Not only am I introducing a guest blogger, but Jill Duffy is the new senior editor at ACM responsible for eLearn Magazine. Meet Jill and learn about her skills and background:
When I was an undergraduate student at the University at Buffalo, a tech-savvy friend of mine helped me land a work-study gig doing something that he claimed would one day boost my resume. He introduced me to Martha, a woman who had a passion for technology that I could see burning behind her eyes. She was the kind of person who was both on top of current trends in technology, as well as able to see exactly it was headed, and it was her mission to move the university to the bleeding edge.
She hired me to be a tech operator for two nursing classes that were participating in distance learning pilot programs. My job was to hook up the video and audio feeds that connected the two sites, and then make sure they stayed connected throughout the class. This is how Martha explained the job to me: “You’ll basically be making sure that seven beefy telephone lines are staying open for three hours.”
She added, “If the lines drop, reconnect them. If you can’t reconnect them, hit the record button so at least we’ll have a VHS.”
I was also in charge of manipulating the cameras, cutting between shots of the teacher’s face, shots of the students’ faces when they spoke, and shots of the reference materials. “The most important part of your whole job,” Martha explained, “is to make sure the camera is never stagnant. Make it look like a movie or a television show, not a class. That’s the only way the people on the other end will be interested enough to get anything out of it.”
That lesson – that technology-based education should embrace entertainment standards – has stuck with me.
It’s funny, but for a long time I had forgotten entirely about that work-study job. It came rushing back when I started investigating serious games while writing and editing for Game Developer magazine and Gamasutra.com, two professional video game development publications. I spent a good five years talking to developers of games for health, education, military training, business training, and social change.
The biggest problem in the serious games sector since its inception is that content experts all too often want to spoon feed information to their audience. And while I’m sure most eLearn readers will agree that neither students nor education are usually best served in that manner, the problem that remains is, well, “How do we do it?”
I’ve been on yet another side of the e-learning equation, too. As a graduate student studying English Composition, I read and wrote about the effects of technology on students who are not adept writers. What happens when a student, who is already not confident in his or her writing ability, is forced to communicate with other students primarily online? What happens when students who are technologically confident finally get to take a Comp 101 class that actually encourages them to blog, post comments, and chat online? Are students more or less likely to ask questions in an online learning environment? Are students more or less likely to answer one another’s questions and figure things out for themselves?
I’ve just joined the staff here at ACM as senior editor of eLearn (in addition to a few other publications), and I hope to continue exploring many of these questions, from the theoretical to the practical to the technological.
Jill Duffy, Jill.Duffy@hq.acm.org
Meet Jill Duffy, New Senior Editor at ACM
Do You Need to Wash Your Hands When You’re an Online Learner?
The World Health Organization (WHO) announced today that H1N1 is officially a pandemic. This will undoubtedly lead to more information about what to do to prevent the spread of germs, all actions people should take even when there isn’t a crisis. One of the main ones is to wash one’s hands frequently. Computers and mobile devices have the advantage that, with the exception of computer labs, Internet Cafes, libraries, and senior centers, they tend to be used by one person and are therefore unlikely to be spreading germs. My prediction is that there will be a resurgence in e-learning and telecommuting because of the WHO’s decision. It may not be lasting; using a bicycle to commute became popular when gas prices rose, with proponents touting the health benefits. But that largely ended when gas prices dropped. However, exposure can break down barriers – not exposure to germs, but exposure to online education.
For those in higher education, EDUCAUSE provides resources about pandemics, many applicable to the corporate environment. I wrote an analysis of some H1N1 resources as well.
And, yes, wash your hands frequently whether you are online or in the classroom.
Love, Math, and e-learning
![IMG_0028[1].jpg](http://blog.acm.org/elearn/IMG_0028%5B1%5D.jpg)
My father-in-law, Dom Gualtieri, teaches math online at Saint Leo University (my sister-in-law teaches geology online too; quite the family I married into!). Tekia Johnson, a Sergeant in the US Army, was stationed in Iraq when she wrote the following poem for one of her assignments for Dom’s College Algebra course. I am posting it with Tekia’s permission. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Math is more than just a game
No pattern or equation is ever the same
Math is used for more than counting and calculating
It is all about how you write it and manipulating
Love is a math problem, let me quickly explain
The addition of a person in your life may seem plain
but the division from that person is what makes it new
So you try to subtract the love to show the world you are through
But then when you find true love, you seem ready to multiply
Willing to give your whole quotient to them for no reason why
Or is it that love is not math at all?
How about life? Is it a math problem unsolved?
Notice how numbers cross over each other, never to dissolve
With multiplication, division, addition and subtraction everywhere
It is a wonder that many don’t notice the math in life there
You work hard everyday to ADD to your life
But you SUBTRACT with fear if you run from strife
You DIVIDE yourself from others to set yourself apart
You MULTIPLY with someone to show the love in your heart
So why should I be afraid of mathematics?
It is just numbers that work out differently like schematics
It holds no illusion, it is plain as day
But then again, life is a surprise so who knows what the equation could say from day to day…
I guess math is life and it is just that way.
The Ultimate Revenge: “It’s a Training Problem” Revisited
I wrote about a frustrating experience with poor customer service (“It’s a training problem”) and was surprised how many people told me that I should have “outed” the company and that the Internet is the ultimate revenge. I was mindful of this when I read on the front page of the Boston Globe about how a “worried passenger” on a Peter Pan bus from Boston to New York videotaped the driver and posted it on YouTube.
The driver was breaking at least two company rules: using his cellphone and taking his hands off the steering wheel to tear tickets. The passenger called the bus company while on the bus, concerned about safety, and also tried to report it after the trip. Company officials are reportedly concerned not only about the safety issues on the bus but that the complaint did not reach them until the YouTube link was sent to them.
There can be a large gap between training and performance. One assumes that all companies teach policies, but determining that training was effective is hard, level 3 and 4 evaluations notwithstanding.
Enter irate – or scared – customers using social media: the ultimate revenge, as I was told. Not only is the training problem made apparent, but the person reporting the problem can get his or her proverbial 15 minutes of fame.
Is a performance problem really a training problem? I’ve taken mandatory compliance training both in the classroom and online and they tend to be dull and do little to enforce the importance of what is being taught. In general, I only referred back to the course material when I needed it: on-the-job training essentially. Perhaps the only benefit of my training was to teach me where to find information when I needed it.
With inspiration from my 10-year old daughter’s homework to locate and circle the twenty misspelled words in a page of text and spell them correctly, I redesigned how bus drivers are taught company policies. I decided to avoid on-the-job learning, especially delivered by mobile devices, since mobile device use is part of the problem.
Here is how my training would go. First, teach the rules. Then show video clips and challenge students to find the violated rules and identify what should have been done differently. Conclude the training by arming students with video cameras and sending them on bus rides. If any violations are detected, how much better if a trainee finds problems because then the driver and the trainee both learn in the process. As an added benefit, fresh videos are produced for the course. I can see Peter Pan’s training director winning awards for this – much more pleasant for all than having the company “outed”.
“It’s a training problem”
Have you ever contacted a company about fixing a problem and felt like you weren’t being listened to or were even insulted? This happened to me recently with my telecommunications provider when my phones started working intermittently. My first phone call informed me about an outage that was “fixed”, the second told me that the outage really had been fixed and I needed new phones, and, on the third, I found out that it had yet again been repaired and I should not be experiencing any further difficulties (like no dial tone). The next day, I received a phone call asking me if everything was working fine and I used it as an opportunity to complain about the process I had been through, especially being told that I needed to replace my phones. The response was, “It’s a training problem”.
I have not changed telecommunications companies despite my annoyance and living in a town where I have ample choices. I have not contributed to the abundant “IhateX.com” sites – there was ever one that included “loathe” and “detest”!
But I did ponder the “It’s a training problem” response. Here is what I cynically imagine: this is what customer service representatives are told to say to calm an irate customer because there are few responses to that statement. But suppose that my complaint is actually logged. In fact, wasn’t that call recorded? The segment where I am told to replace my phones is used in a new online course: listen to this and identify why the customer was offended. Listen again and suggest a different direction the customer service representative could have taken it in. Now speculate on the result: would the problem be solved? would the customer be irate? Now let’s do some online role plays. Playing the irate customer would be both insightful and fun. And then, it’s no longer a training problem.