Author: jmcclurken

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Starting a New Semester and a New Class: Risk and Fear in 2008

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This has been a busy school year for me (hence the long absence of this blog) and this semester is no different. Still, I wanted to talk about this semester a bit as it begins, if only to remind myself later what I hope to accomplish. [Maybe I’ll find time a little later for a recap of what worked and what didn’t in the blogging I used with two of my classes last semester.]

Major projects this semester:

  1. Host a conference (the Virginia Forum in April).
  2. Be part of a campus discussion about the role of digitization and digital initiatives.
  3. Integrate wiki-based weekly pre-discussions into my US History Survey and Women’s history as I’ve done in previous semesters.
  4. Teach a new digital history seminar.
  5. Other work items include a couple of faculty searches, covering some classes for a colleague, serving on four other committees, writing a conference paper and trying to get my book through the later hoops of publishing.

The wiki-based discussions worked really well last fall and last spring and I look forward to using those again. [I introduced the concept of posting comments about the primary sources readings to a group wiki to my survey class which started today and one student asked, with some measure of disbelief, “Has that actually worked before?” When I told him that this was the third semester and the fourth class I’d used this technique with (and that the previous ones had been very successful), he seemed surprised.] Still, at least some in the class were intrigued (and a couple had already posted just a few hours later).

The digital history class is my biggest new project and the point that I’m most interested in laying out here. A little background first: I have wanted to teach a history and new media class since I started adjuncting in 1999. For a variety of reasons (tenure not the least of them) I haven’t managed to get to it. I decided last year that I would teach the class this semester, as a 400-level history department seminar. I began talking to our excellent colleagues in DTLT almost a year ago and we began meetings last fall that started to lay the groundwork for this class. The class as I imagine it won’t easily happen without their help.

So what is the class and what are my goals for it? Well, here’s the course description:

This seminar will focus on the process of creating digital history. The course readings, workshops, and discussions expose students to the philosophy and practice of the emerging field of History and New Media. The course will be centered on the creation of four digital history projects, all of which are related to making local resources available online. These projects include the creation of an online presence for the James Monroe Papers, the construction of a site expanding on the state historical markers in the Fredericksburg area, the expansion of digital work previously done on James Farmer’s presence on campus, and the building of a digital exhibit for UMW’s Centennial.

The roster is made up of mostly seniors, but also juniors and a sophomore or two. I’ve already surveyed their digital interests, comfort level, and self-reported digital skills (maybe more on that later). We’ve already chosen which projects each student will work on over the course of the semester. Almost every student has already created a blog on UMWBlogs and a del.icio.us account of their own. And we haven’t met yet.

Check out the syllabus and the course site for more on the schedule and the rough outlines I’ve laid out for each group project here. [I should say that I’ve been inspired in the formation of this class by the work and graduate teaching of digital historians Dan Cohen and Bill Turkel, neither of whom I’ve met, but whose work I’ve been able to follow in a particularly New Media way. Equally important has been the work and encouragement of someone I have met (at Faculty Academy last year), namely Barbara Ganley, whose words, blogging, and teaching continue to influence the pedagogical choices I make.]

I’m incredibly excited to teach a class I’ve wanted to teach in some form for my entire professional teaching career. But I’m also nervous. Nervous because I want the students to be able to choose some of the path the course takes. Nervous because I don’t know quite where that means we’ll end up. Nervous to ask many different people (from DTLT, from other faculty departments, from other parts of the institution) to work with me and these students on something that might not look very polished in the end. Nervous because I’m asking a lot of people to trust me that this will be worth it. None of that anxiety is stopping me from doing this class. Excitement overwhelms anxiety this evening before the first class. I hope that it will continue to do so throughout the semester.

I hope that the students in this class will read this (I know one of them will soon, but hopefully the others will find it too). I know some of them are nervous as well. Good. I know that some of them don’t feel like they know what they’re doing. Good. I know that the class as a whole, and as groups, and as individuals, will struggle at times this semester to figure out what it is that their projects and this class is about. Good. I don’t mean that I want them to flounder without purpose. I will be there (with the support of some of the best educators I know) to support them and help them find their own way.

But that’s just it. I want them to find their own way. I could (and have) assigned digital projects where everything that students did was scripted for them. [And many of them have turned out really well.]

But I don’t want that this time. Or, I should say, I want more than that this time. I have given the students broad outlines of digital projects as starting places with some basic structures, and what I see as key components, but I’m not going to dictate what they should do. I’ve arranged with Martha, Jerry, Andy, Patrick, and Jim to provide students with a digital toolkit, an array of possible tools with which to approach those projects, but I’m not going to tell them which tools they have to use. I’ve arranged to have expert faculty come and talk to a few of the groups about their projects, but those faculty aren’t going to determine the students’ projects either.

Those people who still follow this blog after its long absence, I hope you’ll check out the course blog, the syllabus, the students’ blogs narrating their work, and the projects as they begin to emerge. I, and the students, will benefit from your comments and suggestions.

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Mary Washington Alum and the Holocaust Museum

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In today’s New York Times, there’s an article about a collection of photographs from a Nazi concentration camp. What makes these pictures unusual is that they’re of the camp’s SS officers relaxing in various ways which seemingly ignore the atrocities of which they’re a significant part. The contrast is chilling and alludes directly to what Hannah Arendt described as the “banality of evil.” The US Holocaust Memorial Museum has an online exhibit dedicated to the images here.

I bring this up on this blog because I wanted to share these striking images, but also because the first name mentioned in the story is a former star student from MW, Rebecca Erbelding, a History and American Studies double major who did her senior thesis with me several years ago. [It was a fascinating exploration of the role that an American, Varian Fry, played in getting people out of Nazi Germany.] She interned with the Holocaust Museum, which turned into a full-time job there. She’s now an archivist at that incredible institution. I suppose one of the positive counters to getting older is that you have more chances to see your students succeed. That’s pretty cool indeed.

Rebecca narrates a slideshow of the images here.

UPDATE: She can also be heard on NPR’s Talk of the Nation here.

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I Enter the WPMU Blogging Fray….

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This post is a quick summary of my digital pedagogy plans for this semester.

In one class, I’m repeating the wiki-as-discussion starter experiment from last spring. In this class, the first half of an upper-level course on US Women’s History, the wiki has already been the site of a great discussion of the theory, history, and current implications of the history of women.

In my new First-Year Seminar on the history of the experiences of returning American veterans and my significantly revised Historical Methods class (required for all history majors), I’ve taken advantage of the new WPMU (WordPress Multi-User) installation begun at umwblogs.org. Each class has a course blog (what Barbara Ganley calls the “Motherblog”), and then each student has their own blog, listed in the blogroll. Using RSS, eventually I want to feed their posts into the course blog itself. In both classes students are required to blog at least once a week and post comments on two of their classmates’ blogs a week.

In the First-Year Seminar, the blogging is more structured, as their posts will be twice weekly 1-2 paragraph responses to the primary and secondary source reading. [They’ll have a chance to rewrite two of the best of those posts near the end of the semester for a separate grade.]

In the Historical Methods class, although they sometimes will have specific blogging topics, at other times, I want them to write freely about their research process, to explore their writing, to discuss their own interests in aspects of history, and to respond to the ideas of others.

So far, everyone in the classes has set up their blogs and made one post introducing themselves. Here we go….

What do I hope to accomplish with this use of blogs? Oh, lots and lots….

As I told the students in the Methods course:

This online space will be used in a variety of ways–a research log, an assignment location, a place to discuss your project and the projects of others–but the ultimate goal is to allow you to create a shared space where you can display your work and begin to reflect on your learning, an electronic portfolio of your time in this class, and hopefully in connections to other courses as well.

I don’t want much, do I?

Suggestions for improving this system or encouraging student blogging? Please let me know.

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Web Filtering and the Schools

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Fair warning: This is a rant about the inability to access certain social tools in certain K-12 school systems. [For another rant on a similar subject see this rejection of over-the-top web-related fears in education.]

I’ve presented and talked with a number of different K-12 teachers from a number of different school districts in my roles as a history professor and as a relative of numerous such teachers.

I’ve increasingly been annoyed by the trend among many school districts to block access from their networks to more and more websites. Now, let’s be clear. I understand that there is a great deal of material out there that we’d rather our students did not look at. But the process of filtering and blocking is done is such an awkward, blunt manner that the process of teaching is being impacted. [This is not to mention my problem with the notion that blocking access makes these things go away; we should instead be teaching students to engage the Internet in responsible ways.]

Let me give you some examples.

  • del.icio.us and ma.gnolia.com — social bookmarking sites — I tried to demonstrate del.icio.us to a group of teachers recently, only to find that it was blocked, for reasons no one could explain. — How exactly are these a threat to individuals? Seriously, can somebody explain this one to me?
  • Basic Searches — I was on a K-12 school network and trying to find a citation for a friend to a scholarly article on Civil War prisons. I remembered the title, “Houses of Horror,” but was stymied by the keyword filter placed by the school system on the Google Search I ran. Now, I was able to find a workaround to locate the citation, but finding things online are difficult enough without such restrictions.
  • YouTube — YouTube is blocked by many school systems, and perhaps I can understand why. However, there are many useful videos on there for history (and other) teachers. Why can’t teachers access such materials, even if students can’t? Why block an incredibly useful resource for teachers? [I know there are walled garden version of these: TeacherTube, unitedstreaming, etc. But none of these are YouTube, the largest and most important of the video sites.]

The two biggest problems I have with the filtering are:

1) It ignores the reality that most students will figure out a way around such filtering. Or even if not, they’ll find this stuff outside of school, and likely outside of the guidance of the people who are trained to teach students how to process information in a responsible way. At the least, guided time online outside of walled Internet gardens better prepares students to be better Net citizens. How are students to learn information literacy if they get only a filtered version in the place where they are supposed to be learning critical thinking, source evaluation and knowledge creation?

2 ) It shows a remarkable lack of trust for teachers themselves. Blocking teachers’ access suggests that although they are trusted with teaching 20-40 students at any given time, they are not capable of figuring out which sites are appropriate and which are not. The filtering systems used are too often blunt objects which make it harder for teachers to do their jobs well. [I’ve talked to teachers who’ve never been on YouTube, never heard of del.icio.us, never tried any one of a number of tools central to Web 2.0, and the main reason is that they don’t have access to them in the classrooms and schools where they spend so many hours each day.]

I acknowledge that K-12 school systems face real problems in protecting children and young adults from the worst that is online. I understand much of the effort that they’ve made in this area, and comprehend that there are very real financial and technical constraints. However, in order for school districts to prepare their students for the digital world in which so often live, filtering systems have to become more targeted, and until they are, teachers need to be able to bypass those systems to gain access to some sites that are wrongly blocked.

Am I off the mark here? Am I missing something? Are there other obvious sites/tools being blocked I haven’t listed here? Let me know.

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Twitter: Why all the fuss?

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I’ve been using Twitter for several months now. [I have ~25 people I follow and about the same number follow me. I post at least once a day and I’ve used it to learn more about people I already knew from work, and gotten to know people with whom I’ve spent less than 48 hours in person. I don’t have it on my cell phone, but I do check it fairly regularly when I’m online.]

Although I have no idea what the company’s business plan is (probably to be bought by Google or Yahoo), it’s interesting to me that so many people are asking themselves how to use it (or dismissing it as overwhelming and/or naval-gazing). If we see it as a slightly different method of keeping in touch with other people, with people we’re interested in for a variety of intellectual or personal reasons, then good. Why the hand-wringing or defensiveness about it I see from so many bloggers (many of whom I really respect)? [For example] Is it that it’s really hard to explain to people who aren’t on it?

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The Revolution in Technology — Links toward a Presentation

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Here’s the list of links from the TAH August 2007 Presentation I did on “The Revolution in (Information) Technology” — These are also at http://del.icio.us/tag/tah2007

  1. Hurricane Digital Memory Bank: Collecting and Preserving the Stories of Katrina and Rita

  2. YouTube – How to Use the Dial Phone (1927)

  3. 2007 Horizon Report | nmc

  4. YouTube – Broadcast Yourself.

  5. Google Reader

  6. Bloglines

  7. Alexander Spotswood’s Journey — as seen in Flickr and Google Maps

  8. YouTube – The Machine is Us/ing Us (Final Version)

  9. My Digital Double: Watch the World(s).

    Very cool representation in SL of Van Gogh’s Starry Night

  10. shifthappens » Various Versions of the Presentation

    copies of “Did you know?” presentation

  11. Netvibes

  12. Internet Archive

    A great idea, even without the Wayback Machine. With Wayback, it’s invaluable.

  13. YouTube – Introducing the book

    Medieval Helpdesk

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Preparing for teaching in the Fall, Or the Manuscript that Ate My Summer

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This is a post that I wrote in late July, but never had the chance to finish. As I have a spare moment now that the manuscript is in, but the class papers haven’t yet arrived, I’ll post it and a series of other thoughts I’ve been meaning to get out….

I’ve been feeling overwhelmed lately as I contemplate the time remaining this summer and the things I’d planned to do during the so-called summer break. The manuscript due to my editor in early September is taking longer than I thought and so many of the other goals this summer have fallen to secondary or tertiary status. This includes delving in as much detail as I’d like into responding to recent posts by Shannon, Steve, Mike, and Gardner. Most depressing to me is that I’d love to spend lots more time on my fall classes this summer, especially my new First-Year Seminar. Then came Barbara’s beautiful post (Midsummer Preparations for Fall) on what she does in the summer to create new fall classes to make feel even more behind….

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve already spent a lot of time on the fall classes, including the new one, and I’ll have it ready on time. [I think the students are really going to like it.] But I’d like to have been able to spend a good month really getting them just right (or at least closer to where I’d like them to be). But balancing my scholarship, my instructional technology interests, and my teaching has been difficult, especially as I attempt to keep all that in balance with the time spent with my wonderful family….

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Why I Love Working (& Teaching & Learning) Here

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As I’ve been working on my big summer project (the revised book manuscript), I’ve been eagerly following Gardner’s summer course entitled From Memex to YouTube: An Introduction to New Media Studies. Then this afternoon (just a few hours before class started), Shannon twittered that she wished she could see the class’s final presentations. I echoed her with a plea for Gardner to setup a webcam and soon suggestions for places to host it came in from our local twittersphere. By the time class started a ustream account had been set up and the event was being streamed, live. It spent most of the evening on ustream’s front page. Anyone could drop in and see the projects of the people in the class.

I wasn’t able to get to the stream until it was more than half over, but when I did I remembered why I like working where I am so much. Why?

  1. The students were amazing. They had great projects and they were incredibly enthusiastic about the class and their own work (and, dare I say, their learning). [See an Alaskan summary of a few of them here and the full video stream from here.] These kind of students are why MW is such a great place to work.
  2. Not a small part of this excitement, interest, skill, and creativity was due to the class environment set by Gardner. Play, interdisciplinarity, technology-enabled creativity, intellectual rigor (the good kind), and real engagement all were at work here, in a Real School class. Cool colleagues are why MW is such a great place to work.
  3. While I watched the students present, I was engaged in a chat with people from all over the continent (Alaska, Arizona, Texas, Canada) many of whom had heard about it from the invite Gardner and Martha put on their Twitter networks. As I chatted with DTLT friends (Jim, Jerry, Andy (on vacation!), and Martha), faculty colleagues (Sue, Gardner), people I’d met at conferences (CogDog) or people I knew largely from the blogosphere (D’Arcy, Chris, Vidya), and students in (and out of) the classroom, I thought to myself: “These are really bright, really engaged, really interesting people, and I can’t believe how much fun this is….”
  4. As I was watching the student presentations, I also found myself engaged in three or four chat conversation threads at once. It was chaotic, it was crazy, and it was probably not for everyone. That kind of multi-threaded conversation drives some people mad, but in this environment it just worked for me. Discussions of projects, of software, of Doug Engelbart, of Carl Jung, of the impact of the process of authorship on the author’s view of other work, of films and film theory, of numerous bad jokes, inside jokes, sarcastic jokes, and ROTFL jokes, of the wonder and awe of the final presentation of the night–an amazing movie by Serena that brought many of us watching online to the brink of tears.
  5. I want to take this class; and if that isn’t possible, then I want to team-teach it with Gardner; and if that isn’t possible, then look for the history version, coming soon to a seminar room near you. [Adventures in Digital History!] I love that I teach at a school where there is room in the curriculum and the minds of the people I work with for these kinds of explorations.

Now, admittedly, this post has a little of the fanboy aspect to it. The reality check is that not every day feels like this in this job. There are days when I would love to have 1/10 of the energy I felt tonight. There are conversations with colleagues or students that leave me drained, not inspired. There are days I plod along, rather than lead and innovate. I know that.
In fact, in the middle of this amazing few hours, I found myself in a brief chat with a colleague where we both acknowledged how special this extended moment was and how we wished it could always be like this. So, where do we go from here? Well, we need to hold on to (and brag about) these moments until they are more common. [Hence this post.] I want to harness this energy, bottle it up somehow and feed it to everyone I see: students, faculty, administrators, learners all. This is what learning can be. This is what Real School is all about.

How can you measure or quantify the feeling of excitement, engagement and learning that took place tonight? [Yes, I use those terms deliberately.] We need to figure out how to replicate these moments, not in a cold, cloning kind of way, but in setting the stage for creativity, learning and innovation in and out of classrooms, and then taking advantage of those moments of opportunity to share them.

But for tonight, I’m just going to keep smiling.

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Data, Information Overload, and Selling the University (in a good way)

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Martha’s written another wide open exploration about the soul of academia in the form of a discussion of what data collection means. I responded in her comments, but I wanted to develop it a little more here.

I wonder if this focus on data and rankings isn’t just another of a series of poor attempts made to deal with the information overload that all of us have been facing? Both faculty/administrators and prospective/current students/parents have to figure out some way of addressing the role of the increasingly expensive collegiate experience. Colleges have to justify their prohibitive expense and parents (and increasingly students) want that justification spelled out for them (and want a measurable return on their investment). The vast amount of data available today about schools and the college experience means that parents and students are easily overwhelmed in their choices. A ranking system allows those parents and students to cope with that overwhelming set of data, providing a set of “concrete” justifications to hang their decisions on. Rankings systems (based on that data) also allow colleges to address (at least in appearance) questions of fiscal accountability (without really exploring substantive external or internal questions about the links between “value” and “education”). It’s not a perfect system, but the structure that data built does allow a kind of compromise method for all these actors to discuss higher education in a manageable way.

But ultimately this system is far from perfect and reveals a substantive failure of academia to properly identify and explain its role. The argument we should be loudly and broadly and proudly making is that the educational experience Martha and Gardner and Steve and so many others are writing about (learning focused; interdisciplinary in all the best ways; playful; collaborative and individualized; potentially, though not necessarily, technology-enabled) is worth the money spent because it does make graduates better enabled to succeed in the work force, as well as making them better citizens, better friends, better voters, better people….

The data-driven approach to education (epitomized by the US News and World Report Rankings, but perpetuated by many others) appeals to people (and always will–it’s easier and it’s minimally satisfying). Of course, if we consider quantitative literacy as important as written, aural, and visual literacy–and what good liberal arts program wouldn’t?–then we could teach students (and their parents) as well as our fellow academicians how to look behind those stats to see the assumptions behind them. And let’s turn all that data (and the tools for presenting it) in our favor. Admittedly, many of the benefits we’re talking about are not easily quantifiable. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t quantify them or present them in new ways. That’s why it’s so important that we develop ways to make individual and community educational experiences visible to ourselves and to others.

And so we’re back to umwronco in at least a couple of its forms. Our work is cut out for us; Martha’s right that this is a pivotal moment in education. I recognize the potential “dark underbelly” she refers to, but I continue to be excited by the sheer possibilities inherent in higher education and the potential of academia to lead the caravan through the 21st century.

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A New Name for umwronco

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In the interests of creating a new, non-trademarked name for what we’ve been talking about here, let me start by making an ungainly suggestion, one so clunky that others will be inspired to come up with something better. Borrowing from Gardner and Martha, I hereby dub it the “Caravan of Learning Suite for Inspired Learners” or COLSIM for short. [Be warned, if someone else doesn’t come up with something better, I will keep using this one….]