Academic Technology Podcast - Episode 8

"How Can We Innovate in Learning" Presentation
Claudia Engel and Kimberly Hayworth
Educause Western Regional Conference
San Francisco
April 25, 2006

Kimberly: Hello and welcome to the seventh episode of the Academic Technology Podcast. I'm Kimberly Hayworth, the manager of Academic Computing's Consulting and Multimedia Services group.

Today's episode includes the How Can We Innovate in Learning presentation that Claudia Engel and I gave at the Educause Western Regional Conference on April 25, 2006 in San Francisco.

Claudia: Welcome. I wanted to start our reflection about innovation in the context of learning with an idea we pulled out from an essay which was published by Alan November in 1998. It is his reaction to a symposium on standards and students and success and entitled, Creating a new "Culture in Teaching and Learning." It's actually an example of—at that time, quite visionary thinking, in that it reminds, it's a reminder to redirect attention of school administrators away from "technology planning" towards the learning process.

November uses these two terms, 'automate, 'informate', and these are two ways to think about technology and he uses these to develop his proposal about a new culture of learning. These terms actually go back to Shoshanna Zuboff in 1988 to characterize the design and implementation of technology in institutions.

Kimberly: So, as these terms apply to teaching and learning, generally when faculty first come on board with technology, you're seeing more of the automate side. They're taking a digital version of their paper syllabus, they're maybe scanning some text, they're possibly scanning their slides, and either emailing them to students or possibly using a course website, or a course management system. And there's really no change at all to the teaching and learning methodology. It's a technology as a medium for distributing content. But, as you move over to the informate side, it really does involve a true integration of the technology. As new methods of interacting, communicating, collaborating, analyzing, and providing feedback become available, the course actually changes; the students are part of the creation process for content, rather than just the consumers of information that the faculty pass along.

Claudia: What we want to do—we want to join those who have extended this model, and we want to suggest a different extension, we want to say 'innovate' as the extension of this model. And obviously this term is quite ambiguous…let's say the definitions are quite variable. So if you google it, you find a whole lot of different definitions, some are more process-oriented, some are more product-oriented. They sort of converge, probably, on the notion that's about something new. For our purposes, we will run the definition we pulled from a website where they give instructions about grant proposals. So they say innovation is "development of new technologies, refinement of existing technologies, or the development of new applications for existing technologies."
Now for our purposes, we're gonna replace and add the 'learning', so I'm gonna say, "development of new learning technologies, refinement of existing learning technologies, or the development of applications for existing learning technologies." Now this is certainly not a carved in stone definition—it's probably also not necessarily comprehensive. But what we liked about it is that is points us to the fact that there are multiple ways of thinking about innovation, and there are also multiple ways to go about it. And this is, actually, one of the main points of our talk, and we're going to illustrate this and in a for the sake of time, rather condensed description and review of what we both—Kim and I—how we both approach this issue.

Kimberly: So you can see the components of innovation, and today's technology makes it easier than ever to find, create, edit, capture, and share information. So this is all in support of communication and collaboration. Whether it's a learning environment that was traditionally classroom-based, or a lecture hall that didn't have desks that moved, to a configurable- furniture environment that has white boards around the room so students can actually get up and collaborate and work in groups, or whether it's a more technological approach, for example with TeamSpot that Allan and Surajit will be talking about tomorrow morning at 8:30.

So, at this point, those types of technologies that actually have the 'informate' component built into them, because you're moving away from the 'automate' into the 'informate' where it's becoming internalized—it's just part of the way things are done because the technology is so ubiquitous.
Again with the capture mode, the coursecast: now this can be as easy as a faculty member turning on some type of recording device—like this digital voice recorder—and then turning their lecture into a podcast, which can be made available to students after the fact, or a screencast, in the case of one of our Mechanical Engineering profs. who just puts on a USB headset, uses his Tablet PC, launches PowerPoint, and turns on a screencapture software called Camtasia, and essentially captures everything. And that's made available to students as part of the course materials. The class time is used for small group activities—for the interaction, the questions, so it's really the face-to-face components that are taken advantage of by this technology.

And you can see that the students can take that information and put it into weblogs, or even now video weblogs, as a way to aggregate the information, to get their viewpoints out there—that can be something that's available only to the course, or it can be made available to the entire world. So you can have subject matter experts commenting on students' comments. And you can see an extension of that in the wikis, where you've got sites that are editable by students, and you can set up permission groups so that small groups have access to one area, you can make it publicly available. So the granularity of the permissions allow much more interaction than a traditional website might, or even, possibly, some course management systems.

As far as video conferencing—again, bringing in that subject matter expert access, making it available to the world—so you go beyond just the classroom walls into a more diverse atmosphere. So as far as the social bookmarking—again students can go, they can share what they've found, and then they can see what other people are doing, by the tags that they are using, by the way they're researching information, by the way things are aggregated and shared.
And that brings us to 'group projects', and I'd like to show you an example of what's going on at Stanford, as far as the iTunes project. What we're doing in our situation at Stanford. iTunes is actually built into our learning management system called CourseWork, and this supports all of the authentication; the students would log in just like they normally would for their course, in this case, Intermediate Cantonese Conversation, second quarter—and this is actually done in winter quarter…of this year. And let me just show you—basically what the experience is. They would just go to Stanford —this is actually a screen capture, so if you haven't seen screencasting before, this is screencasting.

You can see here that the students…basically this is the content, and this is the midterm exam—so it's a skit that they've written and developed. And it's actually kinda funny. I recognize certain words they throw in, like "Atkins" and "calories" but—and I almost feel like I understand Cantonese just by watching them, cause there's a lot of gags, he's got food that they're eating—there's a whole group activity. And you can see this is actually done in Wallenberg Hall. So you can see part of the Websters, this is where the students would share information, this is the configurable furniture, this is the laptop cart, this is the smart panel that is used to control things. And on the other side there's a wireless keyboard that you can't really see. These are-actually -these chairs are amazing. They're just incredibly comfortable and light and easy to move. So as far as the way this works out, you can see that this is video. Now you don't have to have a video iPod in order to use this. You don't even need any type of external device. But this is what the signal looks like on here. It's a great way to download it. But if you don't have an iPod or an MP3 player at all then you can view this in iTunes on a PC or a Macintosh. It allows students to share information. They can subscribe to it, which is the greatest, I think one of the greatest advantages of using iTunes is that any time there's new content that's uploaded, the students will automatically get it downloaded every time they log into iTunes. So it's really like an RSS feed.

Claudia: So I talked about multiple ways of going about innovation and we came up with this graphic representation of our respective positions within faculty support at our university. So what happens is we see our responsibilities at different points of a continuum. And this continuum extends from small scale to large scale, from specialist to generalist from proactive to responsive and from prototypical development to broad adoption. Let me start with this. This is sort of my end of the spectrum. I am affiliated with the Academic Technology Specialist Program at the university. And the mission of that program is to help bridge the gap between technology and academic work and help spread innovative applications in for the use in research and in teaching. This ATS program provides services to selected departments in the form of an ATS. So that is an Academic Technology Specialist. So the point is that this ATS person lives and works in the department. An ATS also typically has a dual background so as you've heard I'm an Anthropologist and I work with Anthropologists. So what that means is that the ATS is involved in the every day of the department. The background in the academic field and also the fact that I teach a few courses establishes a certain kind of conversation and creates a certain kind of environment and the background for interaction with faculty which is crucial for my work.

Kimberly: So as far as my approach to it, I actually head up a group called Consulting and Multimedia Services. This serves not just faculty and students but we also take staff into consideration. It's a diverse approach to it because I also manage the Academic Technology Lab which is completely focused on instructional technologies so that area is limited to faculty and students. But I also have oversight over the Multimedia Studio which is available to students and staff. So what we need to do is take the solutions that they prototype in the ATS program and figure out a way to actually make that available for other disciplines and other uses that might be within the context of teaching and learning and might be within the context of needs for groups on campus. So our purpose is really take things that they do and make it scalable and more general.

And as far as a support continuum goes,our campus is very decentralized so there's a variety of different services offered by the Information Technology Services that provides help desk type services and all sorts of networking and telephone communications and that type of thing. But there's also within the departments, you've got the specialized services of certain ATS's but not all departments have ATS's. And so what happens in the ATL is that I actually help anyone who doesn't have an ATS. So I'm sort of a surrogate for them but I can't possibly have the subject matter expertise in every single area in every single discipline on campus. If I did, I'd probably have a different job. I'd probably be in a think tank somewhere. But I have to be able to take what they've learned here in the ATS program and also at Wallenberg and be able to expand that into something that's general enough to be able to support multiple disciplines and a variety of technical skill levels. Because again in certain departments, I am actually helping a faculty member who doesn't have email to another faculty member who wants to start podcasting, coursecasting. So there's such a range that we have to be able to be flexible enough to respond to it and yet have the workflows in place to be able to figure out how we're gonna scale these services. Because we don't want to be responding to tech support needs all the time. We wanna make sure people are self-sufficient. Tailoring the needs to the level of the people and to the needs of the courses. As far as the discipline-specific ATS's, we meet with them. We're in the same department. We're in Academic Computing. I go to their meetings but I'm not really an ATS. And there's another group on campus that has a similar mission to the ATL which is the Center for Teaching and Learning. And they are really responsible for anyone who comes to them to help with teaching and learning questions.

So, as far as approaches go. Traditionally the Academic Technology Lab had a dual focus. In the mornings, we would support CourseWork, our learning management system. So we would actually be answering HelpSU tickets which is done in the Remedy Help Desk system and we would be working on focus groups for new features. So it was really very, very different in the mornings. Then in the afternoon when we would shift over to our role as integrating technology specialists. And this was really more of the automate version of life. Because we didn't have the time to really work with faculty in-depth. But what we could do very well is to set a rote number of things where they digitize content and then we'd help them upload it and it's something that was very easy for us to do and was very finite.

In April of 2005, they actually shifted our focus. So my colleague who was also on the CourseWork/ATL side, she got moved to CourseWork support 100%. And they gave me the opportunity to do research for the ATL side. And what ended up happening after I ended up doing a needs assessment, we did interviews with folks on campus about the different resources that were available, we did faculty surveys, focus groups of the faculty on campus. We also did surveys of faculty support staff at 15 other campuses. And then we went to do site visits of 6 campuses in the Northeast at peer institutions. So I got massive amounts of data which resulted in 133 pages that we presented to the Director of Academic Computing. And this proposal for the consolidated consulting model which would take the ATL and merge it with the Multimedia Studio for student and staff support as well as RCC components which is our Residential Computing Consultant component for the dorms and student support. So at this point it's really more of we're shifting from the automate to more of the informate. We know what the faculty need. We know what resources are on campus that faculty say they need but already exists. So what we're trying to do is figure out a way to support not just one faculty member with one course but support an entire program.

For example the program in Writing and Rhetoric we're doing a lot of work with them. So as far as the multimedia support, that's something our group is doing through the Studio but I'm working with their Academic Technology Specialist to consider what type of training might be available. We're also trying to figure out scalable systems. For example, the workshops that we give face to face, we're now doing this screencasting. So we're making it available as online modules. We're doing promos for things. So it's a lot more outreach and development. And that's really what we're doing with the podcasting as well. So we're piloting that and then once I get the workflows in place, we'll be able to scale it.

The implementation focus of it is we want to start faculty off to build up their confidence. So that's why you do introduce the Low Threshold Applications. That's actually from Steve Gilbert. And Maricopa Community College has done a fantastic job of compiling a list of things that are simple for faculty to get started. They're stable systems, they're easy to learn, user-friendly. They don't intimidate faculty and they're not that expensive whether in terms of cost or support. Once faculty start using these things and build confidence, then you can ask them more questions about "What is it that you wish you could do that you can't?" And if there's some type of fit that the technology really would be a scalable system for them to use. In some cases it's not technology at all, it's just a different approach to how you do things. So as far as the mechanisms for broad dissementation, again, this is something that the infrastructure of the ITS version of the CourseWork system where it's actually a centralized support system for the campus learning management system. Those type of things...we want to move those things into the mainstream so that it's something that people can use and not really think about it. It's just like a light switch, just flip it and it's there. We try to work with faculty in going out, finding out what happened, lessons learned and then improving the course the next time so that that shows up in their syllabus. And as far as, again, documenting what we're doing in order so-it can be replicated both at our campus and at other campuses.

And so this is planning with the end in mind. So how are you planning on scaling things? Is there a way to repurpose that content that you've created so that you just have to capture it once and then it can be produced in different formats? So, as far as the audience, we do need to keep in mind, for example with the podcasts, if you have the latest technology, the m4a's work great on this, the video works great on this. But if you have older technologies, we also makes mp3's available with links off to transcripts. The expectations of the audience, what are you promising them? What are they going to be getting? Is that...is the type of support that they're going to be getting actually aligned with what amount of time they have available and what type of support they're getting either in their department or centrally? And also thinking about change management...remember the faculty member with no email and the faculty member with the podcasting interest? So, how do you actually manage those changes over time?

Claudia: Kim has tried to give you an overview of how she goes about implementing innovation. I'm going to move you back to this end now. I'd like to illustrate the way I see what I do with this little picture here. What usually happens is that we put students and teachers together. We give them some sort of learning environment, some tool, some space...virtual space, physical space and then what we want to see at the end is some innovative pedagogy. So it can be anything learner-centered, collaborative, project-based, you name it.

And what I'm interested in is this thing because what I wanted to show you actually is that I think that this process requires some sort of facilitation. So what I'd like to do is...I give you a very condensed run through, sort of a summary of a lot of projects or several projects I've found to be highlights of how this process or how this project developed. So we can talk about teaching.

The first thing I try to do is to is as I said inquire about the context and the history of the course. So that involves reading the syllabus and reading the old syllabus. It also involves conversation and trying to find out what are the challenges with this class, what are the problems, how often has this class been taught, all kinds of background information. Another thing I try to do in the beginning is to provide an experience of the space.

This is just an example from the space Kim has mentioned several times, Wallenberg Hall, which is high-performance learning space where all sorts of equipment and flexible furniture, recording and visualization and collaborative applications are installed-an experimental room. So in this case we really go to a physical space. Then with several tools to work from the course goals to the learning activities. So we're using interview technique we have designed or there are others. This one is from Philip Long from MIT. There are several, many tools you can use to really try to pull out the most important course goals and convert them or design learning activities around that.

The important aspect is to make the technology work because as you know the trust in the technology is one of the major components in what it's crucial for us to have faculty know that they can rely on whatever they do is gonna work. Then a lot of work goes into enabling the instructor or the students which is all sorts of support which needs to be done along the way. So I set up, you know, websites or training sessions or technical support or any kind of help you can imagine we do all go through.

Another thing I sometimes try to do, this is a specific example is I say manipulate the space. So in the case of the Wallenberg spaces that are very flexible, what I sometimes did is that I rearranged the space. So students would come in and would not find the place how they're used to seeing it which then immediately led students to run and grab the tables and move them around so they set up their own space. And while there was like a little surprise moment in the beginning, what it also...the long-term effect it had was that students really took ownership of this space. So they felt more empowered designing their own environment.

We have several examples of sort of innovative ideas they came up with how to do things there. Another thing is to be involved in class at different levels of involvement there which is incredibly helpful in terms of constantly monitoring what...what kind of topics come up, what kind of problems come up, where would be a possibility to make some changes in terms of the the technology or in terms of the teaching. So the constant monitoring of how can I best adapt this teaching process or learning process. These are just a few examples of what we did in these spaces. We're using the white boards for a collaborative activity mapping concepts of cultural theory. This is an undergrad class in cultural theory. So students came up with things, three dimensional maps.

This is another example from an archaeology class. This is mostly grad students modeling an archaeological site in Latin America. So you get a sense, a taste of what happened in these rooms. These are digitizing. Something the students came up with...some idea here. OK and lastly, the debriefing which as I mentioned obviously happens along the way. But we also try to get some sort of feedback from the faculty. What worked and what didn't work and what can we do better? And I just wanted to quote a few lines from two interviews we did with both of these faculty. Because I think it's indicative about how it really changed their thinking in terms of how they teach. The first one is from Professor Rick. He's an archaeologist and he says: “The ability to interact with students over the effects of what they are doing is one of the things I really try to work on in the class. When we start putting digital programs and models together, we are actually making arguments. But it's a very different form of argument. So in a context like this space we can actually simulate the type of argument. We can take a time-out and say, ok, by moving through your modeling this way what are you trying to argue, what is the degree of confidence you have with your model.”

This professor she's a Cultural Anthropologist, says: “ I have learned a lot about letting go of old cultural studies and to think more in terms of what is Cultural Studies today. I think the class was successful in that the students got really introduced to something new... it opened up a world, not only as an abstraction, but you really had to do things, you had to apply."

And then she refers to this, this exercise as a keyword exercise. The ones I've showed you with the whiteboards.

She said: "We did this exercise which was very effective, because it immediately brought people into this as a place where you could do something. I'm not standing there and talking at them. It was a very important way of introducing cultural studies to give students the sense of 'empowerment'."

I think it's a wrong notion to set faculty and students up with the new technologies and off they go. And you expect something new to come out of there. So I suggest that for this process of innovation and change The facilitation is a crucial component and I've tried to illustrate parts of what I'm doing with facilitation from examples from my work. And Kim has sort of given her side of it. So what I want to do really is use this notion of facilitation and then turn it back to our initial idea of these two extremes. Because what I really also think while you see our roles at some ends of a spectrum, we also think that it converges in very important things. You've already mentioned that we're collaborating on a lot of things.

Kim: Maintaining focus on learning, reducing technology anxieties, creating opportunities, exploiting teachable moments, building community and raising awareness. So, we can talk about it. And I actually have another screencast of... of examples of how we're trying to incorporate some of this stuff.

And I just wanted to give an example of that with this last screencast. So what you're seeing here is the static website for Consulting and Multimedia Services. Essentially this is the automate version of what we were doing. The Academic Technology Lab would have these static pages and maybe once every quarter or so we'd get some note...note saying you need to update it because we're doing a website review. And so we'd put up our project showcase, our profiles but it wouldn't really get updated again for another quarter. So what we're trying to do with this new model, not just for Consulting and Multimedia Services but also for the entire Academic Computing website is create components that are static with information that doesn't change or doesn't change very frequently and augment it with a more dynamic system for disseminating information.

For example, you see the blog there, so I'm going to show you more about that. This drop off digitizing, this was something that faculty requested. So we're trying to accommodate those things in the needs assessment that we did get feedback from faculty that they want. We're also trying to point them to resources that they said they want but already have access to but just don't know about. So that's where the Academic Technology Podcast series comes in. I'm posting it at the CAMS blog but I'm also going to be putting it on the Community iTunes site for iTunes.stanford.edu.

Really what you're looking at here is all of the mixed support. So this is the Academic Technology Lab for faculty and TA's, this is for students and staff and this is for anybody who needs helps with Meyer questions or technical questions. What you're seeing here are links, static links, subscribing to the podcast. This stuff is actually RSS feeds, the podcasts - that's a separate blog. And this is an RSS feed for Educause so what we're trying to do here is not only create new, dynamic content for things that are happening in our area - you just saw the Academic Technology open house just fly by...that was something that for a website we would have had to post it and take it back down but for the blog it was interesting, it was timely but then when that passed, there's still an archive of it. So we're going to do this again if people want to go back and see what's happening.

So right now I'm subscribing to the podcast and this actually has audio. The music I did with SoundTrack Pro. Some people don't like and some people like it a lot. So this is the difference between the linear podcast and the fact that you can choose different chapters. So you can go directly to the area that you want more information about. And this is available also as an mp3 so people who have older mp3 players who may not support the .m4a format that has all the bells and whistles with images this still comes up as chapterized areas so they can still go to different places and they can see the text .You don't really want to hear itbut you can go to the blog and hear this. This is open to anyone in the world who wants to access it.

But what we wanted to do was take the Information Technology Services page offered by centralized IT department that faculty didn't know about and take out the things that really pertained to faculty, students and staff and make it really accessible in a format that also showcased what's possible with the technology. Because when most people hear podcasts, they think of mp3s, they think of audio but there's so much more that you could be doing with it. And, again, faculty are subscribing to it so every time I put in a new podcast, it's going to show up here. Notice what happens when you click on Wallenberg Hall, that actually is gonna go ahead and launch the website. So all the links are internal. So faculty don't even need to go to a separate interface, they can just do this from iTunes. And again, they don't have to have an mp3 player, although if they wanted to download it, they could. If they're on a PC that's fine it plays great on PCs with latest version and it's also fine on Macintosh as well.

And also, I wanted to show you one last thing. So what we're doing is we're making the text of all this available via the Lyrics tab. So everything that I've said, this script, is available here. I'm also working with the Office of Accessible Education to do captions. And it's something that's extremely important if you're talking about different learning styles, reaching folks with disabilities. I's something that we're keeping in mind. And again, our group, CAMS, is spearheading this effort. And essentially what we're doing is trying to show people what you can do and with accessibility, what you should do. Thank you.

Well, that's it for Academic Technology Podcast, Episode 8. Thanks for listening. Episode 9 will include an overview of Academic Technology events and conferences taking place at Stanford in Summer and early Fall of 2006.

Links to information discussed in this podcast and other show notes are available online at http://acomp.stanford.edu/cams Just click the Academic Technology Podcast link. You'll also find a link to our blog if you'd like to provide feedback or suggest topics for future podcasts.