Interesting post on the Digital Natives blog about backchannels and class participation.
Monthly Archive for May, 2008
Alan Charles Kors has a deeply thoughtful and provocative critique of higher education in the US today. I challenge you to read it. (If you can’t get to it via the link above, let me know and we’ll try something else.)
Edit: Gardner points out that this article is a reprint from a special issue of The New Criterion on education.
Foreign Policy magazine has just published its second annual list of the world’s 100 top intellectuals. How many are you familiar with?
(Thanks to the Chronicle for this.)
This post is about another question that I’ve been considering for nearly six months. It’s actually come up in three different contexts, first the UMW Teaching Center, second the Economics Education Research group, and most recently the FSEM Workshop. I guess it’s time to make my thoughts public and see what we can do to make them operational.
One of the great pleasures I’ve enjoyed over the last three years I’ve been blogging is the opportunity to listen to and participate in high level intellectual discussions on teaching and learning by very bright members of the academy. I alluded to these in my previous post. A key element of the UMW Teaching Center should be to host similar discussions among UMW faculty. Discussions can, of course, be conducted in a face-to-face venue, but past experience at UMW has shown that these have only limited staying power. What we need is continuing discussion.
So here is my question: How might one design an online environment to support and facilitate a serious intellectual conversation among faculty across the internet, most of whom have little experience with instructional technology? The environment should have several characteristics:
• It should be easy to learn and use; participants should be able to tune in and tune out at their leisure, much like Twitter.
• It should record everything so that when participants tune in, they can quickly and easily get up to speed on the current conversation thread. This is also like Twitter.
• Ideally, it should push the content to participants, rather than making them go to the content. This suggests asking participants to use a feedreader. The problem with web-based feedreaders, such as googlereader or bloglines, is that they require participants to go to the website. As straightforward as this sounds to the Web2.0 savvy, faculty with little experience using social software will perceive this as a significant hurdle, and for many this will keep them from participating. Trust me on this. One way around this would be to recommend a desktop-based feedreader like SharpReader, which notifies users when they have new feeds. Would there be a way for email to notify participants who don’t use a desktop-feedreader? If so, we could avoid feedreaders entirely, which would make the system simpler, and therefore more likely to be used by the faculty at large.
• The environment should be a one stop shop, where all contributions to the conversation (e.g. posts and comments) should show up. While participants could subscribe to multiple blog feeds of those who are posting, for the reasons outlined above, this would be an additional and unnecessary hurdle.
• The environment should support different conversation threads, perhaps through categories or tags.
• It should enable participants to redirect or forward posts from other online conversations to show up in this environment. Ideally, it should allow content providers to write on their own blogs and have those posts show up in the online environment.
• It should enable participants to link to outside static resources, such as podcasts or videos of conference presentations. Ideally, these should probably be organized separately from the conversation threads.
At present, I’m thinking that this type of environment could be constructed using a WordPress Multi-User platform. We would need a small core of contributors who would commit to providing enough content to keep other faculty interested enough to follow along and hopefully more actively participate. Those contributors would have author privileges on the blog, and there would need to be an easy way for anyone who wanted to contribute to ask for those privileges. A couple of Jim Groom’s recent posts (here and here) suggest that these ideas may not be science fiction.
What do you think?
Over the last six months, I have several times mentioned the plans for our new Teaching Center at UMW. Faculty and staff have been asked to provide input into the planning process, and we have been told that this input will be taken seriously. Very well. This post is the first of several in which I lay out my ideas for the Center and its programs.
This year we will conduct a nationwide search for a director for the center. It seems to me that while we don’t want to tie the hands of the director, our preliminary plans for the center and its programs can be a strong recruiting tool to get the best possible candidate in the sense that what we plan will signal our seriousness, our commitment to liberal teaching and learning, and our interest in innovative teaching for the 21st Century.
The mission of the teaching center should be advocacy of a culture of teaching innovation at the university. The Center shouldn’t only have an internal focus (improved teaching at UMW), but an external one as well. This external focus should involve contributing to the broader conversation on teaching and learning in higher education nationally and internationally.
We have at least one core group of faculty/staff already doing this: members and affiliates of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (DTLT). Under the able leadership of Gardner Campbell and more recently Martha Burtis, this group attends conferences and present papers at.venues such as the Educause Learning Initiative, the New Media Consortium, and NITLE. Participants include Jim Groom, Charlotte Jones, Jeff McClurken, Angela Gosetti-MurrayJohn, Patrick Gosetti-MurrayJohn, Andy Rush, Jerry Slezak and Michael Willets. I am not trying to leave anyone out—these are just the individuals I know have taken an active role. Perhaps more importantly, these individuals participate in the ongoing conversation streams around these and similar organizations. Note that I have not identified this group because I think that technology is a silver bullet. (More on this point in a later post.) Rather, it is this group at UMW where the most interesting and profound conversations on pedagogy have occurred over the last five years at least the ones that I’m aware of.
In my view, the new Teaching Center shouldn’t be conceived primarily as a department offering programs, but rather as a focus for building and nurturing intellectual community on teaching and learning in higher education. It should promote a culture of teaching as a serious rigorous intellectual endeavor. UMW has a number of existing initiatives, the Faculty Academy, the FSEM Summer Workshop, and the UMW Digital Initiatives Project, which can serve as models for this.
There exist important national cross-disciplinary communities (such as the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and Project Kaleidoscope), as well as the various discipline-specific teaching communities where important work is being done. The new Teaching Center should tap into these communities and indeed contribute to the conversations they foster. (N.B. UMW has been a member of Educause for several years, and in the last two have joined the NMC and NITLE.) These conversations include both technical questions (e.g. How to conduct an effective class discussion? What types of writing assignments can first year students reasonably be expected to do?) and also broader ones (e.g. The continued relevance of liberal education, How to educate undergraduates for the 21st century).
I wouldn’t be surprised if there were other individuals (e.g. in the Writing Program or Speaking Program) or initiatives whose work should also be incorporated in the new Teaching Center. Again, I am not trying to exclude, but rather simply mention those individuals and programs I already know of that fit this vision.
Sometimes progress comes where you least expect it. Checking my twitter feed this morning, I noticed several tweets from someone I didn’t recognize. I clicked on the new tweeter, one Chris Jobling, and discovered that he teaches at the Swansea University in Wales. I thought I only knew one person at Swansea, Paul Latreille, who I met in conjunction with the Developments in Economics Education Conference in Cambridge (UK) last fall.
I went to Chris’ blog site (listed on his twitter profile page), and discovered that he is a long time blogger. In a recent post, he writes:
Swansea University, where I work, has quietly established a WordPress blogging system that anyone who has a University login can use to create a blog.
At the DEE Conference, I gave a presentation on using social software in teaching economics. I pointed out that the presentation was constructed on our homemade umwblogs system, and spent a fair amount of time talking to Paul about umwblogs.
Could my conversation have catalyzed Swansea’s adoption of a similar in-house WordPress blogging system? I wonder.
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