Old Media: field trips, museum visits, study abroad ...
Lesson 7: Virtual Online Experiences
Live Streaming & Conferencing
Live Streaming and live conferencing tools create a virtual teaching and learning experience for students that vary in effectiveness depending on the subject and teacher. Literature reference: Maor (2003)I use Zoom for client training in my freelance business, my undergraduate teaching courses, and my master degree courses.
Zoom is extremely effective for teaching technology in my Tools for Information Literacy Recitation at UNC. I find the quality to exceed residence education and is not polemical in the slightest. These are concerns raised by Larreamendy-Joerns (2006): “Quality is a polemical issue because definitions vary greatly and because untested assumptions easily get in the way of fair judgments. Since the inception of correspondence study, classroom instruction has been the standard to match. Consequently, advocates of distance education were expected to demonstrate that distance teaching and learning were at least as good as residence education.”
Since this paper is from 14 years ago, many of the problems in distance learing have been ameliorated by newer technology and widescale adoption due to the Covid-19 crisis.Below is a description of how my class has been improved via distance learning.
Here is a link to a recording (asynchronous) of a live (synchronous) zoom class from Spring 2020. I used it in Fall 2020 as a flipped (asynchronous) introduction that students could view before we met for the synchronous fall class.
Students that were unable to make the class could use either the recorded video from Spring 2020 or the recorded video from Fall 2020 to complete the Spreadsheet project. This provided opportunites for getting the work done before class, before class and during class, or just during class, or after class. Before I began teaching this class online, I never recorded the class and this resulted in a tremendous amount of extra work as student sometimes miss class, especially athletes. In Spring 2019 I had two baseball players and four wrestlers that missed several weeks. Zoom recordings have significantly reduced my office hours and given student-athletes much more flexibility to get help at times that are most convenient to them.
Field Trips
virtual.
Having the efficacy without the sensible or material part.
—Johnson's Dictionary, 1755.
Appropriate virtual experiences on the web have efficacy, which means they produce a desired or intended result as well as (or maybe even better than) the “sensible or material” experience.
An actual, well-produced, video of a real field trip can provide a deeply immersive experience. In the case of this video of how a model Gutenberg printing press works, you can see that the video has closed-captioning included. For a non-native english speaker who can understand better by reading than they can by hearing, the text-added experience may have more efficacy than the original experience had they been there in person. Also, since it is a recording, it can be paused and replayed. It can also be shared widely, as I am doing now in this web page.
Guest Speakers
People the world over can learn about the potential of online education from an expert speaker in Glasgow Scotland via TEDx talks. In this recording George Greenbury explored the future of education and how we can use online education to address global educational inequalities: Schools without classrooms: the potential of online education and how to fulfil it
Social Media
Prior to taking EAC 539, I was very much opposed to integrating social media into my undergraduate recitation. The Online Learning class forced me to address this important issue. Davis et al.(2013), addresses the perils of social media but also the many benefits: "As digital natives flood colleges and universities, they bring with them an increasingly high demand for socially engaging information from their institutions" (p. 19).
This passage captured my attention as I am in my late 50s and can identify as and "actor" in the passage: Actors within postsecondary institutions are challenged to not only understand the aforementioned perils of SMT, but also to consider its promise to affect change". I cannot ignore SMT and must learn to work more effectively with digital natives. Activities