This is a project?

In our dual academic roles as both educators and scholars we face many challenges as we try to navigate among the many new technologies and formats that have appeared in recent years.  We must somehow investigate and then decide which of all these tools, widgets, wackets and wuckets are useful in our research and our teaching.  But the even larger challenge that we face is the difficult task of trying to convince security-obsessed and CMS-programmed college administors to support our need to explore and use these new technologies in our teaching and research.

In our year-long workshop on teaching the humanities with technology, we have heard from many different scholars who have highlighted in their presentations several aspects of the newly-digitized humanities, ranging from an examination of the very nature of knowledge when it appears in a digital format on the web, to new understandings of the fundamental skill of reading in a digital environment (with redefinitions of the very idea of the "book"), to rapidly changing methods of communication and social interaction on the web.

While we have all grown generally accustomed to the features and characteristics of the world wide web (web 1.0 as we know it), what we are working on now is figuring out a useful understanding of web 2.0 and how can we use it?

Note that the tree has a little more defined form now?

As part of my participation in this workshop, I undertook roughly three different "projects."

First, from a practical, teaching point-of-view, I created a blog (Russian History) for use in my online HIS 241 course (History of Russia I) for the spring semester.  This involved setting up the blog, designing its layout and features (tinkering with the html of the blog template was a lot of fun), writing directions for the blog's use and then each week prompting students enrolled in the course to use the blog.  I had mixed success.

On one hand, the blog allowed me to

1. add additional course content information to the course as students were working week-by-week through the course.  This gave the impression that I was actually working with the students each week to help them understand that week's material and provide them with additional insights that were not currently in the course web pages.
2. bring to the attention of students current political and cultural events that dealt broadly with Russia.  I could, for example, write about the recent Russian presidential elections, even though that did not technically apply to students of the earlier period of Russian history.
3. make the course more public than it already was and to see if anyone at large wanted to contribute to our course discussions.  We had a few useful contributions from outsiders.

On the other hand, what the blog did not really improve was student discussion participation in the course.  There were a few reasons for that

1. One of the problems was that students had a hard time figuring out the posting mechanism (even though it was not that difficult). Students kept thinking that they had to log in to post.  One of the drawbacks of an online course is that you can not walk students baby step-by baby step through a process while they are sitting in front of a computer.  You either have to write out the directions for them or give them an audio or video explanation of the directions.  Some students just ca not handle following the written directions (Or maybe they could not find them.  See my next point.)
2. I believe that another aspect of the problem was the skill set that my students bring to the class--better to say their lack of a skill set.  Since using the blog was not texting email messages, I think that some students were unwilling to learn the process to use the blog.  (See my blog posting on student tech skills--I hope to expand on that subject later.)  I might also consider who actually enrolled in the course (and why) and thus their level of interest in the course materials as another possible explanation of why many did not use the blog.  (It was the last history class that was "open" during spring registration.).
3. I also wanted to use some sort of RSS feed, or email notification, to let students know that there was a new posting on the blog, but I discovered that I could not really do that the way that I envisioned it, or I would be considered a spammer.
4. Finally, I think that the students would be better served using a blog as a reflective, meta cognitive tool in the course.  Let each student record his thoughts as he/she did the reading and assignments.  This would work well if I was doing some kind of portfolio assignment in the course.  In that case, everyone would have their own blog, but I would have to figure out a way to monitor all of them.  I might explore this in the future, if we can work with tech support at the college to allow the install of some blogging software.

Second, from a more reflective point-of-view, I have created my own blog (Experiments in Teaching History) to keep track of my thoughts on teaching with technology.  Now, what I am going to write here might sound a bit vague, but what I hope to achieve is to be able to keep better track of the changes that I make to my online and campus courses and my web projects and be able to assess the different tools that I experiment with (both successfully and unsuccessfully).  I also want to record some of the things that I want to try and do, before I forget about them and move on to other topics.  I also hope to see if I can start some online conversations with other educators encountering similar problems in their efforts to harness technology--I think that the conversation has to be broader than one just with my colleagues at NVCC but we can start at NVCC with a dedicated users' group.  Maybe we can find some solutions.  I also recall that over the past ten years I have made a lot of changes to my web materials, and I’ve undertaken quite a few projects, and I thought that it might help me in the future if I kept some record of what I was doing so that I could think more closely about just exactly what it was that I've done.

Third, I have been reconsidering the nature of teaching with technology as we try to figure out how to move from a primarily web 1.0 environment--and it took many of us a long time to get comfortable with that, and many still are not--to web 2.0 with its plethora of social interaction tools.  I think that there is a profound shift taking place in the humanities as we evolve from content previously bound in books to data floating freely on the web to be manipulated in ways previously not foreseen (morphed, mashed, munged!).  I think that this has implications--not sure exactly what they are yet--for my use of the web in my teaching, professional and creative undertakings.  I am now much more aware of what is available via web 2.0 (There are many possible tools.), and I am beginning to see some real possibilities of what could be done with the web--There is always that challenge of the college's tech staff.  As of this spring, I have already begun to use the resources of web 2.0, such as images (for example Flickr) and videos (for example YouTube) in my courses. See for example, my HIS 101 Chaucer assignment that I am  in the process of rewriting.

So, in sum, what did I learn?

1. There is something out there called web 2.0, and I now have a much better idea of what that means.  I am also sure that it will radically change much of what we do as teachers.  How I'm not sure.  Some at the college have heard of 2.0, but the college is not yet actively encouraging its use
   
2. There are a lot of tools now available on the web as part of 2.0; all aimed to make interactivity easier and richer.  I think that this is pretty exciting.  As for the college, rumor has it that some of these tools might be coming to us soon.
   
3. Gaming and game theory--even though I know nothing about that--is driving a lot of web development these days.
4. When we talk about digital technology (for both teaching and research) that means the web.  So much for CDs, DVDs, flash drives, VCRs!  In fact, I am not sure how much longer my teaching will be "book-centered."
   
5. In the application of technology to and the development of "tools" for the study and teaching of the humanities, there remains a pretty solid wall between projects aimed for teaching and projects aimed for research.  You know where the money is.  There has been little real effort on the part of four-year institutions to involve community college faculty in either, and few cc faculty have stepped up with projects of their own.  We could have a good opportunity in that regard.
   
6. Trying to conceptualize and then use digital technology takes time, effort and support.  Three things that are in short supply for cc faculty.  If we are to stay abreast of technology and apply it to our advantage, then we need college support, support that goes beyond the mere purchase of a CMS and then the ensuing invocation to use that CMS as a catch-all solution to all matters related to technology.