Out-of-Class Content

Currently reading, Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning by Jose Antonio Bowen, for PIDP 3240. Bowen's essential argument is that with "an expanding global market for online learning" that "the value of a bricks-and-mortar university will remain in its face-to-face (i.e., naked) interacting between faculty and staff" (ix). To this end, Bowen suggests numerous ways to use technology to increase the value of the time spent in the classroom.

This is an interesting idea especially as I am planning the course content for teaching ENGL 170. With class time, actual interaction with the students, so valuable how is it best spent? Bowen suggests focus on "what you do best and link to the rest" (125). He offers a number of suggestions about where to find online course content as well as tips on creating your own.

The idea of making the most of class time resonated with me. The course objective for ENGL 170: Writing and Communication is to help students to become better academic writers. The course usually includes mostly first year students and often several English as a Second Language (ESL) students. It covers a great deal of content and frankly, some of it is a bit dry, such as grammar and punctuation. While I agree that good grammar and punctuation are important for clear, concise writing, I believe that you become a better writer, academic and otherwise, by writing and by reading good writing. Therefore, my ideal class would include an opportunity to write during every class. I also feel strongly in the importance of feedback, both giving and getting constructive, positive feedback. So being able to use class time for the students to practice giving and receiving feedback and leaving some of the grammar and punctuation content to be learned online appealed to me. Additionally, I agree with Bowen and others, that valuable class time should be used to practice skills and those higher-order processing tasks such as applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating. Therefore accepting Bowen's challenge to fully utilize the face-to-face class time, I sought to find "out-of-class content" (103) to supplement or replace some of the lessons with online content.

Bowen's chapter, "Technology for Information Delivery," offers a number of sources for finding what he terms as "out-of-class" content. A few of the ones he lists include:

• Educator
• Google
• iTunes U
• Khan Academy
• Merlot
• MIT
• Open Education Consortium
• The Open University
• Scribendi
• TED
• Utubersity
• Yale
• YouTube

Alternatively, as Bowen suggests that you can create your own podcasts. I have had a bit of experience creating podcasts. I've done a few video lectures for other courses in the PIDP program but I really hate being on camera so I usually just record a voiceover on a PowerPoint presentation. While, I try to use engaging graphics, I'm not sure if this is much better than recording one's self lecturing in front of the class, which unless it is done really well, can be truly horrible.

In my hunt for grammar and punctuation online content, I found a number of sites directed at learning to speak English as a foreign language speaker which didn't really meet my needs. I did find some useful content created by the English Department of the University of Calgary. There were some YouTube videos by EnglishLessons4U, which seemed quite engaging but did seem to be targeted more for ESL students (which could prove helpful for my ESL students). I struck pay dirt on the Educator site with English Grammar with Rebekah Hendershot. The lectures are in video format and pairs Hendershot with a nice interactive visual. The lecture has a number of useful options. Not only is there a table of contents for the course but each lecture is listed in table of contents order as well with the time noted - this makes it very easy for learners to go back and repeat sections. The lectures are broken into nice short chunks which don't feel overwhelming to the learner. Learners have the option of being able to download the lecture slides as well as just the notes under the tab Quick Notes. Hendershot, who incidentally is a professor with the University of California, has a very comprehensive course BUT only part of it is free. The majority of this beautiful content is available only through a subscription, which at its most basic is $25.00 per month. For some learners, especially those on learning on their own, $300.00 is pretty keep tuition considering this opens the whole world of Educator to you at your fingertips but for students already paying for a course this is too much to ask.

So what's my take-away? Am I conceding defeat to Bowen's challenge? I vow to use what content I can find and then work at creating the content I still need keeping in mind the model set out by Educator and Hendershot. I'll keep you posted.

PS. I will license my content under Creative Commons and open it for all to use.

Teaching - A Vocation or A Profession?

Is teaching a vocation or a profession?

I just started an online course, Open Content Licensing for Educators, through WikiEducator. Interestingly, the first session begins with the question, "Is teaching a vocation or a profession?" Like so much of my learning journey, I seem to find more questions than answers. Some participants talked about the "call" to teaching, about the need for dedication and the express satisfaction one gets from teaching. Others talk of the hours of hard work that teaching requires and how lends itself to a profession.

As an undergraduate student, I had a number of teachers who made it look easy, as though it were as natural as breathing to simply walk into the room and start teaching. Although I am new to teaching, I can already see how wrong I have been and the amount of hard work that goes into planning and preparing content and lessons and in evaluating learners and ourselves to continuously create a better learning experience.

Do I think teaching is a vocation or a profession? While I think teaching requires a certain degree of dedication and there is definitely an aspect of satisfaction that comes from teaching, I don't know that I would define it as a vocation based on these criteria. I brought dedication to my work as a librarian and there is satisfaction in helping a patron find the answers they are searching for, so I don't believe this is isolated to just teaching. And I wonder if calling these types of work, vocations, removes a sense of professionalism from the job. If it creates an illusion of a "naturalness" to the act of teaching that somehow dismisses the hard work involved or excuses those who don't put in the hard work and are the "bad" teachers. The excellent teachers that I work with, that I watched teach so "naturally" in my undergraduate, work hard to be excellent by evaluating themselves, learning new techniques, and continually studying the practice of teaching and learning.

What's my teaching philosophy?

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been considering my teaching philosophy. It's the driving question of the exit interview for PIDP 3100: Foundations of Adult Education and we spent some time discussing a variety of models in PIDP 3210: Curriculum Development over the past two weekends.

It's a tough question for someone with minimal practical teaching experience so in my usual fashion, when I feel uncertain about something, I research. It's my comfort zone. To this end, I took the Teaching Perspectives Inventory and can't say that I was too surprised by the results. My highest perspective was Nurturing, which states that "effective teaching assumes that long-term, hard, persistent effort to achieve comes from the heart, not the head" (taken from the TPI website). An important aspect featured in this perspective is not to fear failure and to support "effort as well as achievement" which I would agree is a definite component to my teaching and my learning. Even in my own learning, it's not about getting the best grade but rather being able to see improvement and effort which leads to a sense of pride in the work I have accomplished. My next highest result was Developmental which believes that "effective teaching must be planned and conducted 'from the learner's point of view' and this aligns with the philosophy George Siemens discussed in his interview with Howard Rheingold. We need to help learner's create their own paths to knowledge in order to make learning meaningful to the learner. In the words of the TPI, help create bridges to knowledge.

Along with the Teaching Perspectives Inventory (TPI), I picked up a copy of Pratt's book to read and I was struck by his observation that often as instructors, while it is important to think about new teaching techniques and different ways of assessing learners; an "important way in which we develop as instructors ... is through critically reflecting on what we believe about teaching and learning" (Pratt, 1998, p. 12).

Pratt, D.D. (1998). Five perspectives on teaching in adult and higher education. Malabar, FL.: Krieger Publishing.

OpenEd Conference - Vancouver, B.C., October 16-18, 2012

"That is not it all all,

That is not what I meant, at all."

(taken from T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Purfock and used very cleverly by Gardner Campbell)

I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the OpenEd Conference this month in Vancouver, B.C. It was an almost overwhelming experience. As someone new to this field, I learned an incredible and am still trying to process it all. But I must say for me, the absolute highlight of the conference, was Gardner Campbell's keynote address, Ecologies of Yearning, which you can access here: http://openedconference.org/2012/program/archive-of-sessions/day-1/day1-9am-c300/.

It was as though he scratched an itch that I have had for years. He talks about the "double-bind" of education. For example, we want our students to be creative but structure the creativity out of any assignment we give them. It must be 5 pages long, double-spaced, APA format, cite 5 sources and 2 of those must be peer-reviewed, etc. And while there is a need for students to learn how to write a research paper, is this what we really want to assess? Does this effectively show us what students have learned? Is this the best measurement of learning?

I don't have the answers to these questions but I know I want them.

A Vision of Students Today ...

Russell Day from Simon Fraser University used this video in his keynote address at the 10th Annual UNBC and CNC Teaching and Learning Conference - August, 2012.

A short video summarizing some of the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. Created by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University. (description taken from the YouTube website)

“In teaching others we teach ourselves”

A little bit about me ...

I’m a … learner, teacher, teaching assistant, environmentalist, graduate student, librarian, instructional designer, book lover, literature nerd, tourist, mother, wife, daughter, sister … student of the world.

I have created this blog to narrate my journey through the Provincial Instructor’s Diploma program.