Flexknowlogy

It looks like I’ll be presenting at the 2008 MoodleMoot San Francisco, June 9 - 11, 2008 South San Francisco Conference Center on our Open Mod for sharing open educational resources. I’ll be dragging Kenneth Woodward along to explain the technical facets of the mod, and to delve into the community of Moodle developers.

Of course, prior to the conference Ken and I will have to work pretty aggressively with Clark Nielsen and John Krutsch to ensure that the mod’s features and functionalities are stable and presentable.

Marc Hugentobler, John Krutsch, and I will be presenting our online cheating sessions a couple times this summer, and would like to welcome everyone to attend:

1. The Cheatability Factor at Distance Teaching and Learning 2008, Madison, Wisconsin
2. How to Cheat Online & The Cheatability Factor at Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange 2008, Orem, Utah

Here are some details, reproduced from the proposals:

Promotional Summary

What is your online course’s “cheatability factor”? 75% of students have admitted to cheating during their college career, and according to some studies online assessment makes cheating easier. This session considers technical, philosophical, and environmental factors that may increase or decrease the cheatability of online courses from design to delivery, and presents a rubric used to assess those factors.

Objectives and Description

Presentation objectives:

Participants will..

1. Discover the extent to which cheating-related problems exist in online education and online-based assessments
2. Consider factors that may contribute technologically, philosophically, or environmentally to online cheating
3. Examine a rubric used to measure the “cheatability” of online course
4. Discuss practices and strategies to avoid or minimize the impact of cheating

Presentation description:

Nobody wants students cheating in their online class, yet an estimated 75% of students have admitted to cheating during their college career, and according to some studies online assessment makes cheating easier. The problem is not only one of practical importance for educators, it is one of growing importance to instructional technologists, administrators, and anyone else with a vested interest in the validity and reputation of distance education and technology-enhanced teaching.

This session will first present information and collected research data that summarizes the state of cheating in higher education in general, and in distance education specifically. While a general awareness of the pervasiveness of cheating may be in and of itself an eye-opener to many educators and administrators, the motivations behind cheating and the responsibility teachers have to recognize their own influence on cheating can provide an alternative perspective on what is normally considered a quite simple choice. McClusky’s theory of Power-Load-Margin, for instance, informs teachers of the impact they may have on students’ lives, and the impact students’ lives have on their studies, both of which can lead students to choose to cheat. A number of environmental factors are particularly salient in online courses, such as ambiguity of definitions of cheating, actual or perceptual “distance”, level of instructor-student interaction, individual relevance or meaningfulness of activities and assessments, etc. Additionally, there are a number of more technical and technological factors that can increase or decrease both a student’s propensity to cheat, and his/her ability to cheat.

By considering these technical, methodological, and environmental factors, Distance Education at Utah Valley University has developed a rubric to assess online courses and report on potential factors that may increase or decrease the cheatability of online courses from design to delivery. This rubric is (1) provided to teachers engaging in distance education course development or instruction, (2) made available to administrators and department chairs as an example of our mutual interest in preserving the integrity of online education, and (3) implemented internally as a tool in our course design process to better evaluate and recommend online assessments before, during, and after an online course is delivered.

Because cheating itself is a complex and sensitive issue informed by experience and diverse perspectives, this session seeks to engage participants in a dialogue on cheating, online assessments, and technology. We predict there will be naturally flowing discussion and debate between participants who may favor one approach over another, e.g. a “direct assault” approach which seeks to thwart any and all attempts at cheating using technology or applied strategies, vs. “hearts and minds” pedagogical approaches that focus on course environment, assessment design, and student engagement.

I’m always on the look-out for new conference ideas that can be implemented to make Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange (TTIX) more and more useful. While most of the “un-conference” ideas mentioned here require a large crowd (larger than we can expect at TTIX 2008) this article does illustrate the growing tedium with the conference-as-usual approach, and highlights key problems that TTIX can seek to avoid or inhibit in the future.

Steve Hargadon posted up reflections on his Classroom 2.0 workshops, and the ideas he has generated are great for generating new ways of showing, sharing, learning, and doing at the 2008 Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange.

A couple of ideas for TTIX 2008 specificially:

In addition to the option of Twitter, why not a simple web-based chat room for back channeling? It’s old-fashioned now, but most setups require no user name, and rooms are easily created. Skype is cool too, however.

To that end, we’ll have a presenter-editable web page for each presentation which will host a shoutbox, presentation materials, link to video archive, link to relevant blogs, etc!

We are going to try starting TTIX with a 45-minute pre-conference session for everyone on Twitter and blogging. Just a means of getting people in and familiar with these two powerful social software tools. We’re going to ask for volunteers to each guest review 1 session during the day on our TTIX blog, and so we’ll divvy out users/passes at that time.

More ideas coming soon. Again, I can’t thank Steve enough for his work on Classroom 2.0–even though I haven’t attended this, his passion to making it a better workshop (or an “un-conference”) is inspiring and motivating.

One of the things I’m most proud of in my professional life is our annual Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange, which is now nearing it’s 4th year. While we’ve held it as a pretty traditional (small) ed tech conference during the first three years, John Krutsch and I began TTIX in 2004 with two key objectives:

1. TTIX will always be free - no registration fee (and therefore no conference tote bag, low-capacity usb drive, pen, keychain, etc.)
2. TTIX will emphasize 2-part sessions: part 1 is information, part 2 is hands-on application

We’ve added a few other facets, like
presenters are encouraged to make their materials available under a Creative Commons license, videos of presentations should be available for download after the event,
organized social events can help folks make professional connections
And, this year, conference proposals can be rated by the public almost immediately after submission. Admittedly the 5-star rating system is overly simplistic, but we see this as a great way to (1) advertise the possible sessions, (2) give prospective presenters some preliminary feedback, and (3) give the community a chance to make their interests heard to the proposal review committee. Ultimately we hope to go to a fully community-driven conference proposal review system.

Today I was lucky enough to stumble upon Alan Levine (aka CogDog)’s reflections on the EDUCAUSE ELI conference, “On Conferencing”. In this he examined the big questions I always ask myself when I go to conferences: Why do we go? and, Is it worth it? Mr. Levine lays out several complaints and ideas for conferences in general, and this inspired me to think about how we might push TTIX to the next level of meaningfulness and value for our participants. Let me highlight and springboard off of some of Mr Levine’s thoughts (and some of my own) here with respect to TTIX:

1. Online session evaluations. Addition: with immediate results viewable to everyone. With kiosks at the back of the room. Or with “clickers” (as much as I hate ‘em)
2. Learning Circle. Like Cracker Barrels at DT&L in Madison, Wisconsin. I like these a lot, actually, because you get to meet people and talk about related interests, and share experiences. The way I see this working best is someone deemed as expert moderates at small tables, others attend. On cue we all switch tables. I love Mr. Levine’s note that at ELI they used wikis and Google Docs for note-taking; TTIX will have to have this set up in advance for it to work.
3. Post session archives in 24 hours (a/v). We post video archives, but haven’t been able to do it in 24 hours. We probably could if we cut the quality. Addition: make presenter information uploadable during the conference, so presenters can upload their latest slides or materials. On the presentation video and materials download page make participant commentary open, a la a blog. This could be attached to or on the same page as the conference evals for each session! Ooh, but then we couldn’t use a presentation sharing service like Slideshare…
4. Twitter used throughout. ELI had a Twitter account just for the conference, which I definitely want to follow suit with, and many of its participants used Twitter voraciously–I know, I read ‘em! What if we started the first day of TTIX with a Twitter primer/workshop for participants? How to use Twitter, is it good for professional development, is it good for education? I mean, if participants are glued to their laptops for half the conference any way, can’t we encourage them to participate through their laptops? (What other sandboxes can we set up for them?)
5. Do something with the backchannel. No real new ideas here. Chris Lott has suggested “some lamps or orbs which change color and/or intensity according to the back-channel assessment”. Maybe blog up a “best IRC or Twitter quote” per session?
6. Conference blogging. It’s really nice when participants blog up the sessions or even just the conference in general. What if TTIX had it’s own blog that the TTIX committee updated during the conference, or a wiki that everyone could edit on the fly to summarize sessions with. Or, if we aim for something more reflective as Mr. Levine suggests, what if we set up a blog and invited participants to volunteer to author a reflective blog post on one session that they attend? We could have someone in charge of providing those volunteers with an author account on our TTIX blog, and then give them a reward if they post before the conference officially ends.
7. A conference with just keynotes. Last year we ran 4, even 5 sessiosn at a time. Bad move. The sessions were too poorly attended, and we knew some of the sessions were not cream of the crop in the first place. We took notice for 2008 and are trying to limit ourselves to just 3 at a time. But John attended one conference last year that was only keynotes. He loved it. I personally like the variety of being able to choose. But we need to emphasize differentness next year. We need to continue to pushe for, focus on, and applaud the second-day sessions, which is our twist of lime on ed tech conferences. What if we ask 2-day presenters to create an assignment day 1?
8. More hands-on. This is my own suggestion/complaint. Perhaps instead of a conference entirely of keynotes we composed a conference entirely of mini-workshops. That’s the idea behind the 2-part session, after all, but taken to the extreme. Or maybe the regular sessions are all workshops framed in by keynotes (2 per day)? Or a keynote and a learning circle/cracker barrel?
9. More Something Else. At DT&L and many other conferences you have the choice of going to an info session, a panel session, a poster session, etc–all of which are running at the same time. Now I cling to the idea of variety (I’m a session-jumper, remember?), but what if we did 3 sessions at a time, but had an info session hour, a panel session hour, a poster session hour, a workshop hour, etc to force the variety into the day?

These ideas have revved me up. I’m convinced we need to “stir up the stew” as Mr. Levine puts it. The next question is: If TTIX were to implement any 2 of these, which two would you find most valuable? Which would make the conference-going experience more important, more memorable, more applicable to your professional life when you return home?

Looking ahead to conferences in 2008, I’m already planning on attending ITC’s elearning conference in Florida in February as a pure particpant/observer. And of course I’ll be co-hosting and probably presenting at our Teaching w/ Technology Idea Exchange in June. There are a few other conferences that I’m interested in presenting at:

• Distance Teaching & Learning in Madison, Wisconsin (proposal deadline: Jan 15, 2008). I could do an online course showcase or two. Japanese comes to mind, and I’m pretty proud of my new version of Web Essentials. Or I could just push for a regular session proposal, but what topic? “Authentic Applications of Social Networking Tools”? or the yet-unfounded “LMS-Less”?
• Collaboration 2008 - The Southwest Vista User’s Group in Salt Lake City, Utah (proposal deadline: Jan 11, 2008). No idea on a topic here, as I’m not a BB Vista advocate, but I should try to present to support the Utah cause.
• WCET’s 20th Annual Conference is held in Phoenix, AZ November 5-8 this year. As far as I know, the call for proposals is not yet open, and I don’t see a proposal deadline. WCET sessions usually annoy me because each speakers get approx 15 minutes to talk, sharing a 50 minute session with other presenters who may or may not have similar ideas, and may or may not develop synergy. I would love to do a pre-conference at WCET this year, but am not sure how to go about suggesting one to the WCET folks.
• C()SL is sure to have another OpenEd 2008 conference, at which I’d love to present our still-alpha OpenMod for moodle. But will that ever be completed?

I think more than anything I simply need to motivate myself to come up with a good presentation and submit by said proposal due date(s). If needs be, I can use a vague title and determine the specific content as the months pass. I also am considering collaborating with colleagues on a presentation, though I myself often disdain presentations with multiple and unnecessary “support” presenters.

Which leads me to consider the fact that attending a conference can be quite different depending on whether I go by myself or with comrades. I’m a loner by nature, so the solo experience is wonderful in that I tend to learn a lot and reinforce my internal motivation to strive for excellence. I also tend to explore ideas fairly broadly. And I’m always concerned with the bang-for-buck factor of conferences, and so going by myself means the department has more money to spread around at the other conferences.

When I’m with colleagues or comrades, however, the experience is substantiated by the affective factor, and my exploration of ideas tends to be deeper as we discuss possibilities and scenarios together. We also seem to develop a stronger team relationship, and return from such conferences more socially engaged, which is, of course, a natural agent for productivity and innovation in the workplace.

Regardless, I’ll sure to be practicing my own peculiar style of session attendance, which has gained the dubious label of “The Jared Method” by Mr. Hugentobler, where I pop into one session, grab the printed materials, listen to the opening lines as I scan the materials to evaluate the session, then (often) pop out to investigate another session in like manner. If colleagues are involved I can often verify or correct my first impression of the session later in the day.