A Nice Cup of Lizard

Prepping for today’s seminar…

Bobby White — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 18:34:53 +0000

I’m just so thrilled that Howard Rheingold will be visiting with us virtually today using Blackboard Collaborate. I have a vision that we will get to see how an interactive virtual discussion can be hosted. Howard will also be helping to introduce us to Douglas Engelbart and his essay, Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. I’ll start class by showing some clips from The Mother of all Demos, of course. And maybe this one, found via Gardner Campbell:

Howard has written many books and contributed endlessly to our understanding of the value of social media in education. For this seminar, I want to point us to his essay, Attention, and Other 21st-Century Social Media Literacies. He says,

When it comes to social media, knowing how to post a video or download a podcast—technology-centric encoding and decoding skills—is not enough. Access to many media empowers only those who know how to use them. We need to go beyond skills and technologies. We need to think in terms of literacies. And we need to expand our thinking of digital skills or information literacies to include social media literacies.

It’s going to be a full day! After Howard I thought we’d just jump right into social bookmarking and getting serious about our Tweets.

Adding multi-media to a blog post

Bobby White — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 20:56:01 +0000

Our First Week!

Bobby White — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 19:01:55 +0000

Our first seminar meeting was so thrilling! I am so honored to be taking on this adventure with such a rich group of faculty and staff from across the Berkeley campus. We have about 22 professors, lecturers, visiting lecturers, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows, librarians, and staff from Music, College Writing Programs, Public Policy, Public Health, Biology, English, Law, and more…

At our first meeting, we started with introductions and went over a general outline of our semester plan. Then we talked about the results of our pre-seminar survey which gave us a very good idea of the variety of skills and experience in the room. We then (actively) moved about the room writing on huddle boards all of the web 2.0 and online tools we could identify as useful and meaningful to us. (Full list available online shortly.) And then we discussed our homework, which was to:

Read “The New Media Reader, A User’s Manual” by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort
(Available online if you don’t yet have the text: http://www.newmediareader.com/book_preface.html)

Read “Inventing the Medium” by Janet Murray, from NMR, Introduction, page 3
(An online excerpt can be found online if you don’t yet have the text: www.newmediareader.com/book_samples/nmr-intro-murray-excerpt.pdf)

Participants seemed very engaged in the discussion. It was hard to bring the class back together and end. I can’t wait to see what others blog about their experiences in the class! Everyone can follow our posts, tweets, bookmarks, and photos along with the other participating universities by searching online for the tag: “nmfs_f11″ (#nmfs_f11 on Twitter.)

My first-ever podcast and introduction to this course is posted on our iTunes U channel here:
http://itunes.apple.com/itunes-u/awakening-digital-imagination/id466950565

Off to our next gathering!

Introducing an Awakening of the Digital Imagination

Bobby White — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 18:35:55 +0000

Two sessions at two conferences this year changed and inspired my professional interests like never before. In January of 2011, I heard Melissa Peet of the University of Michigan speak about generative learning and e-portfolios at the Association of American Collages and Universities (AACU) conference in San Francisco. I understood that moving towards the portfolio for our students at UC Berkeley was the way of the future. Portfolios could further connect their experiences across disciplines, their courses, their passions, and their learning – both academically and worldly. I understood we might be sometimes missing connection opportunities on campus in everyone’s attempt to lecture information at the students, have them pass their exams, and move on to the next subject. (Of course I recognize much of this is about lack of resources and the rising costs of education.) But focusing on the portfolio as an expression of learning, thinking, and engaging with the world, changes the student. It helps them to know what they know and therefore they can better see themselves as leaders and change-makers… check out Melissa’s work at Michigan online here.

What this post is really about, though, is what happened to me after I attended the annual ELI (Educause Learning Initiative) conference in February, 2011 in Washington D.C. and had the pleasure of absorbing a presentation that focused and inspired my professional goals. Gardner Campbell, Director of Professional Development and Innovative Initiatives in the Division of Learning Technologies as well as Associate Professor of English at Virginia Tech, shared his experiences and successes of a new faculty development model in his session (at 8:00am on the final day of the conference) which can be found here on the Educause site.

Gardner introduced us to the challenge of supporting faculty in their teaching with technology. He spoke of how we hold workshops and play with tools, but the faculty don’t really leave with a deep understanding of, or comfort level in using, the technology. Because he had taught an undergraduate seminar on the history of new media before, it occurred to him that this might be a better approach for faculty as well. So, he came up with a seminar-style course for faculty, staff, and graduate students. It was a success. (You can hear his weekly podcasts on the New Media Consortium’s site here.) He talked about what makes this course different and why it works. I remember I had goosebumps and tears welling up (literally) because I was so inspired. I felt that joy in my chest. I knew this is what we had to do at Berkeley. “At that moment I knew – I knew the way you know about a good melon.“

So, what is this seminar? This is a hybrid seminar for faculty (and staff with an academic focus) who wish to understand more about the historical, theoretical, and cultural contexts in which new media and innovative computing happens. This seminar is hands-on as we will experiment with new media and web 2.0 tools that exist today, using them to interact with, discuss, and reflect upon the content found in the seminar’s main text, MIT Press’s The New Media Reader, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort.

By the end of the semester, faculty will have a greater understanding of the cross-disciplinary foundation from which these tools were created, why social media came about, and they will (hopefully) become more comfortable using these tools to help them meet their own learning and research goals. Ultimately, my goal is to help them utilize this technology in supporting students to facilitate their own learning.

I have chosen the same title as Gardner created one year, Awakening the Digital Imagination, and I’m basing my syllabus on his success. This course will be a full-blown adventure complete with at least three identified pilots: We are piloting this intellectual seminar-style approach to faculty development. We are the first course to be using CalCentral as our online collaboration space. And, we are one of the first two classes being held in our new active learning classroom in Dwinelle 127.

Each week our use of online tools to interact with this content will increase and deepen. We hope to build a collection of content and media from the blogs by all local participants, Twitter feeds, and social bookmarking. There are also at least six other universities teaching this course concurrently. We are hoping to find ways to interact with them as part of a larger cohort. Stay tuned for more on this…

The seminar will be held on Thursdays from 12:30 – 2:00pm, in person, at UC Berkeley. After each meeting, Cathy Cockrell of UC Public Relations will be interviewing me (and later our faculty) on how this course is progressing. We will be publishing these weekly podcasts on our iTunes U channel by the following Monday.

More information can be found in the ever-dynamically changing online syllabus.

I wish to thank Gardner Campbell for his inspiration and support, along with my colleagues on campus in ETS for helping me get this journey started. I would also like to thank the fabulous faculty and dedicated staff who eagerly enrolled in this seminar and are embarking on this adventure with me.

Cheers,
Bobby