Teaching Thursday: MOOCs and Collaborative Writing

There has been a ton of buzz lately about Udacity. Udacity is a company developed by Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig  two other robicists, David Stavins and Mike Sokolsky. They offer Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) on various topics related to robotics and technology to literarily tens of thousands of students per course.  This company grew out of Thrun’s and another Stanford professor, Peter Novig’s, courses in Artificial Intelligence at Stanford which they opened to the world as MOOCs. Here’s an article in Wired about it and here’s an article in the New York Times.

As I have noted before, I find this ideas amazingly cool. I even proposed a similar program focusing on humanities classes here at the University of North Dakota. My theory was that classes in the humanities – particularly history – already have a strong following among students who find the topics and stories particularly appealing. After all, we all know the well-worn story about how a series of podcasts on Byzantium attracted worldwide attention. A few meetings with our technology folks convinced me that these courses could be opened to the world without undue strain on our technical resources. Finally, I knew there was a real interest and tradition of outreach on our campus that would eventually allow a program like this to expand. Unfortunately, as happens to so many ideas, my proposal never made it through the university administration.

One of the recurring concerns with MOOCs is that universities are loath to give students free credits for completing the courses. Students who commit the time and energy to the course, however, want some kind of recognition for their efforts. Recently, Udacity has begun to offer certificates of achievement for completing their courses.

As I worked on a proposal for a History 101 class to run in the UND’s new Scale-Up classroom (here and here), I began to wonder whether one approach to giving students a sense of accomplishment for a MOOC would be a collaborative writing project. If a History 101 course introduced students to the basics of historical methodology, grounded that in some basic writing skills, and provided a solid structure for collaborative writing, would it be possible for students to produce a custom textbook for the class? The book writing process would focus student efforts over the course of the semester and produce something of enduring value to the students in the course.

There are obvious issues to my plan ranging from potential copyright problems to course design and the technical aspects of shepherding students through the writing process. One consequence of the large size of most successful MOOCs is that the instructor tends to present content and provide far less day-to-day feedback to individual students. A course centered on something as methodologically complex as writing a textbook, would require a course design that encouraged students to collaborate in a critical way and provide one another with the kind of consistent feedback that would usually come from an individual faculty member.  With some trial and error, however, I am pretty convinced that it is possible to overcome this hurdle. After all, sites like Wikipedia have managed to self-police their content and provide a rather remarkable degree of consistency, accuracy, and perspective.

The value in collaborative writing is less in the final product and more in the process. Collaborative writing is a great method to expose students to the diversity of perspectives on the past and to encourage the construction of sound historical arguments. A well-managed MOOC that clearly communicated the core ideas of the historical method could serve as an exciting platform for the collective and collaborative production of knowledge.

New Idea: Grand Forks Community History Project

As readers of this blog know, I’ve gradually been moving into community and local history. It began when I wrote a history of our department for the University’s 125th-a-versary. Then last fall, I became involved in writing the history of the last wood-framed church building in Grand Forks when it was slated for demolition. As a result of this second project, I have been courting the Grand Forks Community Land Trust and seeing if there is the potential for a collaborative project between the Department of History and the Community Land Trust to produce local histories in association with properties that it acquires in the Grand Forks area.

Over the weekend, I put together a brief proposal and sent it over the Grand Forks Community Land Trust people to see if they might be willing to take our relationship a bit further. The initial response has been quite positive, but I still haven’t heard from all the players.

On the University of North Dakota side there is still a good bit of negotiating to do, but I am hopeful that there will be some good will toward this opportunity.

So, here’s the proposal:

Grand Forks Community History Project

Introduction

The Grand Forks Community History Project is a collaboration between the Department of History at the University of North Dakota and the Grand Forks Community Land Trust (CLT). The goal of the collaboration is to produce a series of community histories for neighborhoods with properties redeveloped by the non-profit CLT. The histories will combine professional scholarly rigor with an accessible language and format. Each relatively short work (10,000 – 15,000 words) will form a part of a larger series of histories that aspires to a block-by-block history of Grand Forks and brings to life to the stories, dynamism, and architecture of the community.

The CLT and the Department of History recognize the power of the past to shape the present. The CLT’s work to create strong communities by making affordable housing available in Grand Forks finds common cause with work of local and public historians who strive to tell the story of the entire community.  The Department of History and the CLT will present the books to new residents of CLT homes, circulate them to the associated neighborhoods, provide them at no or low cost to civic institutions, libraries, churches, et c., and sell them at cost through local bookstores. The goal from both the CLT and the Department of History perspective is to use these volumes to strengthen the local community.

The alliance between the CLT and the Department of History will also work to reinforce the ties between the University, the Department of History and the community through partnering with a local organization. The main authors of the volumes will be doctoral level students or exceptional M.A. students under the guidance of Prof. Cynthia Prescott, Prof. William Caraher, and Prof. Bret Weber.  The books will be part of the Department of History’s developing program in Public History and serve as a powerful regional showcase for the best work from our department.

The Program

In the Fall of 2011 the first volume of the series was commissioned by Prof. Caraher and the CLT. The volume, authored by, Chris Price, D.A. student in the Department of History documents the history and architecture of the church on 3rd and Walnut St. in Grand Forks, which is a CLT property and slated for destruction this spring.  This church is among the oldest standing churches in town and the last remaining wood framed church in Grand Forks city limits. In spring of 2012, the CLT will build a single family house on the lot and we will present the volume on the history of the church along with an architectural drawing of the building to the residence of the home, the local community, and state and local archives and libraries. This volume will be the lasting record of the church.

In 2012 we plan to expand this program to include properties acquired by the CLT throughout Grand Forks. For a larger implementation of this program, we will run a seminar for the students on community history and begin to develop the skills and research time needed for producing additional volumes. The resources available at the Elwyn B. Robinson Department of Special Collections will support the writing of these local histories and serve as one of a number of outlets for making our work available for the community.

To manage the overhead of producing a series of books, we were serve as the publisher coordinating peer review, contacting authors, and distributing the books locally. We will produce the books in very small print runs and provide additional copies through a print-on-demand service like Lulu. We will also make the manuscripts available in digital formats as either ebook or pdf. This will be done in collaboration with the Working Group in Digital and New Media.

Funding

The collaboration with the CLT provided necessary start up money for the initial phase of the project. They subsidized the publication of the first volume in collaboration with private donors through the Cyprus Research Fund.

 

The next phase of the project will require additional support. At present, we envision a series of 15 to 20 volumes each written by an advanced graduate student. Each volume would cost approximate $1000 to produce and distribute. Because the volumes will be tied to particular properties, the full funding will not be necessary from the start. Ideally, a collaboration with the CLT will open doors to community development money not typically accessible to history projects.

Next Steps

There are three steps necessary to advance this project:

1. There needs to be a liaison between the CLT and the Department of History who will decide which properties will receive the first round of histories.

2. A representative in the Department of History who will work with a representative the CLT to write grants and consider funding options and priorities.

3. A representative to supervise the production of the next round of volumes.

Obviously, these three positions can be occupied by a single individual, but this will involve a significant amount of time and energy. Initiating a community development project is not native to the academic programs of most historians. The value of this project, however is significant, and it will reinforce the innovative character of the CLT as well as the growing interest in public history in the Department of History. The opportunity for graduate students to get first hand experience shepherding a project from research to publication is invaluable for their professional development. More importantly, projects like this have the opportunity to make our community stronger.

 

Preserving Neighborhoods through Documenting Their History

Over the past month, I’ve been working to coordinate the documentation of one of the oldest churches in town before it is “mitigated“. I’ve been working with the good folks at the Grand Forks Community Land Trust, a doctoral student in our program, and a preservation-minded local architect to get the church documented and prepare a short publication so that people know the history of the building that was lost.

As part of this work, I’ve begun to talk with the president of the board of the Community Land Trust about the potential for formalizing our relationship. Without getting into detail about how the CLT works, their goal is to provide affordable housing and invest in the local community. One of the main ways that they’ll do this is by renovating older homes or building new ones on vacant properties. Since much of the affordable housing and open lots in the city are located in historic neighborhoods (the Near North Side, Riverside, and the Near South Side), there is an opportunity to work with the CLT to document the history and fabric of these communities on a very small scale.

I’ve been imagining a plan where the CLT and, perhaps, the Department of History co-produce studies of the blocks where new or renovated CLT properties are located. Each block study will include a sketch or architectural plan of the block, basic history of the house types, the history of the development of these properties, and the history of the community. Each of these studies would be published and made available to the local community at a nominal cost. The sketch or drawing of the block will serve as a house-warming gift to the first residents of the home. It will also be deposited in the local and state archives as a contribution to the architectural and social history of the community.

While this will certainly cost money, there are numerous groups active in town who are looking for innovative ways to strengthen the sense of community.  By providing both new and existing residents with a carefully documented history of their neighborhood, its architecture, and its residents, we’d seek to contribute to the local sense of place by grounding the present in the past. For the other residents of the neighborhood, the local histories would help to ensure that the spirit of preservation would remain strong in town and help the community to have information in front of them to make informed decisions about the future of their neighborhoods. As the CLT expands, the number of blocks and histories would expand as well establishing a sound foundation for local history of the community.  And, finally, this would provide an excellent opportunity for community engagement for the Department of History and our fledgling public history program.

Fragments of a Brief: A New Media Portal for Archaeologists

Over the past few weeks, I’ve continued to think about how archaeologists use new media to document their sites, processes, and interpretations.  My projects have used blogs, Twitter (and other social media), podcasts, video, photographs, and text to communicate our work to a diverse audience of stakeholders. Almost all of the tools we use are “off the shelf” and required very little development to make them suitable for our needs as archaeologists.

One of the side-effects using off the shelf, remote hosted products – like YouTube or Twitter – is that projects do not have a single place for all of their online content to appear.  While it is easy enough to embed video and podcasts in a blog, the basic format of the blog – with its chronological organization and rather linear set of relationships – make it less than optimal showing parallel streams of media collection. For example, it is difficult to juxtapose a video with a textual description of the same building or feature.  I’ll admit that it is possible to do this, but the linear arrangement of a blog tends to privilege the most recent entry rather than allowing parallel themes to develop in a single space.

I have had the good fortune of chatting with a more tech-savvy colleague of mine about how he might imagine a new media portal for archaeologists that would allow them to display video, social media content, text, images, podcasts, et c. all in a single space.  Taking a cue from many of the newest iPad applications, we discussed a single page design which would aggregate content from a wide range of sources. The page would update automatically as new content appeared in various off-the-shelf sites (YouTube, WordPress, Twitter, et c.).  The page allow the visitor to explore single types of media – say video – as well as across media through the use of tags and date-stamps.  The result would be a one-stop destination for an audience.  For the content creator, this site would be low to no maintenance as it automatically aggregated material pushed to the usual sources through an RSS or similar feed.

One could eventually imagine this kind of site providing an outlet for raw archaeological data as well as a new and social media content. With the right support, sites like these (which would involve, I think, relatively little technical development and relatively little server space) could be made available to projects seeking to a quick way to create an online presence or to aggregate an existing range of content.  For projects with a CRM focus required to provide outreach, this would provide a simple location for a range of content. For more academic projects, an aggregating web site could provide a useful teaching tool for students around the world as well as an opportunity to communicate the experience of archaeological work in near real time.

In some ways, the site could become a poor-man’s Omeka. Instead of focusing on the database and (digital) object creation aspects, the site would emphasize the curation of already existing new and social media (and perhaps some day syndicated online data) content.  At some point, the site could become a space for near-real-time data presentation.

A Proposal for a Low-cost Teaching Fellows Program

Over the past few years I have slowly come to feel more and more alienated from the actual levers of power on my university campus.  In some ways, this is good. It means that I am less distracted by temptations to “change my world” and more inclined to focus on the things that I can control (scholarship, research, teaching, advising).  Any romance associated with service work or innovation here on campus gets dashed on the growing mass of administrative procedures and rules.

On the other hand, I am a meddler by nature and despite my promises to myself to remain detached and aloof from my immediate environment, I find that I can’t fight the urge to “do something”.  As a result, I have helped create a Working Group in Digital and New Media with a lab (by co-authoring this White Paper).  I have served on my share of committees and contributed to the development of our new web presence (in such a way as to remain out of the line of fire and not responsible for any of its shortcomings).

Finally, I find that I can easy burn off any frustrations or surplus ideas and energy by simply proposing things. I have created on this blog an “idea box” where I stuff ideas for programs and projects that I know will never go anywhere (or see here) for so many, complex, administrative and procedural (and practical and ideological reasons) that it would be utterly pointless to push the idea personally beyond the proposal stage.  At the same time, writing the proposal and circulating it here gives me a sense of accomplishing something. I’ll send this proposal along through proper channels over the next few weeks (so feel free to provide me with feedback), but the goal is frankly the proposal itself and articulating and circulating ideas that appeals to me.

So, here’s my newest contribution to my idea box:

View this document on Scribd

Archaeology and Man-camps in Western North Dakota

North Dakota recorded a 4.7% increase in population in the 2010 census. Most of these new residents appeared in the western counties of North Dakota and particularly Williams, Montrail, and McKenzie counties. You can check out the basic statistics here or check out the map below.  Note that for North Dakota “below average” is really quite exceptional.  The two “high growth” counties are Burleigh and Cass where Fargo and Bismarck are located.

The growth in population in the western counties is primarily tied to the North Dakota oil boom and particularly the recent efforts to extract oil from the Brakken and Three Forks oil fields.  For some basic information on these fields check out the Bakken Blog or the wikipedia page.  For a live GIS map, check out the North Dakota Oil and Gas Division, or check out the more basic map below:

The boom in oil production in western North Dakota (and presumably Eastern Montana and southern Saskatchewan) has led to significant problems with housing. The community of Williston and outlying area, for example, has found it impossible to accommodate wide range of people who have come to work in the oil fields or as engineers or other support.  As a result, these areas have experienced a building boom. Note in the map below that North Dakota is one of the few states with a positive number of housing starts in the last year:

This map does not capture the significant number of people living in temporary accommodations.  Across the western counties of the state a whole series of so-called “man camps” have sprung up to serve temporary residents in the area. These camps typically consist of prefabricated trailers purchased or leased by one of the companies involved in prospecting or extracting oil.  They are then grouped in accordance with local regulations.  The most dramatic group of trailers to enter the area came from the support area of the Vancouver Olympics.  The construction of temporary “company towns” has a long tradition in the western United States dating back to the mining and logging camps of the 19th century.  Recent archaeological work on the site of Ludlow Massacre sought to document the mining camp organized, in part, by the Rockefeller owned Colorado Fuel and Mining Company. This work has contributed to the site being designated as a National Historic Monument

In the spirit of this work, the material culture of life in these boom counties has attracted my attention. It is almost impossible in Ancient or Medieval contexts to identify the impact of short-term and rapid settlement change in settlement patterns on the local social, economic, and natural landscape. For example, the work crews who labored to build or repair the Hexamilion wall in the Corinthia have left almost no trace of their living and working conditions. In western North Dakota, however, rapid settlement change is producing a new archaeological landscape even as we speak.  Temporary or sub-standard living conditions, gender imbalance (man camps, are, apparently overwhelmingly male), transient labor, limited engagement with the social or cultural life of the more permanent, local communities, difficult working conditions, and, by all accounts, significant wealth, all should leave a distinct imprint on site formation in the local archaeological record.

I’ve begun to think about collaborating with some colleagues here at the University of North Dakota to document the material and social conditions of the North Dakota man-camps.  Ideally this project would be a combination of voluntary collaboration with the various companies that operate these camps (including Halliburton) and some guerrilla archaeology (inspired, for example, by Adrian Meyer’s recent article in World Archaeology 42 (2010), 455-467 where he used Good Earth images to document changes at Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay).  Working with social workers, environmental policy folks, geographers, public historians, photographers, geologists, and environmental scientist types could produce a holistic approach to documenting rapid, localized, settlement change.

The possibilities for this kind of project are pretty exciting so I’ve created an entry and put it in my idea box.