The Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium (LVEHC) is pleased to announce a day-long Oral History Workshop to be hosted at Lafayette College on May 24th, 2018.
Leading the workshop will be Brooke Bryan, Antioch College, who is Co-Director of the Oral History in the Liberal Arts Initiative. The workshop, which will include local panelists, will explore the definition of oral history and cover issues such as project planning, informed consent, data management and workflows. This event is open to anyone (librarians, educators, community members, etc.) who may want to pursue an oral history project related to the Lehigh Valley, and $250 stipends will be available for attendees who complete the workshop and a brief post-workshop survey.
Lora Taub-Pervizpour, Associate Dean for Digital Learning, will join other local practitioners on a panel addressing issues of planning and implementing oral history projects that engage digital pedagogies and archives. If you are interested in attending the workshop, please email LVEHC Mellon Grant Coordinator Kate Pitts (pittsk@lafayette.edu).
We’re sharing this brief update about some of the exciting things we’re collaborating on this semester.
Faculty Online Learning Cohort 2018 Begins!
The Digital Learning Team is gearing up to begin working with a new group of faculty for our fourth annual Spring faculty development program for online learning. Throughout the spring semester, the following faculty are developing online and blended courses, primarily in the humanities and arts:
Sharon Albert — Islamic Traditions
Greta Brubaker — Introduction to Digital Photography
Kelly Cannon — Copyright
Amy Corbin — Melodrama
Roberta Meek — Music and the Civil Rights Movement
Mark Stein — Frontiers in History
Tim Clarke (Instructional Technologist) is leading the Spring program, with Bill Feeney (Lecturer) and Jenna Azar (Instructional Designer). Also supporting the work is a group of Faculty Digital Fellows with past experience teaching online including Keri Colabroy, Susan Kahlenberg, Lanethea Mathews-Schultz, and Danielle Sanchez. We look forward to building on our strong foundation in online pedagogies for liberal arts learning and cultivating Muhlenberg’s intentional approach to human-centered, interactive, and experiential online learning.
Muhlenberg Faculty Develop Hybrid Course Initiatives with Teagle Foundation Grant
In 2015 Lafayette College, working in collaboration with LVAIC, was awarded a three-year grant from the Teagle Foundation. The primary goal of the grant was to build a network “of ‘Digital Faculty Fellows’ who will mentor each other and generate interest among colleagues to pursue hybrid course development opportunities that enrich the academic experience, while sharing costs and using classroom and laboratory facilities more efficiently.”
Over the course of the grant, there where 12 collaboration projects completed, consisting of 42 faculty members total from all six LVAIC institutions. Muhlenberg faculty from chemistry, education, and media and communication participated in collaborations funded through the Teagle grant and include:
Marsha Barr
Keri Colabroy
Kate Ranieri
Sally Richwine
Kim Rohrbach
John Sullivan
Lora Taub-Pervizpour
Sheri Young
To celebrate the conclusion of the grant, and to share the amazing work that was done by each group, we would like to invite you all to attend the final Teagle Sharing Symposium on March 22nd at Moravian College from 4-6:30pm. Light refreshments will be provided. Please register for the symposium by March 15th here: https://www.lvaic.org/event/lvaic-teagle-sharing-symposium/
One of the highlights of the initiative was opportunity to collaborate both within and across institutions and a recent report on lessons learned features faculty voices on the value of collaboration. Read the full report on lessons learned from the project here: http://www.sr.ithaka.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/SR-Report_Teagle_Faculty_Collaboration_Technology_Liberal_Arts_01292018.pdf
Center for Ethics and Digital Learning Team Up to Host Talk on Digital Redlining
On March 1, Muhlenberg welcomes Chris Gilliard, professor of English at Macomb Community College, for a presentation titled “Against Complicity: Surveillance, Education and Digital Redlining.” Chris will speakon issues of privacy, digital redlining, and the re-inventions of discriminatory practices through data mining and algorithmic decision-making, especially as these topics apply to college students. The talk is in Miller Forum at 7 p.m. and open to the public. This talk is co-sponsored by the media & communication department.
Bryn Mawr Blended Learning Conference Call for Proposals
Faculty, staff, and students engaged in blended learning (broadly defined to encompass any mix of face-to-face and online teaching and learning activity) may be interested in submitting proposals to share their work at the seventh annual Blended Learning in the Liberal Arts Conference at Bryn Mawr. The conference is May 23 – Thursday, May 24, 2018 at Bryn Mawr College. Please see the full call for proposals here: http://blendedlearning.blogs.brynmawr.edu/blended-learning-conference/ .
The Digital Learning Team is excited to share a new TechTalks format: video plus. We know that the standard TechTalks session at 8:30 a.m. isn’t feasible for many, and so this format combines a short video available for viewing at any time with a Twitter chat. Our first video plus session explores the opportunities to build and teach with digital collections using the Shared Shelf platform. The video for this session is an edited 10-minute version of a past Tech Talk with Susan Falciani and Lora Taub-Pervizpour. The video is below and the paired Twitter chat is on October 25 at 8 p.m. Join Susan, Lora, and members of the Digital Learning Team on Twitter for 45 minutes (or as long as you can), tweeting with the hashtag #bergcollects.
Video
Background
Muhlenberg is one of 42 small independent colleges around the country participating in the Council of Independent Colleges Consortium on Digital Resources. Funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the initiatives supports librarians, archivists, and faculty collaborating to advance and understand the uses of digital archives in liberal arts teaching and learning. Now in its third and final year, Muhlenberg has benefited greatly from participating in this consortial project.
The initiative provides participating institutions with three years of free access to Artstor’s Shared Shelf, a cloud-based asset management service that enables faculty and staff members across many disciplines and departments to organize and access documents, video collections, audio collections, and digital images. The availability of Shared Shelf enables institutions that lack the expertise, time, or software to build and manage digital collections on their own. During the grant period to date, Muhlenberg has built (or is currently building) eight collections, work that engages librarians, faculty, staff, and students in hands-on, experiential and integrative learning:
Historical Campus Photographs
Muhlenberg in the 40s Digital Stories
Navy V-12 and V-5 World War II Photograph Collection
Photographic History
Protest Artifacts
Robert C. Horn Papyri Collection
The Muhlenberg Papers
The Ray R. Brennen Collection
Among the many projects we have learned about from our CIC consortial partners, below are a few of the ones that stand out for their connections to faculty interests and educational activities at Muhlenberg:
A professor of marine biology at Martin Methodist College in Pulaski, Tennessee, has established an expansive marine biology digital collection of his own photographs from years of researching coral reefs in Key Largo, Red Sea, and Trinidad. The collections are infused into student learning in courses including General Biology for non-majors, Ecology, and Invertebrate Zoology.
At the University of Puget Sound, a Theater Arts Collection documents the process of campus productions from script to stage through set models, scene notes, costume renderings, production photographs, programs and posters. The collection archives this significant element of campus culture and provides faculty resources for introducing students to working with primary sources, for research on material culture, and for fostering visual literacy and multimodal composition.
At Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina, an English professor has developed The Textile Mill Memory Project and is developing a significant collection of digitized artifacts from the Robert Mercer Vance Collection of photographs, correspondence, clippings, and other items related to the Clinton and Lydia textile mills. Faculty in theater, history, and English are drawing on this collection in their teaching and students are contributing to it in a new course infusing oral history into documentary research.
In this video plus Tech Tuesday session, we invite faculty and staff to explore these resources, watch the video introduction to the Shared Shelf platform and Shared Shelf Commons. Explore the digital collections that Muhlenberg has already created and published to the Shared Shelf Commons, including The Robert C. Horn Papyri Collection, the Ray R. Brennan Map Collection, the Muhlenberg Family Papers, and the College’s historic photograph collection. During the Twitter chat, some of the things we hope to encourage faculty to imagine include identifying new digital collections related to their scholarship, ways to integrate digital collections into teaching, how to engage students in working with existing collections or creating new collections related to course work.
The Provost’s Office invites faculty to participate in a 2-day digital storytelling workshop facilitated by Daniel Weinshenker and Ryan Trauman from StoryCenter, in Berkeley, California. Snapshot Stories, August 1-2, 2017, will introduce Muhlenberg faculty to the the possibilities, practices, and tools of digital storytelling to support and deepen integrative learning, faculty student collaboration, and global education. This is the third in a series of three Digital Tools Workshops supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant to support the integration of digital tools into the curriculum, particularly in HDGE and MILA courses (read more about the grant initiative here). This workshop builds on faculty interest and participation in the 2016 Story Matters workshop, which helped several faculty design and implement digital storytelling assignments for their courses in public health, history, sociology, languages, media and communication, sustainability studies, and other fields. For faculty who attended last year’s workshop, this Snapshot Story workshop goes deeper into the methods, techniques, and pedagogical applications of digital storytelling. One faculty participant from last year noted:
I would love an opportunity to attend a workshop where I can build on the lessons from the Digital Storytelling where I design/create specific material in class. Sort of a Digital Storytelling Part II where I come in with all of the necessary parts (pictures, video, audio, etc) and create media that I can use directly in a class. This way I can fully integrate the workshop lessons into actual class specific material while having access to technical support.
This workshop is also designed for faculty who have not previously explored digital storytelling, providing both an introduction to the practice within higher education and meaningful hands-on opportunity with tools for producing digital stories. We specifically highlight digital tools that are accessible and supported on campus by the Digital Learning Team and student Digital Learning Assistants. Summarizing a strength of last year’s digital storytelling workshop, one faculty member noted:
One of the most useful aspects of the workshop was simply having the time to play around with the technologies after being introduced to them. Often times I hear about digital programs that can be a great tool in the classroom but I never have the opportunity to work with the program directly. The great thing about this workshop was that I was able to play around with the tools with a knowledgeable support staff right next to me.
Faculty from all disciplines interested in exploring the possibilities of integrating digital storytelling into their courses are encouraged to participate. Faculty will receive a $500 stipend in support of their participation and efforts to develop a digital storytelling assignment or element in a course. Beyond the workshop, Muhlenberg’s Digital Learning Team and Digital Learning Assistants are available to partner with faculty on crafting digital storytelling assignments and to support students in their digital storytelling projects as well.
To ensure that faculty participants of all levels of technical ability and comfort have the support they need throughout the workshop, and to provide a hospitable space valuing both telling and listening to stories, participation is limited to 16. To register for the workshop, please complete this short form. To learn more about StoryCenter’s work, please visit www.storycenter.org. If you have questions about the workshop or digital storytelling, please contact Lora Taub-Pervizpour, Associate Dean for Digital Learning at lorataub@muhlenberg.edu. For questions about the Mellon funded initiative, please contact Professor Jim Peck.
Workshop schedule
Day One:
9 a.m. -10 a.m. Introductions
Why Digital Storytelling? Why at Muhlenberg? Why in Higher Ed?
10 a.m.-11 a.m. Seven steps of digital storytelling and writing prompt
11 a.m.-11:15 a.m. Writing Prompt
11 a.m.-12 p.m. Storycircle. Break into groups for story sharing and feedback.
12 p.m.-1 p.m. Lunch
1 p.m.-2 p.m. Voice recording and mini tech tutorials in small groups.
2 p.m.-3 p.m. Work time for completing Snapshot Story
Day 2:
9 a.m.-9:30 a.m. Ice Breaker and Finish Up Stories
Daniel is the Rocky Mountain/Midwest Region Director for StoryCenter. Daniel has been telling stories and helping others to find and tell their own for more than 20 years. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Daniel taught creative writing during his post-graduate writing work at the University of Colorado. In 2000, he took a workshop with Joe Lambert, caught the bug, joined our staff and established an office in Denver. He specializes in exploring the impact that the stories we tell about ourselves have on our identity. Daniel developed and currently manages our Nurstory initiative, and has also done considerable work with museums and radio/television broadcasters in the Denver area. He is a recipient of Colorado Public Television’s Independent Media Award. BA, English and Creative Writing, University of California, San Diego; MA, Creative Writing, University of Colorado, Boulder; MSW (in progress), Metro State University.
Ryan is a Chicago resident and full-time lecturer in the Columbia College Chicago English Department. His scholarship and creative non-fiction have appeared in Computers and Composition Online, Kairos, and the North Dakota Quarterly. Ryan taught for six summers at the Digital Media and Composition Institute at Ohio State, and two of his video essays have been screened at the SSML Midwestern Film Festival. After taking one of our workshops in Denver nearly ten years ago, he began working with us and facilitating digital storytelling in locations around the country. Ryan blogs sporadically at his informal, professional blog, New Media Scholar. He also hosts and produces the Masters of Text podcast with his frequent collaborator, Ames Hawkins.
You are invited to join a yearlong Faculty Learning Community on Open Scholarship, facilitated by Ben Carter, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, and in collaboration with the Digital Learning Team. This FLC is supported by the office of the Associate Dean for Digital Learning. Open scholarship can be broadly defined as scholarly activities that aim to increase accessibility to the data, processes and/or results of scholarly research through engagement with communities beyond our disciplines. However, because it is open, is practiced in many different ways and is actively in flux, open scholarship is difficult to define. It includes:
Open access publishing- i.e., publishing in journals or books that provide access to all- usually via the internet.
Open publishing- i.e., forms of publishing outside of the “normal” book and/or journal formats, e.g. multimedia, data, community presentations, or software code.
Open pedagogy- i.e., engaging students with “publics” as a form of teaching and research.
The use of open source tools- i.e., community-built tools freely available to anyone (usually, but not exclusively, software) and/or contributions to the development of open source scholarly tools.
Open educational resources (openly available textbooks- frequently written by faculty and peer-reviewed).
And more, including the dynamic interrelationship of the above.
The purpose of the FLC is to provide faculty with a community in which to read, digest, and discuss current scholarship on “openness” and combine that knowledge with disciplinary, institutional, and individual factors to construct an open scholarship plan.
Goals
Note that, in the spirit of openness, the final learning goals of the FLC will be derived from input from the participants. However, these goals may include:
Providing a scholarly community in which to discuss and critically assess scholarship on “openness.”
Increasing awareness of the ethical dimensions of open scholarship, including those associated with diversity, access and inclusion.
Fostering awareness of issues surrounding the ways that non-traditional deployments of scholarship are evaluated and considered for tenure and promotion.
Discussing and weighing the benefits and drawbacks of the wide variety of possible ways to interact with “publics.”
Analytically evaluate different means and modes of publication.
Expectations
The FLC will entail two components. First, there will be four (1.5 hour) in-person meetings during the Fall Semester of 2017 largely focused upon the ethics and practice of open scholarship. Potential topics for those sessions include those above and will be determined based upon the collective input of the participants. Open scholarship is an extremely broad concept; we hope to engage with those most appropriate for the participants. Second, there will be a final project. This project may take many forms. One possibility is a personal open scholarship plan.
Schedule
4 meetings in the fall. 2 meetings in the spring.
Benefits
Faculty will receive a $500 stipend to support their participation in this FLC and their work on a related project. This compensation is in recognition of the time and energy that participation in the community entails. Of course, the primary benefit is the face-to-face engagement with your colleagues.
Application
To apply, please use the following form to submit a brief statement on your interest in and experience with open scholarship, and what you hope to learn through this experience.
At the end of the FLC, participants will be asked to complete a short survey reflecting on their experience and how it will likely impact their teaching practice and scholarship.
Join the Digital Learning Team on April 25 for a Tech Tuesday discussion on a pilot project we initiated this year: Domain of One’s Own. Members of the Digital Learning Team have written about the early months of this initiative in a series of blog posts that are rounded up in this post: http://diglearn.blogs.muhlenberg.edu/2016/10/31/blogging-is-everything/. In this Tech Tuesday session, we update the community our progress with the initiative and introduce future possibilities for getting involved.
The focal point of our Domains initiative launch this semester is a Faculty Learning Community. Ten faculty and several Digital Learning Team members have been meeting throughout Spring semester to explore new possibilities for faculty, staff, and students to design and build their digital presence with greater flexibility and independence, and to exercise greater agency in determining what and how to share their scholarship and learning publicly online. Each faculty member is developing their own domain, some focused on teaching, others focused on scholarly projects. The themes, readings, and activities for the FLC are openly available here: http://dooo.flc.bergbuilds.domains/. The FLC site provides much more background on the project and the motivations behind our Domains initiative than we can address in our short Tech Tuesday presentation. We hope you’ll take a look and perhaps even encounter material there that you want to share with students or colleagues.
Throughout the year, the Digital Learning Team has been developing the resources necessary to support faculty, staff and students in developing their digital presence via Domains. Tim Clarke has developed a thorough site for support documentation here: http://help.bergbuilds.domains/. Building on and extending the knowledge base created by folks who developed Domain of One’s Own at University of Mary Washington and its early adopters at Emory University and Oklahoma University, Tim’s documentation takes you step by step through the process of creating a Domain and getting up and running.
We’ve also been cultivating expertise among a cadre of Digital Learning Assistants who have offered workshops, one on one consultations, and course visits to help faculty and students begin building their Domains. Faculty consistently note how helpful it is to have peer assistants–much like a writing assistant or a learning assistant–to help introduce Domains to students and support them as they begin creating, curating, and organizing their sites. The DLA website and schedule is here: http://diglearn.blogs.muhlenberg.edu/people/digital-learning-assistants/. While we don’t know the DLA Fall 2017 schedule just yet, it’s certainly possible to begin thinking about a DLA-led workshop to help introduce your students to Domains.
In May and June, DLT members are giving several presentations at conferences near and far about our early work with Domains. Check back soon for blog posts and slides from those presentations.
TechTuesday is cancelled today because of the storm, but the Digital Learning Team has an alternative that doesn’t require stepping out into the snow. This afternoon, Tuesday, March 14, at 2 p.m. EST, we warm up our snow day with a Twitter chat about students, protest, distraction, and taking risks. The conversation will focus on Sean Michael Morris’ recent blog post, “Deeply Aggrieved.” With this piece as a starting point, we’ll consider what’s at stake for students in the current political environment and what our responsibilities are as educators in this crisis moment.
Below are a few questions to get our chat going. Read the post, bring your own questions, and join us for this hour-long chat. We’ll be using the hashtag #snowberg. It’s helpful to include it with all of your tweets so that other participants can easily follow along.
Sean Michael Morris is a digital teacher and pedagogue, and instructional designer at Middlebury College. He is known for his work in critical digital pedagogy and social justice, and directs the Digital Pedagogy Lab. In his latest post, published on March 12, Morris reflects on recent protesting by Middlebury students against the presence of Charles Murray on campus, and an opinion piece by Frank Bruni in the New York Times of that event. One reader on Twitter called Morris’ post “the only required reading on the Middlebury protests,” while another described it as a “must-read for all working in higher education — and anyone else with an opinion about what’s happening here.” Morris challenges readers to question some of the increasingly common ways that college students are described– “emotionally coddled,” “distracted.” He also invites us, as educators, to consider what more we can do to show up for our students, who carry into our classes and campus spaces known and unknown adversities of which we may not be fully aware, let alone prepared for.
As the snow continues to fall and the wind blows sideways, the Digital Learning Team at Muhlenberg is looking forward to reading and reflecting on Morris’ post and invite you to join in at 2 p.m. EST.
Question 1
As educators, how can we better show up for students moving through and with adversity? How can we make our classrooms and community more hospitable spaces?
Question 2
Morris asks us to critically examine our image of a distracted learner. Who is a distracted learner? What kinds of learners do we have in mind? How helpful is that category?
Question 3
How can we practice “Zen-like honesty about the state of things” so that our courses and syllabi help students prepare for their future, to solve the crises in our world today? What kinds of assignments and activities might empower them in this work?
The idea of free and open sharing in education is not new. In fact, sharing is probably the most basic characteristic of education: education is sharing knowledge, insights and information with others, upon which new knowledge, skills, ideas and understanding can be built.–Open Education Week
Open pedagogy uses OER as a jumping-off point for remaking our courses so that they become not just repositories for content, but platforms for learning, collaboration, and engagement with the world outside the classroom. –Robin DeRosa and Scott Robison, “Pedagogy, Technology, and the Example of Open Educational Resources”
On February 17, 2017, the Digital Learning Team and the Faculty Center for Teaching are co-sponsoring two events exploring the topic of open education with Robin DeRosa from Plymouth State University. Robin is a professor and the director of the Interdisciplinary Studies Program at Plymouth State, where she also contributes widely to conversations about the future of higher education, and the ways that collaborating around open education can help make academic scholarship more relevant and accessible to the public. The resources gathered here will help orient interested faculty and staff to the topics we will be exploring during Robin’s workshop and lecture on Friday. For those who were unable to attend last month’s Tech Tuesday, Jen Jarson and Lora Taub facilitated A Conversation on Open Education, and the video recording of that session is available here.
The reading by Robin, “My Open Textbook: Pedagogy and Practice,” offers a detailed narrative of her engagement with open pedagogy over many semesters, and a look at how her practices and beliefs about teaching and learning in the open and online have continued to develop. Towards the end of the article, she raises several critical questions about the “pitfalls, barriers, and challenges” she’s still wrestling with. These questions provide some rich ground for our conversation with Robin while she’s at Muhlenberg. Because she shares her journey into open education, Robin’s account is particularly instructive for those of us just beginning to think about this.
Steve Greenlaw is a Professor in the University of Mary Washington Economics Department and describes in this short article his interest in OERs as an alternative to the expensive commercial introductory textbooks in his field. In Open Educational Resources (OER): One Path to Making Higher Ed More Affordable, Greenlaw writes:
Estimates of annual textbook costs range from $500 to more than $1000 per student. Note the disconnect between the price per book and the spending per student. How can we reconcile these two points? One way is understand that 50% of college students report going without the text required for a course. Another way is to recognize that increasingly students spend their textbook dollars on used books or rentals, which while cheaper than new books are still pricey.
For many faculty, the pressing issue of access and expense drives their turn to OERs. In this regard, there is a social justice dimension to the open education movement that merits our discussion.
But there is more to open pedagogy than just replacing expensive commercial texts, says David Wiley in“What is Open Pedagogy?” Wiley is Chief Academic Officer of Lumen Learning, “an organization dedicated to increasing student success, reinvigorating pedagogy, and improving the affordability of education through the adoption of open educational resources by schools, community and state colleges, and universities.” You can read more about him here. In particular, Wiley is interested in the potential of open pedagogy to “kill the disposable assignment.” What is a disposable assignment?
“[A]ssignments that students complain about doing and faculty complain about grading. They’re assignments that add no value to the world – after a student spends three hours creating it, a teacher spends 30 minutes grading it, and then the student throws it away. Not only do these assignments add no value to the world, they actually suck value out of the world.”
In Wiley’s terms, instances of open pedagogy are assignments that engage with OERs. Indeed, for Wiley, the ultimate test of whether an assignment is open is that “the assignment is impossible without the permissions granted by open licenses.” How are the kinds of assignments he’s iterating similar to those that Robin DeRosa is describing in her work?
“[W]e realized that in asking a relatively straightforward question about using different learning materials — “What does it mean to use Open Educational Resources?” — we were, in fact, looking at the foundations of higher education itself. We were not just asking about credible educational resources; we were asking, “What does it mean to open education?” In so doing, we also began to question how much the systems of higher education are themselves closed and self-replicating. We questioned how these systems prioritize conserving the educational institution itself over actual mastery of content and developing intellectual habits of mind. Through our discussions, “opening education” grew to mean encouraging a revival within our students and ourselves of the essence of scholarship: to experiment and discover rather than to assert and repeat, and to engage in a practice of openness as part of a community of teacher-learners — both inside and outside of the classroom.
What can we learn from the discussions and processes presented in this article? What would a learning community to support exploration and integration of OERs in teaching and learning at Muhlenberg look like? How would this intersect with the Domain of One’s Own initiative, and other pedagogical initiatives aimed at creating more open, more inclusive and accessible learning experiences in the liberal arts at Muhlenberg?
Please join us on Friday, February 17, as we begin exploring these questions with Robin DeRosa.
The Fall 2016 Tech Tuesday series ends December 6 with a long awaited session on 3D modeling. Jordan Noyes, Instructional Technologist, will introduce faculty and staff to a variety of software for modeling, texturing, rendering, and more. In this session, Jordan will encourage participants to think about the ways these changing technologies might be integrated into pedagogy and inspire new possibilities in teaching and learning. Attendees will be introduced to a range of examples of digital scholarship and course assignments to help begin discussions around where and how to incorporate 3D modeling into a liberal arts curriculum. See Jordan’s blog for further details and join us for the last Tech Tuesday of 2016!
