I’m spending this weekend all alone, and taking advantage of the peace and quiet to explore some new #ds106 assignments.

Here’s my fantasy TED talk:

I can’t explain it, but I went through a period in my mid-20′s when I was totally addicted to the Teletubbies. I found the show fascinating — and watching it was a way of completely zoning out. And I was always intrigued by the damn baby sun. What the hell was it?!

Tangled Up

For the last six months or so, I’ve been working with a committee here at UMW that is charged with researching ePortfolio systems. The push for this system comes on a number of fronts:

1. An interest in a system for tracking institutional assessment learning outcomes (on program-, departmental-, and the University-level) and reporting on these otucomes.
2. A space for meta-cognitive reflection by students on their learning, perhaps as part of a larger look at how we advise students.
3. A desire to provide students with a “leg-up” by giving them a robust platform for showcasing their intellectual and professional work and development.
4. A need (specifically in the College of Education) to track student outcomes BEYOND graduation. New laws are requiring us to demonstrate the effectiveness of our students as teachers after they’ve graduated (for a indeterminate amount of time)

It’s worth mentioning that another possibility with a system like this would be to have the ePortfolio become a transcendent presence throughout a student’s time at UMW — a place where they store work, track and share their learning progress, reflect upon their ideas and experiences, and, ultimately, build an online identity for themselves that represents their intellectual self. However, I believe that to do this really effectively we need some kind of programmatic commitment. The ePortfolio would have to be “baked in” to the way we teach from first year seminars to senior thesis. That kind of programming would, potentially, require a much bigger conversation about our curriculum, requirements, and teaching methodologies. I’m not sure that’s going to happen anytime soon here, so, for now, the four needs outlined above are guiding our process more specifically.

I will admit that the first goal (institutional assessment) is incredibly murky for me. I’m lucky in my position to be fairly removed from conversations about academic assessment. I say “lucky” because, frankly, whenever I am in conversations about this topic it feels like the cart is driving the horse. Rather that starting with a conversation about students and what we want them to experience and how we want them to change during their time here, we start at the top — what are our reporting needs and how to we build down from there? The entire institutional assessment process, for me, is sort of a black hole and I can never seem to have a conversation with anyone that sheds any light on it.

The second goal (a space for student reflection) is, by far, the piece of this that intrigues me most. It’s really the starting place for a conversation that could result in programmatic change, and, to me, that’s interesting.

The third goal (a professional online space for post-graduation) is sort of the practical flip side to the second. Theoretically if we do #2 right, I think #3 should happen naturally.

The fourth goal (a space for post-graduation tracking) is the newest for me, and pretty interesting. I didn’t know until a few weeks ago that the College of Education had this requirement. I’m not entirely sure how they’re supposed to realistically achieve it, and I worry if we can build or buy a system that can really answer this need.

Complicating the landscape for this project is our current existing systems which, in some cases, are already meeting some of these needs:

• UMW Blogs, our open source WordPress-based publishing platform, allows any student to create a site, upload content, and, generally, do whatever they want. Students have already started to use it as place to host online portfolios on their own, and some faculty have had students doing ePortfolio-like things in this space.
• Canvas, our new CMS (which also went open source earlier this year), is the space where students and faculty do your standard online course managementy types of activity: submitting assignments (or “artifacts as the ePortfolio crowd seems to like to say”) and grading said assignments. Canvas allows us to create institutional learning outcomes and rubrics which can be used at the course level, but it’s not clear that we can use it to actually do the kind of data gathering and assessment we need.
• TracDat is our institutional data tool into which faculty can submit assessment data and results.

Last spring, three faculty members at UMW (Steve Greenlaw, Anand Rao, and Krystyn Moon) all piloted WordPress as a space for doing different kinds of ePortfolios. Steve used them as a space for freshman advising. Anand had his students build personal portfolios based on their work in a visual rhetoric class. Krystyn and I worked on integrating a Google spreadsheet into a WordPress template to do online assessment of student work.

The projects were as much to understand the questions that we needed to answer as they were to provide the final solution.

This year, we’re hoping to pilot a few systems (both open source and commercial) to see if we can find one that meets our needs (or most of them?). However, we’re running into some challenges:

• Among the systems that are out there, many seems to do one piece of what we’re trying to do well. On the other requirements, they either don’t do it as well or don’t do it at all.
• Many of the systems seem to duplicate the functionality we already have in existing platforms.
• It’s difficult to imagine how yet another system would fit into this landscape. If faculty and students are already happy using UMW Blogs and Canvas to teach and learn, why are we going to thrust yet another system on them (that duplicates some of what UMW Blogs and Canvas already do)? I can imagine many of them just balking at the notion and not using the new system at all.

We’re beginning to wonder if there is another way forward. Is it worth trying to develop something on top of what we already have? Or, is it possible to build something on top of a new system we buy that would gracefully integrate them into what we already have?

I’m interested in talking to people at other institutions about this project. In my mind, we’re not the only ones facing these questions or looking for these solutions. We should be working together to share information about what systems work well (and work well together) and/or what we could build together.

I’d love to hear from people about their ideas. Specifically, here are a few questions I have:

• Do the four goals I outlined above align with any of your institution’s goals? What have I left off that is driving your own interest or research?
• Do you think it’s even possible for one system to meet all of these goals?
• If you’re already implementing a system for ePortfolios how are you handling integration with your existing systems (on both a technical and cultural level)?
• Would you be interested in talking with a group of others about collaborating on this research (and potentially, development)?
• What have I not mentioned here that I should be thinking about?

I’ve been meaning to blog for a while on the “soft” launch this fall of a new look for UMW Blogs. It had been two years since we last redesigned the home page for the site, and in those years several pieces of the page had broken (due to outdated plugins).

This summer, I spent some time building a new theme more or less from scratch for the site and it allowed me to improve some features as well as learn a few new things.

Out with the Old. . .

To start with, I decided to build the new theme on top of the 960 grid system. I’ve been using it off and on for about a year on some other sites, and have come to love how simple it makes layout. I know it adds a bit of extra code to the site, but it’s far less code than we all used to use with tables, and, from a developer’s standpoint (at least THIS developer’s standpoint), it’s worth it.

Jim and I spent an hour or so one morning early this summer brainstorming the overall layout of the site. We decided to keep the animated, tabbed menu but we cut some of the tabs that were pointing to pages that no longer exist (due to a failed experiment with BuddyPress).

We also decided we wanted to keep the featured post slide show, but we wanted to get away from Featurific. It’s an okay plugin, but we hated the branding watermark and that fact that it was Flash-based.

Most of the other elements stayed — the search box for the whole install of UMW Blogs, the Flickr photos (a gallery of public images tagged with “University of Mary Washington”), the featured sites, and the latest posts. We eliminated the tag cloud because it just had never been very meaningful as a way to find stuff on the site.

A bunch of the features that remained got a makeover behind the scenes.

I migrated the horizontal navigation bar out of the MooTools based javascript that we had used in the past. It had been the reason why we ended up using Featurific for our slideshow — tje MooTools menu created conflicts with other javascript-based slideshows we tried to use. I settled on a jQuery zAccordion plugin.

For the featured posts slideshow, I used another jQuery script. This one by Soh Tanaka. You can find a great tutorial about how to set up a slideshow like this here. For kicks, I also created a custom admin page for the theme to choose the category to go into the slideshow. This was my first foray into creating a custom admin page for a theme, so, yay me.

A small thing that I changed that makes some maintenance of the site a bit easier. I migrated the “Featured Sites” which had been hard-coded in the previous site (Yikes!) into WP links in a designated category. It’s much easier to add/remove sites now.

By far, however, the biggest change to the site was the “Latest Posts” feature. We had been using the Sitewide “three-in-one” Multi Widget that was released for WPMU years ago. (No longer available, it seems). This plugin worked in conjunction with Donncha’s Sitewide Tags plugin. Basically, SiteWide Tags sets up a single blog to which any public post that is published on UMW Blogs is republished. Then the Three-in-One Multiwidget checks that blog for the latest posts across the system. It seemed to be working fine, but in researching the entire issue of showing site-wide posts, I stumbled upon the fact that the widget was using the “switch_to_blog” function to get posts from the Sitewide Tags blog. I did a bit of digging and discovered there was some controversy about the wisdom of using this plugin, particularly on a page that gets hit frequently. (The WP Codex actually has the function marked as deprecated.)

I asked around on Twitter about the best way to aggregate posts around the site for display on the home page. Another option would be to use the RSS feed that we get from our the Sitewide Tags blog, but as some pointed out, it doesn’t make sense to be using RSS to syndicate content that is within the same database. (Although, frankly, we do it all the time with FeedWordpress, but that’s another conversation.)

At some point, the fabulous Boone B. Gorges suggested that another option would be to store an array of recent posts somewhere. Essentially, each time a post is published, some information about it would be stored in an array in a global table. And, each time a new post is added, the earliest post stored is dropped, essentially keeping that array manageable.

I thought that sounded very nice. But I had no idea how to do it. So Boone did it for me!

Seriously, in about an hour he built me a “proof of concept” which was a lot more “proof” than “concept.” I spent some time tweaking it (and begging help from UMW’s own Curtiss Grymala to address a few nuances). We needed to check that updates to posts weren’t added to the array and we needed to check a blog’s privacy settings before adding the post to the array. (At this point, we still have a problem with posts that are syndicated elsewhere in UMW Blogs showing up multiple times, so that’s on my list of things to fix.) The plugin is FAR from primetime, but if you want to take a look (and improve upon it!), here’s the code. IMPORTANT NOTE: Any piece of this code that is well-crafted and awesome is from Boone or Curtiss. The rest is all my fault.

But the best part of this whole thing was that since redoing the home page and changing out the latest posts widget, UMW Blogs has had NO downtime. We’re seriously speculating that the old widget and the use of switch_to_blog may have been a significant part of our problems in the past.

The final pieces of ALL of this came together when DTLT’s latest staff member Tim Owens arrived on the scene. I had the page pretty well framed out, but hadn’t spent much time on the actual design. Tim spent a day or two changing out images and generally making everything look awesome.

. . .in with the new.

So, that’s how we skin an institutional blogging platform here at UMW. Shazam.

Over the weekend, I stumbled across this gem on the NY Times. According to the article, the latest trend in corporatizing higher education is the “sponsored” move-in. An example they focused on quite a bit was American Eagle Outfitter’s sponsorship of this fall’s freshman move-in at UNC. The clothing company hired upperclassman to sport AE tee-shirts and hats and distribute schwag while helping freshmen move into their new dorms. These students (whose activities continue beyond move-in) even have official titles:  “brand ambassadors” or “campus evangelists.”

Oy.

Further down, the Times actually interviews administrators at UNC and discovers that they were unaware of the sponsorship. Naturally, the administrator they spoke too Winston B. Crisp (vice chancellor for student affairs and @vicecripsy on Twitter) expressed concern about turning move-in into a day-long corporate commercial event:

“They are not supposed to be using the opportunity to help people move in as a way of forwarding commercial ventures,” he said, standing near the cash registers at Target that evening, as upperclassmen handed out free VitaminWater, Combos and packages of macaroni and cheese. He added: “So it’s a bit of a dilemma.”

Wait. Huh?

Oh! It seems Mr. Crisp is mostly upset because UNC had been arranging its own sponsored events around freshman move-in with Target since 2007! So, “using the opportunity to help people move in as a way of forwarding commercial ventures” is a problem EXCEPT when it’s been officially arranged by the office of student affairs. (And it involves VitaminWater and Combos.)

In his explanation of why UNC set up a midnight shopping trip for freshman at Target, Crisp explains that “It’s an opportunity for us to gather them together on a Saturday night in a healthy, safe environment while allowing another major corporate entity to further invade the space of higher education and create new, life-long customers who will promote their ‘brand’ and spend lots and lots of money. Really, it’s a teachable moment.” Okay, I lied. He didn’t actually say that last part.

Further down, there’s a money quote from UNC student Kiley Pontrelli:

“When you know that the company is not just there to get your money, they’re actually willing to, like, help you as an individual in whatever way possible, it makes you respect them a lot more,” Ms. Pontrelli says. “I’m definitely going to give American Eagle, like, a second thought when I go by next time.”

Once again, corporate America is helping educational institutions and students out of the goodness of their heart! They want to HELP students! As INDIVIDUALS! In WHATEVER WAY POSSIBLE! As long as said students can “engag[e] in real activities to move the needle on major brands.” That last quote is from Matt Britton, chief executive of Mr. Youth, a marketing agency who seems to consult with these companies that are looking for ways to help students . . .as individuals. . . in whatever way possible. . .oh, never mind.

(I didn’t actually know what “move the needle on major brands” meant. You know, because I’m a human being and not a marketer. So I Googled it. Here’s a site I found that actually explains this stupid cliche.)

I can’t decide what annoys me most: The companies that are creating “brand ambassadors” on college campuses because they know the power of peer pressure when it comes to getting young people to purchase stuff. The students who fall for this bullshit and think that these companies actually “care” about them. Or the colleges who are INVITING these businesses to become a part of students’ experiences because it allows them to provide “safe, healthy” student events.

Actually, the last one is the one that annoys me most.

Last Tuesday, a group of about 12 people met in DTLT’s office to discuss an online learning initiative that has been underway at UMW for the last several months. I’ve only recently been pulled into this conversation due to some staffing turnover, but I’ve been following it through conversations with Steve Greenlaw (who has played an integral role in planning and imagining it) and Jim Groom (who has represented DTLT in many of the meetings and conversations).

Generally, the goal of the initiative is to explore online learning within a liberal arts context — with an emphasis on thinking about how the values of the liberal arts can be explored. I think it’s an admirable goal, and I’ve been more intrigued by it than many other conversations about online learning that I’ve been part of in the past because its attempting to address online teaching and learning at a more fundamental level than just the use the Web as a delivery mechanism (more on this below).

The goal of last Tuesday’s meeting was to discuss the review of online courses that a few faculty members have signed up to teach next spring and summer. Part of the project has always included a process wherein colleagues from within UMW and from other institutions would be asked to review the course plans based on some set of criteria. This meeting was to further discuss what that criteria would be.

In preparation for the meeting, I spent some time reviewing three other review mechanisms — specifically rubrics developed by the Illinois Online Network, California State University, Chico,  and the Monterey Institute. All three of these had been suggested to Steve by colleagues at other institutions who had offered advice and feedback on the initiative.

In full disclosure, the word rubric is one that generally leaves me cold. The adoption of rubrics as a way to assess education (both student work, and in this case, faculty work), seems to have emerged out of the increasing presence of instructional designers at our schools and the increasing interest in generating institutional data with which to clobber our accrediting agencies during reaffirmation.

(Now for a short side note about “instructional design”: When I was getting my graduate degree in instructional technology ten years ago, I looked at generally two kinds of programs: ones with a heavy emphasis on instructional design and ones without. I ended up going to one of the latter because there was something about the various instructional design systems that left me cold. Now, to be fair, I’m not an expert on these systems (what with the not going to a school that taught them). But what little I do know about them seems to suggest such a formulaic approach to teaching that it seems to suck the life and art out of the practice. )

I don’t have any particular problem with professional staff being hired to partner with faculty to think about ways to teach that are innovative and creative (hey! that sounds like what I do!). So, if that’s what an “instructional designer” is, fine. I also don’t have any particular problem with institutions being interested in thinking carefully and closely about what they do — and even using that process to imagine ways to evolve and change. If that’s what “institutional data” is for, fine.

But, really, that’s not what I’m seeing. Instead, I see more and more institutions relying on the perspectives of instructional designers and institutional data offices to determine strategic goals.

All of this was weighing on my mind fairly heavily as I gathered the materials for our meeting. I spent sometime reviewing the various rubrics as well as the notes on liberal arts education that the committee had developed earlier this summer. I suggested to Steve that we break the rubrics down into their component parts and then offer these pieces up to the committee to consider as they discussed how UMW should review online courses. In my mind, I was imagining that we would juggle and group the rubric components, finding some that we’d like to look at further for our own purposes, and some that we would eliminate entirely.

I literally printed a card for each rubric component, with the different rubrics each assigned a separate color or paper so that we could keep track of what was what. Last Tuesday, we all sat down at the table in DTLT with piles of colored paper and brief handouts that provided an overview of each rubric.

We started talking.

And then the earth shook. Literally. An earthquake hit Virginia, and, here in Fredericksburg, the walls of duPont rumbled dramatically. The meeting was adjourned.

And ever since then I’ve been joking that the earthquake was some higher power’s sign to us that we needed to treat rubrics with CAUTION!!

In all seriousness, in preparation for the make-up meeting (which, as it happens will be this afternoon), I’ve been doing additional thinking and soul-searching about this project. Here are a couple of thoughts I’ve had, loosely organized, in no particular order.

1. Let’s make Online Learning about Learning Online.
It seems to me that a lot of online learning conversations operate under the assumption that the “online” component is merely the technical component that allows a faculty to deliver a course to students who are not physically co-located. Online simply becomes a mechanism that a faculty member employs for practical reasons. I would like to suggest that we need to start thinking about Online Learning as a practice that considers in a holistic way how learning can happen within a networked, open culture. DS106 is a great example of a course that not only relies on online environments to communicate with students and provide access to content and ideas but also places students within the open Web where their success depends upon learning how to navigate these online spaces, develop networks of support, and contribute their own knowledge and creative practices back to open Web culture.

What if we conceived of our online courses this way? What if faculty were asked to consider how they could incorporate the open Web into their curriculum and students were expected to engage in these spaces as part of their coursework.

2. Let’s Start Over
It seems to me that most online courses grown out of existing face-to-face courses, where a faculty member works (sometimes in conjunction with others) to “transform” or translate the F2F experience to the online course environment (usually an LMS). It’s digital facelifts all the way down. What if we decided to build online courses from scratch? Instead of simply translating a F2F class, how about if every online coure is a NEW course. Perhaps it’s built out of something that has been taught F2F, but it’s given a chance to exist, natively within an online context. Faculty could use online courses to explore those aspects of their discipline that lend themselves to being taught within a Web-based network.

3. Let’s Make (Teaching) Art
I don’t have a particular problem with courses being reviewed by other faculty members, nor (as I stated above) do I have a problem with University’s having people on staff whose job is to partner with faculty to think about new ways of teaching. What I DO have a problem with is taking the review of online courses so far that it sucks the creativity and art out of teaching. Honestly, the rubrics that I reviewed for our meeting were filled with criteria that seemed  over-the-top. We have never subjected faculty to this kind of review for F2F classes. Why do we assume that when they teach online, they’re incapable of making smart choices about how they teach? Can’t our “review” of courses focus more on developing creative partnerships among faculty and their supporting colleagues — partnerships that focus on thinking through the possibilites of a course, bouncing ideas off each other, exploring new technologies or approaches? These partnerships would be a breading ground for discussing the two points I raised above — how to teach a liberal arts discipline within an open, networked Web and how to build natively, online courses within those disciplines.

Okay, that was a LONG post. But when I blog, I don’t just make some crappy animated gifs. I BLOG.   Would love to hear feedback and/or pushback on any of this.

Yeah, I know the current SOB iteration of DS106 covered design/visual a few weeks ago, but I had this idea for another 4 icon challenge tonight and decided to throw it together.

In today’s video Tim Owens and I take you through the Web Storytelling assignment step-by-step. This assignment is due Wednesday at midnight. Please post it to your blog and tag it as “webstories” (no quotes).

Please note the ds106 radio shows are due tonight (7/11) at midnight and the shows will air tomorrow starting at 1:30 PM and run through the evening. Be sure to have one of your group members following the radio stream during that time and have access to Twitter and Skype so that you can come on the radio and talk about your radio show. You can get on ds106 radio by following these directions: http://bit.ly/radio4life Keep in mind there will be no formal class tomorrow, but you will all be asked to monitor the ds106radio station from 1:30 PM on.

On Wednesday, 7/13, we will start the introduction to the video section of this course at 1:30 PM. Please be ready to contribute your favorite web video examples during this session, which will be led by Jim Groom’s twin brother Tim Groom.

On Thursday, 7/14, Andy Rush will take us through the specifics of web video, covering everything from codecs to compression to video editing tools and more. This session will also be held at 1:30 PM.

Best,
Martha Burtis
Officially Done

ds107_amazon

It occurred to me that Jim Groom, given his altered state, may not have given the class some examples of radio shows that have been done already in what was once simply #ds106. Therefore I have taken it upon myself, as a good professor, to provide you with some solid examples of both radio shows and bumpers from previous courses to use as a model as you create your own.

I hope this helps you all in your quest! What’s more, I have taken the liberty to extended the deadline for the final radio shows from Sunday at midnight to Monday at midnight.

What follows is a copy of the email I will be sending out to the ds106 Summer of Oblivion course members shortly.

All,
Here is the link to today’s abbreviated course session:

Keeping up with the ds106 Radio Show
In light of Jim Groom’s disappearance, I think I need to step in and establish some kind of order and reaffirm that we must remain one as a class, and put all our divisions aside. What’s more, you must get your assignments done! Today’s video was short and sweet, and provided a review of where we are and a look at where we are going—with or without Jim Groom.

As a quick recap. you should already have your radio groups formed and each group should have a name and list of members on this wiki page here. Also, your groups :30 second and one minute bumpers are due for your radio show by tomorrow, Friday, July 8th, at 5 PM. In addition, the show is due no later than midnight on Sunday July 10th (this deadline is not negotiable). Finally, the shows will air on Monday, July 11th starting at 2 PM and going through the evening.

Telling Stories in/on the Web Assignment
What’s more, as a look of things to come we will be experimenting with web storytelling, wherein you each will be asked to hack a website and make it your own. Here is an example I worked on today to give you an example of what one of them might look like: http://marthaburtis.net/ds106_amazon.html

This assignment will be the subject of Monday’s course, and the course will be centered on this assignment but in order to get a head start see the video about how to execute this assignment here and the very detailed tutorial here. You can see some ideas and the vision of this assignment on Jim Groom’s blog here, before he lost it entirely.

Steady and strong wins the race,
Martha Burtis