The students are getting ready to do some peer evaluations on their recommendation reports (a draft of which is due in class on December 2). In order to help them understand what they need to be looking for, Dr. Northcut (through me) asked the students to evaluate a sample recommendation report submitted by a student in a previous class (from 2007). The students in today’s class session were given the rubric that Dr. Northcut will use to grade their recommendation reports.

Before class (yesterday), I sent out an email to all of the students notifying them of the assignment they would be working on. I also listed some of the objectives for this assignment:

The objectives of this exercise are as follows:

1. Apply the grading criteria that will be used on you
   towards someone else’s sample recommendation report.
2. Perform a truly collaborative task by developing a
   unified document to be submitted to a third party.
3. Work within a time constraint to create a document
   (happens to me ALL THE TIME!).
4. Give you the opportunity to evaluate not only the
   recommendation report but the grading rubric itself. If you see a potential
   difficulty with the rubric, feel free to voice your opinion in your memo–but
   you will need to back up any assertions with a well-reasoned argument!

When the students arrived in class, I asked them if they had received this email. I got a noncommittal response from most of the students. One student flat-out admitted he saw the email but didn’t read it. I wonder if he is going to tell his boss in the real world that he doesn’t read the boss’s emails?

I asked the students to separate themselves into small groups (3-4 people) and prepare a memo analyzing the sample recommendation report in context with the grading rubric they had been given. They had to submit the memo to me via email by the end of the class period. I mostly wandered around the room and made sure they stayed on the task at hand and answered questions about the assignment as best I could.

One group managed to “finish” about 15 minutes before the end of class. Of course, by my own standards, they had barely gotten started, but I think they did make some valid critiques of the sample recommendation report.

Perhaps the most interesting challenge of the day was when a student pulled me aside for a private chat. Apparently he has been having some personal issues that have been affecting his academic performance lately. Of course, I won’t go into any detail here. I am actually quite honored that he respected me enough to share such personal details in confidence, though I am sorry that he is going through a “rough patch” just now. Fortunately, he seemed to get through the class just fine with his fellow group members.

Dealing with a student’s personal problems is not something they really teach you how to deal with as an instructor (as far as I know). I guess we instructors just have to learn to adapt to the changing environment of the classroom. Another student in the class that I am grading papers for (also English 160, though it is a distance course run out of Columbia) has also been having some rough times lately. I don’t know what else to say about that except that students do have lives outside of classroom, so we need to make some adjustments to help them out as best we can without compromising the integrity of the classroom or lowering our grading standards too much.

Fortunately, the difficulties that we encountered last time appear to have been resolved. I came into the classroom earlier today to make sure that all of the machines would allow me to edit a web page. Since the last training session, we’ve experienced one significant technical glitch that has prevented people all over campus (including myself) from editing web pages. Fortunately, there is a really simple workaround, but it does require that the user have administrator rights on a machine. You simply have to delete a file that is put into the Documents and Settings root folder on a machine. After that, Documentum Web Publisher allows you to edit web pages. I’ve been told by our web support administrators that Documentum will be sending us a permanent fix for this problem in the very near future, but not soon enough for my class. So I went to every machine in the classroom and deleted the file in order to get the web page editor to work.

Another wrinkle I encountered while removing the problematic file was that all of the machines needed to have Windows updates applied to them. Our network is set up so that a series of Windows patches are released across campus every month. The machines receive those patches and then reboot themselves at or around 3 p.m. the next day. This can cause a problem when you are trying to teach a class using computers and all of the machines insist on rebooting themselves in the middle of class [users with “admin” privileges can opt to reboot at a later time, but general users are forced to reboot]. Fortunately, I was able to apply the patches to most of the machines and reboot them this morning, so we hopefully will not have that problem this afternoon.

In order to help reduce the amount of clutter on the training web site I requested that all of the content be removed with a very few exceptions. This way the students will have a “clean” environment they can use for uploading content to the training web pages.

Finally, I created a sample web page for them to use. We will hopefully be able to all download content from this web page and recreate the web page within the training environment. I strongly suspect I will see minor (and possibly major) variations of the sample web page, but it will be enough to get them started. The sample web page I will be using will require them to upload a PowerPoint presentation, upload one or more images, create lists, create links to absolute and relative pages/documents, show a pullout, and use a sidebar.

In this teaching attempt (yes, I call them teaching attempts because I really have no effective means of gauging if the students have learned the material), I actually delivered content to the students. That day we discussed recommendation reports. Dr. Northcut again provided me with the content for the course. However, I wasn’t very keen on the color scheme she selected for her slides, so I “dressed them up” a little using Missouri S&T English 160 template that I put together. It worked quite well. I also added a moderate level of sophisticated animation so that the point that I was talking about would stand out from the preceding points (it’s not hard to set this up in PowerPoint–it usually takes less than a minute per slide, depending on how complicated you decide to make the slide).

I also wanted to have some “insurance” against any technical difficulties that might occur with the campus network, so I brought my own laptop and projector to class. As it happened, this turned out quite well because I used the laptop/projector for presenting the content for the course and I used the in-class computer/Smartboard to access Blackboard and show students where the presentation was as well as to bring up the quotes Dr. Northcut recommended I use from her first day of class. This way I could have multiple displays going doing different things and presenting different content. I thought it worked out well (especially since the network behaved itself).

As I went through the presentation, I made continual reference to the textbook for the class, emphasizing that all of the material about recommendation reports is contained therein. I also hammered on the point that they need to work on effective design (chapter 11) as well as the revision process (chapter 8).

All in all, the entire class went pretty well. Unfortunately, I still can’t get them to talk much. This may be the hardest part of teaching is to bring students out of their self-imposed cocoons and actually have a voice in the class. I can’t say that I would be any different in their place, though.

Due to the technical difficulties I experienced last week (there were campus-wide issues with network file storage, preventing people from logging into CLC machines), I decided to bring along some “insurance”. My presentation is currently housed on a tablet PC that I can log into locally if necessary. Furthermore, instead of the Smartboard in the classroom, I am using a projector that I brought from our office in conjunction with a Targus presenter device that allows me to walk around the room and still advance the slides remotely (I love this device!). I did have to shove the Smartboard out of the way of the projection screen. EdTech really needs to upgrade this room, but the funds for the room are provided by a department and the room is not centrally scheduled, to EdTech doesn’t have much say about what equipment is housed here (it’s provided through some grant funding, I believe).

I plan on having Blackboard available on the Smartboard if I want to show the students some quotations from a presentation earlier in the semester (their first day, in fact). I also want to show them where they can find the presentation to review the content, if they desire (I doubt they will, but I like to give them that option).

Dr. Northcut, the regular instructor for the class was kind enough to provide me with the basic slides for the class. However, I didn’t much care for her choice of background color (light purple is just not my color), so I “dressed up” the slides a bit with a Missouri S&T template. Dr. Northcut is more than welcome to use that template for future presentations, of course.

I also added some complexity to the slide transitions to highlight certain aspects of the content.

We shall see how it goes today.  More later (after class).

My original goal was to have the students access the sample progress reports through Blackboard, then, in groups, write a memo analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of one of the reports. I had hoped that I could somehow get them to articulate their thoughts more effectively by forcing them to write collaborative. A noble goal, to be sure. I created a folder in Blackboard to house the sample progress reports and included an extra bonus of an online conversation I recently had with a computer science professor. It was another example of an informal progress report.

This all sounds like a good plan, right? Well, like any good plan, it fell apart as soon as I had to actually rely on the technology. We have had an extensive outage of the network file storage system on campus. The end result is that students can’t properly login to campus machines (mostly CLC systems–which is what CSF 114 is equipped with). I called in the EdTech technical support guru for assistance. He logged me into the instructor station as an Admin. From there, I could access Blackboard and access the files I needed for class.

I printed out enough copies of each of the files so every student had 1 copy of each file. They also had a copy of Dr. Northcut’s grading rubric. Since the students were having extreme difficulty accessing the machines, I decided to simply have them collaborate together to figure out the strengths and weaknesses of the different progress reports. They could then present to the class their findings, using the copy I had on Blackboard as a visual aid, if necessary.

Overall, that seemed to work. The students had a good understanding of what the “best” progress report looked like (it’s pretty easy to tell, really). I just wish the network had been available so they could actually write a memo summarizing their findings and sending it as an attachment via email. This would more accurately reflect the transactional writing they will encounter in the work place. I added the email exchange between myself and a faculty member specifically to demonstrate a real-world example of an informal progress report.

All in all, it didn’t go too badly, but not as well as I might have hoped.

Moral of the story: Technology will ALWAYS be unavailable when you need it most.

It’s been awhile since I’ve taught Documentum. In the past, I’ve mostly had to deal with administrative support staff and a few faculty. This was the first time that I’ve had to teach a group of students. To make things just a little more interesting, I was the only native-speaker of English in the room. Everyone else was from India (I think–one of them might have been from Sri Lanka or a related nation in the same general geographic location).

At first, everything seemed to go pretty well. Some of the students arrived late, so I had to backtrack a little bit to get them caught up to the two students who were on time. I explained how the interface worked and what we would be doing during the class. Since time was limited, I really just focussed on the following:

1. Upload an image.
2. Upload a document.
3. Create a web page.
4. Web page should have the following features: external link, relative link to another page within the site, bookmark link to location on the same web page, at least one image, and at least one link to a document.

Unfortunately, when we finally got to the point of creating a web page, we ran into some technical difficulties. For whatever reason, Documentum was giving us some strange error messages when we tried to do anything. I didn’t have any difficulties on the instructor stations, but the students certainly did. I managed to get a hold of the web development support team. They all came over to investigate what was happening to the machines. Apparently, the Java Runtime Environment required to use the Documentum web page editor was experiencing some sort of conflict with another component that had mistakenly been installed on those machines.

We did manage to get a web page created for everyone in the room. All of the students were able to access their web pages through a web browser to see what they had done.

Even on the best of days, Documentum can cause issues and frustration.  It is even worse when you are trying to teach it to someone else who has never seen it before, especially when the technology refuses to cooperate.

I have conducted this type of training in the past and so I am pretty familiar with the environment I will be working in. I used to do training in Engineering Management Room 235, but the IT Training group has moved their trainings to Library 103, which is a room designated specifically for training purposes. One of the major advantages to using that room is that the software installed on those machines does not change as rapidly as it may for a typical CLC room (like Eman 235). Also, it can be much easier to get into the Library 103 room simply because there are very few groups competing for that resource.

Since I will be training students instead of staff, I do not anticipate too many problems. Students seem to have a much better grasp of the technology than staff members in a lot of ways. I don’t mean that staff members are computer illiterate, only that many of them have had relatively little exposure to some of the technolgy that DWP incorporates. Within a limited time span, it can be a challenge to make sure everyone is keeping up with me. DWP doesn’t help itself by being somewhat finicky. I’ve seen it work on one system, and not on another, even when both systems presumably have identical software builds (we use ghost-casting to clone system builds, among other things–this allows for all machines in a room to have the exact same build in a relatively small time frame).

DWP can be very frustrating to work with. My goal for the training session is to help the students understand some of the “why’s” of the software. I also hope to give them a better understanding of the technical communication principles behind effective web design. DWP doesn’t support everything that students or departments would like to do on the web (we’ve encountered significant difficulties in embedding flash video), so I would like to help steer the students clear of the potential pitfalls inherent in DWP.

Challenges of Creating Online Content (PPT 2007)

On October 6-7, 2008, I attended the Morenet Instructional Technology Conference 2008 (MITC). It was an interesting conference focusing on the ways technology is used to enhance learning outcomes in the classrooms. The primary focus seemed to be on K-12 instruction, but there were a number of higher ed folks there as well.

How did we find out about this conference? Well, back in the spring, EdTech attended the Morenet HELIX/CONNECTIONS Conference, which is basically the spring version of what we attended earlier this week. However, HELIX has a broader focus on other areas related to Information Technology such as security, servers, networking, and so forth. MITC was only focused on instructional/educational technology. Morenet began advertising MITC shortly after we attended HELIX, and Meg, our director of EdTech, suggested that I submit a proposal to present at MITC.

After giving it some thought, I decided that I am reasonably knowledgeable about web content (it’s my job to create it, after all), so I figured that I could provide other folks who are curious–or intimidated–by the challenges inherent in creating web-based content. My goal was to guide newer web-developers to think about creating web content in a different way than they may have been exposed to already. I sent my submission into Morenet for review, and–to my surprise, terror, and Meg’s delight–they actually accepted. Furthermore, they decided that my chosen topic, “Challenges of Creating Online Content”, was expansive enough to devote over 2 full hours to. That’s right, they gave me a 2-hour block of time to discuss these challenges. As it turned out, that was just enough time to get through the presentation, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

As I began developing the content for my presentation, I had to decide
the best way to approach this. I am a technical writer by training and
a web content developer by employment (among other things). So I
decided to combine the knowledge and experience I have accumulated over
the past 8 years into a 2-hour presentation (approximately 40 slides @
3 minutes per slide).

When I attended the conference, I had the
luxury of presenting my conference on the last day in the last slot
(Tuesday, October 7, from 8:45 – 11 a.m.). I found this to be very
useful because I could adjust my approach to my presentation based on
my observations and interactions with other conference attendees. I had
ample opportunity to conduct audience analysis. I also had the luxury
of making some last-minute adjustments to my presentation. I added a
few more visuals to my slides to help enhance some of the content and
demonstrate the principles/technology under discussion.

My presentation essentially covered four things:

• My background qualifications (Education and Experience)
• Joys of Technical Communication
• Challenges
• Tools of the Trade

I
felt is was important to cover my education and experience to a certain
degree simply because the people in my audience had no idea who I was
or where I came from. I just simply showed up to give a presentation on
web-content. I did, in fact, have a reasonably full audience, so we had
a very good discussion in all. I talked about my education in English
literature with a minor in technical writing (and pseudo-minors in
mathematics and physics–I have all the credits for an actual minor,
but never filled out the requisite paperwork).
I also informed them about my current pursuit of an M.S. in Technical Communication (about 50% complete after this semester).

As
far as experience goes, I have been doing web content development for
over 8 years (closer to 10, but who’s counting?). One of my earliest
projects was the BrainTrax web
site I developed to cover algebra, trigonometry, and calculus. It was a
huge project that really demanded a lot with regards to web-based
content. I had to fit several different technologies together into a
coherent and functional whole that was available across multiple
browsers and multiple platforms. This challenge was significantly
enhanced by the fact that the stuff we were using was still fairly
brand new. As far as I have been able to determine, no one else has yet
duplicated our approach to the BrainTrax content. Either that is
because our approach is worthless (we have several testimonials from
reputable folks that indicate otherwise) or because no one has yet made
the cognitive connections to our pedagogical/technological methodology.
Unfortunately, the project has been put “on hold” until our campus can
figure out if it is worth pursuing more fully.

I also talked about my experience developing the EdTech
web site and this blog web site for Educational Technology @ Missouri
S&T. The EdTech web site serves a very different audience than the
BrainTrax web site and also has a very different purpose. BrainTrax is
more about providing conceptual information on mathematics. EdTech is
more about providing functional “how-to” information on the different
technologies we use and support on our campus.

Once we got into
the actual “meat” of the presentation, the audience discussion
definitely became more engaging. My hope was to shed some enlightenment
not only on specific technologies used for web-content development
(e.g. Dreamweaver), but also on some foundational technical
communication principles that can be applied across multiple, indeed any, web-content development technologies.

Audience
and purpose have been hammered into me over time by every single
instructor I have had in technical writing or technical communication
(yes, there is a difference). I tried to hammer those same concepts
into my audience, though in a pleasant and hopefully memorable way. I
also included organization as the third key technical communication
principle after audience and purpose. When designing a web-space,
organization is absolutely critical. It is important for information to
be easily navigable (addressing the audience’s need for convenience),
but also scalable, so that the web site can grow over time in a
manageable way. Creating a web-space can be a very organic experience,
much like growing plants. However, dedicated plant growers can guide
the growth of their plants in ways that can enhance their gardens. Web
content developers can also guide the growth of their web sites to
enhance the overall site to be appropriate for multiple audiences who
each have different, sometimes even competing, purposes for visiting
the site and always need a convenient way to access the information
contained in the web site. Data is absolutely useless without some
frame of reference to turn that data into meaningful information that
can be acted on or responded to.

I think the audience actually
responded well to what I was trying to teach them. It was certainly a
different approach to web content than many of the audience members had
been exposed to. Audience and purpose are so critical to understanding
technical communication that I kept coming back to them in other
contexts when I was responding to questions later in the presentation.
I told them if they remember nothing else about my presentation, they
should remember AUDIENCE and PURPOSE.

I then discussed issues
that I’ve encountered when dealing with different web page editors. I
gave a representative sample of web page editors that I have used in
the past–Word, PowerPoint (yes, it creates web pages), Dreamweaver,
Documentum, and Note/Word/TextPad text-based editors. This really
sparked some discussion because many folks in the audience have used
either these specific editors or other freeware editors they have found
around the Internet. I still think Word is a fantastic web-page
creation tool even though it creates very bloated code. If time is of
the essence and formatting needs to be just right, Word is a very
efficient and quick way to go. PowerPoint can be useful, but there are
considerable impacts to the final product when saving a PowerPoint file
as a web page. Dreamweaver is very good and quite popular, though
somewhat expensive to obtain (price is always a significant
consideration for K-12 schools that have limited resources). Documentum
is not widely used in education, but I included it as an example of an
institution-wide implementation of web-design that can make it easy to
create web pages in one respect, but also imposes a number of
constraints on web content authors (difficult to include dynamic,
multimedia content in Documentum).

We also had a lively
discussion about images–which to use, which not to use, and why. As
with web page editors, there are some cost considerations when deciding
which product is best. Adobe has Photoshop, Illustrator, and (now)
Fireworks, which are now packaged as part of Adobe Creative Suite, an
extremely expensive product. It is also a very broad suite of products
that really get a web content developer going. There is, however, a
fairly steep learning curve for some Adobe products. One image editor I
really like is Paint Shop Pro. It can do almost everything Adobe
products can do for much, much less money (less than $100). And there
are always freeware image editors like GIMP. I am always a bit
skeptical of freeware simply because they tend to lack well-developed
user documentation. It makes finding the answer to a problem difficult.

One
other major challenge involved with images has to do with resizing
them. Although it seems fairly trivial, there are a few layers of
complexity involved. For one, it is always better to go from a higher
resolution image to a lower resolution image. High to low means that
you can get better mileage from a single image. For instance, a high
resolution photograph can often be used for multiple media such as
flyers, brochures, web sites, manuals, web-based applications, and
more. As a matter of fact, my boss, Meg Brady, was the one who raised
this issue in the first place at the conference, so I found it
extremely helpful to latch onto her comments.

After the Images
section, I talked a bit about PDF documents and Flash video. I love PDF
documents. They are versatile, portable, generally small, open quickly,
and can be used over and over again in a variety of different ways. One
of the key ways I use them for EdTech is to create a printable form of
user documentation developed for Blackboard and other services that we
support. Documentum Web Publisher is configured to create very usable
printable documents, but I wanted to add my own twist to them, which
meant I had to use PDF. Several folks in the audience had a lively
discussion about different PDF creation tools, especially free ones.
One important change that Microsoft made in Office 2007 is the ability
to save directly to PDF (lacking in previous versions of Office). This
means users don’t need to have special software installed to create
PDFs. Of course, you still need a PDF reader to view them, but Acrobat
Reader is readily available for download.

Flash video is still
somewhat new to me, though it is widely used on a number of different
web sites that support multimedia (e.g. YouTube). One of our biggest
challenges here on campus is trying to integrate Camtasia-produced
video tutorials into our EdTech web site. Documentum doesn’t support
flash video very well (or the Admins don’t let us use it–you can’t
embed a YouTube video in a Documentum page, for example).

Towards
the end of my presentation, I talked about Web 2.0 technologies that
are currently being used in the classroom. Having already attended
several presentations about Web 2.0 technology on Monday, it was easy
to discuss. Most of the attendees had also been to those same
presentations, so I could refer to them for some good examples of how
they are being used. Specific Web 2.0 technologies that I mentioned
were blogs (like this one), wikis, and podcasts. I haven’t created
podcasts yet, mostly because I don’t hearing a recording of my voice.
It just sounds “off” to me.

Finally, I informed the audience of
the tools that I specifically used in order to do my job for web
content creation–both hardware and software. It is always very useful
to have good tools available, so state-of-the-art hardware is always
desired. I managed to finagle a decent machine for my own use on campus
through our Desktop Enhancement program, with a few minor upgrades
above our standard Power User machine. Working for IT definitely has
some perks. Working for EdTech means we get to play with cool toys
(even if we don’t always get to keep them).

All in all, it was a
very good experience. One member of the audience whispered to my boss
sitting next to her that this was exactly what she was looking for. She
wanted something that was not too technical and could give her an idea
of where to start. Others in the audience had more experience in web
development, but even they seemed to get something useful to take with
them from our presentation.

I think this presentation is
something that I can use again and again in front of different
audiences, tweaking it from time to time to incorporate new baseline
technologies as they become available and widely adopted.

Today
I helped Angie Hammons teach Dr. Bih-Ru Lea’s class enter the Wimba
Live Classroom virtual environment on Blackboard. Dr. Lea teaches a
course about strategic enterprise management configurations. As part of
the course, students are required to use a variety of different remote
conferencing tools that allow them to collaborate in real time with
people half-way around the world. Dr. Lea herself uses WebEx to include
distance students in her on-campus course. WebEx is officially
supported by the VCC here on campus, but EdTech has some exposure to it
as well.

As it turns out, WebEx and
Wimba don’t play nicely with each other. Apparently they compete for
Java Runtime Environment (JRE) resources if they are both being used. However, it is possible to
get them to cooperate once Wimba is finally opened.

Now that I have seen how Dr.
Lea uses Wimba for her class, I hope I can get it to work properly for
Dr. Jacqueline Bechsel of the Psychology department. She will be using
Wimba for the first time on Wednesday of this week. I have agreed to be
on hand to facilitate the use of Wimba in her classroom. She will be
using Wimba in UC 105 (now Centennial Hall 105), also known as the
Technology Classroom. I will have to find a time to go in there
(perhaps early in the morning since I am usually on campus a little
after 7 a.m.) and make sure Wimba works properly. 

I think I will also take the
opportunity to ask Dr. Bichsel if I can observe one of her courses. She
teaches Psych 140 (Experimental Psychology) and Psych 50 (General
Psychology). She probably wouldn’t want me to observe the class on
Wednesday, but maybe a later class.

Dr. Northcut has asked me to
teach Blackboard to the Tech Com 404 students (and herself) today. I
think I have a decent outline of topics to cover, such as adding
assignments and managing groups. Unfortunately, I don’t have finished
documentation for some of what I will be covering. I will need to work
quickly to flesh out the documentation that Angie Hammons has put
together so that it is consistent with our other Blackboard
documentation.

I will also need to cover some
Blackboard-related issues such as browser compatibility. It turns out
that both IE and Firefox 3 have some issues with Blackboard. The
Firefox 3 issue seems to be resolved for now, but the IE issue is a bit
more problematic.

The only real task I have for the students is having them create an assignment for their course.