teachingwithoutwalls.comTeaching Without Walls: Life Beyond the Lecture

Humanized online teaching and faculty support. Pages Home Humanizing Infographic Presentations Publications Twitter YouTube Archives Resume Friday, February 12, 2016 My Blog Has Moved! My blog has a new home! The site you are on is no longer active. My new website/blog is located at brocansky.com . I've redesigned things quite a bit and have curated some of my most popular content to share it with you. If you have feedback, I'd love to hear from you . If you would like to continue to receive an email notification when I publish a new blog post, please complete this form: http://brocansky.com/subscribe/ Thanks so much! Michelle Posted by Unknown at 2:52 PM No comments: Email This BlogThis! Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Share to Pinterest Tuesday, December 8, 2015 Faculty Panel: Exploring the State of the LMS in the CSU CSU LPS Faculty Panel Thursday, December 10th, 2015 3pm PT/ 6pm ET Register here (it's free). Panelists: Carolyn Gibbs (CSU Sacramento) Jackson Wilson (CSU San Francisco) Paul Boyd-Batstone (CSU Long Beach) Jaime Hannans (CSU Channel Islands) Ben Seipel (CSU Chico) This Thursday, December 10th, 2015 at 3pm PT/ 6pm ET, I will be moderating a 90-minute online panel that will include five faculty representing five of the 23 California State University (CSU) campuses. The panel is one link in a rich, semester-long series of events, blog posts, and sharing of resources organized by the CSU Learning Platforms and Services (LPS) Taskforce ( click here to view all of these goodies, included archives of past live events ). The diverse CSU system has a system-wide contract with Blackboard, which has provided CSU campuses the option to adopt Blackboard via a more seamless process and at a lower cost. This contract is coming to an end and, as a result, the LPS Taskforce is organizing opportunities to review the state of LMSs inside and outside the CSU ( click here to view the complete purpose of the LPS Taskforce ). This review process is the precursor to a statewide RFP for a CSU LMS contract, in which campuses will, again, have the option to participate or adopt a different LMS (or suite of tools) that fits their unique needs. Currently, 11 CSU campuses have a campus-wide license for Blackboard, 20 use Moodle, and the others use Canvas or D2L/BrightSpace (of course, this does not account for the pockets of faculty who use a different LMS or suite of tools than the majority of their campus peers). Click here to see a complete breakdown of LMS use across the CSU. When I was invited to moderate an "LMS" panel for CSU faculty, I took time to think through my own experiences teaching with LMSs; which led to reflections about using web-based tools to cultivate visual, active-learning spaces; as well as my recent experiences providing professional development and support for online and blended faculty. These reflections helped me to realize how important it was going to be to design the panel as a conversation about teaching and learning with technology, as opposed to a conversation about using an LMS . The LMS as "walled garden." As we know, the "state of the LMS" in higher education has changed dramatically in the past several years. Edtech discourse around the LMS has recently included more conversations questioning the value of having students learn inside a " walled garden ," when they are expected to thrive personally and professional in the open web. This trend is also influenced by the increase of easy-to-use, free to low-cost technologies in recent years. This gradual shift from the LMS as "the" place for organizing content, communicating with students, and facilitating learning (particularly for blended and online classes) to the LMS as one of many important nodes in a "learning ecosystem" of educational technologies used by faculty to design learning environments brings opportunities and challenges for higher education organizations. The tools in this ecosystem is referred to in the CSU as Learning Platforms and Services (LPS) ( Click here for more discussion about LMS and LPS. ) The LMS as part of a learning ecosystem. As more faculty have begun experimenting with and adopting additional tools to supplement (or replace) their use of the LMS, the traditional institutional goal of identifying a single, enterprise-wide technology solution for an entire campus is being rethought in some contexts. As such, institutions need new, sustainable strategies for supporting a technology ecosystem and preparing a mostly part-time higher education faculty to effectively navigate this landscape and design meaningful, accessible learning experiences. These are some of the themes that have been conveyed through the experts (and follow-up conversations within the webinars) who have presented in the LPS series ( Phil Hill and Michael Feldstein, Chris Vento, Sasha Thackaberry, Patrick Masson, and CSU students ). I hope you'll join us for the panel on Thursday! I'm hoping to generate rich, thick data through open-ended questions that do not fixate on the LMS, but instead probe for themes in the experiences of faculty. We'll be using the webinar version of ZOOM for the panel. Please register in advance and bring your own questions for the participants. Register here (it's free) . LMS graphics by Mindwires , CC-BY. Posted by Unknown at 2:31 PM No comments: Email This BlogThis! Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Share to Pinterest Labels: csu , emerging technologies , faculty , lms Tuesday, November 10, 2015 Dust to Digits: Writing Our Stories Through Family Photographs I wrote this post as a guest contribution for Digital Writing Month . I hope it will inspire you to to reach back in time, learn a new story about yourself, write, and share. “ Each photograph is read as the private appearance of its referent: the age of Photography corresponds rather precisely to the explosion of the private into the public, or rather into the creation of new social value, which is the publicity of the private: the private is consumed as such, publicly.” – Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 98 When I was a little girl, my mother often shared her old family photographs with me. The photographs were stored in a tin trunk under my parents’ bed. Kneeling on the floor, pulling out that trunk, cracking it open, and unleashing the musty scent contained inside became our ritual for initiating our travel through time. My mom, a first-generation born American who was born to two German immigrants, would share stories about her family members. Photographs were especially important to my mom, as she experienced the tragic loss of her sister and only sibling at the age of 39 and the sudden passing of her mother just two years later. Looking at and sharing stories about the images imprinted on the old torn piece of paper was — and still is — her way of visiting her loved ones. There was a palpable connection between my mom and the time and space of the fading figures portrayed in the images, it was as if the photographs had a magical ability to collapse time for her. We repeated this tradition numerous times throughout my childhood, often with my two sisters. I also ventured into the tin box on my own sometimes, gazing into the fading eyes of relatives who I had never met. Over time, the photographs became familiar to me; yet, there was one that I secretly treasured more than the others. It was a small, sepia-toned image printed on cardstock (known as a carte de visite ). It measured about 2” by 3”. The corners were torn and the surface of the image was heavily scratched. On the back, my mother had written the name of my maternal great grandmother in pen, but aside from that there were no identifying marks on the print. Despite the ambiguity of the photograph’s context, this image resonated with me. “You are my great grandmother,” I used to think to myself, as if she were there in the room with me. My great grandmother lived in Germany until the age of 99 and passed away when I was quite yo...