Final Paper Questions

I am seeing a lot of action around final paper work. This is a great sign that most of the papers are now in progress and I am pleased about this.

Several students have asked about citing outside sources and what is acceptable. Since this is a paper for teachers and/or practitioners, I am not looking for extensive literature reviews. I am looking to see that you have knowledge of what others are doing in your topic area. Thus, if you are writing on implementing Moodle in your school, you would want to check out what other K-12 schools are doing with Moodle. Your sources will probably be from the web and will be based on practical experience and they will broaden the effect of your paper. Web citations are fine for this assignment. My interest is that you show an awareness of the work of others around your topic---a typical 505 final paper might have 2-6 references.

A typical 505 paper is 8-12 double spaced pages and can't be much longer for publication in most practitioners' journals.

I look forward to reading your outlines next week.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Those Early Morning Messages.....

I have Moodle set to send all the messages you post to my email account. In general, this is a good practice for me since it helps me stay updated on what is happening in our discussion groups. Occasionally, this creates an overload of email for me, but I tend to have an overload of email anyway.! I have noticed that we have a lot of early morning activity among the students in our class and I have come to look forward to starting my day reading these early morning posts. It is a good time for me to read and understand your posts before the chaos of the day begins. So, a special thanks to those early morning (and late night) contributors.

I have noticed that many of you have established a rhythm for your contributions to class discussions and whether your regular time is late night, early morning, or afternoon, I think that establishing this schedule is a useful way to approach an online course.

I suspect that many of you know that TPACK is a major research interest of mine and thus I am especially enjoying our interactions around this topic this week. I believe that TPACK provides a very useful frame for describing and understanding true technology integration and your examples of TPACK in action are both interesting and useful to me.

And, finally, viewing the digital stories that are now appearing on our Facebook page is a delightful experience. In general, your stories are personal, informative and expertly presented. Congratulations!

Delicious Discussion in Turkey!

I am enjoying my first morning in Konya, Turkey and after a few challenges, I am ready to make a blog post from here. It turns out that Blogger is so smart that it changes the directions into Turkish and Evrim is not here yet to help me. After a few errors, however, I was able to remember how to make a new post without using the prompts. Here's hoping that smart Blogger does not change my post into Turkish for you!

I tuned into the delicious piece of the readings discussion and enjoyed the first few posts. I tend to read each post and then think: "I really like that quote also". I hope that finding these delicious pieces helps as we work to make the readings real and useful to all of us as professionals. I know that I especially enjoy this particular exercise.

I also use the delicious assignment to change the focus of reading discussions----I find that using the same format for reading discussion can get tedious for students (and instructors) and I work to keep things lively for all of us. Your suggestions in this area are most welcome.

The weather in the United States has caused problems for my colleagues coming to Turkey, so it looks like I will need to do two keynote talks tomorrow. The first one is on TPACK and the second was to be a panel of journal editors talking about how to publish your research. It looks like I will be the whole panel unless travel challenges improve for my colleagues. Wish me luck! We will post the TPACK presentation on our class website.

Catch Uo Week---a Few Worries

Evrim and I decided to devote Week 4 discussion time to getting both the Week 2 and Week 3 discussions started up and vibrant. When I visited these discussions today, I was a little disappointed in what I found. I am looking for student discussion posts that demonstrate a strong knowledge of the readings and an ability to synthesize the readings and apply them professionally. I want students to learn to use the readings as they confront issues of learning and technology use. I had hoped that the Week 2 discussions would result in group definitions of constructivist learning theory, relating these definitions to ideas from our other two authors. And I was looking for similar insights from students around our Week 3 readings. I was excited to find the work of Group 1 in Week 3-----students were very close to my expectations for the discussion. And then I remembered that it is only Tuesday and that the other discussions would probably continue to add specifics and richness as our catch up week continues! I decided to send an email to encourage discussion participation this week.

I know we lost momentum with the Moodle blip and I look forward to regaining this momentum this week!

Back on Track (We Hope)!

We think that Moodle is now updated and that all our discussions and assignments are back. Evrim and I did the Week 4 video this morning and we are going to use Week 4 to catch up with both our Week 2 discussions and our blogging discussions in Week 3. We will then be ready to begin new topics for Week 4. We will have an application assignment focused upon Pre-Writing during Week 4, but no new discussions. Whew!

I am impressed with our class reaction to our mini-crisis. Most students seem to understand technology issues and the need to work around these issues. We noted that Facebook and Diigo became more active during our Moodle downtime and we were glad to have these alternative communication avenues. Thanks to all of you!

In other news, we will not be scheduling office hours unless you tell us there is a need for this synchronous communication. It appears that our other numerous channels of communication are working.

Challenges with Moodle

As you all know, our Labor Day weekend was marred by Moodle giving us technical fits. It all started with a 3-hour announced shut down to update the server and it is now Tuesday morning and our challenges have not ended yet. I first heard about the problems from 505 students and initially I was hopeful that we would have things back up and running quickly. Wrong!

As of Tuesday morning, we are ready to begin Week 3 and we have all the necessary materials up and running. We will make the Week 3 assignments and discussions due one week from today on Tuesday, Sept. 14. We will return to the Week 2 discussions when we have the materials updated and we will then assign a due date for these discussions.

I am a bit concerned that our Moodle challenge will interrupt the process of getting into the flow of the course, but I am hopeful that students will be flexible. Perhaps we can view this as an example of what to do when the technology lets you down!

Be sure to keep us informed if you have Moodle problems this week and we will work together to get things off to a good start. I was very impressed with how quickly some of you noticed our Moodle problem over the weekend----thanks for that.

Another interesting wrinkle in all of this is that the type of home internet service you have influences how long it takes for the Moodle updates to take effect. Our technical consultant just told me that those of you on Mediacom at home may not have the updates until Tuesday evening, while Qwest users have more frequent server updates.

Please share your reactions and stories about our "Moodle blip"!

Tuesday Morning Anxiety......

As I mentioned at our Saturday meeting, Evrim and I tend to be on a little different schedule for our class. We do the weekly video the Thursday before the week starts and thus by Tuesday, it seems that we should be well into the week. Thus, I have a tendency to get a little nervous when I check our class on Tuesday morning. I am usually anxious to see activity starting up and evidence that our assignments and discussion topics made sense to you. I was especially nervous for this, my first Tuesday morning check.

You will now need to picture me sitting at my computer smiling as I have just visited four nicely structured discussions that are all off to a good start. I observe different and effective leadership styles in each group, focused comments including specific references to our readings and incorporating other resources, and some lively interchange. Already on Tuesday morning, I notice one group leader (Kim) hanging out in other groups.

I look forward to the development of our discussions this week as we work to understand (and construct!) definitions of constructivist learning theory and its relevance to our work with technology and to define and consider the needs of a new generation of learners.

And thanks for addressing my Tuesday morning anxiety!

We are up and running!

We had our first face to face class meeting Saturday, August 21 at ISU with four students participating at a distance (Samy, Cheryl, Kim and Erin). We actually started before classes officially start at ISU (August 23), so we are already ahead of the game.

Our first meeting included four goals: meet each other, learn about course expectations, learn about the theoretical base for the class and have some fun. I think we did OK in all four areas, but the students are the ones who can comment on that. I find that these face to face meetings are very important to me as I work to connect with each student and establish a base for a relationship that will grow in our work together over the semester.

Highlights of the day included Crystal's ability to identify each student by name at the end of our day together, the interaction with the "old people" at lunch, Dennis's introduction to some Ipad apps, and the beginning of some interesting Logo experiences.

Our connections with the four distance students were not perfect, but all four hung in there with us. We will work to make these connections a bit more seamless the next time around.

I think that our Facebook entries this week will help with our relationship building and we already have interesting posts from Kim, Carrie, Dennis and Doug. I look forward to the posts and pictures from others this week.