Gardner Campell: The discussion is starting with academic publishing and the wikipedia entry for it and its history. We are constantly in the process of academic publishing, but it all disappears: graded paper, graded exams, and then it all goes away. It's all invisible and then lost.
Exploration of the web and how it can transform education lead away from course management systems and toward blogs. Blogs are simple, built for the web, native to the web, easy to create templates, rapid development of proofs of concept. The experiment of using blogs to publish was transformative of teaching, learning, and relationships between everyone in the Campbell's course.
James Groom: Blogs - a syndication-oriented architecture: anything in the platoform can be shared and republished easily (okay, nothing new there, but I like the terms he is using). To include a post from the student's blog into the class, just use a tag that is specific to the course. That pulls it into a course-oriented portal and links back to their original work. They are using WordPress multi-user and the site-wide tag plugin, which creates a feed from any site-wide tag across the whole platform (similar to what we're doing). The course portal also lets students blog in other environments as long as they share their RSS feed.
[I think the social ratings element that Cole and Scott tried in Spring 2008 would add a lot to this discussion.]
Students using the system for ePortfolios as a continuous development system - claiming the work they are doing as their own intellectual property instead of just something they are doing for a class. Their system is friendly to having students buy their own domain and remap it to the UMW system -- again, this is related to feelings of ownership and being able to control your own materials instead of being locked into UMW's system.
Example: Eighteenth-Century Audio - students make audio recordings of poetry from the eighteenth century. This is a top Google hit and has contributed this content to the public. It has engaged students with the public at large.
Back to Campbell: One major element of the transformation was that the synthesis that he asked them to write at the end of the semester was not just a synthesis of their own work -- students synthesized the whole class discussion and used links to other blog posts as references. This is the first time that happened. This can be a little nerve-wracking because faculty who are blogging may be followed from semester to semester, even after the original course is over. The learning community can transcend the boundaries of a course when it is embraced by both faculty and students.
Privacy and Controversial Content: Students need to embrace their public writing and understand that the content will be indexed and live forever. FERPA concerns: Students can adopt user names if they don't want to be public. The faculty should honor the concerns that students express [Seems like this should be something that is concerned in the syllabus of English and Comm courses and all others that have blogging assignments, similar to ADA disclaimers.] Students can also password protect posts (although this can impact automated aggregation systems).
Good point: people are not typically going to leave college and keep using BlackBoard or ANGEL, but they could learn to become public researchers and writers.
Our standard can't be "no risk at all" since that would lead to a barren system. The trump card to this are those examples of student-public engagement. For example, a student posted that he/she was having problems directing a play and got a comment on that post by the playwright, who said that he had problems writing that scene as well.
Campbell says that he still uses BlackBoard for grading, but not much else. Faculty need to select the tools that are the best for the way they want to teach and not feel guilty about it. Portability, flexibility, and power are more important to faculty than using a monolithic system. Avoid clunky work-arounds and both the faculty and students can use the tool transparency and as it was built to be used (i.e. write in a blog since it was meant for writing). This doesn't replace grading or quizzing functions. Also, scaling assessment can be a problem.
Overall, this was a good session. We're working in this space as well, but it was interesting to hear additional perspectives. Campbell could be a good person to interview or bring in for a discussion.
Exploration of the web and how it can transform education lead away from course management systems and toward blogs. Blogs are simple, built for the web, native to the web, easy to create templates, rapid development of proofs of concept. The experiment of using blogs to publish was transformative of teaching, learning, and relationships between everyone in the Campbell's course.
James Groom: Blogs - a syndication-oriented architecture: anything in the platoform can be shared and republished easily (okay, nothing new there, but I like the terms he is using). To include a post from the student's blog into the class, just use a tag that is specific to the course. That pulls it into a course-oriented portal and links back to their original work. They are using WordPress multi-user and the site-wide tag plugin, which creates a feed from any site-wide tag across the whole platform (similar to what we're doing). The course portal also lets students blog in other environments as long as they share their RSS feed.
[I think the social ratings element that Cole and Scott tried in Spring 2008 would add a lot to this discussion.]
Students using the system for ePortfolios as a continuous development system - claiming the work they are doing as their own intellectual property instead of just something they are doing for a class. Their system is friendly to having students buy their own domain and remap it to the UMW system -- again, this is related to feelings of ownership and being able to control your own materials instead of being locked into UMW's system.
Example: Eighteenth-Century Audio - students make audio recordings of poetry from the eighteenth century. This is a top Google hit and has contributed this content to the public. It has engaged students with the public at large.
Back to Campbell: One major element of the transformation was that the synthesis that he asked them to write at the end of the semester was not just a synthesis of their own work -- students synthesized the whole class discussion and used links to other blog posts as references. This is the first time that happened. This can be a little nerve-wracking because faculty who are blogging may be followed from semester to semester, even after the original course is over. The learning community can transcend the boundaries of a course when it is embraced by both faculty and students.
Privacy and Controversial Content: Students need to embrace their public writing and understand that the content will be indexed and live forever. FERPA concerns: Students can adopt user names if they don't want to be public. The faculty should honor the concerns that students express [Seems like this should be something that is concerned in the syllabus of English and Comm courses and all others that have blogging assignments, similar to ADA disclaimers.] Students can also password protect posts (although this can impact automated aggregation systems).
Good point: people are not typically going to leave college and keep using BlackBoard or ANGEL, but they could learn to become public researchers and writers.
Our standard can't be "no risk at all" since that would lead to a barren system. The trump card to this are those examples of student-public engagement. For example, a student posted that he/she was having problems directing a play and got a comment on that post by the playwright, who said that he had problems writing that scene as well.
Campbell says that he still uses BlackBoard for grading, but not much else. Faculty need to select the tools that are the best for the way they want to teach and not feel guilty about it. Portability, flexibility, and power are more important to faculty than using a monolithic system. Avoid clunky work-arounds and both the faculty and students can use the tool transparency and as it was built to be used (i.e. write in a blog since it was meant for writing). This doesn't replace grading or quizzing functions. Also, scaling assessment can be a problem.
Overall, this was a good session. We're working in this space as well, but it was interesting to hear additional perspectives. Campbell could be a good person to interview or bring in for a discussion.
Leave a comment