First, my stance on openness. Generally, I am a huge fan. I strive to be quite open about my teaching and research practices and processes, and certainly open up my thinking to my students whenever possible. I also am a huge fan of many open source software tools / solutions (WordPress and related plugins are powering a dozen sites for me right now). The software that I developed as part of my dissertation is sitting on my website for anyone who wants to to use in their classrooms.

However, I also have a background as a professional software developer who, at times, struggled with all of the hidden costs that free and open source software introduced into the development environment. Finally, it may surprise people / my students to know that I am a relatively private person. I never update my status in Facebook. Not because I’m worried about who will see it (though that would occur to me) but simply because I feel no need to share unless I am actually having a conversation with someone. In my professional identity, though, I’ve worked hard to do the opposite. I set up two twitter accounts, even when I still thought the whole thing was somewhat silly, and experimented. Now I tweet semi-regularly about my work, teaching, etc. I find it interesting, and I’m pretty sure it is doing some interesting things for my professional relationships. So far, so good.

Shifting perspective

What I’d really like to see us do is shift the conversation away from whether openness is good or bad, or has hidden costs, and recognize the fact that in many cases an “open” approach fundamentally changes the game. Period. That means re-thinking the entire perspective. Thinking about Don Norman’s famous descriptions of the user v/ system perspective, this speaks to me of fundamentally changing the system. When I choose to make something open, it’s not just that more people can see it, it is often that we are now engaged in very different kinds of work.

Take the issue of open courseware as an example. In principal, this is a really great idea. Sure, the idea of having whatever I say off-the-cuff living on the internet forever frightens me a little. But more importantly is the simple fact that I just don’t lecture! The learning theories that I use and develop often suggest that lecture is the worst possible way to present information. Many of my students are actually quite shocked to see me talk for more than 10 minutes straight. Rather, I present a little, ask questions, organize students into groups, throw my opinion in the mix or ask an annoying question, let them run with it, etc. What would it mean to make that open? Let’s say all my students agree and we publish it and avoid the image that is coming to my mind of a very (fortunately) unsuccessful reality show. Does anyone watching it get the same out of it as the students living it? I doubt it. I’m about to transition one of my classes online. To do it “right”, I believe requires fundamentally re-thinking my approach, not just recording the lectures. So, all questions of cost and tenure aside, I think there are far bigger questions about how it changes the entire dynamic both in and out of the classroom.

Or, let’s look at the question of software ownership since I often find myself in the role of software designer. I’ve got some ideas that I think might make money. So I’ve considered what that would mean. Here’s the most important sticking point for me: if I am making a profit off of these ideas, I don’t think I can ethically continue to research them in the same way (or at all). Ouch. Big change there, and much bigger cost to me than the profit. Let’s be honest: if it was all about the $$, I’d still be a software engineer.

Or, let’s take an example that I think is particularly interesting. What about editing a public wiki such as wikipedia? Well, here’s the thing: once a class has edited it, it should become that much harder to re-edit it in a future year. Tweaking last year’s edits anew and trying to expand them may be an incredibly valuable exercise. But it is a very different exercise than writing a fresh new wiki post. Engaging really thoughtfully in how openness impacts one’s teaching, I think, necessitates exploring these implications. We have seen some really great examples of all the feedback that folks can get from the cloud. I agree. But that’s also a lot of information to filter, and some of it may be crap or spam or both. This doesn’t mean we should avoid asking the cloud, and I certainly do on occasion. But it’s not just a cost-benefit analysis. It is, I would argue, a shift in what the activity is. (Incidentally, I hope all of the students in my theorizing class are now nodding their heads at how these ideas link to our course concepts).

On that note

I feel like this is running long, and I want to save some of my ideas for responding to everyone else. But I want to make one last point. I am pre-tenure, and I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t often thinking about tenure. But here is the other bit: I love what I do. I enjoy teaching. I enjoy sharing my ideas. I want to empower teachers and other professionals to do new and exciting things. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here. Also, I think there are all sorts of indirect benefits just as there are indirect costs. For example, spending the time to share all of these ideas does take time away from other things I might do. However, it also helps me connect with more scholars, scholars who might take up my work or might influence my work. That has all sorts of benefits for me both professionally and personally. I guess the point being that I think there are some really important and fantastic other issues balancing the scales that I’d hate for us to lose sight of in a cost-benefit analysis.

Wait, what is an interactive whiteboard and why are you using one?

An interactive whiteboard is essentially a whiteboard that you can control as if it were a computer. Typically, you hook an interactive board up to a computer so that a) the computer screen is projected onto the whiteboard, and b) you can control the computer projection by interacting directly with the board. One of the major interactive whiteboard brands lets you use your finger (or any other object) to control the board, while another requires a special stylus that looks like an electronic whiteboard marker.

Figure 1: A student labeling BeeSign on an interactive whiteboard. Click to enlarge.

My criteria

The way I use the interactive whiteboard is a bit different from most teachers, who either use it as an easy way to present information from the front of the classroom or as a way to let students come up to the board and make changes. However, here are some of the issues I encountered and the resulting criteria for a whiteboard and software.

• The stylus limits access: When you have a room full of 6-year-olds scrambling to make adjustments to your whiteboard, sometimes it behooves you to have a way of limiting their access so that they can’t just run up and start poking around (think conch shell!). Other times, that might be exactly what you want.
• The finger is easier, but maybe too easy: It is, particularly for 7-year-olds, considerably easier to use your finger to control an interactive whiteboard than it is to use a bulky stylus. The unfortunate corollary to this, though, is that anytime you touch some interactive whiteboards, things will start moving around. It is incredibly difficult to annotate a simulation if moving your marker across the board moves an object instead of labeling the object.
• Annotations are tricky: The interactive whiteboards I have seen ship with tools to let you label whatever screen is displayed. I’ve seen some teachers use this incredibly effectively to label different parts of a math problem while working through the solution. The problem with this, though, is that you have to “freeze” the screen to label it, which is not terribly useful if you want to see how your labeled prediction matches up to a simulation that is running. One solution is to build the annotation tool into your simulation. Another is to make sure you can still use normal whiteboard markers.
• Is the whiteboard fragile? One of the trade-offs that comes in having a whiteboard that is designed to be an interactive whiteboard vs. a normal whiteboard that is converted is how casually you can treat the whiteboard. In a recent study, for example, we were afraid to use normal whiteboard markers on our interactive whiteboard because they aren’t 100% removable and the teacher we were working with was afraid they would stain the board. On the other hand, cheaper boards that no one minds staining aren’t always as easy to control.
• Portability: Simply put, some interactive whiteboards are easier to move around the classroom or to a different classroom than others. The tradeoff is often that less-portable whiteboards are more stable and require fewer recalibrations, etc.
• Height: You may or may not have a lot of flexibility with how high some whiteboards stand. Working with kindergartners who can barely reach 1/2 way up a board, though, has made me very aware of how easily a whiteboard can be lowered and whether the software can be controlled on the bottom half of the screen. That’s why a number of key BeeSign elements are on the bottom.
• Control of your software: Interactive whiteboards tend to have ways of letting you use the right button on your mouse, or trigger the equivalent of a mouse rollover event. Similarly, they also have built-in virtual keyboards. However, these are a real hassle to use and are best avoided. Some software relies heavily on these, and other software does not. I also discovered that when developing in Flash (the tool I used to develop BeeSign, and the tool that was used to develop the SPASES client) a double-click does not work as well on an interactive whiteboard. You can’t always design your own software, but you can definitely test-run the main software you will use on an interactive whiteboard to confirm that it works properly. Some boards are better than others, and your needs will dictate the kind of control you need in your whiteboard.
• Shadows: Unless you are using a rear-projection interactive whiteboard (read: the most expensive ones) you will have some shadows on the screen from people standing between the projector and the whiteboard. While these shadows can be minimized by mounting the projector on the ceiling or buying an interactive whiteboard with a built-in projector arm, both alternatives are somewhat more expensive. My partial solution in designing my own software is to try and put as much functionality as possible on the sides of the screen, or on the bottom. This keeps people from having to stand directly in front of the projector. Again, though, we can’t always design our own software, so this, too, is something to keep in mind.

That’s it for now. If you have other suggestions, please let me know! Otherwise, as I run into opportunities or problems I’ll be sure to update this list.

Examples

To see which projects and publications involved interactive whiteboards, click on the the Interactive Whiteboard tag to the right.