Flexknowlogy – Jared Stein's ARCHIVED blog – update to jaredstein.org

As I was wrestling with the privacy of my own Twitter account yesterday I found that marking one’s updates as private did not prevent those whom I follow from following me.

My frustration prompted me to think about if and why I would want to follow people whom I wouldn’t necessarily want to follow me. I looked at my list of followers, which is more than double my list of following, and I had a tiny epiphany: there are some whom I follow not for social reasons, but for professional reasons. I want to know what they are talking about. I want to know what they are thinking about. I want to know what they, as experts in their field, are doing.

Based on that knowing I can reshape my behavior to emulate the practices of the experts.

Of course, in the best case scenario, one gets only infrequent updates that are related to one’s fields of interest, but when they do come it can be affirming, when it matches one’s own practice, or correcting, when it exceeds or is more complete than one’s own practice. I’ve begun to monitor my incoming updates more carefully for this small realization.

I’ve begun monitoring my own reaction to the updates of those who I am curious about or interested in, and I have reflected on some my reactions that have been positive.

Examples:

• ddraper, an edtech guy from right here in Utah, projects constant enthusiasm and energy for his work and his field. Coupled with his zealous blogging (I swear, he averages 4 blog entries a day!) ddraper keeps me alert and on my toes. If I see another blog post from him, I’ll have to conclude that he in fact just an AI script on a Mac.
• johnkrutsch, skydiamond, sleslie, diamond_mind, brlamb, and others are often posting up new or obscured technology, or commentary thereon. The big payoff for me of course is finding an application for it in edtech that I hadn’t thought about before. Or getting inspiration for new ideas that help push me forward. Or making new contacts by referral (I added this in because right after posting this entry I got an update referring me to someone I’d never heard of who is “thinking along similar lines”). Twitterers that provide this kind of relevant news or information are like mini-blog, but more without all those words and symbols surrounding the good stuff.
• While zeldman’s updates are primarily concerned with the mundane, when he comments on his involvment in Web design and development, from consulting to speaking to just working with publishers and clients, his presence exudes expertise; one can gain bits of web professional wisdom from these glimpses into his daily life.
• fncll for me reflects the on-going saga of an edtech trapped in an artist’s body (or is it an artist trapped in an edtech’s body). His updates are (probably unconsciously) balanced between those that look to the cutting edge of educational technology, and those that reflect on the world around us from behind an artist’s lens. That’s food for the soul; that’s what keeps us going.

These examples suggest that there is some real learning potential for the cognitive apprentice in following experts or even colleagues on Twitter. But if you look at my actual update history the “good stuff” illustrated in these examples is frankly few and far between. At any rate, at best my argument could only conclude by suggesting that following encourages continual practice, inspires new ideas, and fosters currency.

Yet I want it to extend further. I wondered how I might apply this idea of cognitive apprenticeshop via Twitter to my Web design students. Having taught Web design for many years I am convinced that in addition to needing all those good basics of visual design theory, accessibility, usability, and of course XHTML and CSS my students really need to embed themselves in the community of web designers. They need to watch and observe the experts as they work, and unless there’s some secret hotbed of constant chatter focused on Web design and development I think Twitter will fall short for this particular audience of learners (beginner to intermediate).

Certainly the social aspects of professional practice can be fostered through Twitter (what those exactly are and how they could be measured I can’t say), though I wouldn’t encourage them to start sending direct messages to folks they’ve never met. And it’s possible that some of the question and answer type stuff could be accomodated by Twitter. It may be that simply through Twitter-mediated contact with their peers–primarily within class or within the program–they can stay motivated and learn together. They’ll have similar questions, they’ll be able to swap war stories, they can share new information, contacts, and even jobs.

I am optimistic that the “stickiness” of Twitter (or the addictiveness, as Kathy Sierra argues) may sustain a community of peers, whereas forced, in-class, creepy-treehouse style social networking usually fails. If students carry on with Twitter as their skills develop, as they graduate from the program, and as they gain experience and greater proficiency in their professions, the community that was germinated in Twitter may end up containing the very luminaries, experts, and professional colleagues that Twitterers like myself so appreciate following daily.

I am a bit miserable about a series of questions that I whipped up for a survey device at the request of an instructor who teaches a Distance Education course.

Not only do I disagree with the instructor’s desired objectives in using this survey (she essentially hopes to prove that the reason students are failing her online course is because they are under-prepared or have wrong assumptions about online education–of course it couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that the course has nearly no media-enhanced learning, no student-student contact, and very little student-instructor interaction), I disagree with the questions that I wrote.

Of course anyone who has written survey questions with a mind to gain accurate and insightful information on the participants knows what a challenge the task is from the get-go; I don’t kid myself that it’s no easy endeavor, but I also think there has to be a better way.

Among my primary objectives in writing the questions were the following ideas:

• Keep the survey short, so that students would actually do it.
• Have some redundancy to check for accuracy and inhibit prejudicial responses.
• Avoid asking questions that dare students to label themselves “dumb”.
• Avoid questions that tempted students into labeling themselves “smart”.

But the primary objective was essentially this: after reading a good number of “student readiness” surveys online I wanted to avoid asking questions that gauged a student’s willingness to partake in a lonesome independent study course. “Independent study” is not equivalent to modern “distance education” in the Stein dictionary (in fact, even “distance education” is not equivalent to “distance education” in the Stein dictionary, but that’s another story). And so though several of my questions are based on the questions asked in other “distance education” surveys, I purposefully steered away from presumptive questions like:

Feeling that I am part of a class is:
a. Not particularly necessary to me.
b. Somewhat important to me.
c. Very important to me.

As if being “part of a class” is somehow mutually exclusive from distance learning! And it’s not that I’m opposed to independent study types of courses; in fact, I myself greatly enjoy and grow in isolation, but I recognize that’s not necessarily the norm.

Then there are questions that perpetuate instructors’ presumptions that they can get back to distance students at their leisure:

My comfort level with waiting a few days to receive instructor feedback is..
Low   Moderate   High

While it may be an unfortunate reality in distance education programs that instructors do often delay responding to students (I recommend a 24 hour turn around at the latest), we certainly don’t want to encourage that behavior, nor do we want to discourage student expectations of their instructors.

Finally, I also have disagreements with the term “student readiness” in general, as that tends to automatically place the blame for student failure at the feet of the students. Jared Spool, a Web usability expert whom I greatly admired, once inspired me to make the following provocative paraphrase, There are no user errors, only
design errors. And while I recognize that this statement is not universally true, it does challenge the designer (in this case, the instructor or the instructor’s instructional designer) to reconsider blaming the user (aka student) for failing to complete the task.

My Questions

Even though I have a pretty good insight into what I think is wrong with so many “student readiness” surveys, I still had a hard time making my fundamentally different. But I’ll share them here anyway, with the hopes that some brainy folks can offer better suggestions to achieve the same general objective: determine if our students are adequately prepared–both mentally and technically–for an online course experience.

(Note: these questions are randomized in the final survey to mask redundancy.)

Options: Strongly Agree | Agree | Disagree | Strongly Disagree
1. I often get things done ahead of time.
2. I can work independently and meet deadlines without being reminded.
3. I learn best through live classroom discussions.
4. I am comfortable engaging in class discussions on the Web.
5. If given clear instructions, I am confident that I can complete the assignment independently.
6. I often need to have instructions for an assignment clarified or explained more than once.
7. As a reader, I sometimes need help to understand the text.
8. When I need help understanding the subject, I am comfortable e-mailing an instructor to ask for clarification.
9. When I don’t understand something I’ve read, I ask the instructor to explain it as soon as possible.
10. I am very competent using e-mail and Web sites.
11. I am a skilled writer.
12. I don’t always comprehend what I read.
13. I expect to spend less time on an Distance Education course than a regular on-campus course.
14. I often put things off until the last minute
15. I expect a Distance Education course to be easier than a regular on-campus course.

If you hate these questions, give me something better.

And if you like them, you can download them here (This survey is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.):

• DE Readiness Survey (survey).zip Blackboard Vista IMS Survey version
• DE Readiness Survey (quiz).zip Blackboard Vista IMS Quiz version (scored for a “perfect” student)
• DE Readiness Survey.txt Moodle GIFT format (scored for a “perfect” student)