Mo Pelzel

DP Workshop Sessions–Collaborative Digital Spaces: Open Up?

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As we planned for the recent Mellon Digital Pedagogy workshop, we noted that many of the grantee projects, quite naturally, involve creating spaces online where students could collaborate around various course materials and ideas. But we also observed that these online “spaces” could be of different types and could be more or less “open” or “closed” depending upon pedagogical objectives, the sensitivity of the subject matter, the developmental stage of a project, and considerations such as student privacy and copyright. So we decided to include two parallel breakout sessions, one on “inward-facing” (closed or restricted) web spaces and one on “outward-facing” (open access) web spaces.

Collaborative and interactive web spaces can take many different forms–for example, blogs, wikis, discussion forums, comment sections, Google docs, Twitter streams, and other spaces defined in particular applications, such as “salons” within Classroom Salon and “projects” within Scalar. In most cases, users (or site administrators) are given a choice of settings to enable varying degrees of publicness. It’s important to note, though, that different kinds of spaces are designed to function best with a particular degree of openness, even if the user chooses otherwise. For example, the benefits of blogging platforms and most forms of social media are maximized when they are completely open and public, yet these tools can also be used effectively with more restricted access. Other collaborative tools, such as Moodle forums or Google Docs, are by design optimally used by teams or groups or classes, though it is possible to open them to wider audiences. And of course “access” can sometimes be further differentiated into various user roles, so that some users are simply viewers, some are creators and editors, and some have administrative privileges.

At one end of the spectrum, an online space may be completely private; a learner may wish to formulate ideas or work individually on a project before inviting the observation or interaction of others. At a next level, a space may be restricted to an instructor and an individual student. That is the case, for example, in Dan Dominick’s project involving music students and their listening journals. Using Classroom Salon, Dan has created a separate salon for each student in the class, in which he and the particular student are the only members. The students upload their musical selections and annotate them with their comments, knowing that only their professor will see and respond to those comments. Several professors in the School of Education have also been using salons in this way to have private conversations with their students about student teaching videos.

A common arrangement is for all the students in a given course to share a common online space that is restricted to members of the class. Learning management systems, such as Moodle, generally operate on this principle. Teams or subgroups within the class may be given their own distinct spaces to work in as well. Wikis and Google Docs work well for these purposes, as does Scalar, the new digital publishing platform now available. David Aiello’s Mellon project includes an example of such a space, the Aiello Genetics Lab Wiki.

Beyond private, group, and class spaces, there is the “open web,” that is, spaces that are public and accessible (at least for viewing) to anyone. In these cases, student work is exposed to the widest possible audience. Some argue that the technical and cultural architecture of the web, which facilitates linkage, open access, and broad distribution of content, promotes an underlying epistemology (“thinking like the web“) and theory of learning (“connectivism“). From this perspective, even though the creation of material and content may in some cases be best done in a closed space, the inner dynamism of the Web ultimately promotes the widest possible sharing of ideas and projects. Wider distribution invites greater levels of feedback and more ways to situate student work in authentic contexts of practice.

In the “open access” or “outward facing” breakout session, we discussed the benefits and challenges of moving students toward a greater degree of participation in the open web in terms of their academic and professional work. We agreed that students need to be mentored and guided toward developing good judgment in sharing their academic work responsibly and taking ownership of their online presence. Perhaps the Communication and Inquiry freshman seminars could be a starting context for developing that judgment. We recognized that there is a wider discussion of student portfolios on campus and the ways in which students would benefit by having a gallery or repository of their academic artifacts to display to potential employers, graduate school admission committees, and others. The technical barriers to academic participation on the open web have come down; it is not necessary to have sophisticated programming or web design skills in order to create attractive and robust presentations of student scholarship. The Career Services and Student Life offices would also be interested in working with students to develop their online profiles.

The discussion then turned toward the possibilities offered by the Domain of One’s Own movement, in which students (and faculty) assume ownership of their own web domains and build their digital identities. Several colleges and universities, such as the University of Mary Washington, Davidson, Emory, and the University of Oklahoma, have established programs in which students and faculty manage their own web domains and leverage new opprotunities to enhance teaching and learning. Web hosting for these programs is provided by Reclaim Hosting, a company created to support just these kinds of initiatives in higher education. There was considerable enthusiasm for bringing the Domains movement to Austin College. We are currently looking into this possibility and planning a pilot program for next year that would involve a small number of interested faculty and students. We’ll have further details and developments here on the blog. If you have any observations along these lines, please let us know in the comments section.

 

Texas Digital Humanities Conference

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Tomorrow through Saturday I (Mo) will be participating in the second annual Texas Digital Humanities conference at the University of Texas at Arlington. The conference is sponsored by Texas Digital Humanities Consortium (TxDHC).

TxDHC is an organization of Digital Humanities Initiatives, Centers, and Institutes in the State of Texas. Our mission is to promote digital research in the humanities disciplines and facilitate interaction amongst researchers working in the digital humanities both within the state, nationally, and internationally. The consortium was organized in 2013, with University of Houston, Rice, Texas A&M University, University of Texas at Austin, University of North Texas, and the University of Texas at Arlington as founding members. We welcome additional institutes of higher learning that host digital humanities researchers to join us.

I’m looking forward to meeting colleagues, establishing new relationships, and bringing back useful ideas to Austin College. The keynote speakers include Adeline Koh (“Social Media and Revolutions: Imagined Communities and Political Action“), Alan Liu (“Against the Cultural Singularity: Toward a Critical Digital Humanities”), and George Siemens (“Prepare for a More Human Digital University”). Among the workshop sessions I’m anticipating is a presentation by Rebecca Frost Davis of St. Edward’s University in Austin on “Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments.”

Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments is an open, collaborative digital humanities project focused on the intersections of digital technologies with teaching and learning.  The project consists of an open-access, curated collection of downloadable, reusable, and remixable pedagogical artifacts that are categorized by keyword and annotated by their curators.  Drawing on the keyword approach of Raymond Williams (Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.), this collection, taken as a whole, will document the richly-textured culture of teaching and learning that responds to new digital learning environments, research tools, and socio-cultural contexts. This presentation by one of four co-editors of the project will give an overview of the project’s conception and progress to date, especially highlighting innovations in open-editing, collaborative workflow, and insights into digital pedagogy.

You can follow the conference by using the Twitter hashtag #TXDHC15. (You can use this hashtag even if you don’t have a Twitter account; just click on that link.) Academic conferences are now routinely “live tweeted,” which provides a rolling digest of ideas and comments, a “back channel” for multiple conversations, an opportunity for those not attending to follow the proceedings, and an archive for later access. We’ll have a blog post soon that will focus on using Twitter for teaching, scholarship, and professional development.

The conference is at UTA, where George Siemens was recently hired to direct the Learning Innovation and Networked Knowledge Research Lab (LINK).

The Learning Innovation and Networked Knowledge Research Lab (LINK) serves as the hub of a network of international scholars who conduct research on the digitization of knowledge and learning and how this process impacts education. Our researchers, educators, and graduate students connect, share, and collaborate in advancing social and technological networks, designing innovative learning models, and exploring the future of higher education.

I will also be interested in learning more about the kind of projects and activities taking place at LINK. Siemens is one of the leading proponents of the “connectivist” learning theory, which has recently emerged as an alternative (or complementary) paradigm to other major learning theories such as behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism. For an overview, see his article, “Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age.”

Using Tablets for Presentations and Grading–A Biochemistry Case Study

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With their Mellon Digital Pedagogy grant, Austin College professors John Richardson and Jim Hebda are experimenting with new methods of teaching biochemistry. In their spring 2015 course on biochemical metabolism, John and Jim are using tablets for untethered, dynamic PowerPoint-style presentations and electronic grading. Here’s how they describe the results so far:

The rationale of our Mellon project is to recapture some of the personal hands on approach that is lost when using PowerPoint presentations.

Biochemistry is a complex topic with a significant amount of intricate structure and visual content, which makes the traditional “chalk talk” difficult for both students and instructors.  By using PowerPoint lectures, students and instructors are free to spend more time on theory and less time on drawing out structures.  However, in-class questions and additional content that ends up being written on the board becomes lost and disjointed with respect to the pre-made slides when the students begin to study the material at home.

To this end we are using tablet technology to create the presentation, project it wirelessly to a large display screen, annotate slides during class and, if need be, add additional slides to the presentation on the fly. The advantage to the student is that after lecture the presentation (including the audio narration during class) can be uploaded to Moodle for future reference. An additional advantage of using the tablet is that the instructor is free to move around the room, enhancing class engagement and student participation. Furthermore, it would be possible to incorporate student use of the tablet during lecture as a novel way for them to mark up a slide during class.

To support this approach, we assessed the hardware available and settled on the Samsung Note 12.2 for its price point, extremely usable stylus technology, and ability to wirelessly mirror the display to a projector with an inexpensive device (we are experimenting with several streaming media adapters, including the Google Chromecast and the Amazon Fire Stick). On the software side, we are using Explain Everything for slide creation and annotation. As noted above, Explain Everything has the capacity to record audio and turn the presentation into a screen-mirrored movie, which we have done for most of our lectures this semester. Here is a portion of the presentation that we gave in the workshop, which was created using the method described here:


A second major feature of using the tablet is that we can grade student work electronically, thus preserving a record of the original and graded assignment. The students upload pdfs of their assignments, and we use a program called Papyrus to open and annotate those documents. Papyrus allows us to grade the assignment with a stylus, so the student still receives the exact same handwritten comments as before, but now in a digital format. Students thus still feel the direct connection of their instructors taking the time to make thoughtful commentary on the work handed in. Papyrus also has Dropbox support to allow easy import and export of files from the tablet. After being graded, the documents are uploaded back to Moodle in such a way that students can only retrieve their own work. We find it advantageous to keep a record of all our feedback to each student. In this way we can track student progress across the semester by accessing comments made on prior assignments rather than by relying on memory alone.

 

The objective of the project was to integrate tablets into lecture and grading, using the smaller CHEM 352 class as a pilot. We have done that and are continuing to refine the apps and software that best allow us to do what we want. We are confident that this approach can be successful with a large class like CHEM 351, Introduction to Biochemistry.

Flipping Out–Organic Chemistry

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One theme prominently highlighted at the Digital Pedagogy workshop was the “flipped” model of learning. In the “traditional” course, class meeting periods are predominantly designed for information transfer via lecture, and students process the content outside of class via homework, problem sets, exercises, etc. A flipped approach inverts this design; information and content transmission takes place mostly outside of the classroom, and meeting time is then devoted to more interactive forms of learning and processing of content, such as guided problem solving, question and answer, discussion, and peer instruction. Often (though not always) the flipped model involves the production of short video presentations by the instructor, which replace the in-class lectures. Students watch and rewatch the videos prior to classtime, in addition to doing assigned reading, and hopefully come to class better prepared to engage the material.

Several grantee projects incorporate elements of the flipped model. In this post, we feature the work of AC chemistry professor Andy Carr, who flipped his fall 2014 course, CHEM 221, Organic Chemistry I. Here are the slides to Andy’s presentation, followed by his narrative description of the project:

 

I have successfully completed my first run of CHEM 221 with the flipped model. Over the course of the Fall 2014 semester I learned how to edit videos and compress them so that the files could be placed directly in Moodle. Overall this has been a very satisfying project for me and for my students. Over 70% of the students in my section reported that they learned much more or somewhat more than they would have in a traditional lecture. Many students have stated that they liked viewing the lectures at their own pace instead of frantically taking notes during lecture.

Besides student opinion, I had other markers of success. I had the lowest DFW (a grade of D, F, or withdrawal) rate in my career. Only two students did not complete the course, and only two students did not earn a C- or better. I started with 27 students; 23 moved on to second semester organic chemistry. Typically, organic chemistry has had a DFW rate of around 30%, and it has been as high as 56%. Overall, grades were slightly higher than they have been in the past.

Not only were students in my own classes benefiting from the videos; they also began to share them with their friends in other sections of organic chemistry. I then decided to make the videos available to the other sections of CHEM 221. So in total my videos were watched by approximately 80 students last semester. At the end of the semester students wanted to know which section of CHEM 222 I was teaching so they could make sure to stay in the sections with the videos. I told them that there may not be videos. This statement actually caused several students to beg and plead for me to continue making videos for CHEM 222. I was inundated by requests from students that were not even in my current section for me to continue the videos. I have never had students petition so strongly for anything like this (other than for a passing grade).

As part of the next iteration of the course I plan to use the quiz feature in Moodle to track student understanding of the videos/lecture material and to better link homework problems with the lectures.

Overall I think this has been a great experience for me and my students. I plan on flipping CHEM 222 and making the videos accessible to all organic chemistry students.

This is an outstanding example of the transformative possibilities for teaching and learning made possible by the smart application of technology to pedagogy. In upcoming posts we’ll present other projects embracing aspects of the flipped model, include Jennifer Johnson-Cooper‘s Beginning Chinese I (CHIN 101) and the team-taught course by John Richardson and Jim Hebda, Biochemical Metabolism (CHEM 352).

Scenes from a Workshop

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The 2015 Mellon Digital Pedagogy Workshop was held this past Saturday, and the participants enjoyed stimulating presentations and conversations about their projects. Fourteen grantees attended; there were four showcase demonstrations of completed (or nearly completed) projects, and six breakout sessions for attendees to choose from. We’ll be blogging a lot more of the specifics in the days to come, but for now, here are a few pictures from the proceedings.

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Gathering in the Library Digital Commons prior to getting started.

 

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Andy Carr describes how he “flipped” his organic chemistry class to improve student learning outcomes.

 

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Jim Hebda explains how he and John Richardson have transformed their Biochemistry class by using tablets to create presentations, then projecting and annotating them during class and saving the files with voice narration for students to watch and listen to again later.

 

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Discussing textual and video annotations during a breakout session in Abell 104

 

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A breakout session on collaborative student learning spaces

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We continue the conversation with a working lunch.

“Nota Bene”–Collaborative Digital Annotation

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At tomorrow’s Mellon Digital Pedagogy Workshop there will be several breakout sessions on themes shared among grantee projects. We’ll be blogging about those over the coming days and sharing insights and perspectives.

One of the shared themes is “collaborative digital annotation.” Several grantees, including Dan Dominick, Elena Olive’, and Kirk Everist, have projects in which students mark up and comment upon digital documents, including texts, images, audio, and video. What is that and why might you be interested? Actually, we did a presentation on this topic last fall at a Johnson Center luncheon, so I’ll reprise those remarks here to provide some background on the subject of annotation.

You are no doubt familiar with marking up things that we read in print form…underlining, highlighting, writing notes and comments in the margins of books and papers, or special symbols and doodles that signify something important about what we’ve read. This is nothing new…readers have been marking up texts ever since, well, there have been texts. For example, in this brief video classicist Gregory Nagy describes the annotation of manuscripts in the ancient era with notes (scholion) and marginal references (hypomnema):

 

After the emergence of print and the explosion of books in Europe in the early modern period, the practice of marginalia flourished as an art form. Literary historians tell us that the golden age of marginalia lasted from roughly 1700 to 1820, and that it was not unusual for people to mark up books for one another as gifts. The English poet and literary figure Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) even published several volumes of his marginalia (and apparently coined the term itself).

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More recently, the American author David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) was renowned for marking up books in his library. For example, here is an image from his copy of Don Delillo’s Ratner’s Star (click on image to make it larger):

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Today, of course, more and more of our (formerly print) documents are in digitized formats…narratives, essays, electronics books and journals, lab reports, legal briefs, play scripts, musical scores, computer code, diagrams, drawings, sketches, photographs, maps, etc. And of course there are increasing amounts of digitized audio and video material.

So the question is, are there ways to annotate these digitized documents in a way analogous to the marking up of books and manuscripts in the past? Can we make digital annotations in the context of the original document, using multiple forms of media, to which other readers, listeners. or viewers can respond, thus creating a dialogue or conversation? What we want is an arrangement in which the original content remains in the center of the online space, and comments, notes, and questions are connected to it at specific points…particular words, phrases, or sentences in a text, regions of an image, and timelines and frames of audio and video files. And this space should be a collaborative space in which scholars and students interact with one another’s annotations in the context of the original document.

The concept of collaborative annotation was actually part of the origin of the World Wide Web. Marc Andreessen, co-developer of Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, recently recalled what he was thinking back in the early ’90s:

Only a handful of people know that the big missing feature from the web browser – the feature that was supposed to be in from the start but didn’t make it – is the ability to annotate any page on the Internet with commentary and additional information.

Back in 1993, when Eric Bina and I were first building Mosaic, it seemed obvious to us that users would want to annotate all text on the web – our idea was that each web page would be a launchpad for insight and debate about its own contents. So we built a feature called “group annotations” right into the browser – and it worked great – all users could comment on any page and discussions quickly ensued. Unfortunately, our implementation at that time required a server to host all the annotations, and we didn’t have the time to properly build that server, which would obviously have had to scale to enormous size. And so we dropped the entire feature.

I often wonder how the Internet would have turned out differently if users had been able to annotate everything – to add new layers of knowledge to all knowledge, on and on, ad infinitum.

And Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, reflected back on the origin of the PageRank algorithm, the heart of Google’s search engine:

It wasn’t that we intended to build a search engine. We built a ranking system to deal with annotations. We wanted to annotate the web – build a system so that after you’d viewed a page you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it. But how do you decide who gets to annotate Yahoo? We needed to figure out how to choose which annotations people should look at, which meant that we needed to figure out which other sites contained comments we should classify as authoritative. Hence PageRank.

Only later did we realize that PageRank was much more useful for search than for annotation…

Over the last two decades, any number of annotation tools and platforms have been developed to try to realize this earlier vision of Andreessen and Page, with somewhat limited success. Projects such as Annotations at Harvard and the Hyperstudio Digital Humanities Lab at MIT are working to develop tools and standards for use in scholarly annotation projects. Some of the tools we have recommended and/or are looking at include:

Several faculty, including the grantees mentioned above, are experimenting with Classroom Salon, with promising results so far. They will be sharing their experiences here so that we can all learn from them. In addition, Brett and Mo are both users of Diigo to collect and annotate web-based content, so we’ll probably do a post on that at some point.

Finally, the W3C, the international body responsible for determine the protocols that make the Web work, has just established the W3C Web Annotation Working Group. Their goal is to develop a common set of standards for annotating on the web. According to the group,

Traditional annotations are marginalia, errata, and highlights in printed books, maps, picture, and other physical media. Web annotations are an attempt to recreate and extend that functionality as a new layer of interactivity and linking on top of the Web. It will allow anyone to annotate anything anywhere, be it a web page, an ebook, a video, an image, an audio stream, or data in raw or visualized form. Web annotations can be linked, shared between services, tracked back to their origins, searched and discovered, and stored wherever the author wishes; the vision is for a decentralized and open annotation infrastructure.

So we look forward to ongoing developments and improvements that will become available for us to enhance scholarship and the engagement of students with content of every kind.

Webinar–Teaching and Researching with Scalar

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We’ve recently been providing information on the digital publishing tool Scalar here on the blog and at Johnson Center luncheons. Now comes word that HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory) will host a free (registration required) webinar introducing Scalar on Wednesday, April 8, from 2:00 to 3:15 pm Austin College time. From the website:

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This workshop will serve as an introduction to Scalar, a free, open-source authoring and publishing platform designed for scholars writing media-rich, long-form, born-digital scholarship. Developed by the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture at the University of Southern California, Scalar allows scholars to assemble media from multiple sources and juxtapose that media with their own writing in a variety of ways; to annotate video, audio, images, source code, and text using the platform’s build-in media annotation tools; and to structure essay- and book-length works in ways that take advantage of the unique capabilities of digital writing, including nested, recursive, and non-linear formats.

This workshop will cover basic features of the platform, including a review of existing Scalar books and a hands-on introduction to paths, tags, annotations, and importing media, and then move on to more advanced topics including the effective use of visualizations, annotating with media, and a primer on customizing appearances in Scalar.

Tell Me a (Digital) Story

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DigstoryProcessAt yesterday’s Johnson Center luncheon we discussed digital storytelling and also took a look at Scalar, a “free, open source authoring and publishing platform that’s designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form, born-digital scholarship online.” More specifically, we thought about how digital stories could be further enriched by being situated in an interactive context such Scalar.

The most common form of digital storytelling produces a video of three to five minutes in length (or perhaps somewhat longer), consisting of a voice-over narration of a sequence of images or slides or short motion clips, with transitions, perhaps accompanied by a musical soundtrack. Most often these stories are produced with programs such as Windows MovieMaker and Apple’s iMovie. Effective stories require careful attention to narrative arc, voice, point of view, tempo, audience, storyboarding, and other elements of vocal, textual, and visual communication.

A culture and practice for digital storytelling has developed at Austin College, particular among students participating in travel abroad programs such as the Go Fellow and JanTerm study trips. A good number of the stories produced in the last several years can be found on the AC YouTube site; look under “Playlists,” for example, to see Go Fellows digital stories for 2014, 2013, 2012, and earlier.

An excellent resource for digital storytelling ideas is the website, Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling at the University of Houston. You might check out their “7 Elements of Digital Storytelling” as well as “8 Steps to Great Digital Storytelling,” for starters. There is a helpful section on tools and software, and a gallery of digital stories covering a wide range of topics. Another helpful site for resources is the Digital Storytelling Library Guide at Mercy College.

Specific tutorials guides that I would recommend include Making a Digital Story in iMovie ’11 and Digital Story Production Using Windows Movie Maker.

Several of our Mellon Digital Pedagogy projects, such as those of Elena Olive’, Julie Hempel and Terry Hoops, and Kirk Everist, involve aspects of digital storytelling. We look forward to learning more from them about the creative uses of digital storytelling and publishing in their classes. In the meantime, if you’d like help with a project of your own, just let us know, and we’ll be happy to help.

Cool Tools–Scalar and Omeka

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DP@AC is happy to offer AC faculty the opportunity to experiment with two powerful new tools for digital scholarship and pedagogy.

Scalar is a digital publishing platform created by the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, based at USC. According to the developers,

Scalar is a free, open source publishing platform that’s designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form, born-digital scholarship online. Scalar enables users to assemble media from multiple sources and juxtapose them with their own writing in a variety of ways, with minimal technical expertise required. Scalar also gives authors tools to structure essay- and book-length works in ways that take advantage of the unique capabilities of digital writing, including nested, recursive, and non-linear formats. The platform also supports collaborative authoring and reader commentary and annotation.

Here’s a quick video introduction (also, for a showcase of projects authored with Scalar, go here):

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Omeka is also a web-based digital publishing platform. Developed by the Roy Rosenweig Center for History and New Media, Omeka is particularly designed for publishing collections and galleries of digital media in an open-access environment.

Omeka is a next-generation web publishing platform for museums, historical societies, scholars, enthusiasts, and educators. Omeka provides cultural institutions and individuals with easy-to-use software for publishing collections and creating attractive, standards-based, interoperable online exhibits. Free and open-source, Omeka is designed to satisfy the needs of institutions that lack technical staffs and large budgets. Bringing Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to historical and cultural websites, Omeka fosters the kind of user interaction and participation that is central to the mission of public scholarship and education.

Religious Studies professor Ivette Vargas-O’Bryan and her students and other partners utilized Omeka to create the acclaimed project, “Mapping Cultures,” a Mellon-funded digital humanities project on Tibetan cultures and cultural preservation.

Again, here’s a video trailer, and a link to a showcase of Omeka projects:

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If you’re interested and would like to learn more, just let us know…we can do individual consultations or small workshops as desired.

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