Reflections on AEIN Staff Meeting 8/31/06

AEIN is encouraging our network schools to participate in "mini-networks" around a theme. A mini-network facilitator from AEIN will help keep the min-networks focused and engaged. We are just beginning the process of developing the team of mini-network facilitators.

Todayat our staff meeting I facilitated a 45 minute session on online faciliation. As I designed the session, I was aware that I did not know everyone's prior knowledge and experience with facilitation in general and online faciliation in particular. I had to access that prior knowledge in the meeting and then tailor the activities on the fly to meet the needs of the group. I also knew that there would a couple new people to our team there... a couple of faculty members who are going to be facilitating mini-networks for us.

Understanding by Design guided my thinking as I designed the session. My plan is set up in the UbD framework. I wanted to get people thinking about what facilitation is and what it is not. I also changed the plan after I developed it, adding the brainstorm at the beginning.

I started the session with introductions and then got right in to a brainstorm about facilitation. We started with the prompt, "To facilitate is to..." I wanted verbs that would describe aspects of facilitation. The brainstorm set the tone that all answers are ok and thus encouraged everyone to participate early on. It achieved the goal of establishing a sense of community and inclusion in the group.

The KWLS chart that we each worked on for a few minutes was a great way for me all of us to discover the prior knowledge of our colleagues. We filled out the columns, "what do I know" and "what do I want to know" in regards to facilitation. I kepts copies of the charts that everyone did so we can use this information as we think of the next steps for this group.

A weakness of the session was that we didn't establish the difference between faciliation and online facilitaion and the difference between facilitator and teacher. I also forgot to make my goals and the agenda explicit at the beginning of the session. It was, however, a positive start to our work together as online facilitators.

In the session I tried to model good facilitation: making sure everyone was included, soliciting input rather that telling them my opinion, summarizing discussions, balancing keeping the focus of the session with letting us go on "birdwalks", and encouraging evaluation at the end of the session. I was conscious that I had opinions on several topics that I did not state. I want the group to discover and own a sense of facilitation. We also need to figure out how we each put wat we learn into practice as we faciliate. How do we grow our skills as facilitators?

COE Retreat

Today's all day retreat for the College of Education started out with introductions- but with a twist. In groups, we spent a minute introducing each other, and then we introduced the person on the left in our groups. Lots of interesting connections: how many people were on Guam, parallels in lives, dog people vs. cat people and the pride of family.

The new provost, Mike Driscoll, spoke with us. He advocated that we strategically choosing what we do. We can and must make careful choices of what we do to improve our University and College. He responded to questions from the college.

In response to a question, he replied that he is interested in the challenge distance education. The provost stated that faculty need to be doing the work that they were hired to do. This can be a black hole for money, though. I wonder what this means university-wide and what kinds of distance education support the university will provide. The second principle that he stressed is that distance education is a critical need for the state of Alaska. We must reach students that need to be reached through technology. I'd like to see more vision and clear statement of the support provided for distance education by the university.

When it came time for me to present with Brian, I started out by asking about what people remembered from last year about our IT. Turns out that no one really remembered the status of IT in the college a year ago. I guess that's good... the file server migration, web server migration, server room cleanout, and lab upgrade are all done and not in people's consciousness.

Our dog and pony on Distance Education went ok. There is some confusion about what Jack, Briand and I will do and what other resources are available on campus

Mac Musings

Ok, let's put it on the table. I am a Mac person. While getting some hardware hooked up to one of the Macs in my office and doing a software update, I decided to preview what's new in Leopard. I can hardly wait. Here are some of the features that I am looking forward to:

-sharing desktops, movies, slideshows, etc in IChat. The cool backgrounds one can have while videochatting will be fun, too. We use Elluminate here at UAA for remote conferencing and teaching. One-on-one application sharing with Ichat will be a nice complement, although there may be bandwidth issues.

-fun stuff with Mail: stationery, direct link to IPhoto to drop pictures into mail messages. Maybe the to do list and notes will be useful.

-spaces: not unlike the virtual desktops that I used in Xwindow in my prior life. Several (looks like 4) desktops that you can run different applications in.

-time machine - a file recovery system

Of less immediate interest to me personally are the accessibily add-ons and the ical add-ons.

I'm looking forward to Leopard, all the same.

I co-exist here at the College of Education with many who are not fully using the functionality of MacOS X, however. I regularly show people how to use tabbed browsing in Safari and Firefox and expose people to Expose, for instance. I look forward to showing off spaces and some of the new Ichat features.

Distance Ed Musings

On the drive into work this morning I had the pleasure of the conversing with 2 wise and talented women, Pat and Kathi. We talked about distance education issues: Kathi is presenting on distance education at an orientation for new faculty. Her 3 main points for the talk are: (1) clarity matters; (2) creating a caring environment is important; and (3) honesty and integrity are essential. She went on to muse that this is not so different from face to face classes. How one creates each of these attributes in the two venues may differ.

This dovetailed nicely in to my conversation with an instructor who teaches about Alaska Native issues and education. He is a master story teller- and that is a vital aspect of his teaching style. In addition, in his face-to-face classes, he does a masterful job of creating an environment in which the students' views of teaching and learning with those of other cultures can be transformed.

He is searching for ways to create that trusting environment in his distance classes. I wonder, too, about bringing his story telling alive in the distance class. We'll be conversing on these points in the coming weeks as he develops his course.

My final interaction of the day was great - it was with a faculty member who taught a distance class this summer. He had taken to heart the ideas of presenting his students with a clean, pared-down, well-organized Blackboard shell. He also made a point of responding to all discussion board posts and emails. The announcements page was his spot to keep students informed of what was going on in the class - and he also emailed the content of the announcement to his students. The informal feedback that he got was positive. We talked about things he wanted to work on: using the survey tool to get better feedback from students, using the assignment manager, maybe adding an Elluminate component to his next class. We also talked about adding learning objects to his shell. I gave him the link to the Algonquin College Blackboard tips page.

Exploring RSS and Blackboard

After several months away, I want to start blogging again. This is my attempt. I thought that I'd start with my explorations in online teaching and learning. We'll see how it goes.

I went to the Algonquin College Blackboard Tips Sheet to learn how to create surveys in Blackboard.


Ok, so I stumbled across a way to put RSS feeds into a Blackboard shell.

It's a great way to provide up-to-date content. The javascript to create a feed that was on the maricopa.edu website didn't work for me, but I did watch a great little talk by Alan Levine, Brian Lamb and D'Arcy Norman at http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/show/nmc1003/ on using RSS feeds in a course.

Memo to myself: work on those RSS feeds again. Then I can use them to provide links to content repositories, which I am starting to collect.

Here are a few of the more known Learning Object Repositories:

MERLOT - Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching
CAREO - Campus Alberta Repository of Educational Objects
Maricopa Learning Exchange


Oh, and by the way, uploading surveys and managing them in Blackboard is easy. Read thie PDF on the Algonquin tips page linked above.