Aqueduct

Posted by amy at November 24th, 2006

Hello World, is this thing on? Is there anyone still out there?  It has been ages since I last updated.  I finished my Master’s program, and am settling into my new career as a web maven for a small liberal arts college.  I’ve been blogging, but just not here.  I am podcasting over there, as well.  The podcasts are a great way to get out into the community and start talking to people.

And in the category of “will this project ever be over” - I’m going back to take another pass at finishing up my dissertation (which you may remember was published, but not defended.)  I’ll try my hand at using this space to play with some ideas that I’m working on.

Posted by amy at August 7th, 2006

Ahh … My first two months in a new, demanding job have coincided with the last two months of my graduate program and I felt that actually working on my capstone project was a higher priority than writing about my capstone project, until last night when I was reviewing my component map and saw I my blog was worth 10% of my deliverables. It seems dishonest to create a bunch of new entries and backdate them so I’ll post a few remarks here and take the hit.

Just a quick reminder - the project was to provide a blueprint for my sponsor to move one of its continuing education programs online. Once I had done that and handed in draft versions of my final proposal, I sat and waited, and waited and waited and then, as I was preparing to head off for the 4th of July fireworks, I encountered some of my own. The one factor I didn’t include in my needs analysis was a readiness assessment. How ready was this group of instructors to begin building an online program. The answer was that they weren’t ready at all and the blue print - no matter how good in theory - would never work without the staff buy in.

Not understanding online education was an overarching problem, but concerns over cheating were the most pressing issue. At first I wrote off the problem because I didn’t see it as a problem - I thought that a properly designed course wouldn’t really give an opportunity for students to cheat - but because my sponsors couldn’t envision what a properly designed course might look like, they didn’t feel their needs were being met or that their concerns were being heard.

Even if I had delivered everything I promised to deliver on my first meeting, I wouldn’t feel as though I had completed my mission if I didn’t in some way move this group along on the readiness spectrum.

I went back and reviewed all the relevant literature I could find on cheating in an online environment and then began to think about building an online class in WebCT for the staff who would someday be teaching their own classes. I modeled the class in the same way that I modeled the turf selection class I included and most importantly, I added a meta conversation to each component explaining exactly why I chose one element over anther or what I was thinking when I built my syllabus for example.

I believe, now, that if they work through the Academic Integrity unit before they view the sample Turf Selection class, they will be far more ready to listen to the ideas I present in the blueprint and then process their own thinking about their class design. And if I can change the way they think about online education, then I will consider my project a great success.

I’m off to the post office to send off my final deliverables to my sponsor and am looking forward to closing this chapter of my education.

I learned a lot of details – little things like building classes in WebCT, how to think about the growth of online learning, how to identify a specific piece of grass – but I think the biggest lesson I learned was without the readiness component, change won’t happen – gauging and addressing that will be the horse I put before the cart as I work in an environment that remains suspicious about technology.

Posted by amy at May 30th, 2006

I am moving ahead on my capstone project. I finished drafting the first two phases and have just begun work on the heart of the project - the instructional design. I am working off partial content, and will be using a bit of backwards design - as I have a quiz that is used at the end of the class to assess student learning. I’m not a big fan of quizzes, and since my plan is to design this for a Blackberry and I would rather students improve their verbal reasoning skills and not their quiz taking abilities, I am going to be spending day working on verbal assessments. To help manage this project, I am using a site called Backpack (www.backpackit.com) which is put out by a group called 37 signals. This may be the easiest project management tool I have found - certainly much easier than Microsoft Entourage - which I will most likely end up switching from in the next few weeks.

Posted by amy at May 22nd, 2006

Capstones are the final project requirement for my Master’s program at Marlboro College Graduate Center. My sponsor is The University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Department of Continuing Education and Outreach, specifically their Green School. The Green School is offered once every two years. It is a 60-hour program taught at a hotel easily assessable to people from all over Massachusetts. Students come from the nurseries and grounds departments and there are two tracks - horticulture and turf grass studies.

Successful capstone projects are ones that attempt to solve a real world problem - rather than just create interesting products or demonstrations. The problem I am trying to solve is how do you take a 60-hour, face-to-face program and redesign it to be online? What defines online? This is a content rich course where student achievement is assessed solely by quizzes which are not returned to the student, where students do not tend to be highly technically literate, and where cheating is a primary concern for the instructors. The instructors themselves, even the most technically literate ones, are resistant to a program that doesn’t have face-to-face interaction and are suspicious about what going online means.

I will use this space to work through some of the challenges I face and document the process as I go.

Posted by amy at April 6th, 2006

Self-assessment:

In an earlier post about self-assessment, I wrote that students often laughed when given the task of grading themselves. With little or no guidance, the instinct to give yourself an A and walk away is too easy. Really, who wouldn’t? But this is where I have begun to see the value of rubrics – and I actually found myself checking back against them this week as I put together my final project.

Since I’ve become a bit of a math freak, lets break out the calculator and see how I did.

Participation
Promptness:
4 points
Always completes the four-step process before Fri at 12:00 noon PM

I’m not sure if I should get all four points because it is not in my nature to procrastinate, but if you are offering 4 points for doing my work on time, I’ll take them.
4
Depth of Post & Clarity of Expression
10 points
Constantly makes reference to assigned readings for the week; Expresses opinions and ideas in a clear and concise manner; Contributions thoughtful, original evaluation, synthesis or analysis of topic

I think I got better at this as the ideas became clearer to me, as the readings began to reinforce my knowledge and I was able to feel more confident in my connections.
9
Contribution to the online Learning Community
6 points
Aware of needs of community; responds to at least four student postings each week; regularly attempts to motivate the group discussion but does not dominate conversation

Looking over my own posts, I think I was fairly active, but, I didn’t do four responses each week because I was constantly aware of trying not to dominate the conversation. If everyone else had been contributing the four posts as well, I would have felt far more comfortable posting more.
5
Contribution to the f2f Learning Community —
10 points
Attends f2f class and regularly participates in discussion or activities; is always on-topic

I attended all the classes, arrived on time with the exception of the 1 time I was locked out, never shied away from answering tough questions, and I hope, stayed on topic.
10

4+9+5+10=28/30

Blog

Critical Thinking & Development of Ideas
5 points
Constantly makes reference to readings, discussions, or other research; Contributions thoughtful or insightful. Makes interesting connections between ideas.

I really tried to connect my readings with things going on outside the classroom and to play with ideas as they occurred to me.

5

Quantity
5 points
Includes 12 or more postings.

This will be my 14th.

5

5 points
Is very cognizant of own learning process

Yep, I think I demonstrated, both in the blog and online, my own learning processes.

5

5+5+5=15/15

Wiki*
Content
4 points
All of the definitions contributed significantly to the knowledge base of the course

I think my definitions contributed to the wiki, but not to the knowledge base of the course (not to quibble over semantics, but I do think I contributed significantly to the knowledge base of the course, but not through the wiki).

3
Quantity
4 points
Submitted 5 or more definitions

Yep
4
Organization
2 points
Always followed the recommended format

Yep
2

I really like the idea of using a wiki, however in full disclosure, I feel that this was the weakest element of this class. It was never integrated into the learning activities, for most of the class it was just Muriel and myself posting and she got to most of the definitions I was thinking about way before I did.

3+4+2=9/10

Project
Needs Assessment and Situational Analysis
7 points

The need for the instructional design project is well stated and is substantiated with data; Problem statement is well written; comprehensive situational analysis.

This was the most difficult part of this project for me, not because I didn’t understand the assignment, but because I didn’t have a “real” audience in mind when I began this project.

5
Learning Goals and Objectives
7 points
Goals are clear and based on needs assessment; instructional objectives are appropriately written to show what the learner will be able to do after the instruction takes places; Goals and objectives also organized around “significant learning”

I think the process of scaling back my goals and objectives made this section stronger and I hope that the goals and objectives are fluid enough to be modified to meet the learners.

6
Feedback and Assessment
8 points
A comprehensive feedback and assessment plan is designed that is consistent with the instructional objectives

Yes – I view this class as a partnership between the students and myself. I address that in the syllabus and have created opportunities for feedback and course assessment into the structure.

8
Teaching and Learning Activities:
10 points
Instructional activities appropriate for the audience and objective; Instructional strategy is creative and learner-centered; Technology always used effectively to enrich the learning experience.

I hope so, I gave a lot of thought to the types of learning exercises I designed. BUT in some cases, I used a tool to try the tool even though it may not have been the best tool for that unit – this was a calculated decision based on the types of assignments I am likely to encounter when I leave MCGC and get a job. I may never, ever, have need for a quiz in a course I design, but I should still know how to do it in Moodle if anyone asks and I should be able to help them integrate the questions into a significant learning activity.

9
Grading and Assessment
4 points
Comprehensive grading and assessment plan reflects learning objectives

In an concerted effort to make the process transparent and to assist students in understanding their own performance, each activity is graded, with appropriate feedback opportunities at each step. Students can know their grade at any point, without asking the instructor for constant updates.

4
Writing Skills
4 points

Sentence structure and grammar excellent; correct use of punctuation and citation style; minimal to no spelling errors. Content is very clear and organized.

I am sure I’ve got a typo here or there, but I think everything is grammatically correct.

4

5+6+8+9+4+4=36/40

Presentation*

Content
2 points
Clearly based on sound learning or instructional design theory; Student demonstrates of full knowledge (more than required) with explanations and elaboration.
Coherence and Organization
2 points
Flows together well; Good transitions; Succinct and well organized
Delivery
1 point
Poised, clear articulation; Proper volume; Steady rate; Good posture and eye contact; Enthusiasm; confidence; Captures audience’s attention; Use of media is appropriate

This hasn’t happened yet, so I cannot assign myself a grade, but I will be shooting for 5/5

So lets add it all up:
28
15
9
36
5
93

Look at that, 93; even by the numbers I’m still giving myself an A.

What the numbers don’t show, and this is where I think I have my biggest problem with rubrics, is that I really learned a lot in this class and I think I could have gotten an A without working as hard (intellectually) as I did. I really liked this class and I liked the work I did in this class. And leaving aside all the numbers and formulas, judging my grade based on a different set of criteria –- did I interact with the ideas and with the other students and did I do so in a meaningful way — I’d still give myself an A.

And if we go back to my original statement of intent:

“This semester, I hope to continue finding answers to my essential questions, among them: what makes a course successful, when does using technology actually enhance a curriculum as opposed to just change the way it is delivered and how can I fine tune the way I learn and teach to be more effective? ” (from the “Who are you post” during the first class)

I would say I made great strides in building up my knowlege base.  As we learned about each element of course design, I tried to pay particular attention to how it was done in this course, and how it was done in other classes here at MCGC and that process contributed as much to my learning as the readings and classroom instruction.  Not only have I learned how to design more effectively, I’ve learned how to learn more effectively as well.

Posted by amy at March 10th, 2006

Assessment in Higher Education …

spotted over at Edwired

“Scholars need to–must, in fact–develop assessment tools that can demonstrate that our students have really learned something worth knowing. We have to come to clearer agreements on what that learning would look like and then show how, without multiple choice tests, we have assessed that learning over a trajectory of years. And, when we fail to meet our own benchmarks, we have to show what interventions we’ve implimented to address some lack of success among our students.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Posted by amy at March 3rd, 2006

Ah, learning exercises. Designing them may be the most creative part of the curriculum process so far. In thinking about my online course design, I’ve had to think outside my traditional box. My tendency is to think in terms of reading, writing and research but those aren’t learning activities; they are homework assignments that, if done poorly, amount to little more than busy work.

How can I transform those skills into actually learning activities that meet the goals of my course? Fink encourages us to routinely revisit the entire process, going back to the goals to make sure our learning activities are in alignment. To that end, I’ve included my goals here.

For this course, I am really starting at the beginning with the student and a writing/reading/editing activity.

a) The Place Where You Stand - The world as you know it depends on where you stand and what you can see. The author’s blurb on the back page of the book attempts to introduce the reader to the author and the perspective they bring. Please write your own blub, to be included on your profile page in Moodle. Please make it concise and relevant; what experience do you bring to this class that shapes the way you view the globtech economy.

b) When you are done, pick one classmate and review their bio. Is it concise? Can you edit the paragraph in any way to make it read better? Feel free to email them and ask questions. Now, rewrite their bio, if necessary.

c) Now, dig a bit deeper on Friedman - what do we know about him, that he hasn’t declared. Post your reply to this forum. Keep a searching journal (see sample journal to be included later) telling us where you searched and what you found.

What is the goal of this activity? To get students writing and engaging in an editing exercise to strengthen their core skills. We slowly begin to introduce critical thinking skills, first by asking the student to decide what is relevant and then by asking their partner to decide. Finally, we introduce some technical skills (the searching) that will require some logic (how do you search for Thomas Friedman and “The World is Flat” and not get online booksellers, for example) as well as some evaluative skills – what do we need to know about Thomas Friedman that he hasn’t told us yet, and why does this new bit of information matter? Finally, students learn that they can be the creators of content, not exclusively the consumers. I see this as a minor learning goal, at this point, so I won’t spent too much time on it, but I want to introduce it because we will be building on it as we go, once I am secure that the lower level goals have been met and or exceeded.

To model what I am looking for, I’ve posted mine. Students are welcome to edit it.

Amy Stevens
Ms. Stevens is a politically aware, libertarian-leaning feminist concerned with the intersection of technology and academics. In the past 15 years, she has survived riots in the nation’s capital, lived in a naked commune, endured a doctoral program in American History, published a book about radical social activists of the 1960’s and worked as a financial technology consultant to some of the country’s largest mutual fund companies. She is a married mother of two, living outside of Boston.

Posted by amy at March 1st, 2006

Growing up in a politically divided household, I learned early about partisan posturing and how to engage in different styles of debate. In a predominantly liberal high school, I found the easiest way to rebel was to become a Reagan Youth. In college, a cute boy introduced me to the errors of my way, at the same time a Political Science professor started indoctrinating me into the new left. A course on the history of American Feminism was the final blow and I returned home for Christmas break a radical feminist blindly quoting Marx and Guevara. I slipped further and further to the left, while ignoring the inner voices in my head that questioned many of the hypocrisies I saw before me. The two naked Marxists arguing over who owned the last piece of tofu lasagna, the Buddhist peace activist who proudly cheated on her taxes and scammed the local utilities so she could spend money on jewelry, the Earth First ecoterrorist who smoked Marlboro Reds by the carton, while screaming about the evils of big business and their lobbying ties to the Republican party. In the course of my dissertation research, I came across a book by David Horowitz, a former 1960s activist who had gone to the other side and became one of the leading critics of the new left and its aftermath.

In an early draft of my dissertation, I lashed out at Horowitz, seeing him as a traitor to the movement and to the cause. I reasoned that we couldn’t really take him seriously; he must have been a poser. As I aged and mellowed a bit, I revised and softened my references to his work, and was able to address a few of his concerns, without resorting to name-calling. But, I was always aware of my own political roots and conscious of the fact that it probably wouldn’t take much to move me back to the right.

I’ve followed Horowitz’s career, and hadn’t really thought too much about him until recently, when he published his list of the 101 most dangerous college professors. From the far left, the list is seen as a joke — you would have to assume that students would actually need to pay attention to their professors in order for their to be any real threat – and as a badge of honor, as recently as last week people were stuffing the ballots on Horowitz’s blog (http://www.frontpagemag.com/survey/vote.asp) trying to get themselves or their friends higher on the list. Then the factions started in – the feminist were urging everyone to vote for Eve Sedgwick, the African-American feminists were pushing for Angela Davis. Reading the blogs and watching the posturing was like watching the new left fall apart all over again as they engaged in a game of oppression one-upsmanship.

I don’t actually think it is a problem that American Colleges and Universities tend to “harbor” leftists, I mean honestly, there isn’t a huge market for Marxist theorists in the real world is there? When else can you play with politically impractical ideals and revolutionary ideology than in college – you certainly can’t do it in a cubicle farm on the 14th floor of some multinational widget conglomerate.

And playing with ideas is fun, it is part of how we learn and grow, for many it may be the only time in their lives where they get exposed to queer theory or Cornel West’s take on the cultural significance of rap music.

The flip side of the oppression status game the left has played so well, is the demonization of those who are different, who don’t think like you. It never bothered me when Republicans engaged in name calling – I expected them to, they never bought into the whole “celebrate difference” thing. But when the left does it, I am appalled. I’m constantly surprised when people I know and respect Republican bash in front of me. I’m suddenly sitting with Archie Bunker, complaining about “dagoes” and “spooks” waving a broad brush over what makes up slightly more than half of the American voting population. Suddenly I understand how once egalitarian revolutionaries in Africa become dictators, how neighbors could take up arms against neighbors in Yugoslavia, how civil wars happen.

The problem isn’t the bias, we all have bias and when pushed, most of us are happy to own up to it. The problem, for me, is that we are so quick to defend our bias as the correct one and that someone else’s bias is wrong, that it gets in the way of actual dialogue, in effect building up the walls and increasing the tension and polarization. The common ground becomes invisible and the difference isn’t something to be celebrated, or even discussed, it becomes something to be labeled and dismissed.

And all of this plays out in the classroom – it is why disagreements about Intelligent Design can’t be reconciled in a school board meeting but have to be fought out in courts, it is why we have state and federal governments administering irrelevant exams, rather than working with school teachers to develop curriculum that could help students learn better while still identifying incompetent teachers.

So I sit notice liberal bias in my classes, just as I notice conservative bias when I sit with my family around the dinner table. And I call my teachers and my classmates on it and I call my family on it as well. I haven’t turned into David Horowitz yet, but I understand where he is coming from and I can hold onto my name calling long enough to actually listen to what he has to say.

Posted by amy at February 3rd, 2006

“Standardized tests and governmental standards are a reality, and they have value – very little of it having to do with education”

In our online discussion, Cindy, a fellow student, called me out on this, specifically “very little of it having to do with education.” I had thought about elaborating on this in the thread itself, but didn’t to wander too far away from focusing on learning objectives. I am happy to have the chance to expand on it a bit more on my blog.

I meant value as currency, as leading indicators, as allowing for correlation or comparison. And, that if we look at the arms and legs of the tests, we can see that they reach quite far.

I couldn’t tell you what was on the MCAS (Massachusetts’ standardized test for public schools), or how much they actually gauge what a student knows, but I could tell you approximately where a town stood in the rankings based on the market value of their homes. Well, I thought I could until I went looking for some numbers to back up my claim. I found a few surprises.

Of the schools that had 100% of their students pass the 2005 MCAS, 7/18 or 40% were charter schools in some of the poorest districts in Massachusetts, the other 60% were the wealthiest. The biggest surprise for me wasn’t that there were school districts like Dover-Sherborn on the top of the list (average home prices is $1,388,715.66 – would you pay $1.5m for a home with a crappy school system?) but that Boston Collegiate Charter and Codman Academy Charter were at the top of the list as well. Now, those two charter schools serve roughly the same neighborhood. While the average home price is $390,230.88, the number is deceiving, because about 60% of the population rent, and they take up about 1/3 of the space that a $400k house would go for, so for comparison sake we can say the actual home value is about $135,000.

Take away the charter schools though, and the list becomes predictable, with scores decreasing at about the same rate as the average home price. The public school serving the same neighborhoods as the charter schools are at the bottom of the list.

I’m not an economist or an education policy expert, but it would seem to me that town wealth isn’t exclusively tied to performance, and that it may be possible to design an economic development program aimed at revitalizing a community around a charter school’s success. You don’t have to spend $1.5 million to get your kid into a good school, you can look at real estate you wouldn’t normally consider.

There are thousands of other tangents we would could take with these numbers, we could look at MCAS scores as tied to school district budgets and principal bonuses vs. schools that need to be taken into receivership. But the point is that if we start to look at the ways the numbers matter in relation to other aspects of the community, then working to bring them up wouldn’t seem like such a hardship and rather than fighting the status quo, you could work effectively to improve it.

Posted by amy at January 31st, 2006

“Are there other affective objectives that would be more in sync with this particular class?”

And there is the rub. It isn’t that I am down on the idea of affective objectives that could be included in a curriculum; it is that all evidence I saw in my exposure to the Boston school system was that the curriculum was built around non-cognitive goals. I once asked a “why” type of a question in one of the groups (I think it was why is studying history important) and the kids answered in a monotone chant, eyes rolling like only a fourteen year old can master, their school mantra about valuing diversity. The question of why is this important had only been put to them in terms of understanding and valuing diversity. They couldn’t have a dance recital to understand dance, they had to have a dance recital that celebrated one of the many ethnic groups heritage, for example. They couldn’t have a cooking class where they learned how to measure and read instructions, they had to have a class on what role the empanada serves in indigenous cultures. They could tell you about esoteric traditions with the same type of recall I break out once every five years for Catholic Mass. Recall that is based solely on repetition with no application

And while I am sure the administrator and the teachers who instituted these guidelines were incredibly well intentioned, the result was that the affective objectives were misfiring, and in the mean time, they were producing kids who couldn’t read and write.

The girls in my knitting class became more self-confident because they finally got math – a freaky, abstract concept that no one ever really explained in a way they could understand and no one ever really required them to know. Their self-confidence came from the mastery of a cognitive skill.

I hope I am not seeming to stubborn or antiquated in my resistance, but I believe that affective objectives need to be introduced at a higher level of the scaffolding, after the mastery of the cognitive skills have been proven. Other wise they can distract from the job at hand.