Year: 2013

AcAdv

2013 Technology in Advising (#AcAdv) Use in #HigherEd [SURVEY]

Laura Pasquini

Dear Academic Advising Professionals, Faculty & Administrators in Higher Education,

The division of Undergraduate Studies at the University of North Texas (UNT) is hosting the 2013 Technology in Advising Use in Higher Education survey to assess how technology in academic advising is being utilized in colleges and universities around the globe. The NACADA Technology in Advising Commission sponsored study is designed to examine the current use and perception of technology in advising among academic advising professionals, faculty advisors, and advising administrators in higher education.

#AdvTech Use in #HigherEd Survey

If you agree to participate, you will be asked to respond to a 20-question survey, which will take approximately 15-20 minutes to complete.  The questions will ask for your opinion of technology in advising use at your college and/or university institution, and your own perception about how technology is supporting the field of academic advising as a whole. Your responses are completely confidential and no individual participant will ever be identified with his/her answers.

SURVEY: 2013 Technology in Advising Use in Higher Education or cut and paste the following URL link into a web browser: http://bit.ly/AdvTechSurvey2013

This survey will close on Monday, March 4th at 11:55 pm CST.

If you have any questions or comments, please free to contact me. On behalf of the Global Community for Academic Advising (NACADA) and the advising profession, I would like to thank you for your time and input. Please pass this survey along to other advising faculty, professionals, and administrators at your college and/or university.

Thank you,

Laura Pasquini (@laurapasquini)

NACADA Technology in Advising Commission Chair 2011-2013

Academic Counselor, Office for Exploring Majors – Undergraduate Studies, UNT

This blog post is cross-posted at The Official NACADA Blog.

PhD, Professional Development, Reflections, SocioTech

Finding a Research “Home” with #SocioTech at #iConf13

Laura Pasquini

As a College of Information student, the learning technology department compliments a number of research areas emphasized within our iSchool and at the 2013 iConference. Andrew Miller (@findandrew), Leila Mills, Mark Evans and I proudly represented UNT as one of the 12 finalists for the Social Media Expo hosted by FUSE Labs of Microsoft Research at the iConference this year. After conducting our ethnographic study on the Denton Local Food System (LFS), we submitted a research paper, video, poster, and created an online space for the LFS community to share information, house knowledge and connect to local happenings within the community at FeedDenton.org.
#iConf13 Social Media Expo Finalists
  Social Media Expo poster @ 2013 iConference (#iConf13) with @findandrew

What I enjoyed most about attending the conference was the refreshing opportunities to engage about research methodology and conceptual frameworks that apply to my scholarly interests. It felt like I was coming “home” when talking shop with various academics and graduate students during the conference. The best part might have been the pre-conference session:  Sociotechnical Systems Research workshop (#CNFWSP2). This is where I was able to connect to other #sociotech researchers, and learn more about areas of inquiry coming out of the iSchools and various disciplines.

The pre-conference was a full day of fun that housed various speakers, discussions, and sharing of directions in sociotechnical research, including

  • critical study and comparative study
  • considerations for multi-scale ethnographic research
  • artifacts that change communication in organizations
  • impacts of human and non-human delegation
  • shifts from visible to invisible networks (part of ANT)
  • organization as a constant communication
  • sustainable information practices
  • action-based research for informatics improvement
  • participation, community resilience, plurality, design

Later in the day, Steve Sawyer, conducted a master class to present various sociotechnical systems (STS) perspectives, which drew upon theories from Actor-Network to social construction. Everything is relational as new forms of social organization is occurring with new technical arrangements all around us. We talked about #sociotech in practice, specifically how to situate the phenomena (conceptual & empirical framing) and conceptualize sociotechnical systems (identify characteristics of the social, technical and interactions) by looking at this STS conceptual space mapping from Steve.

Untitled
This post is just the tip of the iceberg, as I have a number of notes, ideas, references, and research peers to turn to thanks to this workshop. I was not surprised to run into some of the #sociotech usual suspects in #iConf13 sessions such local communities, learning environments, or ethnographic studies of online communities. I appreciated the comments and dialogues brought to both the paper and notes sessions (I preferred the workshop space in the notes session better), and I am motivated to dig back into my own research and dissertation grind.

Want to read more about the 2013 iConference proceedings or connect to a few sociotechs? Here you go:

 

Reference:

Miller, A. J., Pasquini, L. A., Mills, L. A., & Evans, M. (2013). Towards a methodology of virtually augmenting a knowledge sharing community of practice: A case study of the local food system of Denton, Texas. iConference 2013 Proceedings (pp. 1095-1101). doi:10.9776/13527

G*STEP

Using Verbs for Specific Learning Outcomes

Laura Pasquini

Verb Wheel

Student learning outcomes is a very common term in education. For many of my k-12 colleagues we have used this term from graduate course work, to teaching practicum, and for curriculum planning. The challenge in writing student learning outcomes happens when you have to find actionable items and SPECIFIC methods for learning assessment.

Last week I attended “Writing student learning outcomes and the GSTEP teaching template:  How they inform your teaching” for the G*STEP program presented by Shana Cole & Nancy Fire from CLEAR.

We talked about components of a teaching strategy, which included:

A. Context for your teaching strategy
B. Selecting learning challenges to address with your teaching strategy
C. Objectives for this experience
D. Foundational knowledge necessary for students to participate in teaching strategy
E. Step by step planning
F. Ground rules (if needed for you strategy)
G. Assessment: How do you plan to assess the effectiveness of your learning strategy?
H. Anticipated Challenges: Indicate how you plan to deal with any of these challenges that may apply. Describe.
I. Journal Reflection

The three level model for student learning outcome development, which included the following levels:

  1. Goal
  2. General Learning Outcomes (GLOs)
  3. Specific Learning Outcomes (SLOs)

The last step – Specific Learning Outcomes (SLOs) – is where we focused our attention. Specific learning outcomes are highly measurable and possess detailed requirements. As an instructional designer who is often involved in program evaluation or course design, I appreciated the cross-disciplinary conversations on how to meet various subject matter content issues with the needs of the learner. A helpful resource to keep us on the same page and to guide our SLOs discussion was the Bloom’s Taxonomy verb wheel. This was a practical tool that helped to focus our planning and here were some of the key points I gleaned from the overall workshop:

  • be clear, specific & measurable
  • identify what the students should be able to do as a result of a learning experience
  • display evidence that learning has occurred at a specified competency level
  • focus shifts from what “I will teach” to “what students will learn”
  • define content, expectations, assessments & creates constructive data i.e. data, percentage, and understanding of student learning

For student learning outcomes to work they have to connect to the learning. A great way to assess your expectations of your SLOs is to share these with other educators,  both inside and outside your discipline or subject matter expertise. Student learning outcomes need to be written at a general level to ensure clear communication, and limit subjective language. By using SLOs you are able to modify course objectives, assess curriculum design, and measure how your instruction impacts learners. By creating 3-7 overall goals in your course, you will want to consider at least 3-5 specific learning outcomes to measure each goal. These goals will help address your teaching strategy and how you assess your learner’s progress.

How do your specific learning outcomes (SLOs) fit into your entire course planning and content delivery?

Learning Technologies

Happy Digital Learning Day! #DLDay – Top 10 Learning Web Tools of 2012

Laura Pasquini

Happy Digital Learning Day (#DLDay)!

digital-learning2 (1)

To celebrate digital learning day today, I thought it would be a good idea to share my belated Top 10 Learning Web Tools list from 2012. As I have read other lists (here and here), I have been meaning to share useful tools that have helped me learn this last year. You may have heard me say “it’s not the tool” but rather how you use the tool – so I thought I would share my top tools that I have put to use for my own productivity and learning.

  1. Twitter – This is my active stream of information that allows me to track on conversations either via search, hashtags or through my Twitter lists. I value Twitter to find information, learn about news/trends, collect articles, read blog posts, and, most importantly, engage with peers on a daily basis. My evolving personal learning network (PLN) is definitely at the top of my learning list.
  2. Google Docs/Drive I have found Google Drive EXTREMELY useful in 2012, as I am often seen with my Chromebook in tow. Daily I can be found using Google Drive, as I typically take notes during a lecture/meeting, brainstorm storm agenda items, crowdsource ideas, collect information (via a Google forms), or store resources i.e. PDFs, presentations, and database files.
  3. Dropbox – Not all of my collaborators of research, work and writing use Google Docs, so I tend use Dropbox as my “go to” cloud storage and sharing with MS Word. I often move in between spaces and devices (mobile, PC, Chromebook, & Mac) both on campus and at home, so Dropbox is easy enough to save and return to any working projects or assignments. As a frequent flyer for with an edu account, I have accrued 23.22 GB of space through referrals, use, and a Dropbox quest. My Dropbox allows for easy work flow, specifically for storing conference presentations, collecting articles for a literature review, archiving tweets through IFTTT, downloading my mobile photos, holding my lesson plans, and editing manuscripts with co-authors.
  4. Google Search – When in doubt…Let Me Google That For You. I would say that Google is typically used as my initial search for information, news, and quick finds probably because I am often working in Google Drive (see #2) and using Google Chrome (see #7). I have learned benefits of refining my power searching skills, and also not having this as my only outlet for knowledge acquisition.
  5. Google Scholar Although I increasingly use the UNT Libraries – Find Online Articles Search more often these days, I can say that Google Scholar has been a helpful tool for finding data, collecting statistics, locating peer-reviewed journal articles, collecting my literature review materials, and retrieving other scholarly resources.
  6. Google + Hangouts The reason I value Google Plus is for the Hangouts. Both for a meeting space or “On Air” live recording, this forum has proven well for meetings, conference calls, presentations, demonstrations, peer-review process, and general catch up with colleagues. I do still use Skype; I have a greater preference for using a video conference space that has live notes, free group (up to 10) calls, connection to my Google Drive, and, of course, the ability to infuse ridiculous Google Effects when meetings run on too long. Side note: I  am curious to see what happens with the Google Plus Communities. I have recently been invited to a few, and I can see some potential with this feature in Google Plus.
  7. Google Chrome As a mobile learner and avid Chromebook-er, I would say that Google Chrome is a user-friendly web browser for productivity and workflow. I appreciate the streamline interface, search ability, extensions  and applications from the Chrome Web Store {which compliments my Android phone apps as well}. Also, it is quite compatible with Google Drive, Google + Hangouts, and easily transferable from my office to home computing life.
  8. WordPress I may have been exhausted from reflecting during my Masters’ program; however I think that having my own space and place for reflection has helped me in 2012. For a fellow researcher, I candidly explained why I blog and more about my blogging history; however I used my blog more this year to document my doctoral progress and process my own educational experiences. Thanks for being an easy space to draft, publish, and share these thoughts, WordPress.
  9. Delicious Although I use Scoopit, Storify, and Paper.li a great deal, I can say that Delicious is still my top curation tool. Since 2007, I have been collecting and organizing resource into my delicious account. When I share a URL on Twitter it automatically archive the link to my delicious account via packrati.us. This is great to return back to my tags and stacks to find notes, information, statistics, or articles that I can use for presentations and publications. Also I appreciate others in my Delicious network who stayed loyal to this tool (even after a few changes) and socially bookmark useful resources.
  10. Flickr This social photo sharing site has provided me with a lot of inspiration and ideas. Whether I have used creative common-licensed images for presentations and blog posts, or just as a tool to document my own PhD adventures, I appreciate being a member of the Flickr community. I often capture a photo of a presentation slide, make a note from class, or document an image on the go to house them on Flickr for future reference and referral.

For 2013, I plan on taking Jane Hart’s (@C4LPT) 10 Tools Challenge to find out how to use new tools to help for my own professional learning, research, and development as an educator/trainer. For those of you who want to join in the fun, check out the Top 100 Tools for Learning 2012 for inspiration to explore. Happy learning!

Higher Education, Social Media, StudentAffairs

Reflecting on Values & Identity from #Dalton13

Laura Pasquini

Over the past few days at the 2013 Dalton Institute, I have been encouraged to think about the cross-section of how our cultural norms, use of technology, and institutional practices intersect to support students. Educational reform for higher education is not new; however it was refreshing to have a group of graduate students, faculty, scholars, and practitioners to be part of a thoughtful collective to think deeper about these challenges.

Although the institute’s focus was self-promotion, social media, and student development, it was great to hear a number of conversations emerge about the disruptive forces and potential opportunities to embrace change in Student Affairs. The philosophical narratives and analysis of technology’s impact on identity was enriched by listening to personal perspectives and such varied experiences.

Dare to Jump

Photo c/o @DaltonInstitute {Thanks @vanessaballer!}

As the final keynote of the institute, I gave my “triple threat” perspective as a student, instructor, and professional in higher education. My goal was to share ideas and practices to develop a richer learning experiences; specifically ones that I have valued as an active scholar. So, doing my best to follow the amazing #dalton13 featured speakers – I shared my own narrative, critiques, and insights on how emerging technology can support and challenge student development. I gave some tangible examples and ideas of how to move beyond the gadget, application, or “next big tech thing” by considering ways educators can be actively pushing their learners. I talked about everything from exploration to collaboration, specifically by empowering students to be part of the solution to our institutional challenges.

My #Dalton13 Keynote – Notes & Then Some! (thanks for the photos & tweets #dalton13 backchannel!)

I appreciated the conversations (although some were far too brief!) around identity and student values that  I had with a number of #Dalton13 attendees, especially the FSU HESA graduate students. Although a number of ideas were shared at the institute, I am still left thinking and reflecting about these key questions:

  • How are student values demonstrated in a digital environment?
  • Can educators have an impact on the character development of learners?
  • Is student development really impacted by technology? How so?
  • Does there need to be a shift in how we support our student population on campus?
  • How can our graduate programs do a better job of challenging and supporting scholar-practitioners with “self-promotion” questions?
  • Will higher education cultural norms and institutional practices be changed, or will we be left behind?