I've been away from my techno-blog for a while, as I was using it primarily as part of blogging along with my graduate students last semester. However, I am back! I've been learning so much this semester about all sorts of technology-related issues, and want to get back into blogging about them as doing this helps me reflect on what I am learning. I also always enjoy receiving comments & questions on my blog from others who are also exploring similar technology.

I won't post much now, but will put up links to a couple of the things I have been working on recently. I have been doing an in-depth comparison of Moodle and WebCT as course management systems for our M.Ed. programs, and did a presentation to faculty on this. It was really interesting to learn more about both, but I have come away as a real fan of Moodle, and am looking forward to using this in my own teaching. Here's a link to the presentation that I did (this link will download a pdf of the presentation): Course Management Comparison.

I also gave a keynote presentation in January on (this is also a download of a pdf) Demystifying Online Education.

Virtual relationships -- when laws make real ones illegal

I am still in a state of shock, reeling from the results of the vote in the Commonwealth of Virginia yesterday. You may wonder what this has to do with technology, my techno-journey, and even with me, since I live in Minnesota. At first, I didn't think of it in this way, either. Also, it has been hard for me even to think about my technojourney in the wake of the election results. However, as reality has begun to sink in over the past 24 hours, I have realized that technology is going to play an even more vital role in my life, and in the life of my family, than ever before. You see, it is because of technology that my family and I are going to be able to maintain our relationship with my brother, Donald, who lives in Virginia.

As of yesterday, we will no longer be able to go to Virginia to visit my brother, because the very safety of my family in that state would be in jeopardy should we cross the borders in that state. Yesterday Donald closed on a new condo that he purchased in Richmond, VA. My partner, our daughter, and I had planned to go to visit him there to see his new place, but this will no longer be possible. Thanks to web cams and Skype (Voice over IP that enable us to talk and see each other via web cam, over the Internet) we have access to the technology that will enable us to keep in touch on a regular basis. But so long as the new law that was passed in Virginia is in place, we will not be able to visit that state, and our daughter will not be able to spend time with her uncle unless he comes to see us. As grateful as I am for the technology that will enable us all to keep in more regular touch with Donald, virtual relationships cannot ever take the place of real ones. And laws -- and the voters who support their being passed -- should also not be allowed to prevent real, loving relationships, both between partners and also between partners and their family members.

Here is the letter that Donald sent us, telling us why we could no longer visit him (I am sharing this letter with my brother's permission):

An Open Letter to my Sister and her Family

Tuesday November 7, 2006

Dear Helen, Kathryn, and Kaitlin,

I miss you all very much, so it is with a very heavy heart that I writing to urge you not to visit me in Virginia if Amendment #1, the so-called Marriage Amendment, is passed today by the voters of the Commonwealth. The reason for my request to you is very simple: if the Amendment passes, it won't be safe for your family to be in Virginia.

Believe me, this is no exaggeration. Today's ballot amendment claims to be about the rather innocuous goal of protecting marriage, but it's really about a lot more than this. The second paragraph of the amendment would forbid the Commonwealth of Virginia from creating or recognizing any "relationship of unmarried individuals that intends to approximate the design, qualities, significance, or effects of marriage." That's exactly what your relationship does.

This means that if you were to visit Virginia, and Kathryn were to fall ill and be admitted to the hospital, the hospital would not be required to allow Helen to visit her; indeed, it may be allowed to forbid her from visiting, since she would not be regarded as a family member under Virginia law. You may have created for yourselves a legal arrangement that is binding in Minnesota, but the law here would expressly make it invalid.

Any legal agreement between the two of you about making medical care decisions on each other's behalf would be invalid in Virginia. If Kathryn were incapable of making her own wishes know to the hospital, Helen's views would carry no weight whatsoever, since she would not be recognized as having any legal connection with Kathryn. The fact that you have lived together for fourteen years, own a home together, share a last name, and that your relationship is generally recognized and respected in Minnesota - all of this would be irrelevant and under Virginia law.

But it is first and foremost for Kaitlin's sake that I am asking you not to visit Virginia if Amendment 1 passes. In Minnesota, you are both legally recognized as Kaitlin's parents. Both of your names appear on her birth certificate, and should one of you die, the other would automatically become Kaitlin's sole parent. This would not be in the case in post Amendment 1 Virginia. If the surviving parent is not the birth mother, she may have no legal rights at all with regard to Kaitlin; perhaps not even the right to take her out of the state and back home to Minnesota. Again, I am not exaggerating: Virginia's courts have in the past held that a child should be taken away from her lesbian mother, on the grounds that her lesbianism made her an unfit parent.

So, much as I miss you all, I think it would be extremely unwise for you to put your family at risk by visiting me in Virginia if the voters of Commonwealth see fit to pass Amendment 1 today. I will instead come to visit your family in Minnesota, and we will together look forward to the day when decency, tolerance, and understanding return to Virginia.

All my love,

Donald
____________________________________________________________________
Virginia Marriage Amendment, on the ballot November 7, 2006

Text of the Virginia Marriage Amendment

That only a union between one man and one woman may be a marriage valid in or recognized by this Commonwealth and its political subdivisions.

This Commonwealth and its political subdivisions shall not create or recognize a legal status for relationships of unmarried individuals that intends to approximate the design, qualities, significance, or effects of marriage. Nor shall this Commonwealth or its political subdivisions create or recognize another union, partnership, or other legal status to which is assigned the rights, benefits, obligations, qualities, or effects of marriage.


An update to my blog on this issue: Just out today (Nov 14th) South African parliament approves same-sex marriages. This means Kathryn and I can be legally married next time we return to my homeland to visit (we were married here, in Duluth, in the Unitarian Church, 10 years ago, our union is recognized only by our church and our community, and not by the state). However, even once we are legally married under South African law, this would not change our status in Virginia, where the only South African (and other) marriages that are recognized are between a man and a woman.

Podcasting
Here is an example of an audio file that I created (link to audio file) It isn't strictly a podcast until it is linked in some way -- such as here on my blog - so users can subscribe to it. I wanted to share with my students how I did this:

1. Using my iPod and my TuneTalk Stereo recorder, I recorded myself speaking.
2. I loaded the sound file (which was recorded as a .wav file) onto my computer into my iTunes library
   
3. Once in iTunes, under the preferences tab, in the advanced section, I made sure that the "importing" was set to import as MP3 then clicked "ok"
4. Still in iTunes, I selected the audio file that I just created, then went up to the "advanced" menu, and selected "convert to MP3."
5. I uploaded this mp3 file to my own webpage --> then copied the URL where the file is located on my personal website
6. I created a link to the mp3 file from my blog.
   

Deeply grateful for technology
Halloween is hard for me again this year, as it was 2 years ago, on Halloween, that my dad died. So as I think about my technojourney this week, my mind and heart are in a different place than usual. However, it is through technology that I am able to preserve so many treasured memories of those who have died who have touched my life so deeply -- my dad, my birth mom, and my second mom Maria who helped my parents raise me.

Thanks to my passion for digital photography and my ever-present digital camera, I was able to capture many wonderful photos of my dad and Maria. I have been so sad not to have many photos of my mom, because she died before the advent of digital photography, and before I really took many photos (I was 20 when she died). But then yesterday I received a set of 10 emails from my brother, each with about 8 or so digital photos attached. He had come across some old slides that my parents had taken when we were little, and he scanned them all in and sent them to me. They bring back so many treasured memories that had long since slipped into the deepest recesses of my mind. This first one is of my brother at the back, my mom in the middle, and me at the front, taken in about 1963 at our home on the campus of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South African. This next one is of my dad, my brother and me, also at same time and place. The last one must be in 1966, showing Maria and me outside our home on the campus of the University of Durban (also in South Africa), I think on my first day of school (I'm in school uniform).

Being able to capture both the eventful and uneventful happenings in my life through digital photography has really been transformational for me not only in how I see and "process" the world, but also in helping to make it memorable. I have always had a terrible memory, but it wasn't until I was 35, when I was diagnosed with ADHD that I learned more about why and started to develop better strategies for remembering. What I have learned is what an incredibly powerful tool a camera can be for someone who has trouble focusing and paying attention. I found that once I started carrying my digital camera with me, I began to be much more "present in the moment." Whether I am running along the beach or out in the woods in the early morning with my dog, or visiting a school to observe a student teacher, or at home with our daughter, playing in the mud, I find myself noticing and appreciating little things that I would never have seen before -- dew on a leaf or a spider web, the texture of the sand as it forms ripples under the water lapping along the edge of the beach at Park Point, the early morning mist swirling around the lake surface in early Fall up in the BWCA. I find myself paying attention so much more, which already helps me to remember what I see.

The whole processing of digital photographs builds in rehearsal, which further solidifies the memory: once I have taken the picture, I usually switch to "view" mode on the camera to see if I like the picture. I'll usually scroll through the pictures I have taken a few times while they are still on the camera, both to enjoy them and also to delete extra ones. The, once I download them to my computer, I again review them, and name the ones that I am most likely to want to use for various personal as well as professional purposes (like uploading to my Flickr account, to Facebook, onto my personal web page, for use in teaching through inserting them on PowerPoint slides, into Inspiration, in an iMovie -- or on a blog, or even printing them and pasting them into the journal that I have kept for our daughter since she was born, telling in words and pictures for her the story of her unfolding life).

As a teacher, having a digital camera has made an incredible difference in so may aspects of my work. It is so important to me to be able to call my students by name, and to be able to do this right away as I believe this sends such an key (and sincerely felt) message that who they are is important to me. I used to take photos of the students day 1 of all my classes and then spend literally hours and hours studying them so that I could learn their names. My commitment to my students was that I will call them by name from day 2 on. Now I can be even better that this, as the university now makes available student photos along with my class list so I can even learn names before the first day of class. I still have to take photos on day 1 because some students have changed dramatically in appearance from when their picture was taken at the start of their first year in college!

Even after day 1 I keep my camera close at hand, using it for all kinds of things in class. Example: if I write on the board, such as recording student ideas as we brainstorm something in class, then I capture this on a digital photo before erasing it, so I can refer back to it (and if needed, even post it to the class website if it is something that would be of value to the students to refer back to later). Once I had a student who could not be in class as she had to be with her daughter for the birth of her grandchild. My student was still able to participate in our class, connecting to us each day through Skype (free Internet phone), but she could only hear us. Thus what I did, when we did something in class that she needed to be able to see, was to take a photo of it and email it to her on a break. It worked great!

Like most digital cameras today, my little handy dandy Canon digital camera also can also take up to 2 minutes of video in Quick Time format. Using this and also my Sony Mavica that can take up to an hour of small Quick Time movies, I have been able to capture my students doing teaching demonstrations or other hands-on in-class activities, and then share these with the students (some of them have used these video clips to add to their digital portfolios).

And these are just some of the reasons why I feel so grateful that I am able to have and use a digital camera. I could keep going, but this is already probably way more than anyone wants to read on one blog entry, so I'll end for now. I'd love to hear from others on how you use cameras (digital or otherwise) to help you in your own life -- personal and professional. Please add your ideas as comments to this blog. Thanks!

Teaching in the ways we were taught … or not: what do you do when you have no footsteps to follow in?

I wish I was more disciplined (or maybe had more time?) in blogging about my techno journey as things happen to me and as I think of them, because I think of ideas and questions at all sorts of strange moments, and somehow by the time I get to write in my blog the freshness and complexity of my thinking has evaporated. So this week I am keeping a Word doc on my desktop called “techno journey” so that any time I am on my computer, and not necessarily when I am online, I can open it and add to my blog offline – and then paste this later into the blog when I get there.

This past weekend I was at a conference for college professors who are really interested in and have had some success in college teaching. The first evening there we had a session about what college students are like today. We had to do an activity in small groups to help us understand the types of changes that have been happening in the last 20 years. The task was to take a series of events and place them on a timeline from oldest to most recent event. We were directed to decide as a group what the order of events was (and this was a competition among groups to see who could get it right). Being the geek that I am, I of course had my laptop right there and was online (actually trying to sneak in some of my reading of WebX discussions and of student blogs whilst also paying attention to the session presenters). And being a millennial student-wanna-be, I immediately Googled and checked on Wikipedia for each of the events that we were given to find out when they occurred. After all, why guess when you can find the answers at your finger tips? No sooner had I started than a member of another group said, “no fair! She’s cheating – she’s looking up the answers!” This led to mixed reactions from the group, ranging from bemused (“huh? What are they talking about?), through agreement (“Yes! It’s not right to look up the answers”) to a couple who supported me looking up the answers (“Sure! What a good idea!”).

Peoples’ reactions to this were such an “aha” for me. If most of the people this group of academics, leaders in teaching from a prestigious university system, either hadn’t thought of using the Internet in the classroom as a way of having students begin their learning by building on what is already known (rather than starting from scratch) or else consider doing this to be cheating, then the digital divide between digital natives and digital immigrants (Prensky, 2001) is even more cavernous than I had previously realized.

As the weekend continued, I became even more acutely aware of this digital divide as my colleagues and I shared our collected wisdom about the art and science of teaching. Conspicuous by its absence in all discussions through the weekend was any mention of distance education and online learning, except in generally disparaging terms. The common view appeared to be that true teaching in its finest form can only take place in a classroom, face-to-face. As I listened, I understood this position. I recall feeling the same way before I embarked first on my own journey in teaching online, and then digging deeper, through my research, to learn more about distance education. I never believed that any form of online learning could possible replace or be better than face-to-face. That was until I saw it happening, especially in the classes of my colleagues who had become so gifted at this kind of teaching. It reminds me of the saying, “Those who don’t believe it can be done should get out of the way of those already doing it.” I am still humbled when I see what those who teach so well online can do.

I see two key problems at the root of this misconceptions about distance education:

1. Almost all teachers today, both at the university level and K-12, have never been taught through distance education. And teachers tend to teach the way they were taught (until they have learned consciously to do otherwise). Thus, unless we work with in-service teachers & professors to education them about what distance education is and can do, and also teach them how to do it, this situation is not going to change until a whole new generation of teachers enter schools and universities. But even then, the pressure on new teachers to conform to current practices in educational institutions is huge.
2. There is somehow this mythical conception that somehow “a” standard has been established for face-to-face teaching (and that there is only one kind of face-to-face teaching), and then that this is the standard against which distance education (in its many forms) is measured – and falls short.

So what needs to happen to bring about change? Or does change need to happen? What will happen if distance education does take hold so that it becomes a truly viable alternative to face-to-face? Who will be helped and who will be hurt? Hmmm..

Not all chats are created equal

So many tech issues and problems that I have been exploring and learning about this week. One of the “biggies” has been my journey in learning that not all chats are equal. Ignorance is bliss when you have only ever used one tool and think it’s great!

This week the synchronous chat feature that comes with as part of WebX (our online discussion board) was not accessible (and I’m not sure yet why!). The good thing about this is the instructor who needed to use this as integral to his course switched gears and started exploring using the chat within Moodle (course management system). I have used WebX Chat and iChat text chat, and seen some differences between these 2 tools. Seeing Moodle chat has made me even more aware of these differences. Here’s what I have noticed so far:

• WebX chat: very limited. List of participants in the chat room shows in one panel. In the other is the text posted by each participants, with no “frills” at all.
• iChat text chat: allows emoticons; shows picture/avatar of person typing; shows a “bubble” when a person is typing so that you know they are typing (helps reduce the “cross talk,” because when you see that someone is typing, you can wait until they post their comment before you type your response. You can save a whole chat for reviewing later.
• Moodle chat: I still don’t know much about this, having only experimented with it at a very basic level. However, a feature that I really like is being able to archive all chats within Moodle (as opposed to the individual users having to save the chat, which you have to do in iChat). This means that when students log in to Moodle, they can click to review the transcripts of pervious chats.

Synchronous chatting with iChat, Servers down, and more...

It's been quite a journey this past week on my techno-journey. One of the high points has been my participating in an online Ojibwe language class at UMD. Along with 3 other students, I am in a beginners class. It has been fascinating and really fun, both in terms of my learning about Ojibwe language and culture and in terms of learning about how a language can be taught online. It is the first time that our instructor has taught a language class online and the first time that UMD is offering this class through our M.Ed program (it is part of our Tribal Cohort). So the learning curve for us all is steep, both as learners and teachers. Each week our instructor post handouts and an audio file for us to download from WebX. Then we (the 3 students) connect in real-time to each other and with the instructor via iChat (see picture included on my blog here. Note that I blurred the faces of participants other than me to protect their identity). We all now have video web cams, so we can see and hear each other. Our online class lasts an hour, during which time our instructor does some short lecturing and also has us speaking , sometimes as a group chorus, and sometimes individually. We also follow along on handouts that we have downloaded, and sometimes type comments or questions in the live chat window that accompanies the audio & video part. So far the technology and the instruction is working great! Reflecting on some of my "ahas" on this:

• It is so valuable to be able to have the option of live synchronous talk time with the instructor and other students when learning a language, because even though we can listen to the audio files to hear the pronunciation, it's important for us to hear each other and to get the feedback from the instructor.
• Although I think that there is a greater depth of reflection from students, and greater participation by all students in responding to questions when interaction is in written, asynchronous form, it is nice to be able to accompany this with some real-time conversation to have quick back and forth discussion. For example, in my own teaching of technology to online M.Ed students, I would like to offer some of these live sessions to help students with trouble shooting.
• Down side of the iChat format: there isn't an easy way to save and archive the sessions for later review, as is possible in Breeze. I did record the one session using the recorder that I plug into my iPod, and I also copied and pasted the text from the chat window into a Word doc to save it, but these are not connected to each other (again, as they are in Breeze).
• Another down side: I think only 4 people can participate in these iChat sessions at the same time, and to host a session requires a new Intel Mac on the Mac side (I'm not sure as yet what is involved on the Windows side). In our Ojibwe class we haven't had to worry about this as coincidentally there are only 3 students and one instructor, we all have Macs, and the instructor as a new Intel Mac. So my goal in the next few weeks is to learn more about this from the instructor end of things.
  

The other part of my journey this week has been in seeing what happens when the university server goes down. This is my 17th year teaching at UMD, and we have had almost no problems with this before. Our server has been very reliable and we have an excellent tech support service (ITSS). ITSS still is excellent, but there have been technical issues that have had very serious effects on our online delivery of programs. The server was done Thursday morning, Friday morning, then our online threaded discussion (WebX) server was down over the weekend, and then, to top it off, due to human error a few days later, WebX went down again -- and when it was put up, by mistake the wrong back-up tapes were used, wiping out posts that students had made in the previous 24 hours...!! I have been really worried about the effect that this has had to the confidence of our new M.Ed cohort students as they have only just begun their online program. However, they seem to be doing ok, in part because we have been using tools besides just university supported ones, so they have been able to continue communicating online through their blogs (using blogger.com) and various class wikis (using wikispaces.com). So the ahas here for me have been:

• There is value in not having all ones eggs in one basket, the basket being the university system. By using free commercial services we circumvented the problems with the university system. However, the slip side of that in other circumstances is that our use of any services not support by the university leaves us vulnerable should those services go down temporarily or permanently.

• We need to sit down together with all the players on our campus involved in distance education to look at which tools we use, how we use them, and to look ahead to the future so we design an online system (i.e. system of which tools we use and how) that is not so vulnerable.

• These problems are of value if you use them as a learning experience to reflect on the pros and cons of online tools and online education, and come up with ways to address these problems in the future. I have lots more to think about here, but don't want to blog on and on right now:)

Playing around with some of the blog features
I've been pretty boring with my blogs to date, so I wanted to learn more about some of the blog features. So I'm going to try some here:

1. This is a numbered list
2. This is in italics
3. This is bold
4. This is a webdings font
5. This is a link to my favorite podcast, the Savvy Technologist.

Here is a photo:
This is me kayaking in the Apostle Islands (photographed by Therese B).

Loading pics in Blogger is easy: all you have to do is:

• click on the little picture on the toolbar (above the window in which you edit text)
  
• click on the "browse" button to find the picture that you want to upload
  
• decide if you want the pic to be small, medium or large (large isn't good as it takes up too much space on the page and takes the page too long to load
• decide if you want the pic to be on left, center, or right
• click on the blue upload button.
• voila!
  

We are off on another blogging adventure!

My students are amazing! Every one of them has their blogs up and running, plus they set up furl accounts, posted on the class wiki, and participated in threaded discussions. It's so valuable doing this all together to start off with (with everyone in one room, working on laptops together), because that way when someone has problems, we can solve these together. I'm learning so much, both from my students and colleagues, and also from seeing how I could have taught things differently and better. Here are some of the things that I have learned:

• Have students start a new gmail, yahoo mail or some other free email account prior to class so that they have a "junk" mail account that they can use when they sign up for free services such as blogger -- unless they are willing to use their UMD email account. I used to be reluctant to use my umd email as I didn't want to generate junk mail, but I've found that this really hasn't been a problem.
  
• What I've done for free accounts that don't require a "real" email is to make up one. This works, but the lesson learned the hard way here is that if you do this, and then forget your password, there is no way to access your blog ever again, because if you ask blogger to remind you of your password, they do so by sending you and email (if you gave a fake email, you'll never get the password).
• Once a blog account is set up, make sure that the time zone is set correctly (found under settings)
• It would be helpful to have a more detailed set of guidelines identifying the key parts of he blog, like the dashboard, edit buttons and so forth.
• Google scholar exports can be exported to RefWorks (invaluable!)

I know there's lots more, but that's all I have time for now.

Helen (or 2Techie4Me)'s Techno Journey

Another plunge into the blogosphere for me. I have blogged before for a variety of reasons, mostly to learn more about blogging so that I can teach this to my students. I also maintained a blog this past summer while my family and I were traveling in Europe. I wanted to try a blog "for real" to see how it worked as a means of letting our family and friends keep abreast of our trip stories, without us having to send individual e-mails to everyone. This was especially an issue given limited time for us to be online while we were traveling, plus the high cost (pay-per-minute) of Internet cafes where we were. It worked great!!

Now I am off on another blog adventure, this time with my graduate students, who are going to be blogging as a way of reflecting on and sharing their techno-journey as they learn about how to be online learners, and as they also learn to use technology in a variety of other ways both personally and professionally. It seems only fair that I do the same, so here I am!