I remember back to moments in school–both high school and college–when courses and instructors really piqued my curiosity in the course material, sparking both my interest and my intellect.
I’m sure you know how that feels–when that kind of spark ignites, when you’re in a particular course and suddenly the light bulb goes off and you “get it”?!
It’s impossible for me to tell you what will spark your enthusiasm or when–but it’s a truly magnificent feeling. To be excited and challenged is what we, as human beings, strive and search for.
Oh sure, presentation has its place. I don’t know about you, but the more dynamic and engaging something is, the more my curiosity is piqued, the more I’m going to want to learn and therefore actually learn. But I’d like to throw in a caveat. It’s also YOUR relationship with the students and the courses and course material they are engaged with that helps your students not only understand course concepts but, more importantly, get excited about them.
Our relationship with information is also our responsibility. It is, after all, up to us what we do about engaging ourselves too. We have a responsibility in the process of learning.
As the iSchool semester keeps moving on, I’d like to challenge you to consider what inspires you, your intellect, your curiosity about the world you live in and its place in history. Where are we today as a society? Where have we been? Where are we going? What factors into that? Many of our iSchool courses will challenge you in any number of ways, from looking at various cultures to expression via various media–be that music or dance. You will also work on sizing up and discussing societal “issues,” political stances–finding out where YOU stand and be able to articulate why. I haven’t even covered the breadth of our iSchool coursework in summarizing basic course components.
Our iSchool courses will challenge your students and stimulate their minds. But the courses can also stimulate your intellect, your curiosity. How well you engage with the courses and your students, is–of course–up to YOU.
Back in college, I majored in broadcast journalism and got my first job in my last semester in school—writing copy for a morning news show. I was so excited to actually get to write news copy, even if it meant getting up at 4am! I was going to be a “gatekeeper” of sorts…
The whole notion of gatekeeping was fascinating to me. Still is, really. Back in those days, the Associated Press “wires” churned constantly, spitting out reams and reams of dot matrix paper, constantly zigging and zagging stories, making headlines from around the world. There used to be short versions of complicated stories as well as longer versions to help those writing the news understand complex issues like the war in Bosnia or fighting in Northern Ireland. As a news producer, I remember having philosophical debates about whether or not we in “local” news should report international news to our local audience. Did the audience care? Should they care? What was our role then as a “gatekeeper” of the news?
Why am I talking about gatekeeping in an iSchool blog? A literal definition of a “gatekeeper” is someone who’s in charge of passage through a gate. Duh. But another definition is someone who monitors or oversees the actions of others. I find this notion interesting with respect to online learning and our iSchool Program. iSchool instructors act as a gatekeeper of sorts in that they, of course, oversee the actions of their students.
You may ask yourself, how exactly do instructors do that in an online course? Online instructors monitor course assignments, test performance, and your classroom “participation” via the discussion board or blog. All of these aspects are ways instructors gauge how much information students are digesting. Unlike a face-to-face class, all students are required to participate. Like this video says, “Everyone’s answer is different.”
But what about the role of the “student”? How can students be gatekeepers of their own learning? Help students figure out how they best access and absorb information. What kind of a learners are they? Are they more site-based [meaning they like to read text material either online or in a textbook]? Or are they more visual or aural learners? We all learn in different ways but half the battle is knowing how YOU personally best take in information and then chart your course for doing that, thereby acting as your own personal gatekeeper.
My elementary and secondary education took place in a farming community that still used the one-room school house. The first two schools I attended were old wood-heated country houses repurposed for education. The master bedroom on the third floor had become a chemistry lab, and the girls’ bedroom with its rosy wallpaper a library. On good days we ate our lunch sandwiches sitting on a cottage porch, perched in a row like little chicks. The old dinner bell called us back from recess. Charming? Well, yes–and no. Latin, for instance, which I so wanted to take, was only offered in city lyceums.
While I love supporting all students, my growing-up school years have left an indelible soft spot for all rural students. I currently work as part of the UNCG iSchool Learn and Earn Online team. I love the program’s ability to offer a wide variety of online early college courses to the remote communities of North Carolina, its rural communities in particular.
Well, it’s one thing for iSchool to offer the courses, another to know who’s actually taking advantage of them. Curious George that I am, I poked around to find facts and figures. The NCDPI Report for the 2006-07 school year, which was the latest report available online, showed me how many K-12 students were being served overall in each county. I compared these enrollments to those of iSchool students in each county in 2008-09, the second year of our virtual statewide early college program. In 2008-09 iSchool courses were offered in 98 counties; the state’s eight education districts were served practically in equal numbers overall.
Proportionally, rural counties participated in iSchool in much higher numbers than metropolitan counties. The ratio of iSchool enrollments vs. the number of total NCDPI enrollments ranged from 0.00134 to 0.0025 in the four largest school systems (Raleigh-Durham, Charlotte-Mecklenburg, the Triad and Cumberland County). In contrast, the ratio ranged from 0.0172 to 0.0683 in the coastal and rural county systems of Currituck, Columbus, Duplin, and Lenoir. Considerably higher ratios, as you can see.
The metropolitan high schools’ wider range of course offerings as well as the opportunities to take college-level courses from adjacent higher education institutions may, at least partially, explain this difference. Rural schools may offer a smaller number of college course choices, and travel distances to the local community colleges may be greater, while four-year institutions are out of an afternoon travel range altogether. Whatever the reasons, I was very pleased to discover that rural communities are serving themselves with a hefty helping of the North Carolina statewide online virtual early college courses, banking no-cost college credits and thereby saving money for families. Rural regions are indeed reaping the rewards!
Did you know that when the iSchool development team finishes a new course, they make a video introduction? Check out this trailer for one of our favorite new courses, Music 241!
Getting a head start on any number of things is just plain good–good luck, good show, and hopefully leads to a good performance or a job well done.
Remember when you were little and someone let you get a head start in a foot race because their adult strides could outpace yours? You might just have a fighting chance to win if you forgot for a moment someone was (literally) breathing down your neck trying to beat you to the finish line. Although ultimately life’s “finish line” is a subjective goal based on what we as individuals deem important and worthy ingredients for a successful life, surely there are other kinds of worthy head starts in this game called life. . . .
The goal of the national program Head Start is to ensure that participating preschool-age children are ready to start school. That would be incredibly important, right? I mean, it’s a BIG deal to go off to kindergarten–it can be downright traumatic! I can remember crying and holding on my to mom for dear life, not wanting to get on that first school bus for anything. Like a mother hen, she just nudged me on the bus, waved me along, and off I went.
Like so many students or little chicks, we all get used to the routine of school. Although the rhythms of elementary, middle, and high school vary, similarities exist too. One of the biggest I recall is going from elementary, where I had one teacher for the whole year, to middle (we called it junior high back in the day) and then high school with a juggling act of teachers.
One of the biggest transitions our students make after that initial jump into the educational pool is the one to college. After all, the transition to college is wide and can be downright stark. Not only can college mean a severe culture shock for students, but the independence that comes along with it can be heady and lead students away from their studies versus towards them. Students transitioning to college sometimes lose their way and need nudges and prompts just like students do in the K-12 arena.
Some students have family support, financial as well as emotional. And that’s great! Others struggle more with garnering financial aid, while some work their way through. There are all kinds of combinations in between. Finding your sea legs in college is a challenge to be sure, socially as well as academically. OK. Especially academically.
You could say that iSchool also provides students with a head start as it gives college bound students an opportunity to take actual college level courses while still in high school. Every head start you can help your students garner at the high school level is an advantage to all of us.
~Students finish their degrees sooner.
~And students learn valuable skills along the way, namely how to better analyze and digest information, how to communicate more effectively, how to expand their critical thinking skills, etc.
Learning to adapt to a new culture before you’re smack in the middle of that ocean of change is a colossal head start for students. iSchool can help.
I cannot begin to tell you how enchanting these past two years have been touring the state of North Carolina Charles Kuralt-style from mountains to the sea to raise awareness of the greatest opportunity in education since the GI bill–ONLINE college courses for high school juniors and seniors at no cost. I ‘d like to tell you about my road adventures over these two years.
One day crisscrossing Union County in search of Weddington High School, I totally missed a MapQuest turn because the street signs were down for road construction as far as the eye could see. I kept going down the winding country road and passed a sign, “South Carolina Welcomes You.” Oops! In search of the Internet, I dropped into a cybercafé, part of a tiny shopping center carved into the armpit of an old oak grove. The only news I found online while sipping my daily brew was that our dear Chancellor Sullivan had unexpectedly been taken to Duke for emergency surgery. The man brewing the espresso had just relocated from Michigan, and he had not had time to hear about Weddington–yet. Well, I humbled myself and called the school.
I remember a time parked in the pouring rain by a roadside in Fayetteville next to a deserted, dilapidated building that looked like a barracks and carried the distinctly correct street address—2465 Gillespie St.—according to the ONLINE Google Map. Oops again! This resulted in many phone calls. A handful of nautical miles later, I finally managed to sail to the right side of the Cumberland County Education Resource Center, the side with the flagpole. The advice I was given was to always look for the flagpole or the sheriff’s car or both—a sure sign of the main entrance to a high school building. I can testify that it works.
One Sunday evening, when the twilight fell over the Appalachian Mountains, having missed yet another turn heading for Sylva, I found myself descending towards the Tennessee state line behind a logging truck. Luckily a call to *HP saved the remains of the day. I was back-tracking my way through the tunnel and onto a motel close to Swain County High. It was spooky!
I have a big old collection of similar stories under my desk at work. They are much cherished, full of “obsgots” and “liudenhamp” (these are words I coined to describe mysterious things), better than any souvenir. I’m sure many of my co-workers, who clocked miles on the road in like fashion, have similar stories.
What a joy it always was to finally find the educators I had an appointment with. What a collegial welcome at every school! What a pleasure and privilege for me to deliver the good news, entertain questions, and get acquainted with true North Carolina education professionals. And what a beautiful country North Carolina is to travel, with its rolling hills, seashore, farmlands, and mountains. Oh no, I wouldn’t take anything for these last two years on the road.
While recollecting past travel bloopers and blunders, I got to thinking how the inroads to online course delivery and online learning in general are full of adventures, missed turns, and humble recoveries. Those roads are often curvy, hilly, and rough. And sometimes they present potholes, dark tunnels, and soft shoulders. We may feel as if we were flash-flooded with too much of information or too many trouble tickets, or caught up in the squall of missed and crossed communications. It takes a resolute mind, patience, and humor to get us to the destination, and most importantly, for us to have fun on the way. For many of us those roads are uncharted territory with sparse road signs. It is a comfort to know that we are not alone, that we can rely on each other to work as a professional team to educate our state’s future generations. What an exciting time to be in education, what a cutting edge to live on, what a privilege to be a frontier!
As a graphic artist working with UNCG iSchool, I’m required to use creativity to solve visual problems almost every single day. Be it a website layout for an online class or motion graphics for a video, I have to rely on my fine art training to create things that are aesthetically pleasing and exciting for the viewer to experience. That is why, to this day, I keep a sketchbook and take figure drawing classes. It isn’t necessarily about creating a masterpiece charcoal drawing of the human body. For me, it is about the simple act of observing, in great detail, the world around me. I ask myself, are those lines right?
Is the model’s left eye in the correct spot in relation to their foot? I am constantly humbled and inspired by other artists’ amazing abilities to wield a charcoal pencil or paintbrush. Therefor, I believe it extremely important for creative professionals to maintain some sort of a daily drawing journal. It doesn’t necessarily have to be observational; it can be as simple as sketching a simple cartoon character everyday. The graphic designer Stefan Bucher sketches a new monster every single day. In viewing some of his time lapse videos, one can see that all of his monsters are unique and have their own individual quirkiness. It reveals a lot about the man’s creative process and his ability to keep his work looking fresh.
I had drawing professors in college that preached this same principle. “Draw every-single-day.” They would drill it into our skulls. But they were absolutely right. Art is work, as Milton Glaser would say. It takes discipline to stay fresh. Drawing is the designer’s way of staying on top of their craft. Photoshop is great but nothing beats good old fashioned pen on paper. Using a mouse is like trying to draw with a bar of soap. It’s clumsy and hard to coordinate. Physically drawing on paper stimulates the brain in a different way because you’re working with something that’s tactile and tangible. Below you’ll find some examples of drawings that I’ve pulled from various sketchbooks over the years. Some are observational drawings of the human figure and others are straight out of my imagination. Thanks for reading! I’ve got some doodling to do now.
How did Econ 201 end up being about aliens from another planet setting up an economy on a post-apocalyptic earth?
When UNCG iSchool decided to turn Econ 201 into an online game, we had to come up with a scenario that would meet several criteria:
Students would go through all the stages of economic development, from barter to complex modern capitalism. Historically, this process takes centuries.
The same cast of characters had to appear throughout so students could identify with them and also limit what our designers had to create.
The setting had to be plausible for presenting relevant economic information.
AND it had to be engaging, relevant, and fun.
The team brainstormed with the instructor, Dr. Jeff Sarbaum, other successful online profs in related topics, and the developer of the first university online game course. What would work?
The ideal situation, Dr. Sarbaum commented, would be where students had to develop an economy from scratch.
How do you start an economy from scratch? You wipe out all the existing ones. How do you get characters who live long enough to go through all the stages of economic development? Aliens. How do you present the relevant economic history to illustrate principles? A handy ever-present archive.
So—meet the Sarbonians, long-lived residents of Sarbonia Prime where scarcity is unknown, who crash into a post-apocalyptic earth and have to build an economy, aided by the helpful Bot, who has access to all earth archives. Throw in mazes, shooting games, decision games like Storm Front, clever videos, a fake Martha Stewart, John Madden, wheezy gold-mining prospectors, and cagey country farmers—who wouldn’t like that? Welcome to Econ 201.
How developed are your “21st Century Skills”? Some quick research (performed using my 21st century skills) tells me that our new century demands creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, problem-solving, adaptability, and so on. That’s absolutely true! I’m just not sure any of those skills are unique to the 21st century.
Adaptability, for example, is one of the five characteristics of living things (refer to your 10th grade biology class). Assuming that human beings were living organisms prior to the year 2000, people have used adaptation as an essential skill even as far back as my teenage years in the 60s. We opened windows when it was hot, sat on screened porches, and went barefoot. Of course, we adapted rather quickly to air-conditioning which caused us to shut the windows, stay indoors, and bring sweaters to movie theaters in July.
Consult your English, math, or science teachers for help in finding evidence of and constructing simple arguments to support extensive pre-millennial uses of creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, and problem-solving. What is the scientific method, after all, but a thorough exercise in thinking critically? Agriculture has long made use of selective breeding to produce better crops and stronger animals, for example, although people didn’t really understand the science. But imagine Gregor Mendel in his garden musing over pea pods, flowers, and seeds. That bit of creativity and critical thinking, not to mention patience, paved the way for modern genetics. Now instead of selective breeding we have “genetic modification.” Everything old is new again?
You may infer that I don’t really buy the hype on 21st Century Skills as something new and unique. It’s just the hot thing to talk about in education. But (the truth always comes after the but) there is something about education that needs to change to reflect our times. What needs to change has less to do with learning a particular set of human skills than it has to do with the tools at hand to use those skills.
Our students make extensive use of new technologies to find information, collaborate, solve problems, and just plain have a good time. How about our teachers? Do they have access to the technology and can they use it as nimbly as our students? When you visit schools, do you see 21st tools, or do you feel like you’ve stepped back in time? Cell phones and free access to the internet may be verboten. But, c’mon dude, even Iranian politics is powered by Twitter.
If we want to make sure our students excel in this century and beyond, we have to equip them, and permit them, to take what our best minds have to offer — and then to think, collaborate, and creatively engineer the next millennium.@1
Like you, when I was in high school, there was far less technology available. Let’s take a trip down memory lane…We had
Cabbage Patch Dolls, Care Bears, Etch-a-Sketch, Star Wars figures, and games like Battleship and Simon
Three network channels: CBS, NBC, and ABC
When I wasn’t watching some vanilla-type show, the big networks occasionally showed a 3D movie [the glasses came in that week's Sunday paper]. What a thrill–3D with glasses and everything!
TV actually went to sleep–signing off around midnight. You’d see these colored bars and hear a continuous obnoxious beeeeeep and then black until the morning.
MTV had just launched (1981)–a few videos repeated ad nauseum. And they were so predictable–showing every little thing mentioned in a song. Corey Hart had to wear sunglasses in his entire video–he wore them day and night!
Speaking of music, I begged my older brother to let me pick an album from his RCA record club–12 records for a penny! He finally let me–Molly Hatchet’s Flirtin’ With Disaster. Chose it purely for the cover art, a phenomenon most kids likely wouldn’t be familiar with today.
Video games that excited my friends and me: Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Frogger. But by far my all-time? DONKEY KONG!
The Internet wasn’t yet available for mass consumption. Cell phones were a big contraption shown only in movies. I remember thinking I had never seen one in real life. “Texting” involved a school textbook, not a cell phone.
This is a blog for UNCG iSchool, an early college program that works with high school juniors and seniors to get a head start on their college education.
Students taking iSchool courses earn dual credit = honors high school credit and actual college credit, thereby starting a UNCG college transcript. Our courses are offered in [...]more →
Drawing is the designer’s way of staying on top of their craft. Photoshop is great but nothing beats good old fashioned pen on paper. Using a mouse is like trying to draw with a bar of soap. It’s clumsy and hard to coordinate. Physically drawing on paper stimulates the brain in a different way because you’re working with something that’s tactile and tangible. Below you’ll find some examples of drawings that I’ve pulled from various sketchbooks over the years. Some are observational drawings of the human figure and others are straight out of my imagination. Thanks for reading! I’ve got some doodling to do now. 
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