Wisconsin Union Blend

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.

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.

Joanna Robinson from the Great Northern Way Campus talked about the challenges of teaching in and constructing a new, physical complex for instruction in digital media while simultaneously building a virtual space for it in Second Life.

She did an admirable job especially for someone who is only 26 (I wish I had her confidence when I was that young) but I also wish she would have talked more about the pedagogy behind the participatory culture. I think people see the SL avatars, the slick marketing videos, and hear the funny stories about the “crazy” things that happen in virtual worlds and lose sight of the pedagogical value of these spaces and how that same value applies to our physical spaces.

My takeaway quote from her session: Build around your learning objectives.

Wendy Woodward, Director of Technology Support Services at NU, talked about their decision to use Google for student email and other collaborative tools. The ballroom was crowded and lots of people had questions about security, privacy, backup and other issues surrounding this partnership. What I liked most about her presentation was her remark that by putting student email with Google (something 90% of NU students were already doing), they were able to focus more of the NU IT staff’s attention on faculty and staff needs.

In my world, the more time and attention you can give those folks, the better!

I thought the keynote from Doris Kearns Goodwin was really nice. She had some slightly awkward tie-ins to technology, but I appreciated the effort. I liked the fact that she referred to us as “characters.” She’s a great storyteller of history and that’s all this character needed.

I was hoping some of you could fill in the gaps to my listening. Here’s my list of I heard her say are the characteristics of good leaders:

• They have the capacity for listening to and accepting differing points of view.
• They learn from their mistakes.
• They share credit for successes.
• The bear the blame.
• They keep control of their emotions
• They have resolve to see things through particularly in the face of frustration.
• They make time to relax and replenish energies.
• The manage by “walking around.” That is they interact with subordinates to get the day-t0-day perspectives of those that they lead.

What did I miss? Anybody wanna fill in the gaps?

This is a test of PodcastingThis is a description

As I look at the many different features that one could include in his or her blog, I’m wondering what people’s thoughts are on what features are absolutely necessary to blogging.

There are some features which are a part of all blogs regardless of platform:

1. All blogs have an audience.
2. Posts are dated in reverse chronological order and can be linked to directly (permalink).
3. Posts are “labeled” or categorized with tags.
4. Posts are edited by none other than the author.
5. Posts are written in the first person, author chooses what to say.

Then there are many features of a blog which are debatable such as:

1. It has to have frequent updates.
2. It should have a feed.
3. The posts need to be brief.
4. It has to allow comments.
5. It has to incorporate external links.

I would argue that blogs should allow comments and incorporate external links because blogging, to me, means bringing in outside voices as a way of bouncing ideas off of people, getting feedback and rethinking your positions or making better arguments to support them. And one way of bringing in outside voices and supporting your positions is to link to other blogs or websites that do so.

Which features do you feel are necessary to blogs? Would you add others?

From Wired Magazine:

Wikipedia Scanner — the brainchild of Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith — offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.

It’s interesting to see where some of those edits originate, especially where major corporations are involved. There is already  a wall of shame where you can report what you feel are the most flagrant examples of corporate spin.

The Physics building here on campus has a room for the general public to peruse, do some experiments and learn a bit about the subject. There is an experiment that, to me, seems like how we learn about bloggers. It’s called ‘Particle Pinball.’ Here’s a photo of it.

There’s a three-sided, covered box at one end and a knob on top of the box that you turn. When you turn the knob, it changes the shape of the item inside of the box. You never see what the shape is.

At the other end of the experiment you have a rapid-fire, air gun that shoots small metal balls into the open side of box and you’re supposed to determine the shape of the item in the box by the way and angles that the metal balls bounce and ricochet back out of the box.

The same approach can be said for how we get to know people who blog.

Take the case of a law professor here on campus — Ann Althouse. Professor Althouse is a prominent blogger who has written and discussed blogging quite extensively on and off-campus. I didn’t know that or her at all when I began my search. I found her when I was researching blogs and saw her name in a Chronicle of Higher Education commentary that she had written on the perils of blogging in academia. So I thought, “Great, I’ll look at her blog and see what I can learn. Maybe I’ll go and talk with her.”

Fire one — I went to her blog — Althouse– and started looking at her posts. The first one read “Just got an iPhone, it seems pretty cool.” I thought, “So.” Then I saw that she had 32 comments on that post. That’s quite a few comments for a post that isn’t all that interesting. I mean, there’s no commentary on her part other than it seems cool. Then I started looking at her other posts and I saw that she was getting lots of comments on lots of other things she was blogging about. So I decided to check out her ranking through Technorati.

Fire two — Well, Prof. Althouse blogs quite a bit and about things that draw commentary. She writes about the law and politics — two subjects that are certain to get people talking. She had a very high ranking which means lots of people read her posts or link to her blog. But that didn’t interest me so much as the other information about her that I saw. I saw blogs that made references to her — some of them weren’t so nice. I also saw videos from YouTube that she was in. And I saw samples of her photography from her Flickr site.

Firing Away — In about an hour I had read many samples of her writing, read what others were writing about her, heard her voice, and learned that she likes to take pictures of flowers. Through her blog and its connectedness to other blogs via comments, links or trackbacks, I started to get a sense of not only her online presence, but also felt like I had developed an early opinion to the question of “Who is Ann Althouse?”

Prof. Althouse is a blogger who gets bombarded by her readers and their comments. She is bombarded by other bloggers who post about her or the things about which she writes. She’s bombarded by her willingness to put herself and her thoughts “out in the open.” And like the rapid-fire air gun game, all of this bombardment helped me to begin the process of defining the shape of Ann Althouse. You see which posts get the most attention and which comments ricochet off or bounce back to another blog. You get to hear her opinions and how other people interpret those opinions.

This dynamic is exciting and unnerving and it’s no wonder that Prof. Althouse says that she has learned to develop a thick skin. With all of this activity constantly swarming around her and testing her edges, she needs to have that resilience. Personally, it’s amazing to me that someone would choose to be so open about themselves with blogging. It seems to me that no matter how much we think we’re presenting ourselves in a reasonable or likable or innocent or totally obscure way, with all of the buzz in the blogosphere, who you are is always being scrutinized.