One small step for man

The following is an invitation to Centers of Teaching and Learning (CTL)

Preamble
We are looking at updating our website. Again.

The last revision used Oracle tools to make a site that was readily modified by the whole staff — an attempt at content management to eliminate the webmaster. It worked to an extent. We also moved some of our content into the university wiki — an invitation to the campus to contribute to our efforts. But our staff still say they can’t find the stuff they want to help our faculty.

More recently we have been thinking about Web 2.0 strategies for learning, summarized here. This has me thinking about how our CTL could be working differently. Further, I suspect that all CTLs are working on roughly the same problems — assessing learning outcomes, accreditation, large classes, integrating the newest technology, course evaluations, advancing our own professional development, etc — AND all are understaffed for the amount of one-on-one effort required.

We recently enjoyed the help of a post-doc with expertise in survey research who made a collection of public domain survey instruments, with annotations and some bibliographic references about each. We also have our own collection of course evaluation instruments and another collection of rubrics. Each is filed in its little cubby somewhere.

One of the requests for our site redesign was have fingertip access to these surveys. And make that collection available to faculty who might wish to write their own surveys using the survey tools we support.

A large amount of the work of our CTL has no need of secrecy. As a public institution none of it can really be kept secret, but discretion is often advisable around data associated with instructors and programs. Some materials we use have licenses that restrict our posting them on the web.

Sticking with the obviously public content, how do we (all the world’s CTLs) use Web 2.0 tools and Learning 2.0 strategies to collaborate on the common problems we are addressing? I recently wrote a letter of advice to a Web 2.0 Learner. It offers some clues.

The Invitation
Join us in creating the world’s CTL. You will need to work differently and think differently, but my hypothesis is that, by changing some habits, you can learn to work more effectively.

The Strategy
1. Use Google. Someone else might be working on your problem. There are multiple ways to search using Google, including Google Alerts that will run a search and email you when it finds new results (works very well for highly targeted searches). Google’s Blog search and Alerts each produce RSS. You can also get 3rd party RSS feeds of regular Google searches.

2. Teach Google. Google learns from us. (Thanks Michael) The strategies below are all about using and storing links to teach Google.

3. Use Wikipedia. Google privileges Wikipedia highly in its search results. Find your topic there. If Wikipedia knows less than you, “Be Bold.” Not everything can be in Wikipedia, use it to point to additional key resources and communities, this teaches Google and since Wikipedia is where a novice is likely to start, it invites people to your community and resources.

4. Find your community online. Join them, use their tools. Can’t find a community, create a community space. In any case, tell Wikipedia where the community is.

5. Empty everything that does not need to be private from your file cabinet, hard drive, and file server onto the web. Put everything at URLs where it will remain stable over time. If possible, put copies where your community can edit them. Tell Google by linking to these resources.

6. Bookmark online, not in your browser. Use the bookmarking tools and tags your community uses. Post information about which tags in these systems are useful in your community spaces and Wikipedia. This helps your community and it teaches Google.

7. Blog. When you have on a problem invite the world to think about it. Report your solutions, too. Make links in your blog posts to the resources you found. Keep a blog roll of resources that you find valuable. This helps you, your community and teaches Google.

8. Comment on other blogs. Provide both feedback and guidance. Add links in your comments, these teach Google.

9. Write reviews that synthesize and link several resources or your current solution. Post this review where your community can best find it, which might be your blog, your community’s space or Wikipedia.

10. Create custom Google searches. This can focus the search experience for your faculty and community. It also teaches Google.

Possible Objections
Wikipedia can’t be trusted. If the Wikipedia pages you need are wrong or are changing, garden them.

I don’t have time for this. Make this your work, not extra work

My stuff is not good enough to be online. Get over it. If you dare share it with anyone, put it online. Refine it as you go. Keep both versions, blog about what you learned and why the new version is better. This is your learning portfolio, it helps you earn credibility in your community.

I don’t have a web server. Where I can put my stuff? Use free online resources.

Proposal for our CTL Website
This discussion started from a need to revise our unit’s website. It proposed that we collectively create a planetary CTL web resource. Given the above, what should our campus CTL site contain?

As a starting hypothesis, and to be blunt, our website should contain only the things that keep our budget from being cut.

That means the site needs an Intranet where we can securely share with select members of our campus the data and reports related to our collaborations with them.

We may also need a public repository where we can dump our files online.

The site also should provide information about the problems that our unit is working on, and who the partners are in this work, and the value this work is providing to the University — what have we done for you lately? This might be a learning history or a showcase portfolio. This information should be rich in links and other clues to find more information. Some of the links should be fed into the site as RSS from the activities above.

The site should provide one-click access when that is politically valuable, but it should not strive to be an A-Z index, rather our site should have a custom Google search, and hints about what problems that search has been optimized to address.

Our site might have public resources if they are politically valuable to us, but we don’t want turn our site into a content silo, rather the preference should be to link to resources stored elsewhere. We should strive to collaborate with other units and host resources in the most appropriate places (For example, campus-centric technology help in the campus help resource. (And we should remember to make our custom Google search look there.)) We should also collaborate with our communities and put resources on off campus sites if that gives the resources more global value.

Objections
Faculty should find the resources they need by browsing our site.
Maintaining links and resources takes time. Unless having those links is protecting our budget, we should spend time on things that are more essential. Further, we are probably better off assuming (or helping) faculty use Google than being information architects. Social bookmarking is quick and has other payoffs. Feed the results of your social bookmarking to your website. Use search.

I don’t want to put our content in places we don’t control. Wikipedia is based on the hypothesis that “we are smarter than me.” Its seems to be working.

There won’t be much left on our site. So? See the hypothesis about protecting budget and political value.

Our technical and web staff won’t have jobs. Keep your staff focused on your intranet needs.

In If you have a problem, ask everyone (CORNELIA DEAN
NYTimes, July 22, 2008) says:

“John Davis, a chemist in Bloomington, Ill., knows about concrete. For example, he knows that if you keep concrete vibrating it won’t set up before you can use it. It will still pour like a liquid.

Now he has applied that knowledge to a seemingly unrelated problem thousands of miles away. He figured out that devices that keep concrete vibrating can be adapted to keep oil in Alaskan storage tanks from freezing.”

The idea in this article is that by gathering other perspectives, diverse ones, it is possible to solve problems that you could not solve yourself from your perspective. This is analogous to the story on 60 minutes about the inventor with a new approach to treating cancer.

Palouse Prairie School was awarded a charter to open in 2009 using the Expeditionary Learning (EL) model. Pupils will work on integrated problems (metaphorical expeditions into unknown territories to solve a real problem and perform a community service [the philosophy behind Expeditionary Learning, a trade name, has its origins in Outward Bound Expeditions]).

So where does “ask everyone” play in an EL elementary school? The pupils need to gather perspectives to work on their problems. Perspectives will enrich their learning. And enhance their problem solving.

The strategy for gathering perspective may be as simple as taking the problem home to the dinner table, “Mom, how can you help my class think about this problem?” or more sophisticated, by posting the problem on the Internet.

In the latter case, a Web 2.0 strategy is important. How can a school child hope to get help from some stranger somewhere in the world? 1. By linking to others (especially the way blogs do, called ‘trackback’), 2. by using key terms that Google will recognize, and 3. by having a ‘reputation’ to raise the rank of the student’s post in Google’s results.

Tracking back gains attention from a specific person. Its part of a process of saying ‘I read your stuff’ which is the kind of flattery that might get someone else to read you.

Reputation is earned, by being linked by others, which means, by doing or saying something worthwhile.

Tracking back takes thoughtful reading. Being linked takes saying something worthy of another’s mentioning. Both skills are, I think, desirable in a 21st century learner.

If a school had a blog, and it engaged the world thoughtfully with that blog, and friends of the school started linking to the blog posts because the ideas were worthwhile, the reputation of the blog would rise, and the potential of gaining help on a problem (ask everyone) would increase as well. (Not that you make a blog post and wait — you need to be active, finding a community that you think can help and engaging it.)

How does this work? I took the title of the NYTimes article and stuck it into Google and found that Cathy Davidson had responded to the NYTimes with a blog post on participatory learning. Having found Cathy and HASTAC blog, I had also found the term ‘participatory learning’ which has some interesting Google results but no Wikipedia entry.

Were children working on a problem, and found nothing in Wikipedia, that would be a prompt to create the page, even just a “stub page” in Wikipedia terms. A Wikipedia page serves as high ground (in a Google search sense) for the concept and from that page one hopes to find links to key resources and communities, perhaps even ones created by the students. Here are more ideas on how to think about wikis for learning.

The Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology at WSU has been thinking about how to use some of these ideas to transform University education. We are asking how to help students engage the world in authentic assessment of the student’s work. I can point to examples like 17 year-old George Hotz hacking the iPhone (for my purposes the hack is less important than the blog where he shared the blow-by-blow problem solving and got help) and Margo Tamez who, along with her Apache Nation in Texas, is taking on US homeland security over the idea of a border wall with Mexico. I think these ideas can be brought down to the level of the elementary school and challenge children to engage in authentic problems in a global context.

In Wikipedia your contribution can be respected even if you are anonymous. The Wikipedia community works because it has a set of public criteria used by the community (and debated within the community) for judging all work. For example, there is a policy around deletion of pages and procedures for implementing it.

In thinking about transforming the grade book, I am concluding that we have reduced the teaching and learning proposition to one core idea: the public presentation of evaluation criteria, the public application of the criteria to a given learner’s work, and a public means for the criteria and their application to be negotiated by a community over time.

I think this is what Stephen Downes is saying in Open Source Assessment, you don’t need a curriculum created by experts, you need this core tool, the assessment.

But, key to making this work is to directly assess what you want learners to be doing. If you use an indirect measure, like a standardized multiple choice exam, what you will get is learners who master that test but may not have the skills and knowledge that are actually desired. Patricia Cross suggests that what you measure and value is what you will get more of from learners.

And, once you have your assessment underway, you need to constantly redefine it by holding the results up against what you would like to have happening. The key is not how well students do on our exams, its how well the exams promote what we want students to do.

Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike - New York Times

By JANET RAE-DUPREE
Published: December 30, 2007

IT’S a pickle of a paradox: As our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off. Why? Because the walls of the proverbial box in which we think are thickening along with our experience.

Points at an interesting idea, I’ve yet to get the Made to Stick book and look more deeply, but the role of the ‘transient “zero-gravity thinker”’ (an outsider) in causing experts to slow down, explain and in the process examine their knowledge and assumptions, is interesting. We have been talking about communities and how the novice moves from the edge to the center of a community as expertise is gained. That view is hierarchical, the goal is expert status and novices are not viewed as a resource to expertise. This review gives a different perspective, novices play a role that is helpful to experts, breaking them out of the myopia of their expertise. This makes the expert-novice relation within a community dialogic and mutually dependent.

It connects to ideas of ecosystem, where monocultures are less stable and productive than diverse native systems.

Previously I posted on David Wiley’s Open Ed online course. I decided to drop in on the course and see what was happening. I found Alessandro’s post of his frustrations with the course, with David Wiley’s reply:

Alessandro blogged tonight about the same frustration many of us (myself included) are feeling with regard to the Intro to Open Ed course. Alessandro’s frustrated that I haven’t been providing as much feedback as might be desired. I have to agree. With about 60 students following the course, I could easily spend all day every day responding to what you are all writing and still not keep up.

I think its important to surface an assumption going on here and look into some alternatives, especially in light of what this course is about (or maybe what I read “Open Education” to be about). David talks about reading and responding to each student, as if that is his role. Students talk about the “dry” readings and their posts as summaries of those readings.

What if instead, David had framed the course differently — A few general readings to start things off, and a request for each student to propose an open-ed project that interested them and that they would research. However, rather than working alone, students would be asked to form teams among the class members, selecting among the proposed projects the one that they found most interesting. My friend and former colleague Stephen Spaeth designed a distance course (Decs 340) using that concept. The students were all older, working, and had authentic on the job applications for the ideas of the course. Theron DesRosier places this design idea into a broader context when he talks about bringing the outside world into the class.

In addition to working on projects, students would weekly post about readings related to open education they were finding that aided their projects. Some would delve into learning objects, others into copyright and licenses. The topics of the course would get “covered” but driven by the authentic work of the students. The learning of any individual might not be as wide as the course survey, but it would be deeper and more lasting.

Wiley’s student Karen Fasimpaur has proposed a project that I think fits the notions above when she writes (outside of class!?) about her project idea to create a kids dictionary. This looks like an open education activity, when she asks “How could this be hosted to best facilitate mass collaboration?” [Frankly, I’d like to get involved in such a project, and I’d start by suggesting that kids working with parents and teachers could be the authors. Other dictionaries would be a resource to them. I’d also endorse Karen’s inclination to use a wiki for the reasons outlined here.]

I see notes in the course that it has been redesigned in the latter weeks of the semester to give students more reflection time. Perhaps it could still be modified to give students more peer-critique responsibilities as well. A rubric such at the one in WSU Critical Thinking Project might be adapted to provide the framework for the peer feedback, and (for next offering of the course) even the framework for the instructor assessment.

We (Ashley Ater-Kranov, Theron DesRosier, Jayme Jacobson and I) just put in a proposal for the Educause Learning Initiative 2008 Annual Meeting: Connecting and Reflecting: Preparing Learners for Life 2.0, January 28–30, 2008 San Antonio, Texas.

Our proposal is “ePortfolio 2.0: expanding our views of portfolio”

Abstract (50 words max)

George Hotz’ blog chronicling his iPhone hack demonstrates students can collaborate world-wide and create portfolios that make learning visible. Our research suggests students and faculty are equally adept at giving criteria-based feedback. Portfolios capturing learning process combined with criteria-based feedback have implications for teachers, course design and LMS platforms.

Research Results

Ater-Kranov, Ashley and T. Desrosier. Raising the Bar: Communicating High Expectations and Getting Results. Poster. Washington State University Academic Showcase March 2007.

Cho, Yoon Jung, A Ater-Kranov, and G Brown. Faculty Attitudes about ePortfoios: A study for the National Coalition for ePortfolio Research. Poster. Washington State University Academic Showcase March 2007.

Hotz, George. Finding JTAG on the iPhone. Blog. http://iphonejtag.blogspot.com/ accessed Sept 10, 2007

WSU ePortfolio Contest. Making Learning Visible. Website. http://ctlt.wsu.edu/eportgallery accessed Sept 10, 2007

Session Focus

Portfolios have been used in several ways beyond being showcase of best work, including documentation of learning growth and for personal reflection. In the Spring of 2007, the Center for Teaching Learning and Technology at Washington State University hosted an ePortfolio contest that asked students to document their learning growth. The result was a rich array of evidence of learning, and a wide range of portfolio documentation.

More simply, a blog can be understood to be a learning journal, and with suitable summary posts, might serve as a portfolio. George Hotz blog of the hack of the iPhone is one example that illustrates one person’s informal but substantial learning journey enhanced by a collaborative community.

Personal Learning Environments (PLE) integrate both formal and informal learning episodes into a single experience and often have a blog at their heart around which the user assembles a range of resources and systems to create a personally-managed space.

To the extent that users open their PLE space for inspection by others it becomes a multi-faceted journal that makes learning processes and outcomes visible. When the user presents that log of learning evidence the PLE becomes an extended portfolio view.

A key facet of the blog or PLE is that the user seeks critical feedback and collaboration on their learning objectives, which typically involves the creation of social networks that cross institutional boundaries and are intended to place the learner at the central node in a learning community. We have evidence that demonstrates that students are at least as adept at faculty at providing criteria-based feedback, which opens the potential that giving of critical feedback can be scaled much larger than what faculty alone can provide.

This presentation will explore the blurring of the lines between portfolio, blog and personal learning environments and a parallel blurring between novice and expert feedback when novice feedback is appropriately scaffoled and guided. We will invite participants to join in the exploration and the implications they have for teachers, course design, assessment of learning, and IT planning around LMS and other supporting tools.

We are going to be working on this (sketchy) proposal for Active Learning Strategies in the session and welcome feedback:

The audience will collaborate in an analysis and deconstruction George Hotz’ blog (ne portfolio) of the hack of the iPhone. Then the audience will participate in a collaborative criteria-based rating. Audience data about itself will be shared and discussed within the threads of the presentation. Following the session, the audience data will be posed for later review by the audience and others.

On Aug 15, the Pullman-Moscow Daily News ran the editorial below referring to WSU’s John Gardner and aligning WSU priorities with the economic goals of the state. Without citing it, they seemed to be generally responding to his blog post Universities and Economic Development.

Its nice that the local paper has decided to enter the conversation with the Vice President about university priorities, but given the goal of WSU’s President Floyd for increased Global Cultural Competencies, I think a little conversation about Internet Culture is in order.

Dr Gardner has begun to explore the role of blogging in the leadership of a major university. His blog has RSS and is open for comments (create an free account) and trackback, all signs of understanding Blogging Culture. The Daily News went online several years ago, but unlike global citizen The New York Times, the Daily News keeps it content, including its editorials, behind a login available only to paying subscribers. Comments are allowed (by subscribers), but there is no trackback or RSS. And unlike Dr. Gardner, the Daily News does not include links in its online content. Dr. Gardner is exploring what it means to be a node in an online conversation; the Daily News is acting like a broadcaster with proprietary content, a cultural faux paux in a read-write Web 2.0 world. (see Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis, We Media, (PDF) pg 57)

What I’d like to see on Dr. Gardner’s blog, a next step in acculturation, would be context, in the form of a blog roll. Who is he reading? Who provides the context from which his thinking springs. This is different from linking from within a post, where we see Dr Gardner’s synthetic thinking. I should blog roll better in my own blog, but, for example I point to Stephen Downes as a thinker I read on topics related to Web 2.0 and eLearning.

Reproduced for the benefit of furthering the conversation, the editorial appearing in Daily News 8/15/07 (login required)

OUR VIEW: WSU right to align its goals with those of state

BY Steve McClure, for the editorial board

Wednesday, August 15, 2007 - Page Updated at 12:00:00 AM

Nimble usually isn’t a word associated with universities. The procedures that drive institutions of higher education largely dictate that new initiatives and massive changes in direction take a little bit of time.

That will be one of the challenges confronting Washington State University’s new vice president for economic development.

John Gardner arrives from the University of Missouri with the task of aligning the university’s priorities with the economic goals of the state.

That’s a noble goal, and one universities in general should be mindful of.

Universities are a major component of economic development and economic success. In addition to providing a well-rounded education in the liberal arts, college graduates will be entering the work force at some point. Most graduate with the expectation that the skills they picked up in college will provide them with a leg up when it comes to employment.

At the same time, private businesses that support higher education through tax dollars should be able to expect the state’s universities to provide an educated work force. That hope is amplified by the need for a workforce educated in the skills employers are looking for.

If Washington needs nurses - and it does - that should be a skill available at colleges and universities. If economic forecasters are predicting a huge need for computer software engineers in the next five years, universities should be flexible enough to provide a pretty good chunk of home-grown talent.

Washington State doesn’t need to get into the business of providing a degree that only works at one company, but it should be dynamic enough that it can look into its crystal ball and anticipate the careers of tomorrow - and the skills students will be looking for when they complete their degrees.

Gardner already recognizes the initial challenge. His next hurdle will be implementing the changes within the university. We wish him luck.

David Wiley posts an invitation to join and/or help refine his course offering for Fall: Intro to Open Education, and it was with interest that I went to look. What I found did not match my expectations from the title.

Recently, Stephen Downes posted on Open Source Assessment, and I was imagining Downes’ thinking being applied in Wiley’s course:

The conversation comes up in the context of open educational resources (OERs). When posed the question in Winnipeg regarding what I thought the ideal open online course would look like, my eventual response was that it would not look like a course at all, just the assessment.

The reasoning was this: were students given the opportunity to attempt the assessment, without the requirement that they sit through lectures or otherwise proprietary forms of learning, then they would create their own learning resources.

Applying this notion to the course, I would expect that there would be a handful of introductory readings, to get the group rolling, and that the next task would be left to the students: find readings that contribute to this course, post them in the class wiki, justify why they are meritorious readings and explain how they contribute to your understanding.

The assessment would not be based on David’s judgment, but on some criteria more openly agreed and widely valuable to the group.

And rather than a read and respond course design, the course would challenge students to set a problem for themselves, perhaps form teams, and develop a solution to be argued to the community. In the John Seeley Brown notion of repair technicians always having their radios on and thereby becoming a community of practice, the course could be a hub for a community, where students would bring their resources and observations as they worked on their chosen problems. The course could be scaffolded with some open activities (e.g., interview a member of the community who has expertise in your problem but who’s perspective differs from yours.) Given that the students are blogging, they could be tasked to take their problem (definition, solution, etc) to the community(ies) that is addresses and seek feedback from those sources.

The student product from this work would not be a set of blog posts responding to Wiley’s weekly reading prompts, but a portfolio including evidence of resources, alternative perspectives examined, and solutions developed around a problem authentic to the student’s own situation.

Ignore the Global University Rankings, its Web 1.0
This site uses counts on inbound links among 300 universities to develop a rating scheme for each of the universities. Its a “reputation” type of system, the more times that other universities link to your university, the higher your university’s ranking. The chart shows that Washington State University’s ranking of 123 results from substantially fewer links (its nonlinear) than top rated schools.

It would be interesting to locate the AAU schools and see how many links we need to become AAU-like. Which begs the question, what would WSU need to do differently to move up the ranks from rank 123?

There is a tension in this plan, because it expects the university community to work from within the university’s domain to build its reputation. We can debate if this blog constitutes “good” content, but as the rating system above works, it will not attract more score for WSU, since its not within university’s domain. And its not here, for reasons I stated when I launched it — basically, who’s reputation do I want to build anyway?

First step to getting more links is to put good content into our website. Competing with putting content on the web site is putting it in refereed publications. Until the university changes how it thinks about self-publishing and building a reputation in Web 2.0, terms its not likely to win this battle.

Analysis of Global Rankings in Web 1.0 terms

The Web 2.0 Analysis
The Global University Rankings are trying to be reputation based, but the reputation needs to be earned wider than on other university domains. As designed, this is the Broadcast model, but reputation is really about community. Its unlikely that our Marketing or News organizations will be building many links to other universities, and the same applies in reverse. So the linking needs to come from students, faculty and staff, pointing at good work at other places. That sounds a lot like communities of bloggers, linking one another and resources they find useful. Students and faculty would blogroll the university if they found selfish reasons, such as good networking, would come from connecting to the university.

So, where I get in this analysis is that, in a Web 2.0 world, users will build from the platforms that work for them, and those are not necessarily platforms within the university domain. Further, I think there is an argument here that the university is ill suited to establish the platforms that are needed — because the platforms, like Flickr or del.icio.us demand larger numbers of participants to be rich and interesting than the university can muster.
The Web 2.0 analysis

Our Morning Reading Group is reading a Stephen Downes’ piece eLearning 2.0 on Wednesday (7/18/07). It got me thinking about our ePortfolio work and the discussions about our upcoming ePortfolio contest.

As usual, I landed in Theron’s office and we got to talking about the long tail and Amazon.com and drawing an analogy to education. The analogy went like this. Barnes & Noble sells only the current big sellers and clears lower volume titles out of its inventory. Amazon makes many of its sales from the “long tail” of books that are small volume sellers. The classic university offers high volumes of instruction across a small inventory of topics. The Web 2.0 university is a long tail organization, it exploits global resources (each of whom contribute a small amount) to provide a very wide inventory of topics. The classic university uses BlackBoard as its LMS, the long tail university uses “worldware,” and in particular, Web 2.0 tools and techniques.

This point in the conversation jogged my memory about exploring TouchGraph (which makes cool web diagrams of what sites like to other sites, using Google data). The graph I tried was using the term “Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.”

What struck me is the lack of connection between the clusters, there are several isolated islands among what should be (seems to me) a small linked community of practice. Based on the TouchGraph, the SoTL folks are not practicing long tail education and this is a lot of what the current university and the university alumni look like — little islands not webs.

Recently I commented on the goal of the new president of Washington State University to be a “global” campus. This long tail analysis helps me further understand what it would mean to be “global.”

First, it would involve using global tools, and not Blackboard. Global tools would be both Worldware and Web 2.0 Global tools would also be tools that students would use again in the workplace in ways that are similar to the ways they were used in the university. For collaboration, global tools would look like MediaWiki, SharePoint, Drupal, etc.

Second, it would use global assessment — things like portfolios, Downes’ “Open Source Assessment” and my response.

Third, it would use global resources, both to contextualize the learning in authentic problems and as informational resources. The Web 2.0 university would understand and cultivate networks among its alumni and would be active in managing its links to make networks of expertise that its students and the world could exploit.