Digital Learning

Category: Learning Community

  • Call for Participants: Faculty Learning Community on Open Scholarship

    Dear Muhlenberg Faculty,

    logo for the open faculty learning community that reads hashtag openberg

    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.

    https://goo.gl/forms/WEJKAPIN3uFd2nEh2
    Application deadline is June 9, 2017.

    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.

  • Blogging is Everything! A Round Up of Blog Posts on Jim Groom’s Visit

    In mid-October, Jim Groom and Lauren Brumfeld of Reclaim Hosting spent two jam-packed days with us at Muhlenberg, helping us open the door (or Pandora’s Box, as Jim might argue) to our Domain of One’s Own faculty and student learning community. Time spent with Jim and Lauren was everything we’d hoped it would be–catalyzing and supportive, a chance to peer around some corners to glimpse “what might be” even while we’re in the thick of what is needed now to get off to a strong start.  I’ve reflected on our work with Jim and Lauren here in some detail, but in this post I just want to provide a roundup of the several blogs that have spun out of those two October days.

    Over on his domain, Tim Clarke is inviting us to consider What Would a Domain of One’s Own Implementation Cohort Look Like?

    This post is my effort to extend this question, and share my thinking about what may, and what may not be helpful to schools as they implement Domain of One’s Own initiatives. I’m especially interested in teasing out if there is enough commonality among institutions, or enough similarity around this work, or enough fun to be had, to warrant effort to form an implementation cohort.

    One of the things that strengthens our Domain of One’s Own initiative is the multiple perspectives and backgrounds of the people collaborating to make it happen.  Jen Jarson, over on the ACRLog blog, situates Domain of One’s Own in the context of her work on information literacy within librarianship.  In her post, Jen asks, “What does open pedagogy for information literacy look like?” and is connecting our work on Domains to larger interests in open pedagogy:

    The success of Domains, Jim said in his keynote, is not about technology. Instead, its success is the openness it facilitates: thinking out loud, engaging in reflective practice with a community of peers. As part of the Domains story, Jim shared his experiences creating ds106, an open, online course on digital storytelling. As described on the site, the course was “part storytelling workshop, part technology training, and, most importantly, part critical interrogation of the digital landscape that is ever increasingly mediating how we communicate with one another.” The course embodied openness in many ways. UMW students enrolled in the semester-long course and served as its core community, but the course was open to anyone who wanted to participate alongside the UMW students. But the part that piqued my interest most was its open pedagogy; Jim talked about how he did the assignments with the students and also described how students created the assignments. “The only reason it worked,” Jim said, “was because we built an open ecosystem for it to thrive.

    Jen’s post concludes with the observation that “Open pedagogy is about being flexible and responsive. It means meeting learners where they are, rather than where we think they are or should be”–and this seems to me another excellent way to think about the value of students working with/on their own domains.

    We were really excited that Lauren Brumfeld accompanied Jim on this campus visit, because as a recent graduate, she paid close attention to student perspectives and experiences.  This is a focal point in her reflections on A Visit to Muhlenberg College where she casts special attention on our student Digital Learning Assistants:

    The Digital Learning Assistants, DLA’s for short, are in the beginning stages of something very similar to UMW’s Digital Knowledge Center. The DLA’s are a diverse group ranging from incoming freshmen to graduating seniors. These students are all at different stages of finding their “niche” in the digital world. This semester they’re framing out what it means to provide peer tutoring to other students, and how they can best teach themselves and learn from each other.

    Jim and I had a chance to chat with them on Friday afternoon about what this teaching and learning could look like. Any passerby could have seen how much excitement was sitting in that room- the DLA’s are so ready & willing to better themselves and their peers. I loved it.

    One of the DLAs, Meredith Salisbury, has published her Notes on DLAing on her domain–her first ever blog post.

    meredith

    I’ve spent the last few years of my life nerding out about social media + new media research. I have this fascination with how we portray ourselves and communicate with others online. I wonder how the concept of a DoOO impacts the ways in which we think about what we put online and how it will be different then the existing social media and web presences that we have already. What’s different about domains is that I own whatever I put on my site instead of it living in something like canvas or being sold as data by Facebook or Tumblr. But, the thing is that sites like ello were created with the same concept and they didn’t get adopted… I guess my lasting question is do students (or anyone) care about owning our data or are people so used to being the product that its to late…

    P.S. Follow the DLAs on Twitter cause we’re the best

    Really, follow the DLAs on Twitter @bergDLAs.  They are the best!