Carol Gering

I admit it: I love Cool Iris. It’s just so elegant and beautiful.

If you’re unfamiliar with Cool Iris, it’s a browser plugin that currently works with Firefox (Windows XP/Vista, Mac, and Linux), Internet Explorer, Safari (Mac) and Flock. It allows you to preview images and video on an “infinite wall” and then enlarge any that catch your eye. The interface is an approximation of scrolling through items on an iPhone. A key benefit is the speed with which you can sort through a large quantity of images and enlarge specific images—much faster, for example, than clicking through sequential photo pages on Flickr.

Web sites have to be enabled to work with Cool Iris (examples of enabled sites are Flickr, Hulu, Facebook, Google Images, YouTube), but you can also use Cool Iris to view images on your own computer.

As enamored as I am with the interface, it hadn’t yet occurred to me that one might use it as a presentation tool…until I followed a link from Chris Lott’s blog to the Open Ed Conference presentation by Alan Levine.  What a great idea! This could be useful in either my digital photography class or my desktop publishing class when I’m lecturing on elements of design or composition. Besides being significantly faster than the media tools I normally use for presentation, it will let me easily jump from image to image rather than (only) viewing them sequentially. I’m excited to give it a try!

I was fortunate to participate in the National Education Computing Conference (NECC) at the end of June. As to be expected, the sessions I attended were a mixed bag—some useful and informative, others not so much. The most practical session I attended was a 3-hour lab on Delivering Curriculum and Building Portfolios with Acrobat PDFs. I’m looking forward to more experimentation with Acrobat Portfolios! In the meantime, here’s a quick tip that I learned…

Acrobat Professional comes with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) built in! Amazing… and why didn’t I know that before?!

Here’s how it works:

1. open a pdf document
2. from the Document menu, select OCR text recognition > recognize text using OCR
3. choose the page range you want to read and click OK

You get a series of slider bars that indicate activity, and then…nothing. At least, nothing apparent.

1. go to File > Export > Word Document
2. save the file

Voila! When you open the file using MS Word, you’ll see the OCR results. In the simple test I did, it seemed to work pretty well. Note that you can also export from pdf to a word document without doing optical character recognition, but you only get an image of the page rather than editable text.

I just came across an Open Education Resource that I think may be especially valuable. Teachers’ Domain is an online repository of media resources for educational use, gathered primarily from public television. There are three editions of the site: K-12, college, and an edition specific to New York State educators. The college edition has a number of resources for Science, as well as Engineering and Technology. The K-12 edition has many more resources available than the college edition, but some of the movies for grade 12 could also be applicable for developmental studies and 100-level courses. There is also a “special collections” area that includes—among other things— an Alaska Native Perspectives on Earth and Climate. You may need to create an account to access some of the content.

You’ll want to note the license agreement for any resources you use. As typical with OERs, the licenses range from link and view only, to remix and share with attribution.

Major funding for the site was provided by the National Science Foundation.

The Instructional Design Center (IDC) at University of Alaska Southeast Sikta (UAS) in collaboration with the Center for Distance Education (CDE) at University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) offered the first annual iTeach² (advanced) workshop for UA faculty last week. By all accounts, it was a successful and productive week! Heidi Olson and I represented CDE as instructors and facilitators, joined by Mary Purvis, Susie Feero, and Maureen O’Halloran of UAS. We met on the Sitka campus. Chris Lott delivered the keynote from Fairbanks.

iTeach² was a great opportunity to collaborate with instructional designers and educators from other campuses. I came away from the week with several new links and ideas. Two ideas in particular stand out:

1. Keep a journal of each course taught. This is such an obvious idea…but I’d never thought of it! I always tweak courses each time I offer them, based on successes and failures of the previous semester, but I just never thought about keeping a journal as I’m teaching.
2. The spreadsheet application in Google Docs allows you to generate a form for students to complete. The link to the form can be pasted into Blackboard; as students submit their data on the form, it populates the spreadsheet. The results can then be shared back to students as a graph or chart. In effect, each student sees a form for data entry and the cumulative class data—with or without ever seeing the spreadsheet that generated the chart.

I finally got around to purchasing a couple of rolls of seamless paper to use as photography backgrounds. Let me just say that getting them delivered to Fairbanks was painful (mostly due to the cost!). After shopping around and finding the prices from all vendors very comparable, I ordered from B & H. The paper comes in a large roll—9 feet wide—with a length of 36 feet. The cost is $43.99 per roll, and shipping it to Fairbanks is $40 per roll (no significant discount for purchasing more than one roll and shipping them together).

In response to the sticker shock for shipping, I opted to build a homemade stand rather than purchasing one.

Here are my first results:

I should mention that even with the white background paper and good lighting it still takes me about 30 minutes in Photoshop to create a perfectly isolated image.

Inside Higher Ed featured an article today on the strategies used by University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) to deal with failure in gateway courses like developmental math. There were a number of similarities with our situation, including university focus on access rather than exclusivity (demonstrated by a high acceptance rate for applicants). According to the article, UTEP has determined that their current structure for developmental ed isn’t working well, so they’re exploring new strategies to improve student success.

Highlighted efforts include increased interaction with high schools, six-hour refresher sessions held immediately prior to placement exams, and free access to ALEKS (computer-based math exercises that the Math Department at UAF uses for many courses). Their goal is to divert students from enrolling unnecessarily in developmental courses. Among other motivations (like decreased funding), one rationale seems to be that the stigma of developmental placement negatively impacts student success.

This is particularly interesting to me in light of our recent decision to create an open courseware version of developmental math—with the stated goal of providing student practice and avoiding the stigma that might be associated with failure in a a credit-bearing course.

A month ago (can it really be that long???) I posted an idea for pre-grading sheets. I’ve now used the technique for two different project assignments and am ready to share my reflections on this method.

Did it save me time?

This was my original intent. I can confidently report that it has helped to streamline my grading on large projects. It’s not foolproof and I still have to spot check for common problems (your pre-grading sheet says you used spell check, so why do I see 23 spelling errors when I run a spell check?), but it definitely helps me to locate problems more quickly. As a side benefit, it quickly clues me in to places where students misunderstood vocabulary or tasks associated with the assignment. For example, I found that some students couldn’t tell me what leading they used for body text because they either didn’t understand the term leading, or because they didn’t know how to identify it in the software application. I would never have discovered that by looking at their completed projects.

Did it improve the quality of their projects?

Absolutely! As Heidi commented on my earlier post, I created some pieces of the pre-grading sheet as a guideline. For example, I included a checklist of the required elements of the project and asked them to check off all the things they included. While I’ve always listed the required elements of project assignments, the act of checking items off on the pre-grading sheet seemed to help students be more thorough. It also provided a subtle reminder (or hint) about aesthetic qualities that I consider important.

Did it help students think more critically about their own work?

I believe it did. Further, it was enlightening to find out what they thought they did well on, what they would do differently next time, and what they felt they had learned while completing the project. This provided another feedback loop for me—to discover what I’m communicating effectively (or not so effectively, as the case may be).

Continuing evolution

The pre-grading sheets have been successful, and I’ll definitely continue using them. One of the things that made project grading difficult and time-consuming for me in the past was the belief that I needed to provide aesthetic feedback on all student assignments. I’ve switched my tactic a bit on that as well. I now show students’ completed projects on screen during class time. This gives an opportunity for classmates—as well as me—to critique the design verbally. I can then focus my written feedback on technical skill. I believe this has improved the quality of feedback as well as my efficiency in grading.

I’m reading a book—new to me, but ten years old—titled Effective Grading: A tool for learning and assessment. I didn’t glean much from the first seven chapters, other than a few new structures for grading rubrics. Midway through the book, however, I’ve come to a chapter on “Making Grading More Time-Efficient” that has sparked some ideas. Of the nine principles listed in this chapter, one really caught my attention: Use what the student knows. I plan to try it in my Desktop Publishing class next week.

My primary assessments in the Desktop Publishing course are projects. The next assignment due is a one-page magazine article. These projects are always time-consuming to grade; it takes a while to review each of their computer files to see how they’ve implemented the requirements before writing feedback. As Effective Grading points out, I may be spending a lot of time trying to discover things my students already know. (”I knew I didn’t have that lined up properly” or “I knew I used too many fonts in this design.”)

The strategy I’m about to try is a Pre-Grading sheet that each student will turn in along with their assignment. In addition to saving me time, I hope it will help students learn to self-evaluate more effectively. Seems like an ingenious idea to me—but not all my ideas turn out to be as brilliant as I envision. I’ll let you know how it goes. You can view my pre-grading sheet on Issuu.

I have to admit I haven’t yet spent much time looking into the new features of Adobe CS4 products—that’s on my things-to-do list for next month, when I’m planning to attend Adobe Max 2008. As a preview, however, I’m particularly intrigued by the new features that allow InDesign to export working swf files as well as xfl files (ready to import natively into the Flash authoring environment). This clip from Adobe TV gives a demo. It’s about 30 minutes long, and you have to persevere through a bit of cheesiness at the beginning. (The part where he speaks to plush stuffed toys only lasts for seconds…resist the urge to turn it off there! Seriously.) It’s really a fascinating idea, and I’m looking forward to exploring it further.

Skip Via made an interesting observation in response to my post on Visualizing OpenCourseware:

…the question of who values what seems to loom pretty large in any sort of comparative evaluation of open courseware implementations. If I were looking for a source for open courseware or myself, I don’t think I’d place much value on whether or not the structure of the courseware allowed for an integrated learning community. I’d probably just want to jump in, learn what I need, and get out.

Since the goal of my research project is to create a specific plan of action for CDE’s contribution to OpenCourseware, my calculations are based on the features that CDE deems valuable (as Skip noted). As a byproduct, however, it seems valuable to create artifacts that might be useful to others. I worked up a streamlined spreadsheet that allows users to identify their own values before rating an OpenCourseware course. See the preview here. The spreadsheet is completed in two steps:

1. Read down the column of features and enter a value of 1, 2, or 3 into the first yellow column to signify how important each feature is to you. (Three is high).
2. Locate an OpenCourseware course that you wish to review, and enter 0, 1, or 2 into each row of the second yellow column. Zero indicates that the feature does not exist in the course, 2 indicates that the feature is fully implemented, and 1 represents a partial implementation.

The spreadsheet will calculate the quality of the OCW course based on the criteria you established with your customized value system. If you’d like a copy of the spreadsheet, leave a request in the comment field, or send me an e-mail (carol.gering [at] uaf.edu).

Addressing the question of why CDE values the Community of Learners so highly… well, that’s a topic for another blog post altogether!