Embedding audio in a web page

LINK TO DRAFT OF FELTING TUTORIAL

I worked on another project for Web II today because I want to learn the various ways of embedding audio in a web page. I made my six audio files with the free Web 2.0 utility Odeo, and editted them with Audacity. I found the code to embed a player at O'Reilly and used that on the website for users to play the files. Great fun! When I was a little girl there was this stuff called reel-to-reel tape to record voice. The tapes in my dad's stereo were the size of a dinner plate! My how times have changed.

I had an experience in class this week that I thought a lot about on the drive home. We were having one of our lively discussions in Ped II, and Elaine our instructor, said something about having the ability to sense where people were at and how they were doing. I asked her how I was doing and everyone laughed as it may have appeared to be a snarky comment on my part. But it was not meant in that way. I truly wanted to hear my teacher’s voice…not the like in these two audio projects I made for Web II, but her inner voice and thoughts on the material we were covering.

So I thought about what modern theorists said about the role of a teacher in the classroom. Dewey said teachers should have the knowledge and ability to guide students through a very learner-centered process. The teacher’s role was to create authentic learning experiences. Piaget believed that knowledge was not just imparted orally, but that it is constructed and reconstructed by students. Vygotsky believed that teachers and students were collaborating in an effort at making meaning. Are all of these theorists building on the same sort of principles? What was coming up in the reading about teaching in the new electronic age?

In “A Self-Directed Guide to Designing Courses for Significant Learning” L. Dee Fink speaks of active learning which is described as involving students in doing things and thinking about the things they are doing. I remember reading “The Virtual Student” last year. In it Palloff and Pratt suggest that in the learner-centered environment, the instructor is no longer the key content expert…the instructor in an online class moves to the side and allows student expertise to emerge. Wow, that is a shift in the whole paradigm of information delivery! And truthfully, this shift demands more of the teacher. In “What the Best College Teachers Do,” Ken Bain says that he found that effective teachers have something in common. They were learners, constantly trying to improve their own efforts to foster students’ development, and never completely satisfied with what they had already achieved. In other words they were themselves, life-long learners, practicing what they preached. The key is to be flexible and willing to do what the group needs for the learning process. In this way, the students and their learning remain the focus of attention (Palloff & Pratt, 127). A teacher can not just rest on their laurels. Tomlinson & McTighe in fact tell us that: Professionals in any field are distinguished by two characteristics: (1) They act on the most current knowledge that defines the field, and (2) they are client centered and adapt to meet the needs of individuals (11).

All of the above is brought together beautifully in a quote from Kinetic connections: Bloom’s taxonomy in action - Teachers scaffold learning so that students can assume a more active role in their own learning. This means that lessons are in fact more carefully constructed to guide students through the exploration of content. Teachers’ instructional arsenal contains a greater variety of instructional techniques and knowledge of instructional design. Their role has evolved from the limited didactic form of lecturing once held as the standard view of an effective teacher. And while I can intellectually understand these concepts, I still have the nagging question – where do I hear what the instructor thinks of the material?

Audio tutorial using Wink

Introduction to Fine Crafts E-classroom Tutorial

This week I needed to create an audio file and "deploy" it to the web for Will's Implementing Powerful Web Tools class. I decided that I wanted to try a free Web 2.0 software utility called Wink. I made a tutorial using screen shots as I lead my class through the details of our E-classroom site. I chose to add the audio after the screen shots were ready. So after I had all the shots in order, I proceeded to record text for the frames that I wished to add audio to. All audio editting could be done on the fly. I was also able to add text to each frame and buttons that enable students to go through the tutorial at their leisure. What Wink produces is a Macromedia flash file attached to an htm file which I have sitting on zonorus. Then I embedded that address information into this blogger post. It is very large file so be careful if you have dial-up.

Assessment and Evaluation

This week’s photo credit goes to my daughter Angela for this gorgeous windblown shot from the shores of Lake Champlain. Although we jokingly refer to that area as Vermont’s Banana Belt, when the wind comes whipping from the North that is so not the case. This past week we had a record-breaking storm and my little neck of the woods which is a bowl east of Bolton Mountain and south of Mount Mansfield (Stowe) received 30 inches in 24 hours! I am blessed that I only had to shovel it and not drive in it.

This was the week to ponder assessment and evaluation. Assessment is an ongoing process that as Elaine says is taking a pulse…appraisal. I resonated with these definitions in Assessing Open and Distanced Learners:

Assessment is a human activity, involving interactions aimed at seeking to understand what learners have achieved. Like any social interactions…there is nothing definitive or exact about the outcome. Assessment may occur in formal or informal ways, and it may be descriptive rather than judgmental in nature.

The primary purpose of assessment is to increase students’ learning and development, rather than simply to grade or rank students performance. Naturally one cannot grade student performance without first assessing it, but it is implied that grading is a secondary activity to the primary goal of helping learners to diagnose problems and improve the quality of their subsequent learning.

From Pathways to Good Practice at Southern Cross University I appreciated the list of reasons why you want evaluation of your courses. You need to see:

• how well your teaching is received by students and why
• whether the students find your learning materials are helpful to their learning
• whether aspects of the unit delivery are satisfactory to students and help them to learn

While the storm was dumping the white stuff, I took myself on a bit of a TANGENT. This word with Latin and Greek roots is mathematical in nature. The first part tan, coming from Latin and meaning touch or reach; and the second half came from Greek and having to do with a corner or a bend. It was not until the early 1800’s that the word was used for the meaning I have implied – a divergence or path slightly connected with the subject. From the Greek and Latin roots dictionary puns section: Old mathematicians never die, they just go off on a tangent. The trail I went down was a study of the SOLO (the Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes) taxonomy coined by J B Biggs and K F Collis in 1982. It is a further development of Bloom’s taxonomy which Bigg’s described as a framework for understanding understanding, which for me makes the job of assessing student responses ever so much easier: As students learn, the outcomes of their learning display similar stages of increasing structural complexity. There are two main changes: quantitative, as the amount of detail in the student’s response increases; and qualitative, as that detail becomes integrated into a structural pattern. The quantitative changes occur first, then learning changes qualitatively.

I think that the reason I find this so helpful is that I currently teach mostly art and history and I find it difficult to assess learning when the answers students give are somehow so subjective. I am not looking for content-based outcomes. I am looking for how the students integrate the content and make connections with it. In The Experience of Learning, while writing about the "Quantitative Conception of Knowledge," Dahlgren calls SOLO an attempt at empirical classification of levels of outcome in a form which has wide applicability (31).

In the Quantitative realm there are three levels: prestructural, unistructural, and multistructural. On the prestructural level answers seem to miss the point, or contain bits and pieces of information. The unstructural level may answer part of the question, but be an oversimplification. On the multistructural level the answer may make several connections, but not see the whole. In the Qualitative realm the two levels are relational and extended abstract. In the relational realm the answers show the knowledge of the parts and the whole. And in the extended abstract the student begins to make connections outside the area under discussion.

The Big Picture

This photo of my house was taken last fall from Hunger Mountain, a part of the Worcester Range here in Central Vermont, a week before grad school classes began. As of this moment, we’ve just completed our third f2f class and our fourth week of work this trimester, and I am finally seeing the big picture. I will be able to work these f2f classes into one project - the design of a 15-week online Women’s Studies course. This course design is the goal, and the objectives along the way will take place in the f2f class projects. In Pedagogy II I will be doing the instructional design, in Configuring Network Learning Environments I will create a Moodle course for the material to reside, and in Web II I will learn to make a few learning objects (with cool and inexpensive software and hardware).

I tried to get back into the Moodle site I created yesterday in class and there seems to be a cookie-acception problem (even though I can see the cookie in Firefox), which leads me to my vocabulary word for the week, GLITCH. Provided there are none of these, or I overcome them, I will get to my goal. The dictionary says a glitch is a minor malfunction, mishap, or technical problem; a snag. The etymology of the word is probably from a similar Yiddish word, glitsh, meaning “a slip.” I will have to remember these minor technical problems will happen to my students too.

In Web II we read an article titled Connecting Learning Objects to Instructional Design Theory: A Definition, a Metaphor, and a Taxonomy written by David A Wiley. Wiley changed the metaphor for learning objects from Legos to atoms. He best sums up the whole article with the following quote, It should be obvious… that a person without understanding of instructional design has no more hope of successfully combing learning objects into instruction than a person without an understanding of chemistry has of successfully forming a crystal. In Ped II Elaine spoke of the art and science of teaching, which is essentially the same thing Wiley’s saying. Freedom (art) comes from knowing the rules (science).

In Ped II it was Bloom’s taxonomy that I was the most interested in this week because I am fascinated by the cognitive process. How is it that we learn? How is it that we make meaning? I came across this quote from an article called Why Pedagogy by writer David Lusted in Screen magazine, 1986:

Knowledge is not produced in the intentions of those who believe they hold it, whether in the pen or in the voice. It is produced in the process of interaction, between writer and reader at the moment of reading, and between teacher and learner at the moment of classroom engagement. Knowledge is not the matter that is offered so much as the matter that is understood. To think of fields or bodies of knowledge as if they are the property of academics and teachers is wrong. It denies an equality in the relations at moments of interaction and falsely privileges one side of the exchange and what that side "knows" over the other.

Why is pedagogy important? It is important since, as a concept, it draws attention to the process through which knowledge is produced. Pedagogy addresses the ‘how’ questions involved not only in the transmission or reproduction of knowledge but also in its production. Indeed it enables us to question the validity of separating these activities so easily by asking under what conditions and through what means we ‘come to know.’ How one teaches is therefore of central interest, but through the prism of pedagogy, it becomes inseparable from what is being taught and crucially, how one learns.

I have all my classmate’s blogs coming to my Bloglines aggregator. It is so much fun to see the different styles of writing. Blogs have an interesting past, with only 23 known in 1999, today a new one comes into existence every six seconds! What I remember when I saw my first blog, was that they were sort of pre-screened internet material. I counted on others to just give me the tidbits on any given subject. Although that is still the case on some blogs, they have lately become online journals. A quote from Rebecca Blood in Weblogs: A History and Perspective:

Lacking a focus on the outside world, the blogger is compelled to share [her] world with whomever is reading. [She] may engage other bloggers in conversation about the interests they share. [She] may reflect on a book he is reading, or the behavior of someone on the bus. [She]might describe a flower that [she] saw growing between the cracks of a sidewalk on [her] way to work. Or [she] may simply jot notes about [her] life: what work is like, what [she] had for dinner, what [she] thought of a recent movie. These fragments, pieced together over months, can provide an unexpectedly intimate view of what it is to be a particular individual in a particular place at a particular time.

As advertisements creep onto banana peels, attach themselves to paper cup sleeves, and interrupt our ATM transactions, we urgently need to cultivate forms of self-expression in order to counteract our self-defensive numbness and remember what it is to be human.

Connections

I took this photo of a spider web covered in frost on my way to work in October. It seemed an apropos connection to various classes and events of the week. I finally understand the networking stuff from our Configuring Network Learning Environments class. While I’m not sure how this information will relate to using Moodle in a Linux environment, I’m up for that challenge too. In the meantime this information has allowed me to understand the web of cables, routers, and devices strewn along the walls of the small non-profit I work for. Because we had a bit of down time in the Web II class this week I got into researching the history of computers and the Internet. In my links section see the really cool blog called An Incomplete History of Personal Computing.

Every once in a while I do a ‘catch up’ week of making connections with the people in my life: old friends, family, and business networking that I’d been putting off. The net result is I have a date on valentine’s day with a dear friend and her four month old baby, reconnected with an old colleague who is teaching in inner NYC, found out my sister’s job went kaput after 23 years, and my parents were thankfully just outside the area where the tornadoes hit Florida this week. John Perry Barlow, a Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation is quoted as saying: The central purpose of technology is to connect ... to make contact. To wake up, shocked by the voltage of increased interaction between the properties of humanity in my heart and those in yours … I had a business communication over this week that taught a great lesson about email. I was working on a project with one group, and forgot that I had not covered all my bases with another group over said project. I was in a hurry and wrote and sent off an email that I did not re-read…big mistake! I found out later that my email, which in my view was just an objective stating of facts, could in fact be read from a whole different perspective…and was. I said something like a second planned meeting was cancelled last minute…forgetting to mention that the other party was at home with the flu. Overall I apologized, but I wasn’t really sure whether to say sorry I blew it or thank you for letting me learn that mistake from you...

In Ped II we began reading Integrating Differentiated Instruction and Understanding by Design. It seems to be a combination of sound instructional design connected with a desire to make the curriculum accessible to multiple needs. What hit me the most while reading was the quote: Even the best curriculum delivered in a take-it-or-leave-it fashion will be taken by a few and left by too many (18). These authors clearly state that this is not really a methodology, but a way of thinking (10). At CCV, this has been known as Universal Instructional Design. UID principles include: getting concrete (goals, syllabus, assignments, feedback), varying teaching methods (to meet learning styles), allowing for options (makes output accessible and real), and using technology. I don’t really like the term UNIVERSAL though. I still think it connotes a one-size fits all approach. Looking at the Latin roots of universal it literally means like one turn: UNI (one, single) VERS (bend, turn) AL (pertaining to, like, of the kind, belonging to). We should change the terminology to MULTIVERSAL – belonging to many turns….