Digital Learning

Category: blog

  • Wander Wednesday #2: Hypothes.is with Sarah Bui

    Wander Wednesday #2: Hypothes.is with Sarah Bui

    This is a guest post, written by our Digital Learning Assistant, Lucie Hopkins, in which she interviews her colleague and fellow DLA, Sarah Bui.

    Welcome to our second Wander Wednesday post! If you were here last week, welcome back, and if you weren’t, welcome! Take a look at last week’s post featuring Jarrett Azar ‘20 on faculty presence to catch up. This week, we are lucky to have Sarah Bui, a current DLA at Muhlenberg, share her insights on the value of Hypothes.is for students in an online setting.

    Sarah Bui is a rising sophomore. She is double majoring in Media & Communication and Film Studies. She joined the DLA team her freshman year and specializes in WordPress, Hypothes.is, and many digital storytelling tools such as Knightlab Timeline, Story Map and Canva. She also served as a Learning Assistant during the summer 2020 Camp Design program and provided diverse perspectives as a student to help faculty in polishing their online courses. In the future, she wants to expand her knowledge and develop her skills with digital tools in storytelling and social media practices.

    Without further ado, let’s hear from Sarah!

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    “Hello everyone, my name is Sarah. After my first year at college, I had a chance to explore many digital platforms that make my learning process much easier and more effective. For those of you who are thinking of a platform for your class that helps engage students into their course materials and discussion, I would like to introduce Hypothes.is. In this blog, I will discuss my experience of using it in my classes and why I find it very helpful in this online teach and learning environment. 

    Hypothes.is is an annotation platform that allows you to annotate on various kinds of files such as articles, blogs, pdf files, books and ebooks. I was first introduced to Hypothes.is in my FYS class and then used it in my Documentary Research class. We used the program to add comments on the readings and articles. Besides that, I use Hypothes.is for myself while doing research, as it helps me to keep track of the citations on a pdf file. Additionally, I also have a group on Hypothes.is just for myself to note down any interesting ideas or articles I’ve found online. I can easily go back to these websites to see all my annotations while reading. 

    Besides using Hypothes.is just for the comments of students, my professors would also add some guided questions for us to get the ideas of the readings better, as well as to develop our critical thinking to the next level. Most of my professors found it easier to keep track of students’ discussions in Hypothes.is in this way than on the discussion board in Canvas. 

    With Hypothes.is, we can expand our knowledge beyond the reading with other interactive media resources such as images or videos. I have found it to be a really helpful platform for me to both add annotations and comments on the reading and to discuss some of these ideas with my classmates. I can also keep all the highlights for myself which is especially useful when I need the readings for my essays. It also helps me build a good habit of taking notes while I’m reading. Additionally, I feel the best way to improve my writing is through reading, so I always highlight good ideas or good word usages or sentence structures, and Hypothes.is helps me to keep it for myself.

    One small problem with this program could be that all the files must be accessible on a web browser, so it might not work for traditional books. I have not found many other obstacles using this, since it’s really simple and user-friendly. It helps me a lot in my academic process. I really love using Hypothes.is!

    And that is my experience using Hypothes.is and I hope it can somehow ease your burden in the process of building interactive courses but also trying to meet the academic requirements. I know it is a really frustrating time that we are forced to learn everything at the same time that we adapt to this terrible situation. But I hope all the faculty understand that you are not alone on this journey. There are many DLAs and students are willing to help you and we can learn and figure things out together step by step. We, as students, really appreciate every effort you put into your courses. 

    Keep up with great work. You rock!”

    If you want to hear more insights from Sarah about Hypothes.is, join us Thursday, August 6th at 9 AM EST for a Hypothes.is Workshop with Prof. Tineke D’Haeseleer. The workshop is for anyone interested in exploring social annotation as we all plan for the upcoming year. Check your email for more information and the Zoom link!

    If you want a step-by-step breakdown of integrating Hypothes.is into your online course, also provided by Sarah, click this link. She can be further contacted via email: tbui@muhlenberg.edu.

  • Wander Wednesday #1: Faculty Presence with Jarrett Azar

    Wander Wednesday #1: Faculty Presence with Jarrett Azar

    This is a guest post, written by our Digital Learning Assistant, Lucie Hopkins, in which she interviews her colleague and fellow DLA, Jarrett Azar.

    Welcome to our first Wander Wednesday blog post! We are so excited to embark on this blogging journey with you all, and hope our insights are of assistance to your pedagogical developments and reflections. We are starting our first week off with insights from Jarrett Azar, a recent Muhlenberg graduate, on faculty presence in an online format.

    Jarrett (’20) majored in Computer Science and Studio Art with a focus in Photography. He was part of the original DLA team in 2016 and has been a DLA throughout his time at Muhlenberg. As a DLA, he specializes in WordPress, Hypothes.is, Pressbooks, and other digital learning systems. Jarrett has worked on multiple Open Educational Resource projects on campus and was part of the Pressbooks learning community in 2019.

    Without further ado, let’s hear from Jarrett!

    “Positive faculty presence is important all of the time – in a pandemic or not – but it is particularly critical to cultivate when there is no (or limited)  physical space to come together. Students in an online course often feel less connected to you as a professor, their peers, and to the coursework. Working to create a consistent presence in your course goes a long way in bringing those students back to the level of connection that they would feel in person. In today’s Wander Wednesday, I am going to talk about faculty presence and offer a few considerations for teaching and learning online. 

    Before we went online in the spring, I had lots of exposure to what faculty presence could be in online learning throughout my time at Muhlenberg. I took an online course over the summer of 2019, have been a DLA for 4 years and worked with faculty to develop online courses before this pandemic. I, like many others, got a deep dive into this topic when we all went remote in the Spring of 2020. This gave me and the other DLAs a firsthand look at what positive faculty presence in online learning looks like and how to create or diminish it.

    Although there are many ways to create a positive learning environment in an online course, I am going to highlight three techniques faculty used in the spring.  The first practice is to hold a weekly zoom meeting where students are free to talk about how they are feeling and share what they have been doing/working on. This not only offers the students a space to vent, but also makes them feel like the faculty member is there for them. The second practice is to be flexible. You can be flexible in many ways such as being flexible around assignment deadlines, attendance, or even holding more office hours than you would during the semester. Flexibility is important because your students do not have the same lives and learning environments at home as they do at school. Speaking from experience, I have 2 siblings under the age of 5, so the home learning environment can get fairly hectic at times and I may not be able to complete or attend things in the manner that I would usually want to or be able to at school. The third method is to create weekly breakdowns for your students. I have heard from many peers that getting a message at the beginning of the week that outlines that week’s material and assignments went a long way in helping them stay engaged and on track. This provides students with a single message that they can refer to when they feel lost, and trust me, they will feel lost at times. These are just a few methods that really help to support students and help them to feel more connected within an online class. 

    I also want to briefly touch on some things that could break that positive energy that you have created. Online learning is all about finding ways to break down the physical boundaries to learning, and Zoom can be a great way to connect, share, and create in short, interactive class sessions. One thing that I would recommend avoiding would be multiple synchronous Zoom sessions each week that all last over an hour. This is a particularly difficult way to digest the course content for students who are learning online. After the spring and summer, I’m sure we are all familiar with “Zoom burnout” and how hard that second or third meeting of the day can be. This is something students will certainly feel juggling multiple classes and Zoom meetings a day. 

    Nothing here should be taken as fact, only as advice on how you might cultivate a positive presence in your course. There will always be an element of surprise in any course, and it can be nearly impossible to meet each students’ specific needs, but the DLA team has found these few small adjustments to learning online can make all the difference.”

    Jarrett Azar, ’20

    jarrettazar@muhlenberg.edu

  • 3DI

    3DI aims to construct and guide a values-based framework for understanding, shaping, and implementing digital learning theory and practice at Muhlenberg. The framework emerges out of five years of growing our practice within digital learning and foregrounds the values and principles that have implicitly and explicitly guided and sustained the work since it formally began in 2014.

    3DI stands for:

    Digital Imagination

    Digital Inclusion

    Digital Inquiry

    Digital Imagination

    “To be enabled to activate the imagination is to discover not only possibility, but to find the gaps, the empty spaces that require filling as we move from the is to the might be, to the should be.” –Maxine Greene

    “When old and familiar things are made new in experience, there is imagination. When the new is created, the far and strange become the most natural inevitable things in the world. There is always some measure of adventure in the meeting of mind and universe, and this adventure is, in its measure, imagination.” –John Dewey

    It is central to Muhlenberg’s liberal arts mission to strive to develop learners who are equipped with ethical and civic values and prepared for lives of leadership and service.  Philosophers of education agree that this work requires imagination. If we are to live into our mission, it is not enough to build upon reality as it is, but we must aim to construct a world as it might–as it must–be. A world that is more just and humane. We cannot achieve this based on our existing ways of seeing, thinking, acting. Change is constituted, in large part, through the imagination. We must be able to imagine other worlds are possible if we are to strive towards their construction.

    Our liberal arts mission and fundamental values compel us to explore the possible uses and purposes of digital tools to help ignite students’ social imagination–their capacity to construct visions of what should be and might be in their fields of study, their communities, and a society in need of new solutions and approaches to repair some of our most intractable problems and renew our democratic ideals.  This requires an understanding that technology is not neutral. This requires that we do not mistake technology as itself the solution, but rather resources for assisting the ways we attempt to see in new ways, envision other possible futures.  

    Our work in digital learning centers the social imagination.  This means that we prioritize tools and spaces that hold transformative potential 

    Digital Inclusion

    All learners require  meaningful access to and use of digital resources, technologies, and spaces.  Digital literacies are increasingly significant to students’ abilities to fully and meaningfully participate  in our community, and in our social world–to tell the . However, digital inclusion is more than access to technology–it also means all learners, and the faculty who teach them, have access to the human expertise and support necessary to guide, sustain, and grow digital learning practices and digital  literacies. Technology, and the training surrounding its pedagogical integration and application, must intentionally be designed and implemented to counter histories and structures of exclusion.

    Mindfulness of inclusion underlies all digital learning initiatives, processes, and practices that we pursue and promote at Muhlenberg.  Understanding that technology is not neutral, we are intentional in our efforts to center inclusion as a principle of digital learning.

    This means that our work pays critical attention to:

    • How digital tools can be leveraged to help facilitate more equitable participation and inclusive pedagogies in teaching and learning
    • The dominant corporate structure of edtech that extends surveillance capitalism and control into spaces of teaching and learning
    • The necessity of imagining ethical edtech practices that unsettle the digital status quo to imagine more transformative technological practices that serve our liberal arts ideals of democratic participation, education as the exercise of freedom, student engagement and well-being.
    • The implications of edtech platforms, systems, and tools on our students data and privacy
    • The ways that edtech often reinforces patterns of exclusion and privilege and the possibilities for more equitable and inclusive visions of digital learning in the liberal arts

    Digital Inquiry

    “For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.” –Paulo Freire

    Inquiry is situated at the heart of liberal arts learning.  Increasingly, the ways that students explore, think and communicate about issues and ideas across the humanities, arts, natural and social sciences intersect with the digital.  Digital Learning endeavors to create opportunities for campus conversations about the role of digital technologies and spaces for helping students develop as scholars, “as critical thinkers who are intellectually agile.”  Through programming, initiatives, and partnership, Digital Learning aims to engage digital approaches that help scholarly inquiry and knowledge creation forward, and digital practices and platforms that enable us to share that knowledge within a community of practice and with the general public.

    Critical inquiry meaningfully informs and guides our decisions about which digital tools, platforms and practices to introduce and promote at Muhlenberg.  We understand knowledge creation as a process in which people collectively work towards critically understanding and transforming their world. This means that we ask a series of questions about digital tools as we explore their possible uses and affordances within liberal arts teaching and learning.  

    • How do digital tools and approaches help to push boundaries of current knowledge, create new ways of looking at and addressing problems?
    • How do digital tools and approaches help to open access to the means of scholarly inquiry and new knowledge production?
    • Given the prevalence of surveillance and control in academic and popular digital technologies, what are the risks and ethical implications of engaging digital tools for scholarly inquiry? 
    • What are effective strategies for resisting the capitalization of student data captured in their use of digital tools and platforms?
    • Where possible, how do we choose to engage open access tools to promote the liberal arts value of knowledge for the public good?

    In sum, centering digital inquiry means that we promote and support the integration of digital technologies and spaces in activity that advances the College’s institutional values and commitments to the life of the mind and to knowledge in the interest of the public good.

  • 7 Things You Should Know About a Domain of One’s Own

    Recently, Lora Taub, Dean for Digital Learning, joined a group of peers from a variety of campuses to collectively brainstorm and shape a report on Domain of One’s Own for Educause’s 7 Things You Should Know series. Together with Martha Burtis, Sundi Richard, Jim Groom, and Keegan Long-Wheeler, we collaborated with ELI’s Malcolm Brown, Greg Dobbin, and Stephen G Pelletier to attempt to synthesize and explain Domains for a wide audience. Each of the contributors represent different contexts and practices in the Domains community, yet there was still a remarkable shared sense of the connective tissue that joins this expanding network. With the very first question, “What is it?” the conversation was catapulted into pedagogical, philosophical, and political directions:

    A way of thinking as well as an application of technology, Domain of One’s Own refers to the practice of giving students, faculty, and staff the opportunity to obtain a domain with hosted web space of their own …. By enabling users to build environments for learning and sharing, such domains make possible a liberating array of practices that encourage users to explore how they interact with and present themselves in the online world. While giving users more control over their scholarship, data, and digital identity, these domains encourage an ethos of openness, freedom, and exploration and nurture a practice for shaping and thinking about one’s presence on the web. DoOO also draws users into a community of practice focused on collaboration and sharing.

    It was an honor for Muhlenberg to be among those communities featured in this story, a reflection of how far our work with Domains has evolved in such a short timeframe and the creative practices and partnerships emerging around Berg Builds. The Educause article is here: https://library.educause.edu/resources/2019/10/7-things-you-should-know-about-a-domain-of-ones-own

  • Podcast with Jenna Azar and Tim Clarke on Curiosity, Openness, and Empathy in Digital Learning

    Podcast with Jenna Azar and Tim Clarke on Curiosity, Openness, and Empathy in Digital Learning

    In a recent episode of Gettin’ Air, ed-tech ruminator Terry Greene chatted on a late Friday afternoon with Jenna Azar and Tim Clarke about Digital Learning at Muhlenberg. While discussing a range of topics, their conversation centered around our work’s particular embrace of Digital Learning Assistants as pedagogical partners and co-creators in digital learning experiences in the Hive and beyond.

    https://voiced.ca/podcast_episode_post/jenna-azar-and-tim-clark/

    Gettin’ Air is a VoicEd radio show/podcast (voiced.ca) that features a growing collection of episodes with those working in open and technology-enabled learning. If you like podcasts and are engaged in open and digital learning, we recommend Gettin’ Air!

  • Digital Pedagogy Spotlight: StoryMaps in Sustainability Studies

    Digital Pedagogy Spotlight: StoryMaps in Sustainability Studies

    In Professor Rich Niesenbaum’s course, Sustainable Solutions 405, students are challenged to define a sustainability-related problem and then engage in research to develop a global perspective on the problems they identify. Professor Niesenbaum has introduced an assignment that integrates geographic visualization with storytelling, using a tool called StoryMap JS. Using this digital tool, students develop a “Solutions from Around the World” Map that indicates important places where the problems they focus on are being addressed. Once created, students share their maps on their BergBuilds domain. Student web domains are browsable on the BergBuilds Community Portal and links to some of the StoryMaps from SUS 405 are listed below.

  • Faculty, Staff and Students Present Digital Project at Bucknell Digital Scholarship Conference

    Faculty, Staff and Students Present Digital Project at Bucknell Digital Scholarship Conference

    Faculty, staff and student collaborators presented their work on documentary and archival work at the Bucknell Digital Scholarship Conference, October 11-13, 2019. Media and Communication faculty Kate Ranieri, Muhlenberg College special collections archivist Susan Falciani Maldonado, and Muhlenberg College Digital Cultures Media Technologist Anthony Dalton have been engaged in longterm collaborative research that brings together documentary storymaking, oral history gathering, and digital archival work. This ongoing project, The Muhlenberg Memories Project, engages students deeply in community-based documentary and digital scholarly practices as they pursue coursework and independent research.  Students Emily Robinson and Haley Hnatuk, both of Muhlenberg College, attended BUDSC as co-presenters, representing their own experiences as learners, independent researchers, and multimodal media makers.

    From the presentation abstract: 

    The Collaborative Archival Storymaking Model grounds students in primary sources–historical materials and oral histories–empowering them to craft stories in a digital format that feels most expressive to both the student and the community

     

    During the conference, the presentation drew praise on Twitter:

    The project, and the Muhlenberg Memories website, are here: http://www.allentownband.trexlerworks.muhlenberg.edu/.

  • Tech Talk: Knight Lab Tools

    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.

    You can see them all here: https://knightlab.northwestern.edu/projects/

    Interested in working with Knight Lab content creation? Please reach out to anyone in the Digital Learning Group and we’d be happy to help.

  • Tech Talk: Muhlenberg’s Digital Archives

    On November 29th, 2018 Special Collections and Archives Librarian, Susan Falciani Maldonado presents several digital collections created and maintained at Trexler Library, Muhlenberg College. These include The Muhlenberg Weekly, the Ray R. Brennan Map Collection, and the Muhlenberg Visitor Timeline.

    For more information about Trexler Library’s growing digital collections, visit https://trexler.muhlenberg.edu/library/specialcollections/digitalcollections/

  • Tech Talk: Qualtrics

    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.