VoiceThread Tip: Use Identities to Improve Communication With Students

Using Identities

When I take a step back and think about "how" I am using VoiceThread in my online teaching, I equate each VoiceThread to the time I spend with students in a classroom. In my VoiceThreads, students demonstrate their skills and understanding of concepts and I provide my feedback to some (not all) of them. Like a classroom, when I make a comment in response to a contribution, the other students have the opportunity to listen and learn or tune out. Like a classroom, some students demonstrate their proficiency of a concept while others are just beginning to wrap their arms around it.

While I've been using VoiceThread for four years, I continue to try new things and find creative solutions to some of things I'd like to improve. One of those things is the ability for students to clearly recognize that I've left a comment for them. For those of you who use VoiceThread, you know that a user's avatar appears only once on a slide, regardless of how many comments s/he has left.

Here's a solution I'm trying out this week for the first time. It dawned upon me that I leave three types of comments in my VoiceThreads:

1. Introductory comments: the ones that do not change term over term and provide students with a voice narration of the activity objectives, helpful tips, and objectives.

Screenshot showing Sample and Feedback Identities and student comments.

2. Sample comments: When an activity is more conceptual in nature, I will leave a "sample comment" on at least one slide giving the students a hook to get started and provided clarity about how I want the comments to be structured. This can really make or break an activity and usually helps to "break the ice" too.

3. Feedback comments: My VoiceThread activities are "open" for a period of seven days (Tues-Mon). I enter the VoiceThread early in the week to ensure there are no problems that I need to fix and then mid-week (Friday) I will enter the VoiceThread and leave feedback comments for the students who have participated. These comments are important, as they redirect students who are still forming an understanding of a concept/idea ("Great job. You're on you're way and here's how you can improve...) and they identify the contributions that demonstrate proficiency ("That was an excellent contribution because you...").

A single VoiceThread account has the capability to have multiple "Identities" built in.  For example, when I log into VoiceThread, I step into the "Michelle Pacansky-Brock" identity which has an avatar of my photograph.  Before I leave a comment, I can toggle over to any other identity built into my account.  Up until now, I've always used a single identity for all the comments I leave for my students. This week it occurred to me that I can use the VoiceThread "Identities" feature to "label" my introductory, sample, and feedback comments.

In other words, I now have three separate identities within my account:

1. Michelle Pacansky-Brock  (avatar is my photo) which I use for my "Introductory" comments
2. Sample (avatar is a yellow square with the word "sample!!" on it)  
3. Feedback (avatar is a blue square with <----- arrows)

Before I leave my comment, I quickly toggle over to the appropriate identity and then go to work. Above you see a a screenshot of one slide showing both the "Sample" and "Feedback" avatar.

Facilitating a Conversation Using the Move Tool

And here is a video that takes this idea one step further.  In the following video, I demonstrate how to toggle to a new identity to leave "Feedback" for a student and how to use the "Move" feature in VoiceThread (Shift + Click + Drag the gray segment in the horizontal bar at the bottom that corresponds to the comment you wish to move).  Moving the comment empowers you, the facilitator of the conversation, to insert your feedback comments directly into sequence so they play after the student(s) for whom you have left the feedback.

One final tip, I like leaving a single feedback comment in which I leave feedback for a group of students.  Personally, I don't leave comments for every student every week.  I leave comments for students who have missed major elements of the assignment's criteria (as this is a peer-to-peer learning environment so my role is to redirect the group when necessary) and I applaud excellent insights and contributions.

Painting, Power and Pedagogy: Reframing the Classroom

On May 19th, I had the pleasure of presenting at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, as the keynote for the EduSoCal10 conference.  The event was a creative venture to substitute the Educause regional conference that did not take place on the west coast this year.  I'd like to thank Crista Copp, Director of Academic Technology at LMU, and Michael Berman, CIO of CSU Channel Islands, for this speaking opportunity.  LMU has shared this presentation, in addition to many other of the day's sessions, as videos on their iTunes U site.  I have embedded my presentation below, with permission from LMU. 





My presentation explores the art historical role of innovation and risk-taking in western society, highlighting the potential of creativity in teaching to unhinge higher education from its lecture-based traditions. The presentation showcases a specific case study in teaching innovation from my community college History of Women in Art class that examines the learning effects of an instructional model that embraces active learning in the classroom, rather than passive delivery of lecture. Student feedback and survey results are included. This case study was also shared last September, 2009, as an Educause Learning Initiative webinar titled, "Teaching Without Walls."

I'd like to take this opportunity to respond more deeply and thoughtfully to one question I received from the audience.  My presentation criticizes the effectiveness of lectures as a learning activity.  I was asked (not verbatim), "Given your perspective of lectures, why, then, did you select to deliver your content via lecture?" I had considered the contradiction embedded in my lecture style as I was preparing my content but, truly, hadn't worked through it entirely.  In my response to the question, I acknowledged that contradiction but didn't have a clear answer as to why I delivered my presentation via lecture.  Now I can lucidly explain this, as I've spent some time thinking about it.

Lectures do have value in learning and I believe my case study demonstrates this fact. However, if I'm given 16-weeks with a group and my goal is to facilitate they their learning of a variety of concepts and ideas, lecture alone is not an ideal activity, especially to fill my precious face-to-face time with my learners.  Lecture has an important role in learning but it's not only piece of how we should be facilitating deep learning.  As facilitators of learning, we need to engage our audience actively in critique, debate, and discussion to promote higher levels of learning, as well as meet the "offline" expectations of our digital generation of students who are deeply informed by YouTube and TiVo who are most likely to say, "If it's passive content like a lecture is, share it with me digitally so I can watch it when and where it's convenient for me,  I can rewind and forward the content, and learn at my own pace."

When teaching a class on a campus,  I believe this moment in higher education is our moment, as "teachers"-- not deliverers of information -- to implement technology into our instruction (via web-based tools outside the classroom) to enable us to have more time to work directly with our students in a live setting -- without technology -- resulting in more dynamic, relevant, and enriching learning for our students.  "The World is Open," as Curtis Bonk has demonstrated, and our Googled, YouTubed, mobile society has capsized the relevance of a learning model that is based on showing up at a specific time and place, twice a week, for sixteen weeks to hear a professor deliver information that is available in the pocket of most students.  It is time for our classroom model to be transformed by technology, just as the rest of the world has been.

Enjoy the video (56 minutes). I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Students & Scholars Save Public Art with Wikipedia

In my "Building Online Community" class, I introduced my class participants to different web 2.0 tools that effectively promote collaboration and interaction, two essential facets of community building.  One of these tools is a wiki.  What is a wiki?  It's a fairly simple concept.  A wiki is a website that is editable by a group of people.  The settings on the wiki define who this group is: the group could include a pre-defined number of users or it could be open to the entire world.

How to effectively use wikis for learning activities is a much more complicated question.  I share examples from my own classes of how I've used wikis and provide links to a couple of recently published books about leveraging wikis for learning.  But by the end of this topic, there are always many professors left scratching their head.  Wikis, due to their open-ended nature, can be extremely challenging to integrate effectively.

Recently, I read about a creative wiki learning project that has been initiated by Ms. Mikulay, an assistant professor and public scholar of visual culture at Indiana-Purdue, and Richard S. McCoy, an associate conservator at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.  The project was recently showcased in an article in the "Technology" section of the Chronicle of Higher Ed.  Essentially, the two have joined forces and are striving to leverage the public, editable interface of Wikipedia to showcase the many examples of public art in their local area that are otherwise forgotten.  As an art historian, I love the activism woven into this concept, as the history of public art in itself has a similar flavor to it.

I consider this an activist project because of the overall focus on sharing the project, "Wikipedia Saves Public Art,"and encouraging others around the world to do the same thing.  Students and the two scholars locate examples of public art in their local Indianapolis area, identify its GPS coordinates, and write an art historical article about the work, tying it to its local context.  They are also searching Wikipedia for existing examples of public art that fall into the project's criteria and adding a "Wikipedia Saves Public Art" banner to the entries.

Another interesting sub-text to this project are the back door debates about the "worthiness" of particular entries that occur when another editor of a Wikipedia entry decides the public art piece doesn't deserve recognition.  The article explains, "One page about '"Bucket of Rocks,"' on Indiana-Purdue's campus, was temporarily removed until Mr. McCoy made a strong case for it in an online exchange with a Wikipedia page editor."  Now think about the skills required to make that argument.  This project is teaching the art of collaboration, negotiation, knowledge of the definition of public art, and a deep understanding of the subjective nature of valuing art in general.

As I reflect on the social value of this project, I am left with thoughts about how much more democratic a wiki is for archiving our social artefacts.  In my History of Women in Art class, students examined multiple textbooks to have a fair collection of women's achievements in art history.  The lesson they learn through critical inquiry is that women have always been active producers of art, as opposed to the muse (usually depicted nude or bare breasted) for the male heroic artist.  One of the many complex issues they also uncover is that the content in historical textbooks (who gets remembered) are often tainted with the same social biases that still surround us today.

This Wikipedia project is very intriguing to me.  I encourage anyone facilitating learning about marginalized topics to consider leveraging a similar idea.  This approach empowers students to be active contributors to the web, to effectively contribute to the dialogue about "who" and "what" gets remembered in future generations.

As I reflect on these topics, I am reminded of one of Mike Wesch's early Digital Ethnography videos, "Web 2.0...The Machine is Us/ing Us."

ELI Seminar Archive Now Public: Teaching Without Walls, an experiment in 21st century learning

Last September 2009, while still employed at CSU East Bay as their Director of Online and Hybrid Support Center, I had the awesome opportunity to share my teaching innovations through a webinar hosted by the Educause Learning Initiative.  The archive of the 60-minute presentation, titled Teaching Without Walls: Life Beyond the Lecture (which soon thereafter became the name of my consulting business), is now public and I invite you to watch and listen and share it with your colleagues.

The presentation is an overview of a semester-long teaching experiment in which I removed all lectures from my community college History of Women in Art class.  The passive lecture content was pre-recorded as audio/visual podcasts (or enhanced podcasts) and shared through a link in Blackboard along with an illustrated text-transcript of the lecture; providing students with a choice in how they would access the lecture content.  After completing the lectures online, my students engaged in interactive online VoiceThread discussions and learning activities, in which they applied lecture concepts in an effort to begin to reach the unit's learning objectives.  After completing the pre-class assignments, students came to class where we spent all of our time actively engaged in discussion, analysis, and debate about the unit's content.  Randomly, students were also given "active learning assignments," for example, "Go to the mall and critically observe your visual surroundings.  Analyze the actions and signs that contribute to the social enforcement of the "male gaze."  Share your experiences in class and evaluate whether or not our society constructs a passive experience for women, situating them as objects of the male gaze.  Is this an extension or break from the effects of western culture's history of art?"

The shift in my course design and pedagogy was strongly influenced by the research I had done about Millennial students.  I wanted to explore the success of this type of learning environment, in an effort to fundamentally question the effectiveness of passive lectures and active classroom time in the construction of critical thinking, visual literacy skills, as well as the success of crafting personalized, relevant learning experiences for 21st century students.

The end of the archive reveals compelling student survey feedback.  I hope you enjoy it and learn from it!  Please share your thoughts if you take the time to watch!

The ELI website also shares a link to an audio recording of my speaking with three of my students at the end of the semester.  Their dynamic voices are still some of the most compelling reasons for shifting our pedagogy and design of IN-CLASS learning experiences, in my opinion.

Teaching Without Walls: Life Beyond the Lecture
Click on "View Archive"

Enjoy!

The VASA Project: Now offering Free Online Gallery Talks

Roberto Muffoletto contacted me a few months ago to discuss his intriguing idea to leverage technology to bring together visual scholars from around the world to facilitate online workshops, providing intimate and rare learning opportunities for those with an interest in the visual arts. The concept, titled the VASA Project, is moving forward and partnerships are being fostered through his efforts. I applaud his efforts to push this idea forward and continue to connect great thinkers with great technology.

For those who'd like to learn more, I encourage you to consider enrolling in the newly announced free gallery talks that VASA and Society for Photographic Education (SPE) South East Region have just announced.

Beyond the Lecture: Students Reflect on Innovative Lecture Strategy

I am now wrapping up my final semester of teaching art history at Sierra College. Interestingly, my most exciting innovations this semester have been in my face-to-face class, as this has finally been the semester in which I've fully integrated all the content I've developed in my online History of Women in Art class into my face-to-face Women in Art class. Now I am beginning to assess my students' perspectives on how this very non-traditional learning environment has affected them.

Today I had the pleasure to speak with three wonderful student volunteers -- Ashley Abba, Heather Caldwell and Kaylee Schlosser -- about their thoughts on this semester. I have plenty more assessing to do including a full survey that is currently deployed, as well as a self-assessment but I thought I'd go ahead and share this recording because -- well, I'm just excited about it!

Here is some context:
This 20-minute conversation includes three students' perspectives about how Michelle's non-traditional teaching environment enhanced their learning experiences as students. Instead of spending class time lecturing, as a traditional college art history classes are typically structured, Michelle had her students access her lectures via podcast or print prior to coming to class via Blackboard and a link to iTunes U.

During the 16-week semester, her students also participated in visual, interactive VoiceThread discussions before their class meetings and had the opportunity to volunteer to lead the class in "wiki challenge" competitions that involved identifying key aspects of artists' lives and accomplishments and presenting them in the class wiki. The wiki content, once "approved" by the class, resulted in a portion of the assessment content.

Listen to the interview.

Teaching Art History with Video

I recently took a trip to the awesome city of Chicago. Art historians are familiar with taking pictures on their journeys and using these images to present in a classroom as part of a lecture. My memories of university lectures are filled with great stories about my professors' escapades to Greece or Italy. What I find compelling is how the use of video transforms this teaching process.

On my visit to Chicago's Millennium Park, a world renowned site for public art, I had my still digital camera in hand but I also had my Flip video camera. The park was so alive with activity. The sounds of the children running through the water at The Crown Fountain just had to be part of capturing this moment. So, I took several video clips of different works throughout the park (my favorites), edited them together in iMovie and exported the movie to YouTube. Check it out. What do you think? Better than still images? I'm excited to share this video with my students next semester when we explore the topic of public art.