An Always Engaged Audience

November 01, 2017

Some background: For those in other parts of the world who may not know, this fall has been unusually rough when it comes to the bugs that have been floating around here in North Carolina. Like most parents, my wife and I have a working arrangement — subject to change based on the needs of the day — as to who will stay home with our daughter when she has to stay home from school. Since we are both professors, this pattern generally aligns with the Monday-Wednesday-Friday (MWF)/Tuesday-Thursday (TR) split.

This semester, I have the MWF shift. This is counterintuitive, as my classes this semester are on MWF. She, however, has classes with more in-class assignments on MWF than I do. As a result, my MWF schedule is more open to alternate approaches.

I have been using Periscope to stream classes when I stay home. It is an imperfect vehicle for what I am attempting[1], but it gets the job done.

In a strange way, I have noticed that I find it a surprisingly comfortable experience to hold class via Periscope. And after class today, I think I have settled on why this is.

For those of you who have never taught, facing a room full of students can be a depressing task. I know that my students are more engaged than they look. Their questions and comments have, on more than one occasion, proved that just moments before I was about to succumb to despair. But if you know the semi-blank look that people assume when they watch television, you know what you will see looking out at a room full of students. Not all of them look like this, of course. Some are more animated and some are less. Nevertheless, there is a passive look that pervades the room. This can be true with the most engaged of students. If one is taking notes, for example, you do not get to see the animation in their face because they are looking down.[2]

When you broadcast on Periscope, you look at yourself. It is a feature that lets the broadcaster know what his audience is seeing. So, when I am talking about Mark Twain and H. G. Wells,[3] I am looking at someone who is actively engaged — not a classroom of students who are paying attention and trying to process what is being presented or discussed.[4]

I know that when I present, I feed off of those who are actively engaged. Most people in front of an audience do. When that is happening, I feel like I am doing a better job (Whether I am or not is a different question.). With Periscope, I provide myself with a positive feedback loop.

As a result, classroom performance, in the literal sense of the nature of what is presented rather than its content, could (Let me stress: could.) improve on the in-room experience with access to this technology, if it can be successfully linked to a mechanism for student participation, as discussed in footnote one below. It might also be worth considering and weighing for those running experiments with classroom delivery, as can be seen at Minerva University or through on-demand services like Kahn Academy.

[1] If you want to see what can be done with a streamed class that functions very much as an interactive seminar, I would highly recommend that you tune in to one of Signum University’s open classes. You will find me sitting in on “Exploring Lord of the Rings” most Tuesday evenings, beginning at roughly 9:30 PM Eastern. Professor Corey Olsen simultaneously broadcasts via Periscope/Twitter, Twitch, and Discord while being “present” in Lord of the Rings Online. The online version of Middle Earth allows for the classes to take field trips to locations of note every week. (The broadcasts are then made available on YouTube, as can be seen in this randomly chosen example.) He manages to juggle three chat areas (Discord is the primary location for the comments and questions.), where people ask questions and offer comments.

Since this blog is about the iPad in the educational space, I will let you know how I attend. I run Twitch (which contains the video and audio stream I use) and Discord (where I am present in the chat) in split screen mode on my 10.5” iPad Pro. I find it quicker to type my comments on the Smart Keyboard but often use the onscreen keyboard. To get a fuller picture and sound, I AirPlay the Twitch stream to my Apple TV. That, however, is a creature comfort and allows me to avoid resizing the split screen view to see more of the slides presented on the screen and/or type. It is possible to have a decent experience doing it all on the iPad.

[2] In case you are a student and are wondering, your professors can tell when you are writing about their class rather than another. The rhythm of your engagement in the class and the engagement with the page are either aligned or are not.

[3] Today’s 9AM class, which is on the way people understand time and how that is expressed in art and society, wrapped up A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and started The Time Machine.

[4] For those who might want to offer a well-meaning critique here and talk about active learning, let me offer a quick distinction: The look on a student’s face is a function of what they are doing rather than the pedagogical structure they are existing within. The same look will pervade on the faces of students during the kind of discussion or activity you might suggest I try. There is a material difference in the look worn by a student when they are “on” — when they have the floor or are talking — and when they are not, whether they are in a lecture or working in a small group. As a practical matter, it is impossible for everyone to be fully active at once. It is a question of how often they are fully active, how often they are partially active, how often they are passively active, and how often they are disengaged.

Dr. Matthew M. DeForrest is a Professor of English and the Mott University Professor at Johnson C. Smith University. The observations and opinions he expresses here are his own. You are very welcome to follow him on Twitter and can find his academic profile at Academia.edu.

A Tip: Presenting with an iPad

October 18, 2017

About a year ago at a conference, someone looked at my iPad just before I got up to present a paper.[1] That what I was doing came as a surprise made me think I should pass this tip along to readers here.

This is a screen shot of the paper I recently submitted for the conference proceedings[2] of the Yeats Society of Korea's 2017 International Conference on W. B. Yeats and Movements in Literature, Art and Society in Seoul:

And here is what appeared on my screen while I presented.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to increase the font size on an electronic device. What it does require is for us to not loose sight of what we can do with a digital-first document. It is easy, after all, to get attached to the thought that the time of the presentation is tightly tied to its length.[3] But once the paper is completed (Well, as completed as any presentation draft gets....), we are free to change its appearance to suit our immediate needs.

The sharp eyed of you will notice that these are two separate files. I use a duplicate of the completed draft because it invariably needs editing to account for the fact that you can do things in writing that you cannot in speaking -- and visa-versa. Long sentences, for example, can be complex on the page or screen (see footnote one below) without risking losing a reader in a way that they cannot when a speaker encounters a listener.

Using a synched electronic copy also means I have a backup. If something goes wrong with my iPad, I can pull out my phone and access the file. It may not be as convenient but it sure beats having to try to receive your paper from memory.

Incidentally, this approach also works with paper printouts and on laptop screens. These methods have some drawbacks, of course. Printing in a larger font means more pages and an increased chance of the pages getting shuffled (I always make sure to have the page number formatted as "X of Y pages".) and laptops are more awkward while standing at a podium and it is not as easy to scroll through a document while presenting as it is on an iPad. These are, however, things that can easily be worked around if you haven't jumped on the iPad bandwagon.

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[1] For those outside of the humanities who may be more used to other methods of presenting (e.g., poster sessions), I generally give a 20 minute presentation when I attend a conference as part of a 90 minute long panel. Any time that remains after the three presentations (additional time is eaten up by introductions, people getting up and sitting down as one speaker makes way for the next, people running over their allotted time, and the like) is a Q & A and discussion period. Immediately following this, everyone rushes for the bathrooms and/or the coffee station.

[2] One of the nice things about the Yeats Society of Korea's conferences is that the proceedings (seen below, with a pen added for scale) come out before the conference and are distributed to the attendees for their use during the event. As such, we all have the papers in front of us and can make notes in them as we listen. This past year, we also received it electronically and I was able to use Goodnotes to annotate the document.

[3] For those who have not done this regularly, a twenty minute paper is roughly eight double spaced, 11-12 point pages long.

The Tyrannies we Falsely Blame on Technology

October 05, 2017

As this occasional blog may indicate, I am far more technophile than technophobe. Indeed, I prefer to embrace titles like “technophile” and “early-adopter”(^1) to stave off alternate images that would align my behavior with addictions — a case of Star Trek’s holodiction writ small — or as an embracing of wish fulfillment/delusions of grandeur of my being a superhero like Batman, with his voice controlled Batmobile and other wonderful toys, or Tony Stark with his computer assistant Jeeves.

I can stop any time. Really.

My predilection for technology has led me to think about technology and its use in the classroom on more than one occasion. Indeed, a search of iTunes will yield four Summer Institutes(^2), generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, that I organized which focused on Technology and New Media within the academy. Most of my personal focus has been on how the small, incidental uses of technology can improve the life of a faculty member and the experience of students in the classroom rather than on large scale initiatives — how a service like Periscope, for example, can come to your aid when you have to stay home with a sick child as opposed to an analysis of how to roll out online learning campus-wide for all faculty and students. I know people who do the latter (and try to work closely with them) and respect their work. It’s just that is not where my active interest currently lies.

As with all things, both levels of interest in ed-tech run the risk of losing sight of first causes — the underlying assumptions and needs that drive our decisions. Recently, it took me a surprising amount of effort to trace back to first causes my discomfort with a story that, when I read it, I thought I should be excited by. Union County Public Schools in North Carolina (I am pleased to say my daughter attends a school within this system.) published a piece well worth reading on how Vinson Covington, the AP European History Teacher at Parkwood High School, was getting his students to create a mobile app as a vehicle for learning about history.

Before I go any further, I want to make one thing clear. I think this is a fantastic, inventive idea and that Covington should be applauded for his work and for creating an environment where his students are engaged and are challenged to think about the subject differently. Nothing that follows should be seen as taking away from this, my personal and professional (for what little that is worth) assessment of what he is doing or take away from my hope that I see more teachers doing cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary work like this at all levels of education. It is absolutely critical for all of our futures.

But as I was writing, I read this article and knew I should be interested an excited by it. Instead, I found myself disquieted. My first response to this disquiet, which I shared on Twitter, was that I would have felt better if it was part of a team-taught course, where the coding and the history could both be more fully explored by the students. And while I still think that, I no longer believe that is the source of my disquiet. Team taught courses are great but, from a staffing point of view, only occasionally practical. The kind of thing that Covington, on his own initiative, is doing here is a solution to a real zero-sum game that administration plays when trying to best deploy the limited manpower available.

Ultimately, I believe the source of my disquiet is the underlying assumptions about which disciplines should make space for others and how that space should be created. Those assumptions are building a hierarchy that many insist does not exist — even as they participate in building and reinforcing the hierarchy.

In Covington’s case, there is no sense — even in my mind — that it is wrong for history faculty to introduce a coding project into their classroom. Indeed, I remain in awe of what Mike Drout and Mark LeBlanc accomplished and continue to accomplish with their Lexomics Project and know that I need to find the time to use their tool to satisfy some of my own idle curiosities.

To illustrate my concern, consider how non-English and Language Arts faculty react when they decide that their students cannot write well. They turn to the English faculty and ask why they have not taught the students better and look to them to provide solutions. There is no perceived cultural pressure on the non-English faculties to introduce writing into their areas in the way there is to introduce coding into history, as in the case of Covington’s work.

And I hasten to point out that the kind of cultural pressure I am pointing out is not just negative pressure. Covington has been singled out for praise here for his innovation. Can you conceive of an article that praises a member of a Biology faculty for having Pre-Med students write sonnets to improve their writing and interpersonal skills? Can you see that article treating such assignments as anything other than silly? Or as a waste of time that would be better spent on the difficult subject matter material that students are perceived as needing to cover to succeed in medical school?

And yet, no one will deny that understanding how World War I started is easy or unimportant. After all, understanding a highly mechanized, semi-automated system of distributed but telegraphically linked command posts with a series of standing orders that, once begun, cannot be stopped without destroying the system (i.e., the Schlieffen Plan) might be analogous to our contemporary computer-controlled military systems might be what prevents World War III. And learning about sonnets and people’s emotional reactions to them might help a doctor have a better bedside manner or a sufficiently greater sympathy with a patient that lets them notice that, despite the glitter of their walk, their patient may need help. It might help those employed by insurance companies see less of the paperwork of procedure and more the people trapped within the system.

Innovation, then, must not be seen as a one to one correspondence with technology, science, and engineering. Innovation is when we take new ideas and apply them in any field. The unfortunate truth about the way we are currently recognizing innovation in the Academy is that we have tied it too closely to the use of technology — so closely that we can no longer see when innovation is taking place through other areas. This matters not just for humanities faculty who might fear they are becoming second-class citizens within their own disciplines. It also matters to faculty innovators like Brendan Kern, whose podcast on the life of an imagined exoplanet can teach students about biology through the exploration of an alien, new world. Such work is currently more likely to be advertised as “fun” or as a bit of fluff rather than a serious attempt at pedagogical development and innovation that might make material accessible to students.

Whether we in at all levels of the Academy choose to see innovation more broadly than the infusion of STEM and its wonderful toys into other disciplines will determine how likely we are to promote and recognize real innovation across all disciplines. It will require challenging many of our assumptions about how we do things and how much of a king our disciplinary content actually is. It will be difficult for many of us to do this. After all, it is easy to give the appearance of innovation if you see people working on robots or a flying car. It is less easy to do so when you watch someone telling or discussing a story. But both of these represent the skills our students will need to be successful and adaptable in the 21st Century. We must, then, learn how to refuse to be hidebound.

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1. For those that are curious, I added the hyphen because of some research conducted by Sparrow Alden, who noticed that, in The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien appeared to hyphenate certain two word phrases to indicate that they stood in for what would have been a single word in Westron (the common language of men and Hobbits in Middle Earth) and come down to us as kennings (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenning). Although early adopter is not traditionally hyphenated and is not as figurative as oar-steed or whale-road, it is nevertheless true that being called an early-adopter signals more than just being the first kid on the block with a new toy.

2. Or you could follow these links:

The First JCSU Faculty Summer Institute for Technology & New Media

The Second JCSU Faculty Summer Institute for Technology & New Media

The Third JCSU Faculty Summer Institute for Technology & New Media

The Fourth JCSU Faculty Summer Institute for Technology and New Media and Problem Solving in the Interdisciplinary Humanities

The Importance of Note Taking Apps

September 28, 2017

The GoodNotes app published a blog post about how Shirantha Beddag uses the GoodNotes app in her teaching.

While the blog post is worth reading for anyone who teaches music, it is also good reading for the rest of us. GoodNotes (and similar apps like Apple’s Notes and Notability) are foundation-level apps for those of us in education. As such, they run the risk of disappearing into the background.

But these note taking apps are the kind of things administrators, faculty, staff, and students alike will use day in and day out. For that reason, it’s important to find an app that fits your needs. And, quite frankly, they are one of the biggest reasons to go with an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil combination. We may not all be ready to take advantage of the artistic potential offered by ProCreate. Everyone who has meetings inflicted upon them need a way to take notes.

For me, the reason that I ended up going with GoodNotes is its use of notebooks organizational metaphor rather than a system that hews closer to a computer file system, which is what is found in Notability and Apple’s Notes app. All three are strong, and there are others that are worth looking into. The strength of the App Store is that it provides options that users can weigh. For some students, the ability to record a lecture may be the killer feature, as opposed to GoodNotes’ ability to search handwritten text.

So how will you know, short of downloading them all and playing with them? Fortunately, someone has done that for you already. Serenity Caldwell has a great run-down of several apps on iMore. Also, ask around and see what your colleagues are using. I’ve noticed people who have chosen an app, rather than just going with a default, are happy to show you how their app helps their idiosyncrasies.

What is So Different about the Three Current Categories?

April 10, 2016

There are currently three broad categories, each of which can be subdivided, of devices that users can now choose from:

Mobile: This category includes both handhelds (mobile phones and devices like the iPod Touch) and tablets. While these each solve a specific use case within the category, they all have mobility and a touch-first interface as their two primary features. They also provide their users with a task-based focus through the use of apps instead of applications.

Strength: Portability of the device and the focus of the apps.

Needed Leverage: An always (or almost always) available internet connection for extensive file storage.

Weakness: Not as powerful, in terms of computing power and application flexibility.

Laptops: This category includes all devices that are portable but require a keyboard. Yes, they may have touchscreen capability, but the primary input is designed to be through a keyboard. They share with their desktop-bound counterparts an approach to tasks that uses application, rather than apps. This represents not only a difference in focus but also in the number of tasks that a user can pretend they are dong at the same time. While the latest iPads can run two apps at once, laptops and desktops can have multiple windows open at the same time.

Strength: Balances the power of the Desktop with the Portability of a Mobile Device

Needed Leverage: Consistent access to power to recharge its battery.

Weakness: Heavier than a Mobile Device.

Desktops: These devices are designed to stay in one place and provide significant computing power. Quite frankly, they provide far more computing power than most users need. More important for most users, these devices provide a significant amount of on-device storage for large libraries of files.

Strength: Raw computing power and the capacity for a lot of local file storage.

Needed Leverage: An Internet connection for off site remote access when you are away from your desk and a device to access things while out of the office.

Weakness: Immobile and, for some, too many windows.

Seen in this light, the laptop, which was once the way to get work done on the go, is now a compromise device -- a role usually given to mobile devices (It should be noted that this role is usually assigned by people who use laptops.).

It is also worth noting that there is no longer a primary/base-line device for people to use. All three categories are viable computing choices for users. The question, then, is what does the individual user need at the time (given the constraints of their purchasing power). This is something that strikes home every time I come to Asia. You do not see people using laptops as a primary computing device. You see them using a larger mobile phone. It is a trend, incidentally, that educators should keep in mind, as students everywhere appear to be shifting toward this model and it represents a shift as significant as the move from punch cards to keyboards and text-based to GUI-based operating systems.

The importance of use case here is a critical one in education, which has three primary user groups: students, faculty, and administration/staff. Of the three, the individuals most likely to be tied to a desktop are the administration and staff, who work at their desk (when they are not in a meeting). Professors are semi-mobile users, as they move from their offices to a classroom. Students, however, are clearly mobile users. They move from place to place throughout the day, as they go from class to class.

It is worth keeping this in mind when making decisions about the technology that students will be issued or be asked to purchase on their own. Mobility and portability, although they may not always recognize it, is an important factor in their interaction with technology.

The Experiment

January 07, 2016

I have been at Guandong Baiyun University for four days, giving talks and doing some set-up work for the Guandong Baiyun University Center on American Culture and Race -- which, with the support of the US Embassy in Beijing, Johnson C. Smith University is establishing here with our partner. My set-up included preparing three iMacs, ten iPad minis, and ten iPod Touches for use by those visiting the Center so that they can listen to the podcasts and view the vidcasts and other material we will be uploading to promote mutual understanding between the US and China.

During the time I have been here, I have been using an iPad Pro. That is why I am writing this blog.

Traveling here with the iPad Pro is part of a larger experiment. In brief, we wish to determine if it can replace a faculty member's desktop computer for a month (Dec. 15 to Jan. 15 -- a time frame that includes travel, a break, an advising period, and, of course, teaching) and to document the successes and the pain points associated with such an experiment.

Yes: desktop.

Quite frankly, much of what is written about whether or not an iPad is capable of replacing a laptop is reductive. The iPad has been able to replace a laptop for several iterations. Indeed, I ceased to use a laptop computer soon after the first iPad was released. Much like Serenity Caldwell did recently during her iPad Pro Experiment, I closed my laptop for a week and tried to see if I could successfully complete what I needed to do with just the iPad. I have written and edited full length articles on iPads for years (You have actually been able to write articles on an iPhone using only the Notes app for a long time. The screen size just makes it inconvenient. Inconvenient is not the same as impossible. After all, the screens on the typewriters that came out at the same time as the early PCs didn't have a screen that could show nearly as much as today's phone screens.)

There was, of course, a learning curve. I discovered, however, that the overwhelming majority of my tasks could be completed on an iPad and that half of those I could not complete on the iPad wear do to artificial constraints imposed elsewhere (IT staffs have since come around to supporting mobile-centric computing. Indeed, many have embraced it with a fervor that equals or exceeds my own.).

I also learned that many of the perceived constraints of the first generation iPad had less to do with the device and more to do with me. Typing on a glass screen was initially alien. After a week, however, it was normal and physical keyboards felt strange. Yes, the virtual and physical keyboards were different but my initial hesitations had to do with adjusting to what was new rather than what was better or normal.

Disclaimer: While I am not a slow typist, I do not move at the speeds of many professional writers. I never took a typing class so never learned to touch-type. For some, the changeover to a glass screen from a good keyboard involves a noticeable degradation in typing speed. For those whose livelihood depends on the number of words on the page/screen, it wouldn't be a good idea to threaten one's livelihood with retraining. For future generations, however, it is worth remembering the angst that accompanied the shift from Typing 101 to Keyboarding 101 in the 80s and the questions about speed and appropriateness of changing what is taught to students. Because, after all, there were going to be typewriters in offices for a long time and not everyone would have access to computers.

Whether an iPad can replace a laptop is a question based on a series of false assumptions and comparison, as was humorously demonstrated by Fraser Speirs' review, asking if the MacBook Pro can replace your iPad. Most comparisons are not as fair as this one, as they tend to compare a single product with three primary expressions (the iPad mini, iPad Air, and iPad Pro) to a class of products (the MacBook, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, to use Apple's line of laptops as a point of comparison). There is a huge range of capabilities between these three laptops and, for some users, the iPad mini, the MacBook, or a Chromebook are equally unusable because they need the features available at the Pro level.

With iOS 9, the iPad Pro can, in most cases, easily replace a laptop -- as Speirs has outlined on his blog. The obvious next question is if the iPad can replace a Desktop. Of course, given that laptops can replace desktops, Speirs' experiment could be said to have already been completed. But technology usage, like all politics, is local. Can his experiment be completed here?

And, as with most things, the only way to discover is to do.