Wisconsin Union Blend

Drawing on Technology: A Blueprint for Adopting E-Portfolios got me thinking about an alternative blueprint for LessonShare. Some of the early feedback from TAs on LessonShare has focused on “credit.” Will I get credit for my work? Will my course coordinator be able to see my contributions? If I update a lesson, how will I get credit for my updates?

In approaching LessonShare, we had rather idealistically assumed that TAs would find intrinsic value in sharing their teaching materials with colleagues, and were surprised to find that for many, the main interest lied in amassing a personal tally of their contributions to the department - in a sense - a portfolio.

As I took a look at the portfolio projects in this session, and saw how each teacher’s contributions were beneficial for the cohort of teachers in training, I began to wonder if our central focus with LessonShare (sharing), might need a bit of a remix.

The initial step in this direction should be fairly straight-forward. The “My Contributions” view that we developed for our Mexican Migration Portfolio should provide a nice foundation for something similar in LessonShare. Some of the next potential steps, however, might prove more challenging.

A collection of every lesson you’ve ever created or modified is far from a portfolio. To illustrate this one of the presenters made the distinction between the working portfolio, containing each and every contribution, and the “get a job portfolio” which is the result of sifting and winnowing. While I can imagine a couple of ways to approach the challenge of helping a user find and collect their best work, I don’t think we have a model in place for this. We also don’t have a bridge from LessonShare to a more public facing version of the “get a job” portfolio, something that would, I think, prove to be highly motivating for TAs.

Michael Reese & Richard Shingles‘ presentation - Digital Field Assignments: Course Projects for the Net Generation - provided several excellent examples of instructors integrating research and instruction. Many of the projects also had a clear “service” element involved, though the courses did not seem to be connected to any official university service learning initiative. For me, this was a welcome reminder that service learning need not be its own distinct, separate area of coursework, but can be (should be, I think) an integrated expectation across the curriculum.

Anybody use Pipes? Think about aggregating three or four RSS feeds into a single super feed.

Michael Reese and Richard Shingles from the Johns Hopkins University presented on digital field assignments. Digital field assignments are course activities in which students collect and analyze data from the field using digital technologies. Students use digital resources to research issues, topics and interests on campus and in the local community. They enter their data and see it visualized using an Interactive Tool. It’s really interesting to see how these projects get students involved with using their technology skills to research subjects in and outside of their classes.

Both Doug Worsham and I attended this session and we both thought it would be a natural extension to see these digital field assignments evolve into some kind of service learning opportunities.

I also thought it was interesting to hear Michael Reese talk about the need to get students outside with technology instead of sitting in computer labs or at their desks with it. It’s a healthy perspective to balance with the attention that is given to work in virtual worlds.

One of the early challenges of the project we now call LessonShare was finding a name. Among the most prevalent of the working names we used in the early stages of development was the “lesson plan repository.” We weren’t really fond of calling it a repository, but we were having trouble coming up with anything better.

I was reminded of this search for a name, and the vague discomfort I had about the word “repository” in the “Hot Topics Discussion” Institutional Repositories. Much of the debate in this session was around the tension between our emerging ideas of collaborative, social space and the need for persistent and organized document preservation and archiving. Everyone, it seemed, agreed that both these areas were essential, and that clear paths must be made for content creators to move their work from collaborative areas to areas for storage, preservation, and distribution. The disagreement came, however, as to how connected or integrated these spaces should be. More than a few attendees made the case for a dynamic repository - an area for collaboration, improvement, and discussion as well as preservation - that sounded similar to our efforts with LessonShare.

A couple of the participants in the discussion brought up the question - is there really such a thing as a finished product? Since many documents evolve over time, should we dismiss the idea of a repository as a storage mechanism for “finished documents frozen forever in their final state.” Another participant conceded that there are certainly things that do reach a “finished state” (an image of a Matisse painting, for example, would need to be preserved without modification) but that “a finished project doesn’t mean that the conversation is finished” (the archival Matisse image could be connected to remixes, responses, and reinterpretations).

While LessonShare does perform some of the functions of a repository, the very nature of teaching and learning objects is that they will change and evolve over time. I’ve always hoped that LessonShare would encourage creativity and innovation, rather than facilitate the recycling of the same materials and approaches year after year. In that respect, the hope is that LessonShare is more about collaboration than storage. And in that sense it is both a database and a social space.

Josh Baron at Marist College talked about how they manage the onslaught that is Web 2.0 technology. Through a programmatic approach Marist is putting pedagogy and faculty innovation right out front with these technologies. They manage a grant program wherein faculty come to Josh’s group with a technology and/or idea in mind. Through a consultation process, assistance with proposal development, and (as Josh put it) a bunch of us “freaks” sitting around a table and talking about it, the technology gets piloted for a semester.

The pilot/experimental nature of the program means that promises are not made to the faculty about the commitment to supporting the technology beyond the life of the pilot. If that technology is successful in meeting the goals of the instructor, and if excitement builds, then the technology might get folded into something more permanent or longer lasting.

Just in case you are wondering, Josh’s group does take all the security, FERPA and other support issues very seriously. They don’t accept technologies that don’t fit the mold of what they are trying to accomplish with the grant program. I have Josh’s card and some handouts from the session if anyone on the Madison campus is interested.

This is an excerpt from an interview I did with a teaching assistant on our campus. Rick Hunter is in the Dept. of English and he teaches a writing intensive course on technology. In it, he uses blogs as a way to not only give students exposure to the technology, but also as a way to give them more time for writing. In this bit, Rick talks about a creative way in which one of his students, a veteran of the war in Iraq, used the blog technology to write a research paper.

A Soldier’s Use of Blogs

With apologies to Letterman…

Top 10 Challenges of the Academic Community as identified by Veronica Diaz, John Campbell, and Dennis Trinkle. John and company wrote an article for the Educause Quarterly in which they provide more detail on these challenges.

The session was a packed house. Standing room only. Glenda Morgan from George Mason University introduces.

By the way, Glenda has the type of personality that can steal the show. Bright. Funny. She smiles, you smile.

Anyway, here’s the list:

1. Establishing and supporting a culture of evidence
2. Demonstrating improvement of learning
3. Translating learning research into practice
4. Selecting appropriate models and strategies for e-learning
5. Providing tools to meet growing student expectations
6. Providing professional development and support to new audiences
7. Sharing content, applications, and application development
8. Protecting institutional data
9. Addressing emerging ethical challenges
10. Understanding the evolving role of academic technologists

There were lots of good comments from the audience especially over concerns about accountability. I thought that the last point on understanding the role of academic technologists was most poignant. I can’t believe how much our group and other instructional technologists are woven into the day-t0-day practices and institutional missions of our campus. We’re constantly having conversations with people in the libraries, facilities, and administration about the role of technology on campus. One thing is for sure…we’re not bored.

The Horizon Report “charts the landscape of emerging technologies for teaching, learning and creative expression and produces the NMC’s annual Horizon Report.” If you’d like to get involved in the process, add your exciting new instructional technology links to your del.icio.us account with the tag hz08.

Want to see what the Horizon Report community has been bookmarking lately? Just visit - http://del.icio.us/tag/hz08

Thanks to Cyprien P. Lomas for sharing this tag in the Social Software in Higher Education session.

Every session I’ve attended today has included the clicks, bings, boings, and ringtones of our mobile technology. We’re gonna be identifying devices in the same manner we identify birds from their calls.

Ahh…I believe I hear the melodious tones of a Samsung SGH-X497 now.

Oh wait. That’s me.