How students use technology

I'm on a spring break mission trip with nine students and one other adviser to Chicago to study firsthand interfaith relations. I may (or may not) reflect on the interfaith mission in my personal blog. Here, I would like to chronicle how we're using technology, especially how the students are using it on their own.

• One of the students has given up Facebook for Lent, and has lamented that more than once.
• On the bus and on the train, texting takes place.
• Someone had a compass app on their smart phone to tell us which way to go when the bus dropped us off a few blocks from the stop.
• Map apps were helpful in finding our way around a new city, and a very large one at that.
• A student brought his laptop so he could finish a paper that was due on Friday.
• The Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) has a mobile site and a mobile app that helped us plan our day travels.
• Google image search was used to show pictures of a tamarind tree while we tried dried tamarind pods for the first time.
• A girl used her phone to record our rehearsal when we were spontaneously asked to join the choir. She then shared it with several of us through multi-media text messages.
• Phone cameras were used a lot to take pictures of the town and the team. The pictures will eventually make it to Facebook.
• Using the Chromebook I brought, I was able to see pictures of the ball my daughters went to yesterday, pics they had uploaded to Facebook.
• I'm using that same Chromebook to post these observations to Blogger, utilizing the church where we're staying's WiFi network.

How do you observe your students using technology?

Summer swiftly coming to a close

It was just the other day a colleague asked me, "Can you believe it's August already?" Classes start in less than three weeks, athletes start showing up on campus next week, and everything ramps up quickly. The fine person who has been helping on our help desk at this busy time of year is back in the chair, freeing me up to do more Instructional Technology (such as write a blog post.)

Over the summer I've read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, the selected reading for OWU's first year seminar. My, that was a good choice! Appropriately named by more than 60 critics as one of the best books of 2010, it chronicles the story of this journalist striving to uncover the history of the famous HeLa cells, and document the story of the woman they came from and her family. I had never heard of HeLa cells before, but the story pulled me right in and held my attention. It will provide ample food for thought and fodder for discussion on a range of topics, including medical ethics, racism, economic justice, and journalism. I look forward to joining a section of UC 160 and discussing this book as a launchpad into a broader discussion of college life and expectations.

(Image of stained HeLa cells courtesy GE Healthcare (by way of Henrietta Lacks) via CC)

Colored HeLa cells 

Since finishing The Immortal Life, I've started reading Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget, and gotten through the first couple chapters. This one is different than Skloot's in that it's a manifesto rather than a narrative, it's more technical and philosophical. It's also hitting very close to home because, like Lanier, I am also a technologist. I am familiar with his terms and his topics, and am increasingly appreciating what he's trying to do: promote more human-centered, or humanistic, technology. It's interesting to hear criticism that the Web 2.0 is dehumanizing from someone within the IT field. I look forward to reading the rest of what he has to say, and applying some of his suggestions in my own work as an Educational Technologist. (Education comes first, so technology serves the people doing the teaching & learning...)

In other news, OWU Blackboard installation will be upgraded to SP6 before classes start, I will be making appointment slots available where faculty can sign up for consultations online, and I will be offering more informal lunch & learn conversations this fall. There are more initiatives in the works that will be announced later.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth is a technical term indicating the maximum amount of information (bits/second) that can be transmitted along a channel or data connection. The term is also used loosely to indicate how much workload a person can handle in their day-to-day duties.

I could say I haven't had the bandwidth to blog lately due to time-consuming projects, such as the Blackboard upgrade and updating our classroom inventory. Yet blogging is an important medium for communication with my constituents, peer colleagues at other institutions, and the world. It's simply a matter of making it a priority and making time for it.

This semester I've made it a priority to attend the Psychological Foundations of Education class. This has been a good exposure to a typical course here at OWU, and one that integrates a a fair amount of technology: PowerPoint is almost always used for presenting material, and the presentations often include video. The Blackboard course is available and is where course documents can be found. (I've accessed it via the Blackboard Mobile app on my iPad.)  The document projector is sometimes used. The course is taught in Phillips 210, where there is a SMART Board, but the interactive features of that are not used in this course.

It will be interesting to discuss with the instructor ways that she might utilize technology more in this class. However, it's been eye-opening to simply observe her teach and interact with the students. It's given me a deeper appreciation for the time it takes to prepare and present a lesson. I typically teach stand-alone workshops that last up to an hour and a half. She's teaching 50-minute sessions three times a week for 16 weeks, and that's just one of her classes.

It's understandable if faculty don't want to start something new in the midst of a semester. They may not have the bandwidth to give it the attention required with everything else they're already doing. I'm here to support what they're already doing, and to be available when they're ready to learn something new.

My first workshop this semester is Thursday at noon, and will cover the new apps in BishopApps, including Blogger.