Comments for Prestidigitation

Comment on Apples and Oranges and Lectures and Learning by Roberta Brody

Roberta Brody — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:26:54 +0000

I read and reread your posting and I had this awful queasy feeling — thinking about folks just posting captured lectures, as if they were providing training films. I have this awful feeling that for every one of us knocking ourselves out to do interesting stuff with our online courses [or at least, trying], there is someone taping flat-file talking-head lectures.

Our new committee Online/Blended Learning Considerations focuses on concerns other than the nature of our courses. Am I being ridiculous, old and crabby, etc. to think that maybe there should be a parallel set of concerns about the nature of our content?

bobby brody

Comment on Apples and Oranges and Lectures and Learning by smorgano

smorgano — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 05:56:41 +0000

As a student I must say that really got the most out of classes that were heavy on Discussion Board interactions. I would check Blackboard several times a day for some classes just to see what others were writing and how they responded to others. I agree that making the learning as interactive as possible is the best way to really engage the students, but information without perspective is hard to absorb. I found that I was better able to understand course material in classes where professors actively engaged in DB because they pushed every student to expand upon their original ideas and in the process we all started to push each other and ourselves.

Some professors have used podcasts and I think it’s something that adds to the overall quality of the class, but it’s not 100% necessary. I think a student’s biggest fear with online learning is that they are going to have to read the course book and essentially “teach themselves”. Whether the professor’s presence is felt via podcast, DB replies, personal emails, comments on Wikis/Blogs the most comforting thing for students is that it is felt.

Comment on Apples and Oranges and Lectures and Learning by hwach

hwach — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 14:56:26 +0000

Very interesting, Joe. You’ve identified a problem I need to face in my own teaching. I haven’t “captured” lectures in the classroom technology or webcam “talking head” sense, but I’ve “Camtasia’d” them in the form of slides with images and an audio narration. The last time I taught my course (in Sp 09) I noticed that student use of them was dropping–it was way down from the previous term. And yet performance in the class didn’t seem to be noticeably declining. So maybe they aren’t quite as necessary as I thought, or as they seemed to be a year or two ago.

Your laying out of all this made me think about the reality that my strategy doesn’t reproduce what I do in class. I never do straight lectures–I do the Socratic thing–I talk for five minutes and then start interrogating the subject with the students. Or I take a student question and open it up for a few minutes. Then I’ll go back to my narrative. Well, you can’t do this on your own with a laptop and microphone. So…absent real-time interaction, what’s the next step? That’s what I’m thinking about now.

Comment on Apples and Oranges and Lectures and Learning by George Otte

George Otte — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:54:33 +0000

I really enjoyed this, Joe -- not least of all the way you avoid that easy and oversimplified reasons to approve or disapprove of this or that. I'm also struck that you're the first person I've seen really pondering the oddness of the term "lecture capture." It is a bit jarring, and not just because I have a low tolerance for off-rhymes. I think it's significant that "capturing" a "lecture" (of all things) has become a desideratum. We might want to ponder that further. The words we use and how we use them tell us a lot about our mental make-up, and you don't need Steven Pinker for that. The idea that we could/should capture a lecture says a great deal, sort of in the same way we can make syntactic as well as denotative distinctions between "information" and "knowledge" (though I can say I have both information and knowledge, I can't say that I've lost or misplaced knowledge, but I can say that I've lost or misplaced information). I think there's an underlying desperation to the idea of capturing lectures, in the same way it's comforting to stockpile books or articles you really don't have time to review or assimilate. (Mea culpa.) A lot of this has to do with the presumably Internet-induced "staccato" quality of thought Nicholas Carr writes about, our (and our students') foreshortened attention spans: we can't sit still, don't have the time or inclination, at present, to take it in, but it's comforting to think we can save it to a disk and maybe get back to it later. Of course, it would be a mistake to cast that as part of what we would call "learning" or "education."

Comment on What is that these tools do do? by Academic Commons News » Blog Archive » A Midsummer Night’s Commons Update - building CUNY Communities since 2009

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 12:34:30 +0000

[...] Many of those posts, especially those by Jim Groom, Luke Waltzer, Mikhail Gershovich, and Joe Ugoretz, remarked upon the ways in which the Academic Commons could serve as a virtual hub for CUNY, which [...]

Comment on Macaulay Eportfolios Plugin List by Matthew K. Gold

Matthew K. Gold — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 23:29:23 +0000

Sorry for the late reply, Joe, but I just want to echo Boone’s verdict on the awesomeness of this post. We have many of these plugins installed on the Commons, but there are a few (Google Maps, Custom Login Display) that I’ll definitely look into.

Perhaps we should form a WP Admins group on the Commons where we can share news of especially awesome new plugins. . . .

Comment on Macaulay Eportfolios Plugin List by Boone Gorges

Boone Gorges — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:05:57 +0000

Great post, Joe. Thanks for posting this list. As the plugin list for the CUNY Academic Commons grows more stable, I’ll put together a similar list for the plugins we’re using. I think this could be extremely helpful to people starting from scratch with a WPMu setup.

Thanks also for the plugin shoutout. Did you see that I released a new version the other day? It fixes some other problems with the way BP handles profile fields: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/custom-profile-filters-for-buddypress/

Comment on What is that these tools do do? by Barbara Walters

Barbara Walters — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 19:48:46 +0000

I found the WordCampEd to be nothing short of inspirational and would love to see some of students in the CUNY Online Baccalaureate have the opportunity to develop sites like the Macaulay Honors College students. But for most, it will be a challenge to create something on an easy template like Digication. It’s always a struggle between having something to say, which takes a great deal of time, and finding a venue for it. But I’m preparing my first blog for the Commons (I haven’t had a writer’s block since undergraduate school, but for some reason this is intimidating). But in the blog I will link to one of our recent graduates who had both — she introduced me to WordPress.

Comment on What is that these tools do do? by hwach

hwach — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 15:02:21 +0000

..oops–I think I accidentally posted before I finished (either the post went up or disappeared into the ether). So, finishing the thought: …like most of us on the CUNY campuses, we’re not able to go down the open-source road quite as quickly or freely as Joe can at Macaulay–bureaucratic processes and psychological needs are part of the landscape. But like a lot of others, we are following along, a couple of steps behind, moving in the same general direction, and grateful to have pace-setters in front of us.

Comment on A Webby Award for Open Education by Claire Fontaine

Claire Fontaine — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 03:48:04 +0000

Please give my congratulations to Beth!