How to effectively teach two cohorts of students at once using rich-media synchronous technologies?

Issues:
* People who are face to face receive all information from the teacher, but    potentially not the view that the remote students are receiving.
* People who are remote but do not potentially receive all of the information in the remote room.

There is a Catch 22 in operation here. If they receive all of the information in their environment and in the face to face environment, they receive a complete but may miss some of it due to the extra amount of information being processed (cognitive overload, split attention). But if they don’t receive all of the information from the ‘other’ environment then they may miss crucial information. The challenge is to either a) not broadcast the ‘other’ environment but make sure all pertinent information is transmitted through the common environment being used, or b) broadcast the ‘other’ environment but make sure that the pace and focusing strategies reduce cognitive overload to a manageable level. For a), adaptive strategies may be required by the teacher in order to ensure that all information is transmitted through the shared channel – for instance, by repeating questions asked by students in the face-to-face environment into the mediating technology.

Possible recommendations: Face-to-face students should have access to the teacher’s view of remote students, and what is happening in the remote spaces. Remote students should have access to the communicative tool, and ideally to a view of what is happening in the remote environment.

The demands upon the teacher needs to be considered for both paradigms. For a), the demands of ensuring pertinent information is broadcast can be great. For b), the demands of processing and appropriately responding to all of the information in both environments can be great. This would be an interesting test to run. I suspect that it is better to ensure that both environments are broadcast to both groups. I also suspect that using a ‘window’ approach, where the environments are butted up against each other as though they are conjonined, continuations of each other. This is in-line with the net-meeting approach.

Q: Why would you have remote and face to face students collaborate in a group if you could choose that people in the same situation could be put together?
A: Perhaps they are in groups, and some members choose not to attend face-to-face.
Q: What are the strategies that you can adopt to enhance blended synchronous learning?
A: Ask questions of and expect questions from both groups regularly, and encourage questions and responses from groups that aren’t participating. Reiterating information that is potentially not being accessed by one of the cohorts so that they do receive it. Highlighting relevant elements within the environment so that peoples’ attention is on pertinent aspects of the learning episode and their working memory is not overloaded.

In reflecting upon what makes for a good Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) and how to innovate in this already rapidly developing frontier, an integrated design set occurred to me. It involves the following elements:

1. Prescribed readings
2. Short multimedia lecture presentations on the different topics, the shorter the better, up to a maximum of 15 minutes (Youtube, or similar)
3. Tutorials run through LAMS sequences embedded in Moodle – this has the advantage of offering synchronous MOOC activities
4. Extra support sessions (live) run through a web-conferencing system such as Adobe Connect
5. Course run through Moodle, with enrolled Macquarie students in one instance and non-Macquarie self-registered students in another instance
6. Forums and chat for each topic to enable troubleshooting support
7. Twitter feed running continually
8. Facebook sister site
9. Exam run through Moodle/LAMS
10. Non-Macquarie self-registered students  can choose to pay (at any stage) and hence have the assessment elements marked and have completed the subject (non-award or OUA?)

A range of Marketing, Business, Finance, Legal and Enrollment issues to consider. Also need to consider scheduling – how to offer the synchronous learning experiences to a large cohort of potentially internationally located students.

Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is an established methodology in health psychology, and is growing in application in education related areas. It is underutilised in educational teachnology research (Cilesiz, 2010).

IPA interviews aim to have the interviewer to enter the interviewee’s lifeworld through the participants’ recollection of their experiences (Smith et al., 2009). Other key references include Mayes (2006), Hefferon and Ollis (2006) and Shaw (2010). It provides a structured approach for examining recounts of a particular phenomena, and should be further explored as a methodology for our field.

• Cilesiz, S. (2010). A phenomenological approach to experiences with technology: current state, promise, and future directions for research. Education Technology Research and Development. Online early: DOI 10.1007/s11423-010-9173-2
• Hefferon, K. M. and Ollis, S. (2006). ‘Just clicks’: an interpretative phenomenological analysis of professional dancers’ experience of flow. Research in Dance Education, 7(2), 141-159.
• Mayes, T. (2006). LEX: the learner experience of e-learning: Methodology report. Glasgow Caledonian University.

  http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/elearningpedagogy/lex_method_final.pdf

• Smith, J. A., Flowers, P. and Larkin, M. (2009). Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis: theory, method and research, London: Sage.

Grant runs from 1.07.2012 to 30.6.2014

Kickoff grant to do research that enables people to apply for grants. Changes to proportions in 2012:

• Aims, significance, innovation and outcomes (includes National Benefit) 20%
• Approach and methodology (20%)
• Role of personnel and Training (10%)
• Strategy and schedule for attracting external funding (10%)
• Track record (40%)

Applicant must be here for time of grant (so if JK was on then we would need to complete by October next year when her contract runs out). Can have other CI or PI from other institution, but they will not get any funding.

Guidelines:

• DONT exceed page limits and word limits (otherwise ineligible)
• 12 point font, 10 points for reference
• Save final version as a different name to remove track changes
• Delete all instructions

Panel will be concerned if:

• Panel comes from across the university, so don’t use too much jargon.
• Check grammar and spelling
• Collaboration between ICs is poorly described, details of the roles.

Track record of all applicants relative to career stage and opportunity: max 0.5 pages so provide any evidence.
Publications since 2007 are eligible.
Cannot provide submitted but not accepted articles.

Project title – short descriptive, no more than 150 characters (20 words)
Project summary – plain language, no kargon, summary of aims, significance and expected outcomes, no more than 750 characters (approximate 100 words).

Project description (4.5 pages – 50%)
Background blurb not worth anything but does set scene.
Aims, Significance and Expected outcomes. Make aims integrated and clear.
Approach and Method 20%
Strategy to attract funding 10%

Budget:
Personnel (detailed costing)
Teaching Relief (strongly justified and detailed)
Munor equipment (<$1000
Maintenance
Travel – directly related to project
Visiting researchers (interstate or international during grant period but not for general networking, contributing to project outcomes)

Budget justification: link budget items to specific aims and methodology. Why these items are essential.

Research strategy: relate to long term research strategy. Don’t hesitate to describe research weaknesses.

Research funding: previous grants from 2010 to 2014.

Previously, 76% success rate, almost all money approved. Available budget: $710K

Contacts: Georgina Chinchen

While this is a little off my regular topic, I thought I’d share a fascinating session that I had today at the Sydney Allergy Clinic.

The doctor referred to some seminal literature of relevance:

• New World Health Organisation report: deaths from noncommunicable diseases on the rise, with developing world hit hardest (http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2011/ncds_20110427/en/index.html)
• Seborrhoeic dermatitis and dandruff: a fungal disease. Sam Shuster, Royal Society of Medicine Services, 1988
• Health Effects of Omega-3, Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids, By Artemis P. Simopoulos, M.D. June, 2005 (http://pdfrequest.com/seabiotics/HealthEffectsofOmega3.pdf)

Shuster’s article outlines how seborrhoeic dermatitis is actually caused by the fungus (yeast) Malassezia Furfur, also known as Pityrosporum Furfur.

In terms of treating skin generally, the Sydney Allergy Clinic recommended the following five natural elements:

1. Omega 3
2. Vitamin D
3. Zinc
4. Probiotics
5. Prebiotics

Quizzically, the only allergen that returned a positive test result for me was cockroaches!

The Teaching Teachers for the Future project has undoubtedly been a success, and the general mood amongst participants is that it is critical for us to continue the momentum. TTF2 provides us with an opportunity to continue build upon the foundations established by the first TTF project. In particular, we have the opportunity to conduct a coordinate design research program that examines how to most effectively approaches to developing pre-service teachers’ technology-pedagogy-and-content knowledge (TPACK) capabilities.

Under the guise of this research question we could:

1. Perform a mapping using a consistent framework across institutions of the tasks that universities are integrating into their programs in order to develop pre-service teachers’ TPACK capabilities (in TTF1 we did not see how other universities were integrating technology, so could not learn from one another).
2. Conduct the most massive coordinated design research project in history in order to determine the activities and strategies that are most effective in developing pre-service teachers’ TPACK capabilities.

For point 1, we could collect information about each TPACK related task in terms of the technology/ies that are focused upon, the pedagogies that are used, and the content area that is addressed. At Macquarie we completed this by creating a 12 item categorisation system for technologies (Web 2.0, desktop software, audio creation, video production, image editing, etc). Pedagogies were categorised in terms of the degree of construction and negotiation required (from transmissive to dialogic, constructive, and co-constructive). Content was not only categorised in terms of subject area (English, History, Maths, Science, etc), but also in terms of the revised Blooms’ type of knowledge (factual, procedural, conceptual, metacogitive) and cognitive processes (Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyse, Evaluate, Create). This could all then be collected and shared using a national web-portal.

The massive cooperative design research project could then have academics at each university trialing new approaches (or even evaluating existing approaches) using consistent pre and post measures of attitude and ability. For instance, before activities we could ask pre-service teachers approximately 10 easy to answer (common) questions about their perceptions and confidence relating to the technology in question and teaching with it. The task (learning design) itself could then be explained also using a consistent framework, for instance using pedagogical patterns schema. Then post measures and open ended responses could be collected to examine the impact of the approaches and why they were (or were not) successful. In meta-analyses researchers attempt to compare different teaching strategies that were measured using often quite different approaches, however a massive cooperative design initiative would enable us to measure using a common instrument. Once again, all of this information including the resources used in the task could be collected via the web, so we not only have data relating to the impact of the approach and pre-service teacher perceptions of it, but the approach is shared with the rest of the community for reuse (and even re-evaluation for reliability purposes if desired).

Thus this study would then enable the TTF community to (somewhat) reliably compare and understand the way in which different tasks impact on students’ TPACK capabilities, and share our curriculum innovations so that pre-service teachers from all Australian Universities can benefit from the inspiration and hard work of the TTF community.

15th and 16th of March 2012

Mishra & Koeler Keynote Presentation

• In 1999 saw workshop model of teacher professional development not so useful – taught technology but not so much how to use it
• Ran some design experiments – “learning technology by design” – taught themselves the technology skills that they needed – seemed to work [evidence?] – people learning technology without teaching it explicitly – provided teachers with support/scaffolding for technology skill development but not the focus.
• Built on Shulman (1986) who proposed Pedagogical-Content knowledge
• TPACK is conceptual framework that can help describe, infer, analyse, practical (applied).
• TPACK is not prescriptive, or complete (e.g., motivation and attitudes not included)
• Hopefully teachers will reside in the TPC segment.
• TPACK has a handbook, 300 scholarly articles, textbooks, school districts, teacher education programs (eg Michigan state), and of course TTF project, SITE strand.
• An example, using a Kinnect to graph and understand a person’s motion.
• Measuring TPACK – approaches:
• Knowledge – Can ask them about their TPACK knowledge, or self reports of understanding (E.g. 2009 Schmidt survey instrument for statistically measuring self perceptions of change)
• Artifacts – eg discourse analysis of syllabus documents
• Practice – analysing what teachers do in class
• Student Outcomes – Impact on students
• Only a small percentage of TPACK work is measuring TPACK knowledge and abilities – we need more people measuring this.
• Over 66 measures of TPACK out there – can we connect the dots – ie, do the different measures correlate with one another?
• How can we measuring effectiveness of TPACK per se [I believe we can't]. For instance, is just saying that TPACK was used enough to then count as a TPACK study? [Problem: TPACK is not a method, so cannot say that TPACK is effective]

Interesting other point: People who are brilliant in their area often have interests beyond the area in which they are famous – eg Albert Einstein.

“Explore | Create | Share”

Evaluation Working Group

• Constructed based on the Albion, Jamieson-Proctor & Finger, 2010, Jamieson-Procotor & Finger 2009, Jamieson-Proctor, Watson, Finger, Grimbeek & Burnett, 2007) + emerging TPACK literature. Analysed that instrument with 3000 pre-service teachers. Items were also constructed to relate to TTF PRoject Australian Curriculum areas – Eng, Math, Sci, Hist and consideration of AITSL National PRofessional Standards for Teachers.
• Interestingly there hadn’t been much change in teacher confidence in previous projects
• T1: N=12881, T2: N=5809. Only 75% completed the confidence, usefulness and other rating scales.
• Used traditional factor analysis techniques to find four strong scales:
• Confidence – teacher items
• Usefulness – teacher items
• Confidence – help students to use
• Usefulness – help students to use

Punya Keynote day 2

Note: based on a review of 14 contemporary 21st Century frameworks, there are three overarching themes – Foundational knowledge (content, digital literacy, etc), metaknowledge (knowledge about learning and thinking and information), and humanistic knowledge (knowledge of people, communication, etc).

Lookup Bertram Bruce, who espouses that we shouldn’t adopt a technologically deterministic model of education. Technology is deeply embedded in educational practice.

Brainstorming session with Mauricio Marrone

1. Insert a FB Social Plugin discussion

• Facebook Social plugin for discussions is not assigned to any particular FB account. Cannot add a FB discussion plugin that is from a FB group
• FB social plugin can be inserted into any web page, and the post that people make can also appears on their FB wall (and is announced to their friend) depending on whether they select that option
• Must nominate a URL if you are going to start a FB Social plugin discussion.
• Good for initiating a sense of community
• To embed just go to http://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/ and follow the instructions to insert a FB Comment.
• Note: cannot use the FB subscription tool as it relates to subscribing to people within FB

2. Insert a Twitter feed

• For instance, a convenor might want to capture every twitter comment relating to EDUC261.
• This can be done either by
  • A) grabbing the search widget from the My website section of http://twitter.com/about/resources/widgets and inserting it into a section of a unit website, or
  • B) using the Twitter block that comes built in with your LMS (say Moodle)

3. Insert a Disqus feed

• See http://disqus.com for a plugin that enables people to create a comment platform / community on your website. Allows for full integration with Facebook, Twitter and more.
• Interesting question – what are the different advantages and disadvantages between a Facebook Social Plugin discussion and a Disqus discussion?

Aims:

Important that the embedded functionalities are purposeful and useful to students.

From cloud to Moodle

1. Capture all tweets and have them appear in a sidebar of Moodle (done in 2 above)
2. Capture FB comments and activity (in EDUC261 FB group, say) relating to EDUC261 and have them appear in Moodle (?)

From Moodle to cloud

1. People receiving Moodle announcements, discussion activity etc in their FB (for example 1. Insert a FB Social Plugin discussion, investigate Moodle plugin)
2. People receiving Moodle announcements, discussion activity etc in their Twitter (retweet? Twitterfeed?)

Other ideas/questions:

• What is the bet way to conceptualise what we are trying to do using FB, Twitter, and other SN (eg is it just about capturing FB and Twitter within LMS, as well as pushing out LMS activity to FB & Twitter, or are there are other ways to think about what we are trying to achieve?
• How to make the most of the Photo/Video/Docs/AskQuestion features of the EDUC261 FBgroup

There is currently a great deal of change taking place at NTDET. In the immediate term there is no scope for partnership, but once their new social networking policy is put in place (next two weeks).

Operationally NTDET needs to:

• Move from individual to shared Facebook account.
• Circles in Google – overheads due to everyone has to manage their own circle.

NT DET moving from outcomes based learning to A-E learning which means less emphasis on differentiated learning. Shifting to uncomplicating the environment.

Alison Lockley is working in the social networking area – could possibly work with her.

Meeting with Warren Bailey, 30^th January 2012

• Not offering ARC Linkage grants in the first part of the year.
• 12 month projects to establish research partnership with a reasonable prospect of an ongoing project. Reasonable prospect is assessed based on the project being synergistic with the goals of the organisation.
• Application forms on the web, matching dollar for dollar.
• Warren is the gatekeeper for the scheme – 15 awarded last year.
• Reasonable chances of success if meeting the criteria.
• Assessed upon receipt.
• Warren can help with the application.
• Not only Linkage funding because they are becoming harder to obtain and offered less often.
• Talk to Macquarie Institute of Advancement (headed by Mark Williams) look at potential for Foundation money.
• Talk to Mark Wiggins to see if there is a Business Development Manager for Human Sciences who might be able to help source funds.