Poet Ponders the Digital

One of the serious questions facing proponent of online education is if the current nature of online courses encourages poor teaching methods. The qualities of online courses that contribute to "taking the easy path" exist in some traditional courses. Also, we need to be admit that some instructors are lazy, poorly trained, or truly dedicated to models that others might not endorse. The issues instructors and critics of online education should consider: 1. Class size. When you have too many students, it is easier to assess students via multiple-choice exams and other forms of memory recall testing. If you rely entirely on assessment of memorized data, but have only a dozen or so students, I'd wonder if you are lazy or have an out-dated pedagogy. But, if you teach 100 or more students, nobody can expect you to assign massive individual research projects and reports. The larger the class size, the more automated the assessment we have to adopt to remain sane. 2. Cla...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley January 7, 2013 Deadline February 2013 Issue Accommodating Difference with Good Design Websites and software should be accessible to as many people as possible, including individuals with physical and neurological differences. Developers sometimes forget the various challenges people experience when visiting websites or using software. Failing to test interfaces for accessibility leaves barriers in place that exclude readers and users, the last thing any good organization or company wants to do. In the physical world, we notice the obstacles others encounter. Most of us try to help when we notice steep steps, heavy doors, high shelves or small print frustrating another person. Whether out of empathy, compassion or a sense of obligation, we don’t need laws to tell us that helping other people is the right thing to do. Of course, there are laws such as the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), amended in 2008, and the Individuals with ...

The first developers of IBM PC computers neglected audio capabilities (first IBM model, 1981). (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley December 10, 2012 Deadline January 2013 Issue Dinosaur Me: An Attitude from the Past “Dude, you’re like a dinosaur of the PC era. PCs aren’t cool. We only use them to create phone apps.” My students declared me a dinosaur after I suggested they should experiment with more software and programming tools on their personal computers. What about playing games on PCs? When I was in college, serious gamers assembled impressive PC systems. “Consoles are better. Who wants to mess with computer hardware?” I asked about the Web. “Dedicated apps on smartphones are better. Use the Facebook or Twitter app on your phone, not some cluttered Web page. Dude, seriously, you’re a PC dino.” When a student calls you a dinosaur, even in jest, it seems like a good moment for reflection. As the classroom emptied into the foggy night, I ...

I tend to answer questions when asked, often without pausing long enough to consider the best wording — or even if I should answer. This semester, I'm teaching a course that uses Wikis to explore collaboration. The students are struggling with the Wiki format and some of the concepts. You'd be wrong if you thought users of Wikipedia understood how the system functions. I mentioned that installing and maintaining any content management system (CMS) was a good skill to have. A student then asked about job skills currently in demand. He was told by someone that some specific tools were in demand, while others were not. The tools and skills he was told are valuable are absolutely, positively not highly-valued based on a simple search of tech-focused job sites. And, of course, I said so. Sorry, but Visual Basic isn't going to land you at the top of the field. (There are still companies using VB for database applications, but C# is a better choice in my view.) And while ...

Monday night, I spent an hour reviewing basic Word skills with my students. One student asked why she needed to learn the "right" way to use Word, when nobody cared if you used spaces instead of tabs, hit return instead of inserting page breaks, and manually numbered your pages. I was stunned, to say the least, that anyone — especially a child of the digital age — could suggest software skills aren't important. Learning to use any application effectively eventually saves time and improves your work. If you learn how to use Word moderately well, you save minutes a day, and those minutes become hours over a month. Learning any application's features opens up new possibilities. I tell my students that letting Word automate some tasks frees more time to focus on the words instead of the formatting. To me, this is a self-evident observation: I would rather spend time writing rather than formatting. And then, on Wednesday, I received an official departmental syllabus ...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley November 5, 2012 Deadline December 2012 Issue You Need Backups: The Benefits of Off-Site Storage Hurricane Sandy reminds us that in a matter of minutes everything in a building can be destroyed. Though we can predict some disasters, others come quickly and without warning. My wife and I have lived in places with earthquakes, tornadoes, floods and blizzards. Those are only some of the natural disasters that can upend lives. And then, there are the unfortunate events beyond nature. When things do go so horribly wrong, they take possessions and memories. Sometimes, the losses include computer hardware and storage media. In a serious disaster, the best place for personal and business data is somewhere far, far away from the event. Yet, most of us don’t have off-site backups of important data. It is time to adopt an off-site backup strategy. Because all storage media fail, my wife and I do all we can to maintain backups of important data. I have th...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley October 8, 2012 Deadline November 2012 Issue RSS Feeds: The Best Way to (not) Surf the Web Surfing the World Wide Web on a daily quest for the latest news is inefficient and frustrating. I read stories from at least a dozen technology sites and the experience can be annoying. From too many advertisements to videos that start automatically, I don’t like the websites. Why go from site to site when you can have latest news gathered conveniently in one place? No, I’m not suggesting you follow every news site on Google+ or Facebook. My Facebook feed is too cluttered to be useful for serious research and nobody I know uses Google+ on regular basis. There is a better solution for news junkies, though. The best way to read headlines is to use RSS feeds. With RSS, you can have the latest stories from your favorite news sources collected and organized in one location. I can open my RSS application and the latest headlines from more than 100 sources are ...