http://www.edtechmagazine.com/higher/article/2012/05/deans-list-50-must-read-higher-education-technology-blogs

Thanks EdTech and thanks to the fine folks that write with me here at TTW.

So the assistant professor in communications at Elizabethtown College designed anexperiment for 120 students at the college and has just reported the results. It turns out that professors with personal Twitter streams appear to be more credible than those who stick to business. The study, co-authored with Jamie Bartolino, one of her students, appears in [...]]]> http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/professors-with-personal-tweets-get-high-credibility-marks/30635

So the assistant professor in communications at Elizabethtown College designed anexperiment for 120 students at the college and has just reported the results. It turns out that professors with personal Twitter streams appear to be more credible than those who stick to business. The study, co-authored with Jamie Bartolino, one of her students, appears in the most recent issue of Learning, Media and Technology.

The researchers created three accounts on Twitter for three fictional “professors” named Caitlin Milton, Caitlyn Milton, and Katelyn Milton. One account was filled personal tweets (“Feeling good after an early morning swim at the rec center”), the second with scholarly ones (“Working on a study about how social-networking sites can be used in educational settings.”), and the third with a combination.

To Ms. Johnson’s surprise, when the students were surveyed, they rated the personal professor the highest on measures of competence, trustworthiness, and caring—which adds up to credibility.

This is from last year, but it’s nice to see supporting evidence for one of my beliefs about teaching: bringing even a little bit of yourself can be beneficial to students and the learning environment.

Emerging technologies for communication and creation of content afford the possibility [...]]]> I’m very excited to be leading a faculty development workshop at Dominican University of California  on February 24th. Here’s the draft abstract, based in part on a talk I gave at EDUCAUSE Learning Initiatives in 2010:

Creative Collaboration and Immersive Engagement: The Hyperlinked Campus

Emerging technologies for communication and creation of content afford the possibility of the connected, “always on” educational environment. The Hyperlinked Campus is a model of open communication, transparency, social engagement, guided exploration, and creativity. This session will explore how some tools can extend the classroom beyond physical buildings to engage learners with their peers and with the world. The session will focus on open learning systems for courses, Twitter in the classroom and virtual learning space, and the creation of  personal learning networks. Moving beyond the walled garden and into participatory networks of learning and engagement can benefit both faculty and students.

http://infomational.wordpress.com/2011/12/19/project-curve-part-five-library-on-wheels/

Just a snippet demonstrates Char Booth’s evidence-based, grounded approach to library outreach and technology:

the mobile shift: not exactly news

Now, down to project business. Mobile platforms and services have become one of the most handily bandied-about concepts in libraryland over the last few years, and for very good reason. [...]]]> Please do not miss:

http://infomational.wordpress.com/2011/12/19/project-curve-part-five-library-on-wheels/

Just a snippet demonstrates Char Booth’s evidence-based, grounded approach to library outreach and technology:

the mobile shift: not exactly news

Now, down to project business. Mobile platforms and services have become one of the most handily bandied-about concepts in libraryland over the last few years, and for very good reason. Recent research from ECAR, PIL (pdf), and Pew (among others) documents a mobile shift in personal and academic connectivity, communication, and access among learners. My own research for the Council of Chief Librarians of California Community Colleges in 2011 examined in part the receptivity of participants to mobile library functionality, which resoundingly confirmed mobile trends. Figure 27  shows mobile library interest among smartphone/web-enabled mobile device owners, which represented 56% (N=1,453) of our five-campus survey population (CCL LTES Final Report, p. 36).

In all categories, a majority of respondents indicated they were very or fairly likely to use mobile library content, research, and support options from their device, significantly higher than other technology applications such as location-based services and social media (with the exception of a Facebook and YouTube). See Figure 26 (ibid., p 34).

Thanks to Jen Waller for sending this. This is inspiring! I’d welcome the chance to do some flash mob choreography in my robes.

Here’s a snippet:

KJ: You both work at institutions where you have some kind of formal learning management system. Why did you make the decision [...]]]> Kyle Jones interviewed Kenley Neufeld and me for the new Library technology report from ALA TechSource: “Using WordPress as a Library Content Management System” by Kyle M. L. Jones and Polly-Alida Farrington.

Here’s a snippet:

KJ: You both work at institutions where you have some kind of formal learning management system. Why did you make the decision to not use the resources you had? You could have made your lives extremely easier going with the norm and instead you chose to roll your own. You put a lot of struggles on yourself to do so.

MS: I can’t have my students spend so much time creating and writing inside a tool that they’ll probably never touch once they graduate, unless maybe they work in academic libraries. They should be using a tool or a handful of tools they will be using in their jobs. I want them to come out of the program and say they have used WordPress and took advanced web design and experienced Drupal and used Twitter. That’s much more important than these systems. The feeling that I’m serving the students better by using these systems is good.

KN: For me, it’s been more about trying to build tools that will meet the needs of the types of things I want incorporated. The system we had originally, WebCT, I used for only one semester and was very disappointed. As a result, I started using Moodle the following term and then the college went to Moodle as well (thankfully). I do use Moodle, and it works well for the most part, but I found it a little bit clunky here and there for some things I’m trying to accomplish.

The main reason I’m using WordPress/BuddyPress is because the class I’m teaching has to do with social media. Since the class focus is social media and social networking, it seemed like the obvious solution would be to actually use the tools that I’m teaching about. It was a non-decision. This is what we’re going to use and I’ve been very happy. Now, as I look ahead, and if I were to teach other classes without the heavy social media focus, then I would still be inclined toward using the WordPress/BuddyPress solution. I am comfortable with it and happy with it. But I also need to think about the overall student experience and recognize that the school does support one system, which is Moodle, and rather than have students learn a new system, it may be smarter to stick with Moodle. It would really depend on the class. In the current situation, WordPress is the obvious solution.

Fortunately, learning management systems are trying to incorporate more of the social media tools where you can easily incorporate the video and the audio; the interactivity and visual representations that people seek. I haven’t looked at Blackboard in a couple years, so I’m not that familiar with it, but with Moodle you can incorporate just about anything. There are methods to do it, but you are still building within a framework though it is customizable. It will depend on the support you have locally because most instructors are not going to go the extra step unless they have an easy mechanism in order to do so. On our campus we are working in that direction — to support instructors to add other types of media content, interactively, to allow for a richer learning environment. It is possible.

MS: I taught 25-students last summer using WordPress/BuddyPress doing Internet Fundamentals. What Kenley said about media is incredibly important and this summer I would be out on the hiking trail with the dog and my iPhone. I’d be thinking about what I’d like to tell the students, so I recorded a video that isn’t just a talking head. They see a tree going by, or the lake, or the dog, and they hear my voice saying they are doing really great and here are some things to think about while doing this next exercise. And the feedback I got from the students for a 3-minute video was that they loved it. It helped them feel connected and it helped me feel more connected with them. It became part of what we were doing.

Please take a look at the whole post and don’t miss the new report from authors Kyle M. L. Jones and Polly-Alida Farrington.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/embedded-librarian-on-twitter-served-as-information-concierge-for-class/30000?

At the start of each class session, the professor, Gardner Campbell, asked the 11 students to open their laptops, fire [...]]]> I saw Gardner Campbell and Ellen Filgo present about the Twitter-embedeed librarain at EDUCAUSE Learning Initiatives 2010. Nice to see their model getting press. I’d like to see many more examples of this trend:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/embedded-librarian-on-twitter-served-as-information-concierge-for-class/30000?

At the start of each class session, the professor, Gardner Campbell, asked the 11 students to open their laptops, fire up Twitter, and say hello to their librarian, who was following the discussion from her office. During the hourlong class, the librarian, Ellen Hampton Filgo, would do what she refers to as “library jazz,” looking at the questions and comments posed by students, responding with suggestions of links or books, and anticipating what else might be helpful that students might not have known to ask.

“I could see the sort of germination of an idea, and what they wanted to talk about,” she said, noting that it let her in on the process of students’ research far sooner than usual. “That was cool for me,” she added. “When I work with students at the reference desk, usually they’re already at a certain midpoint of their research.”

When the class was discussing the work of the science-fiction author Clifford D. Simak, for instance, she tweeted a link to his archives at the University of Minnesota.

“One of the students said, ‘Hey, is there anything like that for Rilke?’,” Ms. Filgo said. “He was all excited. I don’t even think he knew of the idea that a library might collect an author’s papers.”

http://ictcenter.blogspot.com/2011/02/community-college-blogging-podcast.html

I’ve know Troy for sometime and was very pleased to watch his research unfold. Here are some details from the post:

On Thursday I had the pleasure of talking with Dr Troy Swanson, an Associate Professor / Teaching and Learning Librarian [...]]]> Via Gordon’s Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) Blog comes this interview with Dr. Troy Swanson:

http://ictcenter.blogspot.com/2011/02/community-college-blogging-podcast.html

I’ve know Troy for sometime and was very pleased to watch his research unfold. Here are some details from the post:

On Thursday I had the pleasure of talking with Dr Troy Swanson, an Associate Professor / Teaching and Learning Librarian at Moraine Valley Community College in Palos Hills, IL. In December Troy completed his PhD in Community College Leadership at Old Dominion University. His dissertation is titled The Administration of Community College Blogs: Considering Control and Adaptability in Loosely Coupled Systems. In the podcast, Troy discusses some of his findings.

Here’s some dissertation background from Troy:

Web 2.0 technologies present an unlimited potential for outreach to the public by college employees. This presents a conundrum for community college administrators that David Weinberger calls “the conundrum of control.” This conundrum is that organizations need to find a way to organize people around technology to ensure that it is used to further the organization’s mission. Yet, in terms of 2.0 technologies, the more controls that are put in place, the less useful the tools become.

There is also a second conundrum around technology that challenges mangers. This is that the more controls that are in place around a technology, the easier it is to communicate and transfer that technology across the organization. But, the more difficult it is for organization members to adapt the technology to meet new needs.

As one of oldest form of 2.0 technology, the management of blogs presents lessons that we can use for other, newer, 2.0 technologies.

I interviewed administrators and blog authors at community colleges across the US to see how colleges were managing their blogs. The focus was on administrative blogs as opposed to course-related or faculty blogs that discussed their research.  The larger purpose of the study was to see how easily the technology could adapt to new needs and whether campuses were restricting the use of blogs. What kinds of guidance were campus leaders giving to bloggers who were representing the college?

Listen to the podcast here: http://gsnyder.libsyn.com/community-college-blogging-a-conversation-with-dr-troy-swanson-30-40-

Listen for a discussion of trust, policies for blogging and social software and more!  Listen for “I can’t get what I want from IT, so I’m doing it on my own!”

Michael Stephens, Gail Matthews-DeNatale, and David Wedaman recently conducted a proof-of-concept research project on perspectives of higher education academic support staff. We’ll present a poster on the topic at the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Annual Meeting in Washington D.C. in mid-February, 2011.  A brief overview and the fifteen emergent key [...]]]> Download the full poster here: ELI_Poster_acad15_v5

Michael Stephens, Gail Matthews-DeNatale, and David Wedaman recently conducted a proof-of-concept research project on perspectives of higher education academic support staff. We’ll present a poster on the topic at the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Annual Meeting in Washington D.C. in mid-February, 2011.  A brief overview and the fifteen emergent key themes are posted here; you can also see a more detailed overview document.

The “Academic 15:” Emerging Roles in 21st-Century Learning Support

I. Overview

We interviewed 24 library and I.T. professionals serving in positions that directly supported teachers, learners, and researchers, to understand their perspectives on curricular change and the ability of library and I.T. organizations to deal with that change. The project is on file with the Dominican University Institutional Review Board as “Perceived Changes in the Context of Teaching, Research, and Scholarship.”

We felt the experiences of academic support staff would provide a valuable insight into evolving curricular change in higher education. We also felt that a qualitative research project collecting and analyzing those experiences would be a beneficial supplement to existing instruments gathering wide-scale perspectives of higher education constituents, such as NSSE, FSSE, LibQual+, MISO, the ECAR Student Survey, and others.

We see this project as evidence that such an undertaking is feasible and valuable, and that it will return information that can help library and I.T. organizations in conceptualizing service provision, reconsidering their structure, and making strategic plans.

Next Steps

In a second phase, planned for Fall 2011, we will recruit sponsorship from library and I.T. professional organizations; hire professional ethnographers to interview and analyze responses; review and strengthen our methodology; and expand our scope to 50 participants.

II. Key Themes Emerging from Our Interviews:

SALIENT TRENDS

1. Fundamental reconsiderations of pedagogy are having a dramatic impact on the curriculum and challenge us to rethink our strategies for supporting learning.

2. Cloud-based and consumer-oriented, third-party services create user expectations we struggle to meet in an era of limited staff budgets and funding.

3. We’re challenged to balance generalist support of basic services with the advanced technology and information needs of increasingly sophisticated faculty.

4. We find it difficult to staff and fund the support of established services while also investing resources in research and development and innovation.

5. The redefinition of the academic library in the digital age is a point of tension for library staff and the academic community.

ORGANIZATIONAL NEEDS

6.  We need to evolve from providing tools for users to the more demanding work of forming communities with users to collectively understand evolving curricular needs.

7.  We need to communicate better within our organizations and between our organizations and our community.

8.  We need to redefine our staff roles to promote people-focused, flexible, creative, entrepreneurial, community-integrated work groups.

9.  As our roles change, creating meaningful opportunities for professional development becomes crucial.

10.  Managing the effects of change on people is perhaps our most salient challenge.

STRATEGIC ACTIONS

11.  We’re rebuilding library and I.T. organizations to thrive in the post-”sole provider” era.

12.  We’re engaging the community and building relationships with other academic support units, attempting to be visible, and to communicate well. We’re increasing collaboration with peer institutions.

13.  We’re turning to a re-working of the traditional library “liaison” role as one way we’ll integrate with the community.

14.  We’re also beginning to advocate for a climate that can encourage and reward risk-taking.

15.  An increasing desire to better understand our users is leading towards incorporating qualitative research in our ways of knowing.  We’re rethinking the evidence we gather for decision-making.

(Originally posted here: http://wedaman.wordpress.com/2011/01/30/the-academic-15/)

Take a look at his posts:

Your community will learn its way forward.

It’s people stuff, [...]]]> David Wedaman at Brandeis has a couple of thoughtful posts up at his blog Theatrical Smoke. I’m very happy to be working with him and Gail Matthews-DeNatale on a poster presentation at next month’s EDUCAUSE Learning Initiatives conference.

Take a look at his posts:

That is, make sure your classrooms are safe learning spaces, OK. But then make your institution be one, too. The art of teaching being sufficiently amazingly complex and wonderful, people doing it might need to grow better at it, that is, be able to continually learn about it. And that if we want them to do that, we need to give them a group, and a safe space. And let them make some agreements. And let their feedback feed back. Etc.

We might sometimes think of the teacher as an established professional incapable of further development, a fixed cog, as we kind of do for grown-ups in general, and we when we do that we might not really go out of our way to give them the very things we would work so hard to give other learners in the very same institution. Though we should. Teachers need a class, too, I suggest. A long-term, on-going, opt-in, safe place for them to continually learn and adjust their teaching. And say naive things like, “Are grades THAT important?” This idea–of a learning community for teachers–is of course self-evident to many. But I suggest perhaps not as self-evident as it could be.

http://wedaman.wordpress.com/2010/12/02/the-workshop-r-i-p/

Library and IT staff pretty much have one tool in the tool box when they set out to help faculty come to grips with a new application or service. The Workshop. I’ve been associated with Library and IT Workshops for faculty for a long while, and I’ve [...]]]> Don’t miss this post by David Wedaman:

http://wedaman.wordpress.com/2010/12/02/the-workshop-r-i-p/

Library and IT staff pretty much have one tool in the tool box when they set out to help faculty come to grips with a new application or service. The Workshop. I’ve been associated with Library and IT Workshops for faculty for a long while, and I’ve noticed them sliding away from relevance. And attendance.

It could be that Workshops never were a very great vehicle for anything, and I’m only now noticing it. If it’s true they never were a very great learning vehicle yet we rolled them out continuously and people trudged into them dutifully year after year, that’s just sad. In any event, I’m pretty sure people are now increasingly less willing to trudge into them, and I’m not sad about it.

What’s wrong with Workshops? Well, a few things come quickly to mind.

1. Content Kills Hope. Workshops are generally framed around content, and not very exciting content at that: a tool, a new Learning Management System, say. A tool often NOT chosen in consultation with the attendees, so from their perspective, an arbitrarily-imposed thing, somebody else’s content. What’s worse than boring content? Somebody else’s boring, imposed content that you don’t want. As a friend and pedagogue famously said, learning’s not about covering (content), it’s about UNCOVERING. (Uncovering the people, really).
2. The Encapsulation Fallacy. The thing Workshops cover is usually one small mechanical slice of life presented as a self-contained whole, whereas faculty (like everyone) are probably more likely struggling to come to grips with a complex and integrated reorganization of their information and learning systems. So if they come, they are probably asking themselves the whole time “how the heck does this help?”
3. The Carpet-bagger Syndrome. Workshop teachers are often presented in a kind of clerk-like role. They’re there to teach the topic, then they generally have to run off to do a variety of other things. Answer the phones, show a faculty member how to create a blog, attend a committee meeting, sit at the Reference Desk, help a student submit an inter-library loan request, what have you. All important, necessary, valuable things, but the point is that you may never see them again. They probably won’t be around when you have to do the thing in your real life. They’re like a traveller from an ancient land where tools are vast trunkless legs of stone in a desert, that is to say, easy to learn in decontextualized ways.
4. Fear of What Should Not Be Feared. The Workshop isn’t really a place where engaged learners and teachers participate actively in the conversation about ideas that I imagine is at the core of a learning community. Ha, you might exclaim. What is it? It’s more like a protection from a conversation about ideas, because ideas take time to think about, particularly to think about together with other people, and the workshop has 40 minutes. It’s as if the Workshop teachers were just cramming the time full of activities like logging into the computers and typing in sample forum entries and imaginary search terms so that there’s no unscheduled portion that might generate an unpredictable conversation with the potential to change our assumptions about life, or anything else interesting.

Click through to read David’s suggestions for alternatives.

“Butting in” is the idea that we in the Library and IT world are in what I call the “Cloutterdammerung,” or the Twilight of our Clout. We have a little [...]]]> I stumbled across an old presentation (December 2009) and I liked it, so I thought I’d share.  It’s called “Butting In” (click here for the PPT).

“Butting in” is the idea that we in the Library and IT world are in what I call the “Cloutterdammerung,” or the Twilight of our Clout. We have a little window of time to use this clout to get ourselves inculcated into the places in our schools where the futures of teaching, learning, and research will be decided (or to help create these places if they do not already exist).

Our advantages: people mostly like us and people are looking for partners. Our disadvantages: people don’t totally understand what we do and don’t see us in the role of leaders of the future of teaching and learning and scholarship. They don’t expect us to show up in the places where this future is forged.  Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, though, and they show up anyway; so should we.

I propose 10 ways we can get ourselves a seat at the big people table.  These are repeated below.  They read like a Political Organizing 101 sort of brochure, and that’s the point: libraries and IT should focus on (re)becoming part of the learning polis.

1. Get into the places where the future of your institution is being figured out.

Find the conversations or host them.  Talk to influential people.  Sit on Committees.  Convene committees.

2. Be unified.

Don’t let one branch of you undermine another branch of you.  Let the grass-roots knowledge from one root feed the other roots.

3. Invest in R&D.

Use your research expertise to understand where teaching, learning, and research are going.  Contribute from a position of knoweldge. Develop and propose new ways to teach and do research (someone is going to).

4. Paint a vision of your institution’s future.  Put yourself in it.

If you frame the picture, make sure you’re in the frame.  Note: being in the picture of the future probably requires you to look different.

5. Don’t use jargon.

Library and IT gobbledygook ain’t gonna cut it.  Frame your position in terms of learning, teaching, scholarship.  Adopt the institutional perspective.

6. Cause projects to be that are symbolic.

Create new, achievable things that can symbolically represent you and the institution in your future roles.  Projects that help answer the questions about where the school is headed.

7. Develop street cred and presence and allies.

Appear in all aspects of student and faculty and staff life.  Be helpful.  Do things on faith.  Help people do things that they would not otherwise be able to.  Help people who are dispossessed.  The relationships will pay off.

8.  Leverage space.

While people still come to us, let them do things in our space they can’t do elsewhere.  Things that tend to answer questions about how we will teach and learn and do research in the future.

9.  Open your books.

Don’t ask people to do your thinking for you.  But let them into your decision-making process.  Share your strategic desires and challenges.  They have desires and challenges, too.  You will likely discover you share the same desires and challenges.

10.  Learn from politics.

Pay some attention to the things that make political campaigns successful.  This isn’t necessarily bad, or disingenuous, or anti-academic.  It’s about having a clear message, making a value proposition, organizing yourselves to work together, being in the right places.

David Wedaman is Director of Research and Instruction Services, Brandeis University, and sits on the board of NERCOMP (the NorthEast Regional Computing Program) and on the advisory board of the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative.

He blogs at http://wedaman.wordpress.com