Our Future Environment

 Updates to Come:

5:00 p.m.: EDUCHUDS, The Gentrification of Web-Based Education; Jim Groom
Best presentation of the day. Post to come.

4:30 p.m.:What it Really Takes to Support eportfolios; Lisa Brundage, a Tech Fellow with the Macaulay Honors College.

The Honors College uses WordPressMU for their eportfolio program. Lisa showed a few eportfolios and how they represent the goals within the Macaulay Honors College. For example: A group eportfolio for students who study abroad and one on race and gender that has become popular in the ‘general internet’. Lisa also talked about how they turned a nightmare scenario into progress. This took the form of the techfair two years ago when many students wanted an introduction to their mac. Too many students signed up for what they could logistically handle so they made this site and a two hour introduction course.

4:00 p.m.: Using Eportfolios; Joe Ugoretz

Joe opens with a quick presentation on the Macaulay Honors College. If you weren’t confused before about CUNY organization you will be now! The Macaulay Honors College “offers academically gifted students an exceptional undergraduate education, integrating the vast resources of the City University with New York’s cultural, scientific, and business communities. Macaulay Honors College enables talented students to develop the multiple perspectives they need to respond to the challenges of the 21st century.”
Joe is the director of the Honors College and is talking today about their eportfolio program. His interest in using portfolios for writing assignments started in the ‘90s with student work on paper. He knew no one assessment gives a good picture of a student and wanted a way for students to document their knowledge acquisition. A portfolio slowly emerged as not just text as written letters, but also as math formulas, images, videos, audio, news articles and so on.  He wanted a system to reflect the paths students want to take through their learning. Every student in the Honors College now has an eportfolio; organized using WordPressMU. Joe used the “Cabinet of Curiosity” as a metaphor for what the eportfolio can be. He encourages students to think of the eportfolios, blogs, and other online projects as occuring along a conceptual continuum. There can be multiple functions for these online tools. Students need a place to evoke the social and the intellectual and to become scholars by their own will.

Questions and comments from the audience:

Students who create eportfolios have better retention.
Content analysis and participant observation can be used as assessment, if assessment is needed.

Are alumni encouraged to continue using their eportfolios? Yes, they exist in a public space and are owned by the student. There are no alumni yet who were eportfolio users but they will be encouraged to do so when that happens (next year).

A users theme plugin allows students to alter their theme if desired without disturbing the otherwise available themes.

3:15 p.m.:Discussion- CUNY Academic Commons; Matt Gold

Matt introduces the “one university, many institutions” flavor of CUNY, using the same map as Boone. He discusses how fruitful a CUNY collaboration could be because of our diverse interests.
Part of the AC goal is to create a political and legal shift to help academia get comfortable with sharing and opening up information.  We want to be a beararktopus. We want to better, stronger, faster.

More notes to come. His presentation is here.

2:30 p.m.: Discussion- Developing BuddyPress as a Collaboration Hub; Boone Gorges
He has a blogpost on this presentation here.
Boone opened with an introduction of the CUNY Academic Commons and CUNY itself. I like how he shows the map of CUNY locations and discusses how everyone is researching so many topics. CUNY is both geographically and intellectually disconnected. So, the AC is hoping to connect faculty and graduate student research topics and foster collaboration.
He opens with what developments he has done and exist to foster connection using BuddyPress. Custom Profile Filters allow one to bracket their [interests] within their profile description so that everyone who puts that same tag in their profile can connect.

What developments he has done and exist to foster Collaboration: First, he uses a hub and spoke analogy to describe the relationship between buddypress, bbpress, wordpress and mediawiki. Using these platforms together allows one to create by themselves, with a partner, and with a group. Authorship can be fully attributable or melted into a group. Boone also describes these developments he’s done: bbPress Group Forum Subscription, Forum Attachments, WP/MW Single Sign-on, Displaying the buddybar in other application (using postslug, jquery), and BuddyPressActivity (posting one’s wiki edits in one’s activity feed)

 Noon: Comedic Presentation on Wordpress addiction- wa.serenae.com

Note: The majority of comments and questions after each speaker so far are from nervous faculty who are concerned about what students will say and think online.

11:05 a.m.: Discussion- WordPress K-12: Winning Hearts and Minds; Tom Woodward, Tech Instructor at a Richmond, Virginia middle school; ByrdMiddle.org
Tom began as a regular history teacher at a middle school. He wanted to integrate blogs and technology into the school. He was continuously shut down by the administration for two years because Tom was “the scary monster who wants minors to write in the open space of the internet!” Finally, Tom bought his own server and started something himself. He made a site using the school’s name even though it might be a risky move. He started out simple and allowed teachers a lot of control. Students are first were not allowed to to comment, only read the teacher’s writing and download documents. Students were not considered collaborators. As in most schools, teachers and administrators were afraid of what students will say or do and are afraid to lose control over their students. As the past 4 years have passed the students have become collaborators but at a very slow pace.  Slowly students were given the option to comment. Then, Tom created a simple wordpress about Richard III. Tom played the role of Richard III and changed the basic php to reflect the time period theme. Tom wanted student groups to take on a character role and talk back and forth, eventually creating a social network that mirrors the drama of Richard III’s life. An opportunity accidentally cropped up for students to learn how their conversation exists in the public realm. The president of the Richard III Society in England commented on a student post (the blogs are open). This created a situation for the president to talk with the class online. The school administration then saw it was not necessary to be afraid of students talking in a public forum.

From this point, students moved from commenting to collaboration. Multiple student groups had a password protected blog to plan a debate strategy against the other student group. Students then opened up their blog and students could see other’s work. Students were excited to have a secret space to create their work and and prepare for competition.

Tom argues that within the pubic school system it can be necessary to slowly push towards full student collaboration so that the administration doesn’t become too frightened at the prospect of student’s ideas let loose.

10:00 a.m.: Discussion- Using WordPress to Share Research; Jeremy Boggs, Creative Lead at George Mason University, Center for History and New Media

Jeremy presents his discussion as more as a series of questions and thoughts on how to gather and share research using wordpress or other online spaces. He wants to make the current means of collecting information easier to use for critical reflection and discussion. His dissertation is on the history of cascading style sheets (seriously).

Jeremy asks- What happens when you are working on your dissertation and you realize there is so much information available to you and you will never tackle it all? “If you use all your research, you haven’t done enough research.” (Robertson quote)
From this point on Jeremy presents different APIs and ideas he is working on. He highlights great bibliography sites with API including Connotea, LibraryThing, and Zotero (but it’s API not public).

He show the possibilities available at chroniclingamerica.loc.gov

Jeremy argues that we need code and examples for using these APIs. Example: phpZotero- http://github.com/clioweb/phpZotero

Jeremy presents some plugins to help improve blogs as a mechanism for critical research and discussion.
Plugins: Commentpress allows comments on individual paragraphs within a post, this helps specify the conversation and make immediate edits. Citationaggregator: this adds delicious (or other social bookmarking) login info and aggregates citations into wordpress. This plugin does not allow easy sorting of citations though.

Jeremy is working on his own plugin, he calls Atelier:
“Lets say I use a host of web services for research (zotero citations, flickr images related to research, etc). I want to easily sort through that content for writing posts and pages in wordpress. What have I already said or found somewhere that I can use? This plugin puts a panel from the selected source you want to bring in, you can toggle through the sources you want to draw from (the plugin is basically a box with tabs for google reader, zotero, delicious, flickr, etc.; you click on each to import into your post).
The audience suggests other plugins: One that imports google docs into posts (not sure of title); and, Omeka: a “serious web publisher” for museums and scholars.
Jeremy closes with the point again that it is monumentally important that we turn our blogs into a powerful, respected, collaboration tool for research. How can we push information literacy and management tools in a progressive direction? What can academics learn from journalists who use collaborative online editing spaces?

9:30 a.m.: Discussion- Every Freshman at Baruch College is Blogging: Now What?; Luke Waltzer, Project Manager for Digital Learning, Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute

Baruch college decided to run a media literacy (blogging) component with their incoming freshman this Fall 2009. The green light wasn’t given until June 2009 and Luke Waltzer was given the task of figuring out how this would work and then making it happen. Baruch now has 60 blogs, each maintained by a group of 20 freshman and a junior or senior mentor. The blogs are aggregated into one mother blog here: blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/fro

The purpose of the program, from Luke’s perspective, is to change edtech culture from one of customer service orientation to student run media and information literacy. From my understanding the program is not affiliated with the CUNY Macaulay Honors College but it sounds very similar in scope and goal. The program is part of the required freshman seminar but is not necessarily a graded project. The program is overseen by freshman seminar office and associate director of student life (how is it funded?).

As part of freshman seminar, students attend events within Baruch and NYC. The events loosely fit into these enrichment areas: global community awareness, academic enrichment, career exploration, arts at Baruch, student life, and personal enrichment.

Luke presented a list of technical, pedagogical, and administration challenges.
Technical challenges: Designing a theme for all section blogs; and, Creating a system to keep track of all the updates, needed changes, and user reports. How do we encourage students to dialogue across blogs (see comments in mother blog)?
Pedagogical: How do we teach students to write for different audiences and consider how they are conversing in a public forum? Do we teach this in a physical classroom in relation to each student’s group blog? How do we convince the students that their blog can become personally meaningful and beneficial? How do we encourage students to dialogue across blogs?
Administration: How do we challenge culture of admin and teacher control over student voices? How do we present this project as part of media and information literacy?

9:00 a.m.: Today and tomorrow is the NYC conference for Wordpress users- WordCamp. There are multiple tracks throughout the day for different wordpress uses. I am mostly attending the Academic Track. Here will be some notes and updates about the day.

Filed under: technology, goals on November 14th, 2009