Mo Pelzel

Got Blog? Getting Started with WordPress

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wp1This week’s Digital Pedagogy workshop, “Got Blog? Getting Started with WordPress,” will occur Tuesday, September 22, from 4:30–5:30 pm, with a repeat on Wednesday, September 23 from 11:00 am–noon. The location is the library computer lab (Abell 208).

We all know what a blog is, right? You’re reading one now. Have you thought about starting a blog of your own, but aren’t quite sure where to begin? Come join us for some conversation and demonstration this week about academic blogging and the WordPress platform.

We’ll talk about the nuts and bolts of getting up and running on WordPress, but that’s the easy part of the equation. What requires more thought and consideration is answering the questions, “Why blog?” “What is my purpose?” What are my objectives?” “Who is the audience?” “Do I have something to say?” There are at least a dozen or so colleagues here at Austin College who blog or have blogged with some degree of frequency. And no doubt you read blogs from people in your field and beyond. So one learns by observing that blogging can take many forms and serve diverse purposes. Still, only you can determine whether and how blogging and other forms of online digital academic activity will fit into your larger set of practices for research, teaching, and learning.

I do think that establishing a significant scholarly presence on the open web can be a game-changer for an academic. Traditionally, scholarly work only became public through, well, “publication,” that is, the dissemination of the finished product of a process of investigation, research, and reflection. But now that the process of knowledge production can take place in an open and connected environment, we are more and more discovering the benefits of thinking and writing “out loud” and of “open peer review.” Blogging can be one vehicle by which we make our thinking visible to ourselves and others, not as a finished product, but as something that is still and always probing and provisional, searching and reaching toward greater clarity, insight, and comprehension. By opening our thought to public dialogue and conversation, we create the very conditions by which our ideas can be refined, our understanding deepened, and our expression made more eloquent.

In his post “Who is this for?,” Gardner Campbell (@GardnerCampbell), professor of English and vice provost for learning innovation at Virginia Commonwealth University, reflects on blogging as part of the practice of “observable work“:

I began blogging by understanding that this was my blog, so it was for me, but the work I do for me has the potential to be of interest to others as well. I knew that without being able to explain it, largely because my experience of reading other bloggers had made that impression on me. This is his blog, or her blog, and they write out of their own experience, narrating their work, wondering aloud, bringing things to light the way a good late-night conversation will….

[F]or a scholar to commit to trying to work things out for himself or herself in public in this way can be very daunting. My longing for connection finally overcame my fear of humiliation, though that’s a constant struggle. More to the point, I discovered very quickly that working things out for myself in this way, with the fresh provisionality of the thinking still clinging to the thoughts, had the magical property of bringing other people who were doing the same thing into a distributed conversation that took on a life of its own far beyond anything I could have imagined.

I don’t try to work everything out here. I recognize the difference between personal and private, and I need that difference to exist. But to a greater extent than I had ever dreamed, working things out for myself with a questing, probing, sometimes halting voice brought me to a community where collegial inquiry and most of all connected learning became the norm, not the exception. Something like what I’d always thought a university could be.

Blogging can be part of a broader approach to academic work known as “open notebook scholarship.” Historian Caleb McDaniel (@wcaleb) asks, “What would happen if scholars worked to make every part of their research process more public, not only at the point of final publication, but at every point along the way?” In his blog post, “Open Notebook History,” McDaniel explains his rationale for conducting research on open platforms:

Open-source blogging platforms, curation tools, bibliographic software, and micro-blogging platforms enable historians to easily share information about our research as it happens. As Chad Black noted a few years ago, “we now have the possibility to construct and curate our research materials and process archives, what I call … the ‘Papers of You,’ in real time, and make it immediately available to those without the resources to gain access to our eclectic collections.”

The advantages of such a practice have already been well-articulated by the proponents of something called Open Notebook Science, a movement that recently received positive attention in the prominent journal Nature. Open Notebook Science (ONS) is the practice of putting one’s entire lab notebook online, so that other researchers have access not just to a scientist’s publications, but to the underlying data, methods, and experimental results that drive research projects forward.

These are just a few ideas to get you thinking about how blogging might fit into your professional practice. Join us this week to follow up and learn more.

Curated resources:

Using Social Media in Teaching and Learning

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journal.pcbi.1003789.g001This week’s Digital Pedagogy workshop, “Using Social Media in Teaching and Learning,” will occur Tuesday, September 15, from 4:30–5:30 pm, with a repeat on Wednesday, September 16 from 11:00 am–noon. The location is the library computer lab (Abell 208).

Following up on last week’s introduction to Twitter for academics, this week we’ll explore how to use Twitter and other social media with students. Over the last several years, instructors have been very inventive in experimenting with Twitter to enhance pedagogy. Here are several possible use cases:

Create a “backchannel” for the class. This gives students and you another avenue of communication that can be much more dynamic and rich than, say, a Moodle discussion forum or an email distribution list. A backchannel can function both during class meetings and, especially, outside of class time. Give your course a unique hashtag and ask students to include that hashtag in every course-related post or tweet. Students then have a convenient channel to take notes, make comments, ask questions, share resource links and suggestions, and respond to one another with help. Collaborations could be established with other sections of the course, with other courses on campus, and beyond the college. You could connect the course to outside experts and other persons beyond the class who could enrich student learning.

If you are particularly bold, you could even have this activity taking place during class, letting students “live-tweet” class lectures and presentations, just as commonly occurs at academic conferences. While you might think this would be distracting, it could also be an interesting form of public note-taking and active listening, not all that different from taking notes with pen and paper. It could be very helpful to see, for example, what students take away from a presentation to post on Twitter and how conversations about the subject continue after class. Derek Bruff (@derekbruff) offers a helpful overview of possibilities in “Backchannel in Education–Nine Uses.”

Have students post observations and photos/videos from field or external locations. Many courses have occasions in which students are outside the classroom, performing field observations, visiting museums or galleries, attending events, documenting local activities, etc. And of course students are out and about on their own time as well. Create the opportunity for them to capture course-related information and share it with the entire class.

Margaret Rubega (@ProfRubega) teaches ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut and has employed Twitter as a learning and communication tool in her ornithology class. She asks students to post tweets when they observe birds and bird behavior, noting their location and connecting their observations to course material. Students used the hashtag #birdclass, which others outside the class can also access and contribute to (check it out). Her course activity was featured in local media (“Bird Class Tweets Sightings“) and in the New York Times (“On Birds, Twitter, and Teaching“). An interview with Dr. Rubega notes,

“I wanted students to notice birds more. The assignment succeeded beyond my wildest dreams,” she says. In a lecture class it’s easy to lecture at students without making what you’re lecturing apply to the outside world,” Rubega adds. The Twitter assignment forced students to observe for themselves. And they didn’t limit their observations to campus. They posted about birds beyond the Storrs locale – they tweeted on Spring Break and during weekend trips. Students who gave Rubega the impression that they were not all that interested in birds ended up correcting others on Twitter who were confused about bird species. They wrote about birds on Twitter long after the assignment had ended.

Encourage students to live-tweet events, films, presentations, etc. Instead of having students simply watch media and events (either synchronously or asynchronously), why not have them actively engage by live-tweeting? In “Live-Tweeting Assignments: To Use or Not to Use?“, Adeline Koh (@adelinekoh)

explores some of the benefits and drawbacks to one of my most successful teaching exercises using Twitter—getting students to “live tweet” films. “Live tweeting” basically means tweeting as students are watching the film, either by reporting on or commenting on what they are viewing. I’ve tried this with documentaries, films of famous speakers giving lectures, and feature films. Every single time this activity has massively increased student engagement and learning. You can see a sample assignment I’ve used here and and student reactions to the activity here.

Other possibilities for live-tweeting might include events such as speeches and presidential debates. Imagine having students, say, live-tweet and fact-check this Wednesday night’s Republican presidential debate. They could also analyze the social media strategies of various candidates (so check out…if you dare… @realDonaldTrump, or @BernieSanders).

Use Twitter in foreign language and culture instruction and study abroad. Twitter offers many possibilities for students to practice foreign language communication and learn about world cultures from different perspectives. Students can easily begin to connect with native speakers in the target language and practice sentence composition in real-time chat situations.  Vivian Finch (@vivianfinch) describes her experience using Twitter with her German class:

My first foray into using Twitter with my German students stemmed from an excitement generated from personal use of the micro-blogging site.  I found I could easily plug into a community of individuals that I perhaps didn’t know, but with whom I shared common interests.  It was this community feeling combined with the potential for authentic target language communication that led me to begin using Twitter in my introductory German courses.  The 140 characters gave my introductory level students just enough space to communicate with me, each other, and the world at large in German, and all at their own pace, both outside and inside the classroom.  The students were able to create their own community centered on learning German and learning about German culture, and, to a certain extent, took ownership of their own learning process.

Finch has gone on to even more ambitious activities, as she discusses in “‘Adventures in Twitter Fiction’: Student Generated Digital Storytelling and the Foreign Language Classroom.” In this project students collaboratively and emergently create characters and a storyline to write a Twitter short story in German. A story hashtag pulls all of the tweets into one stream. Students creatively use their German, and also think critically about the short story genre.

There are just a few examples that might help you to start generating some ideas. Of course there are also practical issues to consider, such as how to evaluate and assess Twitter and other social media activities, properly structuring assignments and establishing clear expectations, dealing with possible student resistance, and taking into account possible student concerns regarding privacy and intellectual property. So come and join the conversation this week at the workshop and online.

Curated Resource List

Growing Your Academic Network with Twitter

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acdigped twitterOur first digital pedagogy workshop of the semester, “Growing Your Academic Network with Twitter,” will occur Tuesday, September 8, from 4:30–5:30 pm, with a repeat on Wednesday, September 9 from 11:00 am–noon. The location is the library computer lab (Abell 208).

Join us as we explore how you can use Twitter to cultivate your personal learning network (PLN) and to connect with other scholars, ideas, activities, and events in your discipline. This workshop is for everyone–whether you have no experience with Twitter at all, are a sporadic tweeter, or a more regular user who wants to up their game and improve their Twitter experience. You might be curious or frankly skeptical about the whole thing–and that’s ok. Maybe you’ve heard about live-tweeting at professional conferences, and wonder what that’s all about. Even if you don’t know a handle from a hashtag, we’ll get you up and running.

So among other things, we’ll work on:

  • setting up your account and profile
  • the basic elements of a tweet–messages, hashtags, mentions, links, images, etc.
  • tips and ideas on who to follow and how to attract followers
  • Twitter literacy–hashtags, handles, retweets, modified tweets, lists, notifications, etc.
  • using Tweetdeck as a Twitter client
  • how to participate in a live-tweet session
  • how to strengthen your connections and network presence

We’ll draw on the experiences of Twitter users here at Austin College, including the “Tres Hombres” of digital pedagogy (@bolillotejano, @bboessen, and @MorrisPelzel) and other faculty and staff. (You do know that “Tres Hombres” was the title of a 1973 ZZTop album, right? What’s that…who is ZZTop? Nevermind). We’ll also be drawing on some other resources that you can check out here ahead of time. One of the better comprehensive guides for using Twitter in higher education is “The Ultimate Guide to Tweets, Hashtags, and All Things Twitter” by Sue Waters (@suewaters). Regularly updated and highly recommended. In “A Little Bird Told Me: Maximizing Your Learning on Twitter,” Laura Gogia (@googleguacamole) serves up some pithy recommendations and strategies in an attractive infographic. Alison Seaman (@AlisonSeaman), in “Personal Learning Networks: Knowledge Sharing as Democracy,” offers some important conceptual background on PLNs as well as practical suggestions for using Twitter to help build a PLN.

Bonnie Stewart’s (@bonstewart) articles, “In Public: The Shifting Consequences of Twitter Scholarship,” and “Contributions and Connections” explore how the growing use of social media networks by academics is affecting notions of scholarly identity, authority, and influence. She observes that

As more and more academics take to Twitter and other networked platforms to connect and share their work and ideas, a new sphere of influence is opening. And it is beginning to infiltrate academia itself. Twitter is often framed as a more effective way to get fired than hired, but networked scholarly participation can be a powerful site of new contacts and resources and conversations for a scholar, as well as new conventions (hello #hashtags!) and new public audiences for research. Increased citations, media gigs, collaborative research opportunities, invited talks and keynotes, and a variety of other academically-valued material effects can stem from active and sustained networked engagement.

Finally, on a lighter note, Glen Wright (@AcademiaObscura), in “The Weird and Wonderful World of Academic Twitter,” relates some ways in which “Twitter also acts as a virtual water cooler, a place where academics go to build community, have some fun, and let off steam.” So, if you need a bit of humor and distraction on a slow day, you could do worse than check out, say, #RuinADateWithAnAcademicInFiveWords or @NeinQuarterly.

Twitter is also being used in courses and student projects as well…we’ll look more at pedagogical applications of Twitter and other social media in a subsequent workshop.

So please do join us for the workshop if you can. And, of course…follow us at @ACDigPed.

Fall Digital Pedagogy Workshops

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Welcome (back) to everyone as we start the Fall 2015 semester at Austin College! Here at Digital Pedagogy@Austin College, we’re looking forward to a new year of activities and projects to support student and faculty learning across the curriculum. In particular we’d like to announce a schedule of weekly digital pedagogy workshops that will be offered this fall. These will be one-hour, hands-on tutorials designed to give faculty ideas and skills to use in the classroom and for professional development. Our plan is to offer each workshop twice a week–once on Tuesday at 4:30 pm, and then again Wednesday at 11:00 am, in Abell Library (probably in Abell 102, but we’ll let you know for sure).

Here’s what we have planned:

  • September 8/9–”Growing Your Academic Network with Twitter”
  • September 15/16–”Using Social Media in Teaching and Learning”
  • September 22/23–”Got Blog? Getting Started with WordPress”
  • September 29/30–”Incorporating Student Blogs in Your Course”
  • October 6/7 –”Digital Publishing with Scalar”
  • October 13/14–”Using Digital Maps in Your Class”
  • October 20/21-”Wikipedia Assignments: What, How, and Why”
  • October 27/28–”Leveraging Student Interests Through Social Bookmarking”
  • November 3/4–”Using Hypothes.is for Collaborative Digital Annotation”
  • November 10/11–”Creating Rich Interactive Timelines with Timeline JS”
  • November 17/18–”Fair Use, Copyright, and Creative Commons Licenses”
  • December 1/2—”Study Abroad with Technology and Media: Tips, Tools, and Apps”

We’ll be blogging about each topic ahead of time to give you further context and resource material. This schedule isn’t carved in stone; if there is particular interest in other topics, we can consider adjustments and/or put those on the schedule for the spring semester. So let us know what you think. Also, if other times prove more feasible, we’re willing to be flexible.

Of course, Mo and Brett are always available for conversation, consultation, and support for your questions and issues of pedagogy and digital technologies. So give us a shout, and follow us here on the blog, in our Facebook group, and on our Twitter feed.

“Reimagining the Liberal Arts in a Digital Age”

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ac mag article
The summer 2015 edition of the Austin College Magazine features a cover story on the digital pedagogy initiative here at the college. We’re grateful to Vickie Kirby, Leigh-Ellen Romm, and all those whose hard work contributed to a very fine article. In addition to the main story, there are breakout sections highlighting four faculty projects: Jennifer Johnson-Cooper (Beginning Chinese I); Dan Dominick (Music History II); Ian MacFarlane (Psychology 101); and Andy Carr (Organic Chemistry). I also have an essay that further describes our goal of having faculty and students establish themselves with a professional academic presence and portfolio on the Web (described by Gardner Campbell as a “personal cyberinfrastructure“).

The entire issue is excellent, of course, so do be sure to take it all in!

Mellon Digital Pedagogy Grantees for 2015-2016

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Mellon-Logo-SquareWe’re happy to announce that eight Austin College faculty members have been awarded Mellon Digital Pedagogy grants beginning in the 2015-16 academic year. The awardees join the first cohort of fifteen grantees, meaning that over 20% of AC faculty are now directly involved in the “Collaborative Pedagogies in the Digital Age” initiative. Of course, everyone is involved to some degree because these projects serve as demonstrations and use cases for the entire faculty, and because the resources of the digital pedagogy designer (Mo Pelzel) and the digital pedagogy fellow (Brett Boessen) are always available to the entire AC community. A third round of eight awards will be distributed next year, further extending the impact of the program. (For more info on the first round of projects and the grant in general, check out the “Mellon Foundation Grant” page.)

The new projects span a breadth of academic disciplines and ideas/practices for digital pedagogy. You can read the project proposals of the new grantees by following the links below:

Congratulations to our awardees! We look forward to the innovative pedagogy and enriched learning that you will bring to the Austin College community.

#TWP15–Teaching with WordPress

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twp

During the month of June I’ll be participating in an open online course on using WordPress as a platform for teaching and learning. More broadly, the four-week course will function as a community of learners exploring topics and issues such as:

  • open education, open pedagogy and design
  • WordPress as a highly customizable framework for teaching and learning
  • examples of instructors and learners usng WordPress sites in many different ways for multiple purposes
  • plug ins, applications and approaches for creating, discussing, sharing and interacting with each other

I’ll be using this course as a vehicle to further develop and enhance a WordPress based course I’m teaching this summer at Austin College, “How the Web Works: Building Your Digital Identity, Literacy, and Network.” Beyond that, I’m looking forward to participating with colleagues to build up a rich set of resources that we can then make available to folks here at AC who want to move their teaching and learning in a more open and connected direction.

According to the course facilitators at the University of British Columbia,

Teaching with WordPress is designed to be a “connectivist” open online course, in which the contributions of the participants are crucial to what each of us learns; we will connect with each other through blog posts, Twitter and discussions on this site. Most importantly, we’ll learn from each other’s course design on their WordPress sites. It is our hope that at least some of the connections participants make with each other in the course will last beyond the course itself, that we can develop a kind of community of practice around teaching with WordPress (and/or around open education & open pedagogy, or anything else that comes up in the course).

I know it’s late notice, but if any of you want to join in, that would be great…all you need is a WordPress site and a course that you would like to work on. Or just follow along at the Twitter hashtag #TWP15.

 

#et4online–First Thoughts on an Edtech Conference

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IMG_20150428_190416064-1Last week I participated in the Emerging Technologies for Online Learning Symposium in Dallas, an international gathering of several hundred faculty, academic technologists, instructional designers, and other professionals in the field of digital pedagogy and learning. Like most academic conferences, there were plenary and breakout sessions and opportunities for networking and informal gathering and conversation. Here are a few first impressions…I’m hoping to do several follow-up posts on more specific topics.

The conference was energizing and inspiring….and overwhelming. When you meet interesting new people and ideas, you don’t just encounter them as individuals…you meet up with all the other interesting people and ideas connected to them, and so on. Very quickly, you’re immersed in an expanding network, the boundaries of which keep spiraling outward. And then the challenge is to find your place in an ever-shifting web of conversation, dialogue, and exchange.

So that’s the first theme I come away with…the importance of networks, connectivity, and open access in learning. I suppose we are all aware of that to one degree or another, but to experience it in an intense way brings it home with particular force. All three of the plenary presentations engaged this theme from distinct perspectives. Mimi Ito (@mizuko) spoke on “Learning in an Era of Abundant Connectivity,” Bonnie Stewart (@bonstewart) on “Beyond Alt-Metrics: Identities and Influence Online,” and Gardner Campbell (@Gardner Campbell) on “Thought Vectors in Concept Space.” Collectively, these talks introduced us to several innovative examples of what learning looks like when we really begin to “think like the web,” in Jon Udell’s (@judell) phrase. The presentations were recorded and are available online, but…ironically, given the emphasis on “openness,” and “sharing” at so many sessions…they are only available to those who paid the conference registration fee. Obviously, there are economics to take into account here, but still…a jarring cognitive dissonance from my point of view. But, if any of you are interested in watching them, just let me know and we’ll work out a way to make that happen…maybe a viewing party and discussion, sort of like Oscar night, in the digital pedagogy commons.

When it comes to academic networking, Twitter has clearly become the place to connect. It would be an exaggeration to say that “If you weren’t on Twitter, you weren’t at the conference,” but that wouldn’t be entirely off the mark. Many attendees modified their id badges to include their Twitter handles as well as their names. Every session I was in was heavily annotated in real time on Twitter. Some folks, like Laura Gogia (@GoogleGuacamole) have a gift for capturing insights from a presentation, often including screenshots of a slide, while it is happening and tweeting them out efficiently. These streams of updates represent an unfolding conversation and provide a measure of access to people not physical present at the conference. And beyond the conference itself, participation in Twitter networks is becoming a critical digital literacy for academics. Bonnie Stewart’s research into scholarly networking observes that

Over the past decade and more, digital networked communications have crept into scholarship. List-servs, then blogs, then social networking platforms crept into corners of scholarly practice. Twitter in particular has become a means by which many scholars create and curate public identities and share their work and that of others. But open networked scholarship is, by definition, open to those who choose to participate; the price of admission is not a degree or an accolade or a particular number of publications in the right journals. The price of admission is the willingness to engage, in public, over time, in sustained and iterative discussions over ideas and knowledge and what counts as the public good, among other things.

Speaking of Twitter, one of the sessions I participated in, “Perforate Your Classroom: Collaboratively Hack the Open Online Game #TvsZ 6.0,” was an extended immersive exercise in digital literacy, collaboration, and creativity, carried out largely on Twitter over the course of the conference. The game was facilitated by Pete Rorabaugh (@allistelling), Andrea Rehn (@profrehn), Christina Hendricks (@clhendricksbc) and JR Dingwall (@jrdingwall), with help from Maha Bali (@bali_maha). It’s hard to convey the experience if you haven’t played, but the session abstract gives you some sense of the game design (you can also find out more at the main game site, #TvsZ):

This game builds digital literacy through creating avenues for participants to engage in international collaboration, to compose for a visible and active audience, and to craft personal learning networks. It is a dynamic experience for engaging students in transmedia storytelling and narrative collaboration, and it can democratize the classroom by blurring the line between teacher and student. The game design itself is democratized through emergent rules: players re-shape the rules and revise the narrative as the game unfolds.

Several dozen of us played this game for three days. I was pretty disoriented at first (and only somewhat less so later!), but it was an exceptionally fun way to quickly network with and get to know a cool group of new friends. We formed teams, carried out tasks and missions, debated rules, and created an emerging community and storyline. All of this mostly happened in the interstices between conference sessions and other activities (though we managed to sneak in some gameplay during a few talks as well).

Another theme that coursed through the proceedings is the idea that authentic learning is often unpredictable, loosely structured, ill-defined, emergent…in a word, “messy.” (In fact, one session was entitled, “The Messy Session on Messy Learning.”) By definition, learning involves a movement into the unknown, into a zone of ambiguity, into a place where discovery and insight arise, perhaps in a surprising and non-deductive leap, perhaps after many experiences of failure. Learning environments, and the technologies embedded therein, need to strike a delicate balance between the structure of scaffolding and directive pedagogy, on the one hand, and an allowance (or even a preference) for uncertainty, novelty, and unexpected breakthroughs, on the other.

For example, while statements of learning objectives and expected student outcomes have become standard elements of course syllabi, an excessive insistence on predetermined, measurable, and quantifiable outcomes can actually impede learning. For an intriguing take on this, see Gardner Campbell’s April 2014 blog post, “Understanding and Learning Outcomes,” which includes an illuminating exchange with Robert Talbert (@RobertTalbert) author of the Casting Out Nines blog and a thoughtful voice on pedagogy and technology. Campbell observes that

Teaching and learning are difficult, sometimes bewildering activities, and it’s natural to want to have clarity about it all. It’s also natural, and to some extent a good thing too, when we seek accountability for our professional activities. Asking “what do we want to happen, and how will we know if we get there?” is an entirely fair and just thing to do. It’s when we’re forbidden to use “mushy” words like “understand” and “appreciate” because “they can’t be measured” that the trouble begins. And it’s when we believe that an “ordered list” will take us through the paradoxical encounters of meaning-making, curiosity, awe, and wonder so that we safely arrive at “student success” that we end up with what Ted Nelson famously termed “a forced march across a flattened plane.”

So while there are appropriate reasons for and methods of documenting, assessing, and analyzing student learning, such practices, and the technologies that enable them, should not privilege administrative efficiency and control over the potentially messy pathways within which learning occurs.

In fact, a palpable tension emerged during the conference between what some have called “techno-solutionism” and a more critical perspective on the human context in which digital tools are employed. Are technologies being used to empower student agency and ownership of learning and to foster genuine insight and discovery? Or does their usage reinforce perspectives and practices in which students are monitored, surveilled, tracked, and directed toward predetermined outcomes that leave little space for novel and unexpected learning? Again, are students primarily the objects of administrative and technical control, or are they truly given the opportunities, resources, and mentoring to be the subjects and agents of their education?

Many colleagues that I ran with sensed a major disconnect between the promotional activities of the dozens of edtech vendors and the pedagogical values and priorities of the attendees. I don’t want to portray this as a simplistic binary of bad for-profit vendors vs. good open-source advocates. After all, we were all there using the hardware and software of capitalist enterprises such as Apple, Google, Twitter, etc. The point, again, is a reminder of our ongoing need to be critically reflective about whether technologies, whatever their source, empower and liberate students to be the agents of their own learning. For more pungent thoughts on this topic, see the post by Jeff Merrell (@jeffmerrell), “Humans vs. Tech: Reflections on #et4online.”

Another session I would highlight is the presentation by Adam Croom (@acroom) of Oklahoma University and Chris Mattia (@cmmattia) of Cal State Channel Islands, “For All a Domain: Lessons from Personal Cyber Infrastructure Pilots.” Because we’re thinking of running a similar pilot at Austin College, I was very interested in learning from Adam and Chris. The core rationale of the respective initiatives (OU Create and CI Keys) is captured here:

CI Keys and OU Create make students the sysadmins of their own personal web spaces with full control over content and design and offers students full ownership of the content they produce and the option of moving their content to their own domain if they choose.These projects embrace the Internet as generative of learning, scholarship and the distribution of knowledge. They enable participants to create unique spaces for teaching, learning, publishing and connecting with others in the open public sphere of the Internet and outside the constraints of a closed Learning Management System. The logic of these programs is that offering users this control means allowing them agency and empowering them to make use of the world-wide-web to serve their own evolving needs as learners, teachers, scholars, and digital citizens.

I would recommend Adam’s post-conference reflections and also agree with him that “The conversations were rich and the human interaction was unparalleled to any conference I’ve attended in quite some time.”

Finally, after the conclusion of the formal conference, it was time for an afternoon of #unet4online, an “unconference” facilitated by Jesse Stommel (@jessifer) and Sean Michael Morris (@slamteacher) of Hybrid Pedagogy (@hybridped). About thirty or so folks stayed around to collectively determine topics for further exploration. I was part of a group facilitated by Kris Shaffer (@krisshaffer), who led us through a basic tutorial in GitHub, originally created as a platform for open source software development and now used more broadly as a collaborative space for all forms of text-based open source scholarship. For an accessible introduction, see Kris’s article “Push, Pull, Fork: GitHub for Academics.” In particular, we worked with his open-source, online interactive “textbook,” Open Music Theory, learning how we could “fork” his text if we want to take his project and develop it in new directions. I’ve started to see other such academic projects on GitHub lately, so appreciated the chance to dip my toe in the GitHub waters.

So, that’s just a bit of what went down at #et4online. If I were a better blogger I might have had more images and graphics in this post, but next year (in New Orleans!) I’ll remember to take more pix. If you really have some extra time on your hands, check out the main conference stream at #et4online, and also tributaries such as #et4women, #et4messy, #unet4online, #et4reflect, and, my favorite, #et4snark.

Digital Reading in the Liberal Arts–Deep or Distracted?

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chrome-extension-reading-thumbWe hope to do several followups to our previous post on Web Writing: Why and How for Liberal Arts Teaching and Learning, diving into the details of individual essays and exploring the implications for digital pedagogy at Austin College. Web writing is, of course, intimately related to web reading, that is, reading on digital screens in a networked environment. As the texts we read increasingly migrate to and originate in digital formats, concerns have been raised about the effects on our reading habits and comprehension. Can the liberal arts ideal of “close” or “deep” reading of complex long-form texts be maintained? There is extensive literature and debate on the topic, but here I’ll just draw attention to a couple of recent points of reflection.

First is this article, “Distracted Reading in the Digital Age,” which reports on conversations at Vassar College around the topic of reading practices and digital texts. Faculty forums and discussions have led to observations about shifting student reading practices and in particular the struggles of students to read intricate texts that require sustained focus and attentiveness. Some professors suspect that “hyper-digital culture” and the lure of frequent interruptions and multitasking is making it more difficult for students to concentrate and read effectively. For example, in one forum colleagues in history and English comment that

Since both of us teach rich, dense historical materials that require long stretches of concentration, we began to wonder whether the students’ unresponsiveness to assigned reading was just coincidence—classes have personalities—or whether we were witnessing some larger shift in the reading habits of our undergraduates, perhaps one brought on by their digital habits.

Faculty have been led to reflect more intentionally on the implications for teaching and learning: if student reading habits and competencies are shifting, how must pedagogies be adapted and realigned? What new strategies are needed to encourage active and effective reading of challenging texts? The article describes several responses to the situation, and suggests that there are ways of using the very technologies seen as “distracting” to actually increase student engagement with texts. One strategy for doing so is “digital annotation,” a theme that we have visited before on this blog. Classics professor Bert Lott describes using the digital annotation platform Annotation Studio in his classes:

“I require students to examine the text before and after class,” says Lott. “They write annotations about grammar, syntax, and lexicography and compose interpretive comments. Strands of conversation emerge between students as they do it.” Lott says there are many benefits of this approach, in addition to encouraging students to more deeply examine the text. “Having students write down their grammar questions carefully and ask them before class adds elements of the ‘flipped classroom,’ ” he says. “It allows us to get those technical questions answered outside of class, so the expectations for what they know in class are higher. It allows them to formulate their thoughts better and to participate more fully in class discussion because they have thought through some of their ideas beforehand.

Lott goes on to make some more general observations about how professors should approach reading and technology:

Seeing what such technologies can bring to the classroom, Lott says he’s “not entirely sympathetic to the notion that distracted reading and devices are wholly bad, that our job should be to protect the classroom as a space for only the old kind of reading. It’s much more complex than that.” “I think this is going to be the way in which students are going to engage and get information. Technologically enhanced reading can have huge benefits to education and scholarship. We’re just not sure what they are or we’re not entirely convinced of them yet,” he says. “This is one way for my students and me to practice what it means to read texts in the form they will undoubtedly read them as their lives move on.”

The theme of attentiveness and reading is also taken up in a recent presentation by Alan Jacobs of Baylor University entitled “The Attentive Reader.”  Jacobs is a distinguished professor of humanities at Baylor and a leading voice on textuality and technology. His Text Patterns blog at the New Atlantis is a valuable resource on this topic; he is also the author of, among other books, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction.

Building upon Katherine Hayles’s distinction of hyper attention and deep attention, Jacobs proposes that any serious analysis of how we read must take into account distinctive modes and environments of attention and the various technologies that operate within them. Modes of attention take in relatively more or less of the ambient environment. All modes of attention are contextually valuable; for example, when driving a car it is better to be hyper-attentive, continually scanning a wide range of stimuli and phenomena, than to be narrowly focused on only one sensory input. Managing a digital life of frequent notifications and task-switching is also a form of hyper-attentiveness. Yet it remains incumbent for liberal arts colleges “to be distinctly hospitable to focused attention,” which they can only do “if they become more thoughtfully intentional about environments and devices.”

Jacobs has also promoted annotation and commentary as a positive affordance of digital technologies and a means of prompting greater attentiveness to and engagement with texts. Among his “79 Theses on Technology. For Disputation,” he proposes that

  • Digital textuality offers us the chance to restore commentary to its pre-modern place as the central scholarly genre.
  • Recent technologies enable a renewal of commentary, but struggle to overcome a post-Romantic belief that commentary is belated, derivative.

In other words, the digitization and networking of texts is good because it invites greater levels of commentary and annotation on those texts (“deep reading”), which is at the same time, for Jacobs, the preferred form for learning how to write well. Taking up the challenge of the disputatio, Andrew Piper of McGill University further elaborates the pedagogical implications of the “annotated web:”

There is a vibrant movement afoot to remake the web as a massive space of commentary. The annotated web, as it’s called, has the aim of transforming our writing spaces from linked planes to layered marginalia ….

Missing from these models is pedagogy. The annotated web gives us one example of how to remake the technology of writing to better accommodate responsiveness. It’s a profound first step, one that will by no means be universally embraced (which should give us some idea of how significant it is).

But we do not yet have a way of teaching this to new (or old) writers. Follow the curricular pathways from the lockered hallways of elementary school to the bleak cubicles of higher education and you will still see the blank piece of paper or its electronic double as the primary writing surface. The self-containment of expression is everywhere. It is no wonder that these writers fail to comment well.

It’s all well and good to say commentary is back. It’s another to truly re-imagine how a second grader or college student learns to write. What if we taught commentary instead of expression, not just for beginning writers, but right on through university and the PhD? What if we trained people to build and create in the annotated web instead of on pristine planes of remediated paper? Now that would be different.

Whether or not one is in full agreement that commentary is “the central scholarly genre,” the discussion raises intriguing questions and opportunities for reflection about digital textuality. Do you have observations from the classroom about student reading and writing in the digital age? Let us know your comments.

Web Writing: Why and How for Liberal Arts Teaching and Learning

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WebWritingCoverUMich2015-02One of the richest resources for digital pedagogy that we have seen recently is the new book, Web Writing: Why and How for Liberal Arts Teaching and Learning. The book is a collection of twenty essays that “explore why online writing matters for liberal arts learning and illustrates how different faculty teach with web-based tools for authoring, annotating, peer editing, and publishing.” Originating in a faculty initiative at the Center for Teaching and Learning at Trinity College (Connecticut), Web Writing, edited by Jack Dougherty and Tennyson O’Donnell, was published by the University of Michigan Press in March 2015 as an “open-access” text that can be read for free online (a print edition is forthcoming, as well). The essays represent a broad range of scholarly disciplines, but are all grounded in the classroom experiences of liberal arts teachers:  “The richness of the book is that it represents authors from 15 colleges across the liberal arts curriculum who demonstrate how they use writing in disciplines like biology, history and sociology and across platforms to improve student motivation and learning.”

As the Introduction to the collection explains, the project was conceived as a conversation among liberal arts faculty who actively engage with writing in their classrooms in multiple disciplines but need guidance on ways that web-based tools can contribute to our educational missions:

Web Writing seeks to bridge philosophical and practical questions that arise from the experiences of liberal arts educators who have stepped into the digital realm. What are the most—and least—compelling reasons for why we should integrate web writing into our curriculum? Which tools and teaching methods deepen—rather than distract from—thoughtful learning? How does student engagement and sense of community evolve when we share our drafts and commentary on the public web? To what extent does writing on the web enable our students to cross over divisive boundaries, and what new challenges does it create? The book’s subtitle signals our desire to blend “why” questions with examples of “how” it can be done, presented in both print and digital formats.

Whether in persuasive essays, scientific reports, or creative expression, all academic disciplines value clear and compelling prose. The act of writing visually demonstrates our thought processes: how we respond to ideas that challenge our own thinking, consider alternative perspectives or counter-evidence, and create entirely new points of view. As college educators, we recognize that our students become more engaged in the writing process when they draft, share, and respond to writing with a community of peer readers who encourage and challenge them to revise muddled first drafts into more polished, thoughtful essays. Moreover, we now realize how a new generation of web-based writing tools—including wikis, Google Documents, WordPress, and others—can transform how our students author, edit, publish, and comment on texts in ways that advance, rather than distract from, our liberal arts mission. But exactly how college educators can make use of these tools in our classrooms is not simple, and requires both time and support from our institutions. Our motivation behind this book is to offer faculty a wide range of web-based writing examples across the liberal arts, to help all of us to rethink our current approaches and inspire us to innovate with our own students.

A perusal of the table of contents reflects the breadth of the topics addressed and their grouping under four category headings:

table of contents

The project practices what it preaches–the essays were composed and revised in an open space on the web that invited public feedback and suggestions for revision. You can read about the process in the Chronicle article “Call for Open Peer Review: Web Writing.” The WordPress plugin CommentPress facilitated this method of composition. In fact, you can still read the original drafts of the essays, along with comments, to get a sense of how reader response and feedback helped to shape the revisions of the texts.  The results of this experiment were transformative for the authors:

As educators, our compelling reason for constructing this book online is because that’s exactly what we ask our students to do when we assign them to share their writing with us and other readers. Every educator who requires students to post their words on a course learning management system (such as Moodle, Blackboard, etc.) or the open web should try the same experience by uploading their own writing for feedback from peers and the public. For many of us, our first experiences in publicly circulating drafts was equally terrifying and exhilarating. The process opened our eyes to how our writing changes when engaging with a broader audience, particularly one that talks back through comments that suggest new connections and sharpen our thinking. We hope that Web Writing will encourage more faculty to author and comment online, and that these experiences will transfer into richer forms of teaching and learning in their classrooms.

And now, even though the essays have been published in “final” form, the text continues to invite commentary, discussion, and annotation. A newly developing “open annotation” tool known as Hypothes.is is being used as a platform for continued conversation and dialogue. I’ll have another post up soon to introduce Hypothes.is more fully, but for now, if you’re interested in experimenting with it, there’s a helpful tutorial by Greg McVerry in this post, “Three Tools to Annotate the Web.” The project also offers many appropriate examples of “collaborative open spaces” on the web that I spoke about in a previous post.

One of the initiatives being developed at Austin College involves “Written Communication Skills.” The charge of this project is that “Austin College will develop signature opportunities to enhance writing and other communication skills through curricular and co-curricular programming. By 2020, every graduating student will be able to demonstrate achievement and improvement in these areas.” Perhaps Web Writing is one resource that we could use to generate conversations and ideas to move us forward in this endeavor. Maybe it could be a choice for a faculty reading discussion group next year? Let us know what you think in the comments.

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