iSean

i serve on my university’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) for human subjects research. i have been charged with developing policy and procedures for how principal investigators should ensure data from human subjects is protected. this is my thinking thus far and any feedback is welcome:

• Electronic files containing participant data must be password protected even if the computer requires a login to access the computer.
• Online databases containing project data should be secure. One strategy to better secure online data is to have the database encrypted. The PI is responsible for providing the IRB with details on the following:
1. The online service provider agreement for service with regard to the storage of the data;
2. How long data will remain in online databases;
3. Any circumstances in which the database company can use, share, or archive the de-identified data. Note: not all study data will be de-identified.
• PIs using online-based data collection tools (e.g., SurveyMonkey, Zoomerang) must provide the IRB with a link to the data collection or storage tool’s privacy policies. This policy should also explain who owns data stored on the company’s web servers.
• If data collection occurs via email, the research participant should be notified that many employers monitor email systems they maintain.
• If data being collected is personally identifiable and sensitive, the PI should consider using a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol during data collection. An SSL is often used for online purchases and banking. Many popular online data collection sites will offer SSL as an option.
• Principal Investigators should warn study participants, when appropriate, that the participant is responsible for the security of the computer that the participant is using.

i think this is relevant on my blog because all teachers should be concerned about online data security when using online tools, services, or websites that pertain to their students’ data. the United States even has a law to protect student data often referred to as the Buckley Amendment.

i am teaching a graduate class to teachers who want to learn to teach their own online class(es) so i am planning on being a little more mainstream in the tools i use this semester. i have previously been pleased with Drupal even though it’s not technically made with an education focus. but, i want to use tools that can be easily modeled by the teachers i’ll teach. thus, i am shifting to Moodle this semester. i’ve previously only used it in a quick 2-week summer course that met every day, all day. that experience was too quick to really get into the ins and outs of using Moodle. this will be my first semester really using the tool.

i am not overly impressed with the discussion forum built into Moodle. i am thinking about using phpBB forums, which i’ve used for much of the past decade. but i’ve also heard good things about MyBB so i plan to install it tomorrow and start exploring whether it’ll work for the two classes i am teaching. with all of these internet hosting sites providing free installs with the Simple Scripts and/or Fantastico it’s been a while since i’ve installed a MySQL database and MyBB is going to require that i do it manually so that will be a nice refresher.

but i plan to venture into exploring many tools so that my students can experience a nice variety. i want to use a Wiki for teaching one week. i also asked all of my students to already request a Google Wave account so we’ll see if we can’t even incorporate it. fun times ahead.

i’ve been “Waving” for about a month or so now. i gave invites to my colleagues and 2 of us actually use Wave for a research project we’re doing together that involves evaluating 1-to-1 laptop programs in our area (see my presentation at the SITE Conference in late March/early April on this topic). we share files and interview questions and responses and all sorts of data. we develop thoughts together and we even try and go beyond the very basics of Wave. it’s nice to have everything in 1 place as i have trouble with filing things well on my computer. that being said, the 1 thing that i really didn’t like about Wave is that i don’t have enough other people using Wave to make it something that i remember to check. you have to physically log into Wave to see new messages (so, it’s behind email in this regard). and it’s pretty crummy to get an email telling me to check Wave as that sort of defeats the purpose. well, i use Firefox as my main browser and just came across an extension that solves my biggest issue with Wave (and i have many other issues). it’s the Google Wave add-on for Firefox. now, if Google can just increase the speed of the service and give me a lot more invites then i could consider using it more full time.

i’ve surveyed my students this week after having so many contact me last week during the midterm and immediately after to note problems with Blackboard (our university provided online learning management system). by far the biggest problem was that the “new” Visual Editor in Blackboard (NG) was covering up some of the questions on the exam. in fact, this was the case for the vast majority of students.

some of the responses on the midterm started this way, “I couldn’t fully read the question, but I am guessing that you want us to . . . ” or something to that affect. this is coming from students using the 9th version of Blackboard (i believe it’s also called, Blackboard NG). i have to guess that our university pays hundreds of thousands of dollars for this service and this is what are students are getting in return? seriously? i am appalled that this is even acceptable. perhaps we received a big discount to upgrade early, but if we paid to be the beta testers then someone at my university should be fired. beta testing a buggy system should not be a part of the learning experience; beta testing is for software developers and volunteers. student’s grades should not be affected by the tools we use to deliver an assessment. EVER. and beyond this one issue, more than 40% of my students noted that they had, “other problems on the midterm because of Blackboard.” i’d be disappointed in the product if a few students had issues caused by Blackboard, but this is nearly every student in my classes.

that being said, i don’t use Blackboard for anything beyond administering exams and keeping grades in the grade book so that the university is responsible for that sensitive data. but i think i’ll look at using Moodle exclusively for this stuff next semester.

as i analyze data from student surveys conducted late last year there is much that is surprising me pleasantly. as i have previously noted, i surveyed well over 700 students in grades 6 – 12. one of the questions i asked was how often students use a computer at home.

that’s over 30% using a computer at home for more than an hour a day. 80% are socializing with friends during this time as well as surfing the internet for fun. however, 75% also report to doing homework on the computer at home, so that’s a respectable showing. heh. playing games on the computer was also high at 65%.

amazingly enough, 63% of these students report that they have a wireless network at home (16% weren’t sure). best of all is that under 3% reported having no internet connection and fewer than 10% had just dial-up. i should point out that this district is would be classified as mostly middle class (e.g., lower middle class to regular middle class).

more to come . . .

WordPress MU ended up failing for my use. Almost all of my students now use blogger.com with 1 student choosing to have me install a wordpress blog for just his use (not WordPress MU; rather, regular WordPress). i wonder if the Buddypress plugin caused my WordPress MU installation to fail? in any regard, my WordPress MU installation was determined to try and create the URLs like this (student_chosen_name.seanlancaster.com/blogging/) but students were not able to post a new entry to this address. i had a blog on this site as well and my blog entries showed up like this: seanlancaster.com/blogging/the_date_entered_and_title or something like that. that method worked, but none of the add-on accounts followed suite. i had made a test account and it worked just fine when i tested things, but i think i made the test account prior to installing Buddypress so who knows? i had to quickly drop the notion of using my own blogs via WordPress MU. ah well.

my university just shifted all student email to Google’s Gmail accounts. everyone has access to Google Docs using these accounts as well. unfortunately, the student Gmail accounts do not include the use of blogger.com. so we hit our second wrench. each student had to sign up for a second Gmail account to then have access to blogger.com. what a hassle. and my university doesn’t give me a Google account through the university so i couldn’t test this stuff out prior to class starting.

in the end, we made it through week 2 and i think there should be some pretty smooth sailing from here on out. i am still contemplating the use of Diigo and maybe twitter, but i’d like to let students get accustomed to the new tools we’re now using first.

i am teaching 3 sections this fall of an online course for undergrads preparing to become teachers. i have been fiddling with tools all month trying to determine which will work the best and be easiest for my students to use. this past summer i used Moodle with some success and i am sure i could have improved its functionality next time around. however, i decided to go with Drupal and phpBB as my class staples again. these are the same tools i used last year. Drupal is a CMS and phpBB is an internet discussion forum and both tools are free and open source MySQL databases installed on my server. i am growing somewhat disillusioned with Twitter as an important ed tech tool, so i am scrapping my plans to have students sign up for that service — i’d largely just use it to pass along links, which i can do elsewhere on my class site. meh. i’ve dropped Ning as a potential teaching tool after much consideration, but i might have my students create a Ning site (i just wasn’t sure if Ning would work as well as Drupal for my needs). i am still entertaining the thought of using Diigo — i have an educator account and i’ve explored it a bit, but i also don’t want to use something that isn’t necessary just to be using something so i’d need to make it a meaningful part of my class. my university just switched all students to a gmail account, so i’ll continue using Google Docs and other services as the students are already all signed up, which is nice. should be a fun and action-packed semester.

P.S. i do have buddypress and wordpressMU installed on a server as well. i think it’ll be a last second decision on whether to use my tools or the easier blogger.com. thoughts?

i am a fairly geeky guy (if it wasn’t obvious). but  before i had an iPhone i had never sent a text message. i just couldn’t see the enjoyment in hitting the #2 three times to type the letter C. my phone didn’t get email so it really was just a phone. while that’s great for voice conversations, i had email for something less synchronized and i figured i had my bases covered. well, i upgraded to an iPhone as soon as the price dropped big on the first generation. i didn’t have anyone to text at first, but we soon bought my wife an iPhone as well. that’s when things took off. then, Apple opened the app store, which allowed us to customize our phones like never before. i haven’t gone overboard, but i do have 4 pages of apps added to my iPhone and i frequently delete apps that i find i am not using after trying them for a spell.

last year, we went to Europe for a few months. my wife and i took our iPhones and they were great, but we had to pay a bundle to have audio and also web access while in Europe. last week, we went to Canada and our trip was about hiking and canoeing and exploring the northern shores of Lake Superior (we even saw a bear).

a black bear

i decided we’d leave our iPhones turned completely off. this was a back to nature vacation and i didn’t want to be bothered with work and the other nuances of life for a spell. turns out, this was asking quite a lot. i hadn’t realized how ingrained my phone had become into my life. even little things like using it as a watch for the time were missed. i didn’t realize how often i check my email as i would habitually reach for my pocket to grab my iPhone only to find it was not there. each morning, i use my iPhone to check the weather forecast for the day. i like to scan through twitter updates periodically as well. i check the headlines a few times each day. i typically log into my bank to see my credit card activity and then off to check the stock market and a few individual stocks i follow. i am also a bit obsessed with checking currency exchange rates, which is even better to do while vacationing in another country. yet, i had access to none of this. and. it. was. difficult. “honey, where do you want to eat” my wife would ask. “just a minute and i’ll jump on Yelp to see what’s around” — not available. doh!

i didn’t realize how wired i was. it’s just become a part of me. and losing my connectivity felt a bit like the time i had been on broadband for more than a year and then moved to a new house that only had dial-up (summer of 2000). at least with dial-up i still had access, but it was so slow compared to broadband that i’d frequently just wait until i got to the office for any real work. but to drop my iPhone entirely was even more difficult. i love instant access. love it. and, for those of you wondering . . . yes, i really enjoyed our vacation and had a grand time roughing it. i just didn’t anticipate that it would be so difficult to go without being wired for just over a week. that’s a long, long time in these days of everything being instantaneous.

is it bad that we’re becoming so dependent on these technologies?

so i taught a 2-week long graduate class the last 2 weeks of June. each day was long and i am not sure that this is the best learning environment for the students in this class . . . on the other hand, stuff we worked on during our first day was still fairly fresh in student’s thinking as they approached content on the last day. but i digress already.

this was a face-to-face class, but i ran it completely paperless. many papers were due, but everything was submitted via Google Docs. my university is switching all student email to Gmail accounts any day now, so my take on this is that there is somewhat of an expectation to use Google tools. once you have a Gmail account, then the other tools that Google offers are easy to sign into using your Gmail login. one thing i like to do is keep student logins to a minimum. our blogging activities were using Blogger.com (owned by Google); our documents were submitted via Google Docs; and i even quickly showed students how to use Google Bookmarks — a tool that can be placed in the navigation toolbar of your browser to quickly bookmark pages being visited so that they can be viewed on any other computer once you log into your Google account. and, my students started following some ed tech blogs so i showed them Google Reader — to follow blog feeds more easily. finally, all assignments and topics covered were placed in Google Calendars. someone even joked that Google should be paying me.

of course, that kind of comment struck a chord with me. should i be pushing Google products? here i am a guy who only uses open source tools when i teach online classes and suddenly i am using and promoting Google tools. they’re free, but Google is certainly not open source. Google is a for-profit company that places ads in the Gmail messages and Google sells advertising in various forms to place before our eyes when using their products. their products are free, but they aren’t really free from commercialization and consumerism, etc.

on the other hand, the vast majority of my colleagues have students use Microsoft Word, Powerpoint, and even Excel. Microsoft Office costs a pretty penny and every student who attends our university has paid a bit of their tuition to ensure that Office is installed on every single campus computer. it’s no small expense by any stretch. are my colleagues on the Microsoft payroll? of course not. we tend to use the tools that are available and easy to use. Microsoft tools are pretty much the standard. in that sense, at least the Google tools can be used on each home computer as long as the computer is connected the internet (and even offline once you get going). not everyone has Microsoft tools available. i know i often get odd file extensions each semester from these students. just because MS Word is the standard, is it right to expect students to have it at home as well? i think not. and yes, there are Open Office and other solutions, but most people don’t know about these options.

i don’t feel guilty using Google products. my criterion for any tool i use in my teaching has always been that it must be freely available to my students in their own classrooms or future classrooms. so, open source tools are a natural way to ensure the product is available to anyone. this means i don’t even like using Blackboard when i don’t have to use it. most teachers don’t have access to Blackboard in their own classrooms so why would i promote a tool that they cannot use in their own teaching? instead, i use Drupal, phpBB, Moodle or something along these lines. open source and free. well, Google tools are free as well even if they aren’t open source, so in that sense the Google tools still meet my inclusion parameters. until better online tools come along that are also free i think i’ll stick with the Google tools that work for me.

okay, i’ve used Moodle daily for a week now and it’s growing on me. i started using Moodle after many years of using Drupal and phpBB together. i erroneously assumed that Moodle would be similar to those other 2 tools. with regard to customizing the site, i think it is similar so my prep work was pretty much what i am used to when starting a new course. however, when it came time to have my students join my class that’s where i hit my first problem. Students can just sign up on Moodle like they do for Drupal, phpBB, and most other open source tools. this was a problem for me as i had to individually add each student. i have 16 students in this grad class so i had each student email me so i’d get their critical info to join them up. however, thinking ahead to a semester where i have 75 students potentially and that’s a huge deterrant to me.

next, i was trying to set up the forums to use and i wanted 2 groups of students. with phpBB the permissions issue is very clear and the process seems very intuitive to set up (at least to me). with Moodle, the forums originally get configured out in the main Moodle site above the individual course level. you then go in and configure each specific forum in the course. i did what seemed natural to me and my students could start a discussion and respond to each other, but they couldn’t reply to threads i started. i eventually figured it out while my students were away at lunch so that i could have some forums for whole group discussion and some for individual group discussions. i’d still like a way to make a discussion starting post and have it automatically start a disucssion in each group rather than repeating the process for each group i have.

the grade book is not intuitive. i have to physically add an assignment resource in order for a field to get added to the grade book. so, how do i add participation, for example. i also have a blogging activity using blogger.com . . . how do i add each blog assignment to the grade book? i am sure there must be a way to do this, but currently it seems as though i need to physically add an assignment called blog 1 and another that will be called blog 2, etc. — and each time i do this a page will be created that will look like my students are supposed to submit a file on the assignment page and that’s not what i want them to do as i use blogger.com and Google Docs for all assignments. hmmm.

finally, i like creating a folder of resources for each day and topic in each day (this is an 8:30 – 3 class each day so it covers much). however, i can put resources in the folders, but i cannot put links. that sure would be nice just to make things more organized. unfortunately, links cannot be places in folders — only files can go in folders. maybe i’ll get used to doing things the right way, but i would prefer a tool that i am not forced to compromise on what i think is the best way to present the curriculum. that being said, i am going to use Moodle for the next week to finish up this class and then i’ll have the rest of summer to decide whether to switch full time to Moodle or whether to switch back to my old tools.