category_shortcode.php

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It’s no surprise what I found; a well-intentioned producer, hoping to help illustrate an interesting story but not sufficiently trained in the appropriate use of Flickr, used your image not licensed for commercial use on our clearly commercial Web site.

That’s partly my fault in not giving better direction to our staff on Creative Commons. We’ve used this as a “teaching moment” to improve our training to staffers, and I very much appreciate your pointing this out.

We’ve removed that photo from our site, but by way of remedy, I’d like to offer to pay you our standard one-use fee of [none of your dang business] per image. I’d like suggest that I post a followup message to your blog with my mea culpa on not giving sufficient direction to our producers on Flickr and Creative Commons, and that we’ve taken remedies to close the gap.

I had been not anticipated much in the way of a response at all from the Chronicle, so this was all a pleasant surprise:

I’m a little guy and they’re pretty big. I can get up on my hind legs and complain. But I doubt they’ll pay attention to me. And besides, this particular violation of my rights is relevant to the world (and, really, me) for only the next few hours, until this cycles off their front page. And then it’s just something that happened that’s easy for them (and me) to ignore.

In the end, it took a bunch of follow-ups with Dean (Gmail counds 18 emails in that thread, back-and-forth), several versions of an invoice, and just plain a lot of patience, but I got a (token) payment for the use of my image, a vague promise that some education had happened in the newsroom, and no deeper explanation than what I posted from Dean above. I appreciate the payment. I appreciate the promise that education was happening… but the work to get all that was, in the end, much more than it was really worth.

I think that all of this goes to highlight the difficulty of working with intellectual property law in general: there’s a huge imbalance in terms of the amount of effort required for small fry like me and a major publisher to track down and combat the theft of their work. Nothing that the Chronicle asked of me in return for payment was excessive (it was all normal stuff that outside contractors have to do if they want to get paid by a corporation — but I feel like a sucker now that they have my social security number), but every additional effort that I had to make to obtain redress was increasingly less worthwhile for me. If I had to do this regularly, I would be the world’s grumpiest human being. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, and, it turns out (and I had already known this intellectually), there’s no such thing as redress without real effort (and now I really get it). Nobody’s gonna make it right to you unless you hold their feet to the fire. And I was dealing with nice people who meant well at a decently reputable company; it was still a hassle.

Would I raise my tiny fists and shout into the whirlwind in vain again in a similar situation? Probably. And I’ve got some new thoughts on how to do it — next time I can shortcut some of the email back and forth by just leading off with an attached invoice. And an invoice for an amount that I think is fair (now that I have something resembling a ballpark figure: more than the Chronicle paid me). But I hate how whiny and bitchy it makes me feel. Having the fact that I’m the little guy rammed home makes me feel even littler than before.

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The Model

I have long used Flickr for my own personal photo sharing needs — it’s pretty much a de facto standard in circles in which I travel: a clean interface, strong support for connections between Flickr and other Web 2.0 services, and very real support for innovation in terms of user-designed and coded add-ons. All this adds up to Flickr being a very flexible, very powerful photo sharing service.

My idea was that my students could get to know one of the standard photo sharing services as part of the new media design experience. Using Flickr would expose them to some of the new media concepts inherent in working with Web 2.0: hosting information online and then reusing that information in other forums (for example, embedding their Flickr-hosted pictures in blog entries on our blog server). As Flickr also supports sharing within groups, comment boards and tagging, my hope was to have the students engage with each other’s photos online via Flickr.

In Practice

Signing up for Flickr was a real challenge for my students. Partly this was because they needed more support from me in understanding how to sign up for access to a web site. Partly this was because Flickr is owned by Yahoo, so they needed to (confusingly) sign up for a Yahoo ID and then link that Yahoo ID to a new Flickr account. (I had signed up for Flickr so far back in the day that I hadn’t had to jump through those hoops — and had already had a Yahoo ID to link to my Flickr account when they merged). The sign up process provided an opportunity to discuss digital footprints and privacy online, to help my students think about both protecting their privacy (concurrent with the school’s legal obligations under FERPA) and about how they present themselves to future employers and the like.

My students also wanted a significantly more structured guide to how to upload photos and share them to our class group on Flickr. Note that I say “want” — they were not eager to explore and figure out features on their own (or to read the help documentation from Flickr itself). I gave them a (privately throw-away) assignment to post their first few pictures that only one student completed, who already had a Flickr account before the class.

When it came to linking our class blog to their Flickr accounts, my students also ran into difficulties. The process, while well-documented on Flickr, is somewhat technical and they did not have a clear enough idea of the purpose or desired outcome to really dig in and engage with the process. Plus, they had a lot of typos trying to enter the blog XML-RPC address by hand. It was not a confidence-inspiring performance. Similarly, when it came to posting to the class blog from Flickr, very few of the students really grasped that this was a one-click process — almost all opted for much harder (and, frankly, lower quality and more annoying, approaches to embedding their photos in the blog initially).

By and large, once photos were uploaded, students were successful in sharing those photos to the group photo pool. They were also good about going in and providing comments to each other, when assigned to do so. Interestingly, they could spend an entire class totally obsessed with flipping through each other’s photos online, but actually adding comments was not a voluntary instinct.

After the first few photo uploads, we ran into Flickr’s free account limitations (which, again, I had forgotten about because I don’t run up against them): only 20MB of uploads a month, only 200 photos per account maximum. Complicating this was that the Flickr interface (uniformly reliable in other environments), routinely hung when attempting to upload files from the media lab (probably having to do with the school firewall). Students would spend 20 minutes trying to upload three photos and find that the process had, in the end, failed. To get around this, by the end of the first quarter, I was uploading the lion’s share of the classes photos to my own Flickr account.

In addition, once uploaded, the photos in free accounts are not available at full resolution. My hope had been to use Flickr as a repository for the class’ photos. Instead, it was at best a secondary viewing area: the students didn’t have access to the full resolution images for editing purposes via Flickr. Worse, several of the students didn’t grok that they could download photos from Flickr at all and opted to take screenshots of the photos at very low resolution on the web. And then edit those screenshots. Rather than working with their original files. And I discovered this not because they asked me how to do this, but because I saw them at work editing the screenshots. Enterprising. Stupid, but enterprising.

Flickr did provide a great basis for discussion of photography, composition and style. Flickr’s gallery function allowed me to collect sample photos “live” from the web to present concepts and be the focus of class discussions. This could be a useful tool for having students do a photo scavenger hunt, for example.

Reflection

I was distinctly underwhelmed by the experience of trying to use Flickr in the classroom. I think that there were really three things that were a marked failure in this:

1. I really failed to anticipate all of the limitations of a free account on Flickr (and the complexity of needing a Yahoo ID to play the game at all). This was totally my bad: I knew all of these limitations, but either didn’t think that they would be an issue (“oh, we won’t take that many photos…”) or just didn’t process their ramifications (“20MB a month should be enough!”). I had actually looked around at other photo sharing sites, including Google’s Picasa, SmugMug and using our FirstClass class conference and decided that Flickr provided the best interface and flexibility for what we were doing in class.
   In retrospect, I think I would have separated the photo sharing from the photo archiving plan and explicitly started my students off using the Classes share as a repository for all their images, and then having them post images directly to the class blog for discussion and portfolio purposes.
2. I mistook “digital natives” for web experience. Which is pie on my face, since I’ve long made the argument that these are not one and the same, and that our students really benefit from our teaching in terms of critical analysis, literacy and just plain common sense online. The students just didn’t get how to sign up for an account on a web site online by themselves, and they weren’t really interested in learning. I should have structured that process differently, and, well, in a more structured manner.
   I think that I came in with misplaced expectations about both the background and attitudes of the students. I anticipated a more web-savvy crowd and they were not. In retrospect, I was rushing through much of my material at that point, trying to “stay on top” of the course outline as I understood it. Everyone would have been better served if I had taken a day or two out of my outline earlier in the semester to sit down and talk through:
   • Sharing files online. Literally: where are those files and how do you put them there.
   • Accounts on web sites, how to get them and how to use them
   • How different web sites can be made to work together.
3. The school firewall and web filter did me no favors. As I learned over the course of the first quarter, any time that I decided to rely on sites not directly hosted by the school, I was in for a world of pain at some point along the way. Usually, this pain took the form of problems signing up to use the site (as happened with Flickr) or uploading content to the sight (as happened with Flickr). On the one hand, this is a strong reminder that the school does host a number of useful tools and that I should turn to those tools first, where appropriate. On the other hand, this was just infuriating — I was having experiences with web sites that I have not had ever before — and that I didn’t have when I left our campus network. They claim that the the home crowd is the 12th player on the field at football games. The school network was definitely the 12th player on the field in my classes this fall.
   Using external sites does raise very real and very consequential privacy concerns — and concerns that need to be presented clearly to faculty at the outset in the form of simple guidelines. The rule of thumb that students’ last names never appear online is great, and workable. But cutting us off from free and useful technology is really just exasperating.

In the end, I came away from this experiment feeling pretty dejected.

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Except.

It’s not so great if your idiot teacher gives you a fifteen minute video that explains the whole process, without bookmarking key moments in the process. This is one of those wonderful learning moments, when teaching material helps you understand how to teach that material better. Which doesn’t do your (well, my) students a lot of good if they’re trying to figure out a particular step.

Screencast-O-Matic offers some bookmarking potential that I need to play with on my long video. But, in the short term, it’s been just as easy — maybe even easier — to just record 1-2 minute videos of specific key steps. We’ll see if this works better for my poor, confused students. None of what they see in these videos is new. But they need to be able to pull up the instruction á là carte, rather than as the prix fixe seven course meal.

So, a playlist of the short videos:

And, for comparison’s sake, the original long video (broken into two pieces on YouTube below):

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The Model

I have an inherent prejudice against teaching students (and faculty) to use user computers as tools by providing step-by-step directions for a specific progress. I believe that, while totally helpful in the individual instance of that specific process, the step-by-step instructions are, in the end, handicapping: they do not introduce the learner to the underlying concepts that might guide their further, more extensive use of the same tool independently.

That said, periodically I need students or colleagues to do exactly one specific sequence of steps. This year I have been experimenting with presenting these sequences of steps as “screencasts” — videos of me doing the process while I narrate what I’m doing. This has a number of advantages, not least being that it is far, far faster to create a screencast than to write a set of instructions. Additionally, the screencast presents as a manageable video, rather than as an overwhelming 17-step sequence of directions. Additonally, rather than describing the process, learners are able to see the process as it plays out.

In Practice

I have created perhaps a dozen or so screencasts so far this fall, and I have settled into using Screencast-O-Matic, which I like because it does not require installing additonal software (as Jing does) and it is free (as Jing is) and it makes it easy for me to post my screencasts either to the Screencast-O-Matic site (for free), to YouTube (for free) or to save a high quality video file to my computer, that I can edit in iMovie or Sony Vegas Movie Studio. With the video hosted on either Screencast-O-Matic or YouTube, I’m then able to embed the video in a blog post or wiki page for the learners to view.

One technical issue that I ran into is that the Screencast-O-Matic streaming video requires Java to be installed and allowed to run (which is generally true on all computers), and that the series of dialogs to permit this are disconcerting and derailing for some learners. In general, where I can (for videos under ten minutes), I have also posted the videos to YouTube, which requires less from the user to view it. The YouTube videos, viewed in HD are still somewhat lower quality than the Screencast-O-Matic-hosted videos, but they’re generally fine.

I have also been experimenting with OmniDazzle as a way of highlighting parts of the screen as I talk and work in screencasts, making it easier for learners to follow my mouse motions and directions.

A learning issue that I have run into is that some folks (more faculty than students) have been unwilling to click play to watch the video. The process of learning new technology without an actual person standing at their elbow is too overwhelming to contemplate (this is not inference, this is what I was told by those faculty).

Reflection

I’m not entirely gung ho about screencasts, for the reasons listed above in The Model — that I want learners to understand concepts, rather than steps. I fear that presenting a shamanistic approach to learning technology — “do this sequence of arcane steps and the magic happens” — undermines long term learning. That said, I feel that I am able to better present concepts without intimidating learners in a screencast when I am just talking, rather than presenting a paragraph-sized annotation to each step of a set of directions.

The screencasting approach does, of course, not address all learning styles. It works for more than the directions, I believe, capturing both visual and auditory learners, but it is still not the same as working with the learner to help them accomplish the process in person, themselves. To this end, I have tried to hold screencasts in reserve as a reenforcement for in-class learning, rather than as a sole source of learning about a particular process.

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The Model

One goal of [my media design class] and [my computer animation class] is for the students to develop a portfolio of completed work that demonstrates their skills and creativity in digital design and presentation. In both classes, I have been collecting projects and final products on the [local network shares] and (in the case of [media design]), on Flickr (more on the Flickr experience specifically under Social Media).

At the end of the digital photography unit in [media design], I asked my students to draw on their body of work to present a portfolio of the 5-7 most representative pieces, and to post these pieces, with some annotation, to our class blog. The students each created a category on the blog for their portfolio (so that we could bring up everything related to their portfolio on a single page). I posted my (public) feedback to the students into these portfolios, and asked the students to provide feedback to each other (in public) on the blog as well.

A major part of my rationale for asking the students to publish their portfolio to the blog was to provide them with a public arena for “publishing” their work, hopefully pushing them to take pride in their presentation (and allow them to share with their friends, family, etc.).

In Practice

Thus far, one unit (digital photography) has been posted to the blog. I anticipate that we will post videos shortly, although this may be a more restricted process (I don’t feel good about publishing interviews with students to the world without some pretty clear and explicit permission from the families involved). We may end up having conversations about the videos on the blog without embedding the video (instead, we will probably link to the videos posted on a Ning).

I would like to get my computer animation class to the same point of presenting their work in a portfolio, but the lion’s share of the file collection and organization has been mine. The students in that class have had far more problems losing their files, misnaming them, forgetting to turn them in, and so forth. In fact, on Parent’s Night, I realized that, although I had required a JPEG of each model that that they had constructed, such a vanishingly small minority of the students had turned those files in (and had, therefore, taken a full grade hit on their scores), I didn’t really have enough to put together a slide show for parents.

Reflections

One unanticipated issue (on my part), was the difficulty the students had in distinguishing between when I wanted them to create a new post of their own, and when I wanted them to comment on someone else’s post. I think (based on their most recent performance), that this is a confusion that is dissipating, but that a good clear explanation of the structure of a blog might have been a good place to start.

I fell into the classic trap: I believed that my students were more technologically able than they are, based simply on their appearance as “digital natives” — particularly embarrassing, as I have spent the last few years railing against this assumption! (Students know how to do something better than teachers — play video games, watch YouTube, IM — but are vastly deficient in the critical and analytical skills related to thinking and learning, which we have learned through years of education (and so will they, albeit moderated through more extensive use of technology).

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The Model

Particularly in my [media design] class, which is fundamentally more process-driven, but also in my more application-driven computer animation class, I want to push my students to think critically about their own work and the work of their peers, and to reflect on that feedback (and, potentially, my feedback) in a constructive, forward-looking, “lessons learned” manner. To this end, as we reach the end of a project or unit, and we critique work presented, I ask students to respond the criticism that their work has received (while simultaneously providing similar criticism to their peers). I have them post their responses to our class blog, and then ask them to review each other’s responses, posting comments on ideas or insights that are particularly interesting or challenging to them.

In the interest of “pre-thinking” big questions before students arrive in class, I may also present them with a big question and a list of resources as a starting point for beginning to think about that question. I ask them to post their response to the question to the blog as a way of ensuring some level of thought and reflection prior to class, and ensuring that our class discussion can go further and deeper, rather than getting bogged down in background material.

In Practice

This is definitely something that works better the more you do it. And initial forays will be deeply disappointing. The best advice I’ve ever received about asking students to be reflective (especially in public) is that you have to have one or two “throw away” assignments where the focus is on getting the process under their belt, without regard to the quality of the outcomes.

By the middle of November, I have really asked my students in [media design] class to critique and reflect on our class blog only a couple of times, at the ends of units. This is, perhaps, not frequent enough for them to develop real facility. I have interspersed the feedback reflections with the big questions, so that they stay in the habit of posting to the blog every couple of weeks.

I have found, however, that the process of pre-thinking (first espoused to me by my colleague Anna Reid at [my previous school]), is very effective. Particularly when done regularly (I have also used online reading quizzes in a similar way, asking open-ended questions based on the reading to focus their thought while providing mandatory accountability.) I found, for example, that when we sat down to discuss issues of copyright and Fair Use in class, the students who had posted had already developed much more nuanced and thoughtful perspectives on the issues, and that we had a much deeper and more informed class discussion than we had had on the introduction of the assignment before the weekend. (In fact, when presented with optional reading assignments, most of the students read them as well.)

The process of developing an online conversation, in which students are actively commenting on and discussing each other’s ideas and work also requires more development. I have assigned a couple of rounds of online commenting, asking students to post n responses to each other’s work, but have not had in depth discussions of those comments. I have modeled this commenting, particularly early on, although the process of commenting on every student’s work quickly begins to (at least) feel prohibitive in terms of time.

Reflection

This is actually an area that I want to really hammer away at over the rest of the year. I think that the payoff — not potential, but actual payoff — is huge, in terms of helping students both learn to think critically about their own and other people’s work, and to develop their own perspectives based in evidence rather than hearsay. The big challenge for me, is to really embed this in the routine of my class. (I have mentioned this elsewhere, but the adjustment from 4-5 class meetings per week to just 2-3, is really messing with my rhythm… and I didn’t have terribly reliable rhythm before this.)

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The Model

I wanted to structure the feedback that my students presented to each other during our video critique. We often brainstorm the criteria that we will be using to review work as it is presented, and I post our criteria on the board or on the wiki as a reminder throughout the process. This time, I created a new Form in Google Docs and entered our criteria as questions. I then embedded the form in our class notes for the day, and each student filled out the form as we viewed video. I embedded the responses as a spreadsheet on a linked page, so that the the students could review the feedback they had received and post their responses to our class blog.

In Practice

Creating the form live went relatively smoothly — the only hang-up was my inability to type in public. Fortunately, the students were proofreading on the screen and caught me when I made errors. They were also able to help guide me when I got distracted and forgot what I was doing (“Mr. Battis, we’ve already got that question at the bottom of the screen…”).

It took very little instruction for the students to figure out how to use the form. The most complicated thing they had to do was refresh the page after they had submitted their feedback so that they could get a fresh, blank form for the next video.

We settled into a routine where I played each video through twice, once for them to watch, and once to remind them of details as they entered their feedback.

Reflection

After we finished reviewing videos and posting feedback, I put the question to the students: was this better, worse or the same as having a verbal critique of the same material (which we had done in the earlier digital photography unit). The response, by and large, appeared to be that this was actually really helpful: there were enough things to pay attention to while watching the video that being able to take notes into the form let them not forget things that were important.

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The Model

For the last few years, I have found that, when appropriate, I get far more use out of my notes if I take them on a computer. Using the computer allows me to keep my notes organized, to instantly create links to related information (either within my notes or on the web), to flag my own questions as they arise (and unflag them as they are answered), to find ideas in my notes later (search is way faster than flipping through my notebooks and legal pads), to share my notes with colleagues and students, and to link to as references and resources in later iterations of documents.

In Practice

It’s not always kosher to have your laptop open in a conversation. If I take notes in a one-on-one meeting in my laptop, there is a real danger that I will be talking to my computer rather than the person I am meeting with. (Simultaneously, if I take the notes on my laptop, I am able to refer back to them more easily than in handwriting.) Personally, I have found that if I feel compelled to take notes by hand, that those notes are not going to make it into my computer except in extraordinary circumstances, and that the only service that paper notes have for me is as a memory aid (“the information has passed from at least one neuron to at least one other neuron, crossing at least one synapse in the process, giving you a faint hope of remembering the information.” — Duane Bailey).

If there are network connectivity problems (or battery power level issues), my notes may either not be available or may disappear entirely (as happened at one point this fall, taking notes on [a major collaborative project] presentation). This doesn’t happen with notebooks. However, referring back to the last paragraph… those notes would have gone into the ether anyway (for me at least) if I had taken them on paper.

I find that I am much more willing to share my digital notes than I would hand-written notes — not just because of legibility issues, although those are real, but also because when I share my notes, I share it with an expectation that the recipient will be adding some input to those notes, adding value for me as well.

I have also found that using the tagging feature of the wiki gives me a tool for taking attendance at a meeting — who was there, so that I can find notes based not just on content, but on the makeup of the meeting: “I know we discussed this in EdTech, I think Scott said something about it…”

Reflection

As someone who spent years not taking notes on anything, simply remembering what was said to the best of my ability, I find that taking notes on my computer is a massive advantage: it allows me to empty my brain and forget things with confidence. And taking my notes in a wiki makes them instantly shareable and referable from any computer, anywhere. I love it.

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The Model

This is actually a classic use of wikis — the one for which they were developed, in fact — and one that I have found very useful in the past. By documenting my work on a project in a public, shared space, I am both sharing information that needs to be known and inviting other participants to contribute their knowledge as well. I use wikis both for shared projects with my colleagues (as a way to guarantee that only the most current documentation is available, rather than distributing instantly out-dated paper handouts) and as a way of pushing my students to document their own work so that I can grade them on process. Additionally, wikis are a way for me to document my own thought process for both professional development and future planning purposes.

In Practice

Shared Projects with Colleagues

I have found that many of my colleagues (both at [my current school] and [at previous schools]) are hesitant to edit existing documents. The most reliable contribution that I have found my colleagues make is on meeting minutes, when I invite those who did not attend a meeting to insert their contributions to the meeting as comments on the page.

When working on a project with a similarly technically-inclined colleague (say, in the Education Technology department), the process is more likely to be more collaborative, as we edit each other’s work more liberally (although even this is not a guarantee).

Student Documentation of Process

Students don’t document their working voluntarily. I have only had success in asking students to document their work when I have both assigned the documentation for a grade (usually a grade separate from the end product of their work, so that I can distinguish between process and outcome not just in narratives but also in my gradebook).

The closest that I have come to developing a true classroom culture of collaborative documentation was last spring at [my previous school] in my Application Design classroom. In this case, I worked with the students to help them select and design an open-ended project for which they had to do immense amounts of research (they were creating a computer-controlled CNC lathe). I found that there was an inverse relationship between the amount of expertise that I demonstrated and the amount of work and thought that my students contributed: when they could rely on me for answers, they were lazy about documenting their work and finding their own solutions. When I professed no knowledge (often truthfully), students were far more likely to both do much more exhaustive research and to present their findings more clearly.

Professional Development

One challenge of creating a truly collaborative wiki environment (whether with colleagues or with students) is to get all of the participants to read, respond, revise and/or react to each other’s contributions. For example, I am doing a miserable job, on this page, of linking to the work of others in the Laptop Leaders program. I suspect that a major part of this is simply the “drinking from the fire hose” feeling incurred by the stream of data as everyone contributes simultaneously. In a classroom, I have had some success dividing students into groups around a shared research interest. To that end, I need to sift through the other Laptop Leader documentation that refers to, say wikis.

Reflection

At the basic level, my sense is that wikis represent such a shocking change in paradigm for how the web is used that the average user is either befuddled or intimidated by them. I found that I was explaining how wikis work to my classes and the students were fascinated and mildly horrified at both the ease with which they could make changes and the ease with which I could track their use of the wiki. I don’t know for certain, but I wonder if my colleague’s reluctance to update wikis is a combination of fear of the unfamiliar (editing the wiki) and fear of speaking out (publishing their words/ideas to a broader arena in a way that feels more permanent than, say, an email — more on par with a faculty meeting).

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