Students and faculty have completed the first three weeks of the semester at Muhlenberg. Most teaching and learning is happening online, with a smaller number of courses for first year students being taught on campus or in a blended environment that integrates in-person and online learning activities. We dedicated the summer to helping faculty prepare for this semester, offering 14 sessions of our faculty development course Camp Design Online. Throughout the summer, we were awed by the generosity staff and faculty poured into this effort, as well as an outstanding and dedicated group of student Digital Learning Assistants who ensured that student perspectives were present and shaping conversations around online course design and instruction.
This is one of several upcoming posts featuring the variety of practices animating and humanizing online courses at Muhlenberg. A good place to begin for those interested in understanding more about teaching and learning online is this video interview with Flower Darby, a leader in online learning and author of the text Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science to Online Classes.
The Knight Lab tools are a great collection of visualization and presentation software that is designed for embedding into websites. In the video below recorded on 19 March 2019, Tim Clarke demonstrates how easy it is to build Knight Lab presentations that can expand and support a Berg Builds project. Knight Lab tools include Story Maps, Timelines, before and after image juxtapositions, and many other kinds of simple but powerful tools that work great with WordPress and are often just the right size and complexity for a student assignment.
Qualtrics is a tool for building and distributing surveys and questionnaires. Qualtrics makes it simple to build a quick web-based survey, but the capabilities of this survey platform are vast and sophisticated. Qualtrics permits collaboration both in building survey instruments and reviewing survey data.
Nicole Hammel from the Office of Institutional Research and Kenneth S Michniewicz Assistant Professor, Psychology, walk through the features of Qualtrics as well as an overview of our Institutional Review Board whose policies and procedures guide the creation and distribution of most surveys on campus.
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.
