Implementing Digital Fabrication

As I mentioned in my last post, there are a lot of aspects of digital fabrication that I really like. Students being able to design, create, evaluate, re-design and re-create objects that they conceptualized on the computer. Students being able to physically hold something they designed in a virtual environment. There are many elements of this kind of teaching that represent many of the hopes people have had for infusing technology into teaching and learning: direct application, real-world importance, creativity, etc. Until recently, most of my experience designing and fabricating objects had been done in my office on my one machine that is connected to my computer. There was no waiting for other people, no transferring files from one computer to another, no having to think about how and where to save files so I could resume my work at a later time. In the back of my mind I knew that the experience I had fabricating objects would be much different than the whole-class experience my students would have, and there were several technical aspects of this process I had not anticipated until I released it into the wild with my students.

I had some ground rules for myself when deciding how to introduce this activity:

1. I wanted to give the class 1-2 authentic tasks to do. I did not just want to just have the students using the software for the sake of using the software. That has never turned out favorably for me.
2. I wanted them to be able to finish in one week. That means one class meeting for one section and two for another.
3. I wanted them to have fun and like what they are doing. This all gets back to my belief (and that of many other people) that one way to change attitudes toward technology is to provide people with engaging, meaningful and yes, fun activities that include technology. People, teachers in particular, tend to abandon technology because they have had bad experiences with it.

So, I set out to design an activity that met these criteria. I had the students complete these activities and submit their work when they were done. The first activity was used to introduce the software (no printing or cutting involved), and the second activity was for application. Overall, my students were very gracious and rolled with the punches. They seemed to like the second activity more than the first (Really!?!), and though I have no data to support my claims, I truly believe they understand digital fabrication more than they did after reading an article and watching a video. Here are my reflections (both technical, pedagogical and philosophical) from the experience.

1. You have to print from the same computer you will use to cut the shape.  If you print from a computer that does not have a Silhouette connected to it, the software will put the wrong orienting marks on the paper and it will be useless for cutting ... unless you want to cut it by hand.
2. The trial version of the software does not let you save your work. You must have a licensed version to save a project on one computer and open it on another.
3. The printing and cutting step of this process is a bottleneck. I have 24 students in each class. They worked in groups of 3, and I brought 2 fabricators to the lab.  Under ideal conditions, everything went pretty smoothly. As soon as there was a hitch, and there were a couple, the line got a little backed up.
4. The more fabricators you have, the better. However, the trade-off is that the more fabricators you have, the noisier your classroom will be.
5. I received a couple different versions of this comment, "I have a hard time envisioning myself doing this activity with my class." It's hard to situate an activity within an instructional context AND create obvious connections to other instructional contexts. When you give preservice teachers a task, they tend to focus on the task. A seasoned teacher may do a better job of seeing those connections because she will have more applied experience than a novice teacher. In other words, I could have done a better job of facilitating what Salomon and Perkins call high-road transfer. I think requires some application and reflection, which we didn't really do.
6. Related to the previous observation, there needs to be more emphasis on creativity in teacher education programs. Rather than being a thing a person either has or doesn't have, I think of creativity more like a muscle that needs to be exercised in order to grow and stay healthy. The older I have gotten, the more purposeful I have become in my creative pursuits. As for my role in the creative development of my students, I think the best way to do this is for them to create a digital fabrication activity in their preferred content area. It's one thing to be able to do my activity. It's an entirely different level of creativity to be able to create a learning activity for a group of children. I may do this at some point.

Overall, I would say this was a good activity for my first attempt at a new concept and new technology. I have a completely different vision for how this will look the next time I do it, which is evidence of learning on my part.

Digital identity

The first time I thought about managing my identity as a teacher was during my junior year in my teacher education program. The final project for my language arts methods class was a professional portfolio that included: a narrative about myself and my philosophy of teaching, my philosophy of classroom management (which was so ridiculous I am ashamed that I actually put it in print and let others look at it) and examples of exemplary lessons and other projects I created for my teacher ed. classes. I remember putting a lot of time and thought into this project because I knew it could potentially be something really cool/impressive to show during a job interview. At the time, my portfolio was quite the technological wonder. Yes, the deliverable was still a printed document (a book printed and bound at Kinko's), but I designed the entire thing on my Mac LC 520 computer. This was a stark contrast to how my classmates completed the project, which included a mix of word-processed and photocopied pages thrown together in a three-ring binder. I used a scanner and Clarisworks to make the entire portfolio have a consistent design throughout. At the time, it was quite impressive, and I think I still have a copy somewhere in a box in my parent's basement.

With all of the digital tools available now (17 years after I crafted my first portfolio!), there is no reason that preservice teachers shouldn't be able to put together a killer digital portfolio. While many of the principles for presenting a portfolio haven't changed that much, if at all, in 17 years, the tools we have access to for making one are lightyears beyond my little all-in-one Mac.

I entered the world of digital portfolios when I was teaching the class "Teaching with Technology" at the University of Virginia. I had my students create a digital portfolio using HTML, and they hosted it on their Home Directory. The project started off very clunky and frustrating and eventually became one that the students all loved and commented that they felt most satisfied with. I eventually abandoned NVU and Home Directory for Google Pages (now Google Sites), and the quality of the projects increased exponentially (not to mention the number of e-mails from frustrated students almost vanished). Looking back, the major drawbacks of this portfolio were that it focused on the projects only from my class and most of the students viewed it as an "assignment" rather than a tool that would continually evolve and could ultimately become an archive of their teaching careers.

My journey into the world of digital portfolios continued when I taught at the University of Illinois Springfield. The department I was teaching in (Teacher Education) had adopted TaskStream for the teacher candidates to use for building their digital portfolios, so I had to adopt this tool as well. Overall, it was pretty easy to use and the final product looked very professional. Besides the fact that the portfolio's format was very prescribed (meaning, it helped my department meet its objectives more than it helped the students meet theirs), the main drawback with TaskStream was that it cost money (not a little money, either), almost ensuring that 99% of the teacher candidates would not use it after they graduated. Once again, I was stuck in this rut of "assigning" a digital portfolio for a "grade," which means when the grade is given the assignment is done.

So, when I was asked to teach a section of "Computers in the Classroom" at the University of North Texas, I was once again in the position of thinking about how to structure my final portfolio project. Having a little more freedom than I did at UIS and having learned some lessons from UVA, I tried to improve my portfolio project. Here is the project description from last semester (Fall 2010). As you can see, it is still pretty "my-class-centric."

But it's amazing what one little blog post can do to spark some new ideas. I taught concurrently with Wes Fryer last semester, and we were constantly bouncing ideas off each other. He addressed digital portfolios in one of his posts, which helped me develop my latest iteration of my digital portfolio project.  Here is my latest project description, which I am pretty happy with at this point. I'm sure once my students get their hands on it I will see some areas that need clarification or revision. The obvious weakness of the current version is my rubric (which really isn't a rubric), which I will definitely be revising.

So, do you give a final portfolio assignment? How structured/open is it? What elements do you have students include that I have overlooked?

Technology and Priorities

I am at the SITE conference in San Diego, and after 1.5 days of presentations I have heard one theme emerge above all others. This theme can be reduced to one question, "Why do students, who use technology in almost every aspect of their lives, seem so clueless when it comes to using it in their teaching and learning?" You may have seen versions of this conversation framed in other ways: digital natives vs. digital immigrants, 21st Century learning, Content-creators, Millennial Students, etc. The assumption on the part of teacher educators is that students who love technology in certain areas of their lives should love it in their learning and teaching. I would like to suggest a radical idea: teens and college students don't love technology. They love what they can do with technology, which is to address their priorities and motivations. Take technology out of the picture, and this is what I know about college students:

• They like to have fun
• They are more likely to listen to their friends than their parents or professors
• They like to be entertained
• They are confronted with a lot of information that has challenged their worldview, and they are trying to make sense of it all
• They view their classes as something they have to do to a) stay in college and be with their friends and b) graduate and move on to the next phase of their lives

So, why do students know so much about certain technologies yet know so little about other types of technology (e.g., educational/learning technology)? The technologies they know and use help them address their priorities, and as sad as it may seem, being a life-long learner is not a priority for them at this stage in their lives.

I spend a lot of time talking to teacher candidates about knowing their students and meeting where they are in their skills, abilities and prior knowledge. As a teacher educator, I must do the same with my students. I need to understand their priorities and motivations, and meet them where they are.

My Band plays in a Garage in the Cloud

I recently read about a suite of web-based tools hosted by aviary.com, and I was quickly blown away. Most of the tools are for image editing, but they recently added an audio editor. Each of these tools is web based ,which means they require no downloads, installations or updates. Each time one of these tools comes out (e.g., Google Sites, Weebly, PBWiki, ScreenToaster), I can feel a new life being breathed into my teaching.

When I was teaching ed tech classes, I was always hesitant to show my students applications like Photoshop, Camtasia and Dreamweaver. These programs are powerful and may very well be useful to teachers, but they required a massive leap from what the preservice teachers already knew to what they needed to learn to be successful with them. At different times, I dabbled with the tools, but the focus quickly turned to the tool itself and I would be inundated with e-mails about how to do this or that. I know there are folks who consider the ability to use these tools a necessary literacy for teachers in the 21st Century, but I chose to keep our discussions and projects grounded in pedagogy and the classroom. This makes choosing tools for different projects quite difficult. On top of their complexity, there is the issue of cost and accessibility. If I in fact wanted my students to use these tools and strategies as teachers, it hardly made sense to rely on expensive software that they would a) not have access to once they left the university and b) had to come to the computer lab to use. Using Everett Rogers' criteria for "adoptable innovations" as my framework, it made sense to me to use tools whose trialability, observability, compatibility, relative advantage and complexity matched the needs of teachers.

It just so happens that in the last few years, as more schools are experimenting with student-created digital media, the tools to create these media have been moving to the Cloud. For example, I was eventually able to replace Dreamweaver with Google Page Creator (now Google Sites), and I noticed immediately that the "how do I make a picture show up on my website"  questions vanished. Our conversations shifted to questions about pedagogy and implementation with students in their classes. However, until recently there were no suitable web-based alternatives for editing images and audio, or for creating screencasts. I still had to rely on desktop programs for podcasts, and I got pretty good as using PPT as an omnibus program for all things related to digital images.

Well, I have recently discovered, thanks to TechCrunch, a suite of new tools that may potentially transform (yet again) the way I do things. Aviary has developed a web-based audio editor that allows users to record, mix and download audio files without ever leaving the browser. The interface is extremely easy to use, and you can add up to 10 tracks. Worried about copyright for the audio clips students put in their projects? Myna (the name of the audio editor) provides over 14,500 loops for users to mix into their recordings. Of course, if you are planning on becoming the next Jared Hess or Brian Ibbott, you will need to get permission before using the music loops, distributed by APM Music. Creating an account is free, and you can either save the audio file online or download it to your computer. Needless to say, I am very eager to test this out and see if it's feasible for my students to use. Here is a screenshot of Myna (captured with Aviary's screen capture tool ... of course).

Good teaching is hard to model

I was a school teacher for 8 years, and by my own standards (as well as the feedback from parents, students and principals) I did a pretty good job. Sure, there were aspects of my teaching that, when stacked up against the literature I encountered in grad school, would have been labeled less than exemplary. But I think in most respects I was effective, had a good relationship with the students and parents and my students left my class with a lot more knowledge and skills than they came in with. The problem with all of this is that it occurred within my classroom and was only observed by my students and me. And my students weren't really critiquing my teaching. They were active participants in the process and the reason the teaching was taking place. Contrast this with my current teaching assignment. I teach about teaching. So, when I tell the students they should do  this or that, I need to model this or that. When I was a teacher, I would try implementing this or that, and sometimes would continue using this and completely abandon that. And it ended there. My teaching strategies were the means to an end ... student learning. Now, the end is parallel to the means. I want my students to learn good teaching techniques, but I also feel this pressure to use good teaching techniques in order to teach them. It would be far easier to plan a lecture, flip through some slides and give a test. But it seems to me that the best way to teach certain pedagogical approaches -- say, cooperative learning -- is to design lessons that implement those pedagogical approaches. Additionally, they can't be done in a "community of practice" sense either, where I make some mistakes and we talk about the teachable moments and learn from the things the professor screwed up on. The lessons need to be delivered with precision and completely thought through. I feel at times like I am stuck in some performance assessment nightmare, where I am being judged not only on my knowledge of the content but also by my delivery of the content.

When the preservice teachers have had a chance to participate in the teaching strategy, it seems to me, we have something to talk about. They observed/participated in it, and now we can talk about it in real terms, rather than treating the teaching strategy like some straw man that everyone beats down yet has no real experience with. As my advisor used to say, it's easy to stand on the sidelines and throw rocks, but it's a lot harder to actually do something meaningful and thoughtful. Of course, he was referring to publishing, but it also applies to the art of teaching.

This is all fresh on my mind because I just gave a lecture to my students on how to lecture. My talk was well planned out, and I had a lot of good suggestions for the students. But as I reflected on the class, I was struck that I didn't do some of the things I had told my students they should do when lecturing to students. Strategies such as providing students with a note-taking template and using questioning to check for comprehension and engage the listeners. Basically, I didn't feel like I effectively modeled what I was telling my students they should do in their lectures.

This brings me back to the title. Good teaching is hard to do. It takes a lot of extra time that the teacher will really never get paid for. That never really mattered to me because the standards I set for myself were always higher than those imposed by other people. Good teaching really is hard to do, but it's even harder to model.

Is there such a thing as a toss-aside course?

I used to hear from students that my technology course was commonly regarded by their advisors as a class they should "just get out of the way early." I don't think the advisors were referring to my course specifically, but rather the required technology course in that program in general. The course is primarily taught by grad students, so there is  a new instructor every 2-3 years. I don't think the faculty members even try to keep up with who is teaching the class every semester, unless the grad student takes the initiative to meet the faculty. Most of my students enjoyed my class and would make comments about how much they learned. I think this is the case for most educational technology classes, where most of the students have never seen technology modeled well by their teachers or professors. Their expectations coming into the class are pretty low, and this isn't helped by the attitude held by most of the advisors that it is a toss-aside class. In some ways these pre-existing attitudes act as a barrier, but I think more often than not they created a perfect opportunity to blow the students' minds and help them completely reframe how they think about, and hopefully use, technology in the classroom.

Another common theme, beside the belief that they would have to endure my class until December or May, respectively, is that I was going to teach them how to do a bunch of stuff. I would always ask them at the beginning of the term what they expected to learn from the class, and their responses were almost unanimously, "How to make  a ... " or "How to use ... program." This is important, but I don't think I ever heard someone say, "I want to learn how to support learning in social studies (or any other content area) through technology," or "I would like to learn how to plan a technology-based lesson." Technology was typically regarded as the thing a teacher adds in at the end, throws in for a diversion or uses for his/her own productivity. This context is a fertile ground for discussions on student learning, content, teaching strategies, classroom management and student engagement. Students were so focused on the how question, they rarely considered the why question. Why should teachers use technology? Is this even the right question? Maybe a better question is, what do I want my students to learn, and what are the best resources I can use to help them get there? What would motivate my students to want to get there? What do my students learn on their own when there are no teachers, parents or grades in the picture, and how do they learn it? You can hardly ask a question like this, framed within the context of the 21st century, without mentioning technology. Clearly, there needs to be a change in the way technology is thought about and presented in schools of education, and I think a lot of programs are moving in that direction.

So, to answer my own question, no I don't think there is any such thing as a toss-aside course. The approach and delivery may need some work, but the content -- the big idea of technology's role in teaching and learning -- is just as important as it has ever been.