Wisconsin Union Blend

I’ve been watching the Wordle clouds floating their way through the blogosphere for a few days now, and I’ve been curious to see how Wordle, paired up with del.icio.us tags, a blog, or any other big collection of words, gives people a chance to see what they’ve been writing and thinking about in (potentially) new ways. (Wordle, if you haven’t seen it, takes any collection of words, or your del.icio.us links, and produces a tag cloud, with the words used most often appearing in the largest text.)

So, on a whim, I popped in the text for all of our posts here on WUB:

No surprise that wikis, blogging, and podcasting came up big. I was quite happily surprised, however, to see the word “students” right there, front and center, as the largest word in the cloud. We like to think that we’re putting students first in our ruminations here, but I think only through Wordle would I have realized that, so far at least, we have been!

Next up, my del.icio.us links:

Wow. Looks like I’m a bit behind on my “readthis” reading list. Clearly I’m using del.icio.us as a place to store all the things I wish I had time to read, try, and write about. It is also interesting to see that here, Drupal has eclipsed blogs, wikis, and podcasting. Del.icio.us seems to provide a somewhat more technical “behind the scenes” view.

And then, out of curiosity , my CV:

Oh good, “learning” “teaching” and “technology” are all quite prominent. But interestingly, “Spring” appears much larger than “Fall” - am I more productive in the Spring? And too bad it split up “San” and “Francisco.” So too for “Long” and “Beach.”

What do you think, could a wordle make a good resume? Could these three images - of my collaboratively authored blog, my del.icio.us links, and my CV - provide a short-cut, of sorts, to seeing the things I’ve been doing and thinking about? What else might I include? Should I have mashed them all together into one mega-Wordle?

Seen any other interesting wordles out there?

Let WUB know in the comments!

There’s lots of fun still to be had with the EduPunk meme that has been rocking the Edu-Blogosphere recently.

Myself, I’m looking forward to the development of EduPunk subgenres. As educators, should we head more in the NewWave.Edu direction? or get really experimental with Post-Edu Art-Punk?

I think my favorite EduPunk sub-genre will be PopPunkEdu. Perhaps that’s because, in many ways, EduPunk is already old-school. Where the excitement is, for me at least, is taking the “scrappy, DIY spirit” of EduPunk (as described by Leslie Brooks and Stephen Downes) and then scaling it up.

Just as pop punkers created albums that were “a cross between Abba and the Sex Pistols” (Wikipedia), EduPunkers (whether they identify as such or not) are taking their creative energy, their focus on effective pedagogy, and their insistence on authentic learning, and blending it all together to crank out some amazing work that is both DIY and, well, quite listenable.

Lafayette College’s SoapBox is totally Ramones. If that’s the case, Blogs at PSU must be pretty much Green Day. And I have to hope that the Collaborative Sites Platform will one day be at least somewhat Sublime.

It would be a shame if the larger discussion about EduPunk gets caught up in an EduPunk vs. Blackboard rant, or if the EduPunk philosophy gets characterized as something only accessible to first wave faculty.

Is that selling out? Maybe. But if the result is that we can help more instructors enthusiastically dive in and and create “hands-on learning that starts with the learner’s interests” (Leslie Brooks), then I’m all for it.

For more on EduPunk, see EduPunk on del.icio.us.

T&LS on Union Blend - Notes from the 2008 Teaching and Learning Symposium

Today’s panel session on Facilitating Collaborative and Group Projects wrapped up with a series of quick, two sentence tips from each of the panelists on facilitating collaborative work. Here are my notes on their rapidly delivered good advice:

• be explicit about the role of collaboration in your course
• be ready for your students to be even more diverse than you might think them to be at first
• find creative strategies to maintain independent accountability
• create collaborative exercises that are authentic to the discipline
• collaborative tasks must be challening enough to merit a collaborative effort (in other words, there needs to be a real reason for students to collaborate
• involve students in the development of the strategies, guidelines, and expectations around group work
• collect data from your students on what’s working and what’s not working
• make collaboration a primary and explicit goal of the course
• create the spaces for collaboration to happen - both the tools and the physical space
• assess students, through peer and self evaluation, on their collaborative process
• in addition to teaching students the discipline, train them on collaboration

Being open and direct with students about the goals of group collaboration was an important thread throughout the session. The panelists also stressed the importance of making self and peer assessments of the collaborative process itself an integral part of the project design.

Here are a few other key points from the session that stood out for me:

John Wright, Department of Chemistry, stressed the role student collaboration plays in helping students build the confidence they need to think about problems on their own. Wright explained that when students work collaboratively, their language around problem solving changes, and their confidence improves.

Rania Huntington, visiting Professor in East Asian Languages and Literature, and Sara Miller, from CALS, both emphasized how collaborative work can help put students in charge of their own learning. Huntington said that for her Garden of Searching for Dreams project, students “were the ones asking and answering questions.” Following on the thread, Miller explained that in her projects, students “are designing the day’s learning” and in doing so “they really test their own understanding.”

Constance Steinkuehler from the Department of Education spoke about how collaborative and collective learning happens in early education, and then again in graduate school, but often not enough in between. Steinkuehler pointed out that this gap is particularly problematic, given that “collaborative and collective work is such a big part of what we do in society.”

Steinkuehler went on to talk about how in online gaming environments, or “playspace’s” it is “prestigious to contribute to the collective intelligence.” So, too when tackling collaborative tasks. I like the idea of thinking about collaborative learning environments, like our Collaborative Sites, as intellectual “playspaces.”

If you attended the session - what were your take-aways? If not, what are your tips for effective design of collaborative learning tasks? Let us know in the comments!

I do a lot of dishes. And for whatever reason, I’m always looking for something to do while I’m doing dishes.

My latest strategy for bringing together soap suds and self-improvement is watching the stellar series of TED videos. TED, or Technology, Entertainment, and Design, is annual conference where leaders and thinkers share their innovative ideas in short, 18 minute talks.

I’ve been happy to find that many of these talks are about education, new approaches to presenting and communicating complex information, or about emerging technologies of interest to educators and instructional technologists.

I’m just getting started on the TED talks (there are currently over 200 talks on the site and available through iTunes), but I thought I’d share a few of the talks I found most relevant to my work as an instructional technologist:

• Johnny Lee shows us a smart board, and a couple other neat things, that he built from a $40 Wii Remote. That’s cool as it is, but what I found most impressive about his talk was his enthusiastic approach to sharing his research. He says, “To me what is most interesting about either of these two projects is how people found out about them … I’m just a researcher in my lab with a video camera, and within the first week a million people had seen this work … literally within days engineers, teachers, and students from around the world were already posting their own YouTube videos of them using this system or derivatives of this work.” Now that’s the Wisconsin Idea!
• Sir Ken Robins argues, convincingly, that common approaches to early education stifle creativity
• Amy Smith talks about several “basic tools with world-changing results“
• Hans Rosling shares an impressive approach to presenting statistics, and calls for making statistical data more readily available to the public.

Now if I could only finish the dishes in a single 18 minute talk!

Got a favorite TED talk? Or better yet, a favorite way to keep your mind busy while doing the dishes? Let us know in the comments!

Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video is a new report by The Center for Social Media making the case for fair use consideration for mashups that make use of copyrighted materials.

Also of interest, the “Researcher’s Top Five Videos in Each Category” which you’ll find down near the bottom of the page, near their link to an “extensive database of videos” used by the researchers (in excel).

I’ll be presenting today as a part of the Community of Educational Technology Support (ComETS) event -Emerging Trends and Cool Class Cases.

I’ll give a quick overview of how we’re using the open source content management system Drupal for a variety of teaching and learning solutions, from media rich collaborative environments, to course portfolios, easy to update department web sites, and, of course, LessonShare, our social repository for lesson plans and teaching materials.

If you attended the presentation, please let me know what you think in the comments!

Here are the slides (pdf).

If you’ve been bit by the blog-reading bug, you know that you can very quickly fill up your RSS reader with way too many subscriptions. Fortunately, most of the time, you don’t have to read and respond to each and every post. It is easy enough to skim through collections of posts, looking for those that are most relevant. And of course, there is the wonderful “Mark all as Read” button, a feature in most RSS readers, which instantly relieves the guilt of falling 3 or 30 or 300 posts behind on your reading.

But what happens when blogging and commenting on other students blog posts, becomes a central part of a course? With 20 or more students each writing one or more posts a week, just keeping up with the blog can quickly become a significant part of the weekly workload - for both the students and the instructor. Can students and teachers get away with hitting the “Mark all as read” button?

This is one of the challenges that has come up in a class I’m helping out with this semester that has turned a long-standing paper portfolio project into an online portfolio incorporating both blog-like and wiki-like interaction. When asked to give feedback on the project, nearly all of the students wrote that they like how the online portfolio gives them the opportunity to post their ideas, reflect on their readings, and continue class discussions outside of class. There was wide-spread agreement that the portfolio was an integral and useful part of the class. But when asked what could be improved, several of the students mentioned having difficulty keeping up on what their peers are writing. A few said that it was hard to sift through the many posts to find those that are most relevant each week.

We initially thought that “tagging” would be a solution to the latter problem, but so far it seems that the students don’t really use the tags to navigate the site. We added a “Top Tags this Week” block to the main page, to help students keep track of the topics that are receiving the most attention in class. We also switched over to a short abstract for each post on the front page, so that students didn’t feel as if they have to read every word of every post. This helped a bit, but students still noted that they were sometimes overwhelmed by all of the posts. And so, we’ve come up with a dashboard view, that allows students to quickly choose what they want to read based on the authors and titles of each post.

In addition to improving the layout and design of the site, we’re also thinking about how to frame student expectations. One initial hope for this project was that it would take the individual and potentially lonely act of producing a portfolio and make it social and interactive. Students can click on the “My Contributions” page to see their own evolving portfolio, or they can dive into the river of news, or the tags, to explore the work of their peers. Unlike the paper-based portfolio project, we wanted students be able to benefit from and build upon the work of their peers. This is certainly happening - students are starting to reference each others posts, and are occasionally extending upon their peers’ post ideas and formats. But the process of selecting, reading, and reacting to the work of their peers remains challenging.

And so, I’m asking for your help. If you were tasked to create an introductory guide to course blogging, what advice would you give to help frame students expectations? How would you help them deal with the inevitably overwhelming flood of information? What other advice would you give to make sure students time and energy was put to best use in these environments?

I’ll put a few of my initial ideas into the comments, but I’m most looking forward to seeing what you have to say!

The Chronicle of Higher Education Wired Campus blog has an excellent summary of the Educause 2007 panel discussion on the Spellings Commission report and “The Role of Information Technology in an Age of Access, Affordability, and Accountability.” I only have a couple of small notes to add:

• The need to incorporate more accountability into our daily practice was the most tangible recommendation of the panelists in this session. All three panelists discussed the need for increased transparency and accountability in higher education. Charlene Nunley, President Emerita, Montgomery College said it best: “It is ok to try something and fail - but it is not ok to not know whether something has succeeded and failed.” I’d add that we also need to know why things succeed or fail, and to make our process transparent enough that both our successes and our failures become useful lessons for the IT community.
• Another key theme, though a somewhat less tangible one, was broad and deep change in higher education practice. Nunley said that “vast cultural changes need to be brought about in our institutions” and then she drew some applause and laughter when she cautiously offered that many faculty are very intent on doing things the way they have always been done. This played well with the Educause audience, but I can’t help but think that it is not only the faculty that fall into the trap of momentum.
• David Ward, our chancellor emeritus, and current president of the American Council on Education, said that in order to make these sweeping changes happen, we need to focus on the successful pilots in progress that are happening already on a small scale. “Some of the best breakthroughs are on a disciplinary basis,” he noted, later adding that “the reformers out there don’t feel appropriately recognized. We need to figure out how to scale up some of the experiments that are going on. Scaling up of good practices is where change can happen.”

All in all, a very good session.

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Tucked away in the corner of a Thursday evening poster session was my pick for Educause 2007’s coolest session of the week, Lafayette College’s use of the content management system Drupal for:

two highly flexible and distinctly different online spaces: a departmental Web site full of easily edited and highly searchable documentation, current news, and dynamic RSS feeds, and a campus-wide community space where blogging, photo sharing, podcasting, and class discussions coexist.

Very cool! The poster, From Blogs to Brawn: Deploying Flexible Web Applications, was presented by Courtney Bentley, Instructional Technology Program Coordinator at Lafayette College.

The community space side of the equation, which Lafayette calls Soapbox 2.0, puts Drupal’s blogging, polling, and photosharing modules to work for students, faculty, and staff. Their use of the Organic Groups module makes it easy for any registered user to create a group, whether it be for a student initiated class study group, an instructor led class blog, a student sporting group, or an administrative unit looking for collaborative project space.

This flexible, user driven collaborative space is a great model to follow as we look to building our own collaborative spaces.

To get a sense of how it is working at Lafayette, be sure to check out their Hall of Fame page with stats on the Soapbox’s first year: http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~soapbox/hof/

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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.