Upgrading Online Conference Slides: June 2015: Keynote Slides

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Keynote Slides Index

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Follow Laura Gibbs's board Upgrading Online Conference on Pinterest.

Overall Plan. This presentation has two parts: I'll start by introducing myself and sharing with you the spaces where you can find me online (slides 1-5). Then, I'll share with you some general ideas and strategies that have worked well for me as an online instructor. Some of the advice is specifically about teaching online, and some of it is about teaching in general, or even about life in general. As I'm a folklorist by training, you'll see many traditional proverbs on these pages: online learning is something new, but popular wisdom still applies!

Slide Pages. Each slide page has a few chosen words and a graphic of some kind, just as you would expect, but there is also additional information below the slide if you scroll on down. Since I don't know just how much or little overlap there might be between your online courses and my own, I've tried to take a general approach in the top slide, but with lots of links to specific course materials and online resources down below. You'll also find more information about the graphics at the bottom of each page.

Ask Questions, Please! You can ask questions via the Adobe chat if there are items you'd like me to go over in more detail, or you can use Twitter: #UOConference. In addition, you can contact me after the talk with any questions you have (Twitter, G+, or email: laurakgibbs@gmail.com).

About the Blog. I've also explained here how and why I hacked a blog to be like a slideshow (it's an experiment I've always wanted to try). After the presentation is over, I'll move the widgets at the bottom of the pages to go in a sidebar, and the blog will look much more like a blog!

Here is a list of "slide" posts in the presentation:

Laura Gibbs, Online Instructor

I came to the University of Oklahoma in 1999, and I've been teaching fully online courses since 2002. The courses I am now teaching are Mythology and Folklore and Epics of Ancient India. [next]

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Additional comments:

I do all my teaching "in the open," so you can find out lots more about my classes by visiting the course hubs — Mythology and Folklore and Epics of Ancient India — and also by looking at the links for my mythfolklore.net hub. In particular, I try to document my teaching strategies at this site: Anatomy of an Online Course. Both courses are writing-intensive courses which are part of the General Education program at OU, not part of a major. As a result, I get to meet students from all the different majors and colleges at OU: from accounting to opera, petroleum engineering to graphic design, marketing to meteorology. Most of the students are seniors, and many of them are in their final semester of university, and the Gen. Ed. class for a graduation requirement.

For an overview of my approach to online teaching, here is a Medium post I wrote a while ago: Devotedly Digital — Why I Love Teaching Online. For video, here's a little interview with the incomparable Howard Rheingold: Teaching the Humanities Online.

Connected Learning Alliance on Vimeo.

The image above shows the entrance to OU's Bizzell Library.

Twitter: OnlineCrsLady

One place you can find me online is at Twitter, where I am known as OnlineCrsLady. Twitter is a great way to keep up with news from my school and to connect with colleagues around the world. [next]

Tweets by @OnlineCrsLady

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The panel you are seeing in this post is a Twitter widget which displays the latest tweets (excluding replies) in my Twitter stream. It updates automatically; once you install the widget (in a blog post, sidebar, webpage, etc.), you don't have to do anything: Twitter puts the latest tweets there for you.

Twitter widgets are one of my favorite things about Twitter! You can create a Twitter widget based on a user, as above, or based on a hashtag, a list, etc. Just go to "Settings," and then choose "Widgets," and select the options you prefer. The widget I've used above is one for my OnlineCrsLady account, and I've also used a different Twitter widget on this page for the #UOConference hashtag.

For more information, here's a page I share with my students: Twitter widgets.

Twitter: OnlineMythIndia

I also have a separate Twitter stream for my classes: OnlineMythIndia. This Twitter stream contains items I think might be of interest to students in my Myth class and/or my Indian class. [next]

Tweets by @OnlineMythIndia

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I find it very useful to have these two separate Twitter accounts, and I keep them separate in my own mind by logging in to them from two different browsers. I use the Chrome browser all day for my work, so that is where I log into the OnlineCrsLady account. I then jump over to Firefox several times throughout the day to add items to my OnlineMythIndia class Twitter. By having the accounts in different browsers, I never get mixed up! (At least not so far.) It would also be possible to use Tweetdeck or some other app to access two different accounts like this, but using two different browsers is the solution that works best for me.

For the class Twitter feed, I follow mostly institutional accounts: museums, digital libraries, etc. There are a few personal accounts that I follow, too, like the amazing Dirk Puehl (who posts so much great stuff for my Myth-Folklore class) and the great author William Dalrymple (who posts so much that I can use for Indian Epics). You can see the list of feeds I follow here: OnlineMythIndia Follows.

Most of my students do not use Twitter, so the class Twitter feed is really a way to get information out to them. I include the Twitter feed as a widget in our class announcements page, and, best of all, because that blog is the homepage for my D2L class space, the Twitter widget breathes life into the otherwise lifeless space that is D2L:

Google+

Twitter is fun and useful, but Google+ is my main hangout online. I'm a fan of Google services in general, and I blog at Google's Blogger.com: Blogger profile. [next]

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I've never used Facebook, but prior to Google+ I had used Ning, Yammer, and Chatter for connecting with people online... and then from Day One of Google+ I was hooked. Of course, I'm sure that it will go away sooner or later (nothing online is forever), but I sure am enjoying this social space for as long as it lasts.

About Google+ Communities: I am not a big fan of Google+ Communities because they are not part of the fully public space. When I post something at Google+, anybody can see that, whether or not they are Google+ users or not; it functions as a kind of blog. With Communities, the sharing is more complicated, and only members of a Community can comment on a post. I know there are a lot of educators who use Google+ Communities, and that's great, but I got started at Google+ before the Communities came along, and for me the public posting has worked just fine! If you are curious to see how Google+ works, here's my Google+ stream.

Another one of my favorite tools is Pinterest. I use Diigo for bookmarking too, but Pinterest is much more fun! This widget shows my most recent pins, and I have quite a few Pinterest boards. [next]

Visit Laura Gibbs's profile on Pinterest.

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I've had some good luck in using Pinterest with students, especially because some students are already avid Pinterest users. The 2014-15 school year was my first time to experiment with Pinterest projects by students, and I want to build on that next year, based on what I learned last year, so that I can provide some more structure to the project. Using Pinterest for educational search and discovery can be really powerful, but that's usually not how my students have been using Pinterest for their own purposes. To get a sense of some of the nifty discovery features at Pinterest, here is the information I share with my students: Pinterest for Discovery.

One of the nice things about Pinterest, like Twitter, is the variety of live widgets you can create. See the Pinterest Widgets page for more information about how to do that.

Design an Online Identity

There are so many ways to build your online identity — or identities! — and you need to help your students do the same. What to share, how much, with whom: it's all up to you! [next]

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When people tell me that they are going to start teaching online, the first thing I start advising them to do is to build their online presence, exploring different social spaces online to see what kinds of sharing and interaction they like best. Each online space has its strengths and weaknesses, and only you can decide which space(s) are right for you, along with which spaces might be useful for your students too.

In addition to the spaces I've mentioned in the previous slides that are really important for me (Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest), I'm always trying out one or two new spaces at any give time just as an experiment. For example, during the summer of 2015, I'm experimenting with Known, and I've redone my YouTube Channel so that it is full of Indian music for the students in my Indian Epics class. That's something I hope they will really enjoy!

Here's one of my YouTube playlists embedded for your listening pleasure here:

The image above is one of the GrammarCatz: In an online course, nobody knows you're a cat.

There Are No "Bad Hair Days" Online

Identity is a complicated business online and offline... but online, you have the freedom to emphasize your strengths, showing what you see as your best side. And no bad hair days! [next]

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Compare also the great blog title of a wonderful faculty member at UT Austin, Jennifer Ebbeler, who teaches online and who is a very accomplished online course designer: Teaching Without Pants.

In all seriousness, it can be liberating to be able to focus all your attention on your online content and your online interactions, without the distractions of physical appearance. This is true for students, too, especially those students who are insecure about their appearance. You, and your students likewise, get to design your online presence(s) in the ways you think best! If you want to use video, you can do that, but you can also choose just to present yourself in other ways. Just speaking for myself, I don't use video in my classes, and I always use some kind of "fox" avatar (because of the foxes in Aesop's fables!), rather than using a personal photo.

The image above is another of the GrammarCatz: Bad hair day. Very bad hair day.

Reflect Often

Another great feature of working online is that you can look back on your digital trail. You can see yourself as others see you, and that self-assessment can help you identify both strengths and weaknesses to work on. [next]

Take a look at yourself.

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One of the main reasons that I use blogs in my classes rather than discussion boards is because a blog creates a digital trail of learning for a particular class. By the time students reach Week 15 of a class, they have accumulated four months of work in their blog, and each week along the way, they have a chance to look back on what they have accomplished and reflect on that, as well as sharing in the learning of other students in the class.

Some students leave their blogs online at the end of a class, while others delete some or all of their blog posts; it's totally up to the students. You can see a directory of the student blogs from last semester here: Blog Directory. You can also see some specific types of blog post assignments at the Myth-Folklore course hub and the Indian Epics course hub (those course hubs are built with the Inoreader RSS feed reader, which I highly recommend... it beats Feedly hands down for RSS power users, which would include me, a hard-core RSS-a-holic).

In addition, for me, teaching online, self-reflection naturally leads to self-improvement much more easily than it ever did when I was teaching in the classroom. After a class session was over, I had no way to go back and re-experience that from the students' perspective. In the asynchronous world that makes both teaching and learning more visible, I have so many opportunities to review and improve. It helps me a lot as a teacher just as it does my students!

The image above is another one of the LatinLOLCats: Teipsum inspice. Take a look at yourself.

Keep On Learning

If you are new to online learning, you might have lots of questions: so ask! Even better: you can be a co-learner, asking and answering questions together with your students. [next]

Let him learn who does not know;

by learning wisdom grows.

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For some powerful thoughts about colearning, see this Hangout with Howard Rheingold and colleagues from Connected Courses in 2014: Successful Co-learning Models.

The image above is another one of the Latin LOLCats: Discat qui nescit; discendo sapientia crescit. Let him learn who does not know; by learning wisdom grows. The Latin rhymes: nescit - crescit.

Post Something Every Day

Keep a record of your online learning adventures by writing something everyday, even if it's just a Twitter update. How much you write doesn't matter, but writing every day does! [next]

No day without writing a line.

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Additional comments:

One of the "writing every day" strategies I am going to try with my students is the Happiness Jar. I think this might be a daily writing challenge that will appeal to them, while providing some feel-good moments we can all share.

The image above is another one of the LatinLOLCats: Nulla dies sine linea. No day without (writing) a line. I like to think of it as the "blogger's motto."

Give and Take

As you interact with people online, you'll need to strike a balance between give and take, both helping others while also learning how to ask for and receive their help. [next]

One for all, all for one.

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Additional comments:

One of my favorite things about being online is being able to help people quickly find answers to questions that might have taken them hours to find on their own (if at all), and I'm also not shy to ask questions myself where I need expert help. So, for example, people might contact me with questions about Latin or about online teaching, while I often seek out technical help with people who know far more about computing than I do. By having a wide network and making yourself available to others, you also gain an incredible network of knowledge on which you can draw. Once you realize the power of networked sharing, you'll find it easy to create that sense of give-and-take in your own classes.

The image above is another one of the LatinLOLCats: Unus pro omnibus, omnes pro uno. One for all, all for one.

People Need People

You need to feel connected online, and so do your students. Give them lots of opportunities to interact with one another and with you. [next]

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I'm always surprised when people assume that online classes are somehow "impersonal" compared to face-to-face classes. For me, the experience has been just the opposite: I get to know my students so much better when teaching online, and the students often remark how much easier it is to get to know their fellow students in these online classes than in a traditional 150-minutes per week face-to-face class.

Admittedly, the standard learning management systems are pretty terrible for promoting real social interaction, which is why I rely on blogs for my classes instead, with the students creating their own personal spaces online where they can interact and get to know one another. Each blog has an Introduction post, clearly labeled as such, so that in a single click from any blog post you can get to the student's Introduction. For a sense of how that works, take a look at some of the blogs here: Blog Directory (not all of the students leave their blogs up after the class is over, but quite a few do).

The image above is another proverb poster from the Proverb Laboratory: Without people even paradise gets boring. It's a Polish proverb: Bez ludzi i raj się znudzi — and the Polish rhymes.

Make Friends

Trust me: you will find many great educators by connecting via Twitter, blogs, or other social spaces. Time invested in building a support network is time well spent. [next]

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If you had asked me ten years ago whether some of my best friends would be people I have never met in person but only online, I would have found the idea surreal, yet that is indeed the case. Since moving to North Carolina eight years ago while continuing to teach for the University of Oklahoma, I've come to conduct my whole professional life online. As a result of spending all that time online, I've met many wonderful colleagues online, especially at Google+ and in the blogosphere. I've also made some friends at Twitter, much to my own surprise (the 140 characters can actually do a lot day by day).

So, if someone is planning to teach a fully online course, I would urge them to make sure first that they have had this kind of experience online, truly getting to know a person without having met them in person, face to face. Once you realize this possibility of mutual recognition online, then you are ready to experience that in your classes too!

At the DML 2015 Conference in LA, I got a chance to meet some people in person whom I have known only online before, and that was a great experience! I was surprised that there were no surprises: we were able to just carry on with our conversations at the conference as we have always done online, and we moved back into online mode again after the conference was over. I'm glad we got to meet in person, but it was also reassuring to see that it was not essential that we meet in person: fun, but not required. What is important is the way we are able to share our work with one another, online or offline: either way works!

Meanwhile, I can highly recommend DML as a really remarkable conference experience; I've written up some notes about that here: DML 2015. Here's a video presentation by one of my online friends, Gardner Campbell, whom I first got to know through Connected Courses:

The image above is another one of the GrammarCatz: I can't believe it! Henri the Cat friended me on Facebook.

If you don't already know Henri le Chat Noir, then check out his video Paw de Deux:

And I am the proud owner of an Henri coffee mug and also a mousepad:

Collaborate

Two heads really are better than one! Share ideas and brainstorm with your colleagues online — and with your students too! [next]

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Additional comments:

I get so many good ideas from the other educators that I interact with at Google+ and Twitter and in the blogosphere. In order to keep track of all that good stuff, I use two different bookmarking tools: if I am reading something directly in my browser, I use Diigo to bookmark something for future reference, and if I am reading something inside my feed reader, Inoreader, then I use Inoreader's tags to keep track of things. I really like the way that individual tweets and individual G+ posts are directly linkable for future reference! Having conversations with people in person is great, but I know I used to forget so many of the good ideas that would bubble up in conversation. Online, I can do a better job of actually saving ideas and resources that I want to use later!

Because I teach writing classes, the opportunity for my students to collaborate with one another by reading each other's writing is incredibly valuable. Students learn so much from each other, and they can also really help each other by providing feedback. Depending on their major, students may or may not have learned some good feedback skills in their other classes; for many students, this might be the first time they have ever been asked to provide substantial feedback to other students in written form. In order to help them get ready for that task, I provide some tips and practice opportunities in the early weeks of this semester, as in this assignment: Week 2: Learning How to Comment.

The image above is another one of the GrammarCatz: Two heads are better than one.

Help Conversations to Happen

Help create conversations with and among your students. Blogs come alive when there are comments! [next]

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In order to promote good conversations among students in my classes, I rely on a randomizing spreadsheet in order to set up random blog groups each week. My goal is not that every post in a blog should get comments; some posts are self-reflections or note-taking, brainstorming, writing activities that can serve a purpose without conversation. For other posts though — especially the storytelling posts that students write each week — conversation is important, and it is my goal for students to get at least one, and hopefully two, comments on their storytelling posts each week.

To help make that happen, each week I put students in random groups of three, the idea being that they comment on two other people's blogs, and also receive back comments from those two people. Not all students complete the commenting assignment every week, but it works pretty well. I've been tinkering with this system for years, and I'm satisfied with the results, and also happy that it only takes me a few minutes to set up the groups each week.

Because students are giving and receiving comments from the people in that group, the weekly comments create a conversational sense of mutual back-and-forth, and because the groups are different each week, students can meet lots of other students in the class (my classes range in size from 30-60 students). In addition to reading the storytelling post, students also read and comment on the introduction post, which helps them get to know each other as well individuals. That's important: even though students write those introduction posts in the first week of class, they are meeting new people in the class all semester long — and when you meet somebody new, you need to read their introduction!

You may have heard about the Quadblogging project. My approach is sort of like Quadblogging except that there are new groups every week.

I've written up some information about the way I use a spreadsheet to randomize the blog groups here: Randomizing Blogs. I also made a screencast for that as part of the connectedlearning.tools project; the part about using spreadsheets to randomize starts at about 4:30 in the video:

The image above is another proverb poster from the Proverb Laboratory: An untouched drum does not speak.

Tear Down the Wall

There's a lot of talk about the "walled garden" of the LMS, but I see a lot of wall and not much garden. Tear down the wall, and then you'll see a whole new world online. [next]

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I consider the standard LMS (we use D2L at my school) to be the single biggest obstacle to making real progress in online teaching. The constraints and assumptions imposed by the architecture of the LMS make it impossible to really explore the social and student-centered possibilities that online learning can offer. The LMS I use in the year 2015 is not fundamentally different in any way from the LMS I was using back in 2001, yet the social web has changed completely during that time with the advent of Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking platforms. I've written about my frustrations with the LMS here: The LMS... again.... In sum: I use the LMS for exactly what needs to be locked down and secure — the Gradebook. For everything else, I rely on the open, connected spaces provided by blogs, wikis, and social networking platforms like Twitter and Pinterest.

The image above is another item from the Proverb Laboratory: Someone who stands behind a wall can see nothing else.

Share Freely

Because the walled-off LMS is closed by default, it's hard for you and your students to share their work. Open spaces are better for sharing! [next]

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One of the ways I've tried to promote sharing at my school is by using the hashtag #OpenTeachingOU in my Twitter and Google+ posts. Using Inoreader's great RSS/clippings service, I created a combined feed that shows my #OpenTeachingOU posts, which you can see here: #OpenTeachingOU.

Even better, I got together with two of my colleagues in Oklahoma, Stacy Zemke (who coordinates OER development in the OU Libraries) and Rob Reynolds (of NextThought), and we organized an #OpenTeachingOU Twitter chat event that took place every two weeks at the end of the Spring 2015 semester. It was a big success, and I hope we will be doing that again in the Fall. There's a blog site that supports the chat, and you can find the Storify archives for the chats we had: OpenTeachingOU Blog.

OU also have a Domain of One's Own pilot at create.ou.edu, and hopefully that will also generate some great open teaching experiments next year as well!

The image above is another proverb poster from the Proverb Laboratory: Share and share alike.

Expand Your Reach Online

Openly sharing online is a great way to extend your reach. Even though I'm a very small person in the world of higher education, being online has allowed me to make a real impact. [next]

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In terms of networking strategies, I would recommend following the connections that lead naturally from one person to another. That happens in different ways in different online spaces, so explore whatever space you are using and see how that works.

When you are at Twitter, for example, you can check out the profiles of people that you follow to see who follows them and who they follow. In general, I don't find the Twitter automated recommendations to be very good, but when I have a few minutes to spare, I really enjoy scrolling through the follow screens of people I really like at Twitter.

At Google+, on the other hand, I find new people by following the people who comment in the same discussions that I participate in, and I also find people by joining Communities. I rarely participate in Google+ Communities (more about G+ Communities here), but I do find them really useful for exploring the network.

The image is another one from the Proverb Laboratory: A little person sometimes casts a long shadow. It's a French proverb: Un petit homme projette parfois une grande ombre.

Creative Imitation

As you start building online content, don't try to start from scratch. Instead, imitate what is great, and then make it your own. [next]

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Creative imitation is at the heart of popular storytelling traditions, long before the advent of digital remix culture. The students in my Myth-Folklore class and my Indian Epics class retell traditional stories in their own ways, imitating the stories while providing their own creative twist. You can see the amazing results here in the Storybook projects: eStorybook Central, and I've embedded a javascript widget below that shows some of their projects at random. (The widget is built with RotateContent.com, and you can find out more about this wonderful too here: Randomization Wonderland.)

The image in the slide above is another item from the Proverb Laboratory: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.