January 16th, 2012
During graduate school, I participated in an experimental seminar, “Literature+: Cross-Disciplinary Models of Literary Interpretation,” taught by Alan Liu. He asked students to form groups around topics of their choosing and perform analyses using digital tools on their materials. Most students shared similar research interests and organized their projects around a content-based theme. Our group represented four different disciplines and formed around our interest in digital tools, rather than content. Professor Liu created a toybox of links to various textual analysis tools that generated visualizations, translations, data about word counts, etc. Each of us took a tool in which we were to become “expert,” and applied that tool to data we had collected for our research.
In our recently published book chapter, “Interdisciplinary Knowledge Work: Digital Textual Analysis Tools and Their Collaboration Affordances” our motley team discusses how we applied these digital tools to our research goals and collaborative work. The most important lesson our collaborative experience taught us is that working together both pushed us and liberated us to experiment with our data and methods. In fact, much like our visualizations provide a big picture view of the texts we study, the multidisciplinary nature of our process forced us to step back and view our research at a macro-level. Although our collaboration began as a class project, playing together with technologies led each of us to new and significant understandings of our texts.
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September 1st, 2011
This post is not going to promise dramatic learning gains from using a new technology. It’s not one of those stories where at first a teacher was skeptical, but in the end, the classroom was like a sports movie where the technology scored the winning homerun. I feel skeptical when I read those stories. I don’t doubt the success, but I wonder whether the learning gains, increased student interest/participation, or higher levels of reported satisfaction have less to do with the iPad, blog, twitter stream, or virtual environment and more to do with who is in the classroom.
Cathy Davidson recently described an idyllic experience of teaching a course in which she and the students shared in the discovery of new applications of technologies for learning. She describes the process of developing the course, the thrill when the students actually invited and facilitated a guest lecture, and the ways in which the students challenged her to really be collaborative, even in grading.
If we step back for a moment, though, and consider a class with Davidson and those same students without the new technologies, what would the learning experience be like? I imagine it would still be exceptional, because Davidson is an obviously engaged teacher and the students are obviously engaged learners. She employs teaching strategies that were effective before the new technologies she describes. In particular, she encourages students to take ownership of their learning experience and creates a flexible environment to support whatever direction they take. When developing assignments, Davidson incorporates research in motivation, particularly students’ likelihood to put more effort into writing for an authentic audience. She also has deep experience with her topic and an obvious enthusiasm for both the content and the teaching. These factors are consistently linked to positive learning experiences in educational research. Additionally, the students clearly seem motivated to learn. She describes the class list as a diverse collection of disciplines, so the students appear to be choosing the course. They demonstrate active involvement with the assignments and content and even provide substantive feedback for future courses.
Davidson’s approach to her class corresponds with much of the research on good teaching. Now, if we imagine the same syllabus and same access to technologies, but with a different teacher, what happens? The course might still be exceptional, or it might not.
A common theme when addressing technology in education is a focus on the particular technology and the success or failure of its use. In David Risher’s recent article about educational technologies in developing countries, he urges consideration of ‘the triangle that connects students, teachers, and ideas.’ The way in which a teacher incorporates a technology, designs the learning environment, and promotes learning determines the ultimate effectiveness of the technology. Returning to Davidson’s example, the students are described as knowing they can take risks through the support and encouragement she provides. The technologies are secondary to the empowering environment she creates. In other hands, the students may have been focused on their screens, updating their Facebook profiles while the teacher lectured at the front of the room…a forgettable experience.
When describing the participatory culture new technologies afford, equally important is the teacher who brings these tools into the classroom — the tool merely plays a supporting role.
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July 29th, 2011
Last week, the New York Times reported that in 2007, Deutsche Bank entered into an agreement with two German universities, Humboldt University and the Technical University of Berlin, to fund a mathematical laboratory. The problematic parts were the ‘secret’ terms: according to the article, the Deutsche Bank could not only influence the hiring process, but bank employees could serve as adjunct professors. Perhaps the most disturbing aspects of the agreement were that the bank had veto power over the laboratory’s research agenda and, more importantly, “was given the right to review any research produced by members of the Quantitative Products Laboratory 60 days before it was published and could withhold permission for publication for as long as two years.”
The German universities’ decision to accept the funding highlights a global struggle for universities generally. As governments continue to drastically cut budgets of higher education institutions, administrators are forced to make tough decisions that involve seeking external funding and/or making programmatic reductions. For example, the University of California system, after facing nearly a decade of budgetary shortfall was hit this month with additional deep cuts. The university system in California has already made deep reductions and is now asked to cut further. At what point do these decreases in government funding threaten the fabric of the university? Perhaps they already do. So, how do universities maintain their academic integrity and continue to pursue and preserve their research and teaching agendas with continually decreasing resources?
What if the collaboration involving Deutsche Bank becomes a standard model for survival?
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July 11th, 2011
How often have you walked out of a room and barely remembered anything from a lecture or presentation? It feels that often presentations focus on information transfer rather than connection. If much of what is communicated in academic presentations could easily be done asynchronously, academics are regularly missing an opportunity to connect with and engage their audience.
In this presentation to our Summer Doctoral Program, I use Mayer’s (2001) multimedia learning theory to promote more meaningful (and memorable) presentations. I encourage our visiting students to consider the human element of the presenter-audience relationship by thinking about audience need and how to best communicate their message.
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May 18th, 2011
Yesterday, I attended Google’s Big Tent Event in Hertfordshire. As an academic, I’m used to attending conferences at universities or Hiltons, not countryside resorts with helicopter pads. The event was held in a grand tent that could easily hold 500 people. It was well-insulated from weather and noise, carpeted, with an extraordinary sound and projection system, consistent and fast wi-fi, comfortable chairs, and to be honest, even the bathrooms were amazing. As I sat in my chair, discovering electrical plugs conveniently located under each seat, I couldn’t help but compare this temporary structure for Google’s few days of publicity events to public classrooms in their home state of California. I’ve conducted teaching observations in many elementary classrooms where 28 students share two or three computers, often less, because one computer isn’t working and a request to fix it may take days or months because budget cuts have resulted in limited staffing. I’ve lectured in university classrooms that either do not have a projector or the projector is broken and again, the fix will take weeks, months to fix because budget cuts have limited technical support. School-wide wi-fi is an unrealized dream at most schools. Even at the university level, a majority of classrooms in California do not have it. California schools’ permanent structures frequently do not have the insulation from weather or noise that Google’s amazing temporary structure boasted.
Google’s Big Tent Event
I wonder what could be possible if teachers had classrooms that functioned as well as Google’s Big Tent? If teachers had the technical and administrative support that benefited yesterday’s speakers, how could students’ learning experiences be improved?
Do the quality of bathrooms reflect the health of an institution? MP Jeremy Hunt may say yes. In his address to the Big Tent group yesterday, Jeremy Hunt drew connections between the vision demonstrated when developing London’s sewage system to current efforts to improve broadband infrastructure in the UK. The secret is the size of the pipes, apparently, and larger ones will ensure preparation for future data demands. Mr. Hunt used South Korea, who is #1 in OECD’s educational rankings, as an example of the success possible with super-fast broadband. While discussing funding models for the project, including private support, Mr. Hunt did not address what would seem an obvious part of the equation: education funding. UK schools have been hard hit by recent budget cuts, including canceling the Building Schools for the Future Scheme and recent £155m additional cuts in the standards fund. If the education rankings of South Korea are serving as justification for investing in infrastructure for faster broadband, it would seem that simultaneously cutting funding for education serves cross-purposes.
While much public debate surrounds the quality of education, often solely blaming teachers, the quality of educational environments, including support at the technical, facilities, and administrative levels need more attention. Let’s use Google’s Big Tent, rather than makeshift shelters, as a model for classrooms and start directing funding to supporting students and their teachers, rather than forcing them to make due without.
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April 12th, 2011
Eleven years after Brown & Duguid (2000) released their Social Life of Information, we find that even in humanities, a field that typically conjures an image of a lone scholar toiling in dusty archives, the process of research is very much a social endeavor. Last week, in collaboration with the Research Information Network, we released Reinventing Research? Information Practices in the Humanities, a study of 54 humanities scholars across disciplines such as history, English, and philosophy in 25 institutions in 5 countries. Through interviews, focus group discussions, and web history logs, we examined their use of information, dissemination practices, and collaborative activities.
The scholars we interviewed described the tradition of collaboration within their respective disciplines. Unlike the sciences, in which research frequently involves large teams and multi-authored articles, collaboration in the humanities is more nuanced. One of our case studies, The Digital Republic of Letters, traces correspondences during the Enlightenment. These correspondences include letters from Descartes, Van Gogh, and Grotius, among others. The centuries-old collaboration methods examined by this group underlie current practice. Then, letters sent back and forth reported, unpacked, tested, and developed theories. Sound familiar? The description could easily be applied to e-mail, seminars, conference presentations, or hallway discussions. Research then and now begins with the sharing of ideas.
While not overtly collaborative in the scientific practice of the term, humanities scholars engage in research that “is done in conversation.” In addition to the above examples, scholars engage this conversation through their work in archives, when they prepare materials to be digitally accessed, when they report on rare materials, making previously obscure knowledge available to a larger public. They support each other in their work by talking through ideas and texts, presenting preliminary ideas that later become papers or monographs. Primarily, their research practices are source-intensive, but the sense-making process is very much accomplished in community.
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November 11th, 2010
Today I presented to our DPhil seminar about creating and delivering compelling presentations. In our discussion, we particularly focused on audience need, presenter goals, and developing a clear, coherent story.
For more information, I recommend Nancy Duarte’s slide:ology and Garr Reynold’s Presentation Zen.
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October 19th, 2010
My dissertation research will be presented at AOIR’s annual conference this week in Gothenburg, Sweden. Below is the abstract and presentation.
Abstract: In university settings, students are increasingly required to conduct online research to complete course-related assignments, yet often receive little instruction in the skills necessary to proficiently locate, evaluate, and use the information they find. By comparing the processes of 150 graduate and undergraduate students during a 50-minute course-related Internet research and writing task, this study examined the roles of prior knowledge and cognitive processing in digital literacy practice. Framed within an expert-novice comparative design, this research combined qualitative and quantitative measures including questionnaire, behavioral analysis (log file data), and content analysis (search terms, URLs, and essays). Outcomes were measured by demonstration of synthesis, comprehension, and cohesion in students’ resulting essays. Results show that students who bring greater academic experience to a course-related Internet research task are more likely to succeed than those with technical expertise alone. Analysis of students’ cognitive processes show that deliberate practice afforded through years of schooling contributes to digital literacy more significantly than short-term instruction. The findings of this study challenge the assumption that ease of access to information afforded by the Internet equals skill in using information.
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October 11th, 2010
The U.S. Postal Service is sending around a brochure titled “Do you know the warning signs of fraud?” It is brief, but surprisingly helpful. Here are some of their tips:
Warning Signs
- Sounds too good to be true
- Pressures you to act “right away”
- Requires an upfront investment
Play It Safe
- Never click on a link inside an e-mail to visit a website. Type the address into your browser instead.
- It’s easy for a business to look legitimate online. If you have any doubts, verify the company with the Better Business Bureau.
Fraud Facts
- Your bank will never e-mail or call you for your account number.
- Don’t wire money to people you don’t know
- There are no legitimate jobs that involve reshipping items or financial instruments from your home.
- Foreign lotteries are illegal in the U.S. You can’t win no matter what they say.
Get Involved
- Point out “too good to be true” offers to your kids, and teach them to be skeptical.
- Share information about scams with friends and family. Use social networking to keep them safe.
More tips are available at deliveringtrust.com. I’m excited about this effort by the USPS because it represents both an awareness that critical engagement with information is important and it offers concrete tips for evaluating and engaging with potentially fraudulent sources.
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July 20th, 2010
Today, Jeff Bezos announced e-books are outselling hardcovers at Amazon. What does the success of e-books mean for reading? I’ve been talking to people who read their Kindles or iPads on train rides or plane flights — and this is by no means a scientific sample — and most express surprise at how much they enjoy reading on the devices. This surprise is usually accompanied by a demonstration, showing me what they’re reading, how easy it is to turn the pages. Most cite the convenience of carrying multiple books or magazines in a lightweight device as a major benefit. For most of the families I’ve spoken with, the kids still seem to prefer books which, surprises their parents.
As Sellen and Harper report in The Myth of the Paperless Office, printed books offer affordances that digital devices do not. Mainly, with paper, readers can see where they’re at when they’re reading, in particular where they’ve been and how far they have to go until the end. They can hold their place on a page or within a book, spread out texts on a desk, and better find a spot in a text to which they’d like to return.
That said, e-readers offer their own affordances. Readers can, if they wish, carry their entire library with them (assuming the books are available digitally). They can search for a specific term, rather than thumb through an entire book. Plus, they can download a book instantaneously rather than waiting for it to arrive, or traveling somewhere to purchase/borrow it. Mostly, these arguments point to ease of access and convenience of locating specific materials, but what do these benefits have to do with reading? Do people read more because they can more easily access texts? I think the answer may be ‘yes,’ but the depth of their reading and length of attentional focus is another matter.
I wonder what we lose and gain as we transition toward a more digital life.
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