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?

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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?

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.

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!

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.”

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.

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!

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!

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?

What’s the value of a website that shows “the most popular and best videos” on YouTube? And why do you need a site to do this for you when YouTube allows you to sort by popularity?

I see there’s also a ‘Best of YouTube’ podcast in the iTunes Store.

Umm…hmm.

Also of interest, the “Researcher’s Top Five Videos in Each Category” which you’ll find down near the bottom of the page, near their link to an “extensive database of videos” used by the researchers (in excel).

“…holding average students to broadcast quality standards is as absurd as expecting them to write like Maya Angelou or Stephen King. I expect a broadcast journalism student to crank out video worthy of local TV news, just as I would expect a creative writing student to write well enough for a literary magazine. But it’s absurd to expect either of them to change places.”

Lest you think the author doesn’t care about quality, he later writes:

“Quality does matter. A student should never have to strain to understand her teacher’s podcast, and a professor should never have to squint to see what’s in a student’s video. Quality means that the audio or video never detracts from the actual content it contains. Unless the ability to produce video is the point of the assignment, the medium otherwise should be transparent, letting the ideas shine through.”

I couldn’t agree more. I hate the idea that faculty and students would hold back from creating digital video or audio stories simply because they worry that the quality isn’t of a professional level. The transparent media production he talks about is easily achievable and doesn’t require fancy equipment or high-end studios. A little on lighting. A little on framing. And a little on recording audio. I think that would do it.

Maybe showing instructors how this is possible would be a good workshop?

I’ll give a quick overview of how we’re using the open source content management system Drupal for a variety of teaching and learning solutions, from media rich collaborative environments, to course portfolios, easy to update department web sites, and, of course, LessonShare, our social repository for lesson plans and teaching materials.

If you attended the presentation, please let me know what you think in the comments!

Here are the slides (pdf).

“[S]cientists must learn to focus on presenting, or “framing,” their messages in ways that connect with diverse audiences. This means remaining true to the underlying science, but drawing on research to tailor messages in ways that make them personally relevant and meaningful to different publics. For example, when scientists are speaking to a group of people who think about the world primarily in economic terms, they should emphasize the economic relevance of science – such as, in the case of embryonic stem cell research, pointing out that expanded government funding would make the United States, or a particular state, more economically competitive.”

Dunwoody offered some good strategies for framing:

• Have a sensitivity to the audience – To whom are you delivering the message?
• Have a strong narrative – Storytelling is a powerful way to frame your message
• Vividness – Bring a sense of excitement and energy to your message.
• Brevity – We’ve all listened to people drone on and on about their work. Don’t do this.
• Have a sensitivity to the audience – Yes, it is so important that it needed to be said twice.

Doug and I have talked about podcasting as a way for faculty and other instructional staff to extend their classrooms and share their teaching, research and stories with the rest of Wisconsin. As part of workshops that we’ve given on podcasting, we’ve talked about the importance of the Wisconsin Idea. The challenge that we’ve posed to instructors is to ask themselves why a person who is not a student in their class should care about what they are talking about in their course. What would make the average person choose to listen to their lectures, their thoughts, and stories? Why would people in the general public want to subscribe to their podcast?

To say that such an external audience is not a priority is just wrong. We’ve got a 100 year-old tradition at this University that says otherwise. To say that our work speaks for itself is equally misguided. We need to use the kinds of strategies that Dunwoody lists to frame our work and make it easier for people to understand.

And framing is not specific to science. We all need to work on how we craft our stories so that we can make them lively and accessible. It’s not just a marketing tool. It’s a way of telling citizens, especially of our State, that a necessary part of our work is explaining why what we do has an impact on their lives.

But what happens when blogging and commenting on other students blog posts, becomes a central part of a course? With 20 or more students each writing one or more posts a week, just keeping up with the blog can quickly become a significant part of the weekly workload – for both the students and the instructor. Can students and teachers get away with hitting the “Mark all as read” button?

This is one of the challenges that has come up in a class I’m helping out with this semester that has turned a long-standing paper portfolio project into an online portfolio incorporating both blog-like and wiki-like interaction. When asked to give feedback on the project, nearly all of the students wrote that they like how the online portfolio gives them the opportunity to post their ideas, reflect on their readings, and continue class discussions outside of class. There was wide-spread agreement that the portfolio was an integral and useful part of the class. But when asked what could be improved, several of the students mentioned having difficulty keeping up on what their peers are writing. A few said that it was hard to sift through the many posts to find those that are most relevant each week.

We initially thought that “tagging” would be a solution to the latter problem, but so far it seems that the students don’t really use the tags to navigate the site. We added a “Top Tags this Week” block to the main page, to help students keep track of the topics that are receiving the most attention in class. We also switched over to a short abstract for each post on the front page, so that students didn’t feel as if they have to read every word of every post. This helped a bit, but students still noted that they were sometimes overwhelmed by all of the posts. And so, we’ve come up with a dashboard view, that allows students to quickly choose what they want to read based on the authors and titles of each post.

In addition to improving the layout and design of the site, we’re also thinking about how to frame student expectations. One initial hope for this project was that it would take the individual and potentially lonely act of producing a portfolio and make it social and interactive. Students can click on the “My Contributions” page to see their own evolving portfolio, or they can dive into the river of news, or the tags, to explore the work of their peers. Unlike the paper-based portfolio project, we wanted students be able to benefit from and build upon the work of their peers. This is certainly happening – students are starting to reference each others posts, and are occasionally extending upon their peers’ post ideas and formats. But the process of selecting, reading, and reacting to the work of their peers remains challenging.

And so, I’m asking for your help. If you were tasked to create an introductory guide to course blogging, what advice would you give to help frame students expectations? How would you help them deal with the inevitably overwhelming flood of information? What other advice would you give to make sure students time and energy was put to best use in these environments?

I’ll put a few of my initial ideas into the comments, but I’m most looking forward to seeing what you have to say!

I didn’t get many takers on the suggestion of a road trip, but Susan Gibbons has given me permission to share the photos she took of the new Gleason Library on the University of Rochester campus. Anybody interested in new learning spaces and how students can play a vital role in shaping these spaces should check this out. In some of the photos you’ll see the student drawings/conceptualizations (on stands) that informed the design of the space.

• The need to incorporate more accountability into our daily practice was the most tangible recommendation of the panelists in this session. All three panelists discussed the need for increased transparency and accountability in higher education. Charlene Nunley, President Emerita, Montgomery College said it best: “It is ok to try something and fail – but it is not ok to not know whether something has succeeded and failed.” I’d add that we also need to know why things succeed or fail, and to make our process transparent enough that both our successes and our failures become useful lessons for the IT community.
• Another key theme, though a somewhat less tangible one, was broad and deep change in higher education practice. Nunley said that “vast cultural changes need to be brought about in our institutions” and then she drew some applause and laughter when she cautiously offered that many faculty are very intent on doing things the way they have always been done. This played well with the Educause audience, but I can’t help but think that it is not only the faculty that fall into the trap of momentum.
• David Ward, our chancellor emeritus, and current president of the American Council on Education, said that in order to make these sweeping changes happen, we need to focus on the successful pilots in progress that are happening already on a small scale. “Some of the best breakthroughs are on a disciplinary basis,” he noted, later adding that “the reformers out there don’t feel appropriately recognized. We need to figure out how to scale up some of the experiments that are going on. Scaling up of good practices is where change can happen.”

All in all, a very good session.

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two highly flexible and distinctly different online spaces: a departmental Web site full of easily edited and highly searchable documentation, current news, and dynamic RSS feeds, and a campus-wide community space where blogging, photo sharing, podcasting, and class discussions coexist.

Very cool! The poster, From Blogs to Brawn: Deploying Flexible Web Applications, was presented by Courtney Bentley, Instructional Technology Program Coordinator at Lafayette College.

The community space side of the equation, which Lafayette calls Soapbox 2.0, puts Drupal’s blogging, polling, and photosharing modules to work for students, faculty, and staff. Their use of the Organic Groups module makes it easy for any registered user to create a group, whether it be for a student initiated class study group, an instructor led class blog, a student sporting group, or an administrative unit looking for collaborative project space.

This flexible, user driven collaborative space is a great model to follow as we look to building our own collaborative spaces.

To get a sense of how it is working at Lafayette, be sure to check out their Hall of Fame page with stats on the Soapbox’s first year: http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~soapbox/hof/

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Through various methodolgies including photo elicitation exercises, mapping diaries, and design workshops, Gibbons and Foster gathered a ton of student input for the development of an ideal learning space.

They outline their work in creating a student-centered academic library on the campus. The report can be found at http://www.tiny.cc/GzthX. (Note: I LOVE a good tiny url!)

It was a really inspiring presentation and I hope I get a chance to see this space. Anybody want to take a ride to Rochester?