:Creative Chaos

This summer I attended the free classes in Modern Greek offered by Stockton’s Interdisciplinary Center for Hellenic Studies. For me, one fascinating feature of the Greek language is the ‘absolute superlative.’ In English we comparative and relative superlative (e.g., better, best). In Greek, the absolute superlative is one step further, not just the greatest amount of some quality in the items being compared, but the greatest amount in existence.

Upon reflection, I realized that, although the English language does not have a grammatical structure for the absolute superlative, we do make an attempt to measure and record it. The Guinness Book of World Records is our registry of the biggest, smallest, fastest, slowest, oldest, youngest, heaviest, lightest… you name it… on the planet.

If you search the Guinness site for ‘college,’ ninety-nine records are returned. If you search for ‘university,’ two hundred-eighty results are returned. Some of these records are related to the institutional curriculum or products of research, but most items are related to extra-curricular activities like ‘Most People in a Pie Fight’  or ‘Most People Dressed as Smurfs’.

Pie fights and Smurf costumes are harmless diversions, but one of the most interesting recent records in higher education is missing from the Guinness site. This record seems to have been set in the fall 2011 semester at Stanford University for a free course in Artificial Intelligence.  According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, approximately 94,000 students were enrolled in this course.  While numbers are not yet available on how many students actually completed the course and demonstrated mastery of the course content, the fact that enrollment was so high ia wake-up call for all higher education institutions.

High enrollments in free courses are not the only clarion call. The non-profit higher education market is increasingly finding its space invaded by for-profit organizations.

Knewton, a for-profit company in New York City provides adaptive education in the area of mathematics remediation. The adaptive environment presents material in small chunks, using game mechanics and micro rewards. The system performs frequent assessment, and provides continuous updates on student performance. Mathematics is an area where machine grading can reliably indicate student mastery, but as adaptive instructional technologies continue to evolve, are other content areas far behind?

In recent years we have witnessed technology-enabled transformations in retail sales (think Amazon), the disappearance of newspapers as primary news sources (think Huffington Post, et al ), and a revolution in social interaction (think Facebook). Higher education is facing a similar transformation. We can ignore the influence of technology or we can imagine and construct a different future.

What is your vision of higher education in 5 years? 10 years? 20 years?

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Do you remember first grade? When I think back, I recall the smell of chalk dust, the long skinny poster of the alphabet running across the top of the blackboard, Dick & Jane, and the heavy duty swing set on the playground.

I also remember foil stars pasted on the top of my homework and test papers — an ‘A’ earned a gold star, a ‘B’ earned a silver star. Satisfactory artwork was randomly awarded any one of the remaining colored stars – usually blue, green, or red. In those pre-FERPA days, our school work was tacked up on the classroom bulletin boards with stars shining for all to see.

Of course, as I moved up through elementary school, stars and stickers were soon left behind. The red pen became something to be dreaded. Students quickly scanned their papers hoping to see few red marks and looking for a circled letter, hopefully a high grade.

As adults, we may receive rewards in the form of thank you notes, letters of commendation, professional advancement, and monetary compensation. While this kind of recognition is always appreciated, it is usually earned over the long haul. Often, we do not receive acknowledgement for everyday excellence. Where are the gold stars for grown ups?

Never fear, they actually do exist. If you want to give someone a gold star, visit +1me.com. Enter the email address of the person that you wish to acknowledge, choose the category for the “+1”, enter a brief message describing the reason for the +1 and submit. The person will receive an email message informing him/her of the +1 and why it was given. You don’t need to register, but if you do, a page will be created tracking all of your +1’s.

Gold stars are back. :-) Now about that swing set…

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In the dark ages of public school education (perhaps even still today), there was one corner of the curriculum that required all students to wear a uniform – physical education class. The gym suits for girls  were one-piece abominations (some made of stretch material) that looked terrible on everyone.

Everybody hated the gym suit and yet it had its purpose – providing safe and reliable clothing for physical activities. It  was a standard that enabled the PE teacher to focus on instruction during each class period rather than wasting time dealing with disparate, and perhaps inappropriate, clothing choices made by students and/or parents that could potentially present a physical danger.

Assessment is a lot like the one size fits all gym suit. There is no one instrument that will fit every person, every function, or every environment. Despite the challenges that assessment presents, the process is invaluable for continuous improvement.

There are technology tools that can assist in the instructional assessment process.

Some students may be hesitant to participate in class discussion. For frequent or daily use, personal response systems (aka “clickers”) or cell phones can be useful tools for student and instructors for immediate feedback.

[Using PRS to Enhance Classroom Interaction will be offered May 11, 2011 at 11:00 am in D-018. Polling Features in Online Tools will be offered May 10, 2001 at 2:00 pm in D-019. Click here to register. ]

In addition to in-class or online interactions, students must also create academic artifacts that demonstrate their content mastery  (e.g., term paper, lab report, video presentation, podcast, or exam).  In many cases the academic work product activity is an electronic object that can be collected via a learning management system.

[Blackboard CE8: Assignments and Assessments will be offered May 9, 2011 at 2:30 in D-027. Click here to register.]

Mastery of content is demonstrated by how well the student’s academic work product matches the requirements defined by the instructor. In education parlance this is known as a rubric. (In Blackboard parlance – a grading form.)  A well designed rubric will help both student and instructor – the student will have a clear picture of expectations and the instructor will have a standard to use in evaluating each student and providing feedback, minimizing potentially intimidating “red ink”.

Finally, the student needs to be aware of his/her overall progress. Even the most detailed course syllabus can leave a student wondering “Where do I stand?” A progress worksheet or interim grade posted in the Blackboard grade book can be helpful.

[Blackboard CE8: Grading Forms, Goals, and the Grade Book will be offered May 11, 2011 at 9:30 in D-019. Click here to register.]

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I am in the midst of re-modeling my bathrooms. It seems that when my house was built, the contractor used regular sheet rock behind the tile surround instead of greenboard. Moisture from the shower has wreaked havoc on the underlying wallboard and tiles are buckling.

As anyone who has done any home re-modeling knows, it is a very disruptive process. I’ve survived the selection phase – tub, tile, flooring, vanity, lighting, et cetera (and there is a lot of et cetera!) and work is underway. However, I have been stymied by the process of choosing a new shower curtain.

“How hard can it be?” you might ask. That’s what I thought before I started looking. Just pop on over to the local department store or bed and bath specialty shop, go through the samples, and pick one. In and out in 10 minutes, tops. Right? Wrong.

When you don’t like any of the local options, you go online and that is where your troubles really begin. Although some online stores will allow you to do a limited search based on price, color, and size, the only way to really know whether a shower curtain might be the right choice is to view the image. That process takes a lot of time. I am not kidding when I say that I have viewed pictures of over 1,000 shower curtains.

Wouldn’t it be nice if I could find a visual search engine? I could describe what I am looking for and the search engine would search into the images as well as the text description. The exact type of search engine that I am looking for apparently does not exist. (I think most people would call that a personal shopper.) However, I found some interesting resources in my online travels.

A company called Symmetri is working a search engine called Symbolyze that does not use words. Users of the search engine click on symbolic icons to drill down on topics of interest and retrieve images and film clips from the web. Right now, they just have a limited prototype online, but the concept is fascinating.

Symmetri also has a search engine called Search Cube that projects thumbnails of web page results or significant images from the results onto a three dimensional cube. The user then can rotate the cube using arrow keys and select a site by clicking on it. Up to 96 results are included on the cube surface.

Quintura supplements search results with a “tag cloud” – a group of words related to your search results. The larger the font for the tag the more frequently it appears in the search results. You can mouse over the tag and immediately view the refined search results. Quintura also offers a downloadable application that allows you to further refine your searches and save the results for later.

Yometa provides a visual comparison of search results from Google, Yahoo and Bing. Doing a preliminary search on this site will tell the user which search engine is most likely to provide the best results for a particular search.

Finally, for those who have way too much time on their hands, there is the pastime known as “Googlewhacking”. This is not visual at all, but something I stumbled over in my search. The goal of Googlewhacking is to select a two word phrase that will result in only one found website when the phrase is used in a Google search.

And my shower curtain? At this point, I am thinking of breaking out an old mechanical technology – my sewing machine – and making my own.

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This week on the television game show Jeopardy two human champions, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings will match wits with the IBM supercomputer “Watson”. Watson is parallel system composed of 750 servers, 16 Terabytes of memory and 4 Terabytes of storage. Just like the human players, Watson will use only the information that has been stored in the system – no search engines allowed.

The questions in Jeopardy often include wordplay, irony, and humor. As humans, we have the edge over machines because of our ability to understand subtleties in language. Computers have always dealt with language in a very literal manner, making the challenge of playing Jeopardy a considerable one indeed. To address this challenge, the researchers at IBM have been working on The DeepQA Project. The objective was to create software that could accurately interpret natural language.

While the Jeopardy challenge might seem like a frivolous stunt, the algorithms built into Watson have enormous implications for the future. We humans are gathering billions of bits of data each day and analyzing that data to create new knowledge.

It is impossible for any single human being to know everything. However, most of what we do know exists in electronic format. What we discover and share exists in electronic format. Fed into a system like Watson, this information can be quickly searched and analyzed within the context of human thought. For example, Watson technology could be used in the diagnosis of a patient with a rare disease. Watson could provide hypotheses – some possibly ridiculous, some plausible – for human review.

Are you smarter that Watson? Click here to play a sample game and see how Watson works.

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As a long time higher education professional and admitteded education junkie, I certainly hope that higher education will remain alive and well far into the future. However, rising costs, high unemployment, and economic woes have resulted in increasingly strident calls for accountability and affordability in higher education.

Peter Drucker, noted management consultant and education philosopher said: “We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.” As an institution founded with the liberal arts at it core, the notion of teaching our students how to learn has always been woven into the fabric of Stockton’s institutional mission.

And yet, lifetime learning is not enough. Knowledge, as a basis for innovation, must be integrated. In his prophetic, 1946 Nobel prize winning book, Magister Ludi, Hermann Hesse wove a tale in which intellectual mastery was measured by the connection of seemingly disparate fields of study into a cohesive web of knowledge. The main character, Joseph Knecht, spends a lifetime constructing his web of knowledge to the point of transcending his human existence.

We don’t have to work that hard. We live in a time where, should we choose to use it, a vast web of knowledge – the Worldwide Web – can be at our fingertips at anytime. We are almost literally assaulted by information at every turn. We need tools that help us to integrate and distill all of that information.

There are technology tools that can help.

Focus your search. Are there web pages that you want your students to use regularly as primary sources? With a Google user account (available at no cost), you can create multiple custom search engines that search through only the sites that you define. The code that is generated can be pasted into a web page or a into an HTML file on Blackboard.

Visualize your data. Desktop tools like Excel, PowerPoint and SPSS are helpful. So are web-based tools. IBM’s Many Eyes project offers tools for exploring and sharing data visualizations.

Link disparate data. Create or link to a mashup. Even if you lack the technology skills to create your own mashup, many such applications already exist. You can adopt or take inspiration from exitstig mashups.

What tools or methods do you use to integrate knowledge?

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Although it did not originate with him, there is a famous quotation often attributed to Sir Isaac Newton. “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”  One of the primary functions of education is to provide students with a solid foundation of knowledge and intellectual skills so that they might someday make original contributions that have grown out of or have been inspired by facets of that foundation. Unfortunately, it seems that some students prefer not to invest the necessary effort to acquire that foundation.

In November, Stockton faculty member Ada Casares shared a link to story in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled “The Shadow Scholar.” This piece was allegedly written by an employee of an academic paper mill. The author painted a rather frightening picture – a generation of students paying a handful of ghost writers to produce the written academic artifacts representing student mastery in a content area.

The commentary by readers of this piece included strategies to promote original student writing:

• Use in-class writing assignments – students allowed only pen/cil, paper, and dictionary; the instructor observes and provides guidance.

• Archive in-class writing assignments for comparison with out-of-class writing.

• Change assignments/topics regularly and connect them to current events and/or local resources (e.g., reaction to new art exhibit, interview with an individual of local prominence).

• Review and grade student work at all stages – topic choice, source material selection, outline, drafts.

• Test students on the content of their papers. After the papers have been submitted:

– Ask students to write an abstract of their paper.

– Administer individualized quizzes, based on the submitted paper, with questions that require the student to comment on the writing process (e.g., Summarize the thought process that lead to your conclusion that ___. What lead you to choose ___ as a source for your paper? Which cited sources best support your premise and why?).

Because evaluation is done at many levels, grading writing assignments and policing for original work can be very time intensive. This leads to a reasonable question – Can technology help with this task?

There are some free tools that may be helpful.

Readability and Complexity
Unless a student has spent a significant amount of time working to improve his/her writing skills, it is unlikely that s/he exhibit dramatic changes in word choice, sentence length or readability. Microsoft Word has included content analysis tools built into the grammar checker that can quickly give you counts on sentences per paragraph, words per sentence, characters per word, passive sentences, Flesch Reading Level, and Flesh-Kincaid Grade Level. Comparing these statistics for writing samples known to be authored by and student and suspect samples can be revealing. Click here for details on using readability statistics.

Vocabulary
Measuring an individual’s active and passive vocabulary is guessing game at best. Even British linguist David Crystal tells us that this is an impossibility. However, common sense also tells us that, like readability and complexity, a student’s vocabulary is unlikely to dramatically increase without a significant investment of time and effort. Comparing word choices between documents can also be revealing. This analysis can be done with statistical software.

[For a ‘quick and dirty’ program written in SAS, please contact Linda Feeney]

Calibrated Peer Review
Calibrated Peer Review is a system that allows students to grade each other’s writing. This process uses a free online service hosted by UCLA. Students submit writing assignments. Next, each student uses a rubric to evaluate three sample essays of varying levels of quality. Based on his/her evaluations, each student is assigned an index that reflects their evaluative skills. Finally, each student is randomly assigned the work of three of his/her peers to evaluate. The three scores for each assignment are weighted, based on the evaluation indices, and the grade is assigned. For writing intensive courses, peer evaluation can lessen the instructor’s grading burden and can allow for more writing to be assigned. Click here to read some of the research that has been done on calibrated peer review.

[Stockton has a CPR account. If you are interested in exploring this tool, please contact Linda Feeney]

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We are getting close to holiday season and, although I think I have been very nice this year, I am not depending upon Santa to make my technology wishes come true. While working on my holiday shopping list for others, I also started making a list of tech “toys” for myself.

I’ve been preparing to teach a seminar in our Technology Consumer series titled “Buying an eBook Reader”. Many different devices can read ebooks – computers (desktop, laptop, netboook ), tablets, (e.g., iPad ), smart phones, and dedicated book reading devices (i.e., Kindle, Nook, Kobo).

[Technology Consumer: Buying an eBook Reader will be held November 16, 10:30 am in D-004. Click here to register.]

While investigating these devices, I came across a tablet specifically designed for higher education that has me very intrigued. The Kno tablet comes in two configurations – a single screen or double screen. The display is in color, non-glare, scratch resistant and roughly the same size as a large textbook page (no scrolling!). A stylus interface allows for note taking and highlighting on the textbook page. Textbooks can be purchased at greatly reduced prices or rented at even lower prices.

Next on my list is a software package from Reallusion called Crazy Talk Pro. Crazy Talk allows you to take static images and animate them. Imagine what the Mona Lisa would say if she could talk. The creative educational uses, especially for online courses, are endless.

Finally (no pun intended), I am tempted by another software package called Finale 2011. Finale has been around for quite some time and is the standard software for music notation, but that’s not all it does. In addition to formatting your musical compositions, transposing to new keys, adding lyrics, and printing out sheet music, this version includes an instrument sound library so that you can actually hear a simulated version of your composition. The compositions can be saved in .MP3 format to be shared or added to other projects.

What is on your holiday tech toy wish list?

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If you have ever visited Disney World or Disney Land with young children, you will have stood in line for Es ist eine kleine Welt schliesslich, or C’est un petit monde après tous, or Es un pequeño mundo después de todos, or È un piccolo mondo dopo tutti, or maybe even Het is een Kleine Wereld na allen. Just as the world seemed smaller in 1964 when Disney developed this attraction  for the World’s Fair, the world has become increasingly smaller for higher education. Not all Stockton students are native speakers of English and online students may not even reside in New Jersey much less in the United States.

While our international students know that their instruction will be done in English, even the best of those students can become flummoxed by the quirks of the English language and the creativity we use to mangle this wonderfully malleable language. How can we help them to cope and thrive? There are a surprising number of tools available – many of them are free or low cost, some of them already available on your desktop. This by no means an exhaustive list, but can serve as a starting point.

[Be sure to advise your international students that automatic translation tools are not perfect. They should always ask questions and double check with other reference resources.]

Microsoft Word and Outlook 2007+. Beginning with Office 2007, Microsoft included translation capability built into Word and Outlook. Type a sentence, highlight the sentence and right-click. Choose Translate from the menu, the Translate… to choose your language, then click on the green and white arrow. Your text will be sent over the Internet to a no cost translation engine. Additionally, ESL (English as a Second Language) students may struggle with grammar (i.e., articles, prepositions, verb tense, word order). The fastest way to check grammar is to highlight the desired text and press the F7 key.

Search engine savvy. Using Google’s Translate feature, you can enter a web address and the language for translation. (Caveat: If the web page uses text images, rather than text, translation will not apply). You can also upload a file to be translated. Using this tool, one can easily switch between the original and translated page. Hovering over the translated text will display the original plus an option for readers to suggest a different translation.

There’s a widget for that. Microsoft is beta testing a translator widget that can be embedded in web sites for on the fly translations. This widget can be embedded in many Blackboard CE pages to assist students in your individual course sections. Choose the desired language from the menu, then click on the arrow and wait a few seconds. Hovering over the text will display the original. For a quick demo, click here. Words that are not part of the translation engine will still be displayed in English. Try translating the text into Korean for obvious example of this.

[This tool and others will be covered in more detail at the Blackboard CE8: Embedding External Content seminar, on October 12, 10:30 am in E-012]

There’s an app for that. For those of you with smart phones, there are also a variety of applications that can be loaded to assist with translation. On Apple iTunes you can find a variety of free and low cost applications for Apple devices. Franklin offers the low cost application ViDICTO+  which runs on a variety of Apple devices and, soon, Blackberry devices. On Blackberry App World,  you can find over 100 free and low cost applications. At Droid Apps you can find the free Talk to Me Adroid Translator.

Handheld translation devices. Franklin Electronic Publishers makes a variety of portable electronic translation devices. One of the most fascinating is the Super Pen translator. This device is a handheld scanner. The user scans a line of text and is given an instant translation. The text to speech feature enables the user to hear the text aloud in English.

What tools or techniques do you use to help your international students to cope with language differences?

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“A mighty wind’s a-blowin’. It’s kickin’ up the sand.”  Unlike the characters in Christopher Guest’s quirky mockumentary, the winds we await are not just the stuff of fake folk songs, they are real. We are in the heart of hurricane season. On Labor Day weekend, we watched for hurricanes Earl and Fiona. Over the next few days, we will be wary of Igor and Julia – both active in the Caribbean and possibly headed for the Eastern Seaboard.

Campus technology resources are available to assist you with instructional continuity in the event of a disaster. Disasters are not limited to major events like hurricanes. Disasters can include technology failures. Individual faculty members and students can experience personal disasters at any time. Planning for disruptions of all types can make the semester run more smoothly. Guidelines for individualized contingency planning are available as well as guidelines for larger events.

September is National Preparedness month. For personal preparedness, we are advised to “Get a Kit, Make a Plan, Stay Informed, and Become Involved”. The New Jersey Office of Emergency Management offers specific advice on their website. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) also has information available.

You can become involved locally by joining Stockton’s Community Emergency Response Team (CERT). CERT is a national program that began in Los Angeles, California in 1985. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) made training available for all states in 1993. Volunteers are given basic training in disaster preparedness, fire suppression, medical operations, light search and rescue, psychology, and team organization. Some CERT training can be done online. Watch your Stockton inbox for details on upcoming training here on campus.

What is your plan? Are you ready to deal with a disaster?

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