Collaboration

Yesterday at the Engineering Communication Advisory Council meeting in the ECS Studio (http://cxc.lsu.edu --> studios), executives from BASF and Shell described their companies' uses of collaborative postings by employees working on projects. Their descriptions sounded very much like ideas we have discussed for CxC. Only employees have access to comment on each other's materials, add materials, etc., so the pattern of limiting participation to an internal audience seems like a good one to follow for class projects. We could do this via PAWS, Moodle, or limited membership in Blogs (like the one Kevin set up.) Should these limited blogs be organized around classes, studios, or both at LSU? We need simulations of these professional activities connected to studios somehow. On the other hand, some people feel very strongly that participation should be open to anyone who cares enough to post. This may just be a case-by-case decision. Thoughts?

Do you want the "New Alexandrians" reviewing your articles?

What do you think about this? "As large-scale scientific collaborations become the norm, scientists will rely increasingly on distributed methods of collecting data, verifying discoveries, and testing hypotheses, not only to speed things up, but to improve the veracity of scientific knowledge itself. Rapid, iterative, and open-access publishing will engage a great proportion of the scientific community in the peer-review process. Results will be vetted by hundreds of participants on the fly, not by a handfull of anonymous referees, up to a year later. This in turn, will allow new knowledge to flow more quickly in practical uses and enterprises." Wikinomics, Tapscott & Williams, 159-160. I think this is coming, but not without some problems. If such vetting were to replace the typical peer review process we have now, we'd have to know whether reviewers were in engaged in what H. Paul Grice (ordinary language philosopher) called the "Cooperative Principle." Grice knew very well that this wasn't how all exchanges work ("violations" of his principles or maxims were the fun of language analysis). How would we know if reviewers had motive other than "cooperative" ones? Of course, we don't know it now, but having experts picked for their expertise serves to weed out at least some of the "uncooperative" reviews one might get if invisible variables (money) were in play. Wikipedia has certainly given us the example of a "fairly" reliable source of information because experts on the subjects go there to check things out. But is this good enough? Could a combination of free and open posting plus editors (the Wikipedia model now?) give us the best of both? Thoughts?

Making Facebook Commercial

Here's Facebook's latest advertising plans. It's interesting to watch a "free," (once) user-centered technology becoming more and more commercial in order to achieve a bigger payout for its "founders" when it's eventually sold off. Here's an out-dated history of Facebook, if you're curious about its origins.

Some Resources

Annotated Bib (on Groups)
http://www.chass.ncsu.edu/ccstm/pubs/Biblio/Index.html

The Educated Blogger (article)
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_6/huffaker/index.html

Weblogg-ed (a blog by Will Richardson)
http://www.weblogg-ed.com/

Richardson's blog is great -- so if you can only visit one link, then go there.

Social Networking Site for LSU Alums

Last week at the Campus Communicators meeting I heard about LSU's plans to launch a university social networking site. It will at first be open only to alums, but Public Affairs hopes eventually to open it to current students as well. Once that level of participation is available, whether we get MacArthur funding or not, we might want to explore the site as a forum for discussions between our Distinguished Communicator candidates and our graduates from the program. As the number of DComm graduates grows, I think we'll have many of those alums willing to share their "real-world" communication experiences--I heard from another of our Spring DComm students today about his success giving a presentation for his supervisor and boss.

Student Site 2.0

After grabbing a Reveille this morning, I noticed the typically annoying insert in this morning's paper. On the front cover, a headline read "Top 10 Online Tools", so that I was enough to peak my interest and I started to thumb through the Red Magazine issued by Target. In there was an interesting Student Site 2.0 article all about the new interactive wave of Web 2.0 materials, the need for online portfolios, how useful blogs and wikis have become to students and much of the like. The article also highlighted 10 useful online tools to make life more efficient, some of the note worthy URLs included Bibme.org (bibliography assistance), Rasterbator (homokassu.org/rasterbater) and google docs and spreadsheets (a way to store files and have remote access to them).

Sadly, most of the small Red magazines were discarded on the ground, unread, but hopefully some students were able to see the growing importance as it was enough for me to personally take note about what others are writing in regards to web 2.0.

I do not have a URL for the story, but I did save the copy of the magazine if anyone wants to take a peak at the story.

Happy Halloween!

In honor of Halloween, here's a new book about haunted college campuses. Do we have any ghosts at LSU? I've never heard of any...

[Side note: Apparently, Emory's resident campus ghost, Dooley, has a Facebook page :).]

Introducing Digital Portfolios at LSU

We've talked about various entry points for students, and our problem is that one size does not fit all. Some students already know more than we do about building and posting websites, and some don't even know about the webspace that LSU provides to everyone for free.

So, when we conduct workshops, we face a range of audiences, whether we're speaking to students or to faculty. What this means to me is that we need multiple introductions, e.g., "how to experiment with your first website on your own computer," "recommended web development tools for various purposes," "uploading your website to PAWS," "build locally, upload infrequently," "options for web servers beyond LSU," "Now that you are ready for Flash and Java..." We also need to advertise our workshops carefully. Finally, workshops may not be the answer. We may need multiple media. We might decide that our major function is to post information for a range of audiences on our website or on a a wiki or a blog or an LSU "Grok"-like approach. Collective wisdom? --L

Facebook and Sociodigitization

Here's an interesting quotation from an LA Times article about Facebook:

Boiled down, it goes like this: Humans get their information from two places — from mainstream media or some other centralized organization such as a church, and from their network of family, friends, neighbors and colleagues. We’ve already digitized the first. Almost every news organization has a website now. What Zuckerberg [the founder] is trying to do with Facebook is digitize the second.

Question for me is--what, ultimately, are the consequences of digitizing social relations? If these social relations are secondarily, or even primarily, digitized, how does that affect the shape, content, and dispersion of the information? What is lost or gained in this process of digitalization? Finally, how do institutes of Higher Ed. respond to the shifting terrain of information dispersion, both inside and outside the classroom? Apparently, a new word has already been coined to describe this process--"sociodigitization."

MySpace Class Project

Here's just one of many examples of how instructors are using the virtual world for classroom projects. A fellow graduate student at LSU (Daniel Mangiavellano) created a group project in his ENGL 3022 course that requested the class to create myspaces pages for various authors. Making use of this informal communication site, Mangiavellano was able to merge a "trendy" communication method with pedagogical objectives. Last time I spoke with him about this project, he was writing an article on the experience. It will be interesting to see what develops. In the meantime, we can be virtual friends with Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, and Matthew Arnold (to name a few)!

Google Map Used to Track Cali Fires

Here's an example of how Web 2.0 is changing the way that we communicate and how information is being dispersed on a large scale.

This blog post discusses how a Google map is being used to track the San Diego fires. KPBS Online created the map that includes up-to-date news on the spread of the fire and shows the location of evacuated areas, Red Cross evacuation centers, and closed highways. They are also providing live streaming radio coverage of the fire. [from the Cool Cat Teacher Blog]

EDUCAUSE's Annual Conference and Technologies to Watch

The annual EDUCAUSE conference is being held this week in Seattle (for updates on what's happening, you can visit The Chronicle's Wired Campus blog). Each year, in conjunction with the conference, EDUCAUSE's "Evolving Technologies Committee" releases their findings on which evolving technologies they believe will have the most direct impact on Higher Education. Here' s their summary.

MacArthur Update

According to Cathy Davidson (one of the reviewers of the grant applications), they received 1001 applications for the eight awards that will be given. They expected not many more than 100. Apparently, we're not the only ones who think that Web 2.0 technologies could have beneficial applications in education. Here's the link to Davidson's post.

Video Rehearsals as a Time-Saver for Class Presentations?

Soon at LSU we will have 3 studios (plus the new CxC conference room?) prepared to video small-group presentations. Would it be a time-saver to schedule some class presentations in our conference rooms, post the videos, and invite feedback from appropriate people (peers or faculty). This would satisfy the "oral communication" requirement that students prepare a presentation, get feedback on it, and then present the "final" version to the intended audience. Granted this is a simulation, but many of the things we are currently pointing out to our students in class could be done in a You-Tube-like (X-Serve on campus?) environment.

We (CxC staff members) certainly cannot supply adequate feedback for the growing number of C-I courses. How do we create an environment that yields good feedback and revision? Obviously, small classes make the oral communication requirement more feasible, but even those who teach them might have students who would like to be taped for the rehearsal.

We would have to do this on a trial basis with several classes to work out the problems. Suggestions? Volunteers?

Digital Technologies and Communication across the Curriculum at LSU: The Rationale

Note to CxC Staff: For references and footnotes, see post on CxC Blackboard Site.

Collaboration 2.0: Digital Technologies and Communication across the Curriculum
“Today’s typical college classroom, excluding perhaps its décor and architecture, does not look or function much differently from the way that it did in the 1920s. Can you imagine any other crucial pillar of culture, or sector of economy, that has not changed much in eighty years?” Carl A. Raschke

As the authors of the best-selling Wikinomics argue, “The upheaval occurring right now in media and entertainment provides an early example of how mass collaboration is turning the economy upside down.” Higher education, in general, is not keeping up with these changes. HASTAC reports, “No school of higher education in the country today has tested in a comprehensive way new methods of learning based on peer-to-peer distributed systems of collaborative work characteristic of the new Internet Age.” We propose just such an inquiry into uses of Web 2.0 for teaching-enhanced communication skills at a major university.

Despite some remarkable projects (e.g., MIT’s Comparative Media Studies and OpenCourseWare, DukeCast, Stanford on iTunes U), many students and faculty see Web 2.0 tools as unproven for serious research or as instructional tools, using them instead almost exclusively for social networking purposes. Also troubling are Internet usage “gaps” of concern in Louisiana, e.g., gender, color, poverty.

Nevertheless, Web 2.0’s enhanced collaboration tools are crucial to 21st century communication and to our Communication across the Curriculum (CxC) Program. Using external funding, in three years we have built a strong program—across every college, with 135 Communication-Intensive (C-I) courses and 168 students enrolled in LSU’s unique “Distinguished Communicator” (D-Comm) certification. CxC is part of LSU’s “Flagship Agenda,” which promotes scholarly and research collaboration among faculty, increased undergraduate research opportunities, and LSU’s national standing. Currently, the Flagship Agenda is sponsoring a “Multi-Disciplinary Hiring Initiative,” funding new faculty positions for collaborative Gulf Coast, national, and international initiatives.

We need collaborative research and pedagogy to solve complex scientific and social problems and for artistic expression and design, but collaboration costs time and money. LSU is historically among the most under-funded universities, dependent upon one of the poorest states. Because existing technologies (e.g., accounting systems, enterprise solutions) are outdated, LSU rarely invests in new technologies without solid evidence that they produce; on the other hand, we must be on the cutting edge of research. We need external funding like that offered by this MacArthur Competition to investigate the potential for collaborative technologies.

Wikinomics suggests another explanation for skepticism about Web 2.0 among faculty: “credentialed knowledge producers share the stage with ‘amateur’ creators who are disrupting every activity they touch.” The notion of “peer production,” applied at a university, threatens many who have dispensed “privileged” knowledge and credentials for professionals. Even those who believe that collaboration must replace competitive models can be daunted by the relentless rate of technological change. Others see “virtual spaces,” and digital “communities” as threats to “real” communities built in classrooms, person-to-person.

Tom Franklin and Mark van Harmelen, UK higher education consultants, catalog other issues related to collaborative technologies:
• IPR for material created and modified by university members and external contributors;
• appropriate pedagogies for use with Web 2.0 (and equally which pedagogic approaches are enhanced by the use of Web 2.0);
• how to assess material that may be collectively created and that is often open to ongoing change;
• how to roll out Web 2.0 services across a university;
• whether it is best to host the services within the university or make use of externally hosted services elsewhere;
• integration with institutional systems;
• accessibility; visibility and privacy;
• data ownership;
• data preservation;
• information literacy;
• staff and student training

Because feedback and revision are required components in C-I courses, hundreds of students and faculty can potentially use Web 2.0 for collaboration on written, video, and oral communication projects; for this reason, we must emphasize intellectual property and privacy: should we “publish” final projects on the web and who should view feedback a student receives on a project? According to the 2007 Horizon Report, other trends that should receive priority in 2008 include how increased globalization is changing how we work, collaborate, and communicate; the status of digital literacy among students; and the divergence of views between students and faculty about what is technology.

This project will not be able to address every issue, but we will engage in serious inquiry with faculty, students, and Information Technology staff, remaining open to negative as well as positive findings in our investigations. CxC will be a nexus for collaborative, university-wide inquiry, studying faculty and students who are using Web 2.0 technologies specifically as tools for better communication and pedagogies in three modes: written, oral, and visual. We have four innovative Communication Studios (Art + Design, Arts & Sciences, Basic Sciences, and Engineering). We must employ Web 2.0 in physical spaces—Studios, technology-enhanced classrooms, labs—and in virtual spaces. We will extend our program’s history of building so much so quickly using the philosophy of analogy—people working in a range of disciplines adapting ideas for teaching communication skills from one field to others—to Web 2.0 applications.

The combination of physical and virtual spaces that we have at LSU can move us to “a more ‘open’ idea of learning,” far beyond the current paradigm of “keeping learning local.” Embracing this philosophy, our Communication Studios serve as sites for intense face-to-face collaboration beyond the classroom, serving students enrolled in C-I courses in every major at LSU. They also support students working independently for the D-Comm Certification, a distinction recognizing outstanding communication in courses, leadership, and community service, all of which are displayed in Digital Portfolios.


CxC is not localized within the four walls of a classroom as a transaction between one professor and one set of students. Students, faculty, and staff use our web-based materials and Studios to enhance traditional instruction. Our program’s mission—to improve communication skills across the University—gives us the perfect infrastructure for such a university-wide inquiry into appropriate uses of Web 2.0.

Opening a Blog for CxC at LSU

I invite LSU faculty members and students to engage in conversations about CxC: communication-intensive courses, the 4 types of communication we emphasize in CxC here (written, oral, visual, and technological), the LSU Distinguished Communicator certification, digital portfolios, assignments, useful Web-based resources, assessment, and more.

We also welcome comments and suggestions from people at other colleges, universities, or organizations that have similar missions. For an introduction to CxC, see http://cxc.lsu.edu.

--Lillian Bridwell-Bowles, Director, CxC, Louisiana State University