 2009 Twitter lists are also a great way to group together and make the tweets you follow more manageable. Since your lists can be private or

public, you can also follow lists themselves, essentially follow the tweets of sets of others without following them individually.

For a few years, we have been using Twitter as an administrative communications tool. We post weather and classroom closing, registration, and student program information. It has been a hard sell to our students and to our faculty. Our faculty members believe they do not have the time to learn new applications. Our students also do not want to learn anything they are not already using. Our increasingly younger students attempt to use Facebook for everything rather than explore other things that may be useful for other purposes. Additionally our IT administration of our collective colleges does not trust the permeability and security of free systems. After our college successfully began using Twitter for weather messages, the system of colleges licensed a pay system that can send emergency messages to cell phones but not much else.

Last year my department cosponsored bringing to speakers Mark Freydenberg and Ben Aslinger, Bentley University professors, to our college for a presentation on Web 2.0 technologies that they use in the classroom. I find fascinating their discussions about using Twitter and cell phones in the classroom as a way to get better and more rapid participation and feedback from their students. Their integration with Twapperkeeper meant

that they could capture and archive Twitter discussions for better analysis of their content and quality. It was disappointing to hear that Twitter used their terms of service to eradicate Twapperkeeper. However, there may other ways to capture the content.

For the past semester, our numbers of Twitter users were at about 17% our official college Facebook Insight numbers. We began using more than a year before Facebook but despite concerted efforts the number of users has not budged by more than one percent.

The future of Twitter is unclear. Twapperkeeper founder John O’Brien believes that Twitter is forcing out helping applications so that they can develop and somehow monetize these aspects themselves. However, I have not seen the results of their efforts so far. The popularity of Facebook dominates the college landscape. Facebook also continues to morph into the social media application that does what all others do. So far the only uncopied advantage Twitter has is that it forces users to be more concise with its 140 character limit. But is that an advantage or simply an anachronistic novelty?

Missing the Value of LinkedIn

A few weeks ago I participated in a discussion about the difference between elearning and distance learning with a number of educators: a consultant, CEO of a mission, a professor, an online trainer, a CLO, a teacher/writer, and a technology director. They were from Washington, D.C., Utah, Great Britain, California, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Virginia, and Oregon. They had all volunteered to be a part of the discussion, to share their knowledge and perceptions. For each of them I was able to see online resumes so I could verify that they had some experience, education, and/or background knowledge. I could tell quickly that their comments were valid and reliable during our discussion. We had this conversation asynchronously over a couple of months. A couple of individuals posted research links and other references. I do not normally directly network with any of them but I know people who know some of them. With this asynchronous conversation happening I received emails each time someone posted so that I did not have to constantly check this for two months. During this time several people looked at my background and experience, some desiring to connect with others in my profession, others looking for collaborators or employees with my skill sets. All of this happened in LinkedIn.

In the paragraph above, I have done more to explain what LinkedIn does than the sum total of news coverage for the past couple of weeks. The media focused on the initial public offering and continually asked us if the fact that the IPO did so well was due to a new dot-com boom. They asked us this question even though they gave us only one possible answer. They did not talk about the possibility that LinkedIn has intrinsic value, how it is different than Facebook and Twitter, how the business has grown over the last five years, that it is populated not by everyone you know but by colleagues, that LinkedIn profiles people but has ways to plug in business and industry, and that because LinkedIn is connecting individuals with the same professional interests it is also building the most powerful electronic “mailing list” in the world. The media—all the media—really failed in informing us so that we could answer their question intelligently.

For five years, I have been trying to generate interests at my college in LinkedIn which I believe has enormous value for our students and faculty. I have always placed Linked in the pantheon of social media: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. I organized workshops and talked to many individuals as we worked on other projects. It has been an uphill climb but some of our faculty members are encouraging students to get the account and those students are using LinkedIn to get jobs.

For their part, the students initially do not like LinkedIn. They want it to be Facebook. Although LinkedIn is making what I believe are some antithetical concessions, it is not the place where you post what you are wearing or where you are eating dinner. It is not the place that you post your favorite jokes and pictures of your vacation. It is not the place for concise blast messages. Not the playground Facebook has become, it is grown-up. It is the networking of the adult world, a digital place where time, money and other resources matter and a place where who you connect to online has more of an impact than on your feelings. Students have to be taught the value of LinkedIn, just as I have to teach our faculty and college administrators. Just as the media should be “teaching” everyone. Having stated this, I cannot deny that there is a potential for people to make a boat-load of money but this is not the only story. It is not even the main story.

Compfight for Images

From the January edition e-Learning review I discovered a really neat Web 2.0 tool called Compfight, which allows you to search the Internet for images. Okay so you're wondering can't I already do that with Google? Yes, you can but you have a limited—yes, Google, I said limited set of ways that you can search. Compfight is a Flickr image search tool. Compfight’s thumbnails make it easy to use as well.

Compfight allows you to search for images in safe and unsafe modes as Google does. It also allows you to the license. You can choose "any

license, creative Commons, commercial" to sort the images based on the license. You can also find just the original versions of the picture, its copies, or both. Plus if you like the picture you find this button so that you can tweet it or Facebook it right away.

As a learning management system administrator and a faculty trainer at my college I must confess that it is difficult to help even our faculty users understand some of the ins and outs of copyright, fair use, and public domain items when it comes to their course. Lately we've been talking just a little bit more about Creative Commons which perhaps offers a middle ground, a place where others are willingly sharing their content but also specify exactly what you can do with it. This is what is missing in the general Internet search with Google.

One thing that always concerns when a powerful, new free tool appears on the Internet is its long-term prospects. So many web companies start out as free hope they will be bought out by someone "big." Other companies are hoping that once they get us addicted to the usage their pages that we will be willing to pay for the service. Since change the college is a process not an event, training people to use something new is problematic if that item only last a couple of years. Come by which began in 2008 is already due for some administrative changes. And according to Site Trail it is respectable usage numbers. Still is valuable enough that for now I am advising people to use it before it becomes a pay service.

Too Much Interactivity in Online Courses

The first time I heard it I was at a Sloan-C conference a few years ago. It was a small isolated study so I regarded it as a curiosity rather than a study to cause us to re-examine our online learning philosophy. Since then, I have seen it again a couple more times. Last year in the Distance Learning Report a different group of researchers reported that increased interactivity lead to decreased student satisfaction and may actually decrease a student’s chance of success in the course.

It makes sense to me that increased work places a student under increased stress to make sure the extra activities are completed in a timely fashion.

Despite the sample sizes and the program implications, I can accept the possibility of the veracity of the researchers’ claims. It makes sense that in the continuum of online learning activities there is both a point where the activities can be insufficient in number to allow the students to adequately achieve the course objectives and a point at which adding more does not mean the students learn more.

However, I am not interested in seeing more studies showing the same on either side, “those fer and those agin.” For those of you doing research I propose the following questions. Where are the lines to be drawn? Where is the “sweet spot” in the middle where it is ideal for learning, not too much but containing sufficient rigor? Is “sufficient rigor” the same for all institutions of higher learning? If not, what accounts for the differences? Who is best suitable to determine what is too much or too little, faculty, administrators, student, accrediting bodies, states, or the federal government? Is there a different point depending on discipline?

For now, I suspect that at most institutions for a sizeable percentage of institutions there is too little interactivity, especially if the institutions allow instructors to design their own content. Answering the questions above can help us to repair this problem.

Where Are the Faculty Leaders for Digital Humanities?

A colleague recently sent me a link to a New York Times article, Digital Keys for Unlocking the Humanities’ Riches by Patricia Cohen.


In the article Cohen describes how the new world of data is leading to studies and research in the world of humanities that just were not possible in the past such digitally mapping Civil War battlefields to determine topography‘s role or “using databases of thousands of jam sessions to track how musical collaborations influenced jazz”.

The article is not a list of hitherto unquantifiable potentialities; it asks the question of purpose and value of the information being obtained.

The article is yet further reinforcement that even technophobic or techno-agnostic educators must shift their positions to provide guidance to our digital native students. Even though technology is not their field, this means that educators must continually educate themselves in the both what kinds of technology are available to their students and how to use them. It means that my colleagues can ill afford to spend their time only on their disciplines but must now consider technology usage to be as much a part of their disciplines as is using the library. It means that technology, particularly office and web 2.0 applications, must play a role in classroom sessions.

Another colleague once told me that technology tools are best when they work right and remain in the background. Cohen’s article helps to show that viewing technology through this lens may be shortchanging our students regardless the discipline.

What’s In a Campus Edition?

Why do companies marketing to educators and students love to name their products campus edition? I suppose that the name is intended to make us see that they are creating something specifically for us. However, what exactly are they creating? The term does not seem to refer to the same set of things each time.

Most of my colleagues are familiar with the WebCT Campus Edition and Blackboard Campus Edition learning management systems. These LMS versions are being steadily morphed into Blackboard 9. At some point there will be no online Blackboard campus using the term campus edition. However, based on how frequently the term is used, I do not think there will be any shortage of products or services that do use the term.

An example is Mozilla Firefox Campus Edition 2.0.0.6, a student-centered variant of the Firefox browser that added two components, an iTunes control called FoxyTunes and a research manager called Zotero.

Wimba’s Campus Edition product is called Genuine Genie. It is designed to allow presumably a teacher or college professor to convert easily Microsoft Word documents into web pages. Added features will also allow interactivity to be built into the web pages. The web pages can be loaded into LMS courses. This product is a somewhat schizophrenic and has several permutations of its name/brand: Genuine Genie, Course Genie 2.0, and a version contained in Lectora (another name of prevalence).

One of the latest campus editions to hit the streets is by PBworks, formerly PBwiki. The shift from wiki to works signals that PBworks is expanding its business model. Unlike its basic free account PBworks Campus Edition provides unlimited premium workspaces for $799/year. The premium version offers centralized control, centralized account creation, centralized monitoring of accounts, branding of the PBworks accounts, and easy site administration. A planned add-on will be plagiarism tools. In effect, PBworks is nudging more into the realm of the LMS.

Whether or not PBworks is successful remains to be seen. In the present economy, the low cost is certainly in their favor. If past trends continue, one sure thing is that Campus Edition will not be the final name of their product and they will not be the last to call their product campus edition.

Is Voice Better than Text?

I recently read about Nuance Communication’s Dragon Dictation app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Nuance has created this app version of its remarkable Dragon Naturally Speaking software which allows you to speak into a microphone while Dragon types the text for you. Distance learning professionals have loved Dragon Naturally Speaking and comparable software for years. Many distance learning professionals will also gravitate toward to Dragon Dictation app which adds greater mobility to their ability to work at a distance. (This app is currently free in the US and Canada but if it becomes popular the cost will undoubtedly rise.)


Other Voice to Text Technologies

Of course, Dragon Naturally Speaking has not been the only technology to transcribe voice to text. Microsoft has long built this capability into its operating systems. However, it has not been something that they have marketed as value added, perhaps because it has been woefully inferior to Dragon until recently. Although Dragon Naturally speaking is still in my opinion the best, Microsoft has recently put some pretty good speech recognition software in Windows 7. It starts up easily and works a million times better than their previous versions although Dragon is still better.

Problems

With the app and speech recognition, professionals have gained powerful new tools to help them conduct distance learning courses which are largely text-based. However, does the use of the tools translate into better courses or better service to the students? From my own experiences the answer seems mixed.

One problem is over-reliance on the software. Dragon boasts that it is 99% accurate—and it is amazingly accurate—but there are drawbacks. Dragon learns to recognize your individual speech patterns as you use it and that takes time for the accuracy to get really good. Even so it makes mistakes and herein is a significant difficulty. You need to proof-read your own text from Dragon which is tough for lengthy passages where Dragon got 99% of it right but there are hidden sections that Dragon bobbled but with real words.

Years ago when I first installed Dragon I felt liberated from my slow typing speed. Now I could “type” at the speed of thought. For my online students this meant that I could answer their questions with more detailed, more nuanced answers. In actuality, many of my answers because less succinct. The reading involved in an online class already takes a good deal of time. Long instructor passages take even more time. Lengthy answers from instructors can confuse those who are not strong readers.

It has been my experience and I have heard from others that there is a fair amount of mental processing while typing with the keyboard. For most people, speech may happen to rapidly for this to occur. Speech is also perceived as relatively informal, a fact which we easily tolerate when speaking to someone, but becomes written speech significantly increases the expectation that there will be a more formal structure to the content and that more thought will be embodied in the construction of the content.

Why transcribe at all?

Sometimes I wonder why we bother transcribing at all. Would it not be better if we are speaking anyway to simply record the lecture and post the audio? This would help to students who may have some kinds of learning disabilities. This could help students who have differences in learning styles. This would enable students to listen to the content while mobile such as on an iPod or other mp3 device, which fits with the busy way our world works now.

Some of my colleagues argue that making the text available to students is important still to promote textual literacy, that it is still important for students to master written communication. Yet the same colleagues do not know what to make of the current texting phenomenon, which has students producing more text-based communications than ever.

Perhaps programs like Dragon and the new Dragon app could make a huge impact if adopted for texting. In fact, it could help us solve some of the issues we are fighting in education such as sentences in all lower-case with no punctuation and myriad acronyms. Teens, and all of us, could type as fast as the thoughts occur. This would remove the need for large QWERTY keyboards on phones. The question is would it be adopted because again we do not understand why texting is so popular. When we do we will be able to address the educational problems and move more decisively toward changes in the way students learn and the way we provide them information online.