Digital Pedagogy Metis in Online Discussion Forum Advice

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I’ve experimented for years with various online fora as tools for fostering student discussion beyond the classroom walls, with mixed success.  I’ve tried both optional and required assignments (certain numbers of posts and/or replies, etc.), with quantitative (points/grade) and qualitative (comments from me) evaluation schemes.  And I have tried them in a range of different kinds of media studies course, from topical surveys to upper-level seminars to skills-based production courses.  One thing I’ve realized is that the kind of practical advice Heather Van Mouwerik offers in her Inside Higher Ed piece, “Fostering an Active Online Discussion,” might be the most useful in terms of identifying and alleviating individual and group roadblocks to implementation.

For example, as a response to the deafening “crickets chirping” scenario she describes, Mouwerik suggests five practical guidelines for helping to nurture an online discussion forum, including being “the active participant you want your students to be” and redirecting any questions from students to the forum.  These tips clearly come from practical experience working with many course-based forums with her students.

Such metis – practical wisdom or prudence – is a crucial part of digital pedagogy today, especially when the technology behind each tool becomes less and less difficult to wrestle with.  You can learn the abstract theory of how to use this or that tool as well, but it is in its practical application in actual classrooms and/or with actual students that use of a particular tool shifts from an abstract exercise to a pedagogical practice.


Digital Pedagogy Metis in Online Discussion Forum Advice

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I’ve experimented for years with various online fora as tools for fostering student discussion beyond the classroom walls, with mixed success.  I’ve tried both optional and required assignments (certain numbers of posts and/or replies, etc.), with quantitative (points/grade) and qualitative (comments from me) evaluation schemes.  And I have tried them in a range of different kinds of media studies course, from topical surveys to upper-level seminars to skills-based production courses.  One thing I’ve realized is that the kind of practical advice Heather Van Mouwerik offers in her Inside Higher Ed piece, “Fostering an Active Online Discussion,” might be the most useful in terms of identifying and alleviating individual and group roadblocks to implementation.

For example, as a response to the deafening “crickets chirping” scenario she describes, Mouwerik suggests five practical guidelines for helping to nurture an online discussion forum, including being “the active participant you want your students to be” and redirecting any questions from students to the forum.  These tips clearly come from practical experience working with many course-based forums with her students.

Such metis – practical wisdom or prudence – is a crucial part of digital pedagogy today, especially when the technology behind each tool becomes less and less difficult to wrestle with.  You can learn the abstract theory of how to use this or that tool as well, but it is in its practical application in actual classrooms and/or with actual students that use of a particular tool shifts from an abstract exercise to a pedagogical practice.

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.

Student Blogging in PSYCH 101

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General Psychology (PSY 101) is a fun but difficult course to teach. As with most introductory courses, there is so much material to cover that you never get to present everything you’d like. I’ve incorporated weekly online discussions into my 101 courses since I began teaching them, with several objectives:

  • to get students to engage with content that I don’t have time to lecture about;
  • to expand on topics we discuss in class;
  • to provide a low-stakes opportunity to practice their writing; and
  • to get students who aren’t comfortable talking in class to share their perspectives with their classmates.

I originally used Moodle’s forum feature for a variety of reasons, including convenience, fears about the technical expertise required for other options, privacy concerns, and control over content. In my first semester at AC, an informal midterm evaluation revealed that 25% of the class considered the online discussions to be the worst part of the course, while only one student thought it was the best. I made a few small changes for the two sections of 101 I taught the following semester, but the midterm evaluation feedback was even worse, with 51% listing it as the worst aspect of class. The students largely perceived it as busy work because it didn’t directly correlate to material on exams.

After getting feedback from students about how they would improve the process, I decided to decrease the frequency of the assignments, increase the length of responses, offer choices in writing prompts, and select the topics myself. Around this same time I had several informal conversations with Brett Boessen about how he incorporates blogging into his courses. I figured if I was making changes, why not really try something brand new?

Now, on the first day of class, I explain the blogging assignments to my students and show them how to set up an account on WordPress.com. To reduce anxiety about the proper configuration of account settings, I created screencast videos (available here) to show students how to add me as an administrator to their blog, how to follow their classmates’ blogs, and how to manage their privacy settings (students have the option of making their blog public or open only to their classmates). Only a few students have needed help getting their blogs up and running, which has made the process much less hectic than I originally feared.

Students are required to make an introductory post, which provides some background about themselves and their interests regarding the class, and to post a comment on a classmate’s blog. Over the remainder of the semester, students are responsible for posting seven more times on their own blog and seven more comments on their classmates’ blogs. Every Monday, I post two prompts related to the content we either have just covered or will cover the coming week (for an example see here; for the complete series of prompts, see here), so there are always options for students.

The switch has been a moderate success in my eyes, both in terms of student response and my own impressions. The midterm evaluation comments this past year have been more positive. There were still a number of students who listed the blogs as their least favorite aspect of the class, but the comments were less negative (i.e., words like “annoyed” were used in place of “hate” and “despise”). Requiring longer responses is getting students to be somewhat more reflective and gives me a larger sample of their writing to give feedback on. The reduced number of submissions is also making the grading load more manageable.

One area that hasn’t improved like I’d hoped is the degree of interaction among students. While the posted comments are often a bit more thoughtful, extended conversations have been quite rare. While I continue to work on ways to get students to be more engaged with each other, I’m also working on generating traffic to their blogs from people outside of the class to provide students a wider forum to discuss their ideas. I’m contemplating partnering with 101 classes at other institutions to set up something like “pen pals,” though this idea isn’t fully formed yet and I’ll have to think about how to best make something like that work.

#TWP15–Teaching with WordPress

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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.

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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TxDHC

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.”

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