Her speech touches on so many points of interest: a generalist approach to education to the importance of civic engagement.  This is a TED talk worth watching.

Thanks to Lit Maxwell for sharing this.

The MISO Survey is “a Web-based quantitative survey designed to measure how students, faculty, and staff use and evaluate the services and resources of colleges and universities with merged library and computing units”. We’ve had some non-merged institutions participate along the way, since the survey is a useful measure of how these often complimentary services are received.

With so many services and resources to measure, the MISO Survey takes a while to answer.  Some questions are optional, but the core questions on use, importance, and satisfaction.  The average time to complete the survey is 18 minutes, and that’s been a problem for some institutions.

In response to concerns about time to complete the survey, we’re going to give institutions more options on which sections or even specific questions are included in the survey.  For example, while the questions about frequency of use are interesting, we’ve found over the last few years that there’s more interest on how important faculty, staff, and students consider our resources and services, and how satisfied they are.  So the section on use will be optional going forward: available to institutions who would like to know this information, but not required of all institutions.  We’re confident that enough institutions will continue to ask these questions that the validity of the responses across institutions will persist.

We’ve also made some changes that correct duplication in the survey.  There is a section in the survey that asks whether you use a particular technology, such as course management system, blogs, etc.  Several of the items in this list duplicate questions in the frequency of use section of the survey.  Since institutions can look at frequency of use to determine overall use, we can remove items from our “use of tools” section like the course management system, making fewer options for each respondent to use.

One challenge we haven’t yet figured out is how to ask questions about support for faculty research.  At all of our institutions, faculty across the disciplines have a variety of computing needs at both the desktop and server levels.  Few of our organizations have a research computing unit, and so we respond to each new research opportunity with an ad hoc group comprised of the people with the expertise to support the required technology.  The challenge is to find a way to ask questions about this support that aren’t interpreted in as many ways as there are respondents.  Do we focus on the word “research”?  “Grants”?  Something else?

The survey has one question that asks “How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with support for your specialized computing needs?”.   But I’m not sure “specialized” is the right word either.

I’m going to take the next week or so to try and come up with wording for questions that get at support for research/grant/specialized computing.  In the meantime, we will be preparing an updated version of the survey so it can be tested at each of the five sponsoring institutions.  We’ll be testing the revised questions with faculty, students, and staff over the summer so that the new survey is ready to go when the next survey cycle begins in the fall.

Covering is part cultural argument, part memoir.  In it he tells the story of his struggles with identity as a gay man, and as the son of Japanese immigrants.  Yoshino describes covering as the third and last phase in the integration of any person (or group) with a stigma.

The first phase is conversion.  An example would be how a gay man or woman would try not to be that way.  It could also be a person of color who tries to be white.  The second phase is passing, where conversion is no longer sought, but aspects of personality are hidden from others.  The third phase, covering, takes place after a person has “come out,” but that they still conceal aspects of their identity to conform to the perceived mainstream.

In his talks on campus, Yoshino took pains to point out that while his story was a positive one, he acknowledges that there are significant chances for pain as others consider coming out or challenging the “mainstream” status quo.  At the PETE lunch, he acknowledged that as a lawyer, he is fairly thick-skinned when he encounters pressure to hide his identity.

Others in the room said that they were not so thick-skinned, and a conversation ensued about the difficulty personally and academically when issues of orientation, race, or gender are picked on by students.  Yoshino said that he discloses his orientation in his constitutional law or civil rights courses, but not in the literature courses he teaches, since orientation is not a topic in those courses.  In explaining his orientation he identifies himself as a person coming from a particular point of view but he also emphasizes that he welcomes a vigorous debate.

Two of the big difference between Yoshino’s classes and those at a small liberal arts institution are the age of students (his are 23, undergrads closer to 18) and grading is anonymous in his (and most) law schools, but not in most liberal arts classes.

Yoshino’s solution to covering demands is cultural, not legal.  He prefers a conversation focused on universal human rights rather than civil rights for a growing (and unmanageable) number of groups seeking protections.  When a company or peer makes a covering demand, there should be room for a conversation about the reasons for that demand.  If the reasons are rational, the demand to cover should be accepted.  But reasons shouldn’t be accepted based only on organizational or “mainstream” cultural authority.

This reasoning seems contrary to the pervasive use of public machines I see here at Richmond.  It also runs contrary to data from the MISO Survey, a quantitative measure of faculty, student use and satisfaction with higher education IT and Library resources and services (disclaimer: I am a member of the MISO Survey team).

This past year was the first year that institutions took the survey for a second time, giving us our first longitudinal look at students, faculty, and staff.  Within a 3-year period, students reported a 9% increase in laptop ownership (from 84.4% to 93.6%).  In that same period, use of public computing labs on campus rose at a statistically significant rate (Time 1 mean 3.59 on a 1-4 scale, n=2617, STD 1.25; Time 2 mean 3.66, n=1949, STD=1.21).

It would be interesting to research the reason for an increase in public computing at the same time as a rise in laptop ownership.  Is it specialty software?  The social aspects of public labs?  Insufficient power support for laptops on campuses?

I agree with the cost concerns around public computing.  At Richmond, we’re concluding a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure proof-of-concept project, with the hope that we will be able to make software available to students on their own computers (similar to NCSU’s VCL) or at least via a thin client solution.  There will always be a need for fat clients in some spaces, but these alternatives will make our environment easier to manage and our resources more ubiquitous.  But UVA’s move seems unsupported by the data, and I will be curious to see what the long-term impact is for their students.

“The law provides a four-point test for the fair use of copyrighted works, taking into account things like the purpose, the size of an exerpt and the effect the use might have on the commerical value of the actual work.”

The deal between Warner and Google seems to be that any content merits a take-down if it has any identifiable copyrighted material in it, whether it’s a sign language teacher using a bit of Foreigner in the background or a family video that has some music playing in the background.  The argument seems to be that while YouTube users are noncommercial, Google is profiting from site traffic, and the media companies arguing that all content is thus commercial.

At Richmond, we’re researching copyright and fair use with a goal to more liberally interpret fair use so that the video work our students do – which often includes snippets from commercial music – can see the light of day.  I’m encouraged by the report from The Center for Social Media, which argues that transfomative uses, like the ones our students have for copyrighted material, are legal.

What today’s article in the Times tells me is that while transformative uses may be legal, we’ll need to host the content ourselves rather than host it on a for-profit service like YouTube.  While it’s disappointing to lose the opportunities that YouTube offers in terms of letting more people see our student’s work, I still find hope that we will someday soon have a policy that allows student scholarship to be seen beyond the classroom.

Joe has always been an advocate.  He was there when we owned a parcel on the mainland (every now and then I visit the old landmark – it’s currently a furniture sky mall). He brought his class in world in the fall of 2006, and was one of our biggest reasons for moving to a private estate.

Sharon has been involved too, from participating in NITLE events to recent work starting a Global Studio on the island.  Sharon has been particularly good at encouraging our Second Life to be free of the conventions of our First Life.  We don’t need more brick buildings, though having some visual cues connecting our virtual space to the campus is nice.

We met to discuss the future of our island.  Things have grown organically, and all of us agreed that we could do it better if we started from scratch.  So what’s coming?  We see the need for five kinds of spaces at Richmond:

• Orientation space: A landing zone for the island, with information on what’s there and how to find it.
• Sandbox spaces: A place where anyone associated with the University of Richmond can test, play, create. We plan on making several spaces available vertically so individuals or groups can work in a specific space if they don’t want to work in the general sandbox at ground level.
• Project spaces: When classes or other projects want an ongoing space, we’ll have several. At the ground level will be projects that are expected to persist. This might include Sharon’s Global Studio, and our 3D version of the Voting America project, which will be restarting this term with help from students in our Technology Learning Center. Term-based projects will be up in the sky, and can be as big or little as the projects require.
• Showcase spaces: For presentation of research, or as archives of the best work done in classes, we’ll have space for work to be preserved and shared. One example will be posters from our Arts & Sciences Symposium, held each April. We’ll also link in to videos that students have created for Symposium.
• Meeting spaces: We need a variety of environments for groups to meet and collaborate. This will include an amphitheater for large groups, but also smaller spaces for work groups. I think we’ll have many opportunities for thinking differently about space for these environments.

It will take some time for us to reconfigure the island, but some things are already beginning.  The group has agreed to meet regularly to fine-tune our use of our virtual space.

“The construction of the course syllabus, a natural beginning point for most instructors, is a good example of how the software imposes limitations.  When they first enter a CMS, new instructors see the default buttons of the course menu, which are based on type rather than purpose: Announcements, Course Content, Discussion, even Syllabus.  The buttons link to pages that simply provide a place to upload a document, which is exactly what most instructors do: upload a word-processed file of their in-class syllabus.  It would be more natural for novice instructors to see a blank schedule in which they could create each week’s (or unit’s) activities.  Most professors think in terms of the semester and how their pedagogical goals can be achieved within the context of time rather than space.  The default organization of the CMS forces them to think in terms of content types instead, breaking the natural structure of the semester.”

Lane suggests that constructivist, learner-centered, or inquiry-based approaches are better supported by Web 2.0 applications, or by learning management systems that focus more on pedagogy than content management.

We’re exploring these tools at Richmond now, but at this point we’re connecting with our early adopters, not the majority.  I wonder what it will take for most faculty to embrace social tools: they require more consideration up front, and if they want to use more than one tool, it’s multiple logins for them and their students.  The effort has to be justified, and I think we’ll see that as early adopters share compelling stories of transformed learning.  But is there something more we need to do, either to be sure the stories are communicated effectively or the administrivia streamlined?

I guess I’m trying to step into our learners’ shoes, to be sure our plans are effective.  I can be patient, as social technologies work their way into instructor toolboxes, but I also want to be sure I’m not missing any opportunities.

Thanks to Andy Morton for the link.

• Organization
• Kevin Creamer, Director ( kcreamer at richmond.edu, 804.289.8677)
  
• CTLT Liaisons (web site coming soon)
  
  • Allison Czapracki ( aczapracki at richmond.edu, 804.287.6657)
    
    • Information Systems
      
  • Jim Groom ( jgroom at richmond.edu, 804.287.6872)
    • Teacher Licensure
      
  • Hill Scott ( hscott at richmond.edu, 804.289.8452)
  • Kenneth Warren ( kwarren at richmond.edu, 804.287.6656)
    
    • Liberal Arts
      
    • Weekend College
  • Tom Woodward ( twoodwar at richmond.edu, 804.289.8258)
    • Emergency Services Management
    • Human Resource Management
    • Paralegal Studies
      
• Terry Dolson – Faculty Development Specialist (804.287.6038)
• Mark Nichols – Lab Group ( mnichols at richmond.edu, 804.287.6877)
• Technology Learning Center [TLC] ( tlc at richmond.edu, 804.289.8772)

Resources

• Blackboard
• Oracle
• Acrobat Connect (Breeze)
• Blogs
  • English 203U
  • Daniel Hocutt
  • Open Wide Look Inside
• Wikis
  • ITI
• Second Life
• Web 2.0
  • Flickr
  • del.icio.us
  • Bloglines or Netvibes
  • Twitter
  • 50 Ways

Faculty Support

• Answering questions
• Connecting with resources
• Coming to class

Faculty Development

• Technology overviews and workshops
  • Learning 2008 (web site coming soon)
  • NITLE workshops: Visual Literacy, Web Mapping
• Instructional workshops – suggestions to Pat Brown
• One-on-one teaching consultations – contact Terry Dolson
• School-specific programs