Some Photos from the Working Group in Digital and New Media Showcase

When I started this blog several years ago, I regularly included more news-like updates about my day to day academic life (whether here in North Dakotaland or in Athens, Greece). At some point, the blog drifted more toward being a research journal. In the end, I don’t have a tremens personal or ideological commitment to one form of blogging or the others.

So, I’ll offer some photographs from last Tuesday’s Working Group in Digital and New Media event at the Firehall Theatre in Grand Forks.  The presentations were lively and the food was amazing (and generously provided by the Cyprus Research Fund).

The photos are by Ryan Stander.

The assembled masses

Prof. Crystal Alberts served as an able M.C.

One of Prof. Paul Worley’s characters from the Yucatan where he works with Prof. Joel Jonientz to produce Maya language animated films.

Prof. Travis Dessel, the newest Working Group member, discusses the use of volunteer computing to document Wildlife@home.

Graduate Student Jim Champion presents his marvelous melting sculptures

Prof. Tim Pasch and Prof. Mike Wittgraf make digital music together

The event saw over 50 people come out to see the fantastic digital and new media works of my colleagues, and we considered that a great crowd for the first effort to showcase the efforts of the Working Group in front of the wider university and local community.

 

Steve Jobs

The amazing thing about Steve Jobs’ passing is how many people seem to care. In my memory, there are only a handful of billionaire corporate leaders who could generate this response.

The main reason, I suppose, is that his company’s products created an explicit link between his genius and our bodies.  In the past, creative types have infused rather impersonal tools with their spirit, e.g. Hemmingway’s typewriters or Churchill’s fountain pen.  Apple inverted that process, by selling a totemic product. The Macintosh computer was an extension of its creator, Steve Jobs. In other words, people who purchased a Mac (above almost any Apple product) sought to capture a tiny bit of Jobs’ creativity. As a vessel for Jobs’ demanding and innovative approach to technology, the Macintosh became the totem of  the self-styled “creative class”.

Three Things about Blackboard

I am not a “Blackboard Hater”, but I have to admit to being baffled by Blackboard, our Learning Management System, a good bit of the time. On the one hand, the University of North Dakota has (apparently) a fair Blackboard complete suite of Blackboard services, applications, and plug-ins, and Blackboard does seem able to do an almost bewildering number of teaching related things.

On the other hand, Blackboard seems to lack some of the simple functionality that most of us have come to expect from software these days. I’ll be the first to admit that well-designed software has made me soft. I’ve come to expect almost infinite flexibility from even the least expense web-based application and I have become increasingly reluctant to adjust my workflow to accommodate limitations imposed by the tools that I rely on to accomplish my daily tasks.  And, since I teach online, managing my History 101: Western Civilization class, which has seemingly innumerable moving parts and sometimes close to 100 students is a daily responsibility. So, any friction that I encounter in setting up and running this class can easily multiply.

Over the past week, I have encountered three little issues with Blackboard that have produced a significant amount of friction in my set up and management of my class.

1. Copying Group Discussions. Each semester I break my History 101 class into a groups of 30-40 students to make it easier for them to participate in an online discussion board. Mostly my discussion board questions or prompts ask them to write short (200-300 word) essays on a particular historical questions and draw together the primary source readings, my lectures, and secondary source readings.  While most content copies easily from one semester to the next, these discussion board prompts do not. As as a result, I have to re-enter the discussion board prompts for each of the 15 discussion forums for two or three groups each semester.

This is time consuming and, more than that, annoying. I am sure there is a technical reason why this doesn’t work, but from the end user perspective, this doesn’t seem a particular unusual or strange request.

2. Copying Quiz Instruction. A similar area of friction involves managing my 15 weekly quizzes. Each quiz has the same format and the same instructions, but there is no way to batch change the instructions on the quizzes. So when I changed my quiz format slightly this fall, I had to change the settings on 15 separate quizzes. Not only is there a good chance that I messed this up in some way (e.g. forgot to change the settings or instructions on a quiz), but this also took me the better part of an hour to accomplish. While an hour is not a huge amount of time in the greater scheme of a semester, it is still amazing to me that this simple functionality is absent in Blackboard. I have to think that batch editing quizzes would qualify as typical faculty behavior.

3. Preventing Students from Creating Discussion Board Forums. I discovered this semester that students could create their own Forums in group discussion boards.  From what I can tell, a Forum in Blackboard-speak, is group of threads centered around a particular topic. Oddly enough, it is possible to prevent students from creating new discussion threads within those Forums, but not to prevent them from creating the Forums themselves. This is baffling. Maybe the strange character of the Forum (is it a thread or what?) allowed it be overlooked by Blackboard developers? Because students can create Forums on their own, the first couple weeks of the semester involves me asking them not to do that and, instead, focusing their energies of responding to the prompts that I have provided rather than creating unique and typically unrelated threads.

While none of these issues are major, they consistently add friction to my experience with Blackboard and online teaching. None of these issues seem particularly idiosyncratic to my style of teaching or evaluation and none of them – from the end user experience – seem particularly tied to security, design, or software logic issues.  In short, there is no reason why these things should not be fixed and work, except that the software has design problems.

Some Tech Stuff

I’m going to do my best Mark Grabbe or Sam Fee imitation and offer a few observations about technological changes over the past few weeks.  These are essentially random, but maybe someone will find something of interest amidst my tech ramblings:

• I’ve upgraded to the new Lion operating system on my MacBook Pro. For those of you who fear change in all its forms, fear not!! While I do notice changes, they are not so overwhelming to have disrupted my basic, daily workflow. More importantly, so far, the upgrade was pretty painless.  The revised spaces might well become useful as I tend to have too many applications open at the same time. I am sure that I’ll eventually find uses for things like the Launchpad (or I will stop using it).  The only real disruption so far is that installing Lion seems to have made my spellcheck in MarsEdit 3.x to stop working in the Rich Text Mode. So I have to check my spelling in the HTML editor mode.
• I get that the new operating system is also designed to work seamlessly with their new cloud services, and I am approaching that with an open mind, but the truth is that my use of the cloud is spread pretty widely right now (Dropbox, Amazon, Mediafire, Google, et c.), and I can’t really imagine moving to a single cloud service – even a dreamtastic one integrated fully with my Mac’s OS. One the major issues here, of course, that I am not a 100% Mac person . I still depend on my PC for certain specialized applications and some of my more mundane day-to-day tasks.
• One little issue with OSX Lion.  I am a bit disappointed that Front Row went away. I use a Mac Mini to power my home entertainment system. Primarily I use it as a music server (run through a Cambridge Audio DacMagic D/A converter) so I really got to like Front Row.  I know that there are other options out there, but as this post probably shows, I am not much for change.
• Along similar lines, I was surprised that the newest Mac Mini will lack a built in optical drive. I saw this coming, of course, but for people who use their Mini as a media server and still have some commitment to physical media for music (although it’s waning), it will be annoying to have to buy an external CD drive to rip music to the Mini. I know, Apple is not interested in catering to tiny subsets of the Mac-user community, but it is remarkable how many people use Mac Mini or other Apple products to run their home stereo systems. The lack of Front Row is not a big deal, but the lack of an optical drive may make me consider other options.

There were two other big tech-news stories over the past couple months that I guess I should say something about:

• Google+. Like many of my colleagues, I can already imagine ways that Google+ can work in an online teaching environment. Creating a circle for a class would allow me to easily push out notifications to students while keeping them separate from my day-to-day drivel. I could even imagine things like the video Hangouts to have meetings of, say, my Digital History Practicum, or small groups of students.  Close integration with the YouTubes (which, frankly, can integrate with almost anything) could provide another interesting way to bring together content in various media seamlessly. (One wonders whether Google+ will incorporate some of the features developed in Google Wave.)  Some similar points are made here (h/t Sam Fee).  The only thing I’ll eagerly await is a good way to integrate Google+ with Twitter.
• Spotify. I listen to a ton of music. All the time. And Spotify has blown my mind. In fact, it blew my mind so quickly that I ponied up the $10 a month for the Premium version and can now stream “high-quality” music to my office. While my ears are pretty sensitive to compression, the quality from Spotify is certainly adequate considering my sound system in my office is pretty modest (a miniwatt N3, Energy C2 speakers, and my MacBook Pro (no DAC yet)).

The Great Strawman Massacre

This past week, Robert Darnton published a curious opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education. I am sure that by now, more qualified bloggers have already puzzled over this column where Darnton positively obliterates several strawmen (strawpersons?) about our digital future.  Darnton begins his brief reflections by identifying and refuting five myths of the information age:

1. The Book is Dead. Here he argues that since more books are produced each year than ever before the book is alive and well as a medium for communication.  I am not sure that I’ve ever read anywhere that the book is going away. In fact, most people say that recent changes in way books are produced, published, distributed, and read is a cause for some celebration! The real questions have surrounded our definition of the book and its place within our increasingly convergent media universe. So if the book is dead, long live the book.

2. We have entered the information age. Darnton points out cleverly that “every age is an age of information” as if this somehow undermines the idea that our age has celebrated and problematized information in new ways.  While the changing pace of our ability to discover, manipulate, and communicate information is perhaps not “unprecedented”, our fixation on this abstract notion of information perhaps is.  In any event, his argument is pretty facile. Every age seeks to define itself and almost every age identifies itself somehow and in most cases, these identifications tell us more about how that generation imagines itself than a perspective on some kind of absolute historical character.

3. All information is now available online.  First, I’ve never heard anyone say that.  I suppose someone might have only because people say the darndest things.  It’s such a crazy notion that I am not going to comment any more on it here.

4. Libraries are obsolete. Aside from people who are library haters (and our local politics have reminded me that some version of these people do exist), few serious people have argued that libraries are really obsolete. They are changing, of course, to keep pace with new ideas of what constitutes a book and our fixation (fetishizing?) of information, but they are coming to occupy an important place in our expanding information infrastructure.

5. The future is digital. While it might seem impossible to argue with this, it all depends, of course, on what we mean by digital.  Darnton points out that the information environment will be “overwhelmingly digital”, but also reminds us that printed material will continue to be important as well.  Again, it seems hardly valuable to note that “old technologies” like print will continue to be value just as long-playing records, typewriters, radio, and old houses continue to be cherish as opportunities to reflect on media and through media on our own past.

To be more charitable to Darnton’s offers these strawmen as myths and his few concluding paragraphs offer more compelling observations on the changing landscape of information. He’s particular insightful when he challenges the idea that digital reading habits are undermining long-standing practices of reflective, sustained reading by arguing that there is growing evidence that people read in snippets and gleaned from texts in the past. So, perhaps in the final analysis his article does have something to contribute, even we might even see his effort to push back against such seeming facile and polarizing perspectives as perhaps warranted. I would like to think, however, that massacring such strawmen is an activity better left for a popular outlets than a publication like the Chronicle.

 

Even More Teaching with Twitter

Over the past couple of years, I have been experimenting with ways to integrate Twitter more fully into how I teach particularly my online classes (more on that here, here, here, and here). To that end, I post updates to the syllabus, reminders of assignments, and other odds and ends to a Twitter feed dedicated to my intro-level Western Civilization class.  I’ve not been overwhelmed by the willingness of students to engage the medium, but it is very little energy for me to maintain the Twitter feed and I’ve found ways to embed it in Blackboard, so there is also almost no reason not to use it for the class.

Since I run two other Twitter feeds (one for our Office of Instructional Development and my own), I’m usually tempted to cross-post Tweets (using something like Hootsuite).  Often I stop short of cross-posting between my personal feed and my more professional feeds, however.  It’s not that I post inappropriate things to my personal feed – my life is pretty mundane even by academic standards (as this blog attests!); it’s that I was consistently worried that anything personal would run the risk of undermining my professional teaching persona in front of my online students.  Classroom students, of course, are another matter.  Here I am regularly banter with the class about music, sports, university affairs, or whatever else comes to mind in the five or ten minutes before class starts.  Once class starts, I am generally able switch back into professor mode and conduct re-engage a more typical classroom environment.

My colleague Cindy Prescott has a great blog post over at Teaching Thursday that points out some of the potential issues that could come from breaking down the professional barriers that separate faculty from students. While she is careful to contextualize her experiences, it is nevertheless interesting to consider how different her experiences with our students are from my own, how unpredictable teaching can be, and the difference in our teaching persona between online and classroom based courses.

That being said, this past week Kirsten Johnson published an article in Learning, Media, and Technology arguing that the disclosure of some “social” information on one’s Twitter account can bolster a faculty member’s credibility with students. Credibility is a blanket term for the characteristics that make it easier for a faculty member to relate to students and build the bonds of trust and respect that are central for learning. Johnson’s article at least suggests that personal disclosure can positively influence faculty credibility (in fact, the article suggest that a blend of scholarly and social posts to Twitter do little to influence credibility; the positive correlation only occurred in the group of students only viewing social Tweets). While I am not sure that Johnson’s study is sufficiently robust to allow us to generalize, I do feel it suggests that extending some longstanding classroom practices into the online world could produce positive results and that some of the worst-case scenarios associated with faculty use of social media are probably overstated (the most common examples are students friending a faculty member on Facebook and the mutual horror that comes from discovering that the other person has a life).  Moreover, Johnson’s experiment opens to door to considering some of the observations that Cindy makes in her piece on Teaching Thursday; in particular, it would be interesting to consider whether or to what extent gender influences expectations of faculty behavior online.

The Future of the Computer Lab

This year, I’ve been serving on a committee that distributes technology funding for teaching within my college.  One of things that these funds do is maintain computer labs in departments and programs across campus. Many of the computer labs that these funds will renovate are difficult to keep up to date (and currently rely upon computers purchased more than 5 years ago which is an eternity amidst today’s fast moving technology cycle),  relatively small with fewer than 40 computers, and serve relatively focused constituencies (typically limited to particular departments or programs). These three issues: the difficulty in keeping labs up to date, their small size, and their focused constituencies led me to think a bit about the future and function of the computer lab in the modern university.

As a preemptive caveat, I’ll admit that I do not teach in a computer lab and our department does not make use of one.  On the other hand, I have been involved with building a lab and have observed student behavior and the tech scene over the past 10 years.  So with that framework, I’ll offer some observations here and invite everyone to critique, expand, explode, or reject my observation in the comments!

1. The desktop computer is on the verge of extinction.  Computer labs are almost always associated with the desktop computer.  At the same time, a Pew Study (h/t to Mark Grabe) released last month has shown that just over half (57%) college-aged students have desktop computers whereas 70% of them have laptops.  The reasons for this are pretty clear.  Laptops are now powerful enough to handle all but the most robust computing needs. To be sure, the limitations of laptop computers – particularly at the extreme high end of, say, complex graphics production, video editing, controlling scientific equipment, or other processes that require significant computing power – still require desktop work stations with massive, multicore processes, massive amounts of storage, and robust cooling capacities, and ability to be customized and expanded. These environments, however, are fairly rare outside of upper-level or even graduate research programs.  Few students ever explore the fringes of their laptop’s computational power (except perhaps when they are playing games).  The growing preference for laptop computers among “millennials” makes clear that fewer users and ultimately software makers require the kind of performance limited to desktop hardware.

2. The cloud can do almost everything.  My suspicion is that while personal computers will continue to become more powerful, the real growth in computer power will come through leveraging “cloud” based computing.  In other words, powerful, remote computers with many, many times the power of even the most robust desktop will be available to handle the most demanding processes. Unlike a desktop or even a laptop which is designed for a single individual, cloud based computers can accommodate many users, sometimes simultaneous, and thereby reduce unnecessary duplication of processing power common to a computer lab where processing loads are often distributed unevenly across all users.  For example, processor intensive functions – like graphics rendering – now typically reserved for the most powerful desktop computers, can be sent out to the cloud where clusters of powerful computer can more efficiently and quickly handle demanding tasks.

Moreover, companies like CiTRIX are working to bring even common software to the cloud (like the Adobe suite of image editing software) making it possible for students to use specialized software which is not running on their computer, but in the cloud. The student’s computer become just an access point for the computer power of the cloud and the software running in that environment.  This both eliminates the need for students to purchase expensive, specialized software for one or two classes and eliminates the need to limit software on a group of designated machines in a computer lab environment.

So cloud computing is not only more powerful, but more efficient. If a student can leverage the power of cloud computing from their laptop, why do we need to provide a lab full of powerful desktop computers?

3. Decentralized learning.  Cloud based computing will become more and more important as programs turn toward increasingly decentralized models of instruction. The physical computer lab is based on residential, spatially local models of instruction.  While it is my hope that universities will always have classrooms, labs, and physical locations, I am also aware that the move toward online instruction will make some of these facilities less important for the definition of university education.  Students taking a class from around the world will no long be able to use a computer lab located in a particular building with particular hours and particular physical hardware.  Just as cloud based course management software like Blackboard or Moodle facilitate spatially decentralized learning models, more specialized software will also gradually become available in an online environment making the hardwire computer lab as marginal as the bricks-and-mortar classroom.

4. The line between a classroom and lab is increasingly blurred.  As Anne Kelsch has discussed, new models for classrooms – particularly those designed around the principles of active learning – have incorporated many of the features of the traditional computer lab directly into classroom space. While computer labs do have the benefit of physically concentrating students working on similar projects and problems, the classroom as computer lab brings that focus to even a finer point.  Spaces like the SCALE-UP classroom take computers from the lab (where my mind’s eye sees banks of computers facing the wall or arranged in ranks) and organizes them both in physical space and through software to encourage students to work together.  While labs have always been teaching spaces, the line between the lab and the classroom will become increasingly blurred.

5. The new economic normal. Computer hardware is expensive to buy, to maintain, and to keep current. Public universities are under increased pressure to trim budgets and use resources more wisely. Traditional computer labs will not remain a cost-efficient way to provide students with access to computer power, software, or a sophisticated instructional environment.  Specialized labs will continue to exist for particular kinds of highly-specialized computing needs or to support certain learning environments, departmental or program based computer labs designed to serve diverse constituencies will soon fall victim to the changing economic realities of American university life.  While many of the more powerful and specialized cloud based solutions are not inexpensive, they offer structural advancement over desktop computing by leveraging economies of scale.

Crossposted to Teaching Thursday