Breakfast - donut and gogurt; milk (chocolate/strawberry/regular)
Lunch - Cheese and Fruit plate; Doritos; Pudding Pop; milk (chocolate/strawberry/regular)

Yesterday’s menu at school:
Lunch - Cheese pizza and ice cream; chocolate milk

In the News recently:
“About one-third of children and teens in the USA — about 25 million children — are overweight or on the brink of becoming so, government data show.” — Childhood Obesity: A Lifetime of Danger.

“Tooth decay is children’s worst chronic health problem, a “hidden epidemic,” — Kids’ Smiles At Risk

Sigh. It looks like we’ll be packing some lunches this year. Perhaps when we talk about health care reform, we can add in some legislation for reforming the way our children eat at school?

In a series of articles I wrote about some research I did on Blackboard implementation, I reported that efficiency benefits were very high—students and instructors feel the technology saves them time. But when we asked them about how much it improved learning, we found mixed results. Classes where the instruction was very lecture-oriented felt a CMS DID improve learning–because it made it easier/quicker to absorb the information. However, instructors who attempted more student-centered learning approaches, based on constructivist or collaborative learning ideas, were often very frustrated. One instructor who impressed me with his dedication to collaborative, student-centered instruction described how hard he tried to bend the Blackboard technology to facilitate the kind of instruction he wanted to do, but it just wouldn’t work. As we talked as co-authors, we realized that trying to force a CMS to facilitate student-centered online learning is like trying to facilitate this same kind of student-centered learning in a classroom with the chairs bolted to the floor, facing the instructor. It just doesn’t work very well, although you can do it with great effort.

So what can we do to improve CMSs so they better support other models of learning besides content-driven ones? I think the biggest improvement would be if the designers of these technologies shifted their thinking from focusing on the instructors to focusing on the students. If that happened, then the technologies would open up, not be connected to courses or instructors, but be connected to students. Jon describes these ideas, so I’m borrowing some of his thoughts here. As he puts it, the learners would need to own their learning spaces, and their access to the content and relationships would need to persist over time. He is absolutely spot-on. A huge hurdle for students is that anything they do in Blackboard or any other CMS is then lost when the semester ends. And we claim in higher education to be promoting lifelong learning—what irony when the technologies we make students use are semester-bound and then gone forever!

Marion Jensen, in a comment to Jon’s post, mentions, “It is interesting to me that a lot of the things we want students to do, they are already doing with tools of their own choosing. We want students to communicate with each other, which they do on Facebook. We want them to write about topics, which many of them do on their blogs. We want them to do research, which all of them do proficiently on Google. We ask them to create and do projects, which many of them do on youtube.”

This is also so very true, and the best CMS environment, I feel, would be one that incorporated what the student already was using and doing. If the student has a blog, or a Facebook page, or whatever, it would feed into the CMS. If the student shared video, text, or anything somewhere else, it would feed into the CMS for the students’ fellow learners to see. Perhaps this could be done by having students create profile pages in the CMS, upload their usernames and passwords for their other social networking sites, and then every time they used a particular tag with one of those sites (such as “Psych101″) that piece would feed into the CMS class they were part of that semester. At the end of the semester, they could still access all of the relationships and discussions because these all occurred OUTSIDE of the CMS, with the CMS only acting as an aggregator and facilitator.

One final thought: It isn’t just the CMS technologies that have the problem of being not open enough for their users. Unfortunately, because they all have a product to sell, all social web technologies seem to close their services from each other, with only some exceptions. Hopefully one day there will be a way to have my Facebook page, my blog, my instant messaging service, email, youtube account, twitter account, etc. all talk to each other so if I posted or updated something in one place, it would appear in all of these other networks. Does it bug anyone else that you have to update your “status” in twitter and each instant messaging account separately? Or that you have to maintain several different Linkedin and Linkedin-imitation accounts to be able to be connected? Why can’t I just have one profile, one status message, and one set of blog posts and photos that feed into all of my accounts? That would really make the social web usable and useful.

“Mankind has no more important problem than the study of individuals. Unfortunately, more progress seems to have been made in understanding such phenomena as plants, chemicals, and even the behavior of atoms and molecules than in attaining a sound understanding of human beings.”
- John C. Flanagan in The Critical Incident Technique in the Study of Individuals

Right on!

Tags: research

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I am new to academia, so I want to make sure I understand what is right and ethical in this kind of situation. The policy for journal articles is clear and set out in the APA manual, but it is not so clear for presentations. On the one hand, I see how a researcher should be expected to be coming up with new material. On the other hand, there are so many conferences now that the likelihood of someone from one conference attending your same presentation at another conference is rare, and so is it really a problem?

To be clear, I understand the argument that the research continues to evolve, and the audiences are different, so the presentations would be somewhat different anyway. That is true. But with articles, you can only reuse a very small portion of prior research–say 10 or 20%, I’d have to look it up to be sure. But if you present at two conferences in the same year on basically the same study, the two presentations are likely to be more like 80% similar.

I’m very interested in what anybody thinks about this topic, and what principles might guide our practice. To add to the discussion, Inside Higher Ed has an article arguing that there is a generation gap on this issue, with younger professors/students feeling that "double dipping" is more acceptable. One person commenting (no, that Rick is not me) on the article asks, "Is the purpose of presenting a paper to inform and educate the audience? Or is it to advance one’s own career? If it’s the former, then double-dipping is acceptable. If it’s the latter, then no."

On the other side of the debate, Miguel Roig has an excellent article arguing against any double dipping.

Neither of these articles is in the field of education or instructional technology, so what is our profession\’s opinion on this?

Tags: research, self-plagiarism

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And then the reviewer thought that when I wrote, “This kind activity” that I meant “this kind of activity.” How silly! Of course I meant that this particular learning activity was a kind, generous thing to do!

OK, </sarcasm>. In reality, I’m grateful for this reviewer who caught these typos of mine. As I reread these portions of the article, I just had to chuckle at how my typos completely changed the meaning of the sentence. Thank goodness for careful reviewers!

This left me with two thoughts: 1) Grammar really matters, doesn\’t it? and 2) what kinds of misinformation are out there because there WASN’T a good reviewer to catch the mistakes?

Tags: research, grammar

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And get this — I got to deliver him! I was "Dr." for a day." ;-). Our OBGYN said he would help me deliver the baby, which was a really neat experience.

I’ll try to post a picture when I get them developed. We had forgotten our digital camera, so we had to go "old school" and use a disposable!

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Maybe the mighty power of Harvard will move publication and tenure towards a new direction?

Tags: tenure, publications, online, open education

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On the other hand, the song and dance–the first time–kept me glued, and the genius of it is that it showed off all of their product lines, giving "eye time" to everything on the page.

What do you think? Does this work, or is it unusable? Either way, it’s cool.

Tags: advertising, marketing, web design, usability, creativity

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