In my dream world, besides the world peace and solving of world hunger (and god knows we’re not even close to this), after these much more major issues, I dream of having a version of Adobe Captivate that works with the Mac OS. If that were to happen, I can’t think of a reason I’d ever have to touch a PC.
What’s happening to me?????
Tonight our Department debuted a Citizen Journalism website. Now that the technical structure is in place, I thought I’d comment on the design decisions that went into it.
First, back last summer, when this project was first introduced to me, we looked at a number of existing citizen journalism websites for some insight, such as Chi-Town Daily and MyMissourian. These sites are excellent examples of the genre. In the beginning, it wasn’t clear to me exactly what sort of content (e.g., what types of media) would need to be accommodated. And while to the end-user, the integration of audio, images, and video all look like they work together seamlessly, the back-end handling of these various media forms is not as easy. On many sites we looked at, the media seemed to drive the division of stories, so one would go to one section for video and another section for images. In this way, it seemed like the technology (the media) was driving the site organization rather than the content. In contrast, we wanted the story to drive the navigation, instead of it being driven by the media form.
Furthermore, although there are a number of open source platforms to choose from, when deciding on an appropriate platform, our criteria for selection became: 1) ease of use on the administrative side; 2) availability of plug-ins to handle images, audio, video; 3) and to a lesser extent availability of customizable templates. Based on these criteria, wordpress appeared to be the best option. Though it’s not traditionally a CMS, it is robust enough. We also considered drupal (but I hate the admin panel and the templates always seem to look drupal-y) and joomla (not an intuitive administrative panel).
That was the easy part. I will spare the details of the entire process, but the plug-ins that have been instrumental are:
For a while I was also using the flickr rss plug-in. I really like that as well, but we didn’t want to add an additional layer of username and password for We-Town site users to have to go through to add pictures. Also, the group feature does not currently work with that plug-in. (It works if you are hard-coding the sidebar, but not when using widgets for some reason). I will also say that the YAPB plug-in is a little more flexible, and I like that we can change the width of photos as they appear. For someone already using flickr, this plug-in is excellent though. In fact, I use it on this site. For this same reason of not wanting to burden potential site users, we didn’t opt to demonstrate major overlap with YouTube either.
We are currently pulling together directions for using the site. I have started customizing the admin panel to reflect more specifically for a potential user what each section might be for. If podpress would just support uploading audio, it would make my life a lot easier as there would then be no need to point users to the media gallery.
Next, there are still a lot of process-oriented aspects to consider. I am also curious whether the “one image at a time” aspect is going to frustrate users. Certainly more sophisticated users can link to photobucket, flickr, or other photo sites, but then these images won’t show up in the sidebar. It will also be interesting to see how the categories across the top play out. They are designed to mirror the types of categories one might see in a newspaper. This is fine, but I wonder whether community users will see this as helpful. I can also start to imagine other features that would be good to add, including a way to add to a community calendar. The easier the better, I would think.
So I think we can fairly say that we’ve come to the end of Phase I - choosing the tool, customizing some key additional features, and choosing a look and feel (done by one of my Publication Graphics and Design classes). Phase II will be much more concentrated roll out of student-produced content and community events to help potential contributors get familiar with the process. We imagine student-designed workshops to do outreach to the community.
For the moment, I am in love. Due to some server issues, GD Utility was not working with Wordpress on a site I am working on for our department’s citizen journalism site. Thus, images were not resizing and life felt grim. Yet Another Photo Blog, YAPB has made my life easier within moments. Some additional customization will be necessary and widgetizing related photos for the sidebar is the future, but for the moment, I am elated that I don’t have to worry about how people will upload images and have them appear as reasonable sizes.
Steven Bell notes an article in the NY Times, The Professor as an Open Book. This article highlights one of the issues I have struggled with the most as an instructor at a small college that caters to traditional age students. My facebook profile, for example is not invisible but you have to be specifically searching for it to find it. Of course, since my students are facebook-addicted, it was inevitable that it was eventually found, but I told all my students that my policy was that I would not “friend” them until they graduate. I see them in a classroom several times a week, so it’s not like we need to develop rapport. It’s not an issue of being hip or accessible–there are just not enough levels of access in facebook. Someone is your “friend” or they are not, and although I don’t do anything of interest in facebook, I am actually linked to people I know. I know, I know, that’s SO old school. Even worse, many of my “friends” in facebook are family. Those are the people I have to worry about putting up suspect content that will reflect poorly on me, a la Doctorow’s analysis.
Actually facebook bores me these days, and there are plenty of other venues where I broadcast (this blog, another blog, twitter). They don’t require “friending” me to have access to my thoughts and interactions. I treat these as public representations of myself, but I have majorly cut down on how much of myself I put out there because of a new sense that I have a private identity to protect. Which is pretty funny if you think about it…I’m willing to say whatever if I know no one cares, but suddenly I am aware of a potential audience and I want to preserve my credibility with them…so I blog less.
But what is the responsibility of a teacher in this time of collapsed private versus public identity? How do other people navigate their online versus face-to-face identity with students?
The tenure system is a hot topic right now (or at least a few days ago, but I’m slow) in the academic blogosphere, specifically due to Andrea Smith’s tenure denial at the University of Michigan. The banter on the one hand reassures me that I am not the only person who finds this system perplexing, and on the other hand confuses me because I don’t know what would be a viable alternate system. To sum up some of the best posts on the Smith decision and personal experience with the tenure process:
And then the proposed solutions:
I want to believe that Dean Dad’s multi-year contract idea would work. I worked at an institution that had converted to that model (and was, as I understand it censured by the AAUP for doing so). Though there were some of the same issues that I see in tenure environments, I felt like my opinion as junior faculty mattered. A lot. On the other hand, I’m sure the 50% of the faculty body that were adjuncts might not have felt quite the same way.
A key issue is also portability. Tenure is the collateral of higher education. If some institutions move the cheese, while others do not, I suspect faculty will become even more invested in their “type” of institution than they already are. At the same time, at the community college level, for example, where the only requirement is effective and intensive teaching, and where tenure operates similarly to the public school system as in automatically after x years of service (and I’m sure I’ll get flak for this but seriously, why do public school teachers need tenure?!?!?!?), what is the point? (Please correct me if publications are required at some community colleges, but my experience was that the teaching load was so high that it was not realistic to expect.)
But the key elements Dean Dad calls for are transparency and reciprocity. I would call the review practice in my tenure track job pretty transparent. All department faculty and all students evaluate tenure-track people every year. Anonymously. Tenured professors get evaluated once every five years or something. That feels pretty transparent actually, though I might have enjoyed it more the first time around if I’d been informed of these processes before they happened. (YES, I realized I was going to be evaluated by students). But the stakes are high for the institution, because if they agree to tenure me, they (feel they are) stuck with me for the next thirty years of my career. It’s the all-or-nothing aspect of tenure that is the most inhumane, the rest-of-your-life or FIRED mentality, but I can also see how the abuse of a contract system or creating different tracks of faculty (tenured research versus untenured renewable contracts teaching) and other variations of unfairness might be just as inhumane.
And then reciprocity. What *is* the issue between administrative and faculty power? I’m not literally asking for an explanation, I just don’t understand why many in higher education feel that higher education is somehow exempt from planning and standardizing curriculum, identifying key objectives across courses, assessing outcomes–both student and institutional, supporting students in other areas besides their coursework, and so on. Higher education might not be corporate, but it is still an industry.
Ultimately though, I think this has been such a hot topic because the tenure system is already broken beyond repair. The only people who truly benefit are those who are tenured or on the tenure track. A recent study at least supports The Constructivist’s suggestion for unions in the sense that more faculty at institutions with unions are tenured or tenure track as opposed to adjunct. The army of adjuncts that do the majority of teaching speak to the true injustice in the attention given to one tenure decision of a top researcher.
The one theme I haven’t heard in any of these posts is what tenure means for students? I don’t know of any institution of higher education that exists without students. For the majority of institutions of higher education, teaching and working with students is still essential. Does the tenure system with jobs for life, painful rejection, and army of adjuncts help or hurt students? Thoughts?
So today was an extra day off, and I spent it catching up with “the web.” Since “the web” is such a close, personal friend. Regardless, making this blog happen (bear with me IE users, while I fix that bugginess, or better yet, just pull the content to an aggregator). I have twittered from time to time, and the recent publicity from Dave Parry caused me to give it a second chance. I can definitely see the potential of twitter, though from an academic standpoint, I could understand where there might be skepticism since there is no room for flowery description.
What I had not been aware of, in regards to twitter, is the gaming taking place. I had noticed that quite a few users have references to “red team” and “plaid team.” When I had only noticed red teamers, I assumed it was a linux thing. (Maybe it is a linux thing?). Thank goodness someone else had already been sleuthing, and this explanation should have been enough. However, there is an official call for participation for Color Wars 2008. It reminds me a little bit of summer camp, but on a much bigger scale. It also speaks to the motivation that people have to participate in community, competition, creativity, and interactivity.
Greg tagged The Life Cycle of a Blog Post published by Wired magazine. I stumbled upon this post (not literally using Stumble Upon) by checking out my aggregator (Google Reader!) feed for del.icio.us tags. (I wish the Life Cycle had notations so I could refer to specific items on the diagram. Not a big deal, just would be nice).
The Life Cycle positions the blogger in the role of consumer, at least that’s how I read it. The blogger has slightly more agency than the typical consumer, according to this diagram, based on the ability to generate data that can be easily found and sorted for marketers. In part, this outlook is fueled by the presence if “adservers” and “corporations” are in the middle of the cycle. Of course, the relationship of your blog to adservers depends on whether you have registered to place ads on your blog. And, not to burst anyone’s bubble, but the significance of one’s blog for a corporation, I suspect, will still depend on the influence of the blog or whether more influential blogs pick up on a particular story and start to link to it. Of course, this can be a very powerful way to generate attention for specific concerns as a consumer, which is not easily replicated by non-digital means.
However, our role on the internet is as more than consumers, I hope. If we were thinking of the life cycle of a blog post beyond a consumer role, what other components might be a part of this diagram?
One important aspect of effective design, I believe, is giving users a clear choice. On my Mac, when I install software updates, the above demonstrates the choices given to me. What if I am in the middle of something? I am provided with only two options, both of which amount to the same result–I have to stop what I am doing to accommodate the software updates. Whenever a user is given choices, the choices should result in different outcomes (to avoid redundancy) and should take into account assumptions a user will make. In this case, a logical assumption is that if I don’t want to restart, my other option would be to wait until later to restart. By providing that option, the designer can minimize potential user error.
If you are wondering, no I have not ever pressed either button and accidentally restarted or shut down. But every time I have encountered this message, I have wondered how it passed usability testing.
Blogging here from iDMAa in Philadelphia, sitting in a session entitled Art in a Virtual World: A River of Second Life. Yes, the speaker has leveraged the power of SL by having a panel, of potentially interesting people to comment on this topic. This is my first time hearing the new voice application, and it’s mostly contributed to giving me a phenomenal headache. It is 2:20, we are 20 minutes in, and I have learned nothing except that bandwidth is a HUGE issue with SL.
For anyone who has cared to listen to me babble about my dissertation, one of the biggest findings was that duh! technical problems redirect goals constantly. Where breakdowns occur, the task focus shifts from the original issue to the technology and troubleshooting a problem. Though it is obvious, unless I want my students to focus on this phenomenon, that seems to be what I learn about the most when dealing with Second Life. I know cool things go on in this virtual world, I just find the evangelism for the potential often outweighs any evident pedagogical gains.
At least we ditched the crapalicious sound reverb from the first speaker. Maybe my headache can subside.
Disneyland is not, in fact, burning, but that is because Walt Disney has a contract with g-d to ensure that such calamities do not infringe on corporate profits. For this reason, conference planning is centered around Disney properties when it comes to AECT’s annual conference. This year Anaheim, next year Orlando…perfect. We have no worries of natural disaster.
Sorry, I’m a little punchy. It’s only the first full day of general sessions, but I’m already a little conferenced out.
Last night the keynote with Stephen Downes was interesting, though he seemed to get a little distracted by the technology he was integrating. I would love to see the script of the messages flashed on the screen behind him by the audience. At one point there was a discussion of whether learning was being facilitated by the visibilization of the audience’s mental narrative, but I think that was just the point. At the same time Downes was discussing learning as network, the comments/thoughts/mental impulses of the audience were being quietly shared with the entire room. It was functionally different, I think, than had a text chat been coordinated only for those with a computer. That way, the narrative is hidden, a secret thread for those with access. The way it was set up in the lecture, the entire audience is privy to the discussion. Did I learn from the use of this technology–well, that depends. Of course, we are always learning. As someone commented during the discussion, “can I turn learning off?” If my internet had been working the whole time, I would have enjoyed it more. I don’t think it’s just game-playing or gimmick, people like to be clever and like to share their thoughts, at least some of the people like this some of the time. Adding this channel to the presentation provided a multi-layered presentation, where I could choose to cognitively engage with Downes’ content or textually-verbally engage with others in the audience about the content or cognitively engage with both.