Thursday was my second day at the the 2009 SITE conference.  I attended the last part of Lisa Hervey’s presentation, “Lost and Found in Translation: A TPCK View of Mid-Career Teacher Beliefs and Practice.”  I regretted arriving late!  Hervey’s study seemed to be a more qualitative approach to examining Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge.  My colleagues at BYU are working to develop an instrument that measures TPCK using quantitative and qualitative items.  I was curious about how Hervey interpreted the TPCK constructs as she coded her transcripts, so I asked her about it after the session.  At the end of our conversation, she offered me her card (I really need to get cards made up) and suggested that I contact her during the next week to discuss possible collaboration.

After Hervey’s presentation, I attended the presentation of a colleague, Michael Griffiths, “Using Asynchronous Video to Achieve Instructor Immediacy and Closeness in Online Classes: Experiences from Three Cases.”  Mike had asked me to attend, since I am using his model asynchronous model in my oneline course this semester.  Mike’s enthusiasm for asynchronous video is akin to that of a religious convert.  My enthusiasm is more measured.  My section of the course has been plagued with technical difficulties.  The “video blog tool” that we are using has dropped my entire section from the course, randomly refused to record video from myself and my students, and added the wrong date to several videos.  Asynchronous video does allow me to pick up on nonverbal cues and better diagnose student concerns than email alone.  However, I find it inconvenient, so using it actually delays the frequency of the feedback that I provide to students.  I’m curious to see how my students answer Mike’s survey questions about asynchronous video at the end of the course.

After Mike’s presentation, David Byrum and Liz Stephens of Texas State University-San Marcos presented on “Using Wikis for Curriculum Building: Creating a Web 2.0 Course.”  I was very interested in their presentation.  The wiki model that they have created for their course is based on principles similar to the wiki that I use in my course.  They are using student work to prepare materials that future students then use to learn about Web 2.0 tools.  However, they are using a graduate level instructional design course to create modules to teach students about tools.  Being a graduate student myself, I don’t have the same resources.  Instead, students in my course prepare articles on Web 2.0 tools that future students can use a resource.  Also, Byrum and Stephens’ students create web-based projects and post links to them on a wiki.  So do my students, but Byrum and Stephens’ students create a coherent unit plan.  The principles are similar, but I believe Byrum and Stephens’ course has the superior execution.  I would love to see IP&T 286 move towards Byrum and Stephens’ model.

I ended up attending the 2009 SITE conference in Charleston almost on a whim.  I didn’t propose a presentation, but my good friend Andrea did:  “Online Social Networking Used to Enhance Face-to-Face and Online Pre-Service Teachers Education”.  The abstract states,

“In this presentation we will share our experiences with teaching a technology course for pre-service teachers using online social networks to enhance the course.  We will begin by presenting three case studies in which two social  networks were used in three different instances of the course.  Finally, we will present our findings and our conclusions about social networks, how they can be used most effectively, and the advantages and disadvantages of the features in each.”

Andrea’s section of IP&T 286 was the first instance. A section taught be the course coordinator, Dr. Charles Graham, provided the second instance.  Andrea asked if I would mind writing up a brief description of my experience using Ning in my online section of IP&T 286 last semester.  Since I didn’t mind, I provided the third instance and was granted third author status.

I learned that the presentation had been accepted months ago, but did not decide to attend until a few weeks prior to the conference and didn’t actually make travel plans until last week.  I’m glad I decided to come, and not just because Charleston is a beautiful city with weather ten degrees warmer than what I left behind.

I arrived at the conference on Wednesday.  The first session that I attended was a presentation by Linda Brupbacher and Dawn Wilson of Houston Baptist University.  The presentation described efforts in technology integration in a pre-service teacher program.  Brupbacher and Wilson emphasized their attempts at a spiral curriculum aimed at developing future teachers’ technological pedagogical content knowledge.  For me, the idea that I was most eager to try was that of placing the technology course at the beginning of the course sequence for education majors.   Brupbacher and Wilson pointed out that this gave pre-service teachers skills that allowed them to use technology to aid in their own learning, which in turn gave them ideas for using technology to aid their future students’ learning.  I like Brupbacher and Wilson’s approach, but I would go even further.  I believe that all college freshman should take a required technology course that helps them learn how to use technological tools to support their learning.

Since the presentation that I was a part of was a “brief paper” and was presenting at the end of the hour, I managed to catch a presentation by Denise Schmidt, Evrim Baran, Ann Thompson, Matthew Koehler, Mishra Punya, and Tae shin.  The presentation was entitled, “Examining Preservice Teachers’ Development of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge in an Introductory Instructional Technology Course.”  This presentation described the results of a study that attempted to measure pre-service teachers’ growth in TPACK over a course of a semester (the study will continue to measure these teachers’ growth throughout their time in the education program).  Their results showed growth in all seven TPACK components.  I was interested in this presentation because I have been working with Dr. Graham and a few other graduate students to create an assessment of TPACK for use with pre-service teachers at BYU.  I saw some similarities between their instrument and ours.  However, we’ve encountered some difficulties in clearly defining the boundaries between constructs.  The concept of TPACK has some intuitive appeal for me, but I have concerns about the distinctions between the component parts of  the TPACK framework (I have similar concerns with TPACK’s parent concept, PCK– I’ll discuss these in a later post).

Wednesday afternoon, I attended back to back sessions by Judi Harris, Mark Hofer (and a host of collaborators).  The session title was “Operationalizing TPACK for Educators: The Activity Types Approach to Technology Integration” and it was delivered in two parts.  Activity types are an attempt to categorize the activities that teachers think about when planning lessons.  I first read Harris and Hofer’s article about activity types in 2006 and had immediately sat down and tried to create my own comprehensive list of activity types  (which I still have by the way).  My approach was different than Harris and Hofer’s.  They and their collaborators looked at the types of activities used in each content area.  I attempted to look across content areas in an attempt to separate general pedagogies from content or topic specific pedagogies.  It seems to me that for PCK or TPACK to be a useful construct, it should be possible to classify general pedagogical activities as pedagogical knowledge (PK) and content or topic-specific activities as pedagoical content knowledge (PCK).  I asked Mark Hofer about the lack of general activity structure in the taxonomy.  He argued that they felt that the difference between reading text in, for example, a social studies classroom, was different enough from the activity of reading text in a mathematics classroom to constitute separate, content-specific activity types.  I am not yet convinced.  Still, I find the concept of activity types to be a very practical concept for assiting teachers’ planning, independent of the TPACK framework.

The class I’m taking on New Media, Social Media and Learning asked me to “do some digging around in Google, Yahoo, or [my] search engine of choice and find an interesting article about educational uses of blogs”, to post about “why [I] found the article [I] linked to particularly interesting” and to “extend or improve the ideas described in the article in some way”.

My classmate Nina, has already completed the assignment and posted it on her blog.  I did a quick search of Goolge, on the terms: education, blog, and use.  I also did a quick search of Google Scholar using the same terms.  Like Nina, I found few scholarly articles on educational blogging and none in the past year.  I’m not doing a serious lit review, so I’m not looking very hard (and ignoring the libray databases), but still, scholarly articles on educational blogging don’t seem very easy to find.

However, I know that there is a lot of information available about educational blogging.  Over the past year, I’ve been collecting tidbits of information about educational blogging so that I could share these ideas with my students.  Most of this information has come from bloggers who teach in K12 settings.  Unfortunately, I’ve spent too much time collecting and too little time processing.  My resources are scattered across Delicius, Diigo, and Google Reader.  Maybe now I can use these bits of information to come up with some coherent thoughts on educational blogging.

I found a post on “The use of blogs in education” (from a blog that, based on the style and frequency of posts, I suspect was set up to fulfill a class assignment) that gave four main purposes for using blogs in education:

• Classroom Management
• Collaboration
• Discussions
• Student Portfolios

Each of these could be considered a valid educational use of a blog.  A teacher could keep a blog to post announcements and assignments and strengthen home-school communication.  A teacher could set up collaborative assignments or discussions on blogs and require students to use blogs to display electronic portfolios of their work.  Blogs can be used to share resources (Free Technology for Teachers, iLearn Technology) or they can be used to deliver education, such as “how-to guides” and more (The Edublogger).

But like Sarah Stewart, I tend to think that for teachers and students (anyone really), the greatest power of blogging lies in its ability to encourage reflective practice.  Clarence Fisher, Dan Meyer, and Geoff Sheehy are just some examples of teachers who keep blogs in which they reflect on their practice on a regular basis.  Clarence Fisher and Konrad Glogowski have written many posts on how they use blogging to encourage reflection in their students.  I believe that Mr. Glogowski’s post on How to Grow a Blog is must-read for anyone interested in educational blogging.  I like the metaphor of blogs as an organic entity, as something that can grow.  Blogs as electronic artifacts are definitely not organic, but the learning that they represent is a result of organic processes.  Learning does grow.

From what I have learned about educational blogging, it seems that using blogs as way to turn in “electronic essays” or even to house “online writing journals” is a waste of the tool.  A public blog for a reflecting on your own practice (whatever that practice may be) is like talking to yourself without being crazy. . . someone out there might actually be listening.

From my own experience, I’m not sure I know how to “grow a blog” yet, but I feel like through blogging, I learn more all the time, and most of what I learn isn’t about blogging (blogging would have very little value to me it were).

If you are interested in ideas for implementing blogging in your classroom, I suggest you check out these resources (in addition to the ones mentioned above) for inspiration.

• How you SHOULD use blogs in education
• Using Blogs in Science Education
• Blogs in Education

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As part of a study I was conducting, I recently had the opportunity to ask a lot of people “What is your personal philosophy of teaching?” As I watched my interview subjects struggle to articulate their thoughts on teaching, I realized that I’d never articulated a coherent statement of my own philosophy of teaching.  This is my attempt.

My philosophy of teaching is grounded in my philosophy of learning.  I believe that learning is the purpose of life. I also believe that most learning comes from experience either direct or vicarious and I know that a lot of meaningful learning occurs with no teacher.  I see the learner’s role as primary and the teacher’s role as secondary.  This isn’t to say that I believe teachers are unimportant.  Without a teacher, most learners struggle.  Having a good teacher around makes learning easier, or at least more efficient.

As a teacher, I feel that it is my responsibility to help students learn from their own experiences and from the experiences of others.  I try to help students learn things that would have been difficult to learn on their own.  Often, this means designing situations that students would not have experienced of their own volition simply because they had no idea what they might learn from the situation or even that such a situation existed.  As a teacher, I am part of their experience, their guide, and because I am part of their experience, they are part of my experience and learning is something we share together.

In practice, this means that I spend most of my time creating semi-controlled situations for my students to explore and very little time lecturing.  I stay prepared to answer questions or provide demonstrations if needed and I try to predict where difficulties will occur so that I can provide resources that will help students overcome obstacles (seemingly) on their own.

Not all of my students appreciate my approach.  I’ve had student comments that read, “I felt like I was learning on my own,” and “My group taught it to me,” but I can’t remember having anyone say, “I didn’t learn.”