Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Do you have any students that take a second course from
you, also online?  If so, do they move from one group to
another when they move to the second class, or do they
tend to stay in the same group?  I'm wondering primarily
about the lower two thirds, I'd presume the top third
stays there.
  

    
That's an interesting question. I use the on-line course with my highest
class. (I am a bottom fish, you know.)

I notice that many of the students go on to take other such courses ,and
they come back and tell me that they like researching on-line. I hear from
the teachers that my students seem more confident and more able to work in
groups than other first year students, so I know some things are changing.
and that the skills transfer.

My favorite, favorite anecdote is of a student, a young Mexican-American
woman with a young child who was working as a housekeeper. She was
absolutely part of the third group at first. She "hated" computers. She
"didn't know how to type". She didn't have time. She didn't like the
library. On and on. But little by little, things changed. She started
dropping off at a Cyber Cafe for coffee after her job. She would log on
and tentatively join a conversation, or add to a group project, or do a
little research for her essay. By the end of the class, she was a major
player and .... this is the good part. She took the money she was saving
for a new vacuum cleaner and, instead, bought a computer. "I don't want my
daughter to be a maid." She told me. She's about ready to graduate now.
  

    
I love that story!
  

    
Carol! I'm just out the door for the weekend, but I'll return here on
Monday and post about my ESL chat room job. In the meantime, you're
welcome to visit the larger site:

www.globalenglish.com

or the direct link to the chat room (I believe you do have to register
in the larger site beforehand)

www.globalenglish.com/chat/chat.htm
  

    
Carol asked about the Masters degree program I mentioned.

It's "Information Studies" rather than "Information Science."
We have a fair number of students who are interested in the
"Science" end of things, but our primary order of business
is still, as it has been historically, training Librarians (we
used to be the School of Library and Information Studies).
Because of the demographics of Florida, a large number of our
students come from the area around Miami, where they have held
paraprofessional jobs for a number of years.

We have something between 20 & 30 Masters courses online, some
of which are offered every semester, & some of which rotate.  They
range from fairly traditional Library-oriented courses (reference
work, school-media-center training, cataloguing, etc.) to courses
on multimedia and web production, to information science, to
international information services.

We also hire graduates of the program to act as regional "facilitators,"
to help acclimate & socialize new students as they come into the
program.  The only time students have to come to Tallahassee is
for a required 3-day orientation just before the beginning of
their first semester.
  

    
How interesting Gary.  Can you give a URL on that so we could peek through
the windows at you?
  

    
This is so exciting to hear of these online courses from the people who are
leading them! Thanks for sharing this with us, rubicon and jera. I look
forward to seeing what frako has to say about her ESL chat room, too.

I'm also eager to see what feedback Valorie will have to offer on all this,
and tell us how it relates to her Web Learning Fieldbook.
  

    
Most of the important portions of courses are behind
password protection (to provide some level of privacy for
discussion, etc), but we do have a "sample" course available,
which shows some of what we do:

http://slis-one.lis.fsu.edu/courses/fall1999/1234/

Some of this is also accessible only with a password, but you
can request one if you wish from:

     bmonroe@lis.fsu.edu

Let him know that it's for the sample site, and if you don't hear
from him quickly enough, let me know, & I'll go lean on him!
  

    
Thanks. I will do so on Monday. I am sometimes so isolated. I'd love to
see what others are doing.
  

    

An update.  I spoke with Valorie briefly yesterday.  She's back from the
east coast, jet lagged, and having problems with her ISP.  With luck, she'll
be able to log in today, catch up with all the discussion that's happened
since Wednesday, and contribute her thoughts.

I'd like to thank her for joining us and sharing some of her thinking about
what is likely to be a widely used resource for teaching and learning.
  

    

Yes, indeed!  Thank you, Valorie.  It looks like her book has already been
put to good use by <rubicon>, our very own Carol Adair!  Thanks to you,
too, Carol, for contributing your wealth of experience to the discussion.
  

    
Hi all!  Sorry for the delay in getting back.  I just got off the
phone with pacbell, and their servers have been overloaded to the point
of not working for the past couple of days.  This is the first time
I've been able to log in since I got off the plane yesterday.

I love the way the discussion has developed -- and many thanks to
Carol Adair for her obviously careful reading of the book.  THANK YOU! 

To Libbi's question about different learning styles, no educational
"thing" is going to be able to adequately address all styles.  It would
be just too expensive and time-consuming to reproduce everything in
visual and auditory formats, just to name two.  The web won't really
help here.  Lots of web users don't have sound cards, or browse with
graphics off, etc.  This is another argument for not solely depending
on one medium (even the web) to get your message across.

To Carol's question about whether the web has a better chance of being
a true "educational technology" than, say TV or CD-ROM. I think the
answer is a qualified Yes, mostly because revisions can happen so
quickly with the web, and users can re-make web items to suit their own
styles and purposes (the obvious example is bookmarks).  With other
media, the stuff has to be "frozen" and published in final form at some
point.  However, the web is both participative and malleable, and
therefore may have a better chance as a true teaching/learning tool.