The 1 Train to City College

Friday’s WAC Professional Education event at City College was another great success.  The writing in the disciplines theme was perfect, and we had some very strong workshops.

The panel featuring four second-year Writing Fellows really illustrated just how much Fellows grow in their time with WAC. We saw some great examples of assignments that include “disciplinary writing” in sociology, psychology, history, and even comic book illustration.

I especially liked the way the Fellows did not present the standard “analytic” academic (or research) paper as disciplinary writing.  While not quite Alt/Dis in the sense that compositionists might imagine, these were nice assignments/activities that worked a little out of the traditional box.

The WAC Coordinators meeting that preceded the day’s event was perhaps less successful.  We’re working hard, and from behind the 8-ball, to reimagine the Writing Fellow roles in response to the Graduate Center’s decision to reconfigure the fellowships from a 2-year gig to a 1-year appointment that serves as the capstone for the 5-year funding package known as the Chancellor’s Fellowship.

Perhaps the high point of that meeting was the work done by the committee imagining ways to front load writing pedagogies in the early years of the fellowship.  While perhaps something of a pipe dream, such a reimagining holds the potential to enable CUNY graduate students to have a sustained, multi-year engagement with pedagogical theory and practice.  In my own group it was nice to hear that some of the other schools are adopting a model like the one we’ve moved to, a kind of project-based conception of Writing Fellow work. It’s a great group of colleagues, and we’re all committed to the work.

Roundtable: The Future of WordPress in Education (11/14/09)

WordCampNYC 2009, held at Baruch College/CUNY this weekend (November 14-15) was a HUGE success, though I did find it to be something of a WordPress lovefest. I guess that’s to be expected when hundreds of folks who have chosen WordPress as their web publishing platform come from hundreds of miles to hang out and talk shop.

As an academic involved in advancing WordPress as an ePortfolio platform on campus, I stuck to the Academic Track in the program. The academics at WordCamp appeared to me to be dwarfed by the developers, newbies, and others.  The audience in the panels I attended hovered around 25 folks, and I got to meet some interesting faculty doing pedagogically valuable things with technology.  The entry point for discussions was WordPress, but we didn’t stay there.  As an academic, I often find that panels can get boring because they run on too long.  The opposite was true at WordCamp.  I regularly wished there had been more time for Q&A, though this was due to short sessions and an engaged audience, not rambling by the presenters.

Here’s a run down of some of the panels I attended, and some of the issues discussed.

Luke Walzer

It’s all about the FRO, man! Luke talked about how the Baruch freshman year experience folks got into the idea of blogs in the Freshman Seminar, about how 1600 Baruch freshmen are now blogging this fall, and about how their using what he called a “mother blog” to aggregate the individual posts in each seminar.  What a cool potential model for the York freshman seminar!  Diffusion of innovation, anyone?  That’s so cool!

Jeremy Boggs

Jeremy focused on ways to use WordPress for research and search management, and explored the possibilities that WordPress could become a vehicle to manage and aggregate online research. He also observed the ways that CommentPress, a WordPress plugin, might be used to encourage paragraph-by-paragraph critical reflection.  CitationAggregator apparently makes it possible to aggregate cites from one’s various accounts around the web. And while I do not know the plugin Headup, Boggs explained that this tool reads your post as you write and can pull in relevant content from the web.

Tom Woodward

Tom’s presentation on WordPress in K-12 contexts was a real eye-opener.  This was a presentation that got me thinking about publishing and elementary students, particularly my own children and their school. Hmm.  I’ll be talking with fellow PTA members.

Dave Lester

Dave Lester’s presentation focused on ScholarPress, a plugin that he and Jeremy Boggs collaborated on.  ScholarPress essentially turns course website development into a matter of completing form fields.  I didn’t find it particularly interesting for my own purposes, with the notable exception of the potential for the importing of bibliographic material into a 15-week schedule. Mostly, I’d just make my course website so that it looks the way I want it to look.

I did find both Courseware and WPBook to be intriguing tools, and I’ll definitely implement WPBook for my Spring 2010 course if I decide to go with a Blog-based course website.  I still haven’t decided if I’m moving from my 3 year exploration of CSS style switching, with a steady accumulation of themes as each semester comes around.

Serena Epstein and Shannon Hauser

These two former students from the University of Mary Washington, current stomping grounds of Jim Groom, gave a wonderful interactive presentation that cast WordPress as an addictive drug.  Their presentation totally fit into the general WordPress lovefestiness of WordCampNYC. I even found myself participating, though I don’t have a problem with WordPress.  Hmm.

Roundtable: Future of WordPress in Education

The engaging discussion in the roundtable just went too quickly.  Privacy, choice, the possibilities for integration, the future of Blackboard, and more.

Joe Ugoretz and Lisa Brundage

Joe and Lisa showcased the great work with eportfolios under way at the Macaulay Honors College.  What can one say? Truly exceptional students with wonderful financial and technological support, taught by some of the most engaging faculty CUNY has to offer.  There are some outstanding portfolios happening in their platform, and it’s really nice to see what they’re up to. Intriguingly, I learned that faculty are actually using the blog platform to focus course projects.  This is something I WILL use in Spring 2010.  I’m thinking of a synthesis of Boggs’ ideas and Ugoretz’s ideas in my Writing for Electronic Media course.  Now I just need the project!

Stepping Out of the Ivory Tower

I had a nice lunch with a couple web developers from DC. We had some interesting discussions about open source CMS platforms.  I was intrigued because they were working to move clients to WordPress as an alternative to static, Dreamweaver-based sites or other CMS platforms available. Very pragmatic web developers coming to WordPress because of ease of client use and not because of WordPress evangelism.  I actually saw their presence at the conference as a sign that folks are opting for WP because it’s just good, and easy. These guys were just discovering WordPress MU, and I think they had just heard of BuddyPress that day.

The second day of panels in the CUNY WAC Writing Fellows Professional Development series went very well.  With 3 panel presentations and 5 concurrent sessions in the afternoon, Fellows had plenty of choice as they considered which discussions about Faculty-Writing Fellow partnerships relevant to their local campus work.

Since we were at Hostos, and since I have tremendous respect for Linda Hirsch’s work as WAC Coordinator at CUNY’s bi-lingual college, I opted to attend the workshop that featured Linda, some of her Writing Fellows, and faculty collaborators at Hostos Community College. I’m glad I did.

Linda packed the workshop/panel with faculty from Hostos who had worked with Fellows.  It was very good for me to hear about faculty members’ own anxieties in sharing their assignments and course plans with others.  It really underscored the way that a Faculty-Fellow partnership is a kind of leap of faith for both parties, as well as the importance of building trust over time.

Program

Introduction

Nancy Aries, Interim University Dean for Undergraduate Education, & Cheryl Smith, Associate Professor & Faculty Coordinator of the Writing Across the Curriculum Program, Baruch College

Panel Presentations – The Faculty/Fellow Partnership: Unique Approaches and Outcomes

• Facilitating Active Learning: Effective Strategies for Conducting a Staged Research Paper (David Palazzo, Writing Fellow, Bronx Community College, Janet Heller, Assistant Professor of Health, Physical Education and Wellness, Bronx Community College)
• Classroom Collaborations: Creating WID Resources by and for Faculty and Fellows
  (Karen Gregory, Teaching & Learning Fellow at the Office of General Education, Queens College, Thomas Meacham, Writing Fellow, LaGuardia Community College, Michele Pacht, Associate Professor of English, LaGuardia Community College)

Concurrent Workshops

• When Your Faculty Member is an Entire Department (Lauren Jade Martin, Writing Fellow, Baruch College, David Parsons, Writing Fellow, Baruch College, Diana Rickard, Senior Communication Fellow at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, Baruch College
• Stealth Pedagogy: Encouraging Professors to Adopt WAC Practices (Jennifer Russo, Writing Fellow, Brooklyn College, Siobhan Cooke, Writing Fellow, Brooklyn College)
• The Potential and Peril of Faculty-Fellow Collaboration: Using the Reflective Cover Letter (Stephanie Jeanjean, Writing Fellow, Queensborough Community College, Leonard Finkelman, Writing Fellow, Queensborough Community College, Carl Lindskoog, Writing Fellow, Queensborough Community College)
• Faculty/Fellow Collaboration: Making It Work (Linda Hirsch, Professor of English & WAC Co-coordinator, Hostos Community College,Andrea Fabrizio, Assistant Pr ofessor of English & WAC Co-coordinator, Hostos Community College, Nelson Nunez-Rodriguez, Assistant Professor of Natural Sciences, Hostos Community College, Eunice Flemister, Assistant Professor of Education, Hostos Community College, Jerilyn Fisher, Professor of English, Hostos Community College, Adriana Perez, Writing Fellow, Hostos Community College, Paul McBreen, Former Writing Fellow, Hostos Community College)
• Building a Collaboration for the “Build-Your-Own-City” Assignment (Cindy R. Lobel, Assistant Professor of History, Lehman College, Carla Dubose, WAC Faculty Development Associate and former Writing Fellow, Lehman College)

Kathleen Blake Yancey delivered the keynote at the 2009 Georgia Conference on Information Literacy, a talk entitled “Creating and Exploring New Worlds: Web 2.0, Information Literacy, and the Uses of Knowledge.”

Sources=Materials

Yancey worked to open our conception of sources a bit, to broaden it from alphabetic or written to include multiple media, and consider that one’s sources both come from others and are created by us. Is this new?  The multiple media component is certainly a relatively new phenomenon, at least the ubiquity of it is.  And most students in colleges generally experience research or engagement with source materials as the manipulation of other people’s material. But much of the material we think of as “source” material has been created by someone.

Information Ecology

Yancey argues that, as teachers, we should push students into the “stew” of information, scholarly material found in libraries and academic subscription databases, material in blogs, in more popular press publications, and more.  We should then encourage students to evaluate the information found in these sources as a way for them to take charge of the information they encounter.

Content

Information literacy practices must have content in them if students are to make meaningful use of them.  Yancey claims that one key to the transference of skills from one context to another is content.  In the absence of content, skills become something we may practice without really understanding the why, the reasons the skills are valuable.

Sam Wineberg and Information Ecology

Yancey notes that, for Wineberg, we establish credibility through corroboration (or fidelity), sourcing, and contextualization.  When students don’t engage in these practices in writing about history, they run into trouble.  When confronted with a variety of texts that describe/explain a historical event, students struggle to determine which source(s) are most authoritative.

Assignments

Note the role of “content” in each of the following assignments

• Analyze an entry in an encyclopedia and one in wikipedia. How do the entries compare? How are the pieces written? How does one evaluate the entries?  Shifting the order of filtering and publishing.  Encyclopedias begin with filtering, then publish.  Wikipedia publishes first, then filters.
• Build a blogging map on a topic. Find blog-based material on a specific topic.  What do we learn about evaluating sources by engaging with these blogs.  Are .coms better than .edus? Yancey argues that when we dig into a source we can’t simply “source” by looking at the URL.
• Sourcing backwards.  Start with an editorial in the NY Times.  Then work backwards and locate the kinds of sources the editors draw from in moving to the editorial.

What is the Role of Content?

Logic of Research Practices – transform our thinking from filling in slots to citation, to thinking about the logic in citation or documentation

• access
• intellectual property
• economy
• standardization
• transparency

Identify key terms that together are Information Literacy.

• Circulation – Who cites whom in an article. We can see that scholars are in conversation with each other. In the new circulation, on the web and in television news, we can see propaganda served up as information.  Yancey claims that this development is possible because of changes in the position of filtering in the new information ecology.
• Credibility -
• Corroboration -
• Plausibility -

Yancey argues that we should also use “critical incident theory” practices in the classroom.  Build assignments that put students in positions to take a critical incidents approach in locating and working with sources.

I very much like the suggestion that we have students confront specific critical incidents by juxtaposing information sources as part of evaluation. What I’m not so sure about is Yancey’s conception of “content” in this framework.  Obviously, content matters, and I’m supportive of her point.  (Absent content, information retrieval or research is merely an empty exercise with little relevance to us, or to our students.)

At the same time, I suspect that this kind of work will have the greatest impact in the context of actual courses, places were it may be least likely to find an audience.  Students in a history, biology, or literature class, when asked to conduct research as part of the course, would likely be most receptive to this kind of approach.  But faculty teaching these courses are more likely to be focused on the content knowledge itself.  Embedding the kinds of information literacy assignments into the curriculum will be a challenge that may even be more daunting than the efforts to infuse process writing pedagogies into such courses.

Late last week I heard back on a grant proposal I co-authored to develop e-portfolio at York College/CUNY.  $85,000 for the first year of the initiative, nearly all the money we had requested. The project is to be funded in part by CUNY’s Office of Undergraduate Education under it’s Coordinated Undergraduate Education Innovative Programs initiative. My hope is to use this grant as a springboard to additional support in coming years.

I’m quite excited, mostly because I’ve tried to do some e-portfolio in most of my classes for years.  In the absence of an institutional interest in the project, and real support, it’s been tough to give students good reasons to stick with their portfolios.

We’ve been laying the groundwork for this initiative for about 3 months now; it’s nice to see we’ll have some funds to encourage participation and to help support both faculty and students engaged in the effort.

The platform is decided, and it’s up and running in a minimalist way.  We’ve addressed some of the logistical issues, though not all of them. Now it’s time get really serious.

Some months ago I was asked to present something about technology and learning in the classroom.  I use a lot of technology myself, and try to teach a fairly tech-enabled course on campus. Initially, I thought I would make some kind of presentation involving the myriad composing tools available on the web today. Then I learned that I was agreeing to participate as a seminar/workshop leader for our Online and Hybrid Course Development Faculty Seminar, something that altered the stakes considerably.

CUNY is a Blackboard university, or has been for about a decade now.  It is difficult to imagine entering an official seminar to develop online/hybrid courses and advocating tools that function outside the Blackboard CMS environment.  What to do?

Intriguingly, Blackboard got something of a black eye this spring because the university’s upgrade to version 8 went so awry that many faculty who use Bb found themselves unable to conduct their courses, with people teaching asynchronous online courses most dramatically affected.  Concurrently, the university launched the CUNY Academic Commons, a site for collaboration across the nearly two dozen schools and colleges in the system. The Commons is built on WordPress Multi-user, BuddyPress, and Mediawiki, a radical departure from the vender locked model of Blackboard. This development changed a lot of my thinking about what I might do.

I decided to encourage workshop participants to develop meaningful, pedagogically relevant uses for both the Blog and Wiki tools in Blackboard.  My suspicion is that participants do not necessarily know these tools, much less understand them. I have uses to which I’ve put these tools in my classes. But I have really only scratched the surface. I am optimistic that writing faculty will find real value in the possibility of collaboration and re-writing through wiki work. And the uses of the blog in classes are numerous. Discussion board is certainly important, but it’s not the only solid learning tool.

Of course, the Bb encased blog and wiki tools are limited. How does one really engage Web 2.0 without being able to syndicate to the web through RSS?  Hmm. But that’s a side issue, or so I’m telling myself.

Additionally, I decided to give participants a brief tour of some ways one might use blog and/or wiki tools to create a course website, using some work happening around CUNY as concrete examples and the Academic Commons as a place to practice building a hypothetical course website.  This latter piece is likely to come off as disconnected for some, particularly since faculty are being encouraged to build their courses in Blackboard. For others, my hope is that the effort will encourage an engagement with and responsibility for the technologies they opt to use in their courses.

I don’t think the Academic Commons is the place to really host a course website, but it’s a place to try out some things.  And it won’t hurt for faculty to see and experience some parts of the commons.  Perhaps they’ll get engaged with colleagues across CUNY.

We’ll see.

I joined the CUNY Academic Commons yesterday over breakfast. I’ve been meaning to dig into the commons since our Instructional Technologist sent me the link a few weeks ago, soon after I posted to the faculty listserv and my space on the college website a small collection of e-learning tools faculty might consider as alternatives to Blackboard.

Recent conversations about e-portfolio and platforms gave me the nudge to poke around in WordPress mu from an individual blogger perspective, and the AC seemed like an easy place to do some poking.

I was pleased to see that I’m getting in on the ground floor in the commons; there are still fewer than 100 people on the commons, and things are just getting rolling. I was also pleased to see some active discussion under way on e-portfolio, and on alternatives to the Bb behemoth. I took the time to create a blog in the mu site, and to do some customizing along lines of a possible student e-portfolio framework.

I was really very excited to see that they’ve integrated Mediawiki and BuddyPress into the Academic Commons.  Wiki and social networking are two must haves for any e-portfolio implementation that purports to look forward.  I am somewhat less excited by what I’m discovering about the limited admin priviledges available to the WordPress author under the Multi User version of the blog tool.  (Coming from full admin priviledges in my own WP blog, perhaps anything less than total control would seem like a restriction.)

Lehman College/CUNY - May 8, 2009

Marc Prensky of Games2Train, keynote speaker for the 2009 CUNY General Education Conference held at Lehman College/CUNY, had the audacity to declare that we should rename general education, from General Education to Future Education. (Oh, Boy!)

Prensky didn’t explore the implications of this notion for an important component of the historical mission of higher education. Is history no longer important in Future Education? What of the arts? His comment was a throwaway of sorts.

The surprising thing about Prensky’s comment is that people didn’t gasp, particularly since most in the audience reported that they had never seen the video, “A Vision of Student’s Today,” by cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch.

Explosion of YouTube

“You can learn anything you need to learn about software on YouTube.” (Marc Prensky, May 8, 2009)

“Video is the new text.” (Mark Anderson. Qtd. by Prensky May 8, 2009)

I found Prensky’s claim that you can learn anything you need to learn about software on Youtube particularly intriguing.  My own exploration of interface literacy development through screencasting software tutorials is an effort to tap into and to build on this trend.  There are, of course, many challenges to this viral aspect of learning.  As Prensky put it, “Education is not something you can do to students; we need to do it with them.”

Here’s a hitch: There’s an aspect of boundary crossing here when educators attempt to use twitter, or post “classwork” on YouTube.  What space is left for students if we’re going out and reaching them where they are?  One thinks of Spicoli the surfer/stoner from Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and Mr. Hand’s decision to show up at his house at the end of the term to teach him history so he can graduate. OUCH!

Prensky’s Binarisms?

I was struck by the series of binarisms in Prensky’s presentation.  I found them quite productive for explorations of his idea that we need to “balance” or to meet in the middle of these divides. Of course, they have all the problems one often finds in binaries. They invite misunderstanding, and cultivate a “divide” that doesn’t really exist.

• Digital Natives/Digital Immigrants
• Verbs/Nouns
• After School is Pulled by Kids/School is Pushed on Kids

We can see this binary approach in his early work on Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants (http://www.marcprensky.com/). Intriguingly, Prensky was critical of this binary because it has been taken wrong. I don’t find this surprising; binaries often set up misunderstandings.

Today Prensky offered up a couple additional binaries: Verbs vs. Nouns and Pull vs. Push Learning.

When it comes to technology we seem to quickly focus on the nouns, the actual software.  Prensky suggested that we shift to a focus on verbs. The nouns will change (MS Word to Open Office, from email to texting), but the core verbs remain. No matter the noun, we’re really after presenting (Powerpoint? Youtube?), communicating (Outlook? MySpace?), and learning (Blackboard? Mediawiki? Drupal?) As Prensky put it, “We want students using the best, most up to date nouns (tools) for each verb (skill).”

As Prensky put it, his notion of Future Learning (the new General Education?), is built on another binary. School learning is being “pushed on kids,” while after school learning is being “pulled by kids.” Prensky wants us to reach out and learn how students are engaging in this after school learning. Peer-to-peer, self-directed, even just-in-time learning are all elements of this “pull” learning Prensky advocates.  The counterweight to this approach is the top down approach, the sage on the stage, and the lecture format.  One of Prensky’s slides reported that a high school junior told him, “My teacher thinks she’s awesome because she made a Powerpoint.”

Audience Commentary

Unfortunately, Prensky did not leave time for a structured Q&A following his presentation.  Only audience members who interjected during the talk were able to ask questions.

• These are not really “our” students at CUNY. We have older students, students who want a more traditional education, and students who want the class as a space away from this tech stuff.
• Keyboarding is a skill that is needed for all of these technologies.

A recently published article in Science (April 17, 2009) has me rethinking the notion of “low stakes” writing. The article by Cohen, et al. entitled “Recursive Processes in Self-Affirmation: Intervening to Close the Minority Achievement Gap,” reports on the longitudinal effect of low stakes, structured writing on the academic performance of African-American middle school students.

In an effort to counter negative stereotype effects, researchers administered a series of values writing prompts aimed at helping the subjects articulate and affirm their values. “Beginning early in seventh grade, students reflected on an important personal value, such as relationships with friends and family or musical interests, in a series of structured writing assignments.” One fascinating aspect of the study is that the writing was not directly connected to academic pursuits, or to the development of communication competencies. Most important, it seems, is the payoff!

The intervention appears to have had amazing consequences. “First, early poor performance was less predictive of later performance and psychological state for affirmed African Americans than for nonaffirmed ones, suggesting that the intervention reset the starting point of a recursive cycle. Second, the affirmation not only benefited GPA, but also lifted the angle of the performance trajectory and thus lessened the degree of downward trend in performance characteristic of a recursive cycle. Third, the affirmation’s benefits were most evident among low-achieving African Americans. These are the children most undermined by the standard recursive cycle with its worsening of performance and magnifying of initial differences in performance. Fourth, the affirmation prevented the achievement gap from widening with time. Fifth, treatment boosters were not needed to sustain its impact into Year 2.”

Who would have thought that brief, structured, values writing assignments could have such academic career-altering effects?

My own pedagogy has tended not to explore the ground on which the prompts in this study are built. Needless to say I’m rethinking some of my own practice in light of this work. These seemingly low stakes prompts, assignments with little or now direct connection to students’ grades in a course, are anything but low stakes when one considers their impact on long term academic performance.