The Fish Wrapper

Aside from last year’s Faculty Academy, it’s been almost a year and a half since I’ve attended a conference. This was a personal decision on my part. I chose to come back to UMW part-time after my maternity leave and staying home with my family has been my number-one priority. But last January, I listened in on Twitter as my friend Jen attended EduCon, and so when Jerry asked me if there was a conference I wanted to attend this year, I knew EduCon was the one. From Jen’s tweets, I could tell that the conference was inspiring her. But there were some other really important reasons why I was really excited about the possibility of attending EduCon this year.

First, it’s a K-12 conference. Working in higher ed, I often feel like there is a big disconnect between the people I talk to regularly about technology, teaching, and learning and the people who are doing the same kinds of work in K-12. I find this disconnect concerning and uncomfortable. Students proceeding into higher education are experiencing a continuum that starts, these days, in grade school. Technology is being “integrated” from K through grad school, but it doesn’t seem like we talk to much about that continuum. The elephant in the room when that topic comes up, I think, is that higher education has done a bad job, in general, of acknowledging this continuum. Technology isn’t just a trajectory — learning is a trajectory. Teaching is a trajectory. Do we in higher ed (professors, technologists, librarians, administrators) engage with our colleagues in K-12 nearly enough. Do we understand the forces they’re negotiating? Do they understand ours? If we don’t talk and collaborate more, then how can we provide an learning experience for our students that makes sense?

The other reason the K-12 aspect of this interested me is that I’m a parent with a daughter about to enter kindergarten in our local public school. My daughter has been attending a private school for the last 12 months — first for 5-day preschool. This year, she was moved up into 5-day kindergarten, but she won’t be old enough to enter the public school until the fall. We’ve decided to move her, and I’m suddenly finding myself trying to figure out what, as a parent, I need to pay attention to as the transition occurs. Her current school is fantastic: her classes have been small; the students are amazing; the teachers are dedicated. But I, fundamentally, believe in the idea of public education, and I want her to have a public school experience like I had. At the same time, I hear horror stories about budget cuts, SOLs, and NCLB. My understanding of these issues is rudimentary, at best. I want to start to really understand what today’s public school teachers’ are facing. I want to understand the reasons why some teachers and parents are choosing private school instead. I want this information so that I can make an informed (non knee-jerk) decision about my childrens’ future. I’m hoping EduCon will be a place where I can begin my education.

There’s another reason why I’m really excited about EduCon, and it’s more personal. The conference is held at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia. Here’s a brief description of the school from their Web site:

The Science Leadership Academy is a partnership high school between the School District of Philadelphia and The Franklin Institute. SLA is an inquiry-driven, project-based high school focused on 21st century learning that opened its doors on September 7, 2006.

Twenty-two years ago, I started high school at a school was then an experiment in science education. That school is now well-established and well-respected (and also, still, controversial). My time at Thomas Jefferson was fraught. It was intense, challenging, demoralizing, and inspiring. I left with a great education and a pretty damaged self-esteem. It took a while to get past that legacy, but, given the choice, I’d probably go again.  SLA seems to have a lot of the same goals as Jefferson did when it was starting out. I’m fascinated to hear how another science high school is starting up 20 years later. I’m particularly interested in learning more about the vision of Chris Lehmann, the principal (and, apparently, force of nature) behind SLA. I’ve been following Chris on Twitter since Jen started tweeting at EduCon last year, and he is funny, inspiring, and obviously incredibly dedicated to his students.

The third reason I’m so excited about EduCon is also personal. 12 years ago when I decided to go back to graduate school to student technology and education, my dream was to go into museum work. In particular, I really wanted to work at a science museum. Science and technology museums have always been places of wonder for me. I think it’s because, when they’re done well, then wed narrative and science. The best museums tell really good stories, and the thing I’ve always found most interesting about science has been the stories hidden in the details. In this country, we’ve been bemoaning the state of science education for decades. I think SLA has struck a magic partnership by working with the Franklin Institute. Why not let a museum into the classroom to do what it can do best — make science real and relative? And why not let students into the museum where the practice of making museums can be the ultimate model for making and sharing knowledge?

Around the same time I was applying for graduate school my husband and I had just started dating. On one of our first dates, we drove up to Philadelphia to go to the Franklin Institute. I remember thinking this was the kind of place where I wold love to practice education and technology some day. I don’t know if a dream like that will ever come true. (I really do love working in higher education.) But this weekend I look forward to reliving those dreams and getting inspired.

Several reasons why the above is true:

1. My personal WP blog is so out-of-date in terms of version, I’m embarrassed to tell you what version I’m using.

2. I’ve been so bad about staying on top of my blog, I just found two nice comments buried in my spam from months ago. I’m a loser.

3. Did I mention I never blog?

4. I never blog

5. I have stopped using Google Reader, which means not only am I a bad blogger, I’m a bad blog reader. Shame on me.

Okay, enough with the self-loathing. I’m off to upgrade my blog and turn over a new leaf (again.)

I rock.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my first stint at Mary Washington, now close to 10 years ago. (wow!) I’m not sure why, except that a few things have reminded me about how different the job I have now is compared to the one I had then.

In early 2000, I joined the staff of the then Department of Instructional Technology at Mary Washington College. My job involved working out of an office in duPont hall, where I supported the faculty in the fine and performing arts. The job was a very different one from what we do in DTLT now. Located as we were in the academic buildings, we became, by default, the de facto user support system for the faculty. My job consisted more of fixing printers, installing software, and troubleshooting scanners than it did of consulting or partnering with faculty.

I worked in virtual isolation, only seeing my colleagues in DTLT once or twice a week for staff or project meetings. We actually collaborated on projects rather infrequently; our technical support duties didn’t leave us much time to imagine or create.

Professional development was pretty non-existent. At one point, my then boss recommended that I might consider becoming an Apple Certified Technician as a developmental step. I’m sure that’s a great certification, but it wasn’t really what I had gotten into instructional technology for.

All of this said, I deserve no credit for either challenging that situation or even thinking very far outside of the box. Whereas a year prior I had been in grad school in New York imagining how open source software development practices could inform education and the development of educational software and tools, I found myself at a loss of how I could continue to think creatively in my new job.

Recently, I remembered two examples of my failure in that job.

About a year into the position, a faculty in the music department approached me about a project she wanted to work on. Every summer, she and the other music faculty auditioned dozens of students for placement in the program. She really wanted to take the registration process for this activity online, allowing students to sign up and reserve slots through a Web site. She asked me for help.

I remember telling her there wasn’t anything I could really do for her.

I thought about this the other day when, searching for a good event plugin for our new WP-powered DTLT site, I came across one that allowed for the very functionality she was describing.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my response to her. Why couldn’t I help her? Was it because the technology wasn’t there yet? I didn’t have the technical chops that were required in 2000 to do what she asked? Or was it a failure of my own imagination and initiative?

Now, arguably, what she was asking me to do wasn’t *really* instructional technology (whatever that is), but it was a hell of a lot more interesting than un-jamming printers.

Sigh.

Around the same time, I was asked by my then boss to start leading a workshop we offered on computer-mediated communication. I remember trying to put together a plan for that workshop and being completely flummoxed. What was I going to show them? How to use email? In 2000, showing a professor how to instant message seemed ludicrous, unless it was the “virtual classroom” in Blackboard. As the workshop drew closer, I grew more and more anxious about my job. One faculty member signed up; on the day of the workshop, he didn’t show up. I was relieved.

Sigh. Sigh. Sigh.

I wish I could say I had risen to these challenges. I wish I could feel alright telling myself that it wasn’t my fault, but I have this nagging feeling that it was.

When I think back on both of those experiences, what I remember feeling most was fear. Fear at being asked to do something I couldn’t do. Fear of being exposed as a fraud in my job.

Occasionally, I find myself drifting towards the same fearful reaction when asked to do something that is new, uncomfortable, or now what I expected. I guess I need to try and keep reminding myself of how far fear didn’t get me before.

A long, long time ago, Rev. Jim blogged about a new theme for Wordpress know as Prologue, which created a Twitter-like front-end on a Wordpress blog. The basic idea is that the authors of the blog can quickly write a short post (a la Twitter) right from the blog’s front page. In typical fashion, Jim saw the potential for this new theme long before I understood it. In fact, I remember sitting in a meeting in which he demonstrated it thinking, “I don’t get it.”

Well now I get it.

Last week, UMW’s acting provost, Nina Mikhalevsky stopped by to talk to Jim about a class she’s teaching this fall. It’s a repeat performance of her freshman seminar on Banned Art. Two years ago, in UMW Blogs first semester, Jim set up a blog for Nina that she used to teach the course, with varying success. Apparently, the students were reticent to login and regularly post. She thought that perhaps lowering the threshold into the conversation might help.

I was sitting in the office while Jim and Nina discussed options, and so I heard Jim suggest using the current, revamped Prologue — now known as P2. I confess I was intrigued by the conversation, so I started eavesdropping.

In addition to using P2 as a way to foster a more informal conversation among her students, Nina still wanted to maintain a more formal blog for the class that she would contribute posts to. It seemed like an elegant solution. Use P2 for the more “chatty” conversation about the course, relying on P2’s ability to let authors easily tag posts as they write them to organize and filter the conversation as needed. Meanwhile, Nina will foster a more scholarly conversation through her own posts (and hopefully resulting comments).

During our conversation, the easiest solution seemed to be creating two blogs, one with the P2 theme and the other with a more conventional theme like K2 and then just linking them together.  But it occurred to me that it would probably be easy to hack P2 so that both conversations could happen within a single blog. I volunteered to try my hand at it.

So I spent a few hours today messing around with a test P2 blog on UMW Blogs at http://p2test.umwblogs.org. And, I’m happy to say, that I was able to make the necessary adjustments so that a single blog could be the home of both conversations.

It was actually pretty easy once I got out of my own way.

All I really needed to do was to use WP’s built-in feature to designate a static page as the home page and a separate page as the blogs page. In this case, I created two pages, one called “Nina’s Commentary” and one called “Class Chat.” The first became the blog’s front page (and will host Nina’s posts); the latter was the location for the P2 conversation.

Then I had to tweak the templates for the two pages. By default, there is a single page template in the theme called page.php. Rather than editing this template, I decided to create a new page template (that way if Nina wants to create pages for any other content, the core template will still be tact) In order to do this, I needed to copy the existing template file. I called the new version new_page.php (NOTE: Adding files to a theme is NOT something you can do via the backend in WPMU, even with User Themes installed. I had to work directly on the server for this.)

Once I had the copy of the page template, I just had to do a simple hack to display the correct posts. I started by creating a category called “Commentary” which Nina can use to file her posts. (All other posts on the site (which are NOT in the Commentary category) will be part of the Twitter-like conversation.)

Next, I added the following code right before the loop in the new_page.php template:

query_posts(’cat=9043′);

All this does is run a custom query resulting in only the posts that have been placed in the category with an ID of 9043 (which corresponds to the “Commentary” category.) Then, I edited the “Nina’s Commentary” page and assigned this new template to it.

At this point, I had a page of just posts in a single category as my blog’s home page. Now I needed to make sure the page with the P2 interface DIDN’T show those posts. It took me a bit to figure out that when you assign the blog posts to another page in Wordpress’ general settings (as I described above) you end up using the main index.php template for that blog page. Once I realized that, the hack was to just add another query before the loop. This time, however, it’s a query that EXCLUDED posts from the “Commentary” category:

query_posts(’cat=-9043′);

A few quick hacks, and I’ve got both conversations managed through a single blog.

Before I’m done, I’d *really* like to figure out a way to make this technique easily adaptable for other classes. I’m thinking if I have a custom field on both the “Nina’s Commentary” and “Class Chat” page that contains the ID or name of the category that I’m using to filter with, I could then use a variable (containing the value of that field) for the filtering. Then, we’d have a theme in UMW Blogs that, theoretically, could easily be used by any faculty to create a site like this. That would be cool.

One final step I played with tonight is using FeedWordPress to pull Twitter posts into the P2 side of the conversation. This was actually laughably easy. I just subscribed to my Twitter feed with FeedWordpress and ran an update. Then I was able to go back and use the Authors setting in that plugin to make sure all future posts from that feed were assigned to my profile and to retroactively assign the posts I’d already imported to my profile (I had to run the update on the feed first to see how FeedWordPress identifed the author of the incoming posts before I could assign them to the correct profile).

Next, I’m hoping Patrick can help cook up some magic to convert hashtags from Twitter posts into tags on the WP blog. THAT would really allow students to participate in the conversation via either the blog interface or Twitter.