Here I am, back from ELI 2010 feeling ready to kick it up a notch. It's always good to see what other people are doing at other institutions and have good conversations. As usual, I find the time between sessions and the small group conversations I have at conferences more valuable than the actual sessions. Blogmeisters at other institutions and I got to share stories, and I met up with some people I am starting to forge relationships with from other institutions.
One thread that I noticed in at least three of the sessions I attended was the connection between all this open content (as in freely available to consume) we are asking students to produce and the library archivists. Student's are creating tons of content about their time at the University. How do we preserve this? I have talked to PSU ITS's Digital Libraries Technologies about a electronic archive project they are working on. Prehaps it is time to talk to them again about making it easy for students, faculty, and staff to submit their blogs to the archives.
In one case, University of Oregon has a unique learning experience in which students study documents from U of O students in the past, and are also asked to reflect on their experiences on campus. They created a multi-author blog site where anyone can post short non-fiction narratives that take place on or around campus. At the end of the class, the students donate their work to the university archives and learn about the donation process, and other related issues such as ownership of work, anonymity, and identity. The class was tied together by a facebook group, as well as living together in the same residence hall. All in all an interesting model that echoes in some ways what Chris Long is doing with his Digital Dialogue multi-class site or what Cole and Scott are doing in their CI 597 class. This is a new emergent model, I feel. Multi-authored websites, in which students build a shared document. Heather Briston from Univeristy of Oregon put it this way: students needs to think of what they are doing as "contribution to knowledge instead of class work."
In light of this talk about archiving the history being recorded in student's blogs, I wonder how it changes things to think of what students are doing in their blogs as simply recording short non-fictions that describe their learning.
Throughout the conference I observed what seemed to me to be an increased (over last year) polarization between those that think Web 2.0 tools are the future of education and those think Web 2.0 should not be allowed anywhere near a classroom. The theme of the conference was "Learning Environments for a Web 2.0 World". We are all living in a Web 2.0 world. To ignore this fact in the classroom makes very little sense to me. The world is being reshaped and nature of knowledge creation and communication is changing. Keeping classrooms rooted in a pre-electronic age does not serve the students. But that's my trip. I'll maybe try to write more to justify this position at a later date. But as for the conference, I'll just say that I what I observed was a small but vocal minority that seemed offended by the theme of this conference. Not sure why I am mentioning it other than I am
interested to see how this trend continues.
Some other random notes from the conference:
Google Moderator - The keynote sessions used Google moderator. This was my first time using it at an actual event. It has a slick interface. I like the fact the new questions are presented to you, one at a time, in a "here are your unread questions" fashion. I like that it has a yes, no, or skip option for each question. I don't like that it doesn't allow you to comment on the questions, but that might be an advantage to those that afraid people will be more engaged in the discussion happening on the question tool than what is happening on stage.
Data Visualization for rhetorical analysis - using word trees and tag clouds generated by a computer can quickly aid in rhetorical analysis. Running George W. Bush's 2003 State of the Union through a tag cloud and word tree quickly shows how George Bush connected word like Hussein and America to other words. Doing this on the fly in class makes learning concepts so much easier as before it was a long arduous process, counting words and connecting words. More info: http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/ and http://www.thedigitalrhetorician.com/
http://www.criticalcommons.org/ - Site that offers guidance of fair use, has media clips that being presented under fair use, and serves as a showcase for inventive uses of multimedia as scholarship.
The presentation on Purdue's Hotseat (http://www.itap.purdue.edu/tlt/hotseat/) was very good. In my view, hotseat takes the strengths of open social networks like twitter and facebook and builds on them to include some of those features that that make classroom management easier - class lists, institutional identity, etc. Too bad Purdue is not making this software available, but the building of tools on top of existing services is a model that we should be looking at more closely at PSU, IMHO.
VCU blogs - http://blog.vcu.edu/ - another edublogging platform running Movable Type.
A simple exercise in front of one session showed how all of the attendees use many social web tools everyday at work and in personal life, but very few use them in class.
Overall, I feel that we are just on the tip of the next movement forward. Blogging and other digital publishing is being augmented by social networking, and we been seeing the effects of this for the past several years. But now we are seeing value of shared authorship and openness. These were the topics, IMHO, pushing education practice forward, and also not surprisingly, the ones met with the most questioning. I know that this semester more professors at PSU are adopting the ideas expressed by Chris Long's "Pedagogy of Blogging". I know PSU will have some interesting stories to share next year.
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