Process, Product and Presentation

I often try to think of ways of reducing complex situations to simpler ones, for the purpose of explanation, management and support. The danger in this, of course, is that something complicated, with a lot of connections, forces and combinations of underlying technologies IS really complicated. So, eventually, someone has to deal with the fact the situation is not simple in order to adequately support it.

With that caveat, I think that a student's educational experience in a course can be distilled to three things:

1. The process of learning. The interaction between teacher and student, student and the rest of the world, and interactions within the student themselves.

2. The visible end product or products of that process. These are created by the student or study group, and can be simple or elaborate. The goal of having some end-products in a student's portfolio seems an increasingly important tool in job searches. In addition, creating finished products as part of an educational activity, that we can be proud of, is a reward in itself. I still have some of the better term papers I wrote over 40 years ago, along with a few paintings, stashed in the basement. I get a pretty good feeling when I run across them.

3. The student's presentation of the created product to an intended audience. Verbal or formal presentations are becoming more common as part of the educational experience. (Many being PowerPoint shows!) This gets into the areas of public speaking, time management, and also affects design decisions at the beginning of project creation. These are sometimes ignored.

A little story about time management and design decisions. I let one of my student assistants work on her PowerPoint class presentation at work recently, as she was all caught up on her work with us. I noticed it was fairly complex, with 25 slides. I asked, and was allowed to, attend her oral class presentation. At the beginning, the faculty member reminded them that they only had 15 minutes to make their presentation. I divided 25 by 15, and knew she could not get through almost two slides in each minute! She rushed through her slides (I have never heard her speak so rapidly), and the professor gave her an extra 5 minutes at the end (standing up discreetly at one side, but looking slightly uncomfortable). Although the presentation went well, with very original content, it would have been a better experience for everyone if either the students were given more time to explain complex concepts, or if our student had somehow managed to leave out or distill important information. This may not be a typical presentation, but it was given by a senior in the top 5% of her class.

The presentation area is one where students can use more systematic support and training, in my opinion.

The extreme failed presentation, of course, is described in Edward Tufte's analysis of how an inadequate PowerPoint show probably contributed to NASA's Challenger disaster.

Naturally the three areas of Process, Product and Presentation are related to each other. By thinking of them as 3 different concepts, it may make it easier to support each one.

The second class wiki is first class!

Based on our experience with our first wiki, we feel our second was more successful. Some of the things we did differently:

1. Myself, Diane Creede, another instructional technologist, and Ashley Hanson, who provided research support for the class, attended the entire first class. This gave us a good overview of the course syllabus, goals, and expectations, in addition to understanding better how the wiki was integrated into the course. I demonstrated how the wiki and wikitalk worked for about 25 minutes, but also stressed that students were to see me for additional instruction before starting their wiki pages.

2. The faculty member assigned the wiki production 20% of the total grade. This provided incentive for the students to create a nice wiki. it was obvious to me that the students were motivated to do a good job.

3. There were about 20 students in the course. These were paired, and each pair was responsible for creating a wiki page or pages on their topic, which was selected from a list. Each pair of students came to see me for a private lesson to go over how to create and edit a wiki page, including the use of images. This was done BEFORE they did any significant work in their wiki pages. As projects' due dates were spaced at least a week apart, this made support easier, as I only had to meet with one pair of students every week. The individual lessons took about an hour.

Assuming all 20 students had to start and finish the wiki at the same time, a different approach might have been required. I feel this second lesson is indispensable, the first half-hour introduction the first day of class is not enough.

4. The wiki was private until almost complete, and only students, their faculty and our 3 staff could view it. Thus, students were not concerned about others seeing their unfinished and rough work. The class as a whole decided when to make the wiki public. I encouraged students to start writing right away in the wiki, and not copy-paste from Word documents.

5. I encouraged students to first create main sections, using the wikitalk == characters. The sections acted as an outline of top-level topics, that could then be filled in a non-linear manner, or by a different student. Each section has its own Edit button on the side, making the process easier.

6. I would look at the wiki every 10 days or so, and if I saw something that could obviously be made to look better, or could be coded better, I would email the students with suggestions on how to do it, without making the changes myself. The main problem encountered was in using images in MediaWiki: the formatting around the text for a second image can be skewed unless break code is inserted between text blocks. This was occasionally forgotten.

7. I told students it was OK to look at each other's code, copy/paste chunks of it in their own wiki page if they liked the formatting and did not know how to code it themselves, and then customize it to their own content and appearance. I see the wiki as a collaborative effort so I feel this is justified. The main goal of the wiki was not to learn how to code.

Credit for the wiki goes to Prof. Joseph Schroeder, who had the idea for using a wiki in his course, and to the students that did such a great job. I think that just a little extra effort on our own part paid off in big improvements.

Here is a link to the Neurobiology of Disease Wiki. Prof. Schroeder even created the professional-looking wiki logo shown above.

I learned about areas where MediaWiki software could use improvements for these types of projects:

1. Administration. It would be nice to have a GUI from which one could perform user administration (add/delete/password change), and granular page permissions (read/write/protect). The latter seems impossible unless one gets into the PHP config files.

2. Esthetic control. Students want more control over the wiki appearance. For font style and color, this now means getting into htlm code. It would be nice to have an easier way to do it. Students wanted more control over image placement, and background color, this is impossible with wikitalk.

I'm not sure how well MediaWiki would scale as "campus wide" wiki software without better administrative functionality, but it is certainly a good tool for a handful of individual projects. At this time I think we could administer about 30 individual wikis. Beyond that, one would need a full-time MediaWiki administrator.

We are looking forward to supporting our third class wiki, and I can't think of much we would do differently. One improvement will be to centralize our "Help" section. We now have 7 wikis, each with its own Help section! As we find better ways of organizing this information, it becomes impossible to update each one. In addition, when you click on Help in the sidebar, you navigate OUT of the page you need help in. It makes more sense to use the Help in our Instructional Technology Group Wiki, keeping it in the background as a separate web page for reference.

Ideas for "Learning 2.0"

I'm always scouring the web for ideas on how to clearly and best present 2.0 concepts. I know Bryan Alexander and others, many on my "blogroll", have done some great jobs, better than I could ever do. But still, one has to develop their own little presentation eventually, geared to the group and purpose at hand. As I used to advise others...."beg, borrow and steal". I say "steal" jokingly, of course. Lately you don't have to steal any more, almost everyone is generously giving their stuff away free, they just want a little credit. So, I will try to change that saying to "beg, borrow and credit". Hmmm, borrow and credit don't go too well together, have to work on that...

Surfing through Technorati last week, I was intrigued to see "Learning 2.0" half-way between Paris Hilton and Sanjaya in search hits. This led me to the PLCMC Learning 2.0 site.

This contains 23 Things, or small exercises, that the staff members of the Charlotte and Meckenburg County Public Library could do on the web to explore and expand their knowledge of the Internet and Web 2.0. The additional incentive was to complete all 23 items by a certain date in order to to receive a free mp3 player and qualify for a computer laptop drawing.

23 Things was developed for the library staff by Helene Blowers, the Technology Director for the library. I believe the inspiration came partially from Stephen Abram's article and the 43 Things Social Software site.

Here is the PLCMC Logo According to the 23 Things Blog other libraries are adopting the program, which has been released under a Creative Commons license, and customizing it to their own needs. Seems 23 Things is having quite a "ripple" effect, with 17 libraries signed up today. Some of the adaptations are pretty nice.

Our Temple Summer Institute, a week-long faculty training session, is coming up in June, and I'll be looking at all these sites for ideas on how we can "beg, borrow and credit". Our Instructional Technology Team is more concerned with curriculum support for specific courses, for faculty and students, but there is a lot of useful instructional information here.

Nice Wired Article on 23 Things. While the individual technologies and excersises are not new, the sequencing, combination, and process that combines them in a complete and finished self-training "package" is certainly unique, and I congratulate Helene on her innovative achievement.

Our first class wiki

In early 2006 our team was asked if we wanted to support the college's first course support wiki. An innovative faculty member, David Kyuman Kim, wanted his students to be able to "create their own web site", and showed us what he wanted and was inspired by: Social Justice Movements, a site for a class by Prof. Robin D. G. Kelley at Columbia University. This was a pretty clean-looking site, running on a heavily customized install of MediaWiki.

I admitted to Professor Kim I did not yet have the know-how to get this fancy, and demonstrated our first team wiki. He was satisfied with the appearance. He did ask if we could include a few images, and make it look "like a normal web site" as much as possible. I stressed that students' ability to create and edit content collaboratively was the wiki's strength, and not a great ability to control visual appearance. We had one organizational meeting before the semester started, with Prof. Kim, Diane Creede (an Instructional Technologist), myself, and Ashley Hanson, who was going to provide the Reference Librarian support. The final result of this collaborative effort was the Theorizing Race and Ethnicity Wiki

Lessons I learned in supporting this wiki were:

1. I wish I had, from the beginning, a better understanding of the role of the wiki in the overall course. I only read the portion of the syllabus referencing the wiki itself, and did not study the rest. Our only meeting with Prof. Kim was for an hour before the start of the semester. We scheduled more meetings but something always came up to postpone them. I did contact Prof. Kim and the class by email occasionally, to remind them we were willing to help as much as needed, so they knew we were available. But I would have enjoyed more involvement in the process.

(Solutions: Go to the entire first class to hear about the overall course requirements and get a "feel" for the course. Ask to go to some classes when the wiki is discussed or used. Try harder to schedule meetings with faculty to ensure their needs and expectations are understood and met.)

2. We only had an hour of class time to present, in person, both the wiki instructions (30 min) and the reference librarian instructions (30 min). Students were strongly encouraged to contact us later for further assitance, and I put as much information as possible in the wiki on-line help. However, I only heard from one student once.

I think the students could have benefited from more instruction on how to format text in a wiki (wikitalk). A single 30-minute introductory class is not enough. The large number of students in the course, forty-two, could have made support challenging. However, as they never contacted us, it was not a factor.

(Solutions: Make a requirement, or a strong suggestion, that at least one student from each group or team meet with wiki support staff to go over how to use it, at the beginning of their actual use. Course time is usually tightly scheduled, so this must be done on the student's own time.)

3. It seemed there were long periods when no work was done on the wiki. Then, all of a sudden, it would greatly expand in size. This seemed to happen twice, at mid-term and at the end of the semester, probably when due dates came up.

(Solution: Create a greater number of deadlines or "milestones" when material has to be submitted in the wiki. This, however, is up to the faculty. This can also be addressed in the solution to Observation 5.)

4. At deadline times, text was usually copied-pasted from Microsoft Word. Formatting such as bold, italic, and paragraph spacing is lost when this is done, and you end up with long run-on sentences without any breaks. In many cases, these were not fixed by students. This made the wiki very difficult to read, with a disorganized appearance. I ended up fixing all the problems myself, at the end of the semester.

(Solutions: Encourage writing directly in the wiki instead of copy-pasting from Word. Implement better instruction on how to format text in a wiki. There should be a student 'visual editor' for each group, responsible for appearance, not content. This editor needs to contact staff for assistance with wiki formatting. Staff needs to contact the editors if they see things are not right.)

5. A student contacted me twice, concerned that "everyone" outside the class could see his unfinished work, while he was working on the wiki. In both cases I suggested he contact Prof. Kim directly to express his concerns. I also told the student that the chance of someone stubling into the wiki, one of millions of web sites, is pretty slim. It's possible this aspect of the wiki: always open to readers, though only editable by students, may have been responsible for the large amount of "copy-paste", from finished Word documents, at deadline times.

(Solution: Make the wiki private initially, with a password needed for reading in addition to editing. However, as the goal is to eventually "publish" the results, do this when students feel comfortable, or at the end of the course.)

6. The wiki never did look like a "normal web site", though it has more variety than many wikis. All fomatting to make text more "stylish" was created by staff. It seemed that there was just enough time for students to insert text in the wiki, with no time left to learn to make it more esthetically pleasing. There was a possible misunderstanding with Prof. Kim, he may have expected us to do that. No images have yet been included. In addition, we did not know what types of images to look for.

(Solution: determine whose responsibility it is to make the wiki attractive. If it is the students', then allow for adequate training, support, and time. If our job, ensure we ask for enough guidance regarding text style and image selection. Better communication between our staff and faculty is needed in this area. After the course is completed, ask faculty if anything can be done to enhance its appearance. Obviously, content should be left alone. Insure faculty understand that it is technically difficult to make a wiki appear like a "normal" web site.)

7. I thought that Prof. Kim was satisfied with the work we and the students did, but things were so rushed at the end of the semester that I did not ask for more detailed feedback on the overall process.

(Solution: Request a meeting with faculty at the end of the project to go over, in more detail, their likes and dislikes, and their own "lessons learned")

As the instructional technologist that was in charge of primary support, I hold myself responsible for any problems that could have been resolved by better involvement or judgement. I think and hope I have learned my lessons. All in all, though, I think it turned out to be a nice wiki.

In a future post I'll describe how we are handling our second wiki at Conn. Thanks to Ward Cunningham for inventing the wiki. He prototyped it on HyperCard, and then ported it to the web in 1995. Ward named it after the Hawaiian word for fast or quick, and was inspired by the Honolulu Airport shuttle bus that runs between the airport's terminals. The fact that the wiki was invented over 10 years ago shows how some collaborative, participatory technologies that are now sometimes considered "Web 2.0" have been around for a long time, since "Web 1.0"

That first wiki, WikiWikiWeb, is still running!
To the left is its logo.

Wikis at Conn, Beginnings

In the fall of 2005 I thought it was time to get familiar with wiki technology for the purpose of course support. After evaluating a dozen hosted and locally installed solutions, I decided to go with MediaWiki for our first wikis. The reasons for this were, in no specific ranking:

1. A local install gave us more customization possibilites and software control. For some nice MediaWiki customizations, look at Beagle and Mozilla Developer Central. I wanted the potential to get away from the stock wiki look.
2. The college already had a student-managed wiki on another server, Connwiki, running on MediaWiki.
3. There is a very large user base in Wikipedia, which runs on MediaWiki.
4. There is a large base of developers and tweakers, with lots of helpful support information on-line. Many other sites run on MediaWiki.
5. MediaWiki is open-source, free, and non-proprietary.
6. Although relatively complex compared to some of the other wikis, I thought I would be competent enough to administer it after installation, with enough sources of help online if I needed assistance. There are also tech support staff here familiar with the technologies involved: HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL.
7. If the on-line help and local help was not enough to get me out of trouble, the underlying technologies were popular enough that it would not be hard to find and hire an expert to fix things.
8. I wanted some "under the hood" experience, for my own personal development.

I spent my Christmas vacation in December 2005 learning how to install and configure MediaWiki. I first reformatted my PowerBook hard drive into 2 partitions, put OSX and all my stuff on one, and installed OSX Server on the other. I could boot into either partition, and used the server side for wiki development. I imaged the server side with NetRestore after a basic system configuration, but before installing any software, so I could easily restore it to its pristine state if I messed up. I did end up having to restore and start fresh a few times, due not only to MediaWiki. I was also learning how to customize Apple's Weblog Server for a podcast server in the same partition. So, the restoration option came in real handy.

It took about 40 hours to teach myself how to install MediaWiki and customize it to the state I needed. I had little background in HTML, CSS, PHP, and MySQL, though I had some programming experience in Director's Lingo, which no-one seems to use much any more. I learned just enough of the technologies that MediaWiki runs on for the job at hand. I have to admit my experience was usually more of a "cookbook" approach than true understanding. Thankfully, there are enough "recipes" around, though spread out a bit.

My biggest concern, on top of having the wiki run reliably, was security. I did not want a hacker getting in and messing up our site. This concern proved to be justified, as looking at the web logs later I determined an average of two hacking intrusion attempts a day, for a considerable amount of time.

After a few successful installs on my PowerBook, I felt confident enough to install the production version on an older but reliable Mac G4 running OSX Server 10.4, and started our first wiki, for our Instructional Technology Team. The computer is automatically backed up every night, with a complete image of the hard drive created weekly. Our wikis are still running on this G4, but will be migrated to a new XServe this spring.

Can Academic Staff Learn Anything from Sports Coaches?

My daughter played competitive sports for many years. I feel she learned many lessons as a player that carry over to general life skills and strategies. Recently I became aware of lessons that athletic coaches can learn, and how these also carry over to leadership in other areas of life.

The December 2006 issue of Fastpitch Delivery, a softball trade journal published by the National Fastpitch Coaches Association (NFCA), has a good article where Jeff Janssen and Greg Dale interviewed some of college sports' top coaches to determine the secrets of their success. They discovered a new style of coaching they call "credible coaching" that focuses on developing solid relationships with athletes based on trust and respect. This is unlike the traditional style of coaching which used fear and intimidation to motivate athletes.

I think many of the characteristics of what they call "credible coaching" can carry over to team building and leadership in the real world. So here are a direct quotes from Jeff Janssen's article on Credible Coaching: "Coaching is about relationships....You have to create an environment of trust among your staff and athletes. Without trust, you have nothing. If you do have trust, you will be able to accomplish great things."

Janssen and Dale identified seven primary components associated with successful coaches. Credible coaches are:

1. Character based
They seek to do the right thing. They are honorable people with high ethical standards and great integrity. They tell the truth to their athletes and never manipulate or play mind games with them. They conduct themselves in a professional manner and take pride in representing their teams and athletes with class.

"A lot of our success in Duke basketball has to do with character. And at the heart of character is honesty and integrity" (Mike Krzyewski)

2. Competent
They have a thorough understanding of the strategies and fundamentals of the game. They know how to make the appropriate adjustments. They are highly inquisitive people who continually look for innovative and improved ways of doing things. Further, they understand that admitting their limitations and mistakes is actually a sign of strength, not weakness. Even though they are highly capable and often revered people, credible coaches tend to remain humble and keep their success in perspective.

"Sometimes the most important listening you do is the listening that comes after you've reached the top, after you've gotten very good and could be susceptible to the idea that you know everything." (Dan Gable)

3. Committed
Credible coaches are highly committed people. They create successful visions for their teams and are more than willing to put in the time required to make them happen. They have a true passion for sport and coaching which fuels their intense drive and enthusiasm. They also have incredible reserves of energy and resiliency which enables them to weather the inevitable storms of adversity.

4. Caring
Credible coaches care about their athletes as people. They sincerely want the best for their athletes in all aspects of their lives and are willing to help them in any way possible. They invest the time to get to know each of their athletes on a personal level, showing an interest in their athlete's families, friends, faith and future goals.

"I know if somebody really cares about me and is really fighting for me, I'll go through a wall for them. The same works in reverse. If somebody knows you don't care about him and aren't really fighting for him, then he won't go through the wall for you" (Mike Shanahan)

5. Confidence-builders
Credible coaches continually build their players' confidence. Credible coaches have a special knack for making people feel good about themselves, capable of achieving almost anything they set their minds to. The are demanding and set high standards, yet are patient enough to help athletes develop and improve. When athletes do fall short, they use a good balance of being challenging and supportive to get people get back on track.

"When people realize that someone has faith in them, productivity usually increases. We have a natural desire not to want to disappoint those who believe in us and trust us" (Tom Osborne)

6. Communicators
Credible coaches are excellent communicators. They are open, honest and direct when communicating with individuals and the team. They continually remind and refocus people on what they need to do to be successful. They seek to involve their athletes as much as possible and value the input they receive from them. They have the remarkable ability to truly listen to their athletes. They take the time to understand where people are coming from and are able to make decisions accordingly. Because of their ability to listen, credible coaches are often aware of concerns and conflicts, and proactively address them before they become major problems or distractions.

"You have to listen to develop meaningful relationships with people....You can't do that by talking. You do that by listening. What I have learned is, coaching is not all about me going into a locker room and telling them everything I know about basketball. It's a matter of knowing how they think and feel and what they want and what's important in their lives. Listening has allowed me to be a better coach" (Pat Summitt)

7. Consistent
Credible coaches develop a sound philosophy of coaching. This philosophy remains stable over time, but they are flexible enough to adapt to changing situations or personnel. They maintain a consistent approach to rules and standards for the team. They tend to be highly organized people who take their practice and game preparation very seriously.

I could not find the article on the NFCA web site, so I have taken the liberty of directly quoting relevant passages for the benefit of the non-softball world.

My opinion is that being a "credible coach" is a big, challenging task, and that it is hard to find a coach that scores high in all the above areas. Naturally, you also need talented players and support staff to be successful. The above principles only provide a successful path to reach a common goal, once you have that talent on your team.

Not all of these components may be relevant to leadership in academic settings, and most IS staff probably do not want clones of Pat Summitt or Mike Krzyzewski yelling at them from the sidelines. And, I'm sure that Pat Summitt teaches as much as she listens. The point, though, is that listening is very important to her.

However, some of the concepts Jeff Janssen and Greg Dale have found can be used by leaders in any field to improve the effectiveness of their teams. All levels of leadership, starting with the staff member that supervises one part-time student assistant, can benefit. It is perfectly justifiable to cherry-pick the components that resonate to individual situations.

One should note that not all good players make good coaches. I remember two players that helped a college win a national championship, and then graduated and made a mess of coaching a summer team of young girls. So, some of us may be happier and better suited to playing on the team than coaching from the sidelines.

A final thought is that in sports there are usually winners and losers. In academia, everyone can be successful, there do not have to be any "losers". Maybe that's one reason why a few slightly-jealous folks claim we "don't live in the real world"!

Education, Blogging and Branding

As we look forward to implementing blogging for the purpose of student curriculum assignments, we are deliberating whether to use a hosted service, such as Blogger, Edublogs, or WordPress.com, or installing, configuring and supporting our own institutional blog server. For this post, I will define a "student blog" as one created to meet the academic requirements of a specific course. And I will use Blogger as the example of a hosted service, though other good ones exist.

The pace of innovation and development is rapid in the blog server area. By using a hosted service we can "ride on the coat tails" of the constant improvements and added features of the service we use, reaping benefits with little additional work. With us hosting our own solution, we have to concern ourselves with never-ending upgrade procedures, migrating old blogs to the new server, etc. This is on top of all the work involved in setting up a secure and full-featured blogging server to beging with, backing it up, and maintaining it. It seems that if you have a critical mass of users, or anticipate one, this work can be justified.

However, what is the "tipping point" of users that makes it more sensible to use a hosted service? Assuming we had only a few classes interested in student blogs next semester, I am tending towards using a hosted service. A major downside to this may appear to be the lack of "branding" of the blog to the institution.

If a student blog is to remain private, with only the student(s) and faculty in the class and support staff seeing it, branding should not be an issue. If a student blog is intended to be a public blog with a "PR" slant to it, we would pass it on to College Relations, which uses a locally installed version of Movable Type. However, in most cases the primary purpose of a student blog is not to make our institution look good. If it does, so much the better, but pedagogical issues should not be shaped by publicity issues. Do we want someone asking a student to change a blog to make it look better on our public web site?

I have tried our slightly older installation of Movable Type, and find that Blogger is much easier and more fun to use. The usability aspect is a major one, I want technology to be as transparent as possible. As Will Richardson recently said: "I’m more and more finding myself without patience for tools that aren’t extremely easy and intuitive, no matter what they claim to offer." I find that faculty and students want and need this transparency in technology, without it few will use whatever technical solutions are offered. Personally, I like to get "under the hood" and tinker, but most people here just want to get in the car and drive. Because of this, I'm currently leaning towards Blogger instead of a local Movable Type, but am concerned about the "branding" issue.

Not sure excactly what "branding" meant, but knowing its importance to some people, I Googled "define branding", and came up with this:

"The process by which a commodity in the marketplace is known primarily for the image it projects rather than any actual quality."

"The process by which the true character and purpose of the company or organization is communicated."

"Is a promise, a pledge of quality. It is the essence of a product, including why it is great, and how it is better than all competiting products. It is an image. It is a combination of words and letters, symbols, and colors"

"The process of building a favorable image for a product or company that differentiates it, in the minds of prospects and end users, from other competitors."

"Selecting and blending tangible and intangible attributes to differentiate the product, service or corporation in an attractive, meaningful and compelling way."

It has become more and more apparent to me over the years that branding and PR are big factors in how an educational institution communicates with the outside world, so how important is branding in academic student blogs?

While finishing this post I ran across a timely video, where Glenna Ryan, formerly of Rensselaer Polytechnic University, talks about their admissions student blogging efforts:



The above was pulled from Dan Karleen's recent blog entries on Admissions Blogging.

It's obvious from this that "admissions blogs" are NOT the same as student academic blogs, they are shaped by totally different forces, and have a different purpose. However, we now get into the gray area of student blogs that were private for the purpose of an assignment, but because they are worth sharing, everyone later agrees should be made public.

If they are hosted, there is no college "brand" associated with them. If a public student blog has a little orange "B", does it make any difference in branding the institution? Should we go to the effort of eliminating the top Blogger bar in student blogs by customizing the html template? And what influence and how much control should non-pedagogical forces and non-instructional staff have on the content and style of a student's academic blog?

We will soon be facing those challenges, and it does not hurt to prepare some sensible answers and formulate policies. There are many factors influencing the choice of a local vs. hosted version of a weblog server, not just branding, and unfortunately politics can trump technology. There is no same best way for everyone, and we'll only be deciding what's best for our spring 2007 semester. There are currently too many rapid developments in this area to formulate long-term strategy. Our goal is to stay one step ahead, and keep a close eye on the future.

Although College Relations has supported a few "PR" student blogs, our Instructional Technology Team is new at supporting student academic blogging. I am both impressed and humbled by how far others have gone, such as MIT's Katie Livingston Vale (800k PDF), and Drexel University's Jean-Claude Bradley. Thankfully, we have a variety of good role models to guide and inspire us.

Web 2.0 day at Wesleyan! BarCampCONN?

Yesterday Bryan Alexander from NITLE came to Wesleyan University, and gave a full-day presentation on Web 2.0, I believe this is his SlideShare presentation, except for the title page of course:



About 40 instructional technologists and librarians from Connecticut College, Trinity College and Wesleyan University attended the full-day workshop. Bryan did a grea job presenting and linking together many concepts and processes in a rapidly-changing area. I don't know where he finds the energy for this, I'm usually out of gas after 90 minutes of teaching. The presentation was structured, but informal in that Bryan graciously allowed interruptions for comments or questions anytime. This worked better than a Q&A a the end, as we moved rapidly through many different Web 2.0 landscapes. Here is a link to the workshop wiki.

It was a day full of information, and probably started a lot of wheels spinning in the attendees' minds. My only regret was not asking Bryan, before the presentations, to explain the term "Long Tail" to the folks. It took me a while to figure out what it means, both socially and economically, and it might have helped others that don't know.

I spoke very briefly with Michael Roy, from Wesleyan, about a possible collaboration between our institutions to bring the first BarCamp to Connecticut next summer. This has been a fantasy of mine for a while, but I don't really have any ideas besides wouldn't it be neat! It obviously requires more than this, starting with it HAS to be successful, so "success" needs to be defined. What would be the goals of BarCampCONN (BarCampCT, or whatever), and why do it at all? After surfing through the post-analyses of a few BarCamps, I think it would be wiser to have a one-day the first time, as attendance often drops off the second day.

The first thing we would need, of course, is a cool logo, such as one of these:






Build an attractive logo and they will come? It reminds me of the early 70's when I was sailing on the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater. We'd sail from town to town with a bunch of musicians and environmentalists, have a festival, and make Stone Soup. We started with a big pot of boiling water on an open fire ashore, and put a clean stone in it. As people came by, they would throw different vegetables in the pot, with us keeping an eye on things. After a few hours we'd have a great soup for everyone to share, created communally. The soup would simmer and change throughout the day, as people came and went, added and ate different ingredients. Can an eye-catching logo be the cyber equivalent of the stone?

The Story of Stone Soup
Of course, we are not in a famine, we are all soldiers, and you can't buy a magic stone, you have to make one.

One reason to have a BarCampCONN would be that the "We is greater than the Me" (I'm borrowing this from someone else, but I forgot who!). There is something stimulating, reinvigorating and exciting about getting a bunch of people together to talk and do Web 2.0 stuff, and it seems safer than sky-diving. So, I'm going to try and go to one or two BarCamps this winter, and see what it's all about. Amsterdam or Paris would have been nice, but I missed them. Should I spend my team's entire remaining travel budget and put in a travel request to BarCamp Rome? Nah, it will be turned down, so I'll settle for something closer.

Thanks to Bryan and Wesleyan for a great day!

iPods for Audio Commentary, Media Commons

With our support, Prof. Michael Reder is using digitized audio for providing feedback to students in his writing course.
I ran into Susan Sipple's work which seems similar.

Here is a link to another site on Susan's work.
In Michael's case, he is also providing for students to comment on each other's writings, and the use of iPods and iTunes seems to make the process easier than using a computer and sound-editing software.
I have to admit, frankly, that I did not initially think much of Michael's use, it seemed a bit "gimmicky". It just shows how I have to overcome innate prejudices as to what is a worthwhile use of technology. Part of of my initial feelings were due to the fact I did not fully understand his rationale to this approach, so I have to do a better job at inquiry and understanding. I did talk to one student in his class, informally, she told me the technology was easy to understand and use, and that no-one had any problems with it, beyond minor issues they were able to figure out.
She thought the student>student feedback using verbal vs. written communciation was better, and preferred it. Michael comments on every student's papers, I believe, and each student comments on a few peers. We'll obviously need a full and systematic "debriefing" at the end of the course, Susan has done a good job at this it seems, and we will be inspired by her work.

I had posted directions on how to implement the recording/compression in our wiki. However, I find it much more useful, if I want students to learn something, to make a personal presentation. In this case, it was with the iPod, mic, and laptop connected to an LCD projector. Diane and I went to the class, and in 15 minutes showed them how to record to the iPod, import the recording to iTunes, compress it to AAC, and drag the compressed copy to the desktop. I had also printed out the on-line instructions for each student. They expressed satisfaction when I handed them out.

Michael emails his comments to the students, and they email their own feedback to each other. I was concerned about email size limitations, but the comments are not much longer than 5 min. each, so only about 1 MB in size. Our backup plan was to create a shared network folder for the class, with drop folders for each student, however this has not yet been necessary.

making Media Commons is something I plan to investigate.

"MediaCommons is, or rather will be, a new kind of media studies press for the digital age -- a network in which academics, students, and other interested members of the public can forge critical pathways through a mediated world and publish dynamically in a mediated environment.

making MediaCommons is a planning site through which we'll develop the possible directions this might take."

Educational Widgets?

I've been thinking lately if there are any widgets that would be useful in blogs dedicated to educational or pedagogical purposes.
This Posting finally got me to write. Seems there are office/business widgets, why not education-oriented ones?

I'm not talking about OSX dock widgets, but those viral-like critters starting to populate blog sidebars, among other realms.
I am purposely "widgeting out" (there is a less elegant term but I am not using it) my personal blog just for fun.
My favorites right now are the clock and the lava lamp.

So, if anyone knows about a widget designed mainly for pedagogical, curriculum support goals, I'd love to hear about it.
I will do the same.