Empathy Applied

I created an online version of an assessment I do in my face to face class called "Empathy Applied". It's a handout I created a few years ago and have used when asked to report on the college wide assessment of the competency "Applying Abstract Ideas to a Concrete Situation". I think it will be a great resource to have online.

The assessment starts by asking students to identify the definitions of two terms: sympathy and empathy. Next they are given a concrete situation: "You just found out that your best friend's mother has passed away." After laying out a few more contextual details the students are provided a list of behaviors/responses to that situation. They are asked to identify which statements would be representative of an empathetic response, which ones would be representative of a sympathetic response, and which ones given the situation would be neither sympathetic nor empathetic and therefore "not appropriate".

I've found that many Interpersonal textbooks do not spend a great deal of time discussing grief and how to help those who are sufferring with grief. Over the years I've found a few resources that I like, but this assessment is a great tool for helping us move away from just reading about empathy to actually talking about what it looks like. So it will be nice to now also have it online.

Incivility in the Classroom

If you're a teacher ask yourself these questions: Ever had a student make disparaging remarks in class? How many cell phones have gone off in your class this year? Do students who fall asleep in class bother you? Do student's come in late or leave early for your class and does this disrupt you? How many textmessages do you think students send and receive while in class? Would that distract you? How about those students who are obviously doing homework for another class? These are just some of the behaviors that have been earmarked as uncivil for some instructors. I know they bother me. But are some behaviors worse than others and just how often do they really take place? Well I'm following St Cloud State's lead in trying to figure that out.

St Cloud State University created a survey that was conducted in order to better understand what is happening in the classrooms on their campus. As part of this survey students and faculty were asked to rate both the degree of severity as well as the frequency of 25 different behaviors. Twenty three of the behaviors are generally accepted to be uncivil while 2 are considered positive behaviors instructors expect from their students. With the developers' permission, I have replicated the survey for use in my interpersonal communication class.

One of the interesting outcomes of the SCSU survey is that there is a difference between what teachers are reporting are happening and what students self-report that they see happening in the classrooms. There's also a difference in what teachers as a whole and students as a whole report as "uncivil" behavior . I think this is a great topic for discussion in my interpersonal class as what some perceive as offensive, others may not. Sometimes students don't understand that their behavior affects those around them. So I plan to have the students take the surveys which I typed up today using the D2L format. Then we can look at the results together and have a discussion about how and why those survey's relate to interpersonal communication.

Tracking the blog visits

I met with Michael earlier in the week and he gave me some ideas for tracking the visits to my blog. It's amazing what all I can find out about people just from them clicking into my blogs. It's kinda a bit "big brother"ish. But on the otherhand kind of interesting. Hopefully it will also help me assess how the blog is working, or not working, in the ways I intended. So here's some quick notes about a few options I looked at:

clustrmap: diagrams the visits to your site by where in the world the user is hosted. A little map of the world can be added to your site that pinpoints the locations of your visitors.

feedjit: imports a live traffic feed so you can see the users in a timeline of most recent or currently at your site. There's also a little flag icon next to each line so you can see the country from which that visitor is accessing your site.

sitemeter: a statistical blog summary that allows you to also view how a visitor entered and how they leave your site. It tracks the total number of visits, how many pages they opened and the length of time spent before exiting. There's alot more this site can track as well.

I decided to start with the sitemeter as I'm not anticipating too many international visitors. I was able to set up an account farily easily but ran into a little trouble on getting the link to appear directly on my blog site. There were directions listed for how to do this according to what blog program you use, but the directions given for my program appeared to only get me half way there. So I'll try again later.

**I also created my D2L quiz today on the "FTF and other acronym" blog so I feel good that's done.

Channels and Choices

On Friday I found out that my good friend's brother passed away from a heartattack. So my blogging came to a bit of a cease because I didn't quite know how or what to say about it. I didn't want to write something frivilous. So I gave it some more thought and after awhile came back to blog about it. I decided to honor his memory as a teacher by not just blogging about his passing, but to use it as something that could be a learnable moment for my students. So I opted to talk about the choices people made in how to pass on the news of his death. From the college where he worked calling his mother, to the police officers driving up in their driveway; from my phone call to my parents to the message I posted to our elementary school classmates, even the assignment itself where the students read about his death on the blogsite, all channels were included. So today I created a 10 point objective quiz that students will take on the blog entry. I also intend to talk to them after the quiz about the subjective part of what "communication rich" means and what type of contexts would be appropriate for each of the different channel choices.

Constellations and Cultural Influences

I was with the delegation from Thailand as they toured Brainerd High School and Forestview Middle School. One of the stops on the agenda today was to Forestview's planetarium where Brian Wallace lead us through an intergalactic exploration. It was one of my highlights of the day.

The planetarium was really interesting. I'm glad it was such a visual medium though because even with English being my first language, it was complicated material. Before going into the filmed presentation, he started with the night sky as we see it in Minnesota, and then adjusted it to show us what it looks like in Thailand. It was a cool perspective shift. He then talked about some of the mythology behind certain constellations. Like the big dipper, or Ursa Major. He told us about the American Indian story of "the big bear" and the Thai story of the Alligator. It was interesting to hear the cultural perspectives on the stories that become enculturated within the different parts of the world. And I thought that could be a cool assignment: To research the different mythologies to the same constellations and then compare them to each other through Hofstede's cultural vaue theories (individualism vs collectivism, high context vs low context, masculine vs feminine, etc.)

Here's some online resources for stories of constellations from around the world:

http://www.coldwater.k12.mi.us/lms/planetarium/myth/index.html

But I digress

I just had fun writing my blog "But I digress..." This is going to be a fun exercise to use with my students because there is so much we can talk about with it. To name just a few points:

1) Communication Myths. We can talk about the length of the sentences and correlate it to the chapter concept about communication myths. Specifically, the myth that more words will make a message more clear.
2) Tangents. This blog goes off on several tangents. My students sometimes have trouble with the term "tangential". This could help.
3) Acronyms. I use the acronym "TRF" which somepeople will know and others won't so we can talk about the importance of avoiding acronyms.
4) Knowing your audience and language choices. We can look at word choices like "ricer" which I'm assuming some people are not going to be able to visualize. We can also look at slang language. I don't use the word "hell" because I say I might have students read the blog. Yet I turn around and use "sh*thead" as if that's OK because I used an asterick.
5) The use or overuse of parantheses. I actually took it further and used a bracket within a parantheses too. So we can analyze when adding points that way helps and when it hinders the communication process.
6) Stereotypes. I talk about good scandinavians and good Lutherans.
7) Grammatical errors like ending sentences with prepositions. I struggle with this one myself. At least I know when I do it and if I'm typing I will correct it. It's harder for me when I'm talking. I notice many of my students are guilty of this as well, so can be one way we talk about catching our bad speaking habits.

These are just some of the ideas of how I can use that blog entry. I'm sure I'll be adding more to the list.

Side assignment: have students brainstorm a list of acronyms they have heard or personally use with the assumption others will understand

Side Effects

I've discovered there are some side effects to being on sabbatical. First and foremost I've reverted back to my natural body time--staying up and getting up a later than during the school year. Second, I've discovered that my interpersonality doesn't necessarily jive with a full year sabbatical when I'm home alone and 30 miles away from the place I work and basically live. So I had to manage a new set of dependencies that I wasn't necesarrily prepared for especially at the beginning of the year. It is in reaction to those emotions that led me to the third side effect. I'm addicted to my computer.

I've been very good about getting in and doing work on my computer almost every day. It's not like I'm playing games, but I spend probabl spend at least 6-8 hours online. Part of it is checking emails, part of it is blogging, and OK and part of it is checking in on my facebook account. I noticed that I kept blogging but didn't get into finishing all the D2L pieces, so over the last couple of days I've spent some time incorporating all my blog ideas into actual discussion forums, assignments, and quizzes. As of right now I have a total of 68 blog entries and many of them have corresponding assessments. I think that's pretty cool considering all of that is a "side effect" to my initial idea about blogging. In fact, none of this is in my sabbatical plan. So sometimes side effects can lead to positive outcomes!

Abstact/Concrete Language--'The Thing Is..."

I blogged in my "Showing Reality" site about making pumpkin pie. As I wrote it I specifically had a class exercise in mind. What I did was use the word "things" several times instead of a more concrete term. The assignment for the students will be to rewrite the blog entry replacing the abstract term for one that is concrete and specific.

A second step to this assignment could then be to get into small groups, discuss what word each students used to replace each "thing" in the blog and then to compile them according to the abstraction ladder theory (linear progression of terms that move in steps from the abstract to the concrete).

Facebook Teachers and Facebook Students

I met Susan for lunch today and had a really nice visit. She's a friend and a colleague who just happens to also be on sabbatical this year. We're hopefully going to get together again a couple of times this year, at least check in with each other, as we're both working on integrating some cool technology into our classes. We visited about a wide range of work-related items, but one part of our discussion I really needed to take to not only take to heart, but take some action as well.

She had had a conversation with another colleague about facebook and the student-teacher relationship. Both Susan and I started facebook approximately the same time. We both relatively new to this environment. I orignally started mine as a "business only" account so-to-speak. I did not join any groups that would have political affiliations. I participated in quizzes that only President Lundblad would approve of. I did not put too much personal information on my site and I certainly did not include any personal photos besides my profile picture.

My first "friends" were my international club students as they had so many questions I was unable to answer at the beginning of the school year since I was no longer their advisor nor was I on campus. It was fun to search through their photo albums for the pictures from our club activities. And before I knew it, almost the entire club had access to my account. Some sought me out and I accepted them. It didn't seem like an issue until I started seeing pictures that I didn't want to be associated with on my business account. And it wasn't just the pictures it was sometimes the status line. When the lines about being drunk were coupled with innappropriate pictures started to fill my "news feed". I had to take action. I actually defriended (just made that up) a student. Which brings me back to my conversation with Susan.

Both she and this other colleague had experienced similar situations. In one case a student did not want to accept his teacher's request to be a "friend" for class. In another case, asking nieces and nephews to be a friend seemed like a good idea until you truly learned what was going on in their world. So the conclusion eventually came around to the thought of separation of chats and state. As teachers, most of us would not advise becoming "friends" with our in class students so the same rules should probably apply online. I've learned more about some of my students than I cared to know and more than I probably should now.

So I made the decision to "defriend" my students and just be their teacher--at least until after they've left CLC.

Thanks Susan if you're reading this :)

More YouTube Videos for Class Collection

Today I added some more videos to the playlist collection for my classes. I found a couple of videos on racism that I liked and one I liked that I didn't dare share. So I saved the ones that were class appropriate. I also found out about the "thinkb4you speak" campaign that has PSAs aimed at explaining why "that's so gay" is an insult. I found two video's on you tube but guess there could be others out there too. I need to go see if they have a website.

Then my video searching got even more serious as I saved some links to videos on the Darfur genocide and Rwandan genocide. I was thinking that with the Darfur videos I could create an assignment that had students compare and contrast 3 different style videos (picture/print, music video, and personal narrative) for which one had the most impact on them personally. This way the students are not just learning about Darfur but are exploring the means of the message.

Before I left the youtube site I had to bring myself back to something lighter so I watched a cat that was fascinated by a printer to the point it attacked it (but the printer attacked back!) I needed that.

Cool Avatar Function

Thanks to my friend Deb, who has been following my blog, I learned about a cool function through the voki avatar program. She discovered that within the avatar's "player" there was an icon for leaving a comment. By clicking on this icon she was able to be transported to the "create an avatar" function of voki. She created her own avatar without having to giver her email address out or create a new account. Then she was able to leave a message for me. She told me that she had left a comment so I went back to the link where I had posted my avatar and the original message. All I had to do was click the icon which looks like a dialogue box and up popped her avatar pictuer. With one click I was able to hear her message and see her avatar "talk" to me.

After this fun find we experimented a little more. I was able to leave a message to her message. Everything stays in the one link. The discussion is threaded so you can play in sequence or just play the latest message. Deb even beat me to adding her own voice to her avatar. That was pretty cool.

One down side to the voki site is that your avatar's player (the frame that surrounds the picture) is going to have an advertisement on it. So currently my avatar looks like she's the posterchild for "Bridezilla". That's the "price" we pay I guess when we use free sites. So as long as you know that going in, then avatar away!

The final note I want to make about this experiment is that I received an email notice that a message had been left for me with my avatar. So that's good to know. You don't have to go back to check just in case someone left you a message, it will tell you. Nice huh? So thanks Deb for helping me discover that cool function.

Avatar Assignment

After working on avatars Monday, I decided to create an assignment that looks at some of the factors individuals use in creating their own avatar. I sent them to the same site I used www.voki.com. The tentative plan is to have them publish their avatar on their efolio site. Then they will have to answer some specific questions typing up their answers and submitting their word document into the drop box. Maybe there are some good online resources that I could use as resource links. Then a small quiz could be created. If I go that route, then I will put the questions into a discussion board forum. That actually would probably be more beneficial. I'll go make the addition right now!

Talking Avatar

Today I played around on trying to create an avatar. I did so at a site recomended by an IT friend. The site is www.voki.com. It's a site that allows you to add voice to your avatar and then import them to other places. You can pick certain pictures and then manipulate certain aspects of how they look. I played around with hair styles (although didn't find one quite like mine), hair color, eye color, width of face, length of face, skin tone and even the size of your nose. You can also change the clothing, the accessories and the amount of makeup your avatar wears. The avatar is animated and its eyes will move around and follow your cursor.

The neat part about this is that it allows you to record your own message and synchs your avator to the audio. I didn't have a microphone home (will have to add that to my wish list). The site however has a text to voice function that allows you to type in a short message that can be "read" by several pre-set voices with either American or Brittish accents. I left it on English, but there's probably several other types of accents available as well. It's hard trying to figure out how you look as a character. I wonder if it would be easier to design someone else than design yourself. Could be a fun exercise for class!

Press the play button below to get my first sample of how this all works.



Get a Voki now!

Tibet:Cry of the Snow Lion

Today I watched a documentary titled "Tibet: Cry of the SnowLion". I have to admit that I wasn't as informed as I should be on the history of Tibet. For this I am a bit ashamed. So today was the first step in trying to better understand the deep cultural and religious elements that have had such an international impact on our global society. Besides the 30 second news clips tied to protests over Beijing's hosting of the Olympic games, I hadn't heard much about Tibet in our Western media coverage. Watching this documentary was very enlightening. Of course, it also seemed to raise a few more questions as well. I guess that 's the sign of a good teaching tool.


Note to netflix members: This documentary is available to "watch instantly".

First Movie using Windows Movie Maker

I created my first movie using windows movie maker and some sample video clips taken from my friends new Flip video camera. I still have a lot to learn even with this short video I was able to implement the following techniques:
* import videos
* basic edit of videos (splitting and trimming)
* add title and text (before clips and as overlaying text)
* add special effect transitions between clips
* do some basic work on moving items on the storyboard.
* how to save video
* upload video to blog (uploading takes a little bit of time and waiting for the video to process takes even longer)

I think it turned out all right for my first attempt. Enjoy "Hissy Cat"

Funerals and Flip Bits

I didn't have alot of time to play with the video we took yesterday on the new Flip Ultra. However, I was able to download it on my PC (we had downloaded it on an apple last night). Seems that the software contained in the Flip iteself works pretty well with both the Mac and the PC. Deb put the video on her computer first and there was an upgrade to download. I'm assuming this is to match the software features that are now coming with the Flip Mino (the newest version and probably the camera I'm going to try and get). So the software was ready to go when I put it on my PC.

Although most of the readings listed the maximum storage time at 60 minutes. I noticed that we got 67:08 minutes on our first day and still had room to go. We took a total of 61 video shots and to download all the footage onto my computer only took 5 minutes. I didn't think that was bad. That's about as far as I got since we had to go to a funeral (see blog on Funerals for whom). He was a colleague. In his obituary was a line he used to use in his classes. I don't think he mind if I passed on the tradition. In every class he'd ask his students "Name 3 people who care you are here" and if the student didn't include themselves his response was "if you don't care, why should they?" Words to live by from a wise old soul who left his mark on the educational journey of thousands. Here's to you DS!