Wisconsin Union Blend

And now you can.

I didn’t get many takers on the suggestion of a road trip, but Susan Gibbons has given me permission to share the photos she took of the new Gleason Library on the University of Rochester campus. Anybody interested in new learning spaces and how students can play a vital role in shaping these spaces should check this out. In some of the photos you’ll see the student drawings/conceptualizations (on stands) that informed the design of the space.

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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Susan Gibbons from the University of Rochester challenges us to get to know our NetGen students. At Rochester, the libraries hired an anthropologist (Nancy Foster) to do ethnographic research to help guide decisions about how to improve its institutional repository. Foster stayed busy by doing similar work with the many different “tribes” (Gibbons’ word) of the campus — faculty, graduate students and, most notably, undergrads.

Through various methodolgies including photo elicitation exercises, mapping diaries, and design workshops, Gibbons and Foster gathered a ton of student input for the development of an ideal learning space.

They outline their work in creating a student-centered academic library on the campus. The report can be found at http://www.tiny.cc/GzthX. (Note: I LOVE a good tiny url!)

It was a really inspiring presentation and I hope I get a chance to see this space. Anybody want to take a ride to Rochester?

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.

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.

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.