Participants will explore a variety of digital tools for video that can be used for instruction, remediation, and discussion, as well as student creation of video artifacts to demonstrate understanding.
“Students have a greater role and responsibility in creating new knowledge, in understanding the contours and the changing dynamics of the world of information, and in using information, data, and scholarship ethically.” ~ ACRL
As a participant, I am reminded of the many, many moving parts that the facilitators for such an institute need to plan, and I have been fully engaged in the workshop for the past few days. Couple that with needing to continue working on all my regular tasks as a program director, faculty member, and consultant, and the time here at DMAC slips by entirely too quickly.
I need to pause. To scale back a bit. I woke up early this morning, and knew that I needed to reflect. To refocus.
So, here I am.
Without a doubt, I am enjoying the process. Since my infographic prototype post earlier this week, we’ve also tinkered with Audacity and the audio assignment, as well as iMovie and the video assignment. Fortunately, I’ve had experience with both these tools — as well as these concepts — so I’ve tried to focus more of my attention on the deeper, more theoretical implications of what DMAC has been pushing me to consider.
For instance, yesterday, we were asked to consider the politics of race and social media, deconstructing images and considering how to layer meaning with memes. I’ve certainly thought — and written about — memes before, but the new lenses of accessibility and social justice are all helpful reminders for me as I prepare to create my projects this weekend. Speaking of projects, my work is moving forward, but at a seemingly glacial pace. Again, being a participant reminds me that — when I am in the facilitator role — I need to be quite mindful of my audience’s needs, both technical and social.
Still, I am impressed by what we can do when we put our minds to it. For instance, Elvira and Rich created concise, compassionate short film yesterday:
Giving students — and, when in workshops, teachers — the time and space to play, take risks, and be creative makes a world of difference. I’ve heard these types of opportunities called many things. Quickfire challenges. Rapid prototyping. Sandboxing. Whatever we want to call them, we simply need to do more of them. I will remember this in preparation for the fall.
Of course, the conversations with colleagues from around the country have all been productive and refreshing. Today, we head to the Ohio Union for the Innovate: Forward conference. This, too, will be a refreshing change, as I hear about the many initiatives related to digital learning that are happening here at OSU. While keynotes are always interesting, I look forward to seeing what faculty are doing in their face-to-face and online courses, and I’ve mapped out some sessions that deal with digital distraction, new environments and structures for learning, and building better online discussions. These may ebb and flow throughout the day, of course, but that is the thrill of going to a conference!
As we prepare to “turn the corner,” moving into the deeper, more substantive work of producing our audio, image, and video projects. Again, my work this week is largely in preparation for teaching the honors seminar this fall, “Our Digital Selves.” My aim this weekend is to have my infographic, podcast, and video in a near state of completion for Monday’s preview. What’s interesting in that part of the assignment is that we are supposed to create “no more than :60 (sixty seconds) of video and/or audio that illustrates your work in progress that you plan to share at the upcoming showcase.” Making a recording about our work in progress, rather than simply standing nearby to describe it, is another interesting pedagogical move that I am learning from the DMAC structure, and I look forward to that challenge.
Yesterday, Scott DeWitt introduced to our first task for DMAC, the Image Assignment. The main goal of the assignment is “to work with a collection of information that you can use to
compose a persuasive piece of displayable and/or distributable multimodal media.”
In short, we are making an infographic.
Our task yesterday afternoon was to create a prototype using good ol’ fashioned paper, scissors, glue sticks and other craft items. I know that this one isn’t much to look at yet, but that is part of the process… a process I will try to explain a bit more here.
First, I should say that I’ve had some experience with infographics before, though I am not a graphic design expert. Kristen Turner and I wrote about infographics as one chapter in our Argument in the Real World book, and I also had students in an honors class that I taught a few years ago create infographics, too. I’ve introduced infographics to teachers in workshops, too, yet this is the first time I have been asked/required to create an infographic (at least one that I will iterate and refine).
Second, our second goal emerging from yesterday’s work was around accessibility, and I have many, many ideas spinning in my head, as noted in a number of tweets I shared like this one.
Interesting to think about how we would teach students to compose a multimodal text (challenging enough) and then compose an audio description that is accurate and useful (doubly-challenging). Also, are they aiming to be objective? Are they adding commentary? #dmac18
So, our challenge before this morning was to think about an initial design for an infographic, create the prototype, and to think about how, eventually, we will create an audio or textual description of the infographic. We were able to review a number of infographics as samples, and I developed the one above. Here is my first, very quick attempt at describing it:
The title of the graphic is “Disrupting Digital Distraction,” and below the title are three main portions of the overall graphic.
The graphic is approximately three times as long as it is wide, with a white background and accent boxes in green, red, orange, and yellow.
In the first third of the graphic, there are six boxes arranged in two columns and three rows.
In the left-hand column (with green, then orange, and again a green accent box) are statistics about the prevalence of device use among adults and teens.
In the right-hand column (with yellow, then red, and again a yellow accent box) are suggestions for how to manage distractions.
The middle section of the graphic is approximately one-third the size of the first segment, and is comprised of text only. There are three sentences, with the first discussing “digital distraction” (highlighted in blue font), the second discussing “digital addiction” (highlighted in red font), and the third is a question.
The final section of the infographic includes four more accent text boxes, two columns by two rows. These boxes describe actionable steps for users to consider in taking back control of their digital lives.
In the left-hand column, there are again green and orange accent boxes.
In the right-hand column, there is a yellow accent box.
The final box, when reading left-to-right, top-to-bottom, is in the lower right-hand corner, and has two accent colors: red and green.
And, that’s about it for now… I know that I have lots more work to do, but this is a prototype and a rough draft, so I will take a deep breath and let it go. Being at DMAC reminds me of the ways in which I often position students and teachers, inviting them to create something quickly, and to embrace the messiness of the process. It is good for me to feel some of the same pressures in my own composing process, here, and I look forward to continuing the work on the image assignment.
Today, I made my way to Columbus in preparation for the Digital Media and Composition Institute, also known as DMAC. In more than one way, this has been a career aspiration of mine for well over a decade, and I’m very much looking forward to the immersive, sustained experience of working with colleagues over the next 10 days.
I first learned about DMAC, then CIWIC, when Cindy Selfe and Gail Hawisher were still at Michigan Tech, from my mentor and dissertation director, (and, eventually, co-author on Because Digital Writing Matters), Danielle Nicole DeVoss, as she had pursued her own graduate studies there. To make a long story short, I feel like part of my academic heritage is deeply rooted with CIWIC/DMAC, and in many ways I feel like I am returning “home” though I have never actually attended the workshop.
At another level, this spring is also quite important for me as a moment to pause, reflect, and refocus. Since 2003, I have had the incredibly good fortune of leading countless conference sessions, day-long workshops, and multi-day or even multi-week institutes. This has come about from my long and productive relationship with the National Writing Project. I’ve been humbled and honored to have started the Chippewa River Writing Project at CMU, and to have been invited to dozens of writing project sites – as well as other school districts and professional organization events – over the past decade.
However, one of the things that I miss is simply being a participant in a workshop, to be fully immersed so I can soak up ideas and wisdom from other participants and facilitators. This is not to say that I don’t enjoy opportunities for leadership, because I certainly do, and I’m looking forward to at least half a dozen different opportunities this summer, not least of which is facilitating our own weeklong CRWP leadership institute, returning to Rhode Island to help facilitate the Summer Institute in Digital Literacy, and also coordinating our Beaver Island Institute for science and literacy. I look forward to all of these, and to my time at ISTE and NWP Midwest, among other conference events. All this will be wonderful, too.
Still, there’s something to be said for just having one’s mind in a state of “being.” DMAC will allow me that time and space. And, I will get to meet other like-minded scholars, reconnect to my writing roots, and think critically and creatively about digital composition. In short, it will be intellectually engaging and fun.
And, I’m at a point in my career where, not needing to “pivot” or “redefine” entirely, what I really need to do over the next ten days is get refocused. I have a number of specific projects that I want to work on over the next 10 days, many of which are connected to my teaching, scholarship, and service.
With teaching, in particular, I’m trying to imagine the possibilities for a class I am teaching this fall, a seminar class for honors freshman, that I have entitled “Our Digital Selves.” There’s quite a bit of work that I need to do this summer in order to figure out exactly how I want to teach the course. First, I’m looking to a colleague and leader in the field of digital badging for composition, Stephanie West-Puckett, and the work that she has begun at URI with Writing 104. Titled MakerComp, she helps her students move toward self guided inquiry and significant projects, bundled in a system of badging.
Additionally, I’ve been “away” from writing for a significant amount of time. I have certainly been busy with some smaller projects this year, I have not gotten refocused on a book-length project since the publication of Argument in the Real World, From Texting to Teaching, and Coaching Teacher-Writers in 2017. I have a number of writing opportunities ahead of me, as well as potential collaborators with whom I would like to work, and so these next few days will give me lots of time to consider possibilities and develop project proposals.
Finally, of course, I am interested in learning how other people design professional development experiences for their peers and colleagues. I’ve been struggling to try to figure out how, exactly, to help re-invigorate our own writing project site’s work, connect to our masters in educational technology program, and consider new possibilities for CMU’s education program at large. I hope that watching the DMAC team in action as facilitators will be good for me, too.
In short, I need DMAC.
I am deeply fortunate to have a patient and flexible wife who is managing the chaos at home, as well as an employer in CMU who has given me significant financial support to attend this DMAC Institute. I am thankful for these blessings in my life.
The idea of a professional learning network has existed for quite some time, built on some of the foundational work related to “situated learning” and “communities of practice” developed by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger in the 1990s.
With the emergence of Web 2.0, Stephen Downes described “learning networks in practice” in a 2007 paper, arguing that “The idea behind the personal learning environment is that the management of learning migrates from the institution to the learner.”
Combined with the 2006 emergence of Twitter, a new idea had taken form, and educators began using hashtags to start a variety of ed chats, including our own #MichEd which was inaugurated Nov 7, 2012.
Chat Questions
This week, we reflect on our own experiences being a part of the #MichEd network and, more broadly, what it means for each of us to develop our own PLN. We will be joined by students from CMU’s Doctorate in Educational Technology, and the chat will be hosted by Troy Hicks. During the chat we will consider:
What motivates you, personally, to create and maintain a PLN?
How do PLNs change with time, for you personally and across the network? Think about #michED and who was there at the start, who has joined, who has left (or is less active) and WHY?
How do we keep our networks diverse in thought? We don’t want them to be echo chambers for our ideas, but to be constructive spaces for dialogue. How can we achieve that goal?
Besides sharing great resources, what can a PLN teach us about how to be an educator? How does participating in a PLN become part of your professional persona?
OK, let’s get specific. What, exactly, can we learn from PLNs? Along with soft skills of collaboration and sharing resources, what other digital or pedagogical skills can we learn?
Finally, what’s next for PLNs? How can we nurture and sustain them? How can we invite new voices? What should a group of doctoral students studying educational technology be thinking about?
A recent conversation with a colleague about this topic reminded me of the many reasons why I, personally, dislike Bb:
The interface is almost entirely teacher-centric, and even the features that allow students to contribute (discussion forums, and “innovations” to the LMS like blogs and wikis) are still very didactic in nature requiring that the teacher set them up in a manner to “allow” students to contribute. For instance, look at the many options available in just the “discussion board” settings in the screenshot below from Bb and consider the levels of autonomy that the teacher can decide upon for students, leaving them with fewer and fewer decisions to make for themselves. This is not really a discussion, but an assignment.
Similarly, the interface is designed on a “delivery” model of content. Yes, a creative instructor could build some self-guided learning, inquiry, and even “gamification” into the system (which Bb has conveniently added as “achievements,” but it is centered again on content consumption, assignments submission, and the gradebook. Again, the premise with the LMS is that students are logging in to view content that the teacher has created (or curated), and that this content (and this content alone) is what is important. Even if students create content (and could, theoretically, do so by embedding images, videos, or other types of digital artifacts). Still, for the most part, when directed to engage with the content (and I haven’t even mentioned online quizzes/exams), students are encouraged to do so most often to earn points.
Even in the best possible case, where a teacher is open to multiple revisions of an assignment that allows students to engage in an iterative process of learning, the interface for responding to assignments is, again, didactic, with the student submitting a paper, the teacher using commenting tools and rubrics to reply and, perhaps, opening up another “attempt” for submission. In contrast to a more open and flexible system of collaboration (as enabled by, say Google Docs or even the most current version of Word with synchronous and cloud-based editing), this workflow in Bb still relies on discrete assignments, deadlines, and grades.
Screenshot of Bb Discussion Forum Options for Instructors
There are more critiques that I could levy, but these are the main concerns that I have with Bb. So, from my earliest experiences teaching at the university, then, I have been trying to upend the expectation that I must use an LMS to organize my courses… as well as my thinking and my teaching. It is a struggle, and I have succumbed to the convenience (and mundane normality) of Bb in my past few semesters when teaching masters and doctoral courses all online. (I’ll have to describe my (compromised) rationale for all that in another post, but suffice it to say that I have, at least in recent times).
For the moment, I want to reflect on my journey with wikis as an alternative to the traditional LMS, in particular, with Wikispaces. Eagerly heralded as one of the revolutionary Web 2.0 tools that would democratize knowledge, especially for digital teaching and learning, wikis have been a staple of my teaching and professional development work for over a decade. So, like many others in the ed tech community who were both saddened and shocked when Wikispaces announced its imminent demise (some more shocked and outraged than others), I knew that this was more than just a moment to rethink where I store my data and how I organize my teaching.
First, a quick note of thanks to Wikispaces. Yes, I know that I have lots of data to recover, and that will be a pain. But, I can’t complain. I’ve used, enjoyed, and promoted Wikispaces for over a decade, and I appreciate what they have done with and for educators. Alas, like anything that has been offered for free, I am well aware that it too could go by the wayside (and soon will be). Wikispaces, alas, is no different. People are figuring out ways to save and repurpose their Wikispaces data, and I will, too (before the end of July!).
So, instead, I look at this as an opportunity to rethink my presence on the web as a teacher, teacher educator, and scholar. I will do that in the weeks and months to come. What I want to reflect on for a moment, however, is different. I want to think about why I really used Wikispaces, and whether I was being as open-minded, collaborative, and innovative as I thought I was.
That is, even as a progressive-minded educator, opting to use Wikispaces as a substitute for the LMS, as a tool for students to collaborate and contribute to our classroom community (as well as during workshops in which I lead professional development for teachers), I don’t know that I have fully enacted or lived up to my egalitarian ideas. If I were to do an honest accounting of all the Wikispaces that I manage, and see what I have contributed versus others, I would guess that I am, at best, close to a 50/50 balance. More likely, I am the one doing most of the adding and revising, especially in my course and workshop wikis.
In other words, at a deeper, more substantive level, have any of the wikis that I have created — and the pedagogy that I have enacted surrounding those wikis — really been about the participants, or has it been about me?
For all the class websites that I have created with Wikispaces, including ones for undergraduate, masters, and doctoral students, and for all the pages that I have created for workshops and longer PD institutes, I have to wonder… was I creating things on Wikispaces because it was convenient for me?
Was this a technical choice, perhaps, because giving a wiki address was an easy to find a domain (back before shortened URLs and QR codes made it easier to get to a Google Doc?)?
Was it because I wanted the public facing interface and immediate editing as a way to fit my own style of teaching, and not so much as a tool for really encouraging substantive contributions and communication amongst students?
I’ve been wondering all of this because – as I prepare to download the data from dozens of wikis and figure out where and how to archive it – I’ve noticed that I am the main contributor to most of the wikis I’ve begun. There are exceptions, of course, including our writing project’s wiki which has existed for nearly 10 years and contains the contributions of dozens of teachers. There is also a smattering of wikis that I’ve created in a one time workshop, inviting teachers to create their own page, for a day, that then linger in cyberspace. And, of course, there are the class wikis, where I have had varying degrees of success with students creating and curating their own profile pages and contributing to other sections of the class wiki site.
Still, the challenge is taking a deep, thoughtful look at all of these wikis again and thinking about who it is that has done most of the contribution. There is the old adage that “school is the place where young people go to watch old people work.” Bb, certainly, seems to be virtual manifestation of that physical truth about schools.
My question, at least at this moment, is whether or not I have been simply recreating that truth under the guise of collaboration, creativity, and inquiry by using wikis…
… or, have I really done anything different in the space of hybrid/online learning over the past 10 to 12 years? And, to circle back to the dilemma of the LMS, this has given me pause to seriously reconsider my use of Bb, too.
I’ve started to become complacent, and that is a dangerous place to be when it comes to digital writing and digital teaching. Like most teaching dilemmas, this is a wicked problem, and one that I will need to wrestle with more and more as the July 31 deadline for Wikispaces’ imminent demise comes closer and closer. In a way, I am thankful for the the opportunity to rethink why and how I create and curate materials for the web, for students, and for other teachers. I don’t know that I will ever have the answer, but I hope to soon have some thoughts on how to approach it from a new perspective.
Do a personal 24- to 48-hour news audit in which you record all the news you get now, where it comes from, and how well it meets your needs and interests.
This short course reminded me of the power of experiential, inquiry-based learning. As I am redesigning a media literacy course for teacher candidates, I am thinking that one of these types of brief activities each week could be incredibly useful, so I will return to them again in the future.
As I mentioned earlier in the week, I had an opportunity to collaborate and learn with about 130 other teachers, librarians, and higher ed faculty at the Summer Institute in Digital Literacy. Given that this was my second go-round, I had some idea of what would happen day-to-day, and over the arc of the entire week, and again the institute met and exceeded my expectations.
First, I appreciate having had the chance to collaborate with Jill Castek on our Thursday keynote, “Deepening Assessment, Digitally.” Here are the slides, as well as many additional links.
The other key takeaway for me — which is really just a reiteration of what I have learned from my colleagues in the National Writing Project — is that relevance, relationships, and reflection are at the heart of learning, for both kids and adults. No secret here; just a gentle reminder that great learning takes all three of these elements, and those elements are fostered through sustained immersion in an intensive, sometimes disruptive, yet ultimately supportive and growth-oriented environment.
Both summers at URI have provided this for me, and in a slightly different manner than what I experience in NWP work. One protocol that we use at the end of the day, both with participants and faculty, is a group discussion of “highlights and lowlights.” Not meant to be a space for problem-solving, it is a structure that allows us all to share the best and worst part of each day in a setting where our colleagues listen empathically. While I was quite tired at the end of each day, those conversations were rich, and I am still thinking through what everyone brought to them.
So, the reminder that these elements all matter is a good one, and knowing that there are multiple paths to pursue as we lead our colleagues in professional growth is a good reminder, too. I’m heading back to Michigan with a renewed appreciation for what it takes to immerse one’s self in a digitally-rich learning experience, and that we need to take time to build those three R’s of a true twenty-first century education: relevance, relationships, and reflection.
