This afternoon, I'm attending a meeting between instructors and students in the Science Education Online program that my course is a part of this semester. I'm looking forward to being able to associated faces with names. The students in my course have mostly already taken several on-line courses, so they have developed a clear voice for on-line communications, but its always fun to then people in person after getting to know them on-line. Below is the posting I wrote for my course blog.

On Wednesday afternoon, four of us drove up to Pittsfield to meet with some of the Berkshire contingent of teachers in the class. We arrived a bit before 4pm and had a few minutes to get settled in before the meeting. I was tickled to discover there was wireless network connectivity, so I could check my email, browse the web, and show people things on our site as we chatted.

Kathy gave people a few minutes to chat before we got started. Jim had made a point of sitting next to me and we got a chance to talk about how the class is going. He was concerned about his performance in the class, but as we looked over what he's doing, I assured him that he's doing exactly what we hoped students would do: engage in the activities and participate wholeheartedly in the community of the class.

After introductions, Kathy asked students to do a "two plus two" activity, which is the "teaching tip" name for asking students to write two things they like and two things they would change about a class. The central issue that people talked about was dealing with technology: basically whether to have special-purposes lessons to "teach" technology skills. My take has been that I would rather students didn't do technology for technology's sake, but would have a context. I try to aim where I actually want students to go and then make affordances for people who don't get there immediately. Some people thought that was good and others thought having something "ahead of time" (ie, before the class started) would be good. I didn't mention that our course resources were set up a couple of weeks in advance and we welcomed students who logged in early — I just didn't have any way to communicate with students until the class actually began. But, again, I'm happier having it be part of the class rather than suggesting to people that they have to invest a bunch of time ahead of time in order to take our class.

Kathy tried to reassure people that the "platform" issue will eventually be settled — or at least more settled. I'm not so sure — technology change is still accelerating, I think. I believe we'll continue to see dramatic changes even just from year to year. Especially with respect to people who can't control the infrastructure. In our department, we maintain our own servers and can decide when to switch and when to keep using the same old stuff. The SEO program has to depend on the President's office and OIT who provide one-size-fits-all solutions: one year its a "moomoo" and the next year its a girdle. And the users just have to tag along.

One final point I tried to make was that Buzz and I are committed to using free software because it demonstrates that you don't need to have a giant budget to do this stuff. If you can get a little technical help, you can set up and use tikiwiki at your school for about $200: that includes the hardware. It doesn't take much to make it happen. Is it perfect? Well, maybe not. But it puts usable technology in the reach of everyone.

One question I thought about asking (but didn't) was whether or not people got our strategy around learning the ecology concepts. Rather than trying to "teach" ecology, we got students the Forest and Thicket book which has examples of all of the ecological relationships and phenomena — then we're asking discussion questions about the ecological principles and asking students to reflect on how to organize these examples into a framework. Buzz and I built a concept map ahead of time with all of the ecological ideas organized the way we thought they ought to fit together. Does anyone want me to post that someplace? Let me know.

StevenBrewer