TeachOIT: a Blog for People Who Teach with Technology

Helping you accomplish all of the things you need to do before breakfast remains the focus of many technologies. Some software helps us remain productive; to-do lists, notes, and all the other digital nags and sound effects that remind us what we should be doing, when we should be doing it, and where. And then there’s writing, which doesn’t jive well with the multitasking panic we often call “productivity”. Let’s take a look at a number of tools and strategies to help cut out the background noise of everyday life and get to writing.

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Professor Nat Turner reminded me about this great YouTube video you might enjoy on education paradigms:

Apple’s iPad was released last April so this marks the first semester that faculty might consider using it in a planned way in the classroom. An activity many instructors have expressed interest in is the use of the iPad as a presentation device. After some initial testing I would suggest that this first generation of Apple technology isn’t quite ready for prime time use in the lecture hall, but read on to find out what you should to know if you want to try it for yourself.

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By Jason Blanchard and Zach McDowell

Earlier this week, the U.S. Library of Congress handed down a ruling that expands the circumstances in which academics can circumvent copy protection in order to use copyrighted materials for fair use. This ruling will significantly affect instructors using DVD clips and other technologies in their course.  However, the text of the ruling can be a bit confusing for those not acquainted with the technology or history of digital rights management (DRM) and fair use. Here is a summary for staff, faculty and student to better understand their newly expanded rights.

We often run across questions of copyright when dealing with instructional technology. Instructors, especially in large lecture classes, are regularly expected to incorporate a myriad of sound, video, and text into their lectures and lessons. However, without a law degree (and even with one), it is nearly impossible to navigate the murky waters of copyright law. Luckily, the concept of fair use has gained more traction over the years, allowing use of copyrighted materials for certain purposes (educational, noncommercial, etc.) without having to seek out licensing for each small clip. However, to extract these clips (for example from a DVD) it often requires breaking copy protection.The Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), passed in 1998, was designed to protect copyrighted works disseminated via technology devices and the Internet. Specifically, the DMCA made it illegal to bypass copy protection (or DRM) to access copyrighted works for any reason. Effectively, this made activities such as copying clips from a DVD for a college lecture illegal, even if it fell under fair use. Every three years, the U.S. Library of Congress reviews the DMCA to determine if exemptions to DRM circumvention are needed. Last year the Library of Congress granted exceptions to Media and Film Studies professors to break DRM to extract clips. Earlier this week, the Library of Congress expanded its previous ruling to six classes of works, describing instances where bypassing copy protection is not a violation of the DMCA (read the text of the ruling on copyright.gov).

Six classes of works exempt from DMCA anti-circumvention laws:

1. Motion picture DVDs: Within the bounds of fair use, clips can be copied from DVDs by college and university professors, film and media studies students, documentary filmmakers, or producers of “noncommercial videos.”
2. Cellphones and smartphones: Software can be installed even if it is not approved by the device’s manufacturer (i.e. “jailbreaking” an iPhone).
3. Cellphones and smartphones: Devices can be altered with software that enables the device to access wireless networks “authorized by the operator of the network.”
4. Video games: DRM can be circumvented for testing a game’s security vulnerabilities.
5. Computer programs protected by hardware keys (dongles): Can be altered for access without a software key when the dongle is no longer manufactured.
6. eBooks: Can circumvent controls preventing access to features such as read aloud functions or other assistive formats.

The most direct affect of this ruling for university faculty, staff and students is the expansion of rights to bypass copy protection on DVDs for academic and noncommercial purposes when the derivative works fall under fair use, and all other attempts to acquire the content without breaking DRM are exhausted. This is an important ruling for university students and faculty who re-purpose or remix small portions of motion pictures for critical purposes. Under these new exemptions, academic freedom to motion picture content is expanded.

Also making a buzz on the Internet is the exemption for “jailbreaking” mobile devices.  Many users have complained about how some smartphones are “locked down” and restrictive to consumers and developers. The new exemptions give legal sanction to those who wish to write and add software without the consent of the mobile device’s manufacturer.  Writing and uploading apps for the iPhone, for example, without going through Apple’s “App Store” is now protected (NOTE: doing so is still a violation of Apple’s “terms of service,” and will void the warranty. Also, this does not apply to the iPad at the moment).

Overall, the six newly exempted works expand the rights of users to access technology devices and exercise fair use of copyrighted works. Visit the consultants in the Instructional Media Lab for more information about the ruling or about accessing content.

Additional resources:

• Statement from Librarian of Congress, James H. Billington– http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2010/10-169.html
• “Rulemaking on Exemptions from Prohibition on Circumvention of Technological Measures that Control Access to Copyrighted Works” on the U.S. Copyright Office website– http://www.copyright.gov/1201/
• The Chronicle of Higher Ed’s ProfHacker column, “Letting Us Rip: Our New Right to Fair Use of DVDs” — http://chronicle.com/blogPost/blogPost-content/25797/

Image courtesy of NightRPStar via CC Attribution 2.0 Generic

Creating class discussions is a strong educational technique that allows students to construct ideas and articulate thoughts with their peers.  Putting class discussions on the Web is a great way to extend course content outside of the classroom, and exposes students to online interactions– a crucial 21st century skill.

However, motivating students to participate meaningfully in SPARK discussion forums is sometimes a challenge.  While formulating stimulating prompts and guiding the discussion through responses may help, grading posts is the most popular technique to get students’ voices out.  Yet grading discussion forums can sometimes create an additional challenge for instructors, particularly those with large courses:  how do you manage all those reponses?

One innovative way is by letting the members of the class grade themselves.  SPARK’s built-in “Peer Review” feature for threaded topic discussions lets students anonymously give a numeric value to other student’s posts. Commonly known as crowdsourcing, this distributes the work of grading each response to the students.  Therefore, many students can evaluate a few posts rather than one instructor evaluating many posts.  While the instructor can see who graded each response, the students only see an average rating and a list of anonymous reviews.  At the end of the discussion period, the instructor can click “Grade Topic” from the drop-down menu, and view the average rating of each post.  The instructor or TA can type this number into the “Grade” box for each student

Each post calculates an average rating. This can be entered in as the student's grade for that discussion.

Pedagogical value
Beyond the administrative efficiency, why should instructors consider crowdsourcing grades?  When the students are evaluating each other, they are held accountable by the classroom community.  Thus, they might participate in ways that interest each other rather than what they think will please the instructor.  Perhaps creating this unique discussion dynamic will encourage students to check in on the discussion more frequently, resulting in greater interest and participation.  Additionally, crowdsourcing is becoming a large part of the Internet and Web culture.  Sites like Wikipedia, Digg, and Current, as well as the comments section of the New York Times or CNN websites rely on their users to contribute and rate contributions in similar ways.  Furthermore, user participation is a new “way of being” in the networked world that can be leveraged and discussed as an academic topic in itself.

The ratings are anonymous to students but visible to instructors.

Some things to think about when using the “Peer Review” feature in Spark

• Treat it as an experiment.  Be honest with your students about the nature of this activity: is it the first time you are trying it? Has it worked for you in the past?  What are the dangers of grading this way?

• Use it as supplementary to other graded assignments.  If you weight the peer reviews too heavily, they might overpower other, more important aspects of your class.  Consider having these evaluations contribute to a participation grade or be part of a larger assignment.  This experiment should be fun, not daunting for the students.

• Have clear expectations about what criteria the students should be evaluating.  Clarify that the rating should not be about whether they agree or disagree with the post.  Rather, the evaluation should represent the quality or utility of the response’s content.

• Design a functional scale that uses clear language and quantification.  Spark lets you create a custom peer review scale.  Instructors should use clear language to describe what distinguishes a “3” rating from a “2” rating.

Contact the consultants in the Instructional Media Lab to talk more about Peer Review grading with SPARK.

Additional resources

• Inside Higher Ed: “Getting Out of Grading”

• Inside Higher Ed: “No Grading, More Learning”

• Inside Higher Ed: “Why Grading is Part Of My Job”

• NPR: “Using The Wisdom Of Crowds To Translate Language“

• Wired: “Crowdsourcing a map of the moon“

Would you tell a smoker that it’s possible to quit while having a pack of cigarettes in the house? Probably not.  Nor should you expect to conquer distracting web habits while having access to the Internet.

An application called “Freedom” succeeds where individual self-control fails.  This tool disables your Internet connection for 10 to 480 minutes.  Once activated, only restarting your entire computer can get you back online.  In my experience this has proven to be a sufficient deterrent.  As a result, my productivity skyrocketed.

Freedom’s clock ticks only when your computer is awake.  If you thought you could get around it by putting your computer into sleep mode for an hour or two, surprise! You’re still faced with 38 minutes of Internet-free time when you stir it to life again.  I’ve used this feature to my advantage by setting up Freedom before going to bed.  When I wake up, the Internet is unavailable, leaving me free (or condemned) to direct my early-morning focus towards my writing, rather than my email.

How can you get Freedom?  It’s available by download for free for Macs.  A version for PCs has finally been released, selling for $10 (well worth what you’ll get).

This is also a great piece of software to recommend for students who are distracting themselves from working with email, social networking sites, and web surfing.

Sometimes, though, you need the Internet while researching or writing. For these cases, there is a free add-on for Firefox browsers called “LeechBlock.”  With LeechBlock, you create a list of websites that most divert your attention.  You can choose to block these sites on a customizable schedule (i.e., Mon-Fri from 8am-10am) or by time limit (i.e., 2 hours).

The web has become an indispensable part of contemporary life and education.  But sometimes, you just need some Freedom.

Freedom
http://macfreedom.com

LeechBlock
http://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476

As teachers begin to post multimedia lecture material on their SPARK courses, they often ask our Instructional Media Lab staff how to stop students from downloading, saving, or re-distributing course content outside of the UMass SPARK environment.  The short answer is: you can’t. While SPARK is a safe place to post files for educational fair use, original course materials such as lecture videos, powerpoint slides, and syllabi are always exposed to the elements of the Internet to some extent.  Instructors entering the world of the writable Web are beginning to face savvy students’ abilities to access content on their own terms outside of class, or even send it to fellow students taking a similar course elsewhere.  Yet is it really a bad thing? Is this lack of teacher-centric control a new form of cheating, or is it an emerging paradigm for curricular development and open learning?

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Teachers in the networked world face many new challenges.  As Temple University’s Barry Vacker puts it, instructors may find themselves “competing with the entire Internet” as students multitask during class with laptops and cell phones.  But what if instructors could actually use the very tools that seem to be deteriorating students’ attention to increase student interest and productivity in class?  One way instructors are exploring this is by encouraging interaction during class with what is called a “backchannel discussion.”

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I had the pleasure of being in the third row for this talk Lawrence Lessig gave at EDUCAUSE on copyright and culture last week. Lessig makes some important observations and argument about how copyright is changing and the effect that is having on science and education. If you’ve read any of Lessig’s books you’ll enjoy this, if you haven’t read any of his books yet you probably owe him the 60 minutes. I’m always hesitant to recommend an hour-long video but if Wesch’s talk on the culture of YouTube was my choice for 2008 this is hands-down my pick for 2009. 

Faculty considering using technology to add a credit to a Gen Ed course can contact Academic Computing for help. We can consult with faculty who are just starting to explore whether a given technology will work for them and their course. We offer one-on-one or group workshops for faculty who wish to learn how to use a specific technology.We can also help faculty learn how to best present technology to their students, including having an OIT Academic Computing Consultant make an in-class demonstration when a technology is first introduced into a course.

Here are some ideas on how to use teaching technologies to add a fourth credit to General Education (GenEd) courses:

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Sarah Robbins, a researcher on emerging technologies at Indiana University, shared these slides from an interesting talk she gave yesterday on “The Seven Deadly Sins of Technology in Higher Education: Exposing Our Crimes Against the Future.” This is the slides only, no audio, but it has many thought provoking ideas. Robbins said the “sins” are intended to be tongue-in-cheek and should serve as conversation-starters, more than anything. I found some of these points to be rather striking and they have sparked a variety of conversations among my colleagues here at OIT this morning. 

View on Slideshare.

Last week All Things Considered discussed Personal Response Systems (aka clickers). This short piece touches on the pedagogical potentials, of PRS, and, like with any other tool, emphasizes the importance of investing appropriate time to integrate PRS into the curriculum as a condition of its success.

Check out the 8 minute podcast available in audio and article form.

Why build a virtual world? Philip Rosedale, founder of the popular virtual world Second Life talks about the desire to build and create, and about how virtual worlds make that possible in ways that were not previously available/plausible.

Though I certainly don’t agree with all of Rosedale’s arguments about the merits of virtual worlds, he raises some interesting points. If he’s half-right, we’ll see more and more of these types of tools in the next few years.

13 minute presentation, followed by 15 minutes Q & A:

This video is from the TED talks, check out their website for many fascinating presentations on a wide range of topics related to technology, entertainment, and design.

We’ve made it through our slew of January workshops and just barely through the first week of classes here at Academic Computing, but I thought I’d take a moment to respond to a question I have been asked again and again by instructors thinking about what to use in the spring semester: “what is the best tool to use with my students?” My answer to these queries has tended to meander, was hopefully diplomatic, but eventually got to an answer which is not really an answer: “maybe that is not the question you are really asking, let’s talk about what your goals are.”

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This video made the rounds on the Internet (and TeachOIT) about a year and a half ago, but when we showed it at the beginning of our two most recent “Emerging Technologies” workshops I don’t believe any of the attendees had seen it, so I’ve decided it is worth sharing again here:

Cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch and 200 students at Kansas State University created a video about students in today’s college classrooms. It is an example of “digital storytelling” with an interesting mix of low tech (words on paper, chalkboard and walls) and high tech (time-lapse footage of a Google Doc being edited by the 200 students). It doesn’t offer any concrete solutions, but rather poses some though-provoking questions for anyone trying to reach 21st century students in a 19th century setting.