It’s time for that post again. Programs. . .check. Nametags. . .check. Twittercamp. . .check. Replica of the U.S.S. Enterprise. . .but of course!!

Faculty Academy 2008 takes off at 8:30 tomorrow morning, and everything seems to be in order.  Last year at this time I was plagued with a splitting headache. This year’s it’s a chronic cough, moderate to severe laryngitis, and, oh, did I mention that someone keeps kicking me in the stomach?

It’s going to be a great conference.

As I stumble off to bed, a round of thanks to everyone who pitched in this year.

To Jerry for wearing the Logistics King crown so well, for talking me out of the crazy dilemmas I invent for myself, for pushing back sometimes but always pushing us forward.

To Andy for fighting the new media wars like a pro, even in the wake of a wet, muddy, sloppy Saturday graduation ceremony.

To Jim for his brand of fired-up, charged-up, go-get-em digital preaching.  Folks, I heard the rehersal of his morning presentation and it’s going to be a classic.

To Patrick for, oh, in his spare time, working up a little custom FA Firefox sidebar. Wow. And that was after the Exhibit program and the blog Fishtank (link forthcoming, I promise).

To Lisa for helping us once again make the most of this new conference venue, and jumping back into the thick of things after a whirlwind week of conferences and travel.

To Michael for jumping into this crazy world of DTLT with an amazing sense of humor and patience. Just wait until next year!

To Serena for her war wounds; to Shannon for her dedication even after long drive back from NJ; to Joe for worrying about how he could best help from his flooded Stafford neighborhood. Don’t we have the best student aides?

To Yvonne for patiently supporting us for the last few days — and she even acts like she enjoys it!

To Mary and Charity and Nancy for their amazing busines and administrative support.

To Chip for always figuring out a way to clear the way. Nuff said.

To Gardner for, once again, assisting us in putting together such an exciting program. How could we possibly do Faculty Academy without him?

Putting on Faculty Academy always seems like so much work; it is so tiring. But it is always, always, always worth it.

Good night. See you on the other side.

Note: I wrote this post weeks ago and never posted. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it felt like too much of a rant, and I was sick of ranting. It sort of felt overly argumentative, and that wasn’t really my point. But I’m not going to edit it, I’ll just precede it with this note to not read it as a rant or an argument, but just my own rambling musings. . .

DTLT’s student aide, Joe, blogged last week about the difficulty in getting students to buy into the use of technology in the classroom (and by “classroom,” I don’t necessarily mean four walls). His post has stirred up some conversation among folks at UMW, and I’ve been ruminating on it for several days, trying to decide how to best frame my own response.

Others have already brought up several points that I strongly agree with: the course experience is a shared endeavor and student’s should always have a responsibility to meet (and challenge) faculty in that experience; what students “want” is not necessarily what they “need” and if all courses were driven by simply giving students what they expect, education could get pretty watered-down and bland; faculty should be thoughtful and purposeful in their choices of technology to support teaching goals, not simply paste them on top of traditional classes because it seems to be the trend du jour.

So, I agree with all of those points, and I think among them we can find practical pointers about how to both apply technology in the classroom and how to talk to students about what we’re doing.

However, I think there’s something a lot more deep and fundamental about this (and I don’t think I’m alone in this — I think some the comments that have been made on Joe’s post, which I’ve re-stated somewhat reductively above, are getting at more fundamental issues).

I’ve blogged recently about how I dislike the purely practical approach to technology in the classroom that seems to grip most of our conversations on these fronts. I think it’s reductive and overly-simplistic. I think it allows us and the faculty we work with to practice technology as as an additive as opposed to a baked-in ingredient in what we do in higher education. There is a sense of “otherness” to our use and conversations about technology that removes it from the center of any real intellectual discourse. I’m not saying that everything we do in higher education has to be about technology, any more than I think everything in higher ed has to be about writing, or reading, or research. The recipe is, of course, far more complicated. Rather, I’m suggesting that our use of digital tools is becoming so integral to the ways in which we produce, process, and reflect upon information (in any discipline) that we can longer think of them as simply “tools.” Talking about these things as tools allows users to consider them the way they would a typewriter or a Xerox machine. Can they make our lives easier? Yes. Can they provide practical advantages in the classroom? Sure. Is that the whole point? Not by a long shot.

I may just be repeating what I said in that previous post (I guess that’s my prerogative — it is my blog). But this time what’s driving me is a post by a student that seems like evidence that the overarching mis-guidedness is filtering down to the students’ perspective on why we are doing this. Joe’s not clueless about this stuff — he, has, after all been subjected to the hijinks of DTLT for the last two years. But his post makes me think that from where he’s sitting (and from what he’s hearing from other students), the use of technology at this point still feels very much like a tacked-on tail.

Flickr photo by eszter.

One of the things I love about my job is being able to witness some of the most innovative, creative, transformative teaching around. Every year, I learn about courses being taught at UMW or elsewhere that are using digital technology to push the boundaries of the classroom, and it’s what I see in those instances that inspires me to keep pushing forward.
At Mary Washington, every year Faculty Academy is an effort to locally celebrate the work that faculty are doing along these lines — in particular, by asking them to take the stage and present their triumphs and challenges. But, lately, I’ve been wondering what it would be like if we had a way of focusing that recognition while, at the same time, making the stage a bit larger.

So here’s an idea I’ve been mulling over.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to formally recognize the best-of-breed classes each year across all of our institutions? I would love to see some kind of initiative coming out of a national organization (EDUCAUSE, ELI?) that recognized and rewarded the most innovative classes of the year, with a particular focus on how technology is being used to catalyze new approaches to teaching and learning.

One of the dilemmas that I think many of us working in edtech or instructional technology face is how to make the work we do seem more relevant and important (on a strategic, mission-level) to our institutions. I’ve also heard people wondering how to more effectively empower and expose faculty voices at the regional and national conferences and meetings we all attend.

I can imagine how a program like this could achieve both these goals, by visibly and powerfully recognizing individual faculty who are pushing boundaries and taking risks. By making that recognition visible (and rigorously competitive) we also may be able to send the message back to those faculty members’ (and our) home institutions that what’s happening on this front matters deeply and deserves institutional recognition and reward, as well.

There also might be a wonderful opportunity to highlight student voices in a project like this — asking them to expose and share their experiences in these exemplary classes as further testimonial to the innovation that’s occurring.

I can think of at least half a dozen classes I’d consider nominating this year. At each of our own institutions, I’m sure we do our best to recognize the faculty who are behind those classes, but sometimes I fear that their efforts go largely unnoticed by our local institutional communities as well as by our national organizations. Can we change that? Could changing that catalyze something bigger?

Last week, Steve blogged about a meeting that I was also in at which a group of us tackled the program for an upcoming workshop at the University for faculty teaching freshman seminars next year.

I had to miss the meeting that preceded this one in which a smaller group had kicked off the conversation, so I wasn’t entirely sure what role anyone was imagining for DTLT at the workshop. Much of what I heard going into the meeting about how people were imagining this workshop didn’t really resonate with me. The program seemed rather conventional, with representatives from different service organizations coming to talk about what they could do to support FSEM faculty.

On a fundamental level, I know that DTLT has lots to offer FSEMs. Over the last few years, we’ve worked with many of these courses, and suggested ways in which technology could enhance or complement the goals of the class. That said, there was no really specific role for technology that I could speak to.

To a certain degree, this has to do with the way FSEMs are currently defined at UMW. All of the other service organizations — the Speaking Center, the Writing Center, the Library — “own” a part of the FSEM agenda. The courses are required to include certain kinds of speaking, writing, and research activities. However, technology is not explicitly defined as a part of an FSEM. As a result, I couldn’t walk into this meeting like some of my colleagues with a list of skills or pedagogical goals that DTLT could help faculty to infuse their courses with. I have some of my own ideas about how and why technology should be incorporated into more FSEMs, but those are my ideas — not the institutions.

(I should also mention that at the same time that I would love to see digital technologies and communication as a core element of FSEMs, I have some real concerns about how that would play out in the institution. The core skills or values that we talk about when we talk about writing, speaking, and researching have a certain amount of respectability in the academy that technology still lacks, at this time. In addition, there is an expectation that all faculty not only respect these skills but are skilled practitioners of them. Consequently, the role of those other service organizations isn’t to provide all of the support to teach students how to write, read, or research, but rather to support faculty as they incorporate those fundamental skills into their own courses. This just isn’t the case with technology. We still have a lot of work to do — and I suspect it’s not just at UMW — getting faculty to the point where they are skilled and comfortable digital practitioners. As a result, DTLT would need to play a critical supporting role in these courses, and with FSEMs now required for all incoming freshman, we’re talking about a lot of support — particularly if we’re committed to doing it right. All of this, of course, just makes me think of Gardner’s mantra that the only thing that scales is the person. If we really believe in the digital future of the University, than we need to find a way to get faculty to think about these tools and technologies the same way they think about reading, writing, and research.)

As a result, I was forced into thinking about ways in which we could “piggy-back” technology onto the skills and goals that I knew others would be talking about. Or, I could talk about more fundamental (and vague) ways in which technology could foster community, collaboration, and creativity.

During the meeting, as Steve has already described, the participants actually started to wrestle with how to deliver the very specific skills that were being outlined in the program of the workshop. At a certain point, however, the conversation shifted and we began to talk about the larger goals of the FSEMs. I mentioned how, while helping Steve during his first globalization FSEM, I had come to realize that the course had two goals: the content and the “sculpting” of the University student. In many ways, that latter goal became more important than the former. For some faculty, that may be difficult to accept. After all, many of them propose FSEMs because it affords them the opportunity to work with course content that they normally can’t teach.

However, I would argue (and did at the meeting) that if we can cast the “sculpting” part of this at a higher level than merely skills acquisition, if we can think about what faculty are doing in these courses at a “mission” or “vision” level, then more faculty may feel more deeply invested in the meaning of the FSEM. It was great to be in a meeting where these sentiments were shared, and we began to brainstorm not merely what skills needed to be conveyed during an FSEM but what values needed to be infused into the courses. I think it’s a wonderful opportunity to turn our gaze upward and to have a deeper, richer conversation than we normally can about what our mission is as a University. What kind of students are we hoping to sculpt? How can the FSEM become a passage for students into a larger community of learning and scholarship? How can the FSEM become a microcosm of the intellectual life of a University, modeling for students what they should want for themselves?

(All of this is definitely complicated by the larger context we’re dealing with as Shannon has so clearly articulated. I have some thoughts about this as well, but this post has already gone on too long).

For me, once the conversation at the meeting shifted to one not about skills but about values, the role of DTLT started to become clearer. I can think of many ways in which we could demonstrate how digital tools and communication could underpin these values. I know Steve wants feedback about what those values are or should be. I have lots of ideas, but they haven’t really come together into a big picture yet. I promise to blog about my thoughts on them, next.

Over at Geeky Mom, Laura has a wonderful post up that extends some of what she, Barbara Ganley, Barbara Sawhill, Leslie Madsen-Brooks, and I spoke about during our presentation on “Fear 2.0″ at ELI last week (I have a long post in me about the presentation, but I’m saving it for another day). Right now, I want to respond to Laura’s post, in which she explores her own fears:

How important is my position, really, to the institution as a whole? If my position disappeared, would anyone really notice?

…

So why do instructional technologists exist? Are they really needed and what is their role within an institution? How could they be more effective? Should their role change? Could we envision them teaching or doing research? Or do we want them to shift to be more tech support and be less concerned about the big questions?

First, kudos to Laura for being brave enough to ask the questions that I think keep all of us up at night occasionally, whether we’re instructional technologists, faculty, administrators: “Does what I do matter, really? Do I only think it matters to the institution because it matters to me?” And then, “How can I imagine my role differently? Am I thinking big enough? Am I thinking too big?”

It’s hard to confront these questions. I have trouble asking them of myself, privately, in my own head. It’s even harder to do it publicly.

Personally, I’ve been struggling with the concept of “instructional technology” and the scope of it’s impact a lot in recent months. Nine years ago, inspired by work I was doing then at the Folger Shakespeare Library, I decided I wanted to explore how technology could help people learn. I was working at the time for the Folger Institute, an amazing organization which brings scholars together for intensive seminars, workshops, and conferences on early modern studies. At the time, in the mid-nineties, the Institute (and the faculty it worked with) was becoming increasingly interested in how they could promote and share the work coming out of the programs by posting parts of them online. I became involved in helping to set up some of these early Web sites. For the most part they were basic sites, hosting pedagogical materials (texts written by participants and faculty and images, primarily of scanned materials in the Folger’s amazing collection).

But, I was pretty sure we were just scratching the surface of what was possible, so I decided to go back to school for a masters degree in instructional technology. Which is exactly what I did. And then, I got my first job as an instructional technologist, here at Mary Washington. After a brief interlude as a Web director at another institution, I found myself back here. At that time DTLT was in a state of intense transition, under Gardner’s inspired leadership. The role of the instructional technologist was changing dramatically from one of glorified technology support to one of creative partner — working closely with faculty to re-imagine how technology could help them improve their teaching. Our work with using third-party Web hosting began around the same time, providing us with an amazing sandbox to really push the boundaries of what we were doing with faculty.

I think we’ve continued to make tremendous progress, both in the work we do with faculty as well as in our own thinking about where the tools and technologies we’re experimenting with could take us. However, I’m often afraid that we’re not thinking big enough. I fear that when we focus too much on “improving teaching” we lose sight of the much larger (and much more complicated) landscape of our institutions and the way technology is (or could be) affecting those landscapes.

Perhaps, part of my concern is that I think as institutions we fundamentally define and think about “teaching” too narrowly. One of Gardner’s latest posts about a student who took her learning and her involvement in the course into her own, extraordinarily capable, hands is a great example, I think, of what happens when classes and professors push the boundaries. How many faculty at our institutions see what they are doing as a kind of professional modeling and coaching? Or, do they see teaching as merely imparting and sharing knowledge?

I’m not trying to disparage the notion of experts sharing knowledge. I know, from my own experience, that this is a fundamental aspect of the process of learning. But, what beyond that?

When a faculty member comes to me and says I want to use technology to do X in the classroom, I feel a little sad. I don’t want to just think about technology as a means to an end — a useful solution to a problem. Sure, it can serve that purpose, but, fundamentally, digital technologies are about so. much. more.

How many of our faculty are considering how technology is altering their disciplines? Their own professional practices? The traditions of their institutions? How many of us are considering these issues?

I fear we’re going to wake up one day and discover that in every other sector technology has resulted in a re-imagining, and we’re going to be stuck thinking about how to help someone function better. Everyone else will have moved on to stochastic calculus and we’ll still be dealing with basic arithmetic. Everyone else will be driving around in jet cars capable of crossing dimensions, and we’ll still be trying to figure out how to break 40 MPG with a traditional petroleum engine.

Alternatively, I fear that other sectors won’t push as hard and as deeply as they could, because they’re not invested in the horizons of thinking, learning, knowing, and understanding the way that academia and higher education are supposed to be. I fear that seeing into the great unknown is our responsibility and instead we’re just trying to keep our heads down and be incremental.

I love going to conferences like ELI, but I must confess that I often come away from those events wondering if enough of us are thinking big enough. At last week’s conference, I heard colleagues at other institutions suggest that instructional technologists have no business discussing or trying to impact the processes of promotion and tenure at our campuses. I was disheartened. Don’t get me wrong: I have no (dis)illusions of grandeur. I know that I, personally, can’t change these long-standing traditions. But I am quite sure that someone better be prepared to talk to our administrations, our boards, and our state legislatures about the real crisis in higher education: our failing to take ourselves, our future, and the possibilities that are unfolding around us everywhere in digital technology seriously.

It’s not about smart boards. It’s not about course management systems. It’s not about analyzing student data to improve retention. It’s not even about getting more students or faculty to blog or use wikis or to experiment with virtual worlds.

Or, perhaps I should say it’s not just about these things. There is something more fundamental, more urgent, and more important below those surfaces. We need to find it, and we need to define our roles at our institutions so that when we find it we can help to make change happen.

I’ve been in a bit of a blogging slump — call it a “pregnant pause” — and I’m deterimed to bootstrap myself out of it.

Part of my block has to do with the fact that there is so much going on, I’m not really sure where to start. I’ve got four or five posts brewing from ELI that I’m hoping to work through in the next few days, but for today, I thought I’d start by talking about a project I’ve been working on with Steve Greenlaw.

I don’t get as much time as I’d probably like to work on a lot of projects directly with faculty these days, so I’ve been really enjoying diving into his TLT Fellows project. Last fall, Steve and I started talking about how we could build an online learning environment for his advanced macroeconomics class that would really foster collaboration. He blogged a bit about it in December. In the past, he’s struggled with how to get the students to really synthesize all of the work they’re doing on a topic into a coherent, analytically rich final project.

In the end, we shied away from designing some more complex collaborative writing environment, opting instead for a rich course site that did everything possible to expose the work students were doing around the different topics at hand. Steve also altered his assignments slightly, so that collaboration was happening more in the earlier stages of the course, with a greater emphasis on individual work (building out of the collaboratively generated and aggregated content) for the final project.

For me, the challenge has been really pushing the boundaries of what we could do with RSS aggregation in a WordPress blog. None of it is earth-shatteringly innovative, but it does represent the most complex course aggregation site I’ve ever put together. It’s a completely unsustainable model for individual course site creation. But, as a proof of concept, I’m hoping it will point out to us whether or not this kind of rich aggregated environment is even useful. If it is, then I think that points us in interesting directions for future development. If it’s not, well, that’s another story.

I  wonder about that “other story” a lot. Deep down, I’m a geek at heart, and I love the challenge of figuring out how I can slice and dice feeds together to create interesting views of content. I often wonder if the compelling pull I feel towards building these environments has more to do with feeding my own needs and interests and less to do with what’s really useful resonant for students.

You can see the site in action at http://stevegreenlaw.org/econ488.  For those who are interested in the details, here are a few explanatory comments:

• While the students are all blogging in UMW Blogs, we had to build the course site with an individual Bluehost install of WP. That’s because of the complexity of what I wanted to do with template editing and multiple sidebars. In theory, this is possible with UMW Blogs using Userthemes, but it requires someone to create, at the very least, the blank templates on the server and upload them. It’s not easy to do this with our current UMW Blogs workflow, so I opted for the Bluehost route.
• Each course topic has a page on the blog that includes the following:
  • Resources (added by Steve)
  • Aggregation of feeds from each student’s blog. The students are using a common category for each topic, and the site uses BDP RSS to grab the category feed and create views of each set of topical feeds. Big kudos go out to DTLT aide, Shannon, for major BDP RSS wrangling on the site. This approach results in about 90 separate category feeds, organized into 9 different views. Like I said, not really a sustainable approach. . .
  • A link to a page in the course wiki about the topic. There’s not much going on here yet, but I’m hoping it will become a space for the students to work through their final projects.
  • A link to a collaborative Google Doc (made public) that two students are writing in each week during class to record notes. I haven’t seen many of these yet, but I think the approach is going well. For this kind of note taking, Google Docs is much better than Mediawiki since it allows for simultaneous editing. The problem is figuring out where to send invites (as some students have Google accounts that they prefer to use).
  • An RSS feed of del.ico.us bookmarks for the topic. Steve is asking students to bookmark resources for topics by combining a course tag (e488) with a topic tag. That allows us to have a “mother” del.icio.us feed (using just e488) that we display on the course home page.
  • Both the link to the wiki and the link to the Google Doc are just text widgets that get manually created/edited. I quickly ran out of enough of them (the max number you can get in a default WP install is 9), so I had to hack the functions.php file to increase the number I could create. I had to do the same with RSS widgets for the del.icio.us feeds.

Overall, I see the course site as serving two main purposes. As the students are working through a topic, it becomes a single-source for reading and reviewing all the relevant resources. Later, as they are working on their final projects, it becomes a single-source for each author to work from — sort of a virtual research center, collaboratively written by the entire class.

The hardest part of all of this has been getting all of the templates and sidebars worked out so that the topic aggregation is working properly. At some point, I’ll try to document the steps since I had a hard time finding one place that outlined all of the customization I did.
In the meantime, over in UMW Blogs, we’ve got tagging enabled, and I hear that may change everything when it comes to flexible aggregation. If it works the way tag feeds at Wordpress.com do, we may not need BDP RSS anymore. . .

Some people who work with me are probably sick of me talking about how much I love del.icio.us, but I don’t care. I really love del.icio.us. If I was on some weird desert island where I was forced to only choose one Web 2.0 tool (maybe the desert island is run by some tribe of people with strange network policies?), I would choose del.icio.us.

I know what you’re thinking:

Woman! Are you crazy?! Wouldn’t you choose WordPress, the single best blogging platform in the world? After all, isn’t the blog at the heart of Web 2.0 goodness?!?

Nope. I’d choose del.icio.us, because — guess what!? — if I was really desperate, I could use del.icio.us like a blog! Ingenious! Granted, the character limit would mean my posts would have to be uncharacteristically brief, but that’s okay. It would help focus me, right?

Okay, I’m digressing from my point a little. But the digression is really just an attempt to make it really clear how much I love del.icio.us. It’s also an attempt to make the point that in it’s deceptive simplicity, del.icio.us is actually an incredibly complex, adaptable, powerful tool. We should all seek to better understand that power — and use it for good.

(BTW, did I mention. . .I love del.icio.us?)

Recently, Alan blogged about how hard it can be to get a group of people to tag Web Sites of Interest around a particular topic. I have no doubt that fostering this kind of activity is really hard, and as much as I love del.icio.us, I feel his pain. And, so it is with some trepidation that I’m about to announce a project to get a group of people to tag Web Sites of Interest around a particular topic. (But I’m coming back to Alan’s dilemma, so stick with me.)

The topic is “Fear,” and the project it’s for is the upcoming session at ELI 2008 that Laura Blankenship, Barbara Ganley, Barbara Sawhill, Leslie Madsen-Brooks, and I will be presenting. The title is “Who’s Afraid of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and the Big Bad CMS? A Digi-Drama About Fear 2.0 “. Here’s the abstract:

Web 2.0 tools have the power to transform education. Such a transformation requires that faculty, students, and institutions take risks. With those risks comes fear, which is often unarticulated. How do you tackle this fear and make real change? Join us to face this fear together in a multimedia, interactive miniplay.

We know exactly what we want to do for this presentation, of course. I mean, we’re completely ready. Honestly. But, since we have all this networked Web 2.0 goodness available to us, we thought it might be nice to give those people who are part of our various Web 2.0 networks a chance to contribute their own views, impressions, and even interpretations of the fear that this technology is creating at their institutions. We’re all about the giving, really.

Of course, the tool we’ve chosen to aggregate whatever is contributed is del.icio.us. The tag we’ve chosen is eli08fear. And, while we could just monitor the tag page in del.icio.us and even point to it during the presentation, I thought it would be interesting to see if we could foster some other kind of context for the bookmarks that might emerge.

So, to that end, I’ve set up a blog at fear.umwdtlt.org and used a nifty little script called WordPrecious
to pull the tagged bookmarks into the blog. What’s cool about this script is that it doesn’t just create a daily aggregate post of the latest bookmarks — it creates an individual post for each bookmark. Posts that can then be commented upon within the blog environment. Isn’t that cool?

It actually may present a partial answer to Alan’s question that I mentioned above. I would suggest that part of the answer to getting a community of users to participate in a group bookmarking project might be to create some kind of community conversation/context around that activity. Del.icio.us is a great tool for capturing, tagging, and annotating. But it’s not designed to foster the subsequent conversation that could be generated by the bookmarking activities.

WordPrecious is just a small step in this direction. There are a lot of ways in which I think it could be further improved. For example, it would be cool if the name/id of the bookmarker could be included in the post that’s produced. It would also be cool if the tags associated with the bookmark could be turned into blog categories/tags — and then used to slice and dice the blog posts in interesting ways.

Right now, anyone with an account on the blog can go in and edit the blog posts that are produced, so today I manually edited one of the posts that was pointing to a YouTube video so that the video played through the Anarchy player in the post. It’s not a huge deal to check the blog and do this periodically, but it would be cool if links to YouTube or Google Video could automatically be made to play in the blog post. That’s probalby tricker. But, hey, I’m not in the mood to reflect on what’s tricky! I just want to think about what would be neat.

So, PLEASE contribute to our project by using the tag eli08fear (and the more annotation you can provide in del.icio.us the better), and then PLEASE subscribe to the blog feed, and then PLEASE consider commenting on anything that appears in the feed that you think is interesting. I will personally give a chocolate-covered cashew to anyone who participates whom I run into at ELI. Is that enough incentive?

Update: For those interested, the feed for comments is available at http://fear.umwdtlt.org/?feed=comments-rss2.

Photo: by artnoose at Flickr

We’re a little more than half way through a semester’s work with this year’s TLT Fellows. For those of you who don’t know, the Fellows program brings together five faculty members at UMW to talk about and work on projects that use technology to transform teaching and learning. Since early September, this year’s cohort have been meeting on a weekly basis, and we’ve been having conversations about a variety of topics and technologies.

High on the list of goals for this program is to foster a conversation about the potential of technology to transform the work we do and to narrate the process of working through these issues. To that end, the first thing we do with the Fellows is get them set up with their own blogs, and for the last several weeks we’ve been encouraging them to think of that space as a place to reflect upon and record their progress.

As is often the case with blogging, some of the participants are a bit reluctant to dive into the deep end. I understand that, and I see part of our role as modeling what this activity can mean. So, I was a bit chagrined this afternoon when I realized that I should really be using my own blog as a space to work through these ideas for myself. Perhaps, in doing so, I can encourage the Fellows to consider the potential benefits of this activity for themselves.

First, I have to say that I wish we could rename “blogs.” Let’s face it: it’s just a silly sounding word.  More often than not, when people tell me that blogging isn’t for them, I wonder if part of the turn-off doesn’t have to do with what that word feels like. That said, I encourage people to get past a word that may just sound dissonant and try to focus on what a blog really is (or could be):

• A Web site — that you can easily publish to and that has features that allow other people to easily read what you publish.
• A space for you to reflect, share, connect, vent (within reason, of course ), explore, test, and narrate.
• A home for your online presence

Second, YOU DO NOT NEED TO TALK ABOUT YOUR CAT!!! Okay, that’s sort of a joke, but it still may resonate with some. The point is, a blog doesn’t have to be a place for cat diaries or political rants. The best way for me to think about my blog is as a place where I can jot down thoughts that I regularly have that I don’t want to lose. Sometimes those thoughts are connected to something else I’ve read. Other times, they’re just lose threads that I’m trying to weave together, and my blog just offers me the space to try.

Third, you get to decide how often you blog. Think you don’t have time? Well, that depends entirely on you. Sure, there are people out there who post three or four times a day, but that doesn’t mean there is an expectation that you will. You only have to blog when you think it makes sense to. If you’re like me, you’ll go through periods of time when you’ll have so many ideas in your head you’ll feel like you always have something to write about; then you’ll go through a dry spell when you simply have nothing to share. I’ve noticed this pattern in myself, and I suspect it matches a natural ebb and flow to the way my brain works. Another model is Barbara Ganley’s “slow blogging” method. The point is, there is no right way to blog, there is just the challenge of figuring out the way that works for you.

Fourth, if you think you’re not a blogger, I challenge you to stop for a moment and ask yourself what that means. See, I have this theory that, as a tool, blogging offers us the opportunity to explore the very values that are at the heart of higher education: intellectual curiosity, intellectual identity, conversation, community, a faith in process not just product, and rigorous debate (I’m sure that list could be much longer — feel free to add on in the comments below). If these are values that you care about and that you care about for your students, then I would suggest that a blog could be the place to explore them.

Fifth, even if you’re not writing in your blog all the time, it still doesn’t mean you aren’t blogging. Blogging is about being in a conversation, and that conversation isn’t just about your voice. Part of what will make blogging meaningful to you is if you seek out others who are talking about things that interest you. So start off by listening. Find people whom you like to listen to. Leave them a comment or two. Start there and see what happens.

To that end (and since we’ve asked the Fellows to come to this week’s meeting armed with links to 2-3 blogs in their disciplines), I want to end by talking about how you find those other voices. I remember when I first started blogging not being sure where to find other blogs. There weren’t a whole lot of blog search engines at the time, and I didn’t really know any bloggers personally. Now, I have the opposite problem. There are more blogs out there that I find interesting than I could possibly keep up with. I have to regularly cull my reading list, and I have to accept that even with that culled list, I’m bound to miss a few items.

The way you find blogs is by reading blogs. As you enter into the conversation, you will hear more voices, and you’ll become better at determining which voices you want to keep listening to.

But, recognizing that everyone needs to start somewhere, here are some resources:

• Google Blog Search: A tool for searching blogs, brought to you by the folks who know how to search. Keep in mind that, as with most blog search engines, you’re going to get results that reflects posts about the topic you’re searching for, not necessarily blogs about that topic. In other words, if you’re searching about “basket-weaving” you might get a post from my blog about that topic, even though my blog isn’t all about basket-weaving.
• Technorati: This site indexes all things blog and then allows you to search the results. Results are broken down into categories (posts, blogs, videos, and photos), so you may have better luck finding a blog about a particular topic this way.
• del.icio.us Given the challenge of finding something on the Web, I usually find that del.icio.us has answers. Try this: search on a topical tag and the word “blog” in del.icio.us and see what you find. For example: http://del.icio.us/tag/blog+economics. The advantage to this technique is that del.icio.us users tend to be pretty blog-savvy, so they’ll likely have done a good job finding and tagging useful blogs (in other words, there’s some human intelligence behind this approach as opposed to Google and Technorati’s automated indexing).
• The Academic Blog Portal: I just found this resource. It looks to be a pretty robust wiki-fied index of blogs organized around academic disciplines. (If you find a blog that’s not on the list, add it to the wiki. Or, better yet, add your own!)

Okay. I think that’s it. For any Fellows reading this, come armed on Wednesday to talk briefly about what you found. Bonus points to those who blog about it!! If anyone else has any other thoughts or resources to share, please add the below.

Up way too early this morning, I was on the InformationSuperNetHighWeb™ and came across this description of the Music Plus One (MPO) project out of the School of Informatics at Indiana U. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Music Minus One (I wasn’t), it’s a program that allows a musician to play along with a computerized musical accompaniment:

MMO makes a recording of a piece of music for soloist and accompaniment, such as a sonata or concerto, where only the accompaniment is actually recorded. The music is prefaced by several warning clicks (something like Lawrence Welk’s “and a one and a two and a …”), and the soloist tries to play along with the recording. A heartfelt yet futile battle of wills follows which eventually results in the live player’s unconditional surrender to the robotic insistence of the recording. Thus, contrary to both musical etiquette and common sense, the soloist must follow the accompaniment.

By comparison, the goal of MPO is to put the human in control, instead providing a computerized accompaniment that follows the musician’s cue:

 . . .the program must respond in real time to the soloist’s tempo changes and expressive gestures; the program must learn from past performances so that it assimilates the soloist’s interpretation in future renditions; and it must bring a sense of musicality to the performance in addition to what is learned from the soloist. In this way MPO *adds* to the soloist’s experience by providing a responsive and nuanced accompaniment rather than *subtracting* from it by imposing a rigid framework that stifles musical expression. 

I’ve added emphasis there to the bit that I find most wonderful. I imagine the goals of MPO as potentially a much larger metaphor for how we should be interacting with digital technology.

Unfortunately, all too often technology seems to be engineered to take us by the ear and pull us along some predetermined path. I can’t tell you how often I feel like I’m being bullied by technology. I know that’s a pretty irrational sentiment, but it’s the best way to describe how I feel when I try to figure out how to get Novell GroupWise (our institutional email system) to work for me. And, I’m a more advanced user! It’s no wonder so many people (faculty? students?) approach technology with a whole lot of skepticism.

(And, by the way, for the record, for what it’s worth, it can be pretty exhausting having to bridge the huge abyss that that skepticism generates!)

So, it seems perfectly reasonable to suggest that instead the technology should be following us, responding to our tempo and rhythm — providing opportunities and approaches for doing what we want to do better and thinking more deeply about what we want to think about.

And that’s what I set out to write about in this post. But, as I started writing, I changed my mind. See, I suspect an experienced musician would read this and say that when musicians play together they are actually seeking some kind of shared experience of leading and following, that they are constantly judging, gauging, and adjusting based on their shared readings of each other’s tempo and rhythm, that they are, in fact, reaching some kind of state of synthesis. Is that true? And, if so, what would it feel like to be in that state with technology?