Hope's Centre-Table

NERCOMP Blackboard Sig Conference at Holy Cross College
Session 1:
Vincent Ialenti, Ed.D., Assistant Dean, Distance Learning and Instructional Technology, Mount Wachusett Community College
Don Westover, Director of Instructional Design, Mount Wachusett Community College
23,000 user accounts (bb course for every CRN) 6,000 course shells http://www.ctlmwcc.com/ for their Bb resources
They have had a long history, sometimes disastrous, of implementing CMSs, but after some major meltdowns they have almost convinced their faculty to be prepared for anything, anytime. A good model!
Moving to 9 this summer.
Best advice: convince faculty to use base 100 for grades.
http://www.ctlmwcc.com/ for their Bb resources
Session 2:
Eric LePage, Director of the Teaching and Technology Center, Bridgewater State College
After using Moodle as well as Bb he decided to change the look and feel of his courses: top page is the “Course Content” page, 4 items in left menu: Course # Central, Group Projects, E-mail, MyGrades. The top page has a first item which is a banner, then the rest is divided by weeks (folders). Each week has items: readings, link to discussion forum for week, info on quizzes, quiz link. He moves the banner from week to week so that the current week is above the banner – cute, if your course is a week-by-week kind of course. So, this is a simplified menu, like ours, but he takes it one step further and links the content area as the top page instead of announcements (announcements are tied into each weekly module. (Hey, this was what I did for the blogs&wikis course so of course I like the idea.)
The course name banner is a bit odd being out of place, so how about a banner that says : (an arrow) Current week, (down arrow) Past Weeks. He showed: TED (ted.com, high quality sharable video and it provides the code, both object and embed to make browsers happy, that you can easily paste
into an item in Bb), teachertube, odeo (audio content). Paste the code into HTML view of Bb text editor.
RSS News feeds (into Bb, not out of it): (“finding RSS feeds is like playing Where’s Waldo!”) find and copy the feed link. See http://feed2js.org, also http://itde.vccs.edu/rss2js/build.php.
Paste in a feed URL, generates the code which can be pasted into Bb text window (in HTML view).
Session 3:
An Innovative Professional Development Program for Teaching Online
Nancy Curll, M.Ed., Instructional Designer, Middlesex Interactive
Matthew Olson, Ed.D., Director of Middlesex Interactive, Middlesex Community College
The college offers 8 degree programs online. 100 instructors/courses per semester. OCD trains 10-12 per semester.
Their Online Course Development program (OCD, like our TEO) is “rooted in social constructivist theory, revised each year to include new pedagogies, strategies, and technologies.”
OCD course: 20 hours, hybrid, 2.5 hrs each Friday for 8 weeks, cohorts of 4-10, co-taught with other online faculty, librarians, and tech support. Contractual obligations to pay faculty for course development.
The final product at the end of the course is quite comprehensive: a syllabus, a completion schedule, unit structure with outcomes, 5 weeks of course work, a major summative assessment. (They’ve had some deans
go through the program as well.)
They also offer workshops on additional topics to build out courses from the basic content: podcasting, etc.
Process and ideas for OCD (TEO!) course:
* Ask: how do you conceptualize your course, then find and point out the tools that work for that.
* Have them build online learning activities that have assessment tied to them.
* Try to weave in a little how to with every unit.
* Ask other faculty to provide examples for new faculty to see (they have links to 6 others). (Example, one course has a “What we’re doing this week” and a “Tips to manage this week” which offers a day-to-day
to do list.)
* They also have a large collection of activities that other faculty have shared. They work on making a thoughtful and explicit connection from instructional objectives to assessment with these activities as well as considering kinesthetic and other non-standard ideas. (Bloom, learning taxonomy)
* Include sample rubrics
* Consider asking the library research staff to build some resource collections of instructional technology links, etc., for us (like they do for other courses)
* Their faculty have access to the OCD course for one year after completion
* They offer a “Blackboard dinner” for instructors to share best ideas and demonstrate new ideas
* Interested parties can “audit” OCD as a refresher account
* Consider doing Master Classes for experienced instructors
* Consider offering an IT Faculty Fellow (stipended to help us do what we do)
Their OCD course offers much food for thought for not only TEO but for materials we might develop for support our faculty!
Afternoon sessions:
Session 4:
Donna Jones, Pedagogical Solutions Engineer, Blackboard Inc.
Bb tools mapped to Chickering 7:
1) encourage contact: announcements (“Monday morning memo”), notifications (new in 9), calendar, discussion, journals, e-mail, grade center (9: can give feedback by clicking on a grade, can display up to fifty students at a time), syllabus, chat
2) develop reciprocity: peer assessment, peer review discussion, email, blogs, groups (includes self-enroll option), (kingdomality.com: learn how to group your students to mix it up), scholar, chat
3) active learning: adaptive release (9 defines it more like what we had expected with 8), assignments, discussion, chat, learning units (she recommends we use this more)
4) Feedback: grade center, assignment, early warning system (a positive way also: ex: send congrats to students who got a 90 or better), graded discussion, peer review
5) emphasize time on task:
6) communicate high expectations: reports, safeassign, syllabus
7) diverse learning:
Session 5:
Donna Jones, Pedagogical Solutions Engineer, Blackboard Inc.
How do we know what students are learning? how do we prove it (cf. No Child Left Behind)?
We have to be accountable to more outside agencies, as well as to potential students. Also, students need new skills and we have to show they are learning them: teamwork, critical thinking etc.
Continuous improvement: 8% of institutions surveyed report they have achieved full implementation of outcome assessment. She thinks this number is higher than reality.
Can Blackboard help measure this? well…buy now…
Outcomes System: a massive admin system for pulling together assessment information from courses and assessing them at the institutional level (must have community system and content system in addition to learning system)
* Course Objectives: reports, modify, remove. Make alignments from any objective to external standards – other institutions or state, accrediting, etc.
* Rubrics
* Artifact Templates: ex: collecting final lab report from a particular course
* and more
At the Department level:
even more: improvement projects, improvement initiatives, unit standards. For example, you can manage taking artifacts collected in the  Artifact Templates from above and align with rubric: how well are
students doing? Then have evaluators rate them against the rubric.
Evaluations go back into the system from which reports can be generated.
At the institutional level:
Continue the process, building all the way to the institution.
At the national or global level:
Keep thousands of people employed and improve Blackboard’s bottom line.

Yesterday I attended a webinar hosted by EDUCAUSE titled Widgets: The Slicing and Dicing (and Splicing) of Sharable Learning Content. The speakers were Mark C. Marino, Assistant Professor (Teaching) of Writing Program, and Susan E. Metros, Associate Vice Provost and Deputy CIO, both of USC.
Susan Metros began with slides displaying the evolution of models of educational materials and practices, including:
Modularizing Education: curriculum: programs: courses: modules: topics
Modularizing Content: textbook: section: chapter
Modularizing Digital Content (mid-90s): Learning Object Repository: Subject: Asset (similar in structure to paper-based content, but at least it is searchable. Also, once you have them they can be recombined, at least that was the hope.)
She went on to say that LOs never got much traction – too hard to define – who would build, tag, track? How would they interact or be shared? Early efforts have focused on making big collections of LOs: MERLOT etc., or Europe: Open Education Resources (OER) Commons.
The back channel quickly picked up, discussing freeform folksonomy-type tagging vs. traditional library practice of standardized taxonomies and controlled vocabularies, as well as centralized collections vs. “findable” collections spread across the web. I was struck by how familiar this conversation was. It has been going on from the earliest days of the web and seems to be applied to each new technology, gadget, or model that appears.
According to Marino and Metros, LOs and Widgets have quite a bit in common, only widgets are easy to combine and use. And, to reiterate, they have much in common with any kind of digital collections in terms of building, maintaining, collecting, collating, etc.
Marino picked up the thread by introducing the actual widgets they have been working with, especially the writing widget built for his sophomore level Advanced Writing with Technoloy course: Topoi.
After that the front and back channel again passed to territory that is familiar to anyone who has considered digital collections or technologies and their role in teaching and learning:

• short-term use vs. long-term sharing,
• faculty building vs. institutional building,
• finding the balance between doing “your subject” and doing the “tech stuff (and where this fits into promotion and tenure)
• who will tag or archive
• can standards make things more sharable? Who’s standards?
• How do you, as an instructor, pull together all the disparate pieces to actually use with a class?
• How will you know they are helping students learn (what kinds of rubrics)?

Other widget builders mentioned:
yourminis,
springwidgets,
widgetbox
google gadgets
Other widgets mentioned by audience: box.net, ustream.tv, dligo.com
One of the reasons LOs fell apart: what do you do with them once you have them: in web page, in ppt, – need easy way to glue these together. On horizin: pacyderm, USC/Melon: SOPHIE (super book),

It is now available, and under Cretive Commons licensing. Well done:
“Ten years ago today, a private American collector purchased the
Archimedes Palimpsest. Since that time he has guided and funded the
project to conserve, image, and study the manuscript. After ten years of
work, involving the expertise and goodwill of an extraordinary number of
people working around the world, the Archimedes Palimpsest Project has
released its data. It is a historic dataset, revealing new texts from
the ancient world. It is an integrated product, weaving registered
images in many wavebands of light with XML transcriptions of the
Archimedes and Hyperides texts that are spatially mapped to those
images. It has pushed boundaries for the imaging of documents, and
relied almost exclusively on current international standards. We hope
that this dataset will be a persistent digital resource for the decades
to come. We also hope it will be helpful as an example for others who
are conducting similar work. It published under a Creative Commons 3.0
attribution license, to ensure ease of access and the potential for
widespread use. A complete facsimile of the revealed palimpsested texts
is available on Googlebooks as ³The Archimedes Palimpsest². It is hoped
that this is the first of many uses to which the data will be put.”
For information on the Archimedes Palimpsest Project, please visit:
www.archimedespalimpsest.org
For the dataset, please visit:
www.archimedespalimpsest.net

I usually look to Educause for good summaries of where we’ve been rather than for information on what’s coming up. Here’s one that may prove to be an exception. Just published:

The Tower and the Cloud: Higher Education in the Age of Cloud Computing, Richard N. Katz, ed.
The first article I read, as might be expected given his connections to the TEI, is by John Unsworth titled “University 2.0.” Don’t let the rather pedestrian title fool you. Unsworth always has something of interest to offer and this article is no exception. In it he describes, among other things, a system that mashes bibliographic information with LDAP (personal and departmental information) to generate a system that tracks faculty and subject publications. Who’s doing what at the university? Who, in different departments, is working on similar topics and might want to collaborate?
His main interest in the projects mentioned in the article is in reducing the “information friction” that impedes the sharing of institutional information, or, as he says “What we need more than big science or big servers are good ideas about interesting things that faculty, staff, and students could do with the information produced in, by, and about universities.” That is, not university-wide “content management” but smart content sharing and distribution.
I hope the other articles are as timely and though-provoking. Here’s the bulk of the TOC:
The Gathering Cloud: Is This the End of the Middle
by Richard N. Katz
A Matter of Mission: Information Technology and the Future of Higher Education
by Clifford A. Lynch
The University in the Networked Economy and Society: Challenges and Opportunities
by Yochai Benkler
Growing in Esteem: Positioning the University of Melbourne in the Global Knowledge Economy
by Glyn Davis, Linda O’Brien, and Pat McLean
Higher Education and the Future of U.S. Competitiveness
by David Attis
The Social Compact of Higher Education and Its Public
by Larry Faulkner
Accountability, Demands for Information, and the Role of the Campus IT Organization
by Brian L. Hawkins
E-Research Is a Fad: Scholarship 2.0, Cyberinfrastructure, and IT Governance
by Brad Wheeler
Beyond the False Dichotomy of Centralized and Decentralized IT Deployment
by Jim Davis
From Users to Choosers: The Cloud and the Changing Shape of Enterprise Authority
by Ronald Yanosky
Cultural and Organizational Drivers of Open Educational Content
by Malcolm Read
Challenges and Opportunities of Open Source in Higher Education
by Ira H. Fuchs
Who Puts the Education into Open Educational Content?
by Andy Lane
The Tower, the Cloud, and Posterity
by Richard N. Katz and Paul B. Gandel
From the Library to the Laboratory: A New Future for the Science Librarian
by Mary Marlino and Tamara Sumner
Social Networking in Higher Education
by Bryan Alexander
Scholarship: The Wave of the Future in the Digital Age
by Paul N. Courant
Where Is the New Learning?
by Kristina Woolsey
Teaching and Learning Unleashed with Web 2.0 and Open Educational Resources
by Christine Geith
University 2.0
by John Unsworth
The Tower, the Cloud, and the IT Leader and Workforce
by Philip Goldstein