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 Digital Learning Team and the Faculty Center for Teaching are collaborating to present the Digital Brew–an informal event highlighting eight faculty and the digital tools and pedagogies they are implementing in their courses. Stop by the new Language Learning Commons to see what faculty are up to, meet members of the Digital Learning Team who are collaborating with faculty to implement digital pedagogies, and chat with faculty from the Faculty Center for Teaching about opportunities for pedagogical development at Muhlenberg. We’ll be serving craft beers, sodas, and snacks. Stop by between 4 and 5:30 p.m., Wednesday, November 30.
Digital Brew 2016 Menu
Digital Mapping, Ben Carter, Anthropology
Virtual Reality, Irene Chen, Media & Communication
Research & Survey, Chrys Chronin, Public Health
Single-Board Computing, Brett Fadem, Physics; Tim Clarke, ITDL
Asynchronous Threaded Conversation, Bill Feeney, History
Mobile Analog Video Standards Converter & Digitizer (MAVSCAD), Sean Miller, Media Services
Join us for craft beer and soda. Play with some digital technologies being used on campus. Engage with faculty from a variety of disciplines incorporating digital tools into their teaching. Connect with digital learning collaborators. Get hopped up on digital pedagogy.
Brought to you by The Faculty Center for Teaching and the Digital Learning Team, fermenting ideas in new pedagogies at Muhlenberg College.
Screenshot from Margo Hobbs, Contemporary Art Spring 2016 Scalar Book Project
When Margo Hobbs, Associate Professor of Art, was frustrated with the limits of available textbooks for her Contemporary Art course, she had the idea to engage her students in researching, producing, and collaboratively publishing a a digital textbook for on the topic. For this Spring 2016 project, Margo’s students explored global contemporary art since 1989 through a variety of digital and openly available online resources and tools. Together with Margo, they learned to use Scalar, a free, open source authoring and publishing tool, collaboratively generating a digital textbook published to the web. The platform offers a great degree of flexibility in design and structure, making it easy to produce multi- and non-linear paths within a multimedia project. Scalar was a good choice for Margo’s Contemporary Art project, because it can showcase images as well as text, and you can build items that annotate or comment upon other items.
The possibility of creating multiple pathways and non-linear multimodal narratives within Scalar was ideal for a collaborative student project in the interdisciplinary RJ Capstone Seminar. In S
Screenshot from RJ Fellows Spring 2015 Community Connections Scalar Book Project
pring 2015, the project, “Many Ways of Connecting,” asked students to reflect upon and document the changing relationship between Muhlenberg and the wider community of Allentown, and to explore this relationship along multiple dimensions. In their Scalar publication, students were able to represent the diverse and sometimes intersecting avenues for connecting with Allentown that, as students, shaped their experiences at Muhlenberg. Their project highlights the multi-linear pathways through which students participate in community-based learning, service, engagement, and activism.
After building the digitized Robert C. Horn Papyri Collection in Shared Shelf, Muhlenberg archivist Susan Falciani was interested in extending the collection into a platform that would make these resources more public and accessible, especially for use in teaching and learning. Omeka afforded her the ease and customization necessary to build a rich, searchable collection of the objects in this collection. It required no HTML knowledge, though she was able to rely on colleagues with CSS skills for help with design customization. All said, Susan produced this exhibit in about 20 hours time. Her presentation on the project at the meeting of the Council for Independent Colleges Consortium on Digital Resources for Teaching and Learning, is here.
Screenshot of the Robert C. Horn Papyri Collection
In this Tech Tuesday, we explore both of these open-source, free, and widely used tools for digital scholarship. We will touch on some of their affordances, show examples produced with each tool, and consider some of the reasons for choosing one or the other depending on the type of project faculty are interested to produce and the kinds of materials to be integrated. Omeka is used widely to build digital exhibits, collections, and archives that are image-rich, with the key feature that it integrates Dublin Core metadata schema for describing items within an Omeka site. This standardized vocabulary means that data can easily be moved into and shared with other systems. Scalar is a media-rich digital publishing platform allowing multiple authors to add and annotate text, image, audio and video elements, and connect those elements in multi- or non-linear narrative paths. The annotation feature in Scalar is particularly rich–anything in a Scalar book can be annotated in just about any format. Beyond annotating images with text, text can be annotated with audio or video, video can be annotated with audio, and so forth.
If you are unable to attend in person, we are offering a live stream of the session through Zoom. Please sign in to the link below before the session begins at 8:30. A moderator will be there to share any questions you may have with the presenters. Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS, or Android: https://muhlenberg.zoom.us/j/963994155
Resources on Digital Pedagogy and Digital Publishing
Jen Jarson, Information Literacy and Assessment Librarian and Social Sciences Subject Specialist, has curated the following resources to provide additional information on these featured tools, and in particular, to highlight their affordances for developing digital literacies and pedagogy. If you have discipline-specific information literacy questions related to Tech Tuesday, please contact Jen at jarson@muhlenberg.edu.
Kathy Harring has published an article in the latest issue of the AAC&U’s Peer Review, highlighting the varied uses and forms of eportfolios in practice at Muhlenberg. The article, “Eportfolios: Supporting Reflection and Deep Learning in High-Impact Practices,” can be found here: http://www.aacu.org/peerreview/2016/summer/Harring.
Harring, vice president and dean of institutional effectiveness and planning, together with Muhlenberg’s previous instructional designer Tian Luo (now at Old Dominion University), provide an overview of the evolution of eportfolios since their introduction on campus in 2010. Drawing on data from student surveys and participant observations, the authors provide insights on student experiences with eportfolios and their perceptions of the value of this kind of reflective and integrative work. Faculty and staff thinking about integrating eportfolios as a course assignment or program requirement can learn from the case studies presented in this article. They include:
In her neuroscience research lab, Gretchen Gotthard (associate professor of psychology and neuroscience) works with students as they develop eportfolios connected to their undergraduate research experience. “Eportfolios in this context provide a record of students’ research activity, develop students’ abilities to critically analyze and synthesize the literature, and support deeper reflection of undergraduate research.”
In “Digital Media Design Lab,” instructor Tony Dalton has students develop eportfolios to showcase and reflect upon their coursework in media studies and production, as well as co-curricular experiences. In this CUE course for media & communication seniors focused on media design and making, students “integrated the knowledge, abilities, and practices they had encountered across their major course of study.”
Dana Scholars developed eportfolios in their Sophomore Seminar, taught by Sue Clemens, as space to reflect on their service learning experiences. Focused reflections on issues of privilege, race, representation, and community challenged students to reflect on their service learning activities with high school students and connect these experiences to course readings. The eportfolios were also a space for students’ weekly blogging, “allowing them to make visible the ways that they applied the conceptual knowledge gained in the course to working with local communities.”
When students in the education certificate program undertake their student teaching semester, supervised by Kim Rohrbach, they develop eportfolios that serve several purposes. Student teachers use their eportfolios to produce a curated selection of teaching artifacts–including video and text–demonstrating their teaching abilities. Student teachers’ written reflections help contextualize these artifacts and serve as a meaningful developmental self-assessment tool for exploring both successes and challenges encountered during the semester. “Thus, the eportfolio served as a means for developing students’ teaching skills and their professional identity as an educator, as well as a way to distinguish themselves in job searches.”
The article brings together lessons learned from five years of teaching and learning with ePortfolios at Muhlenberg. The authors work with illustrative case studies that offer a glimpse at some of the ways faculty are effectively framing eportfolios as pedagogical practices. For more information on this work, please visit this site http://eportfolios.blogs.muhlenberg.edu/ and contact Jenna Azar if you would like to learn about the possibilities for ePortfolios in your course or program.
There are many possibilities for integrating real-time (synchronous) online communication and collaboration in teaching and learning. For traditional, blended, or online courses, opportunities to virtually connect with students, with faculty or other professionals in other locations expand teaching and learning beyond our campus boundaries, IT/DL has made it easier to do this with a new web and video conferencing tool called Zoom. This TechTuesday session introduces faculty and staff to Zoom, via Zoom. If being physically present on campus at 8:30 a.m. for TechTuesday has made it difficult for you to attend these early morning sessions, this week we’re using Zoom to introduce you to this tool while hoping also to widen access to and participation in Tech Tuesday sessions. (You’ll have to access your own coffee, however).
Some of the ways you might use Zoom to support interactive and student-centered learning, or to communicate with students beyond face to face opportunities, include:
Guest speakers–enliven a class by bringing in faculty, students, and experts from around the world
Holding class when weather prohibits coming to campus or while you are traveling (with the option to record the class for students who couldn’t attend or for later reference)
Group activities around a shared problem, question, or text
Virtual collaboration space for students working on group projects
Student-led class discussions, review sessions, etc.
Conferences with students to discuss their work
Virtual office hours to widen availability and participation
To join this Tech Tuesday session via Zoom, you need a smartphone or a computer. Although a webcam and microphone are required to join in on the discussion, if you don’t have these tools you can still view and listen. Here’s the link to join the session, which you can access beginning at 8:15: Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android: [link removed] Participation is limited to 50.
A few suggestions to help ensure a successful experience:
If you are joining by video, check your background and be aware of what’s visible behind you. Move distracting visual elements (piles of laundry, leaping cats, etc.)
Join the session prior to the meeting start time, as early as 8:15, to allow time to verify audio and set up
Headsets are recommended, especially if you are joining only by audio without video
If you are joining by video, reduce distracting glare and uneven lighting in your environment, by closing window shades. A well-lit room is important, but the combination of outside light and indoor fluorescent light can disrupt the camera and image quality.
Use the features in Zoom to interact with the session presenters if you have questions or comments.
Poster above reads: Jim Groom, co-founder of Reclaim Hosting. A Pandora’s Box for teaching, scholarship, and identity. Thursday, October 13th. 7:30 p.m. Trexler Library Concourse.
Co-sponsored by Provost’s Office, Digital Learning Team, Office of Information Technology, and Trexler Library. For more information contact Tim Clarke. Muhlenberg College.
Tony begins this Tech Talk by posing some clarifying questions. Why create podcasting assignments? How much production effort is justified by the podcast? What microphones are good to use?
From there, Tony shows the basics of a multi-track audio editor called Audacity (https://www.audacityteam.org/). Some additional time is spent looking at the Kaltura media streaming service, and how to embed podcasts into Canvas courses.
