#digped Storify: The State of Higher Education and Its Future
December 10, 2012 | Filed in: #digped
by Jesse Stommel
The announcement for this #digped suggested that “there is a deeper discussion underlying our anxieties (and excitement) about MOOCs -- a discussion about the efficacy of open education, online learning, and digital pedagogies. A discussion about the future of education.” On December 7, we focused our #digped discussion on issues large and small, loud and quiet, the questions we keep circling around and also the harder ones, the ones that unnerve us. Even before the discussion began, an important issue was brought up by Lee Skallerup Bessette in the comments on the original #digped announcement: "I don't think we can talk about what higher educations 'values' until we face how they treat the people who 'deliver' their 'product.'" The Storify of this discussion includes frank observations about the state of higher education and practical tips for how we can work to help it more ethically and productively evolve.
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The announcement for this #digped suggested that “there is a deeper discussion underlying our anxieties (and excitement) about MOOCs -- a discussion about the efficacy of open education, online learning, and digital pedagogies. A discussion about the future of education.” On December 7, we focused our #digped discussion on issues large and small, loud and quiet, the questions we keep circling around and also the harder ones, the ones that unnerve us. Even before the discussion began, an important issue was brought up by Lee Skallerup Bessette in the comments on the original #digped announcement: "I don't think we can talk about what higher educations 'values' until we face how they treat the people who 'deliver' their 'product.'" The Storify of this discussion includes frank observations about the state of higher education and practical tips for how we can work to help it more ethically and productively evolve.
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Learning as Performance: MOOC Pedagogy and On-ground Classes
August 24, 2012 | Filed in: Open Education
by Chris Friend
I once heard an interesting story about my former collegiate marching-band instructor, Dr. Richard Greenwood. According to legend, Greenwood once held up the score to an extensive piece the band was working on, pointed to it, and said, to the surprise of those around him holding instruments, "This is not the music we are playing. This is not the song we are performing. This is only a map. It's a guide to get us where the composer wants us to go." He then went on to discuss the merits of interpretation, flexibility, and improvisation within a framework.
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I once heard an interesting story about my former collegiate marching-band instructor, Dr. Richard Greenwood. According to legend, Greenwood once held up the score to an extensive piece the band was working on, pointed to it, and said, to the surprise of those around him holding instruments, "This is not the music we are playing. This is not the song we are performing. This is only a map. It's a guide to get us where the composer wants us to go." He then went on to discuss the merits of interpretation, flexibility, and improvisation within a framework.
Read More...#digped Storify: Making Collaboration Visible
July 25, 2012 | Filed in: #digped
by Robin Wharton
This past Friday, July 20th, the Hybrid Pedagogy #digped discussion on Twitter extended the conversation we began with our crowdsourced article Digital Humanities Made Me a Better Pedagogue. In that article, we explain why we're organizing a THATCamp Hybrid Pedagogy in order to "tap the disruptive, deformed, insubordinate energy" we see infusing the collaborative praxis of digital pedagogy and the digital humanities. The #digped discussion "Collaborative Teaching, Shared Pedagogies" was motivated by our desire to include the wider Hybrid Pedagogy collective in a conversation about some of the scholarly work informing that piece.
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This past Friday, July 20th, the Hybrid Pedagogy #digped discussion on Twitter extended the conversation we began with our crowdsourced article Digital Humanities Made Me a Better Pedagogue. In that article, we explain why we're organizing a THATCamp Hybrid Pedagogy in order to "tap the disruptive, deformed, insubordinate energy" we see infusing the collaborative praxis of digital pedagogy and the digital humanities. The #digped discussion "Collaborative Teaching, Shared Pedagogies" was motivated by our desire to include the wider Hybrid Pedagogy collective in a conversation about some of the scholarly work informing that piece.
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.
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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...Participant Pedagogy: a #digped Discussion
May 20, 2012 | Filed in: #digped
by Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel
Hybrid Pedagogy will host a Twitter discussion group about participant pedagogy this Friday, May 25 from 1:00pm - 2:00pm EST (10:00am-11:00am PST) under the hashtag #digped. While the conversation will be, in part, inspired by our previous #digped discussion about Howard Rheingold’s Net Smart, you don’t need to read the book in order to join the conversation.
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Hybrid Pedagogy will host a Twitter discussion group about participant pedagogy this Friday, May 25 from 1:00pm - 2:00pm EST (10:00am-11:00am PST) under the hashtag #digped. While the conversation will be, in part, inspired by our previous #digped discussion about Howard Rheingold’s Net Smart, you don’t need to read the book in order to join the conversation.
Read More...Flipping Faculty Development: Teacher Training and Open Education
May 10, 2012 | Filed in: Profession
by Pete Rorabaugh
A thread in the Chronicle of Higher Ed tagged “Adjunct Life”, MLA President Michael Berube’s recent open letter, and New Faculty Majority’s National Summit illuminate higher ed's slide into contingency. It should be worrisome to all of us that the price of a degree has gone up even as institutions are relying on more and more contingent (and thus cheaper) faculty. According to the AAUP, more than 50% of higher ed faculty in the US are part-time and 68% are non-tenure-track. But whether permanent or contingent, how is the higher ed instructor pool trained to do its job? Universities are inconsistent in their answers to this question. While a few institutions do pedagogically prepare their teachers to varying extents, others offer little in the way of new faculty training, privileging content-area expertise over expertise in the practice of teaching. Yesterday I had a Twitter conversation with some peers about the preparation and development they remember from their first days as an instructor. One of my colleagues, Diane Jakacki replied, "Zero. [I was] Lucky enough to TA for someone who taught by example and trained me."
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A thread in the Chronicle of Higher Ed tagged “Adjunct Life”, MLA President Michael Berube’s recent open letter, and New Faculty Majority’s National Summit illuminate higher ed's slide into contingency. It should be worrisome to all of us that the price of a degree has gone up even as institutions are relying on more and more contingent (and thus cheaper) faculty. According to the AAUP, more than 50% of higher ed faculty in the US are part-time and 68% are non-tenure-track. But whether permanent or contingent, how is the higher ed instructor pool trained to do its job? Universities are inconsistent in their answers to this question. While a few institutions do pedagogically prepare their teachers to varying extents, others offer little in the way of new faculty training, privileging content-area expertise over expertise in the practice of teaching. Yesterday I had a Twitter conversation with some peers about the preparation and development they remember from their first days as an instructor. One of my colleagues, Diane Jakacki replied, "Zero. [I was] Lucky enough to TA for someone who taught by example and trained me."
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.
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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...Hybridity, pt. 1: Virtuality and Empiricism
February 07, 2012 | Filed in: Critical Pedagogy
by Pete Rorabaugh
A critical mind usually avoids binaries. We know that more than two political parties can exist, that gender is constructed, and that emphatic absolutes kill conversation. We live in a world of negotiated hybridity on a variety of levels. Everything about the word calls up a vision of science and the future: hybrid cars, hybrid humans, hybrid flower seeds. Rarely do we consider the implications of a term that floats around us and permeates our daily experiences. Hybridity, as this journal proclaims as one of its foundational principles. What does this kind of hybridity imply?
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A critical mind usually avoids binaries. We know that more than two political parties can exist, that gender is constructed, and that emphatic absolutes kill conversation. We live in a world of negotiated hybridity on a variety of levels. Everything about the word calls up a vision of science and the future: hybrid cars, hybrid humans, hybrid flower seeds. Rarely do we consider the implications of a term that floats around us and permeates our daily experiences. Hybridity, as this journal proclaims as one of its foundational principles. What does this kind of hybridity imply?
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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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Digital Culture and Shifting Epistemology
January 05, 2012 | Filed in: Critical Pedagogy
by Pete Rorabaugh
In his article "A Seismic Shift in Epistemology" (2008), Chris Dede draws a distinction between classical perceptions of knowledge and the approach to knowledge underpinning Web 2.0 activity. Our culture is shifting, Dede argues, not just from valuing the opinions of experts to the participatory culture of YouTube or Facebook, but from understanding knowledge as fixed and linear to a concentration on how knowledge is socially constructed. Dede writes that "the contrasts between Classical knowledge and Web 2.0 knowledge are continua rather than dichotomies . . . Still, an emerging shift to new types and ways of 'knowing' is apparent and has important implications for learning and education."
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In his article "A Seismic Shift in Epistemology" (2008), Chris Dede draws a distinction between classical perceptions of knowledge and the approach to knowledge underpinning Web 2.0 activity. Our culture is shifting, Dede argues, not just from valuing the opinions of experts to the participatory culture of YouTube or Facebook, but from understanding knowledge as fixed and linear to a concentration on how knowledge is socially constructed. Dede writes that "the contrasts between Classical knowledge and Web 2.0 knowledge are continua rather than dichotomies . . . Still, an emerging shift to new types and ways of 'knowing' is apparent and has important implications for learning and education."
Read More...