Course Syllabus Fall 2011

Here is our course syllabus. As new materials become available, we may incorporate them into the readings and class discussions.

Beyond WebCT: Integrating Social Networking Tools Into Language and Culture Courses

Course Description: This course is designed to introduce students to web-based social networking environments and provide them with the resources and experiences to effectively integrate them into their teaching repertoire.

Course Objectives:

1. Students will become familiar with web-based social networks and their use in education.
2. Students will evaluate a variety of social networking sites through hands-on exploration.
3. Students will use a class blog to regularly reflect on course materials.
4. Students, in consultation with the instructor, will implement one social networking tool in a currently taught course.
   • Students will show evidence of integration with course content and objectives.
   • Students will develop a corresponding student assessment rubric.
   • Students will share their classroom project results through an in-class pecha kucha style presentation and blog post reflection.
5. Students will develop a portfolio of effective, appropriate, collaborative teaching/learning environments, to include a pedagogical rationale for their use as well as suggested course applications. Students will submit this work on our course wiki.

Course Format: In-class and online discussions, in-class and online exploration and collaboration.

Required Texts: Online resources provided in syllabus. Unless otherwise noted, you are to read/listen/view these materials prior to that class date.

Course Requirements:

• Graduate status.
• Students must have taught a minimum of one year in the department and successfully completed the departmental methods course.

*Since this course requires the use of a computer with speakers, microphone and webcam, we will assign those items on semester loan to students who do not have them.

Final Grade:
25% Wiki (Portfolio)
25% Classroom Implementation of Social Networking Tool
25% Blog Contributions
25% Participation

Introductory session: Why Social Networking?

For Class Discussion:
Reminder: Please prepare the following four items before our first class:

1. communities of practice by Mark K. Smith
2. Information R/evolution by Michael Wesch (under 6 minutes)
3. Web 2.0 Is the Future of Education by Steve Hargadon
4. Openness as Catalyst for an Educational Reformation by David Wiley
5. To review for Friday: How to get students to find and read 94 articles before the next class by Michael Wesch

In-Class Activities:

1. Get to know our community of practice
2. Discuss course structure, learning activities, assessments
3. Explore our course blog and wiki
4. Create blogger profiles
5. Introduction to LearnCentral and Elluminate (Elluminate Participant Orientation Resources)

2nd Session: Educational Trends

For Class Discussion:
Reminder: Everyone please prepare the following two items before our class:

1. Open for Learning: The CMS and the Open Learning Network by Jon Mott and David Wiley
2. Horizon Report, a collaboration between The New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative. The web version allows you to navigate non-linearly and leave and see comments from other readers of this report. Please pay particular attention to the two trends predicted to impact higher ed in one year or less—electronic books and mobiles—as well as the critical challenges facing learning organizations.

We’ll each choose an additional resource below to explore, reflect on and report about:

1. Thomas L. Friedman’s 2007 MIT talk “The World is Flat 3.0” (Listen up to 37 minutes)
2. Diego Leal’s BRINGing it OUT a notch K12 Online Conference 2009 Keynote (25 minutes). Non-Spanish speakers can select the English subtitles option.
3. 2007 Harvard Business IdeaCast’s interview with Don Tapscott, author of ‘Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything’. (First 15 minutes and 30 seconds of the podcast)
4. ED&I 831: Social Media & Open Education with Alec Couros
5. From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments by Michael Wesch
6. Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 by John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler
7. Scholar 2.0: Public Intellectualism Meets the Open Web by Jonathan Becker
8. This Visible College by Bryan Alexander

In-Class Activities:

1. ‘Pulse Check’ feedback and review
2. Introduction to Diigo.  We’ll look at Mott and Wiley’s article in Diigo to see another example of communities of practice
3. Work on class blog: Profiles and commenting. Some resources:
   • A nice how-to screencast by Molly McDonald on setting up a WordPress blog
   • The 25 Basic Styles of Blogging…And When to Use Each One
   • Great blog post example from Will Richardson on: “Why Johnny’s Professor Can’t Read”
   • Starting this week, you will write a bi-weekly post for the class blog. Your blog posts should reflect on class resources, discussions, projects, and/or the impact of read/write web technologies on language education. You will also respond to a minimum of seven blog posts submitted by your classmates. More specific information regarding this can be found on the course blog posts page.

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3rd session: Presentation Tools

For Class Discussion (to prepare in advance):

Reminder: Everyone please prepare the following three items before our class:

1. Educause’s 7 Things You Should Know About Next-Generation Presentation Tools
2. Video for ELI: Net Gen Students at University of Minnesota from a 2007 Educause Learning Initiative session. Please watch the 5 minute video.
3. Examples of Universal Design for Instruction in Online and Blended Courses from the UDI at the University of Connecticut

We’ll each choose an additional resource below to explore, reflect on and report about:

1. Garr Reynolds’ Presentation Tips in particular, the three sections, ‘Organization & Preparation Tips’, ‘Delivery Tips’ and ‘Slide Tips’ and Presentation21 Make-Over by Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano.
2. Alex Reid’s post on Richard Miller’s MLA Dream (both embedded videos together are under 16 minutes)
3. Seth’s Blog: Really Bad Powerpoint and Challenging the Presentation Paradigm (in 6 minutes, 40 seconds): Pecha Kucha by Jason B. Jones
4. Anatomy of a Project: “Give me Shelter”
5. The Flipped Classroom Model by Jackie Gerstein, Ed.D. (a longer post but well worth the read)
6. Reference Resource—not required reading. Educating the Net Generation: Chapter 7, Convenience, Communications, and Control: How Students Use Technology

In-Class Activities (a sampling from among these):

1. PechaKucha 20×20
2. Wordle
3. Flickr Slideshow
4. Google Docs
5. Slideshare. Be sure to explore the new Zipcast option as well.
6. Spresent
7. Zoho Show
8. Prezi
9. Visual.ly
10. Glogster
11. Vuvox
12. TodaysMeet
13. Poll Everywhere
14. SurveyMonkey
15. Jing
16. Screencast-0-Matic
17. CamStudio (Windows only)
18. Talkshoe
19. Livestream
20. Ustream
21. Voicethread
22. Together, we’ll check out Tom Barrett’s Interesting Ways Series using Google Docs. In particular, the ‘Interesting Ways’ for Web Conferencing, Wallwisher, Wordle, Prezi and Voicethread.
23. Explore course wiki

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4th session: Finding and Evaluating Information in a Hyperconnected World

For Class Discussion (to prepare in advance)
Reminder: Everyone please prepare the following three items before our class:

1. We’re on information overload by Thomas Washington.
2. “It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure” by Clay Shirky. A little under 24 minutes.
3. The Chronicle of Higher Ed: The New Metrics of Scholarly Authority by Michael Jensen for subscribers only. For an earlier and freely available version, see Authority 2.0 and 3.0: The Collision of Authority and Participation in Scholarly Communications by Michael Jensen.

We’ll each choose an additional resource below to explore, reflect on and report about:

1. Tips for Handling Information Overload: Too Much Content by Dawn Foster and What life is like for the class of 2015 by Rob Baxter. (The Beloit College 2015 Mindset List)
2. The iPad and Information’s Third Age by William Rankin
3. Social Bookmarking and Annotating by Bill Ferriter
4. Making Sense of Online Text by Julie Coiro, a UCONN alum!
5. Accessibility vs. access: How the rhetoric of “rare” is changing in the age of information abundance by Maria Popova

In-Class Activities:(in addition to our course Diigo group and course wiki, we’ll explore a sampling from among these)

1. RSS in Plain English by Lee and Sachi Lefever (3.5 minutes)
2. Explore course wiki and our course Diigo group
3. Netvibes
4. Symbaloo
5. Google Reader
6. Paper.li
7. Scoop.it
8. Zite
9. Flipboard
10. LiveBinders
11. delicious
12. Diigo
13. Evernote
14. Google Alerts
15. Zotero
16. Scopus at UCONN
17. Twitter
18. Wordle: using word clouds in a lesson by José Picardo

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5th session: Learning 2.0

For Class Discussion (to prepare in advance)
Reminder: Everyone please prepare the following four items before our class:

1. How to Save the Traditional University, From the Inside Out by Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring
2. Cathy N. Davidson on Evolving Education. An interview by Nora Young. (24:09 minutes)
3. The Machine is Us/ing Us by Professor Michael Wesch (a little over 4 minutes)
4. Chronicle of Higher Ed special video on Digital Ethnography Project (About 7 minutes)

We’ll each choose an additional resource below to explore, reflect on and report about:

1. Teaching in Social and Technological Networks by George Siemens
2. Actually Going to Class, for a Specific Course? How 20th-Century. by Jeffrey R. Young
3. Virtual and Artificial, but 58,000 Want Course by John Markoff
4. Don’t Buy That Textbook, Download It Free, by Noam Cohen, NY Times and iPads Could Hinder Teaching, Professors Say by Ben Wieder
5. Learning Reimagined: Participatory, Peer, Global, Online by Howard Rheingold

In-Class Activities: (a sampling from among these)

1. Diigo how-to
2. Beyond Borders, The Open Source Teaching Project, Spanish Connects Us, Virtual Student Foreign Service
3. FlatWorld Knowledge, California Open Source Textbook Project, CK12 FlexBooks, Connexions
4. Academic Earth, MITOpenCourseWare, Open Learning Initiative, Stanford on iTunesU, Open.Michigan, LearnCentral
5. Google Scholar, DigitalCommons@UConn, DASH, eScholarship
6. OER Commons,Creative Commons, Wikimedia Commons, Open Source Cinema, Europeana, Open Culture, TED: Ideas worth spreading
7. University of the People, Peer 2 Peer University, Think Global School, Sophia
8. 7 Things You Should Know About series
9. Brainstorm class projects

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6th session: Mapping Our Worlds

For Class Discussion (to prepare in advance):
Reminder: Everyone please prepare the following three items before our class:

1. Educause’s 7 Things You Should Know About Google Earth
2. Google for Educators – Maps
3. 7 Things You Should Know About Mapping Mashups

We’ll each choose an additional resource below to explore, reflect on and report about:

1. Digital Storytelling Part V – Google Maps by Silvia Tolisano
2. UC Berkeley asks incoming students to say more than ‘hello’ by Larry Gordon
3. In Africa, citizen cartographers tell their stories through their maps by France Lamy
4. Google Lit Trips: Bringing Travel Tales to Life by Suzie Boss
5. Hypercities

In-Class Activities:

1. Mapping Our Worlds: Creating Interdisciplinary Lessons Using Online Mapping Tools by Barbara Lindsey. We’ll start with the Google Maps section.
2. Work on course wiki
3. Work on class project

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7th session: Social Annotation

For Class Discussion (to prepare in advance):
Reminder: Everyone please prepare the following three items before our class:

1. Hyperpolitics (American Style) by Mark Pesce (25:39 minutes). Note that the full text of his talk can be found on the right hand side menu bar.
2. Educause’s 7 Things You Should Know About Social Bookmarking
3. YouTube Launches Auto-Captioning for Videos by Ben Parr

We’ll each choose an additional resource below to explore, reflect on and report about. This time I would like you to choose one tool to familiarize yourself with and then share with us on our blog what it does and how it could be used for teaching and learning:

1. Quijote interactivo
2. Scoop.it
3. Flickr
4. Diigo
5. Forvo
6. Wordreference.com
7. Lingro
8. Stixy
9. dotsub

In-Class Activities:
We’ll again work on our course wiki during our face-to-face meeting.

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8th session: Digital Storytelling

For Class Discussion (to prepare in advance):
Reminder: Everyone please prepare the following one item before our class. You should reference this article in your blog reflections and we will be discussing it in our online session:

1. Web 2.0 Storytelling: Emergence of a New Genre by Bryan Alexander and Alan Levine

We’ll each choose an additional resource below to explore, reflect on and report about.

1. Educause’s 7 Things You Should Know About Digital Storytelling and the first 10 pages of Silvia Tolisao’s book, Digital Storytelling Tools for Educators
2. Open Discussion on Web 2.0 Storytelling by Bryan Alexander and Alan Levin
3. Why Sharing Stories Brings People Together by Joshua Gowin
4. Tech Tales: Marco Torres on Empowering Students Through Multimedia by Edutopia Staff
5. Heart and Voice: A Digital Storytelling Journey by Kerry Ballast

In-Class Activities:

1. Jigsaw puzzle activities on the Disruptive Innovations in Learning wiki. Mandatory: Pecha Kucha (since I’d like you to consider using this as your class project presentation method) and Google Maps. We’ll choose the other tool together.
2. An addition resource for class project ideas: Educational uses of Flickr. Examples: hoo-koo-e-koo, Geography Girl on Flickr!Choose your own adventure. Create posters, comics and more from your photos with BigHugeLabs. For those interested in an example of an iterative Flickr assignment assessment piece, check out this post by Darren Kuroptawa
3. Discuss class projects
4. Work on course wiki

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9th session: Assessment for Learning

For Class Discussion (to prepare in advance):
Reminder: Everyone please prepare the following three items before our class:

1. Considering Universal Design by Ira Socol
2. UDI Facts (UDI Fact Sheet, Principles and Examples of UDI) from the Center on Postsecondary Education and Disability at the University of Connecticut
3. A physical place for virtual education by Ira Socol
4. Please post your questions for Ira Socol on our Google Moderator page. Instructions and deadlines are included there.
5. We will meet with Ira Socol to discuss Universal Design for Learning on October 26, 2011 at 11:30 a.m. EST in LearnCentral.

We’ll each choose an additional resource below to explore, reflect on and report about:

1. From Degrading to De-Grading by Alfie Kohn
2. The Testing Straitjacket by Trent Batson and The Pedagogy of Uncertainty: A Path to Meaningful Homework by Mairi McDermott
3. Getting It Wrong: Surprising Tips on How to Learn by Henry L. Roediger and Bridgid Finn
4. A Model for Teaching College Writing, guest blog post by Barbara Vance on David Parry‘s academhack Tech Tools for Academics blog
5. Ending the Semester, lessons learned (Part 3) by Barbara Sawhill of Language Lab Unleashed and Ending the Semester, lessons learned (Part 4: Assessment) by Barbara Sawhill of Language Lab Unleashed

In-Class Activities in Preparation for Our Online Session with Ira Socol:

1. CAST: Center for Applied Special Technology, in particular, the UDL Guidelines—Version 2.0
2. Best Practices in Teaching from the Center for Teaching and Faculty Development at San Francisco State University

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10th and 11th session: Online Rights and Safety

*Note: Due to the October 28-29 snowstorm and resulting widespread and extended loss of power, heat, cable and internet services (for many of us over 7 days) we used this week’s session to discuss the important topic of online rights and safety. We will discuss the topic of virtual, mobile connections when we return from Thanksgiving break.

For Class Discussion (to prepare in advance):
Reminder: Everyone please prepare the following four items:

1. In Defense of Open, Online Communication in Education by Jason Welker
2. “Real Names” Policies Are an Abuse of Power by danah boyd
3. The Web’s New Gold Mine: Your Secrets by Julia Angwin.
4. Repressing the Internet, Western-Style by Evgeny Morozov

We’ll each choose an additional resource below to explore, reflect on and report about:

1. Hitting Pause on Class Videos by Steve Kolowich and Educause’s 7 Things You Should Know About Creative Commons
2. Recut, Reframe,Recycle by the Center for Social Media at American University
3. Stalking in English Class by Clarence Fisher, The complete guide to building a digital footprint by David Truss and Digital Footprint PSA by Sarah Edson
4. The German privacy paradox by Jeff Jarvis. Don’t forget to read the comments.
5. On Its Own, Europe Backs Web Privacy Fights by Suzanne Daley
6. The Online Amplification Effect by Margaret Soltan
7. Admissions of Guilt by Terry Calhoun
8. Google Profiles, Online Reputation Management, and Digital Footprints by Wesley Fryer
9. Unmasking the Digital Truth, a wiki by Wesley Fryer
10. Firesheep should get your ATTENTION: Open Public Wifi Dangers are REAL by Wesley Fryer

In-Class Activities:

1. We won’t be meeting week ten. Please continue work on your wiki entries, and your classroom project presentation.

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12th session : Global Education Conference

1. Due to the Global Education Conference we will not meet in person this week but rather, each of us will attend a minimum of two sessions of our choosing from the online conference, blog our reflections on our experiences  and respond to each other’s posts. Please include the session title, presenter names and link back to the session and any additional online content you reference. We will meet with Ira Socol during our online session to discuss universal design for learning issues.
2. Over the Thanksgiving break please continue work on your wiki entries, and your classroom project presentation.

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13th session : Virtual, Mobile Connections

For Class Discussion For Class Discussion:
Reminder: Please prepare the following two items before our class:

1. 2011 Horizon Report: One Year or Less: Mobiles
2. Thoughts on the state of mobile learning on the Abilene Christian University YouTube Channel.

We’ll each choose an additional resource below to explore, reflect on and report about:

1. Mobile Learning Environments by David J. Gagnon
2. Cell Phones in the (Language) Classroom: Recasting the Debate by Peyton Jobe
3. iSchool Initiative’s Mission. Be sure to familiarize yourself with the four key areas: Join the Revolution, YouTube Videos, Educational Apps and Donate to Educate
4. Mobile Perspectives: On teaching Mobile Literacy by David Parry.
5. iPads Could Hinder Teaching, Professors Say by Ben Wieder
6. Social Media in Africa, Part 2: Mobile Innovations and Social Media in Africa, Part 3: Democracy. Want to know more about the impact of mobiles in the developing world? Check out this 38 minute presentation by Nathan Eagle of MIT (not required), “Crowd-Sourcing on Mobile Phones in the Developing World“

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14th and final “official” session: Personal Learning Networks

For Class Discussion (to prepare in advance):
Reminder: Please prepare the following four items before our class:

1. Educause’s 7 Things You Should Know About Personal Learning Environments
2. Educause’s 7 Things You Should Know About Facebook
3. Educause’s 7 Things You Should Know About Facebook II
4. Educause’s 7 Things You Should Know About Twitter

We’ll each choose an additional resource below to explore, reflect on and report about:

1. Myths and Opportunities: Technology in the Classroom an Alan November video (13 minutes) and How I use Twitter, search, Diigo Delicious, DEVONthink, Scrivener to find, refine, organize information –>knowledge by Howard Rheingold a 5 minute video.
2. Sharing: The Moral Imperative by Dean Shareski (26 minute video)
3. My Personal Learning Network in Action by Karl Fisch
4. Questioning the Future of the Open Student by Vicki Davis
5. I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You by Clive Thompson, NYTimes
6. spectacle at Web2.0 Expo… from my perspective by danah boyd

In-Class Activities:

1. Present (no more than 8 minutes each) and discuss classroom projects
2. Your Course wiki contributions are due by 5 p.m. December 9th.

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Extra session (Due to the aftermath of Storm Alfred we won’t be able to discuss these with each other but feel free to explore these on your own and/or with each other!): Gaming and Virtual Worlds

For Class Discussion (to prepare in advance):

1. Free as in Freedom: The Power of Pull – John Seely Brown by Sumeet Moghe
2. Educating the Net Generation, Chapter 15, Planning for Neomillennial Learning Styles: Implications for Investments in Technology and Faculty (You can choose either the pdf or html version (with diigo highlights) of Chapter 15)
3. Video Games and the Future of Learning by Kurt Squire
4. “Living Epic”: What the title means and what it implies by Roger Travis. Be sure to read parts 1-3 (the links appear at the end of posts 1 and 2)
5. Educause’s 7 Things You Should Know About Virtual Worlds

In-Class Activities:

1. Share class projects

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