Ian Knox’s Blog

I was looking through my Powerpoint slides for a new class. The topic was ‘Navigating the Web’. It wasn’t a huge presentation, perhaps 25 slides or so. The slides were from last year, when I taught the class in a traditional face to face lecture/tutorial format.Now the value of someone standing in frount of a class talking for 2 hours in a traditional lecture is questionable anyway, but what happens when that content is placed online? Which slides do I keep? Which to I change? Which do I discard? Taken in isolation a series of dot points don’t amount to much. For example -

• Ranking algorithms needed
• Data base
• Search protocol

 What on earth does it all mean and does anyone care? Like most academics, I have spent many years serving up content to my students. One of my favourite Youtube videos is Father Guido Sarducci’s Five Minute University a comedy sketch which offers the proposition that all learning can be done in five minutes as that is all that will be remembered in five years anyway. Outrageous and silly, but funny because perhaps it contains a little truth?Has teaching been reduced to a series of Powerpoint slides?  We have all heard the term ‘Death by Powerpoint’. Google the search term ‘Gettysburg Address’ and you will find that about the forth result returned is ‘The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation’. I am not giving you the link – Google it!! The presentation includes the Gettysburg Address in the speaker notes, with the opening line - These are some notes on the Gettysburg meeting. I’ll whip them into better shape when I can get on to my computer. A.L.Wow. The actual address was just 267 words, and it remains one of the most famous speeches in history. So, yes, Powerpoint does have a role to play in education, and in business, we just over do it. In an online environment I cannot see that Powerpoint has a role at all. So far this semester I have put a voice-over on several legacy presentations, but abandoned them because I felt they still offered little to learning (and my voice sounds terrible!).So what are the alternatives? I am not suggesting live presentations should be abandoned. They need to be more creative, and in most cases seminar rather than lecture based. In an online environment this is even more important. Simply ‘pushing’ content to students is futile. What content that is ‘pushed’ cannot already be found, with relative ease by searching the Internet? I have found that the most satisfactory method of teaching online is to find a balance between content provision and problem solving. Posing questions which may be the source of discussion, conjecture or research; encouraging students to share their answers, pose counter questions, and to gain an in depth understanding of the subject at hand. This in-depth understanding may or may not equate to the ability to immediately recall facts. Did it ever?  I expect though, that students should develop questioning and (re)search skills that will allow them to find the answer to any question that I pose related to the particular area of study.Communities, by their very nature, tend to be places where knowledge is shared. Knowledge sharing in small regional communities has been a way of life for centuries. In recent centuries learning and knowledge has for many people become institutionalised, with a teacher/student relationship embodying the learning process.  The thought that this could change, is both an opportunity and a threat for both institutions and teachers. Communities are emerging as a place of first choice for knowledge acquisition, in many instances and the use of the World Wide Web has accelerated this transition.Examples abound. Wikipedia is perhaps the most celebrated, but community knowledge sharing sites abound. But it is in the area of problem solving that the power of community collaboration is most evident, as illustrated by the following case study:The problem: Email newsletters abound. Is it possible for a small business owner to create their own newsletter, or is it a specialist task that should be outsourced?The solution: As a teacher of eMarketing and eBusiness I thought I should know the answer to this problem, but the reality was I didn’t. Yes, I could create a HTML web page, but how does someone simple include it in an email? Finding the solution to a problem such as this often lacks scientific method, but rather tends to be a process of elimination. Text books; colleagues; Google. After the first two methods failed, a Google search was conducted. There are plenty of commercial email newsletter clients available, but this was not the solution required. Eventually a (self proclaimed)  ‘expert’ was found on About.com Linda’s Personal Web Pages Blog - By Linda Roeder, About.com Guide to Personal Web Pages since 1998. Despite the claim ‘Creating an HTML fomatted newsletter has never been easier’, the answer did not please most readers of the blog. They included:-

link for tool doesn’t work…Is there a way to put in the actual html? I’ve already made the email in an html    editor now I want to send it. It uses tables and stuff to look more pro and I really don’t think I could make this with the crappy gmail editor.This isn’t really HTML at all, it’s just Rich Text Formatting.I found this blog thinking I could find a way to create my own HTML    formatted email “stationery” but I guess not.

Clearly this was not the solution most of the blog readers were looking for. And there was some obligatory SPAM:-

The best russian site here! http://km.ru Plese visit our site!

But then comment 15 was :-

Hi..! to compose a mail with your own html formatting1-> compose you mail, using any html editor, save file as .html2-> open .html file with Firefox or IE3-> select Edit>Select all or Ctrl+A to select all of your messages.4-> paste in compose window gmail. Voila!ps: Not working in IE? Get rid of IE asap, switch to Firefox. IE sucks!

A community solution was found, and general feelings were reflected in the following comments:-

 Thanks Linda for putting up the article. Thanks Nostalgia, for giving such and effective and easy solution @NOSTALGIA thaaaaaaaaaaank yooooouuuuu such a simple point, but no one else was saying it!

I recently had an irate senior lecturer say to me ‘are you suggesting that we should allow students opinions to challenge our own, or that they should be allowed to contribute course content and design their own learning?’ Yes, right in one. That is, pretty much was what I was suggesting.

Tags: communities of practice, learning communities, social networking

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 at 8:23 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.