May 2009 Archives

Each Faculty Fellow is assigned a group of interested staff from ETS. The team will meet weekly with the Fellow and work through ideas and activities. The team members assigned to Ellysa are:

• Chris Millet
• Hannah Inzko
• Kim Winck

Each Faculty Fellow is assigned a group of interested staff from ETS. The team will meet weekly with the Fellow and work through ideas and activities. The team members assigned to Stuart are:

• Elizabeth Pyatt
• Erin Long
• Mary Janzen

Each Faculty Fellow is assigned a group of interested staff from ETS. The team will meet weekly with the Fellow and work through ideas and activities. The team members assigned to Chris are:

• Allan Gyorke
• Matt Meyer
• Ryan Wetzel

Each Faculty Fellow is assigned a group of interested staff from ETS. The team will meet weekly with the Fellow and work through ideas and activities. The team members assigned to Carla are:

• Cole Camplese
• Brad Kozlek
• Jeff Swain

Stuart Selber, Associate Professor of English and Sciences, Technology, and Society

For my faculty fellowship, I propose to investigate the changing nature of instruction sets in online environments, including Web 2.0 environments. My deliverables will include a research-based heuristic that provides a rhetoric for electronic instruction sets, which can be applied by teachers of technical writing and by instructional designers responsible for procedural documentation.

Instruction sets have become a fixture and a focus of online participatory culture, illuminating the significance of technical writing to an ever widening audience of authors and users. By "online participatory culture" I mean the activities and practices in social spaces on the Web that encourage the production and distribution of user-generated content (e.g., uploading videos to YouTube and photos to Flickr; writing and rating product reviews at Amazon; adding and editing encyclopedia entries at Wikipedia; sharing and tagging collections of bookmarks at Delicious; offering advice in user forums at Apple or Microsoft).

At present, it seems that nearly everyone on the Internet is a technical writer--or at least has the potential to be one. The sociotechnical interfaces that organize literate activity today are inclusive and remarkably flexible. They no longer position data and information--or people, for that matter--in one context or another. Nor do they care very much about the boundaries the field has used to define technical writing. Although the range of user-generated content is extensive and includes a wide variety of materials (new media or not), instructional discourse occupies a conspicuous position in the landscape of online participatory culture. At the previously mentioned websites, which incorporate so-called Web 2.0 features, there is no shortage of how-to texts, images, and videos of both an official and vernacular nature; these items have been produced by amateurs and experts who confound distinctions between subject positions (or audience categories) and between elements in a mixture of additional binary oppositions that have come to organize Western culture (e.g., private/public, work/play, literacy/technology).

In addition, Web 2.0 websites such as Expertvillage.com, Instructables.com, and Docstoc.com have been specifically designed to support the activities and practices of participatory culture in the context of instructions. Sites like these--there are many of them--host hundreds of thousands of instruction sets framed with metadata and mechanisms for various forms of feedback.

My argument is that Web 2.0 environments have begun to recast the instruction set in concrete and meaningful ways. The relevance of the instruction set has been amplified and widened by an online participatory culture that encourages involvement, collaboration, and information exchange. More than simply a good example, the instruction set has become something of a metonym for the complex world of Web 2.0. Although such a part-for-whole substitution is certainly reductive, it has heuristic value in that it helps people to understand a role and function for user-generated content--a phrase with no shortage of interpretive flexibility. In other words, the sharing of expertise, which is an easily understood and frequently practiced form of human discourse, has become an archetypal task of online engagement and interaction.

You can learn more about this project by visiting the ETS Wiki.

Ellysa Stern Cahoy, Assistant Head of Library Learning Services in the Penn State University Libraries

Faculty Fellow Ellysa Stern Cahoy will be exploring the topic of digital literacy acquisition in-depth and developing instructional solutions in collaboration with TLT/ETS staff expert in online content creation, including Digital Commons staff. Following this hands-on summer fellowship, she will continue to work with TLT/ETS, developing and finalizing project outcomes while simultaneously producing an article on the future of higher education information literacy standards and/or strategies for embedding digital literacy instruction within the online content creation process.

You can learn more about this project by visiting the ETS Wiki.

Carla Zembal-Saul, Associate Professor of Education in Science Education

During the Summer of 2008, Dr. Carla Zembal-Saul, was a resident Faculty Fellow.The focus of this project is to explore the PSU blogging platform as a vehicle for student e-portfolios. In particular, we are considering the ways in which we might take full advantage of some of the fundamental aspects of blogging and the richness of the blogging culture to engage Penn State students in professional discourse communities around frameworks and problems of practice associated with their chosen professions. From the perspective of blogs as portfolio, students participation with blogging can both inform their development and provide a means of monitoring their own development along program learning outcomes and personal goals over time.

In cases where this information might be used by programs for accreditation, reporting, and/or self-assessment purposes, we will need to create a mechanism for "capturing" evidence from students' professional learning blogs at specified points in time across their programs. Think of these as "snapshots" of development. The larger umbrella under which this work falls is that of using digital media to serve as evidence of learning.

This project will build on existing research and practice on e-portfolios as a platform for supporting student learning and development. Learn more about the progress made on this project during the Summer of 2008 by visiting the ETS Wiki.

Dr. Zembal-Saul will be returning as a Fellow during the Summer of 2009 as well to continue and extend this work.

Christopher Long, Associate Professor of Philosophy

In Plato's dialogue Gorgias, Socrates claims to be one of the only Athenians to practice the true art of politics. As is well known, Socrates haunted the public places in Athens looking for young people with whom he could converse. During these discussions, Socrates was intent on turning the attention of those he encountered toward the question of the good and the just. It is difficult to understate the lasting political power these dialogues have had over the course of time. Yet the emergence of social Web 2.0 technologies opens new possibilities for this ancient practice of politics, which Socrates fittingly called in the Gorgias, a "techne," or art.

"Socratic Politics in Digital Dialogue" is designed to explore the opportunities digital expression offers to enhance, deepen, expand and promote my academic scholarship in philosophy by focusing on issues related to the Socratic practice of politics. I will work closely with the TLT staff to brainstorm ideas, produce digital content, develop new and enhance existing tools of digital expression in order to model a practice of using Web 2.0 technologies as a mode of philosophical research that is also socially and politically engaged. The point will not be to research the impact of technology on philosophy, but to explore the possibility of pursuing rigorous academic philosophical research using digital media and innovative technology.

The main outcome of the project will be an integrated academic digital profile that serves to strengthen my scholarship and teaching in philosophy. One important dimension of this profile will be the creation of a digital community around some of the central philosophical ideas that animate my teaching and scholarship.

You can learn more about this project by visiting the ETS Wiki.