WSU Teaching & Learning Blog

Writing and publishing is a major area of concern for most academics. Many of us struggle with finding the time to write within our daily routines. The OTL recently sponsored a workshop conducted by Dr. Tara Gray, called Publish and Flourish. Dr. Gray provided many wonderful, concrete strategies for increasing writing productivity, and faculty who attended have let me know that they found the experience to be extremely beneficial.

We would love to invite Dr. Gray back next year, so for those of you unable to attend this year, be on the lookout for the workshop in the upcoming 2008-2009 academic year. In the meantime, some of Dr. Gray’s suggestions include:

• Post your thesis statement and write to it
• Write EVERY day for at least 15 minutes, preferably the same time every day
• Make time by scheduling writing on your calendar and write without interruptions (shut your door, turn off the phone, and close your email)
• Document your progress by keeping a daily log of the minutes you wrote and report it to someone else

I noted a theme in Tara’s presentation, which often comes up in other discussions around writing, and that is the notion of consistency and accountability–writing every day and reporting your writing results to someone else.

To jump start your writing, you might consider joining an online Academic Writing Club. There’s a small fee involved, but many who participate claim the expense is offset by their increase in productivity. Check it out and let me know what you think!

This year’s workshop on Harnessing the Interactive Web held during Xtreme week was fun. Attached are the slides (2.9 MB pdf) from the session. Thanks to all who participated. 

Each summer the Department of Communication here hosts a seminar for doctoral students from communication departments around the country and abroad, focusing on the work of a guest scholar. This year we are pleased to be joined by Dr. Larry Frey from the University of Colorado at Boulder. The focus of the week-long seminar is on Communication Activism. We have selected an impressive group of about a dozen doctoral students for participation and they bring a wide-ranging set of interests in combining activism and scholarly research.

Part of our seminar includes a public event (this year May 29, 1:00 PM, Bernath Auditorium, WSU Undergraduate Library) where we open up and involve a wider audience, sharing some of the expertise of our guest with the community and hopefully exposing the students to some of the interesting things happening in our region relevant to the seminar. This year the topic is Engaged Scholarship: Taking Activism and Social Justice Seriously in Our Work. We will use a “samoan circle” model for the discussion so that audience members and the visiting doctoral students can join in the conversation. After some initial framing remarks by Larry Frey, we will turn to the circle for commentary and dialogue.

Please join us if you can!

Engaged Scholarship Event Flyer

Yesterday I presented a campus workshop entitled “Empowering Educational Resources: Moving from a Culture of Control and Containment to One of Sharing and Reuse”  The description I cooked up is as follows:”This multi-media session will provide a review of an growing shift by academic and civic organizations toward promoting open-access, reusable learning materials. We’ll look at the activity of several large foundations committed to promoting open educational resources and take a tour of a collection of fascinating new tools designed to help users create, locate, annotate, collate, rate, repurpose and exhibit digital resources for learning. And the good news is that the bulk of these tools are free and open-source…”      The slides from the session (all 75+ of them!) have been posted online at slideshare.net

Here’s a useful reference work on challenges educators face with respect to copyright and the use of digital resources for teaching. From the Executive Summary: 

This foundational white paper reports on a year-long study by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, examining the relationship between copyright law and education. In particular, we wanted to explore whether innovative educational uses of digital technology were hampered by the restrictions of copyright. We found that provisions of copyright law concerning the educational use of copyrighted material, as well as the business and institutional structures shaped by that law, are among the most important obstacles to realizing the potential of digital technology in education.

The paper builds on four detailed case studies of initiatives that have encountered such obstacles. Each of these initiatives is moving forward, but only by fighting against a copyright-related system that instead should be helping educators accomplish their goals. The four case studies are: 

• A plan to use social networking software to help new social studies teachers interact and share classroom resources, which confronts copyright problems when teachers incorporate third-party content into their materials;
• The need of film studies professors to bypass encryption on DVDs – likely in violation of federal law – in order to show selected film clips to their students;
• An effort to make a digital database of hard-to-find but important American music available on college campuses, which encountered massive obstacles in the rights clearance process;
• The shortcomings of special statutory provisions intended to benefit public broadcasters, but limited to over-the-air broadcast so that they have become nearly irrelevant as the need to distribute content on multiple digital platforms increases.

Topsy Smalley, a librarian at Cabrillo College in California, has collected an interesting set of links on information competency for students. Targeted at California college-level information, the site also includes links to the major information literacy links from associations like the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL); ongoing projects in information competency; and links to college-specific information literacy initiatives. Seems like digital literacy has become essential. The question is, what are we doing in our work to keep up-to-date, and to help our students demonstrate these core skills in action?

The free online service known as TouchGraph lets you take an idea or web address and visually explore the universe of related websites or concepts using a java-based graphical browser.  Three tools are now available, one that draws on content provided by Google, one that shows relationships within Amazon’s catalog of books, music and videos, and the newest browser which lets you explore connections within Facebook. I did a quick TouchGraph using the Google Browser and the Inside Higher Ed website URL. Below is a clip from the results. You can filter or expand results and change the display type to focus your graph. Definitely an interesting tool that gets better with each revision. 

Faculty might be interested in following the growing campaign focused on reducing the costs of textbooks. Perhaps the fastest window into this work is the maketextbooksaffordable.org website.

Recently, legislation passed in the House of Representatives that would, if passed in the Senate as well, involve 3 components.

1. Requires publishers to disclose textbook pricing and revision information up-front to faculty
2. Requires publishers to offer textbooks and supplemental materials “unbundled” (separately)
3. Requires institutions, to the maximum extent practicable, to provide the list of required and recommended textbooks (including prices and ISBNs) when students register for classes.

There is also growing support for open access textbooks. Faculty are being encouraged to sign the Open Textbooks Statement found online here.

Clearly the trend within higher education is a move toward larger class sizes. A recent article in the Association for Psychological Science magazine Observer presents some tips for managing larger classes. They report that faculty often first have to deal with their own feelings about the change:

Faculty responses to increased class sizes often resemble Kubler-Ross’s (1969) stages of grief and loss: denial (”There is no way to increase the size of this class and maintain academic integrity!”); anger (”I can’t believe they did this, administrators don’t care about students or faculty!”); bargaining (”If I teach 20 percent more students without additional compensation, what do I get in return?”); depression (”How am I ever going to teach this class in a meaningful way again?”); and finally acceptance (”OK, my class is larger. How do I deal with the hordes?”).

If this sounds familiar to you, you’ll appreciate Todd Zakrajsek’s presentation of some very pragmatic tips for staying connected as your class size grows. Check it out here.

Alan Levine, one of the better known digital pioneers in higher education, put together a great tour of 50 different tools that can be used to tell a narrative tale with pictures and more online. A narrated slideshow walks you through them, and a wiki points you to the sources discussed. Very interesting…