The title says it all, really: a big honkin’ tree fell on our house. The tree was in our neighbor’s yard: a 60′ tall 3-4′ wide BIG FELLA. It fell across our kitchen and even pierced through our other neighbor’s living room. The important facts: No one was hurt. Thankfully, no one was in the […]
Category Archives: Virginia Group
Virginia Faculty Collaborative Group
Anxiety about the New Thing
This week has been about anxious feelings about new things. New technology, new ideas, it all provokes an anxious feeling. What is enlightening is that on consulting Merriam-Webster for the multiple meanings of anxious, I am reminded that it not only means “characterized by extreme uneasiness of mind or brooding fear about some contingency,” it also means “ardently or earnestly wishing.” That sums it up for me. I feared the failing of technology, or more accurately my ability to understand new technology fully in order to control it, but ah, I also wished for it to work to bring important conversations to others across the Web! Jenny Dale, in our conversation about the Framework for Information Literacy, talked about her anxiety about the document when it first came out, but she also talked with excitement about how she has come to embrace the Framework and even teach others about its usefulness. An anxious feeling isn’t a bad thing, just temporary unease and a hope for understanding.
Trudi Jacobson and Craig Gibson shared the past and future of the Framework in another interview discussed their latest work that connects the Framework to High Impact Practices (HIPs). I detected some ardent wishing in their voices that showed hope of helping others make this connection. Their passion was contagious and I found myself excited about the prospect of exploring these connections. I am eagerly awaiting this month’s issue of RUSQ where their article will appear.
I am anxiously awaiting your blog posts and eager to know whether you enjoyed the selected readings and the interviews!
From Novice to Node and Back Again Through Liminal Space
I have written previously about my journey from novice to node in OpenLearning ’17. Today I had a back to novice moment and ironically it happened just before the speakers I was working with discussed liminal space. There I was in liminal space myself, grappling with new-to-me technology. I tried to take what I already knew into that space and apply, but it just didn’t work. This wasn’t what I knew, it was new and I didn’t understand how to put the puzzle together.
These moments of unknowing engender empathy for our students. I remember what it’s like to feel unsteady. It’s uncomfortable and frustrating. I want to get past it as quickly as possible. I try what I know and my strategies don’t work in this environment that is new to me. I don’t know what else to do. And then help arrives (thanks, Gardner!), a guide by my side, and I know it will be all right. We get through the problem at hand, but I still don’t know what I should do. Tomorrow we’ll replicate the scenario and I hope I will begin to understand what I need to do so that I can go it alone with confidence.
Visual Arguments and Explanations
Today I had the pleasure of presenting on visual arguments and explanations for Jon Becker‘s class, EDLP 717: Communicating Research Findings (aka Telling Stories with Data). For their final project, Jon has tasked his students with producing a “high-quality modern report” from real data on employee followership for a hypothetical client. While Jon has spent the last weeks walking them through data analysis and statistics, he thought I might have something to say about information design and reporting.
I have a lot to say about information design, mostly driven from attending Edward Tufte’s day-long lecture on presenting data. To prepare for this presentation, I reread Tufte’s books and included a lot of images directly from his books (or, more frequently, from his blog in which he uses his own book images to expand the conversation). However, I also introduced the versatility and ubiquitousness of visual explanation through Berinato’s matrix of “data visualizations that really work” and incorporated other online resources such as the Data Visualisation Catalogue and Ann K Emery, so it wasn’t all Tufte, all the time.
This presentation came at the right time for me, personally. The work that I do involves a lot of information design, although I did not recognize it as such until my recent deep dive into Tufte’s work. I rely on his principles (forced visual comparisons, focus on causation, annotations, direct labeling, smallest effective difference, etc.) every day in how I communicate with the rest of my design team. Since I’ve completed my deep-dive, I find that I am using these principles more strategically and consistently and sharing that intentionality with my teammates…which in turn has improved their information design and communication.
So thank you, Jon and EDLP 717, for giving me several hours of your time. Once again, I learned as much as I taught.
Here are some slides.
Featured image by Carlos Muza on Unsplash
Constant Consideration
Photo from pixabay.com
This week in OpenLearning18, I was reminded of how important it is to clearly indicate the meaning of “open.” I was also reminded that if open education and OERs are truly going to be transformative, then we must also continue to ask ourselves some important questions—what does it take to make courses and resources “open”? open to whom? accessible to whom? open in what way? accessible in what way? These and other questions are integral to ensuring the responsible implementation of OERs.
A Cautionary Tale about Expectations
I was talking the other day to a fairly senior administrator in academic affairs about OpenLearning18. This administrator has been very supportive of our institution’s open initiative, and so I was just bringing him/her up to date on things open.
I made a comment about his/her boss only seeming interested in OER, but not the other “opens.” The admin looked chagrinned and said, “I’m not sure I understand any of the opens besides OER.” I was, in a word, surprised. I have been talking with this admin for years about the various aspects of open that I’ve been involved with, and I just assumed he/she understood what I was talking about. Though in retrospect, I guess most of what I’d talked about in detail was OER.
I wonder how many academic leaders, that each of us interact with, do we think understand the various dimensions of open, but who really don’t. Could that be a reason it’s been difficult to get traction? How can we best address these wrong expectations, or more precisely, how can we better educate our leaders on the range of opens?
Something to think about!
What I’m Looking Forward To in Open Learning ’18
What do you hope to get from Open Learning ’18?
“Open Educational Resources” is a prevalent term in the library world, but many don’t realize what it actually means (myself included at times). I hope to gain a better understanding of open resources through participating in this course as well as learning how to advocate for open resources by gaining the knowledge to define them for others.
What do you hope to contribute to Open Learning ’18?
In the abstract, I hope to contribute my own (albeit limited) knowledge of open resources and share thoughts with others about how to advocate for, use, and teach open educational resources in libraries and on college campuses. However, as I am unsure of the format of this course, I’m can’t say exactly how much I can contribute. I hope to learn a lot, and take it day by day.
A Conceptual Framework?
I participated in OpenLearning17 and am back for OpenLearning18. Why you ask? Because I learned enough last year to articulate better questions this year. Last year, I went in somewhat blind. (There might be something we can learn as teachers here
about the experience of our students.) This year, I have a much better sense of what’s in store for me and how to get the most out of it.
To prepare for Week 1, I read the excerpts from Doug Englebart, “Augmenting Human Intellect“. When I’ve read it before, I found it to be powerful but abstract. This time around, though, I saw it as a conceptual framework for OpenLearning18. Which is to say, my experience last year helped me understand what Englebart was saying in 1962. And what Englebart said, has informed me about what we will be doing starting tomorrow.
Image Credit: – Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart Uploaded by Edward
OpenLearning18: Course and Metacourse
I’ve been to plenty of doctors in my life, but one stands out, even now, because of the way he narrated the examination. Let’s say I went to him with a sore left knee. The first thing he would do was to palpate the right knee. Luckily, I didn’t interrupt him and say, “Not that knee, doc.” Instead, I waited a second, and in that space I heard him say, “Medicine teaches us to examine the healthy part first, to get a personal baseline with which to compare the diseased part.” Suddenly I learned something important about medicine in addition to learning something (as I eventually did) about how to ease the pain in my left knee. That small moment of meta made all the difference. It gave me a framework with which to understand everything from medical education to ways in which I could better monitor my own health and better practice my self-care.
I haven’t been to nearly so many attorneys in my life as I have physicians, probably because lawyers do not administer vaccinations (though they may help one negotiate immunity in certain instances–sorry, I just couldn’t resist). Nevertheless, one attorney in recent experience stands out because of a remark he made in a long-ish answer to a very short question. I simply needed a yes or no–or so I thought. When I got the somewhat longer answer, however, I realized that in fact I needed more than the yes or no I was looking for … but that realization involved waiting for the answer, thinking about it, and doing my best to grok it. When I thanked the attorney for the fuller answer, he replied that he typically declined to give yes or no answers even to simple questions, because the fuller context not only helped the client to understand the answer but also helped the client understand his, the attorney’s, reasoning. (It probably didn’t hurt that this attorney had a B.A. in philosophy from Berkeley, either.)
You can probably see where I’m going with these stories in relation to Open Learning ’18. It is true that the course is arranged topically, with single aspects or subsets of “open” discussed most weeks during the cMOOC. Nothing wrong with that, certainly. And I suppose there’s nothing wrong with folks parachuting in for the one week they’re most interested in. But the best part of the course, and one we focus on this week as our introduction, is the opportunity to consider “all the opens, connected.” This bigger picture, this meta-view, is where information becomes knowledge–and where our shared learning experience may also foster wisdom.
Ideally, we’ll emerge with a few powerful conceptual frameworks that help us make sense not only of “all the opens” out there right now, but all the opens that may emerge as we continue to experience the uncanny, sometimes liberatory, sometimes frightening aspects of the global, light-speed telecommunications network we call the Internet. That sense-making can then be fed back into the network in a truly virtuous cycle–a virtuous cycle that’s part of the optimism and energy within Open Learning ’17, Open Learning ’18, and beyond.
I hope this first week helps to make visible the crucial importance of this meta-perspective. We’ll touch on this meta-perspective throughout Open Learning ’18. And we’ll revisit it, full-on, when we get to the final week’s topic of Open Faculty Development.
Bonus for those who read to the end: a primary inspiration for this post is “The Why of Cooking,” an article that appeared last year in The Atlantic. In this wonderful essay I also learned of the extraordinary metacookbook called Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. In both cases, the analogies with Open Learning ’18 were irresistble, and yummy. For example, from “The Why of Cooking”:
I was … surprised, after roughly a year of searching, to find that there are very few books that concisely articulate the concepts that underlie good cooking, in a way that neither patronizes nor overwhelms. One might call what I was looking for “a metacookbook”—a book not about a certain cuisine or style of cooking, but about cooking itself—and I found good ones to be surprisingly rare.
So welcome to Open Learning ’18, course and metacourse, cMOOC and meta-cMOOC. And welcome to the feast!
Photo by Patrick Mueller CC-BY 2.0
EdTech Nomad 2018-02-09 15:27:07
Photo from Pixabay
What am I looking forward to for OpenLearning18? Connections and conversations! These OpenLearning experiences are designed for network expansion, so participants can connect with each other and see their networks expand (Twitter followers, synched blogs and such). The connections provide opportunities to engage in critical conversations about open education: open in what way, open for whom, what are the benefits, what are the challenges, what are the implications, etc. These conversations can lead to more thoughtful engagement with and implementation of open educational resources (and open learning practices). I am looking forward to continuing to facilitate and participate in those exchanges!