A few articles of interest this week. Let's look at "Most Faculty Don't Use Twitter, Study Reveals: but about 5.1 percent use the microblogging service as part of instruction" in Campus Technology August 26, 2009. Looking at a report from Faculty Focus apparently of the 1,958 "higher education professionals" surveyed, 70 percent said they don't use Twitter and 57 percent have never tried using it. the flip side is that about 31 percent of the respondents reported that they do use Twitter "in one way or another." They identify the respondents as: "Respondents to the study included faculty (60.2 percent, including 4.3 percent identifying themselves as online instructors); department chairs, deans, and other leaders (23.6 percent); and others involved in roles like "faculty development, academic advisement, instructional design, marketing, admissions, assessment, and library services." Should we be surprised? I'm not. The best we can do is our job - help faculty understand how Twitter can be used in classes, support those interested and assess its value when used. If you've read this far and might want to try Twitter out, you can check out the last version of a guide that I've developed.
With the advent of large lecture classes in Centennial Hall, the UA has invested in providing "technology-rich" IT environment. (see UANews article) Centennial Hall has been upgraded and one resource is RepsonseWare from Turning Technologies. ResponseWare allows students to respond to interactive polling questions presented by professors. Another recent Campus Technology article, "Fostering Classroom Interaction, Minus the Clickers" describes how a product within the U. of Michigan's Lecture Tools enables an instructor to develop an active learning environment where students answer questions using their laptops. Another function of this product is that students can submit questions anonymously during class and these questions appear immediately on the classroom display. The prof in the article reported that the number of student questions increased to nearly 2/3s of the class when this was introduced. Besides this really interesting took is that we are seeing alternatives to "clickers."
A few years ago at an EDUCAUSE conference, a keynote speaker reported on a survey at her institution asking students what IT they wanted in their classes. One student commented that she didn't want Powerpointless presentations. The meaning being that too many profs used PowerPoint in ways that the student found less than conducive to learning. I know I've seen far too many PowerPoint presentations like that - cluttered with text, a mix of fonts, Ziggy cartoons, .... So it's no surprise that an August 19th article appearing in the BBC News about PowerPoint being 25 years old begins with the author writing: "I've asked hundreds of people how many PowerPoint presentations they've seen that came across as really inspiring and enthusiastic." He appends that most of the people asked this stuggled to come up with one example, while the most optimistic answer he heard was "two."
I can think of only one myself. It was given by Lawrence Lessig at a Syllabus conference about 5 or 6 years ago. When he was done I thought to myself, "How the hell did it do that with PowerPoint?" I can also recall many of his points from that presentation. Go to YouTube and watch a couple videos of his presentations. Be sure to watch "Do Copyright Laws Stifle Creativity?"
Lots of excellent points in this BBC piece that we can all take to heart. For example, "the more slides you have and the more there is on each slide, the more distracting it will it be for the audience." "You think bullet points make information more digestible? Think again." This BBC piece should be required reading for everyone who gives a presentation using PowerPoint.
Something useful came in an email message from a sales rep at Omniture. Omniture's website presents it as Web marketing company. Omniture maintains a blog and there's a post "Social Media in 30 Seconds" that was posted last April 28th that has a great graphic showing three interlocking rings and where "social news," "user-generated Content," and "Social Networking" tools fit in. I find this graphic very useful in logically categorizing social software. What do you think?
Leave a comment