The Bad, The Good, The Ugly, and The Beautiful. Or, This One Time at Band Camp....

http://www.shimweasel.com/hs_gbu/16268_the_good_the_bad_and_the_ugly.jpg

The semester is finally ending. With its conclusion I am tasked with writing one final reflective blog entry. The topic of which is, of course, the course itself. This was only my second ETEC course. Compared to the first, I was honestly and utterly disappointed. That was until I began thinking about what I wanted to write here. Having now spent some time in contemplation of this course, my opinion has changed. I now see it in a more positive light. Be that as it may, whereas I would recommend Dr. Bert's ETEC 620 course in a second, I could not, in all good consciousness, recommend this course to a friend. It has the makings to be an awesome course. However, as it now stands, it needs more than a little polish. Let me tell you how to transform this reasonably good course into an awesome one!

First, clone Frank! Just kidding! But seriously, Frank was simply awesome. He was always accessible and was always ready to help. I only hope that he will be able to maintain his energy and enthusiasm as he progresses through what I am sure will be a long and very successful career as an educator.

The course Google site is very good. In fact, as I have said before, I believe that this interface between Dr. Bert, the students, and the material is much better than the Wiki pages and Trello combination that we used last semester in ETEC 620. There is, however, one major addition that I recommend. These online courses are a ton of work. There are so many things that we are expected to read, write, and do. It is really hard to keep track of everything. The fact that all of the different tasks are seemly assigned with the randomness of a shot gun blast makes finding them and keeping track of them very difficult. 

In tonight's class I will present my suggestion for a personal solution to this problem. Here I want to suggest a course based solution to the problem. I believe that there should be one central page in the course site which lists all of the required tasks and their due dates. It need not break the tasks down to their component parts. Hyperlinks could be used to direct the students to the details. It would just be nice to not have to spend tons of time checking and rechecking all the various pages on the site in the quest to determine just what we are expected to do and by when.

At the risk of offending Dr. Bert whom I respect and admire greatly, I want to talk about the absolute worst part of this course, the "Assignment Proposals" assignment. In theory it was an excellent idea. For a course called "Emerging Technology: Trends" putting us into groups and tasking us with designing an assignment that utilizes emerging technologies for learning seemed like it was an excellent idea. Not only would it require us to work together in groups, it would require that we seek out, find, and learn about emerging technologies for learning. Furthermore, and this is the bonus part, it would help us develop our skills in project design. The assignment was brilliant in theory!

http://fc09.deviantart.net/fs71/i/2010/315/4/5/of_mice_and_men_by_shearts12-d32nmzh.jpg

Considering that we had all chosen to enroll in this "Emerging Technology: Trends" course one would assume that we all had an interest in emerging educational technologies. Combining this assumed interest with the verbiage of the assignment it reasonably followed that the assignment proposals should have presented us with a virtual smorgasbord of emerging educational technologies. Unfortunately, like John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men wherein "The best laid schemes of mice and men / Often go awry." so too did this assignment go so very awry! Looking at the proposals it seemed to me that almost everybody in the course not only forgot to read the assignment instructions they also forgot that this is an educational technologies course. Almost nobody stayed on point! When I saw the proposals of the other groups I knew that we had a disaster on our hands.

Compared to Dr. Bert I have relatively no teaching experience. What experience I do have is at the community college and private school level. Be that as it may, when I notice that an assignment that I created is going over like a lead balloon I attempt to salvage the situation by asking my students where I lost them. I then retool my assignment and try to float it again.

The "Assignment Proposals" assignment was a colossal failure. It went over like a lead balloon. Judging by the shoddy and unfocused nature of the majority of the proposals, it should have been retooled or at least reexplained, and we should have been made to redo it. The fact that we just went with it and had to waste our time and money doing these pointless projects that were all but completely devoid of ANY emerging technologies for learning really upset me.

To be fair, the third proposal, the Kibits proposal, at least had some emerging technologies relevance and while it was not a pleasant experience, it was a good learning experience. The second proposal, the self introduction proposal, at least tried to touch upon emerging technologies. Unfortunately, the unpolished nature of the project design itself more than overcompensated for the tangental connection to emerging educational technologies.

The first proposal, the cooking show proposal, was the biggest waste of time and money of the three. I still do not see ANY connection to emerging technologies. That proposal cost me so much time and money that I am still upset about it. Come on guys! We are trying to learn about emerging educational technologies. We are not studying the culinary arts. If you want to study them, go for it. Drop out of graduate school. Enroll in Leeward Community College's culinary arts program. Judging by the food I have eaten there, the program is very good. Just do not waste my time and my money. I am here to learn about emerging educational technologies; not cooking!

Obviously, that was the "Bad" referred to in the title. As for the "Good," well, there was a lot of good in this course. To begin with, making us enroll in a MOOC and write about the experience was a very good idea and a great experience. I only wish that we would have been given that assignment at the very beginning of the semester and that it would have involved more writing about our experiences and thoughts. Of course if that had been the case we would have had to cut something else out. Maybe cutting out the cooking channel proposal would have been a good idea?

Likewise, making us participate in the TCC was an awesome idea. Those three days were the highpoint of the course for me. I learned so much. It felt so cool to be connected with so many people from all over the world. I know that this is very nerdy but, I especially got a kick out of sitting in the Waianae Starbucks after teaching my class and before the show that I had to photograph watching presentation after presentation on my iPad. I felt as if I was truly part of something so much bigger and so much more important than just myself. I realize of course that someday I too may get to present at the TCC. I find the thought both a little nerve racking and more than a little invigorating.

Now on to the "Ugly." This ties right back into the Assignment Proposals. The selected proposals were for the most part so poorly conceived and so poorly drafted that trying to work in groups to complete them was very difficult. I believe that the root of the problem was a general lack of motivation on any of our parts to work on these assignments. We all had better things to do than meet and or even work on them. Heck, if it were not for my desire to earn a great grade in this course, I would have rather spent my time cleaning my bathroom with a toothbrush than working on the proposed assignments. The strength of my reaction may be a little over the top but judging by just how much difficulty we encountered every time we tried to find the time to work together, I can only surmise that my fellow classmates and group mates felt the same way.

Do not get me wrong, working with my group mates was not the "Ugly" part. The work we had to do was the ugly part. Yes, I realize that I am therefore being repetitive. I just really want to drive this point home.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5HZ3I6YJD80/T3my6txIRjI/AAAAAAAABNg/Q6YcugsJJUU/s1600/you-are-beautiful.jpg

Turning now to the "Beautiful," despite the difficulty of working with my equally unmotivated group mates, once we were able to muster the motivation to meet, all of the meetings went very well. They say that misery loves company. I guess that our universal misery brought us closer together. When we did meet we almost always spent some time complaining about whichever assignment we were working on at the time. This universal misery gave us all more common ground upon which to build even stronger bonds of friendship and cooperation. 

In conclusion, the irony of the situation is not lost on me. I realize that on the one hand I feel that my fellow classmates failed me and themselves by making proposals which had little or nothing to do with emerging educational technologies. I also feel a little let down by Dr. Bert's allowing us to continue down a course that I still believe to have been way off track of both the assignment's and the course's objectives. However, because of the great suffering these assignments wrought, I feel that I have formed closer bonds and even some friendships with these classmates with whom and by whom I have suffered. I have also come to realize that I unexpectantly learned something about designing assignments at the graduate level.

They say that experience is what you get when you do not get what you want. In terms of its title and my expectations, I did not get even half of what I wanted from ETEC 647e Emerging Technology: Trends. I did, however, learn a lot. Possibly even more importantly, I made new friends and built stronger bonds with my classmates and future working colleagues. On balance, it was a good course. Well done Dr. Bert. You and Frank both have my heartfelt gratitude. I hope that I will be able to take yet another of your courses in the very near future.

http://bryanwilsoncomedycello.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/bandcamp.jpg