June 2009 Archives

We're only a few weeks into the Stuart Selbur project, but already it seems time to review where we are.

Truthfully, we're still brainstorming, but we've had some fascinating conversations about different aspects of Web 2.0 and higher education. Stuart is formulating his taxonomy of online documentation modes, but this week we began to touch on what the implications would be for future practitioners in technical writing/editing. This will have many practical implications for those of us trying to both provide training and leverage resources/knowledge we know is out there in the community.

Another track we want to explore is how the Fellows can interact with each other. The Faculty Fellow team leaders are seeing lots of overlap in the topics, and Stuart himself said that one of his goals was to meet the other instructors. I'm realizing that a major benefit we can provide for our cutting edge faculty is a place where they can meet others with similar interests.

Penn State has been moving at a stately pace towards innovation, but, for the truly cutting-edge instructor, the experience out front may be a little isolating.

Returning to ETS as a faculty fellow this summer has been a natural next step for me. Last summer I worked with an amazing group of designers and developers that included Brad Kozlek, Chris Stubbs, and others. We spent time contemplating the potential of blogs as e-portfolio, discussing and developing tools and templates to support the professional growth of learners while allowing for program assessment, and dreaming-up a mechanism to capture a "moment in time" in the e-portfolio space without interfering with users' work flow. There were a number of successes along the way, such as the adoption of the blogging platform as the primary e-portfolio tool at PSU and a pilot project with Schreyer Honors College students and their advisors. I undertook two pilot projects with education majors in 2008-09. My goal now is to synthesize what was learned from these initial efforts and to explore new problems of practice that were revealed along the way.

In the demonstration of Google Wave, they talk about the metaphor of a "hosted conversation." Whatever the ultimate impact of Wave is for the future, as I begin my TLT faculty fellowship for a project on Socratic Politics in Digital Dialogue, I am struck by the recognition that what the  Wave speaks to at its very core is something deeply human and ancient: the need to engage in dialogue with one another in ever new ways that open new possibilities for human being together.  

We just had our kick-off meeting yesterday, and it was very interesting. Stuart is interested in analyzing how instruction is constructed with new Web 2.0 tools. Stuart's proposal notes that, depending on your tool set, "instruction" can range from static documents to documents with comments or voting or fully participatory wikis.

For me, the interesting question is determining the social factors behind creating joint documentation. Anyone involved with recent efforts at community building know that it's easier to provide the tools than for people to accept them.

I'll be curious to see where this heads, so stay tuned.

I just wanted to take a quick moment and introduce myself to people visiting our TLT Fellows site. I'm Cole Camplese, director of ETS. It is my responsibility to help keep us moving in a positive direction and to help discover great projects for us to be working on. I'll be working with Carla this thinking about how to extend the work we accomplished last year around the notion of social ePortfolios. I think we'll have some interesting things to share as we go forward. Look for posts from the team as work on new ideas this summer.