Monthly Archives: March 2014

Do-It-Yourself Education

Education is about sharing knowledge, social networking for teaching and learning and for accreditation and assessment. Technology today can indeed make it easier to make education more accessible and affordable for all people. A student today has the ability to sit in on a class via the Internet from MIT and in the very next hour shift to another class from Stanford, and so on. This opens up the world of possibilities for certain learners who would never have had such opportunities. However, I could not help but ask myself who is this really benefitting? Is the average person, who struggling for a job and has no time or money for a traditional education going to be truly motivated to go on a quest to seek out knowledge from these institutions, however prestigious they may be, without the prospect of any reward or monetary incentives down the road. Are the types of learners that this system (of free learning, free access) claims to potentially help through the attainment of knowledge even prepared to benefit from such a system? How can students who can barely able to finish high school be expected to thrive as self-learner in an online environment?

Organizations like the KhanAcademy are indeed attempting to bridge the gap between the rich and underprivileged students by offering now free instructional videos, practice for various topics and interactive test prep, services which underprivileged students were traditionally lock out of. In 2015 in partnership with the College Board they are planning free test prep software to help all students get ready for the SAT test.

Another angle to consider are the online learning institutions that accept all students for a price. They wave around the prospect of the degree no matter what your background is in a short amount of time at a very high cost. They calculatingly even provide their version of financial aid, which equates usually to loans for their high price tuition.  and in the environment of these online schools, it is pay to play where you pay first and play at your own will. The problem with this is that many of the accepted applicants are by no means prepared for the rigors of the coursework they are faced with and inevitably discontinue their enrollment and are simply left with staggering debt. Is this what we mean by accessible education for all?

Teach Now (my personal “favorite”) offers 9 months long course to get Master’s degree and teacher certification all for only $23,800. According to their website their program prepares teachers “to think digital who can create ways to educate with smartphones instead of taking them away””

University of Phoenix – offers hundreds different degrees with an average 4 year degree cost of $66,340…

Wikipedia Wars

Hi all,

I was going to email Maura and Michael directly but then decided that my question might be useful to others.

I looked over the talk page of the person who reverted my wikipedia edit and am wondering how to proceed.  It appears he is in the habit of reverting others’ edits and doing so without much, or any, explanation.  My first instinct is to explain to him, with references, the reasons for my edits on his talk page.  But that kind of feels like he owns the page and I’m asking for his permission.  Thoughts?

Silvana

Hamad’s 3 Project Abstracts

  1. Sociology Inter-textbook: In an effort to diminish the power of heavy and pricy textbooks in an intro class, I propose an online ‘inter-textbook’. Students will use the Internet’s many ‘texts’ (written, pictures, videos, audio, games) to create their own chapters on a very large online cork board-type space (pinterest?). As the professor, I would provide lots of structure, like taking the main concepts found in one textbook chapter and setting them up on the board in a logical manner, and guiding the students to figure out what is a good source and what is an unreliable source of information. The students will then post (under their assigned concept) any relevant texts that provide the definition of the concept, examples of the concept, people associated with the concept, etc, with a brief explanation of what the post is and how it relates to the concept. Students will also be required to comment upon and question the postings of other students and thereby engage in a dialogue about their interpretation of the concepts. To make this as close to a traditional textbook as possible, the questions on any quizzes or tests will relate directly back to the boards they create. In short, I envision this as a space for students to create their own chapters, still working with the concepts that any traditional textbook would contain, but making it their own by posting texts that make sense of the ideas to them and engaging with other students about the validity of their sources and the level of understanding they have about the concepts. Class time would be used to go over the board the students have created during the week and fill in any gaps or correct any inaccurate information.
  2. Culture-jamming/Meme-building: Applying sociological concepts to everyday activities and messages is one of the hardest skills to instill in intro level students. I’ve been thinking about how students can use the everyday material that is presented to them online and remix it to create sociologically relevant messages. ‘Culture-jamming’ is a a technique used by activists who engage with mainstream messages (especially advertisements), point out the fallacies inherent in those messages, and sometimes change the script of those messages to relay the truth about a specific product or service – a popular example is when Adbusters took existing tobacco and alcohol ads and remixed them to convey messages about the deleterious health consequences of using those products. ‘Memes’ are continuously reproduced cultural messages, usually visual in nature with some changeable text, that are usually found on social media sites. Memes are also a highly effective way of learning and reproducing the transient cultural norms of the time. Students in an intro level sociology class will learn how to build memes, and produce sociologically relevant memes to spread on social media sites. Each week, students (working in teams) will look for memes relevant to the topic of the week and tweak (jam) it to convey a sociological message instead. In class, teams will present their memes, and the class will vote for the ‘Best Meme’ prize. The winning team’s meme will then be spread around by all students on their social media networks. At the next class, students will reflect on any feedback or responses they receive about the meme from their social networks, and how they responded to those reactions.
  3. What Would Marx Tweet?: In an effort to include students in the ongoing online cultural conversations on topics like race, gender, inequality, education, etc., I want to scaffold intro students into such conversations as informed and engaged participants with a defined perspective. The aim of this project is to have students use Twitter to tweet a series of messages they think their assigned social thinker would say about the world today. Since this will be for an intro class, students will use the topic they are reading about that week and create a series of tweets (4-5 per week) that uses the concepts learned that week to their everyday life. To give the students a sense of perspective, the instructor will assign prominent social theorists to students, and the students will combine their knowledge of the work of the assigned social theorist/perspective and the concepts of the week to come up with appropriate tweets. Later on in the semester, students will also be required to engage with other students’ tweets and start a conversation or debate on the topic (which will inevitable be based on the perspective they are assigned). Toward the end of the semester, students will also be required to engage in ongoing Twitter conversations that is also connected to the topic they would study during that week (the instructor will identify and assign these conversations to groups of students). Students will be required to use class-specific hashtags (#marx, #introsoc, #race) to track conversations between themselves as well as make it easier for the instructor to track the work students are doing.

Adam’s 3 project ideas

1)

As a subject, philosophy has always been contextual.  The seminal works of philosophy are perpetually situated in a time and a place, with a particular historical foundation, and those elements are essential for understanding the theories and postulations of a particular work.  However, without a proper training in philosophy, it can be hard to keep a clear conception of context and history when reading and studying.  Therefore, this project aims to create an interactive world map that can move through the different centuries and essential periods of philosophy, while allowing the user to scroll over different highlighted regions to view a list of seminal authors of said region at said time, while also linking to certain important texts and theories of each author.  Incorporated into each author’s pop up will be a brief synopsis of the philosopher’s contributions and theories, as well as, a short list of historical connections to previous authors.

2)

Writing research papers often take a lot of organization of information and ideas.  There are several applications with organizational tools to facilitate the process.  I’d like to develop an app to incorporate all of these into one application.  Basically, I want to organize the organizational tools.  This application would organize bibliography, note taking, highlights, offer tools for outlining, diagramming, etc., to allow a writer to build a complete paper from start to finish in one program.

3)

Teachers can help each other in so many ways.  With the connectivity of technology increasing, I propose a social media style site for teachers to share tips, teaching suggestions, and anecdotes.  It could easily be organized into categories and tags by department, subjects, grade, and/or region.  Teachers would sign up using school assigned email addresses and could connect with thousands of other teachers to collaborate and ultimately raise the bar in pedagogy.  Threads and forums could be archived as a resource and added to at later dates.

Ian’s one-paragraph project ideas

1. So, my number one idea is still creating The Linguist’s Kitchen—a suite of tools for analyzing language in the home and community—because (1) I’m really getting attached to the name and (2) it would be a tremendous resource for teaching, learning, and the discipline. In the end, I’d like the suite to have tool sets for syntactic, phonetic/phonological, and morphological analysis, but for now I think it’s only realistic to consider building a subset of these. Considering the project feasibility and its usefulness, it might be best to start just with a web-based application with the ability to upload recorded speech, a place to transcribe it, some capability to categorize sentences by type, label words by syntactic category, and compare word order across sentences, as well as storage and sharing capabilities. My main concern is figuring out how/where to get free storage space for speech and analysis files and how to make the interface ‘drag and drop’.

2. Number two is a reworking of my original idea to create a database for research participants. I know CUNY Academic Commons is all about collaboration and community, but I haven’t been able to find any kind of ‘help wanted’ board. I’m wondering if it’s possible to create some kind of Commons ‘collaborators needed’ board or an add-on that functions to connect Commons members looking for individuals with expertise in some area or qualified research participants with those willing/able to offer assistance. This could be for all kinds of work, and could help community members connect with individuals that have particular skills or knowledge. I definitely see a need for something like this. The lab I work in is always looking for CUNY people with certain language backgrounds for experiments and paid RA positions, but it’s always so difficult to find people because word of mouth only goes so far.

3. Number three is a shift in my thinking about modifying CommentPress to better suit the needs of my small writing group. We’re on the verge of using CommentPress now, so I don’t yet have any additional insight into how the functionality of CommentPress might be enhanced for a small writing group dynamic. The shift is this: Our writing group has been helpful and I know that another two or three have popped up in the department, so what about creating a Writing Group Theme for Word Press? It would be a simple theme with just the necessary writing group functionality: a calendar, a log book for recording writing goals, and CommentPress. (Currently, we each use our own recording systems and Google docs). I don’t know if this project would be adequate in terms of scope, but I believe creating a ready-to-use package for writing groups would useful to individuals interested in starting one and may even encourage them to engage in writing as a social process.

Silvana’s Project Ideas

1.  Mobile App Game

I would like to create a mobile app game that would allow students to play against their classmates.  There is an existing app — QuizUp — that allows you to play against others by either using your email address or signing in through Facebook.   You are both shown the question and whoever answers it first correctly wins that round.  There are 5 rounds.  If you win the tournament, you go up a level.  I think I could perhaps have certain incentives for reaching certain levels. Maybe extra points on tests or something like that. 

Somethng to consider is whether students have smart phones or not.  I asked my Intro to Psy class whether they had smart phones and 2 out of 39 did not.  I would not want any student to not have access to the app, so I may have to consider making the game accessible in other ways besides a smart phone.

2.  Social Networking Site for Class

This idea is designed to move the realm of learning into students’ everyday life.  Social networking is something we usually do with our “friends.”  I’m thinking of Facebook, not Linkedin.  Having a site for the class, I hope, would help students integrate their student identities with their personal ones.  It would also help students see their professors as real people, as opposed to super nerds who do nothing but read and think about esoteric theories. Hopefully, humanizing professors would lead to students feeling less like learning is for other people.  I’m specifically thinking of underrepresented students at community colleges. 

3.  Interactive Course Site

This new idea has come out of hearing others’ ideas and thinking about the lack of technology in my classroom at the moment.  This would be a website for the course that presents the information that has also been presented in class.  The difference would be that for each topic, there would be links to relevant youtube videos.  In addition, students would be able to leave feedback about ways they remember certain terms.  The idea for students leaving “learning tips” for topics comes from students doing this in class.  For example, one student suggested that the O in occipital lobe looks like an eyeball (the occipital lobe processes visual information), while another student said occipital reminds her of optical.

Joshua’s project ideas

1. Improving the BMCC ESL Lab website: Revising, revamping, renovating, re-tooling, reorganizing, restoring, rebuilding, repairing, remaking, and/or otherwise improving the wiki page that I have created for the ESL Lab, which I oversee at BMCC, is still my plan. After speaking with Maura and Michael, it became apparent that a “less is more” approach will work with this project, particularly to begin with. Step # 1: moving the content that I want to keep on the site over to WordPress. There are several reasons for this, including

  • Expandable, Flexible: On WordPress, there is a huge community coming up with useful plugins and resources all the time. Our site functions more like a web page than a wiki, in that it’s not particularly collaborative (other than some of the faculty who contribute/write/edit); as I noted before, the site is meant to be a repository of information, links, materials and interactive exercises/activities for English language learners at BMCC rather than a student-created/collaborative wiki. WordPress seems to be the best platform to create new content for the site, and also introduce more interactive elements and/or games.
  • Content Ownership On many free web-hosted platforms (Wikispaces, Blogger, Tumblr, etc.), the terms of service are pretty clear. Without warning, these companies can remove your content, remove your site, and they actually can use your stuff however they want because they own it. With WordPress on my own server, I own everything I put on there.
  • Integration with other applications. WordPress seems to be the first choice of third party software and websites when it comes to creating easy to integrate website applications. If I want to program/create new content for the site, it will doubtless be easier to do on WordPress than on Wikifoundry, the site’s current host.

2. Making Interactive Content for a writing skills/grammar site, again comparable to– and hopefully an improvement upon– John Jay College’s E-Resource Center . The John Jay site is useful in many ways, but consists of mainly Flash animation slideshows, which make for a slow experience as the site unfolds at its own pace. I am interested in creating something perhaps both CUNY-specific and/or more general, providing interactive composition/grammar/reading comprehension activities helpful (hopefully) to any college student. As I posted earlier, I know that the John Jay site was grant funded, by the U.S. Department of Education (Title V) and the New York State Education Department (Perkins III). If I apply for grant money, faculty will be interested in collaborating. This project could be built from scratch, or incorporated into the WordPress site.

3. Writing/Grammar App: I would like to create an app, to assist students to improve their English writing/grammar skills, perhaps for ELLs (English Language Learners), perhaps for native writers/speakers of English. This could be a game-based app or not. There is an interesting app called Rhetoric and Composition Study, which could serve as a model… but I would want my app to cater to ELLs.

Kelly’s 1-paragraph project ideas

pardon the tardiness… orals has hijacked my brain.

Kelly’s 1 – paragraph Project ideas

 

  1.     Erotic niche Create an erotic database from feeds. It will be a user-generated database where people go to in order to find “good erotic literary material”. The way it would work since it will be UGC is that whenever someone wants to ‘add’ a certain text and comment it, they get a certification, or star system (a bit like vine), or an approval after several ‘let’s see’ posts just to clarify that they are good critic-readers-reviewers (and don’t think ‘Fifty Shades’ is it!). The website would be subsidized by websites which sell the said books. It would not be restricted by languages.
  2.   Wiki-Spanish Tap into the wiki community in Mexico and promote real time projects with higher education institutions in order to put Spanish Wiki up to speed with the English one. Promote workshops in order to teach teachers how to edit so they can teach students how to do it as well.
  3.    Literature for all  My goal in teaching world-literature-requirement classes for non English majors is to make them fall in love with literature. I use not very traditional tech based methods which seem to work. I would create an app for teachers who want to tap into non traditional pedagogical methodology. It would be an exchange system so that teachers who upload assignments don’t feel they are being ripped off. So you give one, you take one. The assignments would be starred and it would create an ‘honor system’ in which you give credit to whom credit is due.

 

Christina’s Three Project Ideas

Supporting the Transition to College: Implementation of a Summer Workshop Series for Students with Autism
Students with autism often experience significant stress when transitioning from a supportive high school setting to the more independent college setting. While stress and anxiety have been identified as factors associated with the high student drop-out rate, no colleges have created evidence-based intervention programming to support students with autism during this transition. The proposed research will design, implement, and evaluate a summer training focused on classroom readiness, social skills, self-advocacy skills, and computer-mediated communication skills that is designed to support students with autism as they transition into college. Twenty students will be recruited to participate in this four-week workshop. A five-phase, quasi-experimental pre/post-test design employing focus groups, behavioral assessments, and standardized measures will be used to examine the program’s impact on classroom behaviors, computer-mediated communication skills, self-advocacy skills, anxiety, social support, loneliness, self-esteem, depression, and student adaptation to college life. This study will instruct future programming targeting students with autism as they meet the challenges of an increasingly complex online and offline college social environment.

Creation of a “Teaching Hub” for Graduate Student Instructors in Psychology
Doctoral students enrolled in the CUNY campuses often teach one or more undergraduate classes in the CUNY system. However, preparing to teach a new class for the first time can be a daunting task and there are few teaching of psychology websites with open-access availability for students. The Graduate Center was given the opportunity to host the Graduate Student Teaching Association (GSTA) for the next few years. This responsibility comes with an out-dated GSTA website, half-created social media accounts (Twitter, Facebook), and few in-person resources such as teaching activity guides and sample textbooks. The proposed project will take full advantage of the GSTA’s potential by transforming the nature of the online website or by creating a new website that houses teaching resources such as activities, textbook reviews, and syllabi. This website will be accessible through the CUNY system initially, but may later expand to open access of these resources.

There’s an App for That! Bringing the Experimental Psychology Lab to your Mobile Device
Similar to other introductory classes, undergraduate students enrolled in introductory psychology classes often struggle to fully understand many of the historical experiments used consistently in psychological research. In these introductory classes, students are expected to learn a multitude of researchers and theorists, in addition to memorizing the experiments the researchers conducted from within a framework of their research questions and chosen methodology. Class time is limited and students may be required to look up an experiment mentioned in class after formal class hours, or students may want to learn more about recent expansions/modifications made to the original experiment. The proposed project will design and pilot-test a mobile app that searches through YouTube videos for illustrations of appropriate psychology experiments. This app will be based on the number of “hits” received on the YouTube page illustrating a given experiment, since higher quality videos tends to receive more hits.