Richard Devon delivers courses via Google Apps for productivity, convenience

Richard Devon, professor of engineering design and science, technology, and society, uses Google Apps to deliver course content and facilitate student teamwork—all part of what he calls the "pedagogy of convenience." As a 2010 Teaching and Learning with Technology (TLT) Faculty Fellow, Devon is working to make even more use of the suite of Web-based productivity tools to enhance the projects he assigns his engineering design students.

Explaining what he means by the pedagogy of convenience, Devon said, "I want to lose sight of the infrastructure of pedagogy and just deal with the content. For students and faculty alike, we need to minimize the burden of work that is created by the medium rather than the message."

"In engineering," Devon said, "productivity is critical and that applies to what we do with information technology also. Since I teach design, user-centered design is very important." In the case of his courses, he said, the users include the students. "The right way to design is to get your users involved in the design process," he explained, and said that two years ago, two students approached him, asking why he didn’t use Google Apps in his courses.

Google Apps includes tools for communication such as e-mail, calendars, and messaging, tools for collaboration including shared documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, tools to build Web sites, and more, all stored on the Web—what some term "in the cloud"—rather than on users' local computers. Users can easily control sharing simply by pasting in e-mail addresses, or can make content public.

In response to his students' suggestion, Devon agreed to give it a try. He moved all his course content for EDSGN 100 Introduction to Design to a Google site. His students use Google Apps as well to complete course work.

Student teams use Google documents to collaborate on design projects. The application allows anyone who has been invited to share a document to edit it, either synchronously or asynchronously. Devon said, "Design is all about collaboration. You're always working with users, with your team members, and with clients. I do global design and I very often have foreign students. All I need for a foreign student to be added to a Google doc is their e-mail address."

He noted that Google Docs may not be as powerful for aspects like formatting as Microsoft Office. However, said Devon, "The way the final document looks is not what we're working on most of the time. We’re working at developing our ideas. That's where all the important stuff happens."

Within Google Apps, students can also store and share files created in more specialized applications, for example, CAD drawings created in SolidWorks.

Since working with his TLT Faculty Fellow team, composed of Brad Kozlek, Matt Meyer, Audrey Romano, and Jeff Swain, Devon has become familiarized with additional capabilities of Google Apps, which he has begun incorporating into course assignments.

One of those is the ability to create forms in Google Docs that can be used to collect information. Devon now asks his students to create forms to use as surveys about product design. He said, "They can contact friends as users and say, 'OK, you use a camera or a cell phone. What do you want from it as a user?' The data are automatically compiled into a spreadsheet. We can have first-year students creating quite large data sets on user needs."

An assignment that has evolved with Devon's adoption of Google Apps is that of having each student create a portfolio. He used to ask students to create an online resume using an HTML editor. "More recently," said Devon, "I've had them create a portfolio on Google Sites. However, the portfolio did not have a blog." He said that Faculty Fellow team leader Kozlek encouraged him to ask students to blog. Devon said, "At first, I was resistant to that."

However, Devon began to see the benefits and now his students' e-portfolios each include a blog. He said, "The blog allows the students to capture areas of design which particularly interest them and write about it. So a potential employer or team member can come to their portfolio and see who they are—all the usual professional identifications—but then they can also say, 'Wow, I feel like I know this person.'"

Another Google tool Devon began using after learning more about it from his team is Google Reader. He now has his students use it as well. As background, he explained, "There's more knowledge available now on the Web, for more people, than ever before in history. Most of us are using it almost exclusively for learning about stuff."

"We have faculty meetings and the faculty get all bent out of shape, saying students are just cutting and pasting off the Web," said Devon. "I'm not sure that's the right attitude. In my view, their work is getting better, because they’re finding really good stuff on the Web."

He said that being able to find information, making good choices about which information to use, creating a good synthesis, and referencing the source of the information are what is important, and that's essentially what his colleagues have to be concerned about. Devon said, "Plagiarism is a small part of that. The culture of writing and knowledge has changed radically and through the TLT Fellowship I am able to learn a lot about it." He added, "I'm also interested in how well students can contribute to the Web," saying that was one purpose for having students write blogs.

Devon's students are now asked to use Google Reader as a tool for finding and organizing feeds of the best quality sources of information on the Web. He said, "They have an assignment to create a reader and organize it in folders on different topics. When they do a design project, they have to sort the RSS feeds that support that project. That means they will do something you have to do in design, and that is benchmark continuously. You have to find out what's happening in the world, find out if there's a new breakthrough in technology that you didn't know about. Reader and organizing RSS feeds is a good way for doing that."

Devon noted that using an RSS feed reader may sound basic, but previously, even though he felt overloaded with information, he was reluctant to use a reader. Now, he said, he sees how organizing RSS feeds can help the design process and reduce the feeling of being overwhelmed by information.

Devon backed his decision to deliver his courses via Google Apps by saying, "Most experts think that cloud computing is only going to get bigger. If you’re preparing students for future careers, it's something we have to take very seriously, by exposing them to it. And it's not like it's a burden; it's helping them already."

Over the course of summer 2010, members of Devon's Faculty Fellow team are posting updates and reflections about the project at the TLT Faculty Fellows blog site at http://blogs.tlt.psu.edu/fellows/