UnionBlend

A place to discuss teaching, learning and instructional technology

EduCause 2009 – Collaboration is Strategy: from DIY to DIO

November 20th, 2009 by · No Comments · collaboration, Conferences

This post has been migrated to the LSS Blog: EduCause 2009 – Collaboration is Strategy: from DIY to DIO

Summary:

Brad Wheeler’s talk Collaboration is Strategy, was a favorite of mine at EduCause 2009, primarily because it helped me better articulate a set of ideals and practices that increasingly define how many of us involved with learning technology are approaching our work at UW-Madison.

For me, a central question in learning technology support continues to be: how do we move from a DIY (Do It Yourself) approach to a DIO (Do It Ourselves) approach?

Read more…

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EduCause 2009: A short Q&A in a very large room

November 19th, 2009 by · No Comments · Conferences

So, how did that big, group-based, question filtering thing work out for Jim Collins and the audience at EduCause 2009?

The first question our group discussed was:

How do you know if you’ve fallen in love with your own idea?

We didn’t end up taking this question to the larger group, which is too bad, because I would have liked to have heard the answer.

It is a great good-to-great question, I think, because so much of Collins advice hinges on focus: focus on what you can do best; focus on your passions; start a stop-doing list; don’t over-reach; don’t grasp for salvation by launching a big new program; discipline, discipline, discipline! Did I say discipline!? Give me ten push-ups! (OK, I guess that last bit was more implied than said directly).

How do you keep this focus? How do you know when you’ve strayed? How do you distinguish a good idea that deserves to run, from one that you’re just a bit too much in love with?

Alas, the question never got asked. But I think the answer might have come from another part of the talk. At one of the many points that Collins discussed discipline, he discussed the careful balancing act of preserving core values and fostering change in an organization. “We preserve our values so we can change our practice.” Organizations that stay true to their core values, says Collins, will be the most effective change-makers.

Side note: Perhaps we have a chance to test Collins advice in the recent Google Moderator discussion about potential new instructional services for the UW-System. Which ideas are most in line with our core values? Which are most directly tied to improving teaching and learning? Which are most likely to help us foster the next generation of leaders and change-makers?

OK, now we switch to the questions that the break-out groups actually did ask Collins.

What keeps you motivated?

This was a question that Collins seemed to really enjoy answering. He told the story that begins the authors note for the Good to Great and the Social Sectors Monograph where an influential mentor told him “It occurs to me, Jim, that you invest too much time trying to be interesting. Why don’t you invest more time being interested.”

How does Collins act on this advice? Stay tuned for a future post on his 10 item to-do list for good-to-greaters at EduCause.

How do we deal with people decisions – it is harder in the social sector to get the right people on the bus. Sometimes it is impossible to get someone off the bus.

This was a challenging question, and it got a few chuckles from the audience. In his answer, Collins dished out a fairly quotable line: “We need to be rigorous, but not ruthless with people decisions.” Pausing only a moment to savor the alliteration, he went on to say that it is possible to get someone off the bus, when necessary, through frank, reasonable conversation.

It sounded pretty good, but I think I heard a few rumbles of doubt from those who’ve been around the block a few times with university committee work.

Shifting to the easier part of the answer – how do you get the right people on the bus in the first place, Collins advised: Look for people who, rather than saying, “I have a job” instead say that they have “sets of responsibilities.” Look for people who always do what they say they will do, people with a proven record of success.

What metrics can we use in higher ed. to measure success?

Ah yes! How do we know if we’re moving from good to great? How do we know if we’re at stage 4 of the 5 stage descent into irrelevance and woe! (Did I mention Collins’ 5 stage descent into irrelevance and woe? Not yet? OK, well there is a nice succinet summary of it at Autology that I highly recommend, both because it provides a superb list of Collins most quotable moments, and reveals the strange – but indubitable – connection between Jim Collins and Al Pacino.)

I know I was listening intently at this point – hoping, hoping, hoping for an answer. Metrics! Metrics for success in Higher Ed!

But, my notes fail me. Perhaps because this is a perennially difficult question to answer, even for Collins. There’s really nothing in my notes that’s tangible at all.

Sorry to let you down at such a crucial moment. My apologies. My only consolation is this little surprise: the last question, the one right down there on the last line, may have been the most interesting one.

How do you move from good to great in an organization more concerned with goodness than greatness?

Wow! Now that’s a good question.

Jim’s answer: Focus on building your own pockets of greatness. Strive to build a great department in a good organization.

Success comes with the decision: I’m going to build a pocket of greatness.

And, he added, as a little bonus at the end, that the greatest success stories happen when organizations hire from within their own small pockets of greatness those individuals who can make that change happen on a larger scale.

Sound advice? I think so. What do you think?

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EduCause 2009: Dinner with Jim Collins (not really)

November 17th, 2009 by · 1 Comment · Teaching and Learning

Dinner with Jim
Near the end of Jim Collins Good to Great and the Social Sectors talk at EduCause 09, Jim did something a little bit unusual. He asked each of us in the very large amphitheater to turn around and form small groups of 6, and then he gave the following task:
Imagine we’re all having dinner this evening, and you’ve got a chance to ask me a few questions about Good to Great in the Social Sector, what would you ask? After you talk to your group, you’ll have a chance to send one of your group members up to the microphone to ask your favorite questions.
This task was interesting for a few reasons:
* It effectively broke down a room of several hundred people into small working groups
* It gave participants a chance to answer each others questions (our group had a Jim Collins fan who was able to clear up a few points that we found confusing)
* It provided “prepared participation” – allowing participants to practice articulating their questions on each other before sharing them with the large group
* It created a “question filter” where groups of 6 chose their best/most relevant questions before sharing with the larger group
It made me wonder if a similar technique might work in large lecture class. Would 10 minutes of small group question filtering make a difference? Would it help a class get key questions asked and answered? At a base level, would it dramatically increase the number of questions asked during a lecture? (I’m guessing it would!) Would it increase retention and/or engagement? If groups came up with more questions than could be answered in the remaining class time, could they be saved/submitted in some way? Would a question voting mechanism be useful? Perhaps something like Google moderator?
I thought the technique worked pretty well for Jim. In a future post, I’ll try to run through a few of the dinner questions the audience had for Jim, and my notes on their answers.

Near the end of Jim Collins Good to Great and the Social Sectors talk at EduCause 09, Collins did something a little bit unusual. He asked each of us in the very large amphitheater to turn around and form small groups of 6, and then he gave the following task:

Imagine we’re all having dinner this evening, and you’ve got a chance to ask me a few questions about Good to Great in the Social Sector, what would you ask? After you talk to your group, you’ll have a chance to send one of your group members up to the microphone to ask your favorite questions.

This task was interesting for a few reasons:

  • It effectively broke down a room of several hundred people into small working groups
  • It gave participants a chance to respond to the groups’ questions (our group had a Jim Collins fan who was able to clear up a few points that we found confusing)
  • It provided “prepared participation” – allowing participants to practice articulating their questions on each other before sharing them with the large group
  • It created a “question filter” where groups of 6 chose their best/most relevant questions before sharing with the larger group

It made me wonder if a similar technique might work in large lecture class.

Would 10 minutes of small group question filtering make a difference? Would it help a class get key questions asked and answered? At a base level, would it dramatically increase the number of questions asked during a lecture? (I’m guessing it would!)

Would it increase retention and/or engagement? If groups came up with more questions than could be answered in the remaining class time, could they be saved/submitted in some way? Would a question voting mechanism be useful? Perhaps something like Google moderator?

I thought the technique worked pretty well for Collins. In a future post, I’ll try to run through a few of the dinner questions the audience had for him, and my notes on their answers.

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Apologies

February 19th, 2009 by · No Comments · general

We apologize for the absence of posts in Union Blend. Doug and I have been busy applying our blogging energies in other places. Please stay tuned!

Wordle WUB

June 16th, 2008 by · 5 Comments · general, Remix culture

I’ve been watching the Wordle clouds floating their way through the blogosphere for a few days now, and I’ve been curious to see how Wordle, paired up with del.icio.us tags, a blog, or any other big collection of words, gives people a chance to see what they’ve been writing and thinking about in (potentially) new ways. (Wordle, if you haven’t seen it, takes any collection of words, or your del.icio.us links, and produces a tag cloud, with the words used most often appearing in the largest text.)

So, on a whim, I popped in the text for all of our posts here on WUB:

No surprise that wikis, blogging, and podcasting came up big. I was quite happily surprised, however, to see the word “students” right there, front and center, as the largest word in the cloud. We like to think that we’re putting students first in our ruminations here, but I think only through Wordle would I have realized that, so far at least, we have been!

Next up, my del.icio.us links:

Wow. Looks like I’m a bit behind on my “readthis” reading list. Clearly I’m using del.icio.us as a place to store all the things I wish I had time to read, try, and write about. It is also interesting to see that here, Drupal has eclipsed blogs, wikis, and podcasting. Del.icio.us seems to provide a somewhat more technical “behind the scenes” view.

And then, out of curiosity , my CV:

Oh good, “learning” “teaching” and “technology” are all quite prominent. But interestingly, “Spring” appears much larger than “Fall” – am I more productive in the Spring? And too bad it split up “San” and “Francisco.” So too for “Long” and “Beach.”

What do you think, could a wordle make a good resume? Could these three images – of my collaboratively authored blog, my del.icio.us links, and my CV – provide a short-cut, of sorts, to seeing the things I’ve been doing and thinking about? What else might I include? Should I have mashed them all together into one mega-Wordle?

Seen any other interesting wordles out there?

Let WUB know in the comments!

Playing in the DiRT

June 9th, 2008 by · No Comments · collaboration, general

Digital Research Tools (DiRT)

I saw a post on this in the Chronicle’s Wired Campus this morning and thought I would add a blurb on it to the WUB. Love the acronym! The wiki is at http://digitalresearchtools.pbwiki.com/. Here’s the description:

“This wiki collects information about tools and resources that can help scholars (particularly in the humanities and social sciences) conduct research more efficiently or creatively. Whether you need software to help you manage citations, author a multimedia work, or analyze texts, Digital Research Tools will help you find what you’re looking for. We provide a directory of tools organized by research activity, as well as reviews of select tools in which we not only describe the tool’s features, but also explore how it might be employed most effectively by researchers.”

EduPunk – all sold out?

June 5th, 2008 by · 2 Comments · Emerging Technologies and Practices, general, learning communities, Teaching and Learning

There’s lots of fun still to be had with the EduPunk meme that has been rocking the Edu-Blogosphere recently.

Myself, I’m looking forward to the development of EduPunk subgenres. As educators, should we head more in the NewWave.Edu direction? or get really experimental with Post-Edu Art-Punk?

I think my favorite EduPunk sub-genre will be PopPunkEdu. Perhaps that’s because, in many ways, EduPunk is already old-school. Where the excitement is, for me at least, is taking the “scrappy, DIY spirit” of EduPunk (as described by Leslie Brooks and Stephen Downes) and then scaling it up.

Just as pop punkers created albums that were “a cross between Abba and the Sex Pistols” (Wikipedia), EduPunkers (whether they identify as such or not) are taking their creative energy, their focus on effective pedagogy, and their insistence on authentic learning, and blending it all together to crank out some amazing work that is both DIY and, well, quite listenable.

Lafayette College’s SoapBox is totally Ramones. If that’s the case, Blogs at PSU must be pretty much Green Day. And I have to hope that the Collaborative Sites Platform will one day be at least somewhat Sublime.

It would be a shame if the larger discussion about EduPunk gets caught up in an EduPunk vs. Blackboard rant, or if the EduPunk philosophy gets characterized as something only accessible to first wave faculty.

Is that selling out? Maybe. But if the result is that we can help more instructors enthusiastically dive in and and create “hands-on learning that starts with the learner’s interests” (Leslie Brooks), then I’m all for it.

For more on EduPunk, see EduPunk on del.icio.us.

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T&LS – Tips for Facilitating Collaborative and Group Projects

May 21st, 2008 by · No Comments · collaboration, learning communities, Teaching and Learning

T&LS on Union Blend – Notes from the 2008 Teaching and Learning Symposium

Today’s panel session on Facilitating Collaborative and Group Projects wrapped up with a series of quick, two sentence tips from each of the panelists on facilitating collaborative work. Here are my notes on their rapidly delivered good advice:

  • be explicit about the role of collaboration in your course
  • be ready for your students to be even more diverse than you might think them to be at first
  • find creative strategies to maintain independent accountability
  • create collaborative exercises that are authentic to the discipline
  • collaborative tasks must be challening enough to merit a collaborative effort (in other words, there needs to be a real reason for students to collaborate
  • involve students in the development of the strategies, guidelines, and expectations around group work
  • collect data from your students on what’s working and what’s not working
  • make collaboration a primary and explicit goal of the course
  • create the spaces for collaboration to happen – both the tools and the physical space
  • assess students, through peer and self evaluation, on their collaborative process
  • in addition to teaching students the discipline, train them on collaboration

Being open and direct with students about the goals of group collaboration was an important thread throughout the session. The panelists also stressed the importance of making self and peer assessments of the collaborative process itself an integral part of the project design.

Here are a few other key points from the session that stood out for me:

John Wright, Department of Chemistry, stressed the role student collaboration plays in helping students build the confidence they need to think about problems on their own. Wright explained that when students work collaboratively, their language around problem solving changes, and their confidence improves.

Rania Huntington, visiting Professor in East Asian Languages and Literature, and Sara Miller, from CALS, both emphasized how collaborative work can help put students in charge of their own learning. Huntington said that for her Garden of Searching for Dreams project, students “were the ones asking and answering questions.” Following on the thread, Miller explained that in her projects, students “are designing the day’s learning” and in doing so “they really test their own understanding.”

Constance Steinkuehler from the Department of Education spoke about how collaborative and collective learning happens in early education, and then again in graduate school, but often not enough in between. Steinkuehler pointed out that this gap is particularly problematic, given that “collaborative and collective work is such a big part of what we do in society.”

Steinkuehler went on to talk about how in online gaming environments, or “playspace’s” it is “prestigious to contribute to the collective intelligence.” So, too when tackling collaborative tasks. I like the idea of thinking about collaborative learning environments, like our Collaborative Sites, as intellectual “playspaces.”

If you attended the session – what were your take-aways? If not, what are your tips for effective design of collaborative learning tasks? Let us know in the comments!

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Doing the dishes with TED

April 23rd, 2008 by · 4 Comments · Emerging Technologies and Practices, general, Teaching and Learning, video, Wisconsin Idea

I do a lot of dishes. And for whatever reason, I’m always looking for something to do while I’m doing dishes.

My latest strategy for bringing together soap suds and self-improvement is watching the stellar series of TED videos. TED, or Technology, Entertainment, and Design, is annual conference where leaders and thinkers share their innovative ideas in short, 18 minute talks.

I’ve been happy to find that many of these talks are about education, new approaches to presenting and communicating complex information, or about emerging technologies of interest to educators and instructional technologists.

I’m just getting started on the TED talks (there are currently over 200 talks on the site and available through iTunes), but I thought I’d share a few of the talks I found most relevant to my work as an instructional technologist:

  • Johnny Lee shows us a smart board, and a couple other neat things, that he built from a $40 Wii Remote. That’s cool as it is, but what I found most impressive about his talk was his enthusiastic approach to sharing his research. He says, “To me what is most interesting about either of these two projects is how people found out about them … I’m just a researcher in my lab with a video camera, and within the first week a million people had seen this work … literally within days engineers, teachers, and students from around the world were already posting their own YouTube videos of them using this system or derivatives of this work.” Now that’s the Wisconsin Idea!
  • Sir Ken Robins argues, convincingly, that common approaches to early education stifle creativity
  • Amy Smith talks about several “basic tools with world-changing results“
  • Hans Rosling shares an impressive approach to presenting statistics, and calls for making statistical data more readily available to the public.

Now if I could only finish the dishes in a single 18 minute talk!

Got a favorite TED talk? Or better yet, a favorite way to keep your mind busy while doing the dishes? Let us know in the comments!

Curious about copyright

April 10th, 2008 by · 12 Comments · Fair use, Remix culture

Okay here’s the question: Let’s say I create a presentation, a podcast, or a video as part of my work here at the University. I think I did a good job on it and I want to share it with the world. I slap a Creative Commons license on it and say, “Here it is. Enjoy.” The thing is, was it ever my right to put a CC license on it in the first place? If I created it as part of my work, did I have the right to share it with the world?

Now let’s move to phase two.

Let’s say I use a University service, a website on a UW server, to share it with the world.  As part of using this service, the Terms of Use states that the University  retains copyright control of that presentation, podcast or video. So what does that mean? Does the University retain the CC license I placed on the work or is that license nullified? Is the University obligated to share the work under the terms of the license?

What do the three people actually reading this blog think?