Casting Out Nines

In this post, I put forth three questions that are good for creating a little objective distance between you and that shiny new technology you saw at the conference are MUST HAVE in your classroom. On the plane to San Antonio, I was thumbing through the SkyMall catalog and found another question to add in to that mix. It was inspired by this:

This is the “Learning Tower and Playset”. As you can see, it’s intended for kids to climb, so they can get up and see what’s happening on a table or countertop that’s normally too high for them. It also doubles as a playset; the platform that the child stands on can be removed and the kid can get inside it, and there are accessories that come with it so the child can use it as a puppet show theater or a make-believe drive-through window.

This product, like the technology we teachers use and think about using, does solve certain problems. My kids love to get up on a chair or stool and watch me cook and sometimes help me cook. But chairs and stools can be unstable, especially given that kids tend to lean over when they are looking at or reaching for stuff on a countertop. Both of my girls have fallen off whatever they were standing on for this very reason. So the Learning Tower solves the problem by giving the child a stable platform with a big base and a sort of enclosure at the top to prevent the child from falling off.

But this product also creates problems as well. The base of this thing is two feet square. That doesn’t sound very big, but that is an enormous chunk of real estate in my kitchen. Even the stepstool that L often uses, which is maybe 12 inches by 10 inches, seems to get under my feet at the worst possible moment all the time. I can’t imagine putting a playset in the kitchen.

So that’s the fourth question to ask when evaluating new technology:

• What problems does this technology create?

And rest assured, every technology creates problems. Take something like Maple, for instance. It’s a hugely useful tool that solves many problems for math students and mathematicians. But it also creates problems. We have to train students, and ourselves, to use it. We have to put up with network installs that never seem to work. We have to think about where the money is coming from to pay for it and maintain our license. And so on. Even the computer itself creates problems, not the least of which is the environmental problem created when the computer is manufactured.

So it seems that to evaluate a new technology, you have to look at a sum balance given by the usefulness of the technology in solving an existing problem, minus the redundancy that technology has with other existing technologies AND the minus the extent to which the technology creates new problems. You’ll never have a problem-free technology, so the question is whether, on balance, the technology solves more problems than it creates is really the key.

I might corner one of the exhibitors here at the ICTCM and ask her/him all four of those questions; a vendor who gives a straight answer to the fourth question might well be worth doing business with.

As you can see in this photo, I made it safe and sound to San Antonio and the ICTCM. The image here is the ICTCM logo being projected on to the floor of the lobby. I guess that makes more of a splash than just putting the names of the groups who are meeting on a board somewhere.

Except for a 90-minute delay in Detroit for a mechanical problem, the trip here was uneventful.  That’s something of a big deal for me, since I am breaking a ten-year long boycott of Northwest Airlines on this trip. The last time I flew NWA was in 1997 when I was interviewing for jobs, and I had to make three trips on NWA. Every leg of each trip encountered a delay of at least two hours. But this time around it was pretty smooth sailing. The pilot even managed somehow to make up 30 minutes of lost time while in the air.

All I have done since getting in to the hotel is check in, get my conference packet, go roaming for fast food, and plan my schedule out. The hotel here is connected directly to the famous San Antonio Riverwalk, and while looking for dinner, I exited the hotel directly into these scenes (click to enlarge):

…which were accompanied by the heavenly smells of the Southwestern fare of the riverwalk restaurants. I’ll be lucky to escape here having only gained a dozen or so pounds.

As for the conference itself, it will be a busy and informative couple of days. Tomorrow we have the keynote address from Frank Hughes on “Real-time virtual environments for teaching mathematics” which sounds like it’s going to be about immersive, virtual-reality-type technology for teaching mathematics. That sounds interesting, and strangely enough this is exactly something that one of my linear algebra students was telling me he hoped I would see while I was here.  Then I will have my Camtasia workshop, followed by my contributed paper session talk at 1:10. Then at 2:10 there’s a contributed paper on a first-year mathematics course on mathematical experiementation; then a session on Octave; then a session on how to choose an online homework delivery system; then a session on something called symbolic geometry software which is supposed to be a hybrid of a computer algebra system and dynamic geoemtry software.

And that’s just Friday, and only a very small sample of the great variety of stuff being presented here. Saturday is just as busy, and I’ll talk about that tomorrow. As the Riverwalk is a feast for the smells and tastes of food lovers, the ICTCM promises to be a feast for the creativity and ideas of people who are passionate about teaching and technology.

At various points throughout tomorrow and Saturday, I’ll have chances to go to the exhibit hall as well. Although I have to say I am a little disappointed, because evidently there are fewer than 20 exhibitors in all here. I was expecting something like at the Joint Meetings where the entire convention center floor is wall-to-wall exhibitors. At least this will allow me to get some face time with each one, and who knows, maybe even some impromptu video interviews.

Unfortunately, the internet access at this hotel is not wireless except in the lobby, which means that I will only be able to post when I am back in the room. I will publish some of the posts on a delay to spread them out during the day, but they won’t all be in real time. I will refrain now from the rant I so desperately want to give against the Marriott hotel here — which advertises high-speed internet but charges you $10 a day to have it. Come on Marriott, what would it cost you to set up a few wireless routers and offer net access to guests?

Anyway, stay tuned for more.

Tomorrow is a travel day as I fly down to San Antonio for the ICTCM. I’m leaving from Indy around 11:00 AM and am supposed to (!) arrive around 4:30. All I  plan to do tomorrow is travel, check in to the hotel, and maybe grab a  program and plan my schedule for the conference. Given that my most recent airline experience was sheer hell, I’ve learned not to plan too much on a travel day since a “day” can end up being about 40 hours long.

I’m excited about the conference, especially at the prospect of meeting some of the folks I’ve been blogging with for years and at learning lots of cool new things. But I don’t look forward to missing my wife and kids. I don’t travel much, so it’s not easy for the girls (ages 2 and 4) when I’m gone for a few days. P, our 2-year old, is picking up speaking English very rapidly these days, and tonight she looked up at my wife and said — clear as day — “Miss daddy!” It’s a reminder that despite the reimbursements for travel and hotel that I’m getting from my college, there is still a cost involved in going to these conferences, and it’s up to me to make it worth that cost.

I hope to check in with another post once I’m there tomorrow, but I’m not planning on blogging until then. However, you can follow me on Twitter for more regular (if less substantive) updates. Yes, I know I just bashed Twitter addicts and yet there I am using it.

Glad you asked. Pretty well, all things considered. My talk, having the catchy (?) title of “A Tale of Two Wikis”, is about creativity in upper-level math courses and how I used wikis to facilitate collaboration on creative projects in two of my upper-level courses. It’s a subject I enjoy talking about, and I enjoy showing off the wikis that my students made in those courses. But that’s something of a problem now, since I only have a 15-minute time slot to work with, and only 10 of those minutes can be taken up with an actual talk.

Yesterday I had a practice run through my talk with a few of my colleagues present. It took me 12 minutes to get through the entire talk, but I lost about a minute because I had forgotten to sign into my Wikispaces account prior to showing how the wiki-authoring process worked. So modulo that glitch, I think I’m actually OK time-wise. The only other issue with the talk was that one graphic — a full-color graphic of Bloom’s Taxonomy with text labels on each stage — looked fine on my laptop monitor but was illegible on the projector screen. (Black text on dark red and orange background.) So I need either to redo that graphic myself and fix the legibility, or else just plan on reading the text labels.

Now begins the preparation for the presentation itself, which is basically centered around having a Plan B, C, D, …, Z just in case Plan A (= show the presentation off my laptop using Keynote, a wireless internet connection, and an LCD projector) fails when I get up in front of the audience. My contingency preparations include:

• Having transparencies of my Keynote slides.
• Having PDF’s of my Keynote slides available on a CD.
• Having PDF’s of my Keynote slides available on a flash drive in case CD fails.
• Having Power Point versions of my Keynote slides available on Google Presentations in case the internet works by my hardware doesn’t. (Yeah, that’s unlikely.)
• Having Quicktime versions of the walkthrough of my student wikis in case internet doesn’t work.
• Having electronic copies of the slides, the movies, and the handouts for the talk in an email on GMail.

Basically I have been through so many presentations that turned into disasters because some piece of technology didn’t work, that I now plan for any talk, no matter how simple or short, as if all the possible outcomes are equally likely. Paranoia: It’s not just for breakfast anymore!

One thing that is sure to happen at the ICTCM later this week is that I will be inundated with tech stuff (from the exhibit hall) and ideas about using tech stuff (from sessions and workshops) in my teaching. Of course it’s good, clean fun to play around with tech stuff, and it’s good to come into contact with other people who are passionate about technology in teaching and with their ideas. But there’s a danger here as well: You might get so swept up in the zeitgeist of the conference that you begin to uncritically adopt all kinds of tech stuff and tech ideas for inclusion in your classroom without really evaluating it.

So when I am at the conference, there are three basic questions that I will ask whenever encounter tech stuff or ideas. They are the same questions I have asked for years about technology, whether that technology is for education, entertainment, home improvement, or whatever:

1. What does this technology do?
   
2. What problem does this technology solve?
   
3. What technology currently exists to solve this problem, and in what sense is this product an improvement over the existing technology?

This series of questions has, in the past, provided me with a buffer of objective distance from interesting-looking tech and forced me to think critically about things I see, rather than just snapping up whatever looks cool or interesting and blindly moving forward with it in my classes. Forcing yourself to see new technology from a problem-solving point of view is a pretty good exercise in general.

I daresay that there are a lot of edubloggers out there that could stand a little more objectivity and critical thinking in how they approach technology; sometimes ed-tech blogs put off a sort of glassy-eyed cult-like aura, like the blogger wants nothing than for you to drink the Kool-Aid of the latest read/write Web 2.0 social network/digital storytelling thing they just spent 36 hours deconstructing. (I think the delusion about digital natives arises mainly as a product of the haze of one’s own unbridled indulgence in educational tech. Spend enough hours wasting time on Twitter and you can convince yourself that 24/7 sharing of personal acts and information is actually normative.)

If a technology product I am considering cannot be described easily in terms of its basic functionality, or if it is not in place to solve a clearly-defined problem, or if it does not improve significantly upon existing technology whose functionality is well-defined and which solves a clearly-defined problem, then most likely it’s not going to make me be more productive or my students learn better.

I think these questions actually originated with Wendell Berry, not somebody you’d normally associate with the ed-tech stormtroopers in the blogosphere. He’s something of a Luddite, I know, but an intelligent one and a person whose caution with new technologies I have always admired.

The Wired Campus is running a series of articles on using Twitter, the popular micro-blogging platform, as a classroom tool. Here’s the first article (interesting stuff in the comments there), and here’s a followup with a short video from a Twittering professor. And here’s a more lengthy article from Chronicle.com.

Twitter does appear to provide good backchannel discussion opportunities for those who are motivated to use it productively, and as a corollary there are some interesting out-of-classroom student interaction possibilities there. But my experience with any form of online communication is that students like it if they are pushing the information to people of their choosing (such as IM) but not if class stuff is being pushed to them (such as Twitter or even regular email). Control of information is a really big issue with students, and it profoundly creeps them out sometimes when professors presume to include them in backchannel conversations about class.

On Thursday I’ll be heading south, out of the deep freeze of late winter in Indiana to lovely San Antonio, TX for the International Conference on Technology in Collegiate Mathematics (ICTCM). This is my first time to an ICTCM, and I’m genuinely excited about going. (Which is something I can’t say about very many conferences I have attended.)

I’ll be giving a talk at 1:10 on Friday about some stuff that I have been doing with wikis in my upper-division classes lately and about the potential role of wikis in advanced math courses in general. Of course, my talk’s time slot is only 15 minutes long, and they tell me the talk should really only be 10 minutes long, so my talk is going to be more of a conversation-starter (at least I hope so) than it is anything nearly comprehensive .

Earlier on Friday, I’ll be attending a workshop on Camtasia, which I am considering as a replacement for Snapz Pro X as my screencasting software. I’ll have more to say about screencasting and screencasting software a little later. It turns out that our IT department at the college use Camtasia to do tutorial videos, and they apparently like it very much.

And apart from those two things, which constitute sort of the official reason I am going to the ICTCM, there will be lots of other fun stuff happening. For one, I’ll be meeting up with other edubloggers — notably Maria Anderson from Teaching College Math Technology Blog and Scott Franklin from Natural Blogarithms. If you’re reading this and will be there with nothing to do Friday night, join us in the lobby of the hotel and have dinner and hang out.

Also, since the Camtasia workshop and my talk all happen between 10:30 and 1:30 on Friday, the entire rest of the conference is wide open for me to attend other stuff. They haven’t posted the full schedule at the ICTCM web site yet, but the 45-minute workshops look pretty interesting, and there ought to be a huge diversity of short talks like mine. And don’t forget the vendor exhibits, which are always among the coolest things at math conferences.

In the spirit of educational technology, blogging, math, and all the other stuff that makes Casting Out Nines more or less what it is, I’ll be blogging the conference as I go, including photos and video (hopefully; I’m taking the camera, at least). You never know exactly how much down time you’ll have at a conference, but I hope to keep a steady stream of posts coming from Thursday through Saturday.

As I told my linear algebra class yesterday, this is not only a math conference but a technology conference too — so this is the sanctum sanctorum of geekhood. Don’t you want to be along for the ride?

I just made this flowchart for the Calculus Preparation lesson coming up next Monday, which is on how to model nonlinear data. Click to enlarge:

I <heart> OmniGraffle. It’s one of my top ten e-learning tools for good reason.
The PDF version of this is in my Box.net widget — go to the sidebar and scroll down. Feel free to download and use/share.

I’m pretty busy right now with writing, administering, and grading midterms — so blogging is light for a day or so more. However, given the recent posts and traffic about course management systems, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind answer a few questions down in the comments area. 

1. Teachers: What do you need a course management system to do? What functionality do you consider essential?
2. Teachers: What are the best ways for a course management system to help make your job of managing a course easy?  
3. Students: Same questions as #1 and #2. 
4. Current CMS software users: What are the three features of your CMS that are the most essential? If you could change three things about the way your CMS works, what would they be and what would you rather have? 

This afternoon I finally reached the limit of my patience with Angel. The details are unimportant (but revolve around the patently stupid refusal of Angel to automate tasks for multiple sections of the same course). Just suffice to say that I spent a good portion of the last half hour seriously investigating ways to declare independence from Angel and all other proprietary CMS’s.

I came up with two possible options.

Option 1 is to use Wikispaces to make a course wiki, containing pages for different content. Wikispaces allows the posting of files, too, with a pretty generous 2 GB storage limit and no limit on bandwidth. So it would be easy to use the wiki as a glorified file server, which is pretty much all I need from a course web site. Use a basic email client as I discussed at length here to handle communications. Each page has a discussion section attached to it to allow for integrated discussion “boards”.

Pros: I know Wikispaces pretty well, having done three wikis through them already. Pages are easy to manipulate and are fully text-searchable. Everything is in one place and there is a simple URL to access it. No functionality is duplicated as with Angel and its execrable “email” system. Also, Wikispaces handles native LaTeX typesetting. And there’s an RSS feed for every page to help students keep up. Cons: File management on Angel is kind of a pain. And despite the whole digital native hoopla, most students and faculty I know have no clue about RSS, which would mean somebody would have to get them to use it. Finally, wikis do not have a native hierarchical structure — they are pretty nonlinear by nature, and that can be confusing to people used to top-down designed web sites.

Option 2 is to create a Google Group for the course. I had not used Google Groups before today, and I was impressed when I looked around. There’s obviously the nice discussion board feature, along with rudimentary wiki functionality and customizable structure — you can make a “page” for anything and it shows up as a tab in the main view. I’m not sure how well-integrated it is with Google Docs, Spreadsheets, etc. but it seems like those connections ought to be easy and strong. Not a lot of file space at just 100 MB, but perhaps I could keep the “freshest” 100 MB of stuff on the Group page and archive the rest at a Box.net account for the class.

Pros: Nice look and feel, intuitive, well-connected. RSS feeds available as well as the ability to connect/post to the group via email and mobile phone. Cons: No LaTeX; only 100 MB of file space; more structure means fewer options.

There is an option 3, which is to create a WordPress.com blog for the course and construct pages for everything that is static in nature (syllabus page, files, etc.). But WordPress.com only gives 50 MB of file space which is too restrictive for this purpose. It could possibly be done if I wanted to use Box.net for file sharing, which would be easy since WordPress.com blogs have a Box.net widget available for the sidebar. (I’ve got one off to your right, down a ways.)

In all these options, I would keep Angel around only for the online gradebook — which still sucks for reasons I haven’t elaborated on here (yet), but which students understandably appreciate. If I could find a good workaround for a secure online gradebook, I’d ditch Angel entirely.

Anybody have thoughts or experiences in this kind of thing?