Social Networks Not Just for Chatting Anymore

Social-networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter can help community college students become more engaged in their academics, a recent report from the Center for Community College Student Engagement suggests.

Although large numbers of students say they use such tools in their daily lives, many two-year colleges have yet to mine the potential of the technology.

"The uses of social-networking tools are clearly growing in frequency," said Kay McClenney, director of the Texas-based Center for Community College Student Engagement, which released the report. But "colleges are not taking advantage of that particular set of tools for making connections with students to the extent that they could."

Ohio University Lancaster Campus Dean John Furlow said officials at the campus have discussed the possibility of utilizing Facebook and Twitter as a way to recruit new students and more effectively communicate with the students who don't regularly check their campus e-mail accounts.

"If we need to get a message out to all students, we send it through e-mail system; every student is assigned an e-mail address through Ohio University," Furlow said. "But we have a number of nontraditional students who don't use their e-mail, so we're not reaching as many students as we need to."

The report is based on a survey of more than 400,000 students from 663 institutions that assesses how much effort students invest in their studies, whether they interact with faculty and staff and whether they are challenged by their academics. Studies show the more engaged students are in such activities and relationships, the more likely they are to learn.

The survey found higher levels of engagement among students who said they used social media multiple times a day for academic purposes, such as communicating with other students, instructors or college staff about coursework, than students who said they don't use such tools at all.

It also revealed a potential downside for colleges that don't harness the technology: Students who frequently used social-networking tools but not for academic reasons tended to put less effort into their schoolwork.

Among the findings:

95 percent of students ages 18 to 24 use social-networking tools, including instant messages and texting, 64 percent multiple times a day. Yet just 18 percent do so for schoolwork, and 27 percent never do. Just 5 percent never use social networks.

Among older students, 68 percent used social networking, 41 percent multiple times a day. But just 10 percent do so for school; 49 percent never used social networking for school.

The report stops short of suggesting that social networking is the key to engaging all students, but it urges colleges to "find the right match."

Furlow said OU-L has worked to implement more ways for students to chat about what they've learned in classes and communicate with their professors. For the past five years, the university has utilized a social networking site of sorts called Blackboard.

"There is a chat element to that blackboard system, where professors can put out a discussion question for students and then students can interact by giving feedback," Furlow said. "Professors also can put up entire syllabus and put up notices about assignments, which can be helpful for students."

Furlow said the system has gone through numerous upgrades during the past five years and has become easier to use.

He said social networking avenues such as Twitter and Facebook could only improve that communication process among students and professors -- but there still needs to be some discussion about how to most effectively use the sites.

"We are aware these sites are out there and we love to talk about tweeting and twittering; it makes us sound up to date," Furlow said with a laugh. "There are so many different sites out there, we want to be sure we find the best one."

Social networking seems a natural for Phillips Community College of the University of Arkansas, based in rural Helena.

"We're always fighting the tendency of students to go from the parking lot to the classroom and back to the parking lot and into their jobs and homes and their other life," said chancellor Steven Murray. "A lot of our students do not have computers at home, broadband Internet access, but they all have cellphones with the capacity to text, and ... access Twitter and Facebook."

BY MARY BETH MARKLEIN • USA TODAY • December 6, 2009

Eagle-Gazette Education Reporter Michelle George contributed to this article.

Source: http://www.lancastereaglegazette.com/article/20091206/NEWS01/912060324/1002

TEACHING AFTER MIDNIGHT

3:15 a.m. Friday, today, as in a little while ago. Back from teaching my midnight class, College Writing I, 11:45 p.m. to 2:45 a.m. at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston. I drove past Harvard and MIT on the way home. The lights were out. I only have a few minutes until Inside Higher Ed’s 4 a.m. deadline. Here goes.

Any students at midnight?

Yes. My section is full. Same for Pysch 101, which began Tuesday. Forty-seven students in all are enrolled in the two midnight courses. Four students are taking both courses. Two thirds of the midnight students are part time, same as at the college as a whole. The youngest of the 47 is 18, the oldest 59. Sixty-four percent of the midnight students are 18-22 years old, the so-called traditional college age. Nationally and at Bunker Hill, most students are women, but most of my midnight students are men. The national average age for community colleges students is 27. Languages other than English in my class this morning: Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Chinese and Somali. The Russian student also spoke Ukranian and German.

Since the classroom had no windows, I couldn’t tell it was midnight. No one nodded off. This was just a regular class. Kathleen O’Neill, who taught the Tuesday midnight class, said that her section may even have been livelier than daytime sections. This morning we applied Aristotle’s Rhetorical Triangle, writing in class to read aloud. I sent them off with Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address and an assignment, from the Advanced Placement English composition exam, to analyze the rhetorical strategies Lincoln used to achieve his purpose. Students stayed after class to ask questions.

Click here for the full article. Source: Inside Higher ED, September 11, 2009 by Wick Sloane.

REACHING STUDENTS, SETTING LIMITS

TORONTO – Practicality was a major theme at teaching sessions here at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. Many professors expressed dissatisfaction with traditional teaching methods – and also discussed the need to find alternatives that don’t either take so much time that they can’t do their research or hijack the syllabus away from the material they would like to cover.

There was a general consensus that there are ways to better engage political science students -- but also that these methods take much more time and, in some cases, cost more money. Many of the ideas discussed here were attempts to challenge the traditional lecture format “without ruining your life,” in the half-joking phrase that was part of the title of one of the papers presented.

That paper, by Rebecca Glazier, assistant professor of political science at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, examined the use of simulations in courses. Some experts have promoted these simulations – in which students are assigned a role in some large global conflict on which they will then negotiate. But Glazier noted that these large simulations are very difficult for professors who don’t have armies of research assistants, since the students need assignments on their roles to play, coaching on key issues, and feedback.

Her solution is to use the simulation approach on a much smaller scale. She has a cast of five characters -- rather than hundreds -- and in a class of 25, she will have 5 simulations going on simultaneously. She can then give detailed “position papers” to the participants playing the various roles in a way she couldn’t with a larger simulation. A recent simulation was based on the Juba round of negotiations over the Ugandan conflict, and each group of five students included one student representing the government, one the main rebel group, one the United Nations, one an international non-governmental organization, and one a local NGO.

“We had all kinds of creative results,” she said, with interesting approaches to such key issues as whether there should be amnesty or war crimes trials, and what the political solutions should be.

Click here to read the full artile. Source: Inside Higher Ed, September 9, 2009 issue.

Ten Worst Teaching Mistakes

Like most faculty members, we began our academic careers with zero prior instruction on college teaching and quickly made almost every possible blunder. We’ve also been peer reviewers and mentors to colleagues, and that experience on top of our own early stumbling has given us a good sense of the most common mistakes college teachers make. In this column and one to follow we present our top ten list, in roughly increasing order of badness. Doing some of the things on the list may occasionally be justified, so we’re not telling you to avoid all of them at all costs. We are suggesting that you avoid making a habit of any of them.

Mistake #10. When you ask a question in class, immediately call for volunteers. You know what happens when you do that. Most of the students avoid eye contact, and either you get a response from one of the two or three who always volunteer or you answer your own question. Few students even bother to think about the question, since they know that eventually someone else will provide the answer. We have a suggestion for a better way to handle questioning, but it’s the same one we’ll have for Mistake #9 so let’s hold off on it for a moment.

Mistake #9. Call on students cold. You stop in mid-lecture and point your finger abruptly: “Joe, what’s the next step?” Some students are comfortable under that kind of pressure, but many could have trouble thinking of their own name. If you frequently call on students without giving them time to think (“cold-calling”), the ones who are intimidated by it won’t be following your lecture as much as praying that you don’t land on them. Even worse, as soon as you call on someone, the others breathe a sigh of relief and stop thinking. A better approach to questioning in class is active learning.[1] Ask the question and give the students a short time to come up with an answer, working either individually or in small groups. Stop them when the time is up and call on a few to report what they came up with. Then, if you haven’t gotten the complete response you’re looking for, call for volunteers. The students will have time to think about the question, and—unlike what happens when you always jump directly to volunteers (Mistake #10)—most will try to come up with a response because they don’t want to look bad if you call on them. With active learning you’ll also avoid the intimidation of cold-calling (Mistake #9) and you’ll get more and better answers to your questions. Most importantly, real learning will take place in class, something that doesn’t happen much in traditional lectures.[2]

Mistake #8. Turn classes into PowerPoint shows. It has become common for instructors to put their lecture notes into PowerPoint and to spend their class time mainly droning through the slides. Classes like that are generally a waste of time for everyone. [3] If the students don’t have paper copies of the slides, there’s no way they can keep up. If they have the copies, they can read the slides faster than the instructor can lecture through them, the classes are exercises in boredom, the students have little incentive to show up, and many don’t. Turning classes into extended slide shows is a specific example of:

Mistake #7. Fail to provide variety in instruction. Nonstop lecturing produces very little learning,[2] but if good instructors never lectured they could not motivate students by occasionally sharing their experience and wisdom. Pure PowerPoint shows are ineffective, but so are lectures with no visual content—schematics, diagrams, animations, photos, video clips, etc.—for which PowerPoint is ideal. Individual student assignments alone would not teach students the critical skills of teamwork, leadership, and conflict management they will need to succeed as professionals, but team assignments alone would not promote the equally important trait of independent learning. Effective instruction mixes things up: boardwork, multimedia, storytelling, discussion, activities, individual assignments, and group work (being careful to avoid Mistake #6). The more variety you build in, the more effective the class is likely to be.

Click here to read the full article. Source: On Course Newsletter April 2009

'A Great Man, Dumbledore'

Anticipating the release of the sixth Harry Potter movie this summer, I spent much of the spring rereading all seven volumes of the popular series. (Mixed in with the usual Proust and Kierkegaard, of course.)

Taking them one after another, rather than waiting a year between installments, gave me a new perspective on the novels and provided some interesting insights -- not the least of which is that Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, might just be the greatest academic administrator of all time.

Indeed, in her books, J.K. Rowling covers the entire spectrum of administrative types, giving us not only Dumbledore but also his antithesis: the petty, vindictive, rule-mongering bureaucrat-cum-"professor" Dolores Umbridge. Since I can find no evidence that Rowling ever worked at an American community college, I can only conclude that administrators are much the same the world over.

The truth is, while I've known a few administrators who were Dumbledore-esque, I've also seen my share of Umbridges. Most campus officials, frankly, fall somewhere in between, but I like to think that a heartening number have Dumbledorean potential.

So what is it, exactly, that makes Hogwarts's headmaster such an exemplary leader? And what can two-year college administrators learn from him?

Click here for the full article. Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education by Rob Jenkins

No Size Fits All

If you visit a four-year college, you can predict what sort of student you are going to bump into. If you visit a community college, you have no idea. You might see an immigrant kid hoping eventually to get a Ph.D., or another kid who messed up in high school and is looking for a second chance. You might meet a 35-year-old former meth addict trying to get some job training or a 50-year-old taking classes for fun.

These students may not realize it, but they’re tackling some of the country’s biggest problems. Over the past 35 years, college completion rates have been flat. Income growth has stagnated. America has squandered its human capital advantage. Students at these places are on self-directed missions to reverse that, one person at a time.

Community college enrollment has been increasing at more than three times the rate of four-year colleges. This year, in the middle of the recession, many schools are seeing enrollment surges of 10 percent to 15 percent. And the investment seems to pay off. According to one study, students who earn a certificate experience a 15 percent increase in earnings. Students earning an associate degree registered an 11 percent gain.

Click here to read the full article. Source: The New York Times July 16, 2009 by David Brooks

Carnegie Calls for More Useful Assessments at Community Colleges

Stanford, Calif.—A new report from The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching calls for community colleges to develop richer, more revealing measures of student learning—beyond the traditional indices of grades, retention, persistence and degree attainment.

Toward Informative Assessment and a Culture of Evidence is the final publication from Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC), a three-year, action research project that explored the teaching and learning challenges in basic skills math and English at 11 California community colleges. A partnership of the Carnegie Foundation and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, SPECC asked participating faculty to use innovative forms of assessment, such as common exams and think aloud protocols (audio and video records of students verbalizing their thought process while trying to read texts or solve problems) to better track student learning and to improve instruction.

Working with their campus's institutional research offices, the faculty also explored different approaches to data, including collecting it directly from students through interviews, focus groups, special surveys and diagnostic tests; and faculty considered actual growth over a course through "value added" or pre-post assessments.

Click here to read the full article. Source: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching