Whitney Ransom McGowan

I have really enjoyed reading about social networks this week. I am quite amazed and impressed by the magnitude and popularity of these social networks. My husband is the director of social networking where I work, so I am constantly bombarded (in a good way) with a variety of aspects of social networking. I will admit that a few years ago I really didn’t think I wanted or needed a Facebook account. Then one day my boss, Paul Allen, met with our company and encouraged everyone to get a Facebook account (so I did to meet a requirement from my boss.) Now, I am very happy that I did. I think we all generally feel some sort of need to connect with other people, whether that be our friends or family members. We also like to share what’s going on in our lives, and find out what’s happening in the lives of other people. Social networks are a great way to be an active participant in those areas.

As per social networks in education, I’m still trying to figure out there place, and I think a lot of other people are as well. I know that some classes at BYU receive their announcements through Facebook. Other faculty members have set up groups for their students to have a space to be able to discuss their thoughts on the class and assignments. Some faculty members have even become friends with their students, and some students have invited their professors to be their friends on Facebook. Still, I don’t feel like we have even begun to use social networks for educational purposes.

>And speaking of being able to communicate with others through social networks, I just went to my Facebook account and found a friend request from a lady. She read one of my articles that I wrote for our company newsletter and wanted to see if she could get permission to distribute it to her members. Awesome! Who would have thought we would have connected on Facebook? She could have responded to my email in the newsletter, but she chose Facebook as the venue to communicate.

We are now friends on Facebook.

Now on to social applications. There are thousands of applications on Facebook…so many that I would not have time to review them all, nor add them all. I think some of the applications are excellent, and some definitely need some work. Now, if I can brag for  a moment, my husband’s application, We’re Related is currently the number 8 application on Facebook for the most active users! Yes, and it is about to reach 10 million users. 10 million users! Oh, how I love technology, and the virality of these applications. I haven’t added a lot of applications to my Facebook page, not because I don’t like them, but because they require time, and I have been pretty focused on some other things lately. I did appreciate the assignment from Dr. Wiley to look at some of the applications. I downloaded the application that lets you select where you have been. I am still working on that fun, but so far it has been fun. And what is the purpose of all of these applications? I guess they have different purposes, some are just for fun, others are to get you thinking, others are to connect you to your friends and family…and the list goes on and on and on. I typed in the word “education” to see how many applications were related to education. There were 164 results for “education.” Some encouraged others to find jobs in the field of education. Another one was a language challenge. Another application was to support literacy. Hmm. There are some great educational applications…and I’m sure there will be even better ones in the future.

When I looked at blogs that discussed education and social networks, I found a great blog on social networking in higher education. Now, I am a little biased to this blog because it focuses on how social networks are impacting individuals at Penn State. I almost went to Penn State for my doctorate, so I enjoy reading about things that are happening there. The author discusses how Twitter is changing the culture of Penn State. Here are a few of his thoughts:

“At Penn State World Campus we’re beginning to take advantage of the opportunities with tools like twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and Second Life in the hopes of building a true, active community of faculty, staff and learners. I’ll be talking about these tools in detail in future posts, but for today we’ll concentrate on twitter. If you’re tired of hearing about twitter, just give me five minutes of your time and let me tell you how twitter has really, truly, changed things at Penn State….At Penn State, twitter has changed the culture on campus and has given us ways to connect across our university that we couldn’t have imagined. We’ve used twitter to ask for help, work on projects, discuss topics during conferences, schedule impromptu lunches, and offer things for sale. We’ve planned meetings, found opportunities to collaborate and have become a much more connected, intelligent, communicative group that now includes people from several Penn State campuses, departments and academic colleges. We are IT professionals, professors, advisers, learning designers, and students. We have used twitter to build a community that now thrives at Penn State.”

This is awesome, and if social networks are changing Penn State, they are probably changing another university or college near you!

So, I just finished reading about social objects. I think this subject is quite interesting. I particularly liked learning about how you can build a service around a social object using the five principles below:

1. You should be able to define the social object your service is built around.

2. Define your verbs that your users perform on the objects. For instance, eBay has buy and sell buttons. It’s clear what the site is for.

3. How can people share the objects?

4. Turn invitations into gifts.

5. Charge the publishers, not the spectators. He learned this from Joi Ito. There will be a day when people don’t pay to download or consume music but the opportunity to publish their playlists online.

Yes, that’s the explanation of how to build a service around a social object. The next question is how does this work in education? First of all, I will say that educational content can definitely be social objects because they can easily be used to get conversations started. Of course I don’t feel like we have advanced as far in education, as we have in business with social objects. This statement goes along with my blog title, where I have replaced the word “business” with “education.”  I also feel that assessments and assignments can be and are currently used as social objects as well. Who doesn’t go home to their roommates or spouse and talk about the test they just completed at the Testing Center? In this case, the Testing Center could also act as a social object, along with the assessments and assignments. The key here is just having a sharing object.
Now lets move on to the idea of compatibility of learning management systems with social objects. I think they are not very compatible. LMS are very confining and seem restricted in many ways, whereas learning objects are open, more social, easily shared, and just seem more exciting.

What is my metaphor for social objects? Lets go with a piano today. One piano wherever everyone can come together and press on different keys, making different sounds, melodies, harmonies, and even some wrong notes (and maybe they are not wrong to the person who pressed on those keys).
On a fun note, when I started looking for other links about social objects, several of our classmates made the first page of results on Google with their blogs on social objects! Way to go class! I also liked this little presentation on 10 Principles for Social Object Design. The author brings up many of the same points that were addressed in our reading.

Here are the 10 principles:

Today I found an article in the New York Times titled, Let Computers Compute. It’s the Age of the Right Brain. This is article was quite interesting to me. The author discusses how we need to use the right side of our brains more than we have been doing. In essence, she says that our computers can do many of those left-brained tasks, so lets focus our attention to the creative/innovative right side of our brains.

Now our assignment for my social media class was to find an article on using Wikipedia in education, and that article probably doesn’t sound like I have nailed the topic…and I haven’t really with that article. However, this New York Times article was linked to another article titled, In Age of Right Brain, Wikis Hold Key to Success. This article was quite short, but the author hit on an important point. Janet discusses how blogs are good for the right brain. They don’t focus on the left side of the brain, but rather, allow people to engage in creative and thoughtful writing. I think more of this type of writing is needed in education. Oftentimes, students are confined in their writing, whether that entails restrictions on page length, subject matter, due date, voice or style of writing, etc. Blogs allow for freedom of expression, and it’s very simple to make a post.

Of course I recognize that some constraints need to be in place, but spending a little more time working with that right side of the blog could bring forth some new, innovative, useful, and life-changing ideas to the field of education.

To read more about differences between the right and left sides of your brain, click here.

The assignment this week in class was to explore Wikipedia, and if inclined, to improve it some way. I have used Wikipedia a lot as a quick reference, but I have never edited it. I actually jumped right on and started making edits (I saw a few lines that said You are Logged In), however, I realized afterward that the changes I made were recorded, but only the IP address on my computer was shown. So, I set up an account, which was very easy, and started reading. The assignment was to read about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. That which I read was quite accurate. I did make some changes, but all of them were grammatical changes. For example, I italicized the Nauvoo Expositor, since it was the name of a newspaper. The sentence was: On June 7, 1844 an anti-Mormon newspaper called the ‘’Nauvoo Expositor'’ was published in the city.  I also added a comma in between the words, shoot and killing in the following sentence: In June 27, 1844 at 5:00 pm in spite of the promised protection by Governor Ford, an armed mob was allowed to enter the jail and shoot, killing both Joseph and Hyrum, while wounding Dr. Willard Richards and John Taylor who were there visiting them. I also added a hyphen in another sentence.

I was happy by how easy the whole process was. I think this is a reason why so many thousands or people are adding or editing articles on Wikipedia. It’s simple and doesn’t take a lot of time! I love that so many people are involved in this work. The old adage, “Many hands make light work,” is true.

Editing this page on Wikipedia also reminded me that the LDS Church is making a similar effort in the Family History area with their indexing project. In essence, any individual can register with the LDS church and then become part of a worldwide effort to index the names found on 2.4 million rolls of microfilm and make accessible to everyone on the Internet.

“Of course I recognize that some people will add information who may not be completely knowledgeable about the subject matter, or may not have a degree to show their specific expertise in an area. To me that really doesn’t matter. If there are errors, they will be correctly quickly by others. In class, someone gave an example of how they changed the birthday of Joseph Smith to a date that was incorrect. They posted it, and within less than ten minutes, someone had edited that change and put the correct date. It’s amazing. It’s peer review to the 150th power!

For our next social media class assignment, we were asked to find an educational blog. I did a quick search on blogs in education and educational blogs and found 42,900 and 95,300 results (respectively) from Google on these topics. Although these results equal more than 100,000, I was a little disappointed that I didn’t see many recent posts in the top Google hits. Many of them were 2003-2006. Of course there were some recent ones too, but I was hoping for more.

One blog that I enjoyed reading was titled, Panelists: Blogs are changing education. This blog was the winner of the ‘Best of the Education Blog’ Awards. The title of the blog caught my attention because I believe it has some truth to it. Yes, I think that many faculty and teachers are catching onto the vision of using blogs in education. However, I think that although many faculty and teachers are using blogs, they may not be using them effectively in teaching. I think it goes down to the idea of “just because we have the technology, should we use it?”

I recognize the fact that blogs make people’s ideas more readily available to a wider audience. They can allow the students to view and comment on the work of their peers, whereas in the past, usually just the teachers or faculty read the assignments from the students. So, yes, blogging is important, and a quote from the article says that “The impact on blogging in teaching and learning can be profound.”

My question is how are people measuring this “profoundness” and what are some of the best ways faculty and teachers are using blogs to improve education? I hope I’m not sounding too negative. I do love technology, and I love that blogs are being used in education, I’m just questioning a little on how this impact is being measured and really want to know and hear stories of how blogs are really changing the face of education.

Hi Everyone,

For those of you reading this blog, I am taking a class on social media by David Wiley. I am going to be posting my assignments for this class on this blog for a while. Our first assignment is to tell a little bit about ourselves and then explain why we are taking the class. So, here goes…

I am from the beautiful town of Preston, Idaho, otherwise known as the place where Napoleon Dynamite was filmed. Yes, Jared Hess went to my high school, and is a great guy. This semester I am starting the PhD program in Instructional Psychology & Technology at BYU. I also received my master’s from BYU. I just finished my thesis last semester, which was on Contributing Factors to Improved Teaching at BYU. I love teaching and learning and really did enjoy researching that topic.

On a lighter note, I do love being outdoors. I love running. (I have run a few half marathons and have run several 22 mile runs.) I just got married a few weeks ago to Jason McGowan. I love this man, and we are so excited to start our lives together. We met at work, FamilyLink.com. We actually have a blog about our wedding, courtship, etc., which is http://mcgowanwedding.com.  I also love music and have played the piano since I was eight, started dancing when I was 3, and also play the organ and guitar.

I love sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ with others. I served a full-time mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to Bucharest, Romania. It was such a wonderfully sweet and amazing experience. I love the Romanian people so much. Not one day goes by, since I have been home from my mission (about four years) that I don’t think about the Romanians, or an experience I had in Romania, or something I learned there. I will indeed never get over Romania, and I am quite okay with that. Oh, and I also have the opportunity to interpret for General Conference in Romanian. This is a very neat, rewarding, spiritual….and somewhat scary experience.

I am excited about David Wiley’s class. David used to teach at Utah State University. I have been interested in the subjects I have heard him lecture on and actually applied for Utah State’s PhD program so I could get to know him better and perhaps work on a similar area of research in the future. With that being said, David accepted a position at BYU, and I was delighted by this. I love technology, Web 2.0 gidgets and gadgets, new ideas and communication, and thought this class would be a great experience to learn more about some of these tools and how they can be used in education. I have also been impressed several times by Elder Ballard’s talk urging members of the LDS church to use these new media tools to spread the gospel. I have thought about doing a dissertation topic relating to Elder Ballard’s talk and thought that this class might give me some ideas. I was also very happy when on the first day of class David said that this talk would be the foundation of our course! Sweet!

Yes, my thesis has been finished now for a few months, and I am pretty happy about that. I have loved doing the research on contributing factors to improved teaching at BYU and will probably continue to pursue another aspect of it in the future. Here is a copy of my thesis: http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/ETD/image/etd2327.pdf .

The fun news is that I also had the opportunity to participate in a vidcast discussing some of my learnings with Russell Osguthorpe, Director at the Center for Teaching and Learning. Here is the link to the vidcast.  http://ctl.byu.edu/improving-your-teaching-interview/

Here is a brief synopsis of some of the results:

More than 300 of the 1600 BYU faculty have made significant and sustained improvements in their teaching, based on a recent research study conducted at BYU. These 300 faculty had at least a 1.5 standard deviation increase or higher in their online student ratings. In fact, more than 50 percent of the faculty improved between 1.5-1.99 points, 39 percent improved between 2-2.99 points, 9 percent improved between 3-3.00 points, and two percent improved between 4-4.99 points. Although faculty in this study had a wide range of improvement, 29 percent of the faculty (100 faculty) improved their online student ratings from a 5 to a 7.  Fifteen percent improved from a 4 to a 6 and another 15 percent improved from a 6 to an 8.

Typically, when faculty receive online student ratings scores that range from 4 or lower, the majority of the comments are negative. Faculty who receive an overall score of 5 usually receive comments from students in their online student ratings that are positive and negative. The majority of the comments that come from faculty who receive online student ratings scores between 6 and 8 are generally positive.

How did faculty change? Whitney Ransom, a graduate researcher at BYU conducted 30 interviews from the pool of 300 faculty to better understand what these faculty did to improve their teaching and the process they used to make these changes. Data from the interviews showed faculty were often motivated, humble and willing to change, usually selected one item to improve, along with a date to initiate and evaluate the change, and then put forth efforts to change. They usually had an experience that triggered the change.

Approximately 74 percent of these faculty said they utilized the online student ratings to improve their teaching. Further, comments from the online student ratings were the number one factor to improved teaching performance for 44 percent of the faculty, followed by mid-term surveys and exit interviews (22 percent).

In essence, faculty needed to take advice from the students whom they were teaching to make their classes better. Faculty said the online student ratings were helpful and beneficial, and that overall they had a positive experience with the student rating process. For example,

I take the online student ratings very seriously. It is an incredible opportunity that every 16 weeks I have some very truthful feedback on my job performance. I think a professor would be silly not to read them and take them seriously.

Faculty were asked what they did to improve their teaching performance. The top three contributing factors were (1) Active and Practical Learning, (2) Teacher and Student Interactions, and (3) Learning Outcomes and Expectations. An example of each of the three categories is provided here.

Active and Practical Learning. Faculty engaged their students in real-world experiences, hands-on activities, and in-class discussions. One faculty member said,

Some students would say that I bring real world experience and practical stuff. Even though we cover the theory, I cover it in a hands on, very meaningful, and practical way. The students can take what I teach in class and actually apply it.

Teacher and Student Interactions. Faculty often learned the names of their students, cared about them, believed in them, and were genuinely interested in their lives. One professor demonstrated this aspect of improvement by getting to know his students really well. At the beginning of the semester he invited every student to set up a 15-minute appointment with him. He said,

It helps me because when I see them in class I know their names and a little bit about them. It helps them because they can ask any questions about me, so they get to know me. I hope what that accomplishes is that it breaks the ice….I have had students comment that out of all of their years at BYU, this was the first time a professor has tried to get to know them personally…It is very rewarding for me because my students know that I look at them as a person and not just as a name or a picture on a roster.

Learning Outcomes and Expectations. Faculty often had high and clear expectations for their students. They also emphasized each learning outcome to their students. One faculty member said,

Some of the students felt like some of the work that I was having them do was busy work and that was not my intention. Instead of taking away the assignment, which I feel would have been detrimental to their learning, I had to help them understand that it was beneficial to their learning. I had to help them understand how it fit in to the big picture of what we were trying to achieve. I started adding this statement on my syllabus, “You may find these assignments don’t fit you as a learner or how you learn; therefore if you would like to propose alternatives that fit the learning outcome, I am open to that.”

During the interviews, most of the faculty commented that the effort it took to make these changes was minimal. In essence, the faculty members were fine tuning their teaching and focused primarily on one factor to change. For example, here are some short statements from faculty demonstrating the effort the change in their teaching involved:

•    Most of the changes that I have made are simple but they make a big difference to the students.
•    It took a little bit of time. Overall the changes reduced a lot of the grading work that I had to do. It reduced some of the load off of me.
•    I don’t think it was any more effort than I normally put in. In terms of class preparation my focus changed. In term of energy I put forward, it was probably about the same.
Although the effort to change did not require hours and hours of each faculty member’s time, the results were visible, important, improved online student ratings, and were even life-changing to some faculty members.

Findings also demonstrated that students were not satisfied with the teaching in their classes when there was no alignment between desired learning outcomes, activities, and assessments. For students to give the class an outstanding ranking, however, it was not sufficient for faculty to just align these three areas. It was only when faculty linked learning outcomes, activities, and assessments to the life of the learner, made these areas challenging yet attainable, and were inspiring to the learners that students raved about their classes. Overall, this study shows that nearly 20 percent of BYU faculty who have different personalities, who teach a variety of disciplines, with various course sizes have succeeded in improving their teaching performance with minimal effort, and with the aid of online student ratings.

Okay, so I know it has been a little while since I have written. However, today is a big day because we launched FamilyLink.com this morning. I am really excited about this site, and the usefulness it will be for genealogists. If you haven’t signed up for an account, go to http://www.familylink.com. The account is FREE.

Here is the press release for the launch:

Genealogy Collaboration Web Site Rapidly “Links” People at a Whole New Level
Geographic and language barriers minimized to improve genealogy research with launch of FamilyLink

Provo, UT, April 18, 2007– FamilyLink, the newest social genealogy networking Web site created to rapidly link people across the world launched today.

“The recent surge in social networking sites demonstrates the need for people to connect around diverse types of interests” said Michael Tanne, Founder and CEO of Wink, a People Search Engine. FamilyLink provides a perfect venue for families, genealogists and family historians to share their common interests and heritage as they connect with one another and upload their photos, family tree, and family history.”

FamilyLink has been created to facilitate genealogists in working together in ways that have never been attempted before in the genealogy world with a tool that is easy to use and understand.

“During the early years of Ancestry and MyFamily, I could hardly sleep. I was so excited about what we were building. I feel the same way about FamilyLink,” said Paul Allen, CEO, WorldVitalRecords.com.

Using FamilyLink, geographic and language barriers are minimized as individuals connect with their loved ones, research their family history, and preserve memories.

“For the first time ever, if I’m looking for an ancestor in a particular part of the world, I’ll be a click away from the expert researchers who live there, and from others who have done research there,” Allen said.

FamilyLink users can view the profiles of other individuals, communicate with individuals who have researched or are currently researching in their area of interest through the City Link feature, meet new individuals who also participate in the service, share photos, genealogical information, and post comments.

“One thing that is really interesting right now is that there really is nothing out there on the Web to help someone who lived in a certain city gather information from another city, unless they fly there. The need for this type of social networking definitely exists. FamilyLink allows people who are in different cities to connect with each other in an amazing way,” said Jason McGowan, Product Manager, FamilyLink.com.

Additional features include a news feed system, Ancestor Pages, announcements pages, email features, shared connections between WorldVitalRecords.com and FamilyLink.com, and will soon include a family tree.

“Putting FamilyLink.com and WorldVitalRecords.com together is a great way to preserve, share, and grow your family tree,” said Barbara Renick, professional genealogist, nationally known lecturer, and author.

In the past genealogists were able to make connections with other genealogists. However to do so required a lot of time, and effort, two scarce resources for genealogists. FamilyLink is a tool that connects people in such a way that it makes everyone and everything more efficient, and will become even better as people join the site.

“As with other social networks, the more people that use FamilyLink, the more useful it will become to everyone else. So we invite you to join and encourage others to join as well, so that we will soon have members in all of the cities of the world–all helping each other to find and preserve their heritage,” Allen said.

xxx

I was uplifted and motivated to action by Dave Whetten’s presentation earlier this week in my scholarly publication class. Dave Whetten is the Director of the Faculty Center at Brigham Young University.