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Debating a sermon about online facilitation in the late night show

Mar 3rd, 2010
by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner.
2 comments

I love conference recordings especially of conferences which I could not attend. Thus, I am very grateful to the conference organizers who decide to record their (keynote) events and make the recordings available to the general public. Such a recent event was eLearning 2010 (#ITC10), the conference of the Instructional Technology Council in Fort Worth, 20-23 February 2010.

The speaker line-up was excellent: Nancy White, Jim Groom, and Jared Stein among others. I particularly liked the following:

  • Nancy White with “Online Facilitation 14 Years On: Where are we headed?”
  • Jim Groom with “A Sermon: ‘For Who Hath Despised the Day of Small Things?’”
  • John Krutsch Sr. and Jared Stein with “Late Night Learning LIVE!”
  • Carol Spalding and Paul Harrat debating “Colleges Must Monitor Student Social Networking”

Nancy White and Jim Groom did not only have well-thought out arguments, but also presented them in a very engaging and funny way. Where have you ever won chocolate, books or a bottle of wine at a keynote (Nancy White)? Or has a sermon about social media tools been more compelling than Jim Groom’s rendition? Just these two examples show that keynotes do not have to follow the standard set-up, but could and should depart from them. Of course, it helps when the speaker has a great sense of humor and can respond on their toes.

Jared Stein’s and Marc Hugentobler’s “Late Night Learning LIVE!” touched upon current learning issues with a sarcastic, ironic, humorous tone, interspersed with ads that drove home their points very well.

Carol Spalding and Paul Harrat argued about monitoring student social networking in a friendly though thoroughly researched debate in which the moderator, Michael Catchpole, who has a knack for making people laugh, watched over their allotted times because they could have debated for much longer.

If I had to choose the keynote that I liked best from the recorded events that I watched, I’d definitely go with Nancy White’s presentation. She presented the history of online facilitation, what has changed over the years, and what needs to be done in the future along with a very personal style of presenting that kept me attentive the entire time, and she also tested a couple of new presenter tools incorporating her own learning in real-time.

History & Future of of Online Facilitation

View more presentations from Nancy White.

Posted in: conference, edtech, social media.
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imMEDIAte TEACHing goes on

Mar 2nd, 2010
by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner.
No comments yet

From 25-27 February 2010 I was at the AKS-Tagung in Bochum, Germany. I was invited to give a brief presentation on the project “imMEDIAte TEACHing” for which I had worked at LMU München a few years ago. In particular, the organizers of the workshop “Lifelong learning also for language teachers?!” were interested in our concept for a language teacher training program.

These are the slides that I used for the presentation. More details can be found in the “notes” section below the slides directly on the slideshare web site. They should make it a bit easier to understand the presentation. If you cannot see the embedded presentation, view it here.

Das Weiterbildungskonzept von imMEDIAte TEACHing

I liked the new concept of this conference very much. Everybody had to choose one specific workshop in which s/he stayed the entire time. No “workshop hopping” as is so frequent at other conferences. Thus, the workshop participants could get to know each other better and could really discuss the proposed issues over the three conference days. We had 4 ca. 15-minute presentations and the rest of the time for discussions and group work.

At the end we were very pressed for time to generate a presentation of our workshop results. Luckily, our workshop organizers, Sigrid Behrent (University of Paderborn) and Gunter Lorenz (University of Erlangen-Nürnberg) had already categorized most of the results the previous night. It was too bad that there was only little time to view the results of the other workshops. If this conference concept is continued, I would prefer to have a specific time slot for brief summaries from the workshops besides the slides or posters because then these could be put into context better, and it would be possible to see the connections between the individual workshops more clearly.

The biggest results from the workshop for me are the following:

  • Continuously training language teachers is necessary (nothing new there) and is done differently at individual institutions. Some have in-house workshops, others organize external trainers, others have a mix, but many do not have any scheme in place.
  • Sharing resources and workshop facilitators between language centers will help to offer a wide range of workshops. Language centers should try to pool their resources and see if they can profit from their respective expertise.
  • Any training program should be accredited to command respectability and offer real value to the participants for future employment (especially for freelance teachers) and professional development in general. Other professions already have such certificates – why not language teachers in higher education in Germany?
  • The idea behind “imMEDIAte TEACHing” is still current and provides a good ground for discussions to venture off to new grounds.
  • We have set up the AKS-NetworkING space where the discussions can be continued, resources shared, etc. The conference was just the start for the actual work.

Posted in: conference.
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Losing the monopoly

Mar 2nd, 2010
by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner.
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A few days ago I learned that this building will be torn down soon.

Delhaize, the Belgian supermarket chain that currently resides in this building will tear it down to construct a new one. Though the old name of the store was not taken down when Delhaize moved in, this supermarket chain did not have the monopoly anymore as other supermarkets are also present.

The name of the former store "Monopol" (Monopoly) was telling: no competitors. This reminds me a bit of the “good ol’ GDR times” just in the capitalist west. ;-)

Not the monopoly anymore

Not the monopoly anymore

Posted in: miscellaneous.
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Making of my jewelry tree

Dec 29th, 2009
by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner.
6 comments

Knots, bends, entangled strands – it had to end.

That’s what I thought when I took a good look at my necklaces a couple of weeks ago. I remembered that something like a jewelry / necklace stand / tree existed and searched the web to find some answers. All commercial ones looked kind of unstable, did not have much space for the jewelry, were too short / small / tall, or were not to my taste. I also ran across a Swiss artist’s (Reto Baumann) interpretation of a jewelry tree.

That’s when I decided to make my own. I was going home for Christmas where I knew I would have a workshop, my dad still had tons of wood to choose from, and I would have all the tools I needed. I had called ahead to ask if he had any suggestions for the material of the “branches” as they needed to be made of some metal that could be bend easily but not too easily.

When I was at home, my dad and I looked for a nice piece of wood. We eventually found a piece of locust that would work perfectly. My dad used a big electric saw to shape it nicely. Then we sanded it lightly to bring out the texture.

We had a good collection of rods from 2 mm to 7 mm thick in my dad’s workshop. I chose brass rods of 3 mm that are used for welding because they were flexible enough to be bent without problems, but sturdy enough to keep from changing their shape if something was draped over them. The length of the individual rods we decided on was 0.5 m with one longer one of 0.6 m and a shorter one of only 0.4 m. Altogether I had 10 rods to bend. I used tongs for the bending process while keeping the rod immobilized in a bench vise. I also used some steel wool to put a shine on the rods.

After I finished the bending, I drilled 10 holes into my wooden base and varnished it twice. Twice because the “hair” of the wood would stand up after the first coat of varnish. Thus, I had to apply some strokes with the steel wool and could varnish a second time. The diameter of the holes was the same as the rods which allows me to avoid having to glue the rods into the wooden base unless necessary. Currently, only one rod moves around a bit. The others are pretty tight. Furthermore, having the rods a bit mobile, I can change their position. I already realized that I should have drilled the holes a bit closer to the white rim (I could only drill within the brown center) to set them further apart. When I put the rods in the wood for the first time, I had to re-bend a couple of them a bit, but that was also to their advantage. :-)

Here is my jewelry tree, my Xmas gift to myself:

Jewelry tree made out of locust wood and brass rods

Jewelry tree made out of locust wood and brass rods

And the tree in action:

My jewelry tree with my necklaces

My jewelry tree with most of my necklaces

Posted in: miscellaneous.
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TechLunch 2009 and 2010

Dec 19th, 2009
by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner.
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On October 9, 2009, Bob Reuter and I held our first TechLunch on Campus Walferdange (Faculty of Language and Literature, Humanities, Arts and Education – FLSHASE) of the University of Luxembourg. We had initiated this informal lunchtime session to give students, teachers, and researchers the opportunity to learn about digital technologies in a relaxed setting. Often, people at university do not have a lot of time to participate in workshops. Furthermore, 3- or 4-hour workshops are not always the right format to whet the appetite for a topic. To get people interested in something, we thought that a shorter session could be more beneficial. Participants would not have to invest much because they could eat their lunch at the same time. Thus, TechLunch war born.

We planned to hold it approximately twice a month also depending a bit on the internship schedule of the BScE (Bachelor in Educational Sciences) students who are a primary target group for us as we are both involved in that study program. However, we also welcome anybody else from the university, i.e. students, researchers, teachers, and staff from all 3 campuses, to join us. We have had 4 sessions up to now with 4 to 12 participants. All sessions are video recorded and uploaded to YouTube in case anybody who could not attend the sessions wanted to review them.

Although we are happy that anybody shows up, we would, of course, like to have a larger audience.

TechLunch survey

We set up a questionnaire to find out what further topics would be interesting to our potential audience now that they may have already heard about TechLunch or even attended one. Within the last 4 days we have received 23 responses. Now that everybody is in holiday mood and preparing for the festivities, I do not think that we will receive many more responses, but we will keep the questionnaire open.

Out of these 23 people, 5 had already attended a TechLunch. We also already have a couple of regulars who have come to 2 and 1 already to 3 TechLunches.

TechLunch time

One concern of ours is the time to offer TechLunch. With students not having classes every day, researchers and teachers also being on campus often irregularly, it is very difficult to come up with a time that would suit most. We had opted for Friday 12:00-12:45 p.m., but wanted to see if other times might be more convenient.

Friday does not seem to be too bad, but our preferred time was not among the ones chosen most (only 3 people agreed with that time).

  • 6 participants preferred Friday, 1:00-1:45 p.m.
  • 5 participants opted for Wednesday, 12:30-1:15 p.m.
  • 4 participants each voted for Monday, 1:30-2:15 p.m., and Thursday 1:30-2:15 p.m.

One person suggested to offer a date with several time slots before each TechLunch and see which one is the most popular. In theory that might be a good idea, but bringing in a sign-up process would complicate everything. We had asked people to sign up for the first TechLunch (Zotero for Beginners) because we knew the topic was a favorite for our students, but it generated more emails than people actually came to the session because some could not come in the end and apologized or asked if they could come late etc. Having the sign-up process also feels as if it is something formal whereas we want to keep TechLunch open and just as a gathering to exchange ideas and opinions about using digital technologies for learning, studying, teaching, and researching.

TechLunch topics

Before planning the coming “summer” semester (it starts in mid-February ;-) ), we wanted to get an idea if the topics that Bob and I would offer would also be of interest. We proposed 13 topics:

  • Bookmarking: synchronization and sharing with others
  • Electronic notetaking
  • Advanced features of Zotero
  • Facebook and Twitter
  • Alternatives to PowerPoint
  • Setting up a personalized start page in a browser
  • Mahara [this eportfolio system doubles as social network and is in use in the BScE] as social network
  • Creating cartoons online
  • Open Educational Resources: What’s that?
  • How do I find photos online that I can use?
  • Why should I have a blog?
  • How can I subscribe to online content and view it easily?
  • Password management

Only “Creating cartoons online” got less than 5 votes. Maybe we should have added “… for learning purposes / with kids in the classroom” or something like that. ;-)

The top 3 topics with 14+ votes are:

  • Alternatives to PowerPoint (17)
  • Open Educational Resources (15)
  • Using online images legally (14)
Interest in proposed TechLunch topics

Interest in proposed TechLunch topics

Some people also provided their own suggestions for future TechLunch topics:

  • Troubleshooting common error messages on a Mac (I guess, also Windows computer owners could find some); unfortunately, no examples were provided and also no email address to contact the commenter
  • Chrome OS
  • Cloud Computing
  • Privacy Issues
  • Image, audio and video editing
  • Using Word optimally
  • Google Wave (that was already on our list, but we did not put it forth because it is not out yet for everybody)
  • iTunes U
  • Zotero for beginners (two times)
  • OpenOffice (two times)
  • R as alternative to SPSS
  • SPSS
  • Creating online surveys with tools other than Grafstat
  • Tools for creating handouts (which tools are there? compatibility PC-Mac, preferably free)

We also asked if anybody would be interested in leading a TechLunch. Although up until now we have led all 4 TechLunches that doesn’t mean that that needs to stay that way. We welcome others who want to share their experiences and use of software or online services. Two people were interested in doing just that. Yeah. :-)

Comments in the survey

In the general comment text field we received encouraging comments to keep up with TechLunch. However, we need to make it clear that the language in which TechLunch will be offered will depend partly on the audience. The first posters were in German thus discouraging some people to attend. However, the last two sessions were conducted in English as we had some non-German speakers in them. Thus, we can be flexible, but it must be clear to our audience. Initially, we used German to encourage the BScE students to attend. The language issue is a bit complicated because the University of Luxembourg has three official languages: English, French, and German.

Originally, we intended TechLunch for students, researchers, and teachers. However, administrative staff can also benefit from some of the sessions. Therefore, TechLunch really is for anybody at the university.

Where to go from here?

So how will we continue? Well, the last session for winter semester 2009/10 will be held on January 15 (time to be announced) and we will look into using polls in the classroom and for research. The online service PollEverywhere will be introduced. Then there will be a brief semester break and TechLunch will be back in summer semester 2010. We will come up with a schedule and take all the topic suggestions as well as preferred times into account to allow more people to join us.

Posted in: edtech, university.
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