The conference aims to be a gathering place for librarians, educators and others to explore new opportunities for education and outreach in virtual worlds.  Some of the topics at this year’s conference include:

• The Immersive Virtual Natural History Experience
• Virtual Heritage Preservation, An Unfulfilled American Necessity
• Visual Representation of Chemical Data in Virtual Worlds
• Planning an Event in Second Life
• History-Related Sites and Museums in Second Life: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Keynote speakers are Jeremy Kemp, San Jose State University, discussing his project connecting Moodle and Second Life and Bryan Carter from the University of Central Missouri who developed Virtual Harlem, Virtual Montmarte and other islands in Second Life.  Anders Gronstedt, a consultant who works will Dell, Sun and other companies and who has written for the Harvard Business Review, will discuss how businesses use virtual worlds to improve workplace performance.

Registration is $49 and you can find out more information on the event at their website, http://www.alliancelibraries.info/virtualworlds .

• iTunes U and iTunes Podcasts – You can enhance your study of French or Spanish, or try learning a language that isn’t offered at Duke. A search of “learn language” in iTunes turns up hundreds of podcasts, including “One Minute Irish” and “Learn Tagolog Easy”. There are podcasts for Azeri, Kazakh, Uyghur, Tajiki, Yiddish – you name it and there is probably a podcast that will teach you how to speak it.
• Google Language Tools – At http://translate.google.com/, you can enter text from any one of 41 languages (as of this writing) and have it translated into any of the others. You can also have it translate an entire webpage. Want to read this in Lithuanian?
• News from Other Countries – An excellent starting point is http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/languages/, with 34 regional sites. Read and listen to news in Kirundi or Tamil.
• Video – Sites such as YouTube offer endless choices of foreign language clips. Watch Sesame Street in Dutch or Portuguese.

These are just a few of the many free, online resources for language self-study.

As an instructor using online discussions, how do you avoid initiating every thread or simply counting all replies (including “I agree” posts)? Or, if you are trying to grade quality of posts, it can be tedious to find the posts, and grading may be subjective and difficult to justify. One way to streamline grading is to create rubrics for discussion posts  (see description in previous post). John Fritz takes this one step further: he uses a rubric, and requires students to submit an online “participation portfolio” of their best work, with student’s own rating of their work. He’s found that students take responsibility for discussions and reduce the assessment burden.

Steps for online discussion grading:

1. The instructor defines a grading rubric for good posts and replies (this is the hardest step for instructors, see previous post for help).
2. Instructor posts this rubric in an assignment in Blackboard for the students, and provides a template for a student portfolio (for the students to download and complete).  (See the blue arrows in the picture)
3. Students propose a grade they feel they deserve, based on 3 to 5 examples of their discussion posts and replies. The student examples must be taken from separate weeks to avoid end of semester “dog pile”. Students copy and paste examples into a portfolio and submit this portfolio electronically (using an “assignment” in Blackboard).  The portfolio template is below.  Students fill in the gray boxes, some of which are drop-down choices, based on the rubric.
4. Instructor can accept, raise or lower the student grade based on the student examples and the rubric.

In Fritz’s experience, most students grade their participation harder than he does. He does participate in the online discussions, to model participation. He responds to student posts, and because his rubric counts student responses to posts, his responses can be included in the student portfolio. He does not read every post, and does not have to grade every post. From following the discussions, he already has a sense of how the students are doing before they hand in their portfolios, so he can scan the grades students have assigned. He finds that the biggest problem is that students don’t take the discussion seriously the first time, so he repeats this assignment three times during the semester. Each discussion is for a fixed duration. Because students must leave time for replies to their posts (replies count in the rubric), students become more proactive and do not put off the assignment. It’s also easier for him to mange one discussion at a time, than several discussions concurrently.

Another faculty member uses online discussion to engage students in reading primary literature. He assigns students to read a paper, then post a question about the paper in the discussion board, and elicit responses as well as respond to other student questions. This assignment engages students in literature outside of class, and provides forum for discussion.

Resources

• See this presentation, watch faculty testimonials, and get the rubric and portfolio template here
• See part 1 of this post for more about rubrics for discussions

How can we encourage students to participate in online discussions and ensure that the discussion contributes to learning? Successful, collaborative online discussions are directly linked to assessment; in other words, to encourage good online discussions, grade them (Swan, Shen and Hiltz, 2006).  How? Use rubrics. The idea is simple: the rubric explains to students what is expected, and then is used to grade the students according to these expectations.  Give the rubric to the students with the assignment, so they can meet your objectives.

What is a rubric? A rubric lays out the specific expectations for an assignment, and creates guidelines for assessing that assignment.  There are several types of rubrics:  checklists, rating scales, and the most useful, descriptive rubrics.   Pictured is an example of a descriptive rubric that can be used for a discussion, courtesy of Dr. Austin.

Steps to create a descriptive rubric for an assignment:

1. Explicitly state your goals  (stating your goals may be the hard part, use models to help)
2. Look for models  (see the resources, below, and ask colleagues if they have rubrics)
3. List the goals in the first column of the rubric
4. List the “things you are looking for” or criteria for each of the goals.  For example, if one of your goals is “make connections between the reading and the class project”, a good criteria might be “applies at least 2 specific ideas from the reading to the course project” and a not so good criteria might be “does not mention the course project” (see the example)
5. Create the rating scale for each of  the performance levels (number of points for each of the levels)
6. Test the rubric  (share with a colleague to try it out on a discussion board to determine ease of use or missing goals)

Rubrics can be used for any assignment, not just online discussions.  Rubrics make grading fair, equitable, and defensible, and save instructors time.  I’ve used rubrics to grade student presentations; it’s relatively quick to circle the boxes in the rubric that applies to each student presentation, and the students got immediate, specific feedback.  In addition, because the rubric stated the expectations, the students created presentations that met these expectations; they were great.

Resources

(many rubrics available have been created for grade school assignments, but can be adapted for other students)

• Resources and links to rubrics from North Carolina State University
• Rubistar guides you through creating a rubric, which can be easily downloaded and modified.  Also has sample rubrics.
• iRubric is a free online rubric building tool, with many models to chose from
• Checklist rubrics for project based learning
• University of Wisconsin-Stout has a collection of rubric models and resources
• Duke instructors can contact the CIT for help with creating rubrics or other ideas for online discussions (or anything else related to teaching with technology)

Thanks to Barbara Austin and Suzanne Pieper of Northern Arizona University for great information and sharing their experiences in the session, and for sharing their materials with me after the session.

Examples of strategies to be presented include:

• Ideas for going outside the restrictions of CMS
• Tools for student-centered instruction
• Ideas for linking classes worldwide
• Creating content that is not just content driven
• Social networking/community building mechanisms
• Rubrics for good student assignments

To obtain the seminar access login, email cit@duke.edu.

Can’t make it to the seminar between February 9-23? Don’t worry! You can check out a DVD copy of the seminar from CIT after February 23 – just email us.

• Use a blog to post notes from guest speakers, librarians, or add resources from your lecture
• Require students to post to a course blog and comment on each others posts
• Post supplemental material for the course (links to multimedia and more information)
• Use a wiki to organize course material
• Use a wiki for student to student communication (for collaborative projects)
• Connect class material to the world by connecting to relevant headlines and news stories
• Construct an assignment where students are required to find relevant headlines and post, connect to the course material and create a concept map within a course wiki
• Students can blog course notes, after they have edited and reviewed the material (example and discussion by Lou FCD, who participated in this discussion)
• Students can use their term papers as blog posts
• Students blog during a field trip, perhaps with video; this increases student focus on the trip as they know they must blog, and can see posts made by other students (example from Duke’s Marine Conservation Biology field trip).  The blog may be mined in the future for data on changes over time.
• Build up a resource for field trips that revisit sites by adding notes to a wiki
• Use blogs with relevant content as a resource for exploring a subject
• Use a blog to run course discussions as a supplement for in class discussions, to encourage all students to participate
• Use a blog for group project to keep track of what worked during the project
• Use a blog or wiki to share links, possibly making it competitive (who can find the best links)
• Create a space on the web to discuss controversial course topics
• Connect students from different universities
• Have students read and summarize papers in a blog, perhaps contribute to ResearchBlogging.org
• Keep a research notebook or field journal online
• Have students use a blog to create a website, like an online science fair project

One student who was homeschooled and found blogs useful for exploring topics of interest to him pointed out that it can be difficult to stay focused on the web.  He shared some tips:  monitor yourself to make sure you are on task, and take frequent breaks to refocus (take a walk, eat some fruit).

One of the participants who uses a blog to post his course notes, wrote about his own ideas from the session, in his blog, Crowded head, cozy bed.

If you are at Duke, call us at the Center for Instructional Technology for ideas and help incorporating any of these ideas in your course.

Update:

Kevin Zelnio participated in this session and wrote about it in his blog, Deep Sea News .

Mason Posner teaches anatomy and physiology and marine biology, and is experimenting with blogs in his senior capstone biology course.  You can follow his experiment at their central course blog.

Bringing together faculty and students using Second Life in education with professionals from Linden Labs, this online gathering or conference will include booths with support information on using Second Life in education, exhibits of educational uses of SL by faculty and scheduled events.

Educators using Second Life in courses are invited to present.  More information is avialable in the Linden Labs blog.

blog entry at Linden Labs

The Program web site includes a rubric describing the criteria for assessing exemplary online courses, the principles in which could be adjusted to apply to any course web site. In addition, a list of Exemplary Course winners from previous years on the site may provide ideas useful to other online faculty (note that NCSU was one of the 2008 winners for their course “Organization & Operation of Training & Development Programs”).

Have a quick look at the Program site – you might find something useful to help you expand the use of your Blackboard site or any course web site.

During the week of November 10-14, schools, colleges, and other organizations will be showcasing their programs for current and prospective students. Additionally, the USDLA will be conducting a series of free webinars during NDLW, showcasing various types of distance learning providers.

To view USDLA sponsored webinar and event listings and register and attend some online free sessions, visit http://www.ndlw.org/learners.html#webinars

Government and educational leaders throughout the country will be voicing their support for NDLW, including Massachusetts Senator, Edward M. Kennedy, Chairman of the US Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

UMW Blogs is quite simply a web-based publishing platform for the Mary Washington academic community. The distinction between a blog and a more loosely defined publishing platform is actually important because while some people on UMW Blogs use it for what is commonly thought of as blogging, many more use it for a wide range of purposes that often don’t quite match the underlining logic of a blog (see Ten ways to use UMW Blogs for examples). So to call it a series of blogs in many ways doesn’t capture the more complex reality, it’s more akin to a dynamic online publishing space for students, staff, and faculty alike.

The official birth date of UMW Blogs is August 27th, 2007, but unlike Athena it didn’t just jump from the head of Zeus one day. It came out of numerous iteration cycles with a variety of free and open source applications. It was born out of a culture of experimentation at UMW more generally, and the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (DTLT) specifically. Our “sandbox” approach to exploring educational technologies embraced the best tools already freely available on the web (which were not necessarily limited to open source solutions) for sharing videos, images, bookmarks, and documents such as YouTube, Flickr, and delicious, and Writely (which is now Google Docs).

I think the driving logic behind the experiment was to imagine what takes place in the classroom at a university as not removed from what is happening already on the wide open web more generally, but rather in constant dialogue with the conversations and resources that already exist out on the web. The move towards ‘openness’ (the networked approach of thinking and sharing openly on the web) with these Web 2.0 tools at UMW was not so much premised on a pre-determined ideological impetus, but a push for developing the best framework for sharing resources and publishing easily on the web for an entire intellectual community. In many ways openness comes as a serendipitous extension of such a framework, illustrating the point that the architecture of most Course Management Systems (and university websites more generally) are built upon a vision of controlling an image and locking down ideas rather than sharing and opening them up to the world at large. Openness is as much a function of design as it is of any set of beliefs. One might truly desire to be open, but have no means through the web-based publishing tools provided by their campus’s IT department to truly enable the kind of access requisite for allowing others to both find and re-purpose their work and ideas easily.

One of the things we really like about UMW Blogs is it allows people throughout the community to take ownership of their own work, they control their space to some great extent. For example, they can use their blogs for personal reflection, to frame an eportfolio (here’s a nice student example), they can delete their own work at will, and export their data on the fly and re-import it to their own space, or a commercial blogging system like Blogger or WordPress.com. Moreover, this “syndicated framework” we are using allows instructors and students who are using external applications to easily add their RSS feeds to UMW Blogs so that their work can become part of the searchable and discoverable flow of data. [CIT note – for more on Really Simple Syndication see CIT's page on RSS aggregators or watch RSS in Plain English] That is the key, don’t try and create a space that locks anyone in to one university tool, rather build a system that can, to quote Whitman, “contain multitudes.” This idea of empowering the community with their own tools for framing the work they do during their time at UMW epitomizes DTLT’s approach to instructional technologies. One practice that has highlighted the importance of managing and developing your voice online has been UMW Blogs’s ability to pull together all the individual threads from individual blogs into a larger, syndicated (or is it syncopated?) chorus of learning on campus. UMW Blogs has brought us closer to that vision than we have been heretofore, but there is still a ways to go. Nonetheless, after three years of one-off WordPress blogs and MediaWiki installations, the move towards a larger, integrated campus-wide publishing platform was as much a necessity as it was an experiment.

Q: Does UMW blogs take the place of a standard Learning Management System (LMS) for UMW?

No, it doesn’t replace our standard Learning Management System (LMS) which is Blackboard Basic. UMW Blogs is not a mandate from the administration. In fact, we’re still trying to make sure everyone knows it’s very much an experimental space. Despite this fact, the interest has been so great that it has become a de facto enterprise system simply based on numbers: we currently have 1,954 users on campus (out of a population of roughly 4,000), and more than 1,800 blogs. Those numbers are far more than the 100 or 200 blogs we were hoping for last fall.

The growth has been phenomenal and much of that might be because the system is not mandated, nor is it cordoned off for a special few. Such facts have no small impact on the community that uses UMW Blogs. It’s active, variegated, experimental, and highly entertaining. Over the last 12 months over 75 UMW faculty have signed up for UMW Blogs, and almost 100 courses have used (or are currently using) this publishing platform in some fashion. And I stress ‘in some fashion’ for often no two courses use it the same exact way, much like the fact that no two professors teach in the same exact way.

For example, Dr. Gardner Campbell’s Milton Seminar this summer has pushed the limits for his class by encouraging students to use their own blogs, and pulling (or feeding) their work into a central aggregated course blog. Professor Steve Greenlaw’s freshman seminar on Globalization is an excellent example of a distributed course site using all kinds of tools like WordPress.com, Flickr, del.icio.us, and YouTube. Professor Mara Scanlon’s Asian American Literature course blog used the tool as a space where students could choose where they did the work, and built the course resources (such as a syllabus, assignments, etc.) around the active blog space. Professor Sue Fernsebner’s Cultural History of Late 20th Century China provides a centralized course space for the professor to publish announcements and reading questions while at the same time providing pages for tracking all the students’ research blogs. Professor John Morello has used the space for his speech course to allow his class to share and comment on each others’ video-taped speeches. Our provost, Nina Mikhalevsky, has been using UMW Blogs for two of her course sites (one here, and the other here) for both sharing course materials and creating a dynamic forum via the blog posts. Additionally, Professor Steven Gallik is using UMW Blogs as digital laboratory notebooks for his Cell Biology course, harnessing the power of syndication for his Online Laboratory suite (find out more about this project here).

Yet, all that said it does not replace our LMS because there are several things it cannot do (all of which might be more of a blessing than a curse):

* It cannot integrate into Banner and other institutional data systems.
* It cannot provide pre-populated lists of students and courses for professors.
* You cannot have a testing/quizzing module, nor do you have a grade book.

The logic behind UMW Blogs is a loosely coupled system that gives the community the ability to publish and share online, it is not (nor do we necessarily believe it should be) contorted to meet the administrative concerns that are often better dealt with by course management systems.

Finally, in terms of the hosting and administration of UMW Blogs, it is hosted off campus and for the first year it was on a shared server and cost us $30 a month. This year we have it on a dedicated server with nightly backups to an alternate site and it currently costs us about $400 a month. And if a campus wanted to offload the hosting and maintenance entirely, James Farmer’s EduBlogs Campus might be an excellent, cost-effective alternative. The cost of any campus publishing endeavor like this should be far more in terms of people working with the faculty and students for imagining ways of using these tools rather than infrastructure and administrative overhead. How about that for a cost effective and sustainable model in these troubled economic times!

Q: What have the general faculty and student reactions been?

So far, the reviews have been rather favorable, and the number of people using it might be one indication of this. The dialogue around the tool is wide open, and we are constantly getting feedback about tweaking things and ironing out some interface issues. But most of the conversations center around how to further push the limits of using this space for teaching and learning, which might suggest we have gotten beyond the question of whether or not it’s functional and onto the issues of how we can make it even better as a space for syndicating the amazing stuff happening around campus.

In many ways the range of faculty has been interesting. It isn’t simply the most tech savvy folks are using UMW Blogs, as is often the case with new media. Rather, it has attracted those faculty who want to do something online, and want it to be both simple and aesthetically pleasing. This is where such a system has become a tremendous asset for the professors. It is often no harder than writing an email, and the ability for them to maintain full control over their space and make it look the way they want has made it very appealing to a wide range of people. This includes working committees, staff organizations, student organizations, and faculty who want to create online resources for their professional presentations and research. It has offered a low-threshold entry point for many who have been previously uncomfortable with the web, while providing the room for experimentation and customization that keeps those who understand the web intimately continually intrigued and engaged.

Q: Since many of the blogs are public, how do you deal with privacy concerns? Along that same thread – have any of the blogs received ‘outside’ attention/feedback/collaboration?

Keep in mind that making blogs public or not is determined on a case-by-case basis by the user. Not everything published on UMW Blogs is open, and every person controls the extent to which others see what they create. This is essential to the logic of such a system. We wanted to put as much responsibility and control in the hands of those managing their own space as possible. The logic behind the model is that someone who wants to share their work freely can do so as easily as someone who wants to control who sees their work. What is radical about this is the idea of choice built into the system; the ability of controlling permissions and access in LMSs and CMSs is often far more difficult than it should be.

That said, I would imagine most of the sites are open to the public, but that has less to do with the system than the culture. It is made easier given our choice of platforms, but the faculty and students often understand this space as a resource made freely available as part of the mission of a public university. Below I’ll point to a few of the class projects that have intentionally created resources for the world at large:

* Jeff McClurken’s Digital History course sites researched created by students have become heavily trafficked resources by the local community (check out the Historical Markers student site);

* Marie McCallister’s Eighteenth-Century Audio have become a resource that has collected and contributed hundreds of audio files to the internet more generally;

* Claudia Emerson’s Literary Journals project that provides students the ability to envision, solicit entries and create a web-based literary journal over the course of a semester.

If you followed any of the links above, you may have noticed that many of these sites are not blogs at all, but dynamic websites for publishing research, media, and creative works for the world at large.

Q: In terms of the various uses your faculty are making of UMW Blogs in teaching, is the main thing the platform (i.e., WordPress specifically makes so many things possible) or the concept (i.e., blogs are by nature flexible)?

The application we are using, WordPress Multi-User, is indeed a blogging engine, but we have found its open-ended possibilities and simplicity make it far more. It’s a highly flexible and accessible platform that the UMW community can use for anything from publishing dynamic personal web pages to managing courses, or sharing audio and video on the fly to framing eportfolios. So, its ease-of-use and built-in syndication works well for what we are trying to accomplish, and hence was the tool of choice.

All that said, the concept of an open and flexible syndicated publishing platform is far more important than any one application. Moreover, the willingness of faculty and students to experiment has been the key element for something like UMW Blogs to garner the impressive response and buy-in we have had over the past year. Part of the genius of this system is that additional functionality comes at no extra cost. More importantly, such a system encourages faculty and students to explore the framework and think about what they would like to see and go out and find it. In that very act there is a different relationship to how you frame the educational experience online.

To read an expanded version of this post, visit Jim Groom’s personal blog.