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!
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.
Join Trexler Library’s special collections archivist Susan Falciani today for a lively Transcribathon–a 3-hour social gathering aimed at transcribing items in the Muhlenberg Collection of rare 18th and 19th Century letters. This is a fun environment to learn about transcription and to expand and amplify the usability of this valuable manuscript collection held at Trexler Library. Transcribathons are a wonderful way to engaging students and all members of the community in a democratic activity that highlights the humanities in a public, participatory, and empowering way. While digitizing an important collection, transcribathons have the potential to foster community and connection. Transcribathons also demonstrate the power of the humanities as a field of inquiry–and the library as a space–to bring people together in common purpose.
Poster content: Love History? Love puzzles? Love the idea of digging through archives trying to decipher 200-year-old documents? Join the Transcribathon! Bring your friends! Spend a few minutes or a few hours reading and transcribing 18th- and 19th-century letters from the Muhlenberg Papers Collection. Your efforts will benefit the ongoing digitization efforts of Special Collections & Archives. Wednesday, November 16th 4-7 pm. Trexler Library, Level B, B-01 Lab. For more information, contact Susan Falciani sfalciani@muhlenberg.edu 484-664-3694.
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.
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!
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.
