Online Teaching and Learning Augmentation

Philosophy began as a result of humans trying to understand. We generate theories, talk about them, and write about them. Then we create tests to research and explore our theories. What good is all this theory and research? Hopefully, and in many cases, we learn. We inform ourselves and share it with others. We take the learned knowledge and apply it to our lives and develop applications of this understanding. But why? To improve our lives, to make things better in a more significant world; to work toward a more harmonious existence. This striving for harmony is done through the education of the people, a basic and primary building block of all civilizations.

Through educational institutions and their emerging information technology and media studies departments, we are experiencing a growth in education to promote younger generations to retain the skills required to contribute to the mediated landscape (ecology) of blogs, photo blogs, podcasts, vlogs and other emerging forms of personal all-media production, interaction, and delivery. Specifically, the integration of wireless, mobile hardware such as cell phone capture and publishing, Palm, Blackberry devices, video cams, still cams, laptops, Wiki's, and XML formatting RSS 2.0 broadcast are changing the very methods in which individuals can and do receive their information about the world around them. These numerous digital devices and services are now changing the ways in which individuals express themselves and participate in their communities. Through these changes, we see the impact of personal media on the fields of journalism, publication, mass media broadcasting, and alternative media, just to name a few, but really, these changes are dynamic everywhere, in all sectors and in all fields of study. We are witnessing first hand a new mode of citizenship and participatory politics. The very foundation of the ways in which we understand ourselves and the world around us is in a state of flux. There will never be a time when we are without new and emerging ways in which to tell a story.

In the past six months (or several academic terms) I have been working on giving dedicated, direct time and attention to each student, each week, on each project or assignment they turn in. This time and direct attention has had a positive response from the students, who seem highly appreciative (in many cases, not all). When applicable, the use of augmenting technologies to aid in this instruction has been implemented (Jing, Audacity, and other instructional software applications have been used.)

Areas for Improvement

Most importantly, I am working on improving my level of critical assessment of the students' work. As time goes on, I interact with them more, and evaluate more of their work, I am realizing that often times this is the only way some of them will be pushed to improve. I can see this in the classroom as well as in the comments that they leave in the term-end evaluations. For me, this is the biggest challenge in teaching because so many of the variables that consitute a grade are somewhat subjective and ambiguous when being evaluated. Much of the communication media (and art) field is this way.

Also, as a result of this change mentioned above, I would like to continue in this manner, generating some more effient methods for out-of-class responsibilities in order to be able to direct more time and energy to the students each term. I would like to have the ability to explore further these augmenting technologies and use them in improving time and energy spent on instructing students, grading work, and discussion forums. These are the key areas of online education and areas that can be greatly improved upon if we have the time and resources to start experimenting and researching.

Recent Changes in Teaching

Recently I have started to spend more time per student in the classroom in order to direct this time toward a better critical assessment of each of the assignments that are turned in from each student. I am starting to realize that this is the single most important part of the online classroom, and perhaps, the lack of connection in a physical environment may have to be made up in other ways in the online environment. This is also an element to improving online education. Please see "Online Teaching and Learning Augmentation" and "Areas for Improvement" above for more.