Archive of Inclusive Learning: Lightbulb Moments

Here is the archive of Inclusive Learning: Lightbulb Moments, a Hangout on Air from The Center. In this Hangout, +Deborah Lemon and I share and reflect on our own growth and development as online educators and discuss how the integration of social tools into our online learning environment has fostered community-oriented learning that nourishes our students' learning differences and creates personal, relevant learning. Deborah showcases her online Spanish class which is taught in Facebook and I share my online ice breaker designed in VoiceThread and examine how the option to express oneself in voice or text is impacting my students' learning. What are your two takeaways? I'd love to hear them! #CCCLEARN

    Thanks for sharing with me today, Deborah! I always learn so much from you. 

Video: Using Facebook to Improve Critical Thinking Skills in Online Classes

Recently, as part of my "Learn with Michelle" series, I had the pleasure to interview +sabita persaud, Assistant Professor in the Notre Dame of Maryland School of Nursing, about her intriguing application of Facebook in her accelerated online graduate nursing course.  In this video, you will learn how Dr. Persaud transformed a medical case study (with permission from the individual's family) into a fictitious Facebook profile that her students "friended."  As Persaud played the role of the patient, she revealed mysterious symptoms and reached out to her "friends" for help.  The students responded by applying and synthesizing ideas from their learning units, offering opportunities for deeper learning and formative assessments to prepare for their exams.

What were the results of this experiment? How did the quality of the student interactions compare with previous activities, constructed in an LMS discussion board?  Watch the video and find out!

This video may also be viewed on YouTube.

Hangout! Using Twitter & Facebook to Improve Critical Thinking in an Online Graduate Nursing Class

Hangout On Air!

Using Twitter & Facebook to Improve Critical Thinking
in an Online Graduate Nursing Class

Wednesday, July 10th

9am-9:30am PST/ 11-11:30am CST

no registration required
View Live at: http://facultyecommons.org/learn-with-michelle-hangouts-on-air/
Tweet questions during the Hangout with hashtag #learnwmpb

In this Hangout on Air, I will interview Dr. Sabita Persaud, of the Notre Dame of Maryland University School of Nursing who will discuss how and why she facilitated a 7-week nursing case study by dawning a fictitious patient identity.

Throughout the online course, students followed and responded to Facebook updates and Tweets from the patient, “Cee Veeay,” who shared evolvingly complex symptoms and reached out for advice through social media exchanges.  Students actively engaged in lengthy discussions with “Ms. Veeay,” offering her advice about her symptoms, leading to greater student engagement, critical thinking, and increasing the relevancy of their learning experience. These interactions prepared students for their exams. Dr. Persaud will also share how this teaching approach refreshed her own engagement as a college instructor!

I am so excited to speak with Dr. Persaud about this inventive teaching approach and I hope you will listen in and ask questions via the Twitter backchannel! 

Teaching with Facebook: a Hangout with Deborah Lemon

This week, I sat down in a Hangout with Deborah Lemon to learn about how she uses a private Facebook group to teach spanish fully online and in a blended format.  I must say, I was impressed and inspired!  I've found myself thinking long and hard about some of the examples she shared in the Hangout.  Deborah's point, to me, is that Facebook allows for her to seamlessly and fluidly interact with her students but also, and perhaps more importantly, the students can spontaneously stream their lives and experiences through their feed updates, functioning as authentic assessments.

As Deborah explained to me, this type of fluid connection to students is essential when teaching a foreign language.  For example, (you'll see this in the video) Deborah showed a video of a student who set up her smartphone phone and recorded herself interacting with customers at her place of employment -- using the spanish skills she had just learned in class.  Deborah likens the video clips that the students share in the Facebook microblog feed to an ePortfolio.  Nearly all college students are on Facebook already so having them shift to a private FB group to share their spanish skills with their phones makes a lot more sense than requiring them to get to a computer and log into Blackboard or Moodle.

To me, I had always been a bit stand offish about microblogging because it's so fragmented but Deborah demonstrated how the Facebook Group function provides a simple way to sort the contributions made by each student.  This gives a comprehensive view of the students' activities in one place.  Deborah covers a lot of other important topics including dealing with reluctant Facebook users (which is very rare, she says) and archiving content.

I find myself thinking about how using social technologies push us, as teachers, into new and unexpected territory.  We might start using a social technology for one particular reason but what blossoms from there is the exciting and unimaginable part -- that's the piece that we need to be cultivating and that's the piece that will not happen in traditional course management systems.

Finally, Deborah invites you all to join her Facebook Group "Using Groups for Teaching." In this group, you'll find lots of tips and resources for learning about how to teach with Facebook, as well as the chance to interact with other like-minded educators.  To check it out, go to Facebook.com, sign in, search for "Using Groups for Teaching" using the search box at the top, and click "Join group."

Enjoy the video!

Update: Facebook Kills Creative History Project

I recently posted about a creative use of Facebook by a librarian at the University of Nevada, Reno that embraced social media to make history come alive.  Today, the Chronicle reported that Facebook has deleted the accounts representing each of the historical figures due to a violation of its terms of use. 

As much as I loved the idea, I completely understand why Facebook enforced its rule that users may not “provide any false personal information on Facebook, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission.”  There is a common trend among young users of Facebook to create false profiles of real people and post erroneous, inflammatory comments about them.  Maintaining integrity in social media is important. 

The Chronicle article reports that the pages received thousands of friend requests after the project hit the blogosphere and Twitterverse.  So, the good news is that people are interested in learning about historical figures through creative applications of emerging tools.  And the article also suggests that creating a Facebook Page about each of the historical figures may fall within the Facebook rules.  We'll see.

Experimentation is good.  This is how we learn to define the boundaries of our of new digital landscape and understand how we can apply it to learning.

Social Media Meets My Great Grandparents

Last week I shared a status update on Facebook requesting the help of "friends" to solve a family mystery.  I have an old postcard that was written by my great grandmother, Elise, in 1915 in Germany to her husband, Theodore, while he was away at war.  The letters on it are incomprehensible to me and my immediate family and I've always wanted it translated. 

I tagged several friends in my post, including two relatives from Germany (who I have never had the opportunity to meet).  Along with the post, I included a link to a VoiceThread I had created with a picture of the postcard (front and back) and my questions in voice and text (to help with translation).  You can view that VoiceThread above.  (By the way, additional photos have since been added to the VoiceThread in response to the dialogue -- a couple of which I had never seen before.  The VoiceThread is becoming a family archive and I hope to continue adding voice descriptions and stories to it.  Imagine the relevance this will have to my own grandchildren.) 

The postcard is a family relic and I had been told by my mother that it contains a message from my grandmother, who was home caring for her five daughters (one of them my grandmother, Ella), while her husband was away on the battlefields of World War One. I wanted to know more than that though -- especially what the red text on the right side of the postcard said.  The meaning of the postcard had been conveyed to me through my mother through oral stories but what did the postcard really say?

Within 12 hours of the status update, a dynamic exchange had ensued between my cousin, Thomas, in Germany, and a close family friend, Lore, who lives in the US but is from Germany.  A high school friend, who I haven't talked to in more than 20 years but now lives in Germany, assisted with identifying the type of script used on the postcard too.  The script, apparently, is not German but Suetterlin.  This is one of the reasons why it's been so hard to translate over the years.  Lore, apparently, had received instruction in reading and writing in Suetterlin when she was young. 

The writing on the left side of the postcard, by Elise, shares her happiness upon hearing recent news that Theodore was healthy (we assume she had received a note from  him not long before this was written).  The postcard is date stamped 8-16-1915.  But there is a handwritten phrase in red dated 8-25-1915.  This phrase says, "killed in action."  I had understood that the postcard had been returned to my grandmother with this handwritten mark upon it.  However, my Facebook community keenly identified that the red letters are in ballpoint pen, indicating that it was written much more recently than the Suetterlin text which was made with a fountain pen.

The death of my great grandfather has been verified by another of my relatives in Germany who has located a photograph of Theodore's grave -- on which the date 8-23-1915 in inscribed (matching the red text on the postcard).  Since I posted this on Facebook, I have also received never seen before pictures of Elise's parents (my great, great grandparents) including one of them standing in front of their own porcelain shop (these have been added to the VoiceThread).  My cousin has also shared stories with me about Elise which I've never heard before -- she said that her husband had volunteered for the war but soon thereafter was "shot in the head." She was a strong woman, up until her death at age 99.

The postcard is a precious family relic to me.  It is a metaphor of love, loss, and the incredible courage and human commitment of both Theodore, who voluntarily left for the war, and Elise, who raised five young daughters alone in early 20th century Germany.  

With the combined help of Facebook and VoiceThread, a new layer of family history has been revealed and more keep coming.  I'm very grateful to be alive right now.  We have an unparalled opportunity to leverage social technologies to learn about and tell our own stories. We are all experts in something -- and when we have the opportunity to share those gifts with others, the power of social technologies is felt.  That is part of our quest in this century, I believe -- to identify our passion and area of expertise and share it with the world.  This empowers each of us to give something back to the world and leave our mark.

Finally, as an educator, I'm realizing the significance of this "moment" and how important it is to weave these opportunities into our students' learning experiences.  Doing so would illuminate the deeper relevance of social media to our students to open up their own stories -- and encourage teachers to move away from our reliance on textbooks to facilitate learning.  Mashable shared a related story today about how social media is informing world history events.  How many history professors are working this concept into their curriculum, I wonder.  I remember how difficult it was for me to connect with history when I was young -- I can't imagine how different my academic experience would have been if I were introduced to history through an opportunity to tell my own story and share it with the entire world.

As a result, I'm thinking about integrated a project into my online History of Photography class that requires students to "tell a story" involving a photograph and a defining family event. This project would include a research stage in which social media would be used to reveal new bits of information and the story would be shared in a student-generated VoiceThread.  I really can't think of a more valuable learning experience.  What do you think?  

History is yours.  What's your story?

Facebook Announces Fellowship Program for Doctoral Students

Facebook is enhancing its relationship with the academic world. Today the company announced the creation of five fellowships to be awarded to doctoral students in the 2010-11 academic year. The research-focused awards also include tuition, fees, travel money, a $30,000 stipend and more!

If you or an innovative PhD student you know is enrolled in a full-time PhD program in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, System Architecture or related area in the 2010-11 academic year read the full Facebook Fellowship Program Overview for more info.