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!

Digital Research Tools (DiRT)

I saw a post on this in the Chronicle’s Wired Campus this morning and thought I would add a blurb on it to the WUB. Love the acronym! The wiki is at http://digitalresearchtools.pbwiki.com/. Here’s the description:

“This wiki collects information about tools and resources that can help scholars (particularly in the humanities and social sciences) conduct research more efficiently or creatively. Whether you need software to help you manage citations, author a multimedia work, or analyze texts, Digital Research Tools will help you find what you’re looking for. We provide a directory of tools organized by research activity, as well as reviews of select tools in which we not only describe the tool’s features, but also explore how it might be employed most effectively by researchers.”

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.

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!

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).

I attended a Delta roundtable dinner recently and heard Professor Sharon Dunwoody from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication give a talk on “Framing Science.” She describes a frame as a narrative scaffolding — a necessary interpretive framework for making sense of information. She referenced an article in The Scientist in which the authors, Matthew C. Nisbet & UW-Madison’s Dietram A. Scheufele, talked about using framing to engage the public on the subject of science:

“[S]cientists must learn to focus on presenting, or “framing,” their messages in ways that connect with diverse audiences. This means remaining true to the underlying science, but drawing on research to tailor messages in ways that make them personally relevant and meaningful to different publics. For example, when scientists are speaking to a group of people who think about the world primarily in economic terms, they should emphasize the economic relevance of science - such as, in the case of embryonic stem cell research, pointing out that expanded government funding would make the United States, or a particular state, more economically competitive.”

Dunwoody offered some good strategies for framing:

• Have a sensitivity to the audience - To whom are you delivering the message?
• Have a strong narrative - Storytelling is a powerful way to frame your message
• Vividness - Bring a sense of excitement and energy to your message.
• Brevity - We’ve all listened to people drone on and on about their work. Don’t do this.
• Have a sensitivity to the audience - Yes, it is so important that it needed to be said twice.

Doug and I have talked about podcasting as a way for faculty and other instructional staff to extend their classrooms and share their teaching, research and stories with the rest of Wisconsin. As part of workshops that we’ve given on podcasting, we’ve talked about the importance of the Wisconsin Idea. The challenge that we’ve posed to instructors is to ask themselves why a person who is not a student in their class should care about what they are talking about in their course. What would make the average person choose to listen to their lectures, their thoughts, and stories? Why would people in the general public want to subscribe to their podcast?

To say that such an external audience is not a priority is just wrong. We’ve got a 100 year-old tradition at this University that says otherwise. To say that our work speaks for itself is equally misguided. We need to use the kinds of strategies that Dunwoody lists to frame our work and make it easier for people to understand.

And framing is not specific to science. We all need to work on how we craft our stories so that we can make them lively and accessible. It’s not just a marketing tool. It’s a way of telling citizens, especially of our State, that a necessary part of our work is explaining why what we do has an impact on their lives.

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!

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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On his Learning and Innovation blog, Cole Camplese has put together a compelling picture of the growing campus Eco-System for Digital Expression at Penn State University. Camplese shows how academic blogging, podcasting, digital media creation, and other emerging communication and collaboration tools are made possible by a healthy mix of campus IT infrastructure, physical spaces on campus, support resources, and numerous opportunities for instructors, students, and support staff to get to together and talk about instructional technology.

Wikipedia is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation; the corpus grows not from harmonious thought but from constant scrutiny and emendation. (Many to Many)

As hinted in a previous post on differences between wikis and blogs, wikis aren’t always used for collaborative writing. And, as the quote above reminds us, “collaboration” might not be cooperative collaboration in every wiki project.

The various ways in which “collaboration” works (or doesn’t), in different wiki projects is possible because wikis are so inherently flexible, and so initially blank, that creative folks come up with an endless supply of new ideas on how to put them to use. Even with the wide range of potential applications, most academic wiki projects seem to fall somewhere on a spectrum between two approaches to wiki collaboration:

the compilation approach: multiple authors contribute their part to a growing collection of knowledge
the consensus approach: authors work together (or perhaps against each other) to write an evolving document that reflects the perspectives of multiple contributors

The compilation approach (aka the knowledge base)

The majority of academic wiki projects I’ve seen use wikis primarily as an efficient way for a group of people to pool knowledge. Each author adds their 2 cents to the wiki, and, as a reward, benefits from the contributions of the group as a whole. In these projects, the tendency is to not edit the work of others.

An interdisciplinary project at UW-Parkside, created by Wendy Leeds Hurwitz and Shi Hae Kim is a good example:

At UW-Parkside in fall 2006, COMM 310: Communication in Everyday Life linked with TEDU 210: Teaching, Learning and Development. We put the students into groups across courses, and gave them a wiki designed to permit easy sharing of information. The Education students observed K-12 classrooms and posted fieldnotes to the wiki. The Communication students made videotapes of interaction in the same classrooms, and posted the videos, as well as transcriptions, to the wiki. All students were asked to read 10 sources and post their notes to the wiki. We created FAQ, a glossary of specialized vocabulary, and a “water cooler” where anyone could ask a question and anyone else could answer. Each student and group had their own pages, linked to those of others. Then each drew on the information collected in the wiki to write an individual paper (which was not posted to the wiki). - adapted from WiscWiki’s list of UW wiki projects

In this project, the wiki acts as an efficient clearinghouse for the data students are collecting on their classroom visits, rather than as a collaborative writing platform. Students read and draw on each others contributions, and work together to keep the resource organized, but don’t actually edit each others work.

The consensus approach

Less common, in the academic wiki projects I’ve seen, is to use the wiki as a central point for collaboration, argumentation, and consensus building.

One example is the Choose your Own Adventure mystery novel project from an intermediate French class at UW-Madison.

For this project, students worked together in groups to write a “Choose Your Own Adventure” mystery novel in French. Each group collaborated on a chapter of the story and decided on the choices the main character would make at the end of the chapter. Other groups joined in and wrote chapters corresponding to each choice. All in all, each class wrote a story with eight possible endings. - adapted from Wiki Ideas Galore!

Like many wiki projects, this one involves both the compilation and consensus approaches. The story as a whole is a compilation of the chapters submitted by each group. Each chapter is a result of collaboration and consensus among group members. (It is interesting to note however that this project was structured such that much of the consensus building and decision making happened verbally in class rather than on the wiki.)

How does your wiki work?

When I first got started working with wikis, I expected to see many more projects focused on argumentation, debate, and consensus building. I’ve been happy to see the many compilation oriented projects succeed, and it has been fascinating to see how powerful wikis can be for efficient information sharing.

But, I’m beginning to wonder - How well do wikis work for consensus oriented collaborative writing projects in academia? Are there models out there to follow? What makes these wiki projects work? Do wikis need a richer set of collaboration oriented features?