Wednesday, October 10, 2007

AcademHack Inteview: Part I

Just last week I listed David Parry’s site AcademHack as the blog of the week.  In my experience, it is the best blog/site for academics interested in using tech in the classroom.  For someone like me, with limited tech skills, David’s site makes the gear and software more understandable and accessible.  As a new tenure tracker in Texas, David is swamped with work.  Fortunately for us, he agreed to an interview about useful classroom and professional applications for technology. 

What is the most useful Web 2.0 application in your academic toolbox? How do you use it?

By far the most important tool that I use for teaching are blogs; I use the term in the plural here because I am always using several at once (usually one per class, plus my own).  Blogs are the ideal platform for sharing information with students.  When I first started putting class material on the web for students to use I had to write and update my own website “by hand” (that is without a blog).  This was okay, as I learned a great deal about how web pages are made and designed (and learned how to write CSS and XHTML—the languages that creates web pages), but ultimately it was not very efficient.  The learning curve for this type of communication can be pretty steep; not only do you have to learn mark-up languages, but several different software programs for managing all of the files and writing the pages.  Even using a program such as RapidWeaver or Microsoft GoLive, which promise to make it easy, can take a substantial time investment.  I still recommend this for those who want to study Emergent Media, but for a majority of professors out there who are just looking for a useful and efficient way to communicate with students, blogs are the way to go.  They are markedly better than any of the other options for communicating with students such as Course Management Software (WebCT, Blackboard) or even email.

Blogs are ridiculously simple to use—if you can use a web browser and a word processor you can blog.  On some level I would argue that blogs seem to be designed for a pedagogical purpose.  The reverse chronological order of presentation is perfect for supplementing a class.  After every session I post to the class blog the assignment for our next meeting.  This makes it easy for students to access the assignment, plus it has the added feature of allowing me to add in extra contextual information, something one really can’t do on a syllabus.  One week I was teaching Foucault’s concept of the Panopticon and read just a couple of days before the class about a current event that related.  So, I just placed a link on the blog so students could watch that video as well. Another use is when I teach a fairly difficult text.  I post to the blog and have students comment about the reading, saying what they understood and what they struggled with.  This does several things: 1. It makes them more likely to try the reading, as they know I will be reading their thoughts.  2. They see that they were not the only ones who struggled, that most of the class had difficulty.  3. Most importantly, though, this gives me feedback before class on where I might want to focus my lecture.  It tells me the most common difficult points so I can pre-plan examples to help during class time.  On the most basic level, blogs open up a way to communicate with your students through a medium which they are used to.  The blog becomes an entry point for students to get a sense of the class and keep track of how we are progressing. 

A lot of professors got turned off early to the idea of online course content because universities bought huge expensive software applications like WebCT or Blackboard and tried to get everyone to use them, seeing this as the revolution in education, the next great thing.  This didn’t work. Why? Because the programs were bad, clunky, hard to use, professors didn’t like them, students didn’t use them . . . I could go on and on about why this is the case, but instead I will offer the short explanation: bad design.  For those who tried these early programs and got turned off, give blogs a try, and for those who never have . . . give blogs a try.  Honestly, if you can use a word processor you can use a blog.

At the end of the semester when I read student evals the most common comment I get is that students appreciated the class blog.  They thought it was one of the more useful aspects of the class.  This makes class time so much more productive for the students, which makes it the number one tool in my Web 2.0 box.  I never worry about students not knowing assignments, or if I am traveling and forgot my syllabus I can just check the website.  I don’t have to email students directly for class announcements . . . the list of features is pretty useful. I’ll stop here and refer to a few resources. The first is my blog, academhack , where I walk through some of the features, the how-to, and point to links that might be of use.  The second site is edublogs.  This is a fantastic FREE site which lets you create and host a blog for your class, not only that, but they have video tutorials to make it really easy to use.  And if you want to see examples of teachers using blogs, you can visit my undergrad site, or this one for a composition class by a colleague of mine (both of these could be set up in less than 30 minutes at the beginning of the semester, and after that the labor entailed is just a matter of writing updates—10 minutes a week, tops).

What Web 2.0 tool do you think appears to be useful, but is much more of a distraction than a practical application?

The simple answer here in terms of a distraction is Twitter, but I am not so sure about that yet.  I think it might have its uses, we just haven’t figured it out.  I do see a lot of professors trying to use things like Instant Messenger or chat rooms, I personally have never found these useful.  I suppose if you are teaching at a distance this might have its use value, or in terms of having virtual office hours if you teach a large commuter population . . . but I would rather save the discussions for in class, and would rather the students come to my office hours in my office.  (But I do know several libraries that are using IM effectively for helping students so it is all probably a matter of context.) Does Second Life count as Web 2.0? I am skeptical of its academic usefulness, but that too is a much longer discussion.

I think learning to use things like blogs, wikis, and YouTube are important, both for students and teachers.  My general rule is to think of how Web 2.0 tools allow me to do something I couldn’t do without them, not in place of something I am already doing.  Office hours work fine, no need to fix that. On the other hand getting students to look at a collection of photos before class used to be really hard, now you can just use http://flickr.com/” title="Flickr">Flickr.

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