The Discussion Forum is Dead; Long Live the Discussion Forum
May 08, 2013 | Filed in: Tools
by Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel
There are better forums for discussion than online discussion forums. The discussion forum is a ubiquitous component of every learning management system and online learning platform from Blackboard to Moodle to Coursera. Forums have become, in many ways, synonymous with discussion in the online class, as though one relatively standardized interface can stand in for the many and varied modes of interaction we might have in a physical classroom. The rhetoric of a physical classroom -- its pedagogical topography -- can certainly dictate how we teach within it: where the seats are, which direction they face, whether they’re bolted down, what kind of writing surfaces are on the walls, how many walls have writing surfaces, whether there are windows, doors that lock, etc. The same is true of the virtual classroom: is it password protected, what kind of landing page do we arrive on when we enter the course, how many pages allow interaction, can students easily upload and share content. Each of these predetermined variables allows (and sometimes demands) a certain pedagogy.
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There are better forums for discussion than online discussion forums. The discussion forum is a ubiquitous component of every learning management system and online learning platform from Blackboard to Moodle to Coursera. Forums have become, in many ways, synonymous with discussion in the online class, as though one relatively standardized interface can stand in for the many and varied modes of interaction we might have in a physical classroom. The rhetoric of a physical classroom -- its pedagogical topography -- can certainly dictate how we teach within it: where the seats are, which direction they face, whether they’re bolted down, what kind of writing surfaces are on the walls, how many walls have writing surfaces, whether there are windows, doors that lock, etc. The same is true of the virtual classroom: is it password protected, what kind of landing page do we arrive on when we enter the course, how many pages allow interaction, can students easily upload and share content. Each of these predetermined variables allows (and sometimes demands) a certain pedagogy.
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Why Online Programs Fail, and 5 Things We Can Do About It
April 08, 2013 | Filed in: Online Learning
by Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel
The failure of online education programs is not logistical, nor political, nor economic: it’s cultural, rooted in our perspectives and biases about how learning happens and how the internet works (these things too often seen in opposition). For learning to change drastically -- a trajectory suggested but not yet realized by the rise of MOOCs -- teaching must change drastically. And in order for that to happen, we must conceive of the activity of teaching, as an occupation and preoccupation, in entirely new and unexpected ways. We must unseat ourselves, unnerve ourselves. Online learning is uncomfortable, and so educators must become uncomfortable in their positions as teachers and pedagogues. And the administration of online programs must follow suit.
Read More...
The failure of online education programs is not logistical, nor political, nor economic: it’s cultural, rooted in our perspectives and biases about how learning happens and how the internet works (these things too often seen in opposition). For learning to change drastically -- a trajectory suggested but not yet realized by the rise of MOOCs -- teaching must change drastically. And in order for that to happen, we must conceive of the activity of teaching, as an occupation and preoccupation, in entirely new and unexpected ways. We must unseat ourselves, unnerve ourselves. Online learning is uncomfortable, and so educators must become uncomfortable in their positions as teachers and pedagogues. And the administration of online programs must follow suit.
Read More...A Scholarship of Resistance: Bravery, Contingency, and Higher Education
April 01, 2013 | Filed in: Profession
by Lee Skallerup Bessette and Jesse StommelDigital pedagogy, or any experimental critical pedagogy, is necessarily dangerous, often with real risks for both instructors and students, much of which can be valuable for learning. But when we experiment with our pedagogies, we confront an establishment that can be hostile to anything new -- an establishment that often punishes rather than rewards innovation -- that increasingly enforces the standardization of curriculums and classroom practice. With approximately three-quarters of all classes being taught by contingent faculty, any deviation can trigger a non-renewal, leaving the critical pedagogue on the outside looking in. Read More...
Decoding Digital Pedagogy, pt. 2: (Un)Mapping the Terrain
March 05, 2013 | Filed in: Digital Pedagogy
by Jesse Stommel
Digital pedagogy is not a dancing monkey. It won’t do tricks on command. It won’t come obediently when called. Nobody can show us how to do it or make it happen like magic on our computer screens. There isn’t a 90-minute how-to webinar, and we can’t outsource it. We become experts in digital pedagogy in the same way we become American literature scholars, medievalists, or doctors of sociology. We become digital pedagogues by spending many years devoting our life to researching, practicing, writing about, presenting on, and teaching digital pedagogies. In other words, we live, work, and build networks within the field. But digital pedagogy is less a field and more an active present participle, a way of engaging the world, not a world to itself, a way of approaching the not-at-all-discrete acts of teaching and learning. To become an expert in digital pedagogy, then, we need both experience and openness to each new learning activity, technology, or collaboration. Digital pedagogy is a discipline, but only in the most porous, dynamic, and playful senses of the word.
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Digital pedagogy is not a dancing monkey. It won’t do tricks on command. It won’t come obediently when called. Nobody can show us how to do it or make it happen like magic on our computer screens. There isn’t a 90-minute how-to webinar, and we can’t outsource it. We become experts in digital pedagogy in the same way we become American literature scholars, medievalists, or doctors of sociology. We become digital pedagogues by spending many years devoting our life to researching, practicing, writing about, presenting on, and teaching digital pedagogies. In other words, we live, work, and build networks within the field. But digital pedagogy is less a field and more an active present participle, a way of engaging the world, not a world to itself, a way of approaching the not-at-all-discrete acts of teaching and learning. To become an expert in digital pedagogy, then, we need both experience and openness to each new learning activity, technology, or collaboration. Digital pedagogy is a discipline, but only in the most porous, dynamic, and playful senses of the word.
Read More...A Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age
January 22, 2013 | Filed in: Online Learning
On December 14, 2012, a group of 12 assembled in Palo Alto for a raucous discussion of online education. Hybrid Pedagogy contributors Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel gathered together with folks from a diverse array of disciplines and backgrounds, representing STEM fields, the humanities, schools of education, corporations, non-profits, ivies, community colleges, and small liberal arts colleges. Among us were adjuncts, CEOs, a graduate student, several digital humanists, and two outspoken educational technology journalists. As a group, we’d chaired online programs, designed MOOCs, dropped out of MOOCs, and the term "MOOC" was even coined in one of our living rooms. The goal of the summit was to open a broader conversation about online learning and the future of higher education. This co-authored document, which calls for hacking and open discussion, was the result. Read More...Online Learning: A User’s Guide to Forking Education
January 08, 2013 | Filed in: Online Learning
by Jesse Stommel
At exactly this moment, online education is poised (and threatening) to replicate the conditions, courses, structures, and hierarchical relations of brick-and-mortar industrial-era education. Cathy N. Davidson argued exactly this at her presentation, “Access Demands a Paradigm Shift,” at the 2013 Modern Language Association conference. The mistake being made, I think, is a simple and even understandable one, but damning and destructive nonetheless. Those of us responsible for education (both its formation and care) are hugging too tightly to what we've helped build, its pillars, policies, economies, and institutions. None of these, though, map promisingly into digital space. If we continue to tread our current path, we'll be left with a Frankenstein's monster of what we now know of education. This is the imminent destruction of our educational system of which so many speak: taking an institution inspired by the efficiency of post-industrial machines and redrawing it inside the machines of the digital age. Education rendered into a dull 2-dimensional carbon copy, scanned, faxed, encoded and then made human-readable, an utter lack of intellectual bravery.
Read More...
At exactly this moment, online education is poised (and threatening) to replicate the conditions, courses, structures, and hierarchical relations of brick-and-mortar industrial-era education. Cathy N. Davidson argued exactly this at her presentation, “Access Demands a Paradigm Shift,” at the 2013 Modern Language Association conference. The mistake being made, I think, is a simple and even understandable one, but damning and destructive nonetheless. Those of us responsible for education (both its formation and care) are hugging too tightly to what we've helped build, its pillars, policies, economies, and institutions. None of these, though, map promisingly into digital space. If we continue to tread our current path, we'll be left with a Frankenstein's monster of what we now know of education. This is the imminent destruction of our educational system of which so many speak: taking an institution inspired by the efficiency of post-industrial machines and redrawing it inside the machines of the digital age. Education rendered into a dull 2-dimensional carbon copy, scanned, faxed, encoded and then made human-readable, an utter lack of intellectual bravery.
Read More...Online Learning: a Manifesto
December 03, 2012 | Filed in: Online Learning
by Jesse Stommel
Since I started teaching in 1999, I've frequently encountered an anti-pedagogical bent amongst fellow teachers and faculty, a resistance to thinking critically about our teaching practices and philosophies, especially regarding online learning. What we need is to ignore the hype and misrepresentations (on both sides of the debate) and gather together more people willing to carefully reflect on how, where, and why we learn online. There is no productive place in this conversation for exclusivity or anti-intellectualism. Those of us talking about digital pedagogy and digital humanities need to be engaging thoughtfully in discussions about online learning and open education. Those of us in higher ed. need to be engaging thoughtfully with K-12 teachers and administrators. And it’s especially important that we open our discussions of the future of education to students, who should both participate in and help to build their own learning spaces. Pedagogy needs to be at the center of all these discussions.
Read More...
Since I started teaching in 1999, I've frequently encountered an anti-pedagogical bent amongst fellow teachers and faculty, a resistance to thinking critically about our teaching practices and philosophies, especially regarding online learning. What we need is to ignore the hype and misrepresentations (on both sides of the debate) and gather together more people willing to carefully reflect on how, where, and why we learn online. There is no productive place in this conversation for exclusivity or anti-intellectualism. Those of us talking about digital pedagogy and digital humanities need to be engaging thoughtfully in discussions about online learning and open education. Those of us in higher ed. need to be engaging thoughtfully with K-12 teachers and administrators. And it’s especially important that we open our discussions of the future of education to students, who should both participate in and help to build their own learning spaces. Pedagogy needs to be at the center of all these discussions.
Read More...A MOOC is not a Thing: Emergence, Disruption, and Higher Education
November 19, 2012 | Filed in: Open Education
by Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel
A MOOC is not a thing. A MOOC is a strategy. What we say about MOOCs cannot possibly contain their drama, banality, incessance, and proliferation. The MOOC is a variant beast -- placental, emergent, alienating, enveloping, sometimes thriving, sometimes dead, sometimes reborn. There is also nothing about a MOOC that can be contained. Try as they might, MOOC-makers like Coursera, EdX, and Udacity cannot keep their MOOCs to themselves, because when we join a MOOC, it is not to learn new content, new skills, new knowledge, it is to learn new learning. Entering a MOOC is entering Wonderland -- where modes of learning are turned sideways and on their heads -- and we walk away MOOCified.
Read More...
A MOOC is not a thing. A MOOC is a strategy. What we say about MOOCs cannot possibly contain their drama, banality, incessance, and proliferation. The MOOC is a variant beast -- placental, emergent, alienating, enveloping, sometimes thriving, sometimes dead, sometimes reborn. There is also nothing about a MOOC that can be contained. Try as they might, MOOC-makers like Coursera, EdX, and Udacity cannot keep their MOOCs to themselves, because when we join a MOOC, it is not to learn new content, new skills, new knowledge, it is to learn new learning. Entering a MOOC is entering Wonderland -- where modes of learning are turned sideways and on their heads -- and we walk away MOOCified.
Read More...Udacity and Online Pedagogy: Players, Learners, Objects
August 27, 2012 | Filed in: Online Learning
by Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel
This sentence is a learning object. Wayne Hodgins, the “father of learning objects,” first came up with the idea for them while watching his son play with LEGOs. The basic notion is that we can create units of learning so fundamentally simple and reusable that they can be applied in different ways to different objectives and lessons, no matter the context. Hodgins’s dream was of “a world where all ‘content’ exists at just the right and lowest possible size.” Like a single sentence. Like a single question on an exam. Like a photograph, a moment in a video, a discussion prompt. As online learning has grown, learning objects have become something of the Holy Grail of instructional design... Or the windmills at which it tilts.
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This sentence is a learning object. Wayne Hodgins, the “father of learning objects,” first came up with the idea for them while watching his son play with LEGOs. The basic notion is that we can create units of learning so fundamentally simple and reusable that they can be applied in different ways to different objectives and lessons, no matter the context. Hodgins’s dream was of “a world where all ‘content’ exists at just the right and lowest possible size.” Like a single sentence. Like a single question on an exam. Like a photograph, a moment in a video, a discussion prompt. As online learning has grown, learning objects have become something of the Holy Grail of instructional design... Or the windmills at which it tilts.
Read More...A MOOC by Any Other Name
August 13, 2012 | Filed in: Open Education
by Hundreds in Google Docs
On August 13, as part of a collaborative exercise in Hybrid Pedagogy’s MOOC MOOC, nearly 500 participants worked together in seven separate documents to create essays about MOOCs. They were given specific parameters -- half a day, cite three sources, write exactly 1,000 words, and illustrate with an image. Working in sections of about 50 participants each, each group succeeding in massively co-authoring, and massively peer-reviewing their articles. The article below stood out as one ready to publish, but all the articles were noteworthy. We’ve included a short Storify at the end of the complete piece below, including links to all the Google Docs in which the essays were written.
Read More...
On August 13, as part of a collaborative exercise in Hybrid Pedagogy’s MOOC MOOC, nearly 500 participants worked together in seven separate documents to create essays about MOOCs. They were given specific parameters -- half a day, cite three sources, write exactly 1,000 words, and illustrate with an image. Working in sections of about 50 participants each, each group succeeding in massively co-authoring, and massively peer-reviewing their articles. The article below stood out as one ready to publish, but all the articles were noteworthy. We’ve included a short Storify at the end of the complete piece below, including links to all the Google Docs in which the essays were written.
Read More...The March of the MOOCs: Monstrous Open Online Courses
July 23, 2012 | Filed in: Open Education
by Jesse Stommel
MOOCs are a red herring. The MOOC didn’t appear last week, out of a void, vacuum-packed. The MOOC has been around for years, biding its time. Still, the recent furor about MOOCs, which some have called “hysteria,” opens important questions about higher education, digital pedagogy, and online learning. The MOOCs themselves aren’t what’s really at stake. In spite of the confused murmurs in the media, MOOCs won’t actually chomp everything in their path. And they aren’t an easy solution to higher education’s financial crisis. In fact, a MOOC isn’t anything at all, just a methodological approach, with no inherent value except insofar as it’s used.
Read More...
MOOCs are a red herring. The MOOC didn’t appear last week, out of a void, vacuum-packed. The MOOC has been around for years, biding its time. Still, the recent furor about MOOCs, which some have called “hysteria,” opens important questions about higher education, digital pedagogy, and online learning. The MOOCs themselves aren’t what’s really at stake. In spite of the confused murmurs in the media, MOOCs won’t actually chomp everything in their path. And they aren’t an easy solution to higher education’s financial crisis. In fact, a MOOC isn’t anything at all, just a methodological approach, with no inherent value except insofar as it’s used.
Read More...Digital Humanities Made Me a Better Pedagogue: a Crowdsourced Article
July 10, 2012 | Filed in: Digital Pedagogy
by Leeann Hunter, Pete Rorabaugh, Jesse Stommel, Robin Wharton, & Roger Whitson
Pedagogy is inherently collaborative. Our work as teachers doesn’t (or shouldn’t) happen in a vacuum. In “Hybridity, pt. 3: What Does Hybrid Pedagogy Do?,” Pete and Jesse write, “Teaching is a practice. Good teaching is an engaged, reflective, and generous practice. Pedagogy is not just talking and thinking about teaching. Pedagogy is the place where philosophy and practice meet (aka “praxis”). It’s vibrant and embodied, meditative and productive.” There is an important distinction here between teaching and pedagogy, between work that is productive and work that is productive and also reflective.
Read More...
Pedagogy is inherently collaborative. Our work as teachers doesn’t (or shouldn’t) happen in a vacuum. In “Hybridity, pt. 3: What Does Hybrid Pedagogy Do?,” Pete and Jesse write, “Teaching is a practice. Good teaching is an engaged, reflective, and generous practice. Pedagogy is not just talking and thinking about teaching. Pedagogy is the place where philosophy and practice meet (aka “praxis”). It’s vibrant and embodied, meditative and productive.” There is an important distinction here between teaching and pedagogy, between work that is productive and work that is productive and also reflective.
Read More...Hacking the Screwdriver: Instructure’s Canvas and the Future of the LMS
June 15, 2012 | Filed in: Tools
by Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel
There’s nothing wrong with Blackboard, except in the way that there’s something wrong with all of it. At InstructureCon 2012, we noticed a lot of hate being directed at Blackboard, a bit of indifference about Moodle, and cheer after cheer offered up for Canvas, the learning management system (LMS) created by Instructure. That there was enthusiasm for Canvas at a Canvas-based event wasn’t unexpected; however, it spurred Jesse and I to dive deeper into this LMS to see what it’s really about, and whether it’s as flexible and progressive a tool for education as Instructure says it is.
Read More...
There’s nothing wrong with Blackboard, except in the way that there’s something wrong with all of it. At InstructureCon 2012, we noticed a lot of hate being directed at Blackboard, a bit of indifference about Moodle, and cheer after cheer offered up for Canvas, the learning management system (LMS) created by Instructure. That there was enthusiasm for Canvas at a Canvas-based event wasn’t unexpected; however, it spurred Jesse and I to dive deeper into this LMS to see what it’s really about, and whether it’s as flexible and progressive a tool for education as Instructure says it is.
Read More...Hybridity, pt. 3: What Does Hybrid Pedagogy Do?
June 12, 2012 | Filed in: Critical Pedagogy
by Pete Rorabaugh and Jesse Stommel
Teaching is a practice. Good teaching is an engaged, reflective, and generous practice. Pedagogy is not just talking and thinking about teaching. Pedagogy is the place where philosophy and practice meet (aka “praxis”). It’s vibrant and embodied, meditative and productive. Good pedagogy takes both teaching and learning as its subjects.
Read More...
Teaching is a practice. Good teaching is an engaged, reflective, and generous practice. Pedagogy is not just talking and thinking about teaching. Pedagogy is the place where philosophy and practice meet (aka “praxis”). It’s vibrant and embodied, meditative and productive. Good pedagogy takes both teaching and learning as its subjects.
Read More...Theorizing Google Docs: 10 Tips for Navigating Online Collaboration
May 14, 2012 | Filed in: Tools
by Jesse Stommel
My Hybrid Pedagogy co-editor (Pete Rorabaugh) and I hatched the plan for this journal in a Google Doc, and we’ve since written 29,316 words in that document. Before the end of 2012, we will likely produce the equivalent of a lengthy academic book. We contribute ideas synchronously and asynchronously, writing together at specific times and taking turns in the document on our own. Our collaboration runs so deep that single sentences are usually co-composed, our cursors occasionally blinking in unison within a single word. While I still recognize the texture of my own language and the idiosyncratic turns of my writerly voice, I don’t take ownership of my own writing the way I once did. And it isn’t just that I’m no longer attached to the sentences I write when collaborating; rather, I find myself more and more unattached to (but not detached from) the writing I do no matter the circumstance.
Read More...
My Hybrid Pedagogy co-editor (Pete Rorabaugh) and I hatched the plan for this journal in a Google Doc, and we’ve since written 29,316 words in that document. Before the end of 2012, we will likely produce the equivalent of a lengthy academic book. We contribute ideas synchronously and asynchronously, writing together at specific times and taking turns in the document on our own. Our collaboration runs so deep that single sentences are usually co-composed, our cursors occasionally blinking in unison within a single word. While I still recognize the texture of my own language and the idiosyncratic turns of my writerly voice, I don’t take ownership of my own writing the way I once did. And it isn’t just that I’m no longer attached to the sentences I write when collaborating; rather, I find myself more and more unattached to (but not detached from) the writing I do no matter the circumstance.
Read More...The Four Noble Virtues of Digital Media Citation
April 24, 2012 | Filed in: Literacies
by Pete Rorabaugh and Jesse Stommel
In digital space, everything we do is networked. Real thinking doesn’t (and can’t) happen in a vacuum. Our ideas about pedagogy, teaching practices, and scholarship don’t just burst forth miraculously from our skulls. The digital academic community is driven by citation, generosity, connection, and collaboration. The work we do as hybrid and critical pedagogues, digital humanists, and alternative academic publishers depends on our sharing ideas as part of a much larger project or conversation.
Read More...
In digital space, everything we do is networked. Real thinking doesn’t (and can’t) happen in a vacuum. Our ideas about pedagogy, teaching practices, and scholarship don’t just burst forth miraculously from our skulls. The digital academic community is driven by citation, generosity, connection, and collaboration. The work we do as hybrid and critical pedagogues, digital humanists, and alternative academic publishers depends on our sharing ideas as part of a much larger project or conversation.
Read More...How to Storify. Why to Storify.
April 14, 2012 | Filed in: Tools
by Pete Rorabaugh and Jesse Stommel
Storify describes itself: “Storify lets you curate social networks to build social stories, bringing together media scattered across the Web into a coherent narrative. We are building the story layer above social networks, to amplify the voices that matter and create a new media format that is interactive, dynamic and social.” It’s a beautiful description and yet we’re not sure we buy it. For us, Storify feels more like the layer beneath social networks. The layer where the archiving (not the “amplifying”) happens. Story doesn’t “drive” or “build” thinking. Story organizes and maps thinking. The power of Storify, then, is in its ability to cohere and preserve, to create a blueprint for a much wilder and more disparate conversation happening on the web.
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Storify describes itself: “Storify lets you curate social networks to build social stories, bringing together media scattered across the Web into a coherent narrative. We are building the story layer above social networks, to amplify the voices that matter and create a new media format that is interactive, dynamic and social.” It’s a beautiful description and yet we’re not sure we buy it. For us, Storify feels more like the layer beneath social networks. The layer where the archiving (not the “amplifying”) happens. Story doesn’t “drive” or “build” thinking. Story organizes and maps thinking. The power of Storify, then, is in its ability to cohere and preserve, to create a blueprint for a much wilder and more disparate conversation happening on the web.
Read More...On Pedagogical Manipulation
April 09, 2012 | Filed in: Critical Pedagogy
by Pete Rorabaugh and Jesse Stommel
Encouraging learning is an act of subtle manipulation. When we enter a classroom, we’re stepping onto a stage. This is true no matter how student-centered our classroom is, because our students are also stepping onto a stage (or into an audience). Even in the most open learning environments, we all play roles: the teacher, the student, the devil’s advocate, the reporter, the questioner, the dictator, the grader, the teacher’s pet. It’s in the careful modulation of these roles that we can actively control a learning environment. [Jesse writes this last sentence fully aware that his co-author and much of his audience will balk at the word “control.”] This issue of control is a delicate one, because the work we do in classrooms (as both teachers and students) depends on a very deliberate attention to how we manage the space and how we express ourselves within it. The work we do in classrooms depends on us finding a careful balance between asserting control and ceding it.
Read More...
Encouraging learning is an act of subtle manipulation. When we enter a classroom, we’re stepping onto a stage. This is true no matter how student-centered our classroom is, because our students are also stepping onto a stage (or into an audience). Even in the most open learning environments, we all play roles: the teacher, the student, the devil’s advocate, the reporter, the questioner, the dictator, the grader, the teacher’s pet. It’s in the careful modulation of these roles that we can actively control a learning environment. [Jesse writes this last sentence fully aware that his co-author and much of his audience will balk at the word “control.”] This issue of control is a delicate one, because the work we do in classrooms (as both teachers and students) depends on a very deliberate attention to how we manage the space and how we express ourselves within it. The work we do in classrooms depends on us finding a careful balance between asserting control and ceding it.
Read More...Crowdsourcing a Curriculum, pt. 3: Degree Requirements
March 13, 2012 | Filed in: Digital Pedagogy
by Jesse Stommel
Now, I’d like to turn this crowdsourcing project toward the degree requirements for the major. The intention for this program is to have its content (literary studies) and its medium (the internet) be thoughtfully connected. This is not just a simple English degree delivered online. In addition to more traditional study of literature, we will also consider the evolution of our various technologies of text, thinking critically about what happens to literary texts when they are made digital and when we engage them via digital interfaces.
Read More...
Now, I’d like to turn this crowdsourcing project toward the degree requirements for the major. The intention for this program is to have its content (literary studies) and its medium (the internet) be thoughtfully connected. This is not just a simple English degree delivered online. In addition to more traditional study of literature, we will also consider the evolution of our various technologies of text, thinking critically about what happens to literary texts when they are made digital and when we engage them via digital interfaces.
Read More...Hybridity, pt. 2: What is Hybrid Pedagogy?
March 09, 2012 | Filed in: Critical Pedagogy
by Jesse Stommel
My hypothesis is that all learning is necessarily hybrid. In classroom-based pedagogy, it is important to engage the digital selves of our students. And, in online pedagogy, it is equally important to engage their physical selves. With digital pedagogy and online education, our challenge is not to merely replace (or offer substitutes for) face-to-face instruction, but to find new and innovative ways to engage students in the practice of learning.
Read More...
My hypothesis is that all learning is necessarily hybrid. In classroom-based pedagogy, it is important to engage the digital selves of our students. And, in online pedagogy, it is equally important to engage their physical selves. With digital pedagogy and online education, our challenge is not to merely replace (or offer substitutes for) face-to-face instruction, but to find new and innovative ways to engage students in the practice of learning.
Read More...Crowdsourcing a Curriculum, pt. 2: Design Principles
February 23, 2012 | Filed in: Digital Pedagogy
by Jesse Stommel
I’ve been thinking about my audience for this series of posts. Initially, I had thought to bring digital humanities, literary studies, and educational technology experts into conversation, allowing my ideas for the program to be considered and influenced by a much larger network. I’m realizing, though, that there’s another group of experts from whom I particularly want feedback and suggestions: students. Ideally, this would include input from prospective students for the program, but since the program is only just barely beginning to germinate, what I’d like to do here is ask both students and teachers in existing programs to think about how literary studies is being transformed by digital technologies and about how online learning can be re-imagined through the use of new (and increasingly social) media.
Read More...
I’ve been thinking about my audience for this series of posts. Initially, I had thought to bring digital humanities, literary studies, and educational technology experts into conversation, allowing my ideas for the program to be considered and influenced by a much larger network. I’m realizing, though, that there’s another group of experts from whom I particularly want feedback and suggestions: students. Ideally, this would include input from prospective students for the program, but since the program is only just barely beginning to germinate, what I’d like to do here is ask both students and teachers in existing programs to think about how literary studies is being transformed by digital technologies and about how online learning can be re-imagined through the use of new (and increasingly social) media.
Read More...Crowdsourcing a Curriculum, pt. 1: Program Name
February 20, 2012 | Filed in: Digital Pedagogy
by Jesse Stommel
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be working to get feedback on the program I’m directing and helping to develop at Marylhurst University in Portland, OR. Marylhurst is a small liberal arts university focused on non-traditional students and adult learners. I teach (both in the classroom and online) for the English Literature & Writing department, which currently has concentrations in Literature, Creative Writing, and Text:Image. The new online degree program, which opens January 2013, integrates literary studies and the digital humanities with a focus on service and experiential learning. My goal in crowdsourcing the curriculum for this program is not only to get feedback on its design but to open a larger discussion about what happens (or should happen) to English programs as digital pedagogy continues to evolve.
Read More...
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be working to get feedback on the program I’m directing and helping to develop at Marylhurst University in Portland, OR. Marylhurst is a small liberal arts university focused on non-traditional students and adult learners. I teach (both in the classroom and online) for the English Literature & Writing department, which currently has concentrations in Literature, Creative Writing, and Text:Image. The new online degree program, which opens January 2013, integrates literary studies and the digital humanities with a focus on service and experiential learning. My goal in crowdsourcing the curriculum for this program is not only to get feedback on its design but to open a larger discussion about what happens (or should happen) to English programs as digital pedagogy continues to evolve.
Read More...
Experiments in Mass Collaboration
February 15, 2012 | Filed in: Critical Pedagogy
by Pete Rorabaugh and Jesse Stommel
We see the banking model of education in classrooms where desks are arranged in tidy rows and in every labyrinthine online class portal. Mass collaboration disrupts organizational structures imposed from the outside and encourages students to build new channels of communication and new habits of analysis. Mass collaboration pushes students out of the classroom or online class portal and into the world, where their work has more immediate relevance and a much larger audience. Finally, mass collaboration redraws the role of the instructor, shifting power dynamics and forcing students to take ownership of their own learning.
Read More...
We see the banking model of education in classrooms where desks are arranged in tidy rows and in every labyrinthine online class portal. Mass collaboration disrupts organizational structures imposed from the outside and encourages students to build new channels of communication and new habits of analysis. Mass collaboration pushes students out of the classroom or online class portal and into the world, where their work has more immediate relevance and a much larger audience. Finally, mass collaboration redraws the role of the instructor, shifting power dynamics and forcing students to take ownership of their own learning.
Read More...In Search of the "Peer" in Peer Review
January 23, 2012 | Filed in: Profession
by Pete Rorabaugh and Jesse Stommel
The word “peer” suggests a person of similar age, education, ability, etc. The word also means “to look closely” (to peer inside something), suggesting that peers are those people close enough to us (in whatever way) that they directly observe and have a vested interest in what we do, think, or say. In an academic sense, who are our peers? Are they the small set of individuals who have similar expertise? Are they our localized, departmental colleagues? Our students? Here’s a pedagogical litmus test: have you ever brought an in-progress paper into class for your students to observe, discuss, critique? If no, then why not?
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The word “peer” suggests a person of similar age, education, ability, etc. The word also means “to look closely” (to peer inside something), suggesting that peers are those people close enough to us (in whatever way) that they directly observe and have a vested interest in what we do, think, or say. In an academic sense, who are our peers? Are they the small set of individuals who have similar expertise? Are they our localized, departmental colleagues? Our students? Here’s a pedagogical litmus test: have you ever brought an in-progress paper into class for your students to observe, discuss, critique? If no, then why not?
Read More...Technological Panic
January 05, 2012 | Filed in: Tools
by Jesse Stommel
The computer and the LMS for an online or hybrid class are merely a medium. Still, so many instructors and students in technologically-enhanced classes spend the majority of their time grappling (and coming to terms) not with the ideas of the class but with the delivery device. We struggle to log in, to format our work correctly, to find information in an endless parade of contextual menus, and to bring some semblance of ourselves into the interactions we have in forums and chat tools.
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The computer and the LMS for an online or hybrid class are merely a medium. Still, so many instructors and students in technologically-enhanced classes spend the majority of their time grappling (and coming to terms) not with the ideas of the class but with the delivery device. We struggle to log in, to format our work correctly, to find information in an endless parade of contextual menus, and to bring some semblance of ourselves into the interactions we have in forums and chat tools.
Read More...The Twitter Essay
January 05, 2012 | Filed in: Tools
by Jesse Stommel
Consider the tangible violence technology has wrought upon grammar. We rely on automated grammar and spell-check tools in word-processing software (so much that they’ve become a crutch). E-mail shorthand fails to live up to the grammatical standards of typed or handwritten letters. And many believe our language is being perverted by the shortcuts (and concision nearly to the point of indifference) we’ve become accustomed to writing and reading in text messages and IMs.
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Consider the tangible violence technology has wrought upon grammar. We rely on automated grammar and spell-check tools in word-processing software (so much that they’ve become a crutch). E-mail shorthand fails to live up to the grammatical standards of typed or handwritten letters. And many believe our language is being perverted by the shortcuts (and concision nearly to the point of indifference) we’ve become accustomed to writing and reading in text messages and IMs.
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The Tangle of Assessment
January 05, 2012 | Filed in: Critical Pedagogy
by Pete Rorabaugh and Jesse Stommel
Grading and assessment are curious beasts, activities many instructors love to hate but ones that nonetheless undergird the institutions where we work. Peter Elbow begins his essay “Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgment” with the mission to “attempt to sort out different acts we call assessment” (187). It’s interesting to note his specific phrasing here. He doesn’t say that he intends to “sort out assessment” but rather that he intends to “sort out different acts we call assessment.” From the first sentence of his essay, Elbow makes clear that assessment is a complicated and potentially fractious subject, one that he treads lightly. He continues, “I have been working on this tangle not just because it is interesting and important in itself but because assessment tends so much to drive and control teaching. Much of what we do in the classroom is determined by the assessment structures we work under” (187). The choices we make about assessment, often at the outset of a course (in the syllabus), guide much of what happens within the course. Assessment is a “tangle” for Elbow, both because it is difficult to navigate with any true objectivity and because ideas about assessment influence so much of what happens at institutions and in classrooms.
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Grading and assessment are curious beasts, activities many instructors love to hate but ones that nonetheless undergird the institutions where we work. Peter Elbow begins his essay “Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgment” with the mission to “attempt to sort out different acts we call assessment” (187). It’s interesting to note his specific phrasing here. He doesn’t say that he intends to “sort out assessment” but rather that he intends to “sort out different acts we call assessment.” From the first sentence of his essay, Elbow makes clear that assessment is a complicated and potentially fractious subject, one that he treads lightly. He continues, “I have been working on this tangle not just because it is interesting and important in itself but because assessment tends so much to drive and control teaching. Much of what we do in the classroom is determined by the assessment structures we work under” (187). The choices we make about assessment, often at the outset of a course (in the syllabus), guide much of what happens within the course. Assessment is a “tangle” for Elbow, both because it is difficult to navigate with any true objectivity and because ideas about assessment influence so much of what happens at institutions and in classrooms.
Read More...The Student 2.0
January 02, 2012 | Filed in: Critical Pedagogy
by Jesse Stommel
Students are evolving. The student 2.0 is an altogether different animal from the student 1.0. And our classrooms are ecosystems, an environment all their own, where we each must decide how to engage this new species of student. We teeter at a slowly disintegrating threshold, one foot in a physical world and the other in a virtual one. Our students are no longer just bodies in desks; they are no longer vessels. They have become compilations, amalgams, a concatenation of web sites. They are the people in front of us, but also their avatars in World of Warcraft and the profiles they create on FaceBook. They speak with mouths, but also with fingers tapping briskly at the keys of their smart phones. When they want to “reach out and touch someone,” they use Skype and Twitter. They have become more than just ears and eyes and brains to feed. Now, they feed us, and themselves, and each other, with an endless parade of texted and tweeted characters. Shouldn’t we, as teachers 2.0, work with not against the flow of these seemingly errant 1s and 0s? Shouldn’t student-centered learning address itself, as fully as possible, to this new breed of student? Shouldn’t we understand our students as more than just inert flesh?
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Students are evolving. The student 2.0 is an altogether different animal from the student 1.0. And our classrooms are ecosystems, an environment all their own, where we each must decide how to engage this new species of student. We teeter at a slowly disintegrating threshold, one foot in a physical world and the other in a virtual one. Our students are no longer just bodies in desks; they are no longer vessels. They have become compilations, amalgams, a concatenation of web sites. They are the people in front of us, but also their avatars in World of Warcraft and the profiles they create on FaceBook. They speak with mouths, but also with fingers tapping briskly at the keys of their smart phones. When they want to “reach out and touch someone,” they use Skype and Twitter. They have become more than just ears and eyes and brains to feed. Now, they feed us, and themselves, and each other, with an endless parade of texted and tweeted characters. Shouldn’t we, as teachers 2.0, work with not against the flow of these seemingly errant 1s and 0s? Shouldn’t student-centered learning address itself, as fully as possible, to this new breed of student? Shouldn’t we understand our students as more than just inert flesh?
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