Syllabus--The Adventure Continues

Syllabus Update—Thursday, July 28, 2005

It has been a busy week. I never cease to be amazed at how much happens at conferences. Participants will sometimes complain about the cost or the venue, but it’s clear that amassing so much experience, knowledge, and like-minded enthusiasm in one place for a week is worth many times what we invest in these adventures.

Issues that seem to bedevil almost everyone center on technology integration and faculty/staff development. For the most part, participants acknowledge, students can find ways to make technologies work as long as faculty provide (or suggest) logical connections between the tools and the content. Content is king. I asked Diana Oblinger (dolblinger@educause.edu) of EDUCAUSE if she felt that the content we’re able to provide online and our ability to assess are a match yet. She stated (and I agree) that we can provide the content, but we’re not yet able to address unique learning styles in the way that we currently assess students. A great deal of online assessment is still multiple-choice and true-false—objective tests which don’t work for a significant number of students. There definitely seems to be interest in further developing alternative means of assessment.

There were certainly a number of occasions during the past several days when ePortfolios were on the agenda. Still, there exists the question of how to assess quickly and consistently. A group of educators from the University of San Diego ( discussed the use of ePortfolios, but lamented that providing a level playing field for the assessment of those portfolios has been a challenge. They’ve striven to use rubrics to streamline the process, only to find in the initial stages that different evaluators scored similar content quite divergently. The team has since refined its practice, but this is a good example of the evolutionary nature of problem solving in the digital age—or any other time, for that matter. (Blogger's note: It's worth mentioning that the ePortfolio implementation was in reponse, at least in part, to USD's mission to achieve NCATE accreditation. The manuscript detailing their adventures can be found at http://www.sandiege.edu/~ammer.)

On the issue of ePortfolios, the make-or-buy debate rages. Apps like Taskstream (http://www.taskstream.com) have a sizeable following, but there are still technologists who like to roll their own solution. The most common tool is HTML, followed by PowerPoint. Regardless of the tool, streaming media is growing in popularity. The group from USD found that their students were able to demonstrate the ability to teach reading and math more readily by providing a video artifact. California evaluators like the digital video, but only if the segments were long enough (appox. 2-3 minutes) to show the competency, but not so long as to take up huge amounts of time. This is definitely an idea worth adding to the list.

Archiving content is a significant concern among attendees. Ali Hanyaloglu (ali@adobe.com) of Adobe (http://www.adobe.com) and Brian Harris of Loma Linda University offered up a surprisingly non-commercial presentation about the use of PDF/A the soon-to-be de jure standard for long-term archiving of content. We can implement PDF/A right now, as there are options to output to the format from Acrobat 7.0. The standard is just settling in, but we know that it will exclude such things are JavaScript, executables, and broken links. Fonts will be embedded, much as in current Acrobat, and the resulting package, it is hoped, will help institutions avoid the inevitable technological obsolescence that has rendered some Vietnam War records, land use records, and certain types of Census Bureau data unreadable in the past. This is pretty exciting, and it fits right in with the practices I see happening among some PCC faculty and staff right now.

It’s about time for me to go off to the last keynote of the conference. I’ll post more information this evening and in the upcoming days. There’s so much to do (well, some things haven’t changed), and so many good ideas to at least consider.