Teaching Online Musings

Censoring Blogs?

2005-12-05T08:18:00.000-08:00

Freedom of speech once again takes center stage regarding Blogs. While reading Forbes in the chiropractor's office, I saw an article on how bad blogs are. Not agreeing with that opinion, I read further. It seems that many businesses are feeling rather helpless in the face of blogs that are attacking their businesses. Some are even going as far as legal action in order to stop the blogging.

Thinking about it, I can understand why Forbes has come out against blogs. However, I cannot fully appreciate their veiw either.

Take the famous examples of www.walmartsucks.com. It is basically a blog started by someone who constantly received bad service at the Wal Mart (something I know only too well). Otehrs found his site and began posting as well. It hit the media and all of a sudden, Wal Mart is offended. Well, guess I would be too. After many cease and desist letters and even a lawsuit, the site stood. Why? Because it was free speech against a public entity. In those cases, I have to cheer for the little guy. How many times have you seen a commercial for a company you believed was the evil empire and thought you wanted some way to get the other side of the story out?

Forbes, however, did make a good point. It illustrated the case of one small company which was devastated by a series of bad blogs against it, all by one person. Investors became skiddish, some backed out, and his business suffered. The hosting company, a free blog site, said they would not give the president of the company any information on who this blogger was due to privacy concerns. Only after he went through the trouble of a court order did he find out it was someone who was a disgruntled former employee. Court action is pending, as the accusations were false, but the business has suffered.

Blogs have proven themselves to be a very powerful tool in the equalization of society. No longer are newspapers controlling the news or opinions. No longer will bad service be suffered with just a letter or maybe a letter to the editor. At the same time, when is a blog a service and when is it an attack? When is it free speech and when is it crying fire in a crowded theater?

As for me, I still think the power of blogging is in its infancy. With the blogs that I have read just from my classmates, new worlds and venues have been opened. Yes, there are the ones which detail in excrutiating detail the minute details of someone's life (not from the blogs of my classmates, mind you, but from another blog site I am on), but for every New York Times, you also have The National Enquirer.

What do we do with this powerful new technology waits to be seen. However, the same could be said for Virtual Training. Raise a glass with me, my fellow classmates. Let's make a toast to the future. *clink*

How Do We Get Past Ourselves?

2005-11-29T15:40:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading something in MoneyCentral regarding one columnist's opinion regarding the troubles GM and Delphi are having. His contention, which I cannot deny, is not the bugaboo of globalization that is killing them, but rather the lack of constructive ideas. Their answer to everything, which I see in company after company, is to cut costs, get wages lower, reduce benefits, etc. Their focus is solely on the short term and not how they once again become world leaders in what their respective fields.

If you have been in the training field for any amount of time, you know this is very close to our hearts for a few reasons. The first is economic: What do you cut first? The three Ts: travel, treats, and training. The argument training always makes is that they can impact the bottom line, but not in the short term. This argument falls on deaf ears when all someone is thinking about is the next quarter.

So, what do we do? Make it cheaper to train. No more travel costs with virtual training. Use self-studies whenever possible. Use virtual classrooms. However, nobody wants to pay for these things. Self-studies are wonderful...but who pays the annual subscription. Virtual training? Wonderful! Who is going to invest in the system? That has been the plague of the company I am working at for years now. They all want virtual training, but don't want to pay for it. So we are using a cobbled together system that doesn't really work.

We have the tools to train better, faster, cheaper, and with these classes, we have the knowledge to do so. Now how do we wrest control from the bean counters so we can make this a real difference in the companies and colleges? Sort of circular, isnt it? How do we get past forces that are blocking innovation so we can make companies like GM innovative again?

Wish I had an answer? Anyone have any thoughts?

The Cutting Edge or the Wave?

2005-11-15T06:34:00.000-08:00

Now I may be wrong here (I know, such a shock), but I think I am finally on an edge. No, the The edge...though I have been there many times before. The cutting edge. You know, that place where all the 'cool' people are? Maybe I am simply riding the 'wave', which is just a few yards past the edge.

Okay, before I overdose on terminology, I am talking about online teaching. While for some, like Joanne, who have been doing this kind of teaching for some time, the idea of teaching virtually still seems to be gaining steam. True, there are already big players in the field, but from what I read, more and more colleges and institutions are going virtual. And, those who are big are looking for teachers, according to the job search notices I am getting.

I bring this up for purely selfish reasons...I am finally in an in demand field! At least I hope. As I mentioned at the beginning of the current class, we might want to become teachers in virtual colleges. Does one interview differently in an in demand field?

Some Free Software Ideas

2005-11-15T05:30:00.000-08:00

Oooh, I get to use my favorite four letter 'f' word -- FREE.

In the most recent issue of PC World magazine (www.pcworld.com) they reviewed a host of freeware that is light years beyond the old, clunky programs that used to be called that term. If you can't afford, or don't want to pay for, Microsoft Office and/or don't particularly like Outlook Express, here are some quality alternative.

The first is one we talked about in class: A Microsoft Office clone that is both free and full featured. The OpenOffice suite (www.openoffice.org) has a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation program, database, and elementary drawing program. It is compatible with Microsoft Office, but does have some difficulties translating complex PowerPoint animations or complex Excel formulas.

If Outlook Express is not thrilling you, you might want to consider Mozilla Thunderbird (www.mozilla.org). A free e-mail application that has some very nice features, it is constantly being updated because it is open source. One feature that I really like is the intiutive spam filtering. By training Thunderbird, it will recognize and delete spam e-mails from your inbox, something my Outlook 2002 did not do. One word of warning: It imports seamlessly from Outlook, but it takes some work to export back to Outlook or another application. It can do it, but it is not easy.

Need a graphics editor and don't want to line Adobe's pockets? Try GIMP (www.gimp.org) GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, and is not as powerful as PhotoShop, but does the job pretty well for amature and intermediate level image manipulation.

Anyway, more goodies await! Here is the link: http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,122929,00.asp

Enjoy!

Mike

Online Education and Seven of Nine...

2005-11-08T06:13:00.000-08:00

...hey...Joanne gave me a great lead in for my last TV reference, I figured I might as well keep with a good thing...lol...

For those of you who might not be the Star Trek fan I am, Seven of Nine was a character on one of the shows. Her history was that she was taken as a child by the Borg, a half-human, half-machine race that is quite malevolent. She was rescued by the Starship Voyager, most of her implants removed, but some remained.

In one of the episodes, Seven found a way to assimilate vast amounts of data from the ship's computers using one of her remaining Borg implants. The results were interesting...her mind could not assimilate all the information she received and began making up paranoid delusions...making circumstances to fit the data. I found it an interesting analogy to today's dilemma of information overload.

So far in class we have discussed synchronous, asynchronous, online, offline, voice, text, newsgroups, RSS, blogs, bulletin boards, and a host of other technologies that are now available to online educators to enrich the educational experience. But like Seven of Nine, how much is good and where does good become, in Monty Pyton terms, "My brain hurts..."? I think the fact that someone had to invent an aggregator for both RSS feeds and blogs tells us that we are dancing on the line even as we speak.

I believe we will need to add another talent to a good online instructor...selectivity. How much technology is used in a class to enrich the class and which techologies do we use? Are they the same with every class or vary due to class composition? If they vary, how do you quickly switch in a class as brief as 10 weeks? What will be the determinant: low bandwidth? ease of use? rich experience? cutting edge? common use? majority preference? I think that other lines will be danced on in the very near future as we have to deal with these kind of questions as online educators.

If we don't use the least common denominators, do we get charges of discrimination? If we only use the least common denominators, do we get told we are losinn our cutting edge or getting complacent? I can see it being more than eggshells...I can see landmines.

Wow...talk about a journey into the unknown!

Your thoughts?

Too much of a good thing?

2005-11-01T05:36:00.000-08:00

In one of the postings for the forums in class, someone mentioned that an instructor, if they taught as I described, ought to be replaced. That raised an interesting question for me.

With the plethora of colleges getting into the online education business, are there enough good instructors to go around? From what I have heard, the answer is no. My neighbor is taking classes at a somewhat well known online university and she has had to complain about a couple of the instructors already. I have had a bad instructor or two in my online career. Is the production on online teachers becoming like temps at Christmas -- get them in the three hour training course and let them loose?

In my permanent job hunt, I have seen that Axia college is advertising like mad for instructors, as well as ITT Tech. I wonder what kind of applicants they are getting and what their criteria is? I am taking classes to make myself an online instructor and taking it seriously. What if others aren't?

I am sure like other 'big things', this will shake out, but I feel for those who take those classes before there is a shake out.

What do you think?

Shhhh!

2005-10-31T12:25:00.000-08:00

What does Buffy the Vampire Slayer and NYU have in common? Silence. At least that is what I saw in my mind during one of our classes. In one class, we only had a text chat, instead of the usual talk and presentation. While it meant different things to different people, to me it meant silence.

How does this tie in with Buffy? In one famous episode, these creatures stole all the voices of people in Sunnydale, Buffy's home town. Pretty much the entire episode was done in silence. It was very, very disturbing. In a sense, that is how that text session was. We are all so used to sound being around us that we take it for granted. Until it is taken away, we don't notice it.

That silence in that class actually got to me after a while. I wanted...I craved the sound and presentations in the class. It seemed so static, so sterile, so...dull. Like Buffy, the lack of sound made it almost creepier than all the scary music the show used to have.

I used to snort derisively at the MTV generation for always wanting to be assaulted with quick lyrics and flashy graphics. Now I see, that while I am never in the MTV mindset, I miss that sound and flash as well. Wow...what a little silence can teach us.

A greyt idea?

2005-10-15T06:45:00.000-07:00

In working with the online class tool, I see how it can be used as a wonderful facilitation approach to all types of teaching. Now I am wondering how it can be spread out beyond just the classroom.

For those of you who have heard me brag, I have two greyhounds in my life. Because of the unique nature of this dog, there is a lot of advocacy work that goes on dealing with the occupation they are usually associated with and the work we have to make sure they are adopted out after their racing life is done. Last week one of largest gatherings of greyhound owners took place in Dewey, Delaware. Called "Greyhounds Reach the Beach", it is a big weekend of lectures, informational sessions, etc. However, like in person classes, there is only so many people who can attend a particular session, due to space restrictions and such. It is disappointing in a sense that the great information I received could not reach more people and sad as well all the information that I missed out on.

After one class on Tuesday nights, I thought of the powerful of a virtual class once a month on greyhound issues. A presentation by someone knowledgable in some greyhound issues, an expert of some sort, or just a general discussion. While there are still theoretical restrictions on how many could attend, I think this idea has merit. A virtual Dewey Beach, in a sense.

Hmm...have to investigate this and see what tools are out there...

Any thoughts, comments, opinions?

Thanks,
Mike

Testing...testing

2005-10-03T10:16:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone. Just testing out the blogging here for the NYU class. I do have another blog on another site that I use under an alias to vent my spleen every once in a while. I like blogging...it allows me to do a journal in a format that I am very comfortable in.

I hope to have some insights and inspirations to share with everyone as we go along. Please feel free to respond back to me with any retorts, questions, or additions.

I look forward to working with everyone in class this semester!

Mike