Week 11: Class Resources and Intellectual Property

Intellectual property and copyright issues are always closely related to every educator and student. Educators inevitably have to deal with these issues when they are using resources and materials for their class, etc. As for students, to avoid plagiarism, they  need to pay special attention to these issues when they are working on their assignments and papers. However, the reality is that not everyone knows and understands the rules of copyright and intellectual property clearly. For a lot of people, these rules are just blurry concepts. I guess this is one of the reasons why some college students plagiarize even without realizing their behaviors are wrong. Intellectual property and copyright issues have been becoming more and more complicated nowadays in the digital age.

I still remember a few years ago, before I officially started to teach Chinese in Kansas, there was an orientation for new teachers in our institute. One topic we discussed in this orientation was about intellectual property. Since we had to design and use PowerPoint in the class every day, we always embedded some online resources such as graphics and videos in the slides. Our supervisor emphasized that the URLs of these online resources were required to be added to the slides as well, but we didn’t have a detailed and comprehensive guide that teachers could consult. After that orientation, I was just sure that I wouldn’t have any trouble as long as I marked all the resources. I am glad that Ko and Rossen talk about these issues in the book. Their illustrations let me have a better understanding of intellectual property in the context of education. I found the Fair Use Guidelines for Educational Multimedia is very handy and useful. I also like the “Assuring Academic Integrity among Your Students” part. The tips mentioned in this section are useful for teachers to help their students guard against plagiarism.

Week 10 Blogs

I like Lisa’s visual map about the pedagogical use of blogs. It gives us some good hints and guidelines on how to determine the specific forms and ways of using blogs for class. I agree that teachers need to be very sure about their pedagogical goals of using blogs, or other social networking tools. I even think setting clear goals is the most important thing in the process. My personal opinion is that teachers should avoid using blogs or other social networking tools if their goals are vague, or their goals are just to spice up the class. After all, whatever technology tools that teachers use for class, the ultimate goal is to facilitate and enhance instruction, that is to say, to make instruction more effective.

Blogs can play different roles according to different pedagogical purposes. Just like Lisa stated in her presentation, it can be a forum, a resource center, a place for class presentation and interaction etc. As a student, I have used blogs, Google sites and wikis for my online courses. The teachers usually asked us to post reflections on our blogs and they commented on them. I also worked with other classmates to do group projects using Google sites and wiki. Overall, I enjoyed the experience of using these tools. Blogs, Google sites and wikis become additional communication bridges and platforms between teachers and students, between students and their classmates. They make the whole online learning process more convenient to some extent.

Speaking of communication, I start to think about the interesting questions Dr. Major raised about blogging: how do you know if someone has read it or not (and is that important?)? If no one reads it, have you communicated? If no one responds, have you connected? How do students feel if they blog and no one responds? From my perspective, it is important to know if someone, no matter the teachers or classmates, has read my blog or not. In most cases if people don’t leave comments, it is not likely to know all the readers. However, I could still see the hit count of my blogs. I don’t think I have really communicated if no one reads my blog. Communication is two-way. If no one read my blog, I can only say my blog is just a place to achieve my thoughts, but not a place to interact with others. Theoretically speaking, I should feel connected if someone has read my blogs even without commenting. But in reality, I will feel a little disappointed and frustrated. After all, we need others’ feedback and comments which are actually important in the communication process.

Week 9 Diigo and Second Life

Diigo is an interesting and convenient bookmarking tool. It can be utilized in our everyday life whenever browsing the web or reading articles online. This reminds me another popular social bookmarking tool called Delicious which is quite similar to Diigo. I am sure some of you also know them. As for its educational usage, I think teachers can use Diigo as a complimentary tool for instruction. There are many available online resources about the educational use of Diigo. I just did a little searching and picked some, which I think would be helpful for us to understand its application in education.

Social bookmarking - Diigo for Teachers

http://educationtechnology-theoryandpractice.blogspot.com/2011/06/social-bookmarking-diigo-for-teachers.html

10 Reasons to use Diigo

http://www.ictineducation.org/home-page/2009/11/2/10-reasons-to-use-diigo.html

Student Learning with Diigo

https://sites.google.com/site/team8project9440/using-diigo-in-the-classroom-2/using-diigo-in-the-classroom-1

As for Second Life, I am still skeptical about its educational value. The designing concepts of Second Life seem very fancy and advanced. There are also some successful examples of using Second Life in education. However, I still cannot figure out the sufficient reasons for spend so much money on purchasing a virtual island and building a virtual community. I remember last week Fang showed us the virtual Graves Hall which is “under construction”. There is a “test room” on the second floor in this building. If a teacher sets up a test in this “room”, his or her students’ need to move their avatars to this “place” and take the test in this virtual room. Students may think that is cool and interesting at the beginning, but I doubt if they will feel the same after doing that for several times. Why would I spend extra time to log on Second Life and try to find the right “test room” if I can just simply take the text online? For teachers, the cost of using Second Life and the required technology skills are relatively high. There are still a lot of issues of Second Life for researchers to discuss and resolve.

Week 8 Online Community

Ko and Rossen mentioned the virtual learning environment in chapter 6. Since I raised a question about Second Life in last week’s post, I am quite interested in their ideas about this issue. They stated that “Despite great strides in the development of such software, virtual-world software still presents a fairly steep learning curve for the majority of instructors to perform even simple tasks and for many students as well”. This is truly the reality of Second Life in education. We have to admit that more and more educators have started their experiments of integrating Second Life into instruction. Researchers have also conducted many research projects about Second Life. However, as “the most widely known program for virtual-world educational use”, Second Life still has a long way to go. There are many instructional issues and problems that need to explore.

On the contrary, using social networking tools in education is no longer a new topic for most of the educators. It is still a hot and controversial topic as well. In my opinion, if instructors can use these social networking tools appropriately and effectively, they will see the benefits these tools bring to their classrooms (no matter face-to-face, hybrid or online). But if instructors misuse them or even lose control of them, the consequences could be serious sometimes. Thus instructors should be very cautious and make detailed plans if they decide to use social networking tools. It’s a pity that Ko and Rossen didn’t talk much about this issue. Although I am not a big fan of Facebook, I did a web search about its usage in classroom. I found some practical tips for instructors who plan to use Facebook and I would like share them with you. Here are the URLs:

Social Media & Education: Using Facebook for Teaching:

http://saschafunk.de/teaching/sociale-media-education-using-facebook-for-teaching/

30 Important Rules for Professors on Facebook:

http://www.onlinecolleges.net/2011/06/21/30-important-rules-for-professors-on-facebook/

Facebook and Your Online Course – 10 Resources for Faculty:

http://www.onlinecollege.org/2011/04/25/facebook-and-your-online-course-%E2%80%93-10-resources-for-faculty/

Week 7 Online Community

This week’s topic is building an online classroom. We discussed this issue in the class this week. How to build an online community? This question is really hard to answer. Building an online community is not an easy task. From my perspective, the online community initiated in a course management system is mostly forced. Learner’s participation in the online community is not spontaneous if the learner is not interested in it or forced to involve in this community by course policies or other external factors. I guess this is the nature and one shortcoming of learning management system which might be hard to conquer. This makes me to think about the use of virtual learning environment, such as Second Life. Did anyone use Second Life before? What about the online community in Second Life? Could it be really different from the one in course management system? Is the communication in virtual learning environment more effective than learning management system?

Additionally, I would like to introduce Richard Mayer’s cognitive theory of multimedia learning. This theory is based on three main assumptions: there are two separate channels (auditory and visual) for processing information; there is limited channel capacity; and that learning is an active process of filtering, selecting, organizing, and integrating information. The figure below presents the model of how people learn from multimedia lessons.

The principle known as the “multimedia principle” states that “people learn more deeply from words and pictures than from words alone”.  However, simply adding words to pictures is not an effective way to achieve multimedia learning. The goal is to instructional media in the light of how human mind works. This is the basis for Mayer’s cognitive theory of multimedia learning. 

Mayer’s cognitive theory of multimedia learning presents the idea that the brain does not interpret a multimedia presentation of words, pictures, and auditory information in a mutually exclusive fashion; rather, these elements are selected and organized dynamically to produce logical mental constructs. Design principles including providing coherent verbal, pictorial information, guiding the learners to select relevant words and images, and reducing the load for a single processing channel etc. can be entailed from this theory.