Internationalizing Web Literacy E-Book Project Crowdsourcing Translations

Written by Alice Wu, Globe Multilingual Services

As we reported in the late June edition of the DIRT the Office of Digital Learning & Inquiry is partnering with Middlebury Institute’s Globe Multilingual Services to internationalize (translate and localize) Mike Caulfield’s open source e-book, Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers. The target languages include: French, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, and Ukrainian. The final translations will be uploaded to Pressbooks, the site where the current English version of the book is being hosted.

Since the beginning of the fall semester, the Globe team has been busy recruiting volunteer translators from language schools across the U.S. and abroad. The response from universities has been enthusiastic, and the team is planning to ramp up recruitment even further moving into December. The team recently set up an instance of their open source crowdsourcing platform for translation and they are currently testing a multilingual WordPress site using the WPML multilingual plugin to enable content availability in multiple languages.

The team has also secured a grant from Middlebury to host translation nights at the Institute starting November 26. “Translation Night at MIIS” will be a weekly gathering where graduate student translators will contribute translations to the Web Literacy project while enjoying pizza.

Web Literacy’s Globe team includes a diverse group of graduate students in the Translation and Localization Management Program (TLM) at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. Their roles are as follows:

Alice: Account Manager, Chinese Project Manager
Nika: Marketing Manager, French Project Manager
Jessica: Technical Lead, Italian and Spanish Project Manager
Alina: Terminology Manager, Ukrainian Project Manager

Members are responsible for managing all aspects of the project including logistics and technical issues while the project managers for specific languages recruit talent for their respective languages, domestically and abroad.

For more detailed project updates, see the team’s Facebook page, or get in touch with Marketing Manager, Nika Allahverdi [nallahverdi at miis.edu]

Second Edition of “Small Moves” Instructional Design Blog Series by Heather Stafford

Heather Stafford continues her blog series to dig deeper into some of the small moves that were discussed during her October 25th online workshop ‘Student-Centered Course Design Using Canvas.’ In the series Heather shares activities and design elements that faculty can implement to amplify connectivity of a class.

In the second edition of the series, Heather features the use of multimedia and interactive discussion tools in Canvas to build social capital among and with students. Keep an eye out for future posts in the series in coming weeks.

Librarian Presence in Canvas

Written by Kristen Cardoso and Bob Cole

As Middlebury Institute’s User Experience Librarian, Kristen Cardoso is passionate about improving learning experience for graduate students in Monterey. With the Institute moving towards developing more hybrid and online short-term programs, Kristen and her colleagues have begun thinking about how the Institute’s library could best serve students who may be away from campus. She notes, “…my colleagues and I have done a lot to improve the library’s physical spaces for students; however, our user experience work with regards to the library’s digital spaces have been mostly limited to our website and the library catalog.” Library staff help students through email and over the phone (and very rarely, even through their Facebook page). To transform Library services, she adds “…we knew we were going to have to find a way to provide online the warm, welcoming, and personal service that we currently offer in person.”

After discussing the idea and the platform requirement for having librarians embedded into Canvas courses with Bob Cole, Kristen agreed to run a mini-pilot with the two sections of EDUC 8510: Educational Research Methods, currently being taught by Netta Avineri and Deniz Ortactepe. The pilot started about mid-way through the semester, but so far, the results are encouraging. Kristen began by posting an announcement in one section’s Canvas site and posting to the discussion board in the other, and then sending out an email through Canvas to everyone in both sections. Kristen also posted a brief instructional video and created a Library Resources & Tips folder.

Acknowledging the positive response to her virtual presence in the courses, Kristen reports that “several students responded to my presence in Canvas, although most of them chose to come and see me in person for help! I’ve helped several students with APA formatting, using our databases, and writing a literature review.” After checking in with the professors, they decided there would be value to also visit the class in-person. This connection led to good discussions about open access publishing and citing sources using tools like Zotero. In the future, Kristen thinks that embedding librarians into Canvas courses from the beginning of the term could be really beneficial and create opportunities for librarians to connect with students taking classes in Monterey or remotely. Inspired by DLINQ’s recent Teaching Online & Hybrid conversation series event on humanizing online learning, one idea Kristen would recommend to further establish librarian presence would be the addition of a personal, introductory video so students can get to know her.

Dig Deeper:

“If you see a whole thing – it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives… But up close a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin, author

Featured Image by Oli Gibbs on Unsplash

The Shape of Gratitude

The weekly DIRT news and updates is on brief hiatus this week as the Middlebury community in the United States takes a breath to gather with friends and family in recognition of Thanksgiving. In our monthly all hands meeting last week we created a little space before we said goodbye for team members to channel their inner five year old. There were smiles and laughter across our web conference as we traced our hands and outfitted our gratitude turkeys with balloons, hearts, bandanas, hashtags, hats, stars, tails, and feathers. There’s a lot going on in the world right now. Wherever you are, we hope you too find some time to reflect on and share the many shapes that gratitude takes in your life. See you next Tuesday!

Featured Image by Pro Church Media on Unsplash

“Defense Against the Digital Dark Arts”, Prototyping Conversations on Privacy and Security

Written by Joe Antonioli and Amy Slay

Do you know who has your data? What do companies know about you? Who are they sharing it with? How are they keeping it secure? Recently, a number of Middlebury faculty and staff joined the INTD 0254a Innovation in Action: Design Thinking class for a discussion titled “Defense Against the Digital Dark Arts” led by DLINQ staff Joe Antonioli and Amy Slay. The pilot conversation, informed and inspired by DLINQ’s 2018 Digital Detox and attendance at the 2018 Digital Pedagogy Lab immersive course on Access, Privacy, and Practice, took a look at personal data privacy and security, and the information we share when we communicate using the web. Some of this information we provide when we use social media sites. Other information is extracted from us via pervasive tracking, usually without our knowledge. To better understand the magnitude and impact of tracking on the web, we explored a number of visualization tools including:

Ghostery – a browser extension that helps you identify and block trackers.
Lightbeam – a browser extension that creates an interactive visual of how trackers follow you as you browse the web, and the relationships between trackers.
Am I Unique? – this website helps you understand your device’s uniquely identifiable fingerprint.

The conversation concluded with a handful of tips for safer habits that could be used without drastically changing our lives. Our hope is that this initial conversation will serve as a model as we engage the broader Middlebury community in the conversation.

Related posts:

3 Ideas – Digital Pedagogy Lab 2018 Reflections
Access, Privacy, and Practice — Reflections on Digital Pedagogy Lab, 2018

Heather Stafford Kicks Off  “Small Moves” Instructional Design Blog Series

Written by Bob Cole

Heather Stafford is launching a blog series to dig deeper into some of the small moves that were discussed during her October 26th online workshop ‘Student-Centered Course Design Using Canvas.’ In the series Heather plans to share some of the activities and design elements that faculty can implement in class to amplify the connectivity of a class.

In the first edition of her series, Heather suggests that a screen captured virtual video tour of a course Canvas site can be a very effective extension of a course syllabus creating opportunities for instructors to establish teacher presence before a course meets for the first time and also to communicate course expectations. Keep an eye out for future posts in the series in coming weeks.

Documenting Content Based Instruction Project Update

Written by Jason Martel

In a late-May installment of The DIRT, Bob Cole wrote about a brewing collaboration between DLINQ and Jason Martel, TESOL/TFL Assistant Professor and Associate Director of Middlebury Institute’s Summer Intensive Language Programs (SILP). The goal of the project was to create multimedia artifacts that showcase the Middlebury Institute’s expertise in content-based instruction (CBI), an approach to language teaching that involves the simultaneous learning of language and non-linguistic content like cultural studies, environmental issues, and current events. Bob and DLINQ multimedia specialist Mark Basse met with Jason from SILP during the spring semester to set terms of partnership and an initial timeline for the project.

We are happy to report that the project is well on its way to meeting its goal! During the Monterey summer term, three SILP instructors agreed to having their language teaching documented: Claire Eagle in French, Vita Kogan in Russian, and Gabriel Guillen in Spanish. In preparation, each instructor was invited to sit down with Jason for a thirty-minute recorded interview during which they discussed their experiences with and beliefs about CBI. During September and October, Claire, Vita, and Gabi reviewed the raw video footage that Mark captured to identify significant instructional moves and weave together coherent representations of their lessons. This week, Mark has received their outlines and has begun the task of editing the annotated segments into a coherent whole. The next step will be to finalize and review the videos – both the classroom lessons and interviews – so that they can be shared publicly on the SILP website.

It is our hope that these videos will be helpful tools for the foreign language teacher education community. For example, we envision foreign language methods instructors using them for observational analysis in class and shown as models of effective teaching practice in their courses. We are grateful to DLINQ for helping us turn this idea into a reality!

Dig Deeper:

“Sunflowers end up facing the sun, but they go through a lot of dirt to find their way there.”
― J.R. Rim, author

Featured Image by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

October 26th Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon Makes Dent in Newspaper Data Voids Written by Bob Cole A brief note of gratitude to the approximately thirty faculty, staff, and students who joined us [ … ]