Acatechy

I have been meaning to blog more regularly for some time now and found myself writing on this story about the study out of OSU linking Facebook to lower grades.

While I am not a researcher and I am a Facebook user (who fully admits that Facebook can be and is, a huge time-suck), I do wonder if we have really learned anything here:

“… (the study) found that Facebook users, who generally studied between one and five hours a week, had GPAs between 3.0 and 3.5, but non-users, who studied 11 to 15 hours per week, had GPAs between 3.5 and 4.0.”

So, the students that studied 11 to 15 hours per week did better than the students that studied 1 to 5 hours per week…

Yeah, I kind of feel that Facebook or no.. that we have known this for awhile.  And the researcher is forthcoming about it, “Karpinski pointed out that the study doesn’t necessarily mean Facebook use automatically leads to lower grades”

I understand that the study is trying to point out that those that use Facebook don’t study as much, but I would like to see how Facebook users / non Facebook, users that studied the same amount of time, compare to each other.   Or how about between Facebook users that have class materials and discussion on Facebook and those that don’t.

Would students just find something else to distract them if it were not Facebook or is there some special allure to Facebook? Is this something that we will find across other social networking sites as well?

Is this mirroring the research that told us that Television was a big distraction to kids?  As with Television, the Internet as a whole and social networking have also been compared and contrasted between the educational benefits and the distraction factor.  Which one wins out in the end?  This study has me asking all these questions and more but I have a feeling that the truth is that Facebook is a distraction, however, it is one of many distractions that college students deal with on a regular basis.  Can we meet students where they already are and turn the distraction into a learning tool? Should we?

Yes, we could do the same thing on a blog or a listserv or hell even through email, but there is something so tangible about this; we pose a question once a week and then have everyone write something about it, encouraging keywords, statements and more questions.  I had actually just mentioned it in passing but one of the students really grabbed hold of it and made it happen by clearing off the board, posting the question and transcribing the responses.

This was last weeks question: “How does technology affect education?”, to which we got the following responses. 

1. Media literacy!
2. It encourages mature learners to keep current.
3. It pushes education forward.
4. Online technology can create a professor-student disconnect if improperly utilized.
5. What do we mean by “technology”?
   1. Everything from computers to this white board.
6. (on-line) Some may become “anti-social” for introverted clients due to lack of classroom interaction. L
   1. Still, some introverted students will have an environment where they can thrive and learn the subject matter where they would not have otherwise. J
7. Encourages innovation.
8. No one has said it yet, but for the student, technology also allows for a way for students to get off track (video games as an example).  It is still up to the student to use the technology given to them responsibly.
9. What does technology do for students that cannot afford it?
   1. Cannot afford what?  Students need not own technology to be impacted by it!
   2. Cannot afford technology.  This is exactly the question.  Technology is impacting those that cannot afford technology, but what is this impact?  Is it positive or negative?
      • For those that cannot afford their own technology, there are communal resources.  This could actually spur community development, at least among disadvantaged students.
10. Technology removes the barriers to entry for learners and mitigates “proprietary” knowledge. (Kepha via Twitter)
11. Online education brings together many cultures quickly and easily
    1. And convenient and improved time management for all!!
12. It makes the education process faster.
13. It helps to minimize redundant tasks!
    1. Or can make for more redundant tasks.

Of these answers I found a few things pretty interesting:

• The willingness of people working in the IT department to see not only the positives but the negatives of this particular question.  (note: we did have people outside of IT write but they seemed to focus on the more positive aspects of this question)
• How many people equated technology in the setting of academia to “online” education. 
• I posted the question to Twitter and got a response that I posted to the board.  So, it even reached past our little circle.
• I found the first answer to the question “What does technology do for students that cannot afford it?” to be quite clarifying.  I actually posted this question and thought of it as a possible future question for the board as a whole.  I still think that it is a good premise but it needs to be reworded so that it does not come off as so accusatory but more inquisitive.  The follow up response about community development through a communities’ public technology resources is quite attractive and could make a good research subject.

Our next question flips the last question and is simply “How does education affect education?”

I really am so bad at keeping up with blog posts, but things have been really active and very cool things have been developing.  

We have successfully upgraded to Blackboard 7.3 with all the cool bells and whistles.  Everyone else is still talking about Bb8 but I don’t think that we could have pulled together the training for the new gradebook in time.  

One of the most exciting things is that I am working with a new student assistant.  Emily has been helping me with lots of projects for the last couple of months and we have talked about blogging together here.  So, I have added her as an author here, lets see if maybe we can inspire one another to keep up with the blog posts.  We have been tweeting on Twitter the last few weeks so maybe we can pull off more than 140 characters a time or two for a few posts here.

Emily and I recently went to the eportfolio conference sponsored by the Ohio Learning Network here in Columbus.  I have been wanting to learn more about eportfolios and this was a great introduction.  I was really surprised that there was such an emphasis on record keeping and documentation for accreditation.  I always seen these things as side benefits of academic uses for an eportfolio with the main purpose being to give the student something to take away with them into the workforce as examples of their capabilities. 

Next Friday we will also be attending the Blackboard council for all of the schools hosted by UC.

Hoping to keep up with things a little more often.

A

Yes I did not keep up with the blog like I promised myself but I want to make up for that quickly and just list a few of my current projects.

Blackboard upgrade to 7.3
This project is going well and is almost complete.  We used a custom app called the Course Migration Tool to allow instructors to decide which courses that they wanted moved to the new environment.  This helped to clean out some old data that was no longer needed.

Blackboard Data Integration
This one is the bane of my existence at the moment, none of the data is right it is all over the place. We are getting duplicates of thousands of enrollments and many of the users are not coming down in the right format.  When working correctly will automatically create our users and courses and enroll all the students.  Will also allow for username changes and automatic changes of names or emails or any other data.

iTunes U
Up and running thanks to a custom app created by one of our student web apprentices and the Baker Blackboard Building Block.  Still working on subscriptions though… it is not really much more than a glorified storage area without it.

Copyright
Working with library on copyright policies and digital rights. 

I will be attending conferences all next week as an attendee as well as a presenter.   

Being new to Ohio I am excited to be attending the Ohio Digital Commons for Education http://oln.org/conferences/ODCE2008/ODCE2008.php I have signed up as a blogger so I plan to be blogging the conference at the ODCE blog.

Then on Tuesday the 4th I am flying to Vegas to present a paper that I co-authored with two of my professors from Eastern, David Gore and Marie Lee, at the SITE conference (Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education).  The  paper is entitled “IT Proposal Assessment – Teaching Rubrics Through RFP Simulation” and it describes the process of teaching students about rubrics in making business decisions, specifically through the process of purchasing a telecommunication system.