Faculty Netscape Workshop

Brent Wilson, Lorraine Sherry, Janell Sueltz, and Craig Cutts

Originally, the Dean had asked Brent Wilson and our home page development team to give him another briefing once we had revised the School of Education home page. Later, he changed his mind and asked Brent Wilson to present a one-hour faculty inservice training session on Netscape and the School of Education home page to any interested UCD faculty members. This took place on February 28, 1996. About ten faculty members attended.

To make this inservice session a success, many other activities had to be done in advance. In particular,

• Netscape had to be installed on all machines in the IT lab
• CINS needed to generate and provide "install" disks for Netscape on both Windows and Macintosh platforms
• Job aids were required, with screen prints showing exactly how the Netscape preferences were to be set
• Any remaining "dead links" in the School of Education home page had to be fixed
• Any suggestions for home page improvements that were made by faculty had to be implemented before the inservice session

Brent, Janell, and I met several times with CINS to be sure the disks were ready. Janell handled the Windows part, while I concentrated on the Macintosh part. Each of us wrote a job aid and duplicated all necessary install disks.

After Brent gave the initial presentation on Netscape and its features and let the faculty explore the WWW a bit, he then began to concentrate more on the School of Education home page and its affordances. Throughout the session, each of us worked individually with various faculty members, answering individual questions and giving help and guidance where necessary. We gave each faculty member a set of install disks for their office computer, along with the necessary job aids to install it and to explore the home page.

There was no formal evaluation. However, since then, we have had requests from faculty members to add information concerning their programs, and add names and pertinent information to the faculty profiles. The EPA program bulletin board now contains a prominent announcement about the Ph.D. page. I personally received a congratulatory note from Stacy Kalamaros, complimenting me on my excellent work on the home page.

HTML Authoring Workshop

While I was in Indianapolis attending and presenting at the AECT conference in February 1996, Judy Duffield invited me to give a two-hour workshop in HTML authoring to her ITE students. She had been impressed by some of the Web presentations at AECT, and felt that her students should begin to gain some of these skills. The workshop was to take place the day after we returned home from AECT, February 18, 1996, so I had very little preparation. I created a very simple Web page to use as an example, and put it on the WWW. I also created a handout for students to use as a guide for both classwork and follow-up independent work.

The students were familiar with Netscape, so I concentrated on teaching them how to build their own home page, and to be able to access it from the WWW. I did not use an editor, but taught them the elements of the markup language itself. However, I showed them where they could find editors if they wished, as well as any other resources they may need. I also created a library of HTML authoring resources for the IT lab; anyone may borrow whatever they like, and add anything they think might be of some value.

Agenda:

1. Introduction
   Hand out "Introduction to HTML Editing" and the code for the sample document
2. Initial activities (15 minutes)
   Using Netscape, show students where they can find the following:
   • Sites for downloading HTML editors
   • Netscape and WWW tutorials
   • Online help
   • Style guides
   • The UCD and School of Education home pages
   Show students the HTML resource library I have created for the IT lab and describe what is in it
   Tell students I am available by e-mail to answer any questions, at any time; write down my e-mail address
3. Have students work through an initial exercise by generating some text, at least two links, and a graphic (1/2 hour)
4. Have students create their own page, selecting their own options from the sample document handout. (1 hour)
5. Have students connect their page to the WWW. (15 minutes)
6. Have students print out a copy of their home page and hand it in
7. Have students fill out evaluation form (after the workshop was over)
8. Two weeks later, collect evaluation form and any revised home pages

Evaluation forms are included in the paper copy of my portfolio, along with printouts of students' home pages. All of the students did create a home page, and did hand in a printout to me. For my first full two-hour workshop, I thought the evaluations were fairly good. Moreover, I have now established a baseline of competence from which I can continue to improve my teaching skills and strategies. If I had this class to do over again, I may want to use an editor. There are pluses and minuses: an understanding of how a markup language works is crucial to students who wish to build more sophisticated home pages, but it limits the amount of productivity that can be expected in a single workshop. An editor may increase productivity because it is user-friendly and simple to operate, but it can mess up code and cause unanticipated problems later on that students may not be able to deal with. This is a decision that each Web authoring teacher will have to make on his/her own.

Foundations of Teaching with Technology

The Foundations of Teaching with Technology conference is an annual professional development event. It was hosted by the CU-System with the Colorado School of Mines, and was supported by CCHE and the Pathways to Learning grant. Invited speakers are university professors from all over the country. For the first time, I was treated like an invited university professor, and I was paid at the same rate ($500/day, which is what our RMC Researchers charge). I was expected to conduct an inservice just like any other professor. As Chairman Mao would say, this was the great leap forward!

The first activity was to serve on a 3-hour panel, Panel 2, "Matching instructional goals with technological potentials", led by Tim Neese from CU-Boulder. (See "blurb" on conference, in paper portfolio.) Using a case study and group discussion we explored key issues that arise when developing course materials and activities using technology. We developed a grid that incorporated teaching/learning objectives, pedagogical style, appropriate selection of technology, and value-added by the use of that technology. This grid formed the theoretical foundation for the workshops that followed in the second and third days of the conference. I tied my two (identical) workshops to this grid; I also had my trainees contrast a traditional paper-based approach with an online alternative for presenting completed student products.

For this portfolio product, I'll describe the two 3-hour workshops I conducted. The reason why there were two of them was that 45 people wanted to sign up for my workshop (it was the most popular one offered), and the largest UNIX lab on campus only seated 30 people.

Audience:

University professors from throughout the USA (with a heavy emphasis on Colorado, naturally!)

Objectives:

To present a spectrum of Web-based instructional strategies that are currently being used at the university level, and to allow professors to investigate and evaluate these strategies for their own future use.

Materials:

• Handouts (bound, included here)
• PowerPoint presentations (3, printouts included in handouts)
• Virtual ID Case (http://curry.edschool.Virginia.EDU/go/ITcases)
• Web sites to illustrate each of four strategies covered in this workshop
• UNIX lab with Netscape to explore all pertinent Web sites
• Ancillary materials (reprints of journal articles, syllabi, booklets, and other print-based materials dealing with computer-mediated communications, collaborative design, case-based instruction, and online publishing)

Agenda:

1. Presentation: Web-based instruction (20 minutes)
2. Presentation: Case-based instruction (30 minutes)
3. Hands-on: explore the Virtual ID Case and answer five questions in the handout (40 minutes)
4. Break: back to the Student Center, with food (30 minutes)
5. Presentation: Collaborative design (20 minutes)
6. Hands-on: explore three classes of projects (student pages, team pages, whole-class pages), list pros/cons for each site explored, and fill out the grid in the handout (40 minutes)

Evaluation:

Ed Nuhfer provided each participant with a set of evaluation forms to be filled out at the conclusion of each workshop. I collected all evaluation forms from both workshops and handed them to Ed at the close of the conference. Though I put them in a sealed envelope, I did take a quick glance at them, and the scores averaged between 4 and 5 on a Likert scale of 1 (low) to 5 (high) - which is better than I've done before!

I'm also including a few e-mail messages I received the day after the conference, which attest to the great job I did: (these are in my paper portfolio)

• Ed Nuhfer (who also said people told him my workshop was very good)
• Mable Kinzie (who wrote the case, commenting on a remark from David Graf who developed the theory of case-based instruction, and who was in my workshop)
• Tonya Sutton (relating a comment from her boss, Robin Harvan, who was one of the presenters in Panel 1).

Computer-Supported Collaborative learning

This was a repeat of the one-hour portion of the Colorado School of Mines workshop from July, invited by Ed Nuhfer, to be given at the Business School. I re-used the same slides and handouts, and also added a section on how CMC can be used to support dialogue in university-level classes. There were about 20 participants, primarily professors from the Business School. Since they came and went at will (this was given during a lunch time "brown bag" session), very few attendees filled out the evaluation form.

Later, both Ed Nuhfer and the Vice Chancellor said that I did a good job, and that they would like to see more activities of this type take place at UCD.

Professional Development Luncheon Sessions

One of the duties of a research associate at RMC Research Corporation is to participate in the professional development luncheon sessions which are given about once a month. This fall, I gave two sessions: "The Teachers' Internet Use Guide" and "Online Publishing". Both were interactive sessions using our live Internet connection. For the online publishing session, I used the same handouts I had used for Judy Duffield's class. Both sessions were well-received, but I really don't foresee anyone who is not on the technology team making real use of this information in practice.

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