The most noticeable trend of the last few years in web-enhanced teaching is the rapid movement away from individual course sites built and maintained by instructors themselves and towards centralized, standardized course management platforms that do not require HTML knowledge or other technical skills. Most universities today use third-party course management software, either proprietary or open-source, or they develop their own course management system. If you wish to get a sense of the variety of applications you might encounter at peer institutions, check out this comparison tool for course management systems.

Today will begin with an exploration of Telesis, the Course Management System (CMS) designed for and used by Washington University's School of Arts and Sciences. Telesis can serve in a number of roles for a given course: as a central location for course information including the syllabus and assignments, as a site for interactive discussion, and as a means for instructor-student communication. We will review in detail the various tools that comprise Telesis, and you will begin to set up your own sample course based on the material you selected as part of your “homework.“

Later today, we will explore other platforms (blogs, wikis, social networking tools) that can serve some of these same functions, and we will consider how these various tools compare and why one might choose to employ one versus another. While you might not have encountered these applications in your own classrooms yet, they promise to be both useful currently and seen more often in the future.

Telesis | Blogs | Wikis | Social Networking

Overview of Telesis Features

To access your courses through Telesis, go to the following address:
https://telesis.wustl.edu

My Home
When you first log on to Telesis, you will see a list of all courses in which you are a “member.” Besides the Summer Graduate Workshops community, you may also see other courses in which you are enrolled as a student or for which you have teaching responsibility.

Telesis links directly to the WUCRSL system (the Washington University course and registration system), which means it automatically retrieves your official roster, class session dates, meeting time and room, and other pertinent information about your course.

From My Home, you can pull up either existing courses or previous courses for which you used Telesis (under the tab for “History”). Once you click on a course, you will be able to access the following items for each.

Course Home
The Course Home page shows a description of your course as it appears in WUCRSL. Because the description comes directly from WUCRSL, no changes can be made to the content in Telesis.

Syllabus
In Telesis, the Syllabus is separate from the course calendar. It is the official document that outlines basic course requirements for students (course objectives, course policies, grade weights, etc.) and that provides instructor contact information.

Calendar
The Telesis Calendar is very robust. The “session dates” (i.e., dates you are required to have class) are derived from the official calendar for your courses in WUCRSL. However, you can also add session dates for any other occasion where you require attendance (such as conferences). Adding dates to the calendar will allow you to link assignments for those events, as well as take attendance for them. The Calendar also allows you to link Topics and Assignments (which are described below) to specific dates. The Calendar in Telesis can be viewed in a number of ways. Students can see the dates in a list view or on a calendar by day, week, or month. The most user-friendly view (and the default one) is the “List View.”

Topics
Telesis Topics are like the units or segments of a course. They describe an overarching theme or “topic” that might cover several days on the Calendar and that might encompass several Assignments. In Telesis, Topics can include short descriptions of the unit/segment, its aims, and any other information you want to include.

Assignments
Assignments in Telesis can include descriptions and details for any kind of work you choose to assign your students. Assignments can be linked to specific dates on the calendar. Like Topics, Assignments can be composed directly within the internal text editor, or can be linked to other documents/images.

Announcements
The Announcements tool in Telesis gives you a place to put reminders and make announcements to your students. Announcements typically provide as a default the date on which you compose the announcement and are not linked to the Calendar.

Links
The Links option provides a central location where you can post links to web sites that you might want your students to access.

Library
The Library option links directly to the ERes (electronic reservation) site for the Washington University Libraries.

Files
The Files function in Telesis can be used in two ways: 1) as a way to distribute materials to your students and 2) as a way to receive materials from your students. You can store files in your own Personal Files folder, which travels with you term after term, course after course. On distributing files: you can post files for students to download -- files for the whole class can appear in "shared files" or a folder you create, and files for individual students can appear in their individual outboxes. On receiving files: you may choose to have students submit materials to you via Telesis. Students can upload files to your “inbox,” and the file uploads with a date and time stamp. Uploaded files currently can have duplicate names, so it is important that you give students a standard for naming files they post to you. Files can be linked to various Topics and/or Assignments.

Discussion
The Discussion function allows you to require and/or encourage your students to engage in a dialogue with their peers about particular topics outside of class. Discussion allows you to divide students into groups and set them up as peer groups and/or on-line collaborators.

Email/Rosters
Once your course has been linked through Telesis, your official WUCRSL roster appears in Telesis under your Writing 1 section. The Roster allows you to see lists of all the students enrolled in your section, as well as those who are waitlisted. Here, you can find out what school/division your students are in, as well as see their phone numbers, email addresses, photos, and other information you may need for contacting them. You can email students directly from here; there is a “select all” feature that allows you to email all of your students at once.

(Note: there are privacy guidelines about the information you can view in Email/Rosters. If a student has requested that his/her contact information be kept private, there will be a notice here.)

Chat
This function is similar to chat clients such as AOL Instant Messenger or Gmail's GChat feature.

Attendance
The Attendance function here allows you to record attendance by class session date. For each class session date, you can select from a list of options (Present, Absent-Excused, Absent-Unexcused, Tardy-Excused, or Tardy-Unexcused) for each student. You can also select an “Auto-Present” button to take attendance more efficiently. Because you can add session dates to your section’s Telesis calendar, you can also take attendance for other dates/events where you require attendance (conferences, lectures, etc.).

In the Manage Attendance section, you can generate attendance reports that give you a summary of each student’s attendance, and you can make attendance visible to students so they can check their individual attendance record. There is also a “memo” field where you can record any notes or additional information you might wish to record; this field can be used as a way of keeping track of individual students’ participation, notes on the reason for absences, and/or warnings you have issued to students about their attendance record.

Gradebook
The Gradebook works from the WUCRSL roster, and requires you to enter numerical grades. It allows you to create formulas for weighting and calculating grades within the system itself, and it also links to the E-Grades system to electronically report midterm and semester grades. Grades can be made visible to students.

**Detailed instructions on how to use each Telesis feature:
https://telesis.wustl.edu/Help/TelesisFacultyHelp/TelesisFacultyHelp.htm

Blogs

In recent years, blogs (derived from "web log") have become an increasingly mainstream way for the internet audience to keep up on business and lifestyle news, topics, and other information. Blogs on news, politics, business, technology, pop culture, education, and other themes proliferate. Although much blogging originated from individuals who maintained personal "diaries" online, the blogosphere is a significant realm for idea communication and discussion.

Blogs are easy to use, dynamic, and encourage conversation; consequently, they make an excellent educational resource. Moreover, many undergraduates are familiar with blogs: either they have their own, read various blogs that interest them, or have heard about them through television and other media outlets. However, the role of blogs as educational resources continues to be a hot topic among many academic and non-academic bloggers. We encourage you to continue to seek information and read about the topic at your leisure.

In the classroom, blogs can be an excellent tool for everything from individual student writing or lab journals, to collaborative workspaces, to whole-class discussion spaces. Moreover, blogging requires very little technical knowledge or institutional support, given the availability of free blog hosting sites such as Wordpress or Google's Blogger (the host site for our own blog). Though some universities have begun hosting and supporting blog sites for their faculty and students, most educational blogs remain independent of the institutions that host the courses that they support.

During this workshop, we want to allow you the opportunity to experiment with blogging and the ways in which you might find it useful to your teaching. In addition, we hope the workshop blog will help foster a community in which workshop participants can continue to connect with other graduate students to discuss technology use, successes, challenges, and new resources.

After Day 1 of the workshop, you received an email invitation to join the GSSW blog. If you have not, please notify Tanya or Stacy and we will send you the invitation. The invitation will contain a link that you can follow to the GSSW blog. You will be prompted to create a Google account or to log into one if you already have one. You’ll then be able to view and post to the GSSW blog. Feel free to post questions, comments, or any other material that you feel might stimulate discussion and debate on the issue of academic blogging. You are welcome to post on other issues relating to the GSSW as well. One of the real benefits of blogging is the community aspect, so please take the time to read and respond to what others have written as well.

We’d also like you to set up your own blog at Blogger. You don’t have to maintain your blog and you can delete it any time you’d like. To register, go to https://www.blogger.com/start. You’ll be prompted to create a Google account; if you already have one (or if you created one to read the GSSW blog) you can use that. Once you have singed in with a Gooogle account, Blogger will take you through the initial steps of creating your blog.

There is no shortage of resources on academic blogging and blogging in teaching. Here are some links we found particularly interesting and useful.

Course blogs:

• Tufte's economics class blog is an example of one blog created by a whole class.
• Another approach is to have students each create separate blogs and link them in a mini-blogosphere. Stacy used this last fall with her Creativity class.
• This Communication Studies class blog, iGeneration: Digital Communication & Participatory Culture, not only includes discussion of blogging but also considers podcasting, and wikis. Here the instructor posts and the class comments.
• Blogs are also becoming increasingly common as sites for academics to share theit thoughts and work with others, for example, this historian’s site.

Blogs that are teaching about teaching with blogs:

• General Musings about using Technology to Teach with Images by two art historians. Here are scholars in the field having lively discussions that students can listen to--with audio podcasts included!
• Here a UCSD professor discusses teaching with blogs, and generates some great discussion from his colleagues.
• Check out Using Blogs to Teach Philosophy by Linda E. Patrik of Union College.

Interesting commentary on blogging:

• An article on blogs as virtual communities
• Blogging, personal participation in public knowledge-building on the web (PDF file) by Mark Brady, a Chimera Working Paper
• Audio Recording of the “Academia” session of Bloggercon III by Jay Rosen (downloadable as an mp3 as well)
• Lore: An E-Journal for Teachers of Writing’s special section on academic blogging (some excellent essays here that give real classroom experiences with blogging)

Wikis

A wiki (pronounced either "wick-ee" or "wee-kee") is a website built around software that allows for easy web publishing by multiple users in a collaborative environment without requiring extensive coding knowledge. Or, in simpler terms: wikis are like a public Google Docs page. By nature, wikis are open-ended both in “narrative” terms and in participatory terms. A wiki is never finished (unless the database is deleted or the site stops being hosted). All users can edit nearly all other user-created pages and the process of editing (ideally) represents the distillation of a community consensus on the information contained in a page. It’s not exactly peer-review, but wikis rely on community members to operate as both creators and arbiters of knowledge in a wiki. This is both the power and the potential difficulty of the wiki environment.

In the best of all possible worlds, a wiki is an incredibly powerful way to encourage collaboration and community-based learning. A wiki can allow community members to forge connections across multiple pages, manage hyperlinks, track editorial changes over time, and participate actively in the ongoing discussion of the selected topics . At the same time, a poorly managed wiki is the digital equivalent of a Wild West saloon where anything goes and poor behavior (flame wars, malicious editing, etc.) can go relatively unchecked.

Perhaps the best outline for wikis in the educational context is this definition and explanation from the Encyclopedia of Educational Technology edited by Bob Hoffman at San Diego State University. We encourage you all to read this short and thoughtful piece as a way of initiating your thinking on the potential value of wikis in the educational environment. There are also a number of useful links at the end of the entry that will be of interest as well.

One particularly useful element of the EET’s definition is the chart that describes the differences between wikis and conventional webpages:

Just as there is a significant amount of quality internet material about the academic uses of blogging, there is an equally significant amount of material on wikis in the educational environment. The following links are recommended as first forays into the literature surrounding this technology.

Course wikis:

• Black Movements in the U.S. - A course taught by Columbia University and Barnard College
• Biophysics 101 - This biology class uses a wiki to explore science topics such as stem cells, bioengineering, and personalized medicine, and places them within a larger social framework. This class did it all online: readings, lecture PowerPoint slides, and student projects.
• The Nature of Code - This computer programming course on mimicking natural events and properties using computer software simulations has both a wiki and a blog, giving you a chance to see how each application can be used to different ends.
  
• The Romantic Audience Project 2 - Latest version of Mark Phillipson's Romantics course wiki
• Flatclassroomproject - Though this is a high school rather than a college course, it shows how the wiki your class creates can reach outside your classroom and national boundaries.

Articles about using wikis:

• Making Wikis Work for College - A new piece from Inside Higher Ed that explores the ups and downs of wikis.
• Interview: the State of Wikis in Education - Steve Mader's blog on wiki patterns.
• 7 Things You Should Know About Wikis - If you wanted to print off a brief and insightful description of wikis to share with a colleague, this is exactly the source you'd want.
  
• For Teachers New to Wikis - Division of Instructional Innovation and Assessment by the University of Austin in Texas
  
• "The Romantic Audience Project: A Wiki Experiment" - Mark Phillipson and David Hamilton describe their experience with using a wiki for an English literature class on English Romanticism (see the link above); excellent discussion of both technical and pedagogical challenges
  
• Teaching, Learning, and Other Uses for Wikis in Academia by Jude Higdon (USC)
• Using Wiki in Education - a resource page hosted at the Science of Spectroscopy wiki that links to a number of excellent academic wiki resources and academic wikis themselves
• University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) Wiki Group Home Page - a collective at UMBC that supports and encourages the use of wikis in a variety of courses and disciplines
  
• "Wide Open Spaces: Wikis, Ready or Not" by Brian Lamb at the Educause Review
  
• Collaborative Content: The Wikipedia Phenomenon (article available through Lexis-Nexis, may require library login from off-campus computers)

As with blogs, wikis are fairly new ideas in educational technology and continue to generate energy, excitement, and debates among academics regarding their potential uses (and misuses).

To allow you an opportunity to explore wikis, please go to our workshop wiki site, http://gssw2008.wikispaces.com.

Please follow the directions on the homepage to register for wikispaces, and then enjoy experimenting with our workshop site. In addition, use this opportunity to consider the possibilities or challenges you might find in your own teaching experience if you were to experiment with wikis.

It's no Wikipedia at this point, but it will give you an idea of what creating and editing pages in a wiki entails. Aside from Wikispaces, there are a number of wiki hosting options available; some are available for free, but others charge for site usage. The best way to identify possibilities is to explore a little bit.

Social networking: Facebook, Twitter, and Second Life

This segment is a brief consideration of several of the exciting new tools instructors have started to use in university classrooms. Facebook, Twitter, and Second life are popular social networking tools, meaning that they help connect users to other individuals who share their own interests or experiences.

Facebook, which has been popular among college students for several years, advertises itself as a way for users to connect with people they already know, typically through school, but also through work and local communities. Facebook users may opt to add a variety of applications, many of which have been created by users. In particular, the Study Groups application operates similar to Google Docs and some of the other collaborative tools we have discussed. This application allows students to work together to create discussions on particular topics, develop to-do lists for assignments, and collaborate on papers and notes; it also provides a tool for scheduling meetings and events.

For more thoughts on Facebook as a teaching tool, check out this blog entry about the pros and cons of Facebook in education.

This website lists some of the Facebook applications that could be beneficial to both students and instructors, particularly for online education.

Finally, this wiki provides specific insight on Facebook in education, with examples.

Twitter, on the other hand, is a form of blogging that emphasizes brevity. While blog entries may be long or short, Twitter updates - which generally follow the idea of answering the question "What are you doing?" - can be only 140 characters long. Moreover, Twitter is built around the idea that users follow each other's status updates, thus creating a virtual community in which people may respond to one another's "tweets" or updates to form conversations.

In recent months, some academics have begun to consider the ways in which Twitter may be useful in the classroom.

Academhack, a website devoted to tech tools for academics (especially those in the humanities), has two recent entries on Twitter that propose specific uses for Twitter in the classroom: Twitter in Academia and Micro-Blogging, Part Deux.

In addition, this website discusses Twitter in the Classroom.

Second Life is an on-line, 3-D virtual world that is designed by its users. SL is becoming increasingly popular as a tool for university teaching. In fact, over a hundred universities are using it -- some even have their own "islands." SL can be used as an in-class tool or for real-time but at-a-distance class meeting, or it can be used as a forum for course assignments. It offers a chat function, a "question tool," as well as streaming audio and video, and many other graphical features that make it useful for courses with significant visual content (e.g., Chemistry).

Some links about pedagogical uses for Second Life:

• An American Chemical Society talk on teaching Chemistry in Second Life by a professor from Drexel University (includes how he transitioned through many tech tools to arrive at SL)
• A wiki devoted to teaching using Second Life
• A blog entry from a professor describing her learning process in learning to use Second Life in her teaching.
• A blog interview of a profesor using Second Life for a course -- examines benefits and challenges, mostly focused on distance education but with some general insights as well.
• An entire conference devoted to pedagogical uses for Second Life.

Other Options?

What other options are there for educational technology? Are there some that you have used? Are there some you'd like to see someday? We may spend some time discussing what other kinds of options are available for enhancing our teaching with technology, and as we consider not only what options we have now, but also what the future might bring, we can direct our attention again to our Technology Plans and to a consideration of how our desired pedagogical goals should inform our technological decisions and not vice versa.