Mike Roy’s Notes from  BUCKNELL DIGITAL SCHOLARSHIP CONFERENCE

Collaborating Digitally: Engaging Students in Faculty Research, 14-16 November 2014

https://dsconf.blogs.bucknell.edu/

#BUDSC14 on twitter

 

“Performing Collaborative Scholarship”

Chris Long (Pennsylvania State University)

 

Of particular interest to me in Long’s talk were

• His Digital Dialogue (http://www.cplong.org/digital-dialogue/ ) project , which “dedicated to cultivating the excellences of dialogue in a digital age. Colleagues are invited on the podcast to discuss their work, and in the course of the dialogue, my own scholarship is enriched. Please join the Digital Dialogue by participating on this blog.”
• His upcoming publication (with Oxford) of Public Philosophy Journal (http://publicphilosophyjournal.org/ ) which is exploring how to allow faculty who participate in useful ways in the peer-review process to receive credit for their contributions.
• He also had queued up tweets that he then live-tweeted, which was a first: live tweeting your own talk.

 

Session One: Multi-modal Narratives and Cultural Engagement,

 

• Visualizing Holocaust Testimony Anne Knowles and Laura Strom (Middlebury College) Anne and Laura showed some of the innovative maps that they have created as part of their work together, and also talked a great deal about their collaborative research process.

• Building Communities of Collaborators at Our Marathon: The Boston Bombing Digital Archive Alicia Peaker (Middlebury College) and Joanne DeCaro (Northeastern University)  Alicia and Joanne talked about the process of creating their archive, with a particular emphasis on the outreach process, including many sessions in libraries across Boston.

• Archiving Hindu Gaya: Temples, Shrines and Images of a Sacred Center in India Abhishek Amar and Lauren Scutt (Hamilton College)Abhishek and Lauren talked about the collaborative process of creating their archive, with a particular emphasis on the challenges of creating a robust metadata schema.

 

 

Taken together, the three sessions provide useful models for how to meaningfully engage undergraduates in research projects that both contribute to a larger research effort, but also provide the individual student with an authentic opportunity to do their own original research.

Session Two:  Faculty-Student Partnerships in the Hybrid Classroom,

 

• Foreign Language Flipped Classrooms – Scaffolding Grammar Knowledge Anytime, Anywhere Ching-Hsuan Wu (Ohio Wesleyan University) Professor Wu demonstrated the videos she created as part of her ambitious effort to ‘flip’ the Chinese language classroom, showing how by moving grammar instruction to outside the classroom, she is able to provide more time for higher-value, interactive activities during class.

• Teaching Presence on the Rise: Engaging Undergraduate Students in Online Courses Kim Lacey and James Bowers (Saginaw Valley State) Kim and James discussed how their online teaching can be as or even more engaging as traditonal face to face instruction, the challenges they face with their faculty even in the face of compelling evidence in favor of this method, and the realities of how this approach is more labor intensive than face to face instruction.

• Bringing Bank Street’s Progressive Pedagogy to iTunes U: A Collaborative Effort Across the College Steven Goss and Lindsey Wyckoff (Bank Street College of Education) Steven and Lindsey discussed their efforts to use  iTunes U as a platform for sharing resources within Bank Street’s archive as well as to promote other on-line resources.

• An Inquiry-Driven Classroom: Letting the Students Lead the Way Paul Bond (University of Pittsburgh-Johnstown) Paul discussed the course Computer Science 104 (also known as “The Internet Course”) taught by Paul and Jim Groom at the University of Mary Washington.

 

 

While this session might not have been quite as on topic in terms of lessons for us as we engage in our digital liberal arts efforts, it was still useful to hear faculty and librarians reflect on how these experimental efforts in these new modes of teaching are changing their attitudes.

Keynote: “Researching Out Loud: Public Scholarship as a Process of Publishing Before and After Publishing”

Zeynep Tufekci (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) http://technosociology.org/

 

Zeynep’s work on TechnoSociology was fascinating as she reflected on how her work studying the intersection of technology, and in particular social media, and social movements, transformed her thinking about the role of public writing and scholarship. As an untenured professor, it was revealing to hear her talk about how she wrestles with how to balance her time between her tweeting and blogging and her ‘traditional’ scholarship.

 

Session Three: Institutional Models for Digital Scholarship and Collaboration

 

 

• Undergraduate Digital Scholarship: CLASS as a Model for Digital Humanities Scholarship in the Liberal Arts Janet Thomas Simons, Gregory Lord and Kerri Grimaldi (Hamilton College) Janet, Gregory, and Kerri shared how Hamilton’s approach to managing digital humanities projects has evolved over time, with a focus on sustainability and in creating a meaningful experience for the student.

• Collaboration, Not Chaos: Managing Collaborative Project Work Mike Zarafonetis and Laurie Allen (Haverford College) Mike and Laurie discussed Haverford’s efforts in the digital scholarship field.

• Collaboration and Outreach through the Center for Digital Scholarship at the University of Notre Dame Matthew Sisk and Alexander Papson (University of Notre Dame) Matthew and Alexander shared Notre Dame’s recently formed digital scholarship project, and discussed how at a larger institution this is complicated by ‘competing’ departments offering similar services.

• Long-Distance Dedication: Consortial Collaboration at Scale Jacob Heil (The Five Colleges of Ohio) Jacob discussed his role in promoting and supporting collaborations across the Ohio Five Colleges.

• Imagining the Global: Digital Field Scholarship on Global Themes in the Northwest Five Consortium Jim Proctor (Lewis & Clark College) Jim discussed his efforts to bring together the work on five campuses through a shared website.

 

 

This session was useful as we embark on building up our own capacity to do this work, as it provided insights and connections with individuals, individual schools, and consortial efforts to develop DS programs that are sustainable, and provide meaningful experiences for undergraduates. It also points to the real challenges in developing sufficient technical and methodological expertise on any one campus.

Public Digital Scholarship: Engaging Faculty in Student Research Benjamin Rowles, Adam Haley and Chris Long (Penn State)

 

Ben talked about his research project of building a hub on the topic of Internet Trolls ( http://thetrollbridge.net/ ) , and what he learned about doing scholarship through this process. Adam discussed what he learned when he taught  ‘unclass’ at Penn State during the summer where he was not paid and the students received no credit and did not pay tuition. Chris talked about the larger liberal arts and honors college frameworks at Penn State in which Ben and Adam’s work took place. There was some very real concern about the implications of Haley ‘teaching for free’ and Haley said that while it was a great experience, he would not and could not repeat it. Ben’s work did not strike me as scholarship per se; it seemed like it was a very helpful collection of resources and links, and that he learned a great deal and developed a great network of connections, but I wondered whether there was an argument to be found within the work.

Overall

The big themes and questions that I came away with upon reflecting on this experience are

 

1. How do we meaningfully engage students in our digital liberal arts efforts so that they gain authentic research experiences through these efforts?
2. How do we broker the gaps between current scholarly practices and some of these more public forms of scholarship for which there are not as many time-tested models?
3. What is the role of public engagement in our efforts?
4. How might we collaborate within and across institutions so that we are not all re-inventing the wheel? What are the necessary conditions to support this sort of collaboration?
5. Do digital scholarship efforts overlap with other new modes of teaching (on-line, flipped) and if so, how?

After years (really, over a decade) of kicking these thoughts around, I’ve finally published my thoughts on the challenges of born-digital scholarship in a world that values tradition, legibility, and durability over innovation.

You can find it at  http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/linking-thinking-addressing-and-assessing-scholarship-digital-era 

It isn’t the final word, but it is nice to have this off my chest and into circulation.

I enjoyed Middlebury’s own Laurie Essig’s recent Chron article Profs Fail iEtiquette 101 which makes many useful points about the evolution of manners and good taste over time, but also about the mounting evidence that multi-tasking is actually not possible, and that it largely results in mediocre or worse results all around.

 

Charles Henry, the President of the Council of Library and Information Resources (aka CLIR) visited Middlebury last week to give a talk about how the future of higher education is being disrupted by a set of major national and international initiatives that collectively bring both promise and challenges to the existing system of teaching, learning, and scholarly communication.

The projects and initiatives he highlighted included the following:

• National Endowment for the Humanities Digging Into Data
  http://www.diggingintodata.org/
  The projects supported by NEH explore what happens when humanists apply various algorithmic and more importantly collaborative approaches to research in fields that have up to this point been mostly been pursued as solitary scholarly inquiries of an individual mind interacting with a culturally significant work.
• Hathi Trust
  http://www.hathitrust.org/
  This digital library brings forward a significant collection of texts that, once/if copyright issues are resolved, provide scholars and students with access to a treasure trove of materials that (see digging into data above) promote whole new ways of thinking about teaching and inquiry.
• Digital Public Library of America
  http://dp.la/
  This audacious project proposes to take the democratic impulses of our bricks and mortar public libraries and extend them to the internet, providing the general public (and yes, the general public includes the scholarly community) with access to the cultural, artistic, and historical record of our nation and beyond.
• Europeana
  http://www.europeana.eu/portal/
  See above, and apply to the culture, art, and history of Europe. Now imagine these two projects merged.

• Digital Preservation Network
  http://digitalpreservationnetwork.wordpress.com/
  A completely digital system requires checks and balances to assure that our archives and our systems of record are reliable, robust, and durable over the long-haul, with the long-haul being measured not in years but in centuries.
• Linked Open Data
  http://linkeddata.org/
  New ways to publish data using open meta-data standards allow for inquiry and discovery that may make blush the blunt instruments of google and its brethren.

• Semantic Web
  http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Main_Page
  Connected to projects to promote linked open data, the semantic web proposes data structures that enable new modes of discovery, analysis, and correlation that rely less on serendipity, and more on the ability of networked computers to communicate with each other independent of human intervention.
• Data Curation
  http://www.clir.org/initiatives-partnerships/data-curation
  As we move increasingly to an all-digital world of scholarly communication, there is a growing need to establish sustainable methods for providing long-term curation of research data. (See digging into data above.)
• Anvil
  http://www.nitle.org/live/news/195-clir-and-nitle-to-launch-digital-academic
  Anvil is a national effort to help the world of academic publishing think through how to support the seemingly inevitable transition from print to screen, from analog to digital, and in so doing, both embracing the real benefits of the digital platform without completely discarding the traditions and benefits of the previous system of scholarly communication.

• Internet 2
  http://www.internet2.edu/
  Once just a way to provide more bandwidth and higher quality network services, Internet 2 of late has become a very interesting way for the higher ed community to aggregate needs and to negotiate very favorable rates for commercial services.

• Kuali
  http://kuali.org/
  Kualia is an effort to develep an open-source/community-source alternative to commercial ERP (e.g. Banner, PeopleSoft) that has the potential to provide Higher Education with a way to improve administrative efficiency at greatly reduced cost.

Each of the eleven topics in and of themselves are important and pose important questions for us as we think through our own local technology and library strategies. More provocative, and potentially far more disruptive, is to think (as Chuck encouraged us to do)  about how all of these seemingly disconnected trends might connect with one another to enable a whole new ecosystem of teaching, learning, inquiry, and scholarly communication. How might such a system allow us to provide to our faculty and students new services, improved access to resources, new platforms for scholarly communication and collaboration? What role if any might we play in helping to ensure that these transformations do not cause us to abandon that which is essential to our identities? What can we do to help this brave new world be a world that we want to be part of?

It is increasingly clear that the most important work is happening not on individual campuses, but rather as part of consortial projects, or as part of projects spear-headed by entities such as NSF or NEH. The lesson I took away from my time spent talking with Chuck about all of these complex topics is that the future lies in collaboration, innovation, and working at a scale that most schools can not sustain on their own. Unlike other nations with far more influential national systems of education, we live in a country that lacks a tradition of thinking about education (or libraries) at a national level. To a certain degree this consigns visions of a unified and open system to just another idealistic pipe-dream. On the other hand, the entrepreneurial and opportunistic environment that our national non-system of higher education presents may in fact in the end allow for creative and productive disruption to carry the day.

One of the big differences for me in moving to Vermont a few years ago is that I have a social life that is far more intermingled with my professional life than my pre-Vermont social life. For better and worse, this is one of the features of living in a small town where a great deal of the social life revolves around events at the College.

Yesterday our men’s and women’s basketball teams played Williams. I was in the stands with my nine year old boy, sitting next to my doctor and one of my colleagues in the college administration. We noticed that all of the coaches were wearing suits and sneakers. I asked my doctor, my colleague, and my son if they knew why this might be, and they had no idea. Despite the fact that the coach’s wife (also a colleague and the mother of my older son’s girlfriend) was but three rows away, I decided the simplest way to get an answer was to turn to twitter. I posted:

Now it was time to wait to see if the Twitterverse would provide an answer. As the game progressed, I would check my phone during timeouts to see what was up. Now it turns out that the network of people who follow me on Twitter is not the network of people who pay much attention to Division Three College basketball, and so I came up empty on that question.

However, I did happen to catch on to the fact that MiddTwitt was live tweeting the game in her inimitable style. She posted at one point

Now being a sweatshirt-clad and balding Vermonter that happened to have brought  a nine-year old to the game, I laughed out loud and passed my phone around to my friends, who really didn’t get it, because they don’t follow Twitter to begin with, and haven’t been following MiddTwitt and her hilarious efforts to find love in Vermont during J-term.

The very next morning I get an email that had been forwarded to the College from a firm that was looking to help us out with our social media strategy. I will confess that I have not been particularly involved in developing the College’s social media strategy. While there are those within LIS who work closely with our colleagues in Communications to think about this, I have taken at best only a passing interest. I had been thinking (mistakenly)  that social media practices mostly take place on somebody else’s infrastructure, and don’t really impact our core duties. As a result, while we may need a College strategy, we don’t really need to have an IT strategy for social media. Like I said, this was not the most strategic way of thinking about this.

Upon reflection, it is clear that the entire College, including and perhaps especially LIS, needs to think through how we want to engage with social media: twitter, facebook, youtube, foursquare, wikipedia, and the list goes on. How can these platforms be used to help us achieve our mission of producing liberally educated leader/citizens ready and willing to engage the challenges and opportunities of a world that is rapidly changing? How do we use these platforms to attract and retain great faculty, students, and staff? To ensure that the curriculum remains both rooted in the tradition of the liberal arts and yet dynamic and adapting to new disciplines and new ways of approaching traditional disciplines? To engage our alumni, parents, and friends in the mission of the College?

How do we build these networks? How do we challenge our academic and administrative colleagues to engage in these sorts of questions and to continue their experiments with how this can help us more effectively communicate, collaborate, and educate ourselves and others? How do we measure the effectiveness of our various efforts so that we can learn and improve? And as importantly, how do we balance these on-screen efforts with our efforts to build community in what William Gibson calls meatspace?

As I think back on using Twitter at the basketball game, I wonder what my experience of the actual game might have been had the Twitter backchannel been more active. What happens to communal activities when many or most of the audience is both in the stadium but also on-line? The same issues, challenges, and opportunities of technology in the classroom are bleeding over into all of our other social events. There are no simple answers to these questions. But we need to keep asking them, in order to shape our practices to help make sure that we don’t create unintended effects by chasing after every new technology simply because it is new, or ignoring important new platforms because they are clearly threatening to the status quo.

(And it turns out that the coaches wearing sneakers was part of a national ‘coaches versus cancer’ event organized by the National Association of Basketball Coaches. The hashtag is #coachesversuscancer . )

 

 

 

 

Here’s a start to my blog, which will serve as a way to provide me (and whoever else might find such things interesting) access to all the various things that I’m working on or thinking about. Topics that I’m already composing in my head include: the future of word processing, the cult(ure) of print, email and the never ending workday, the convergence of time and project management. It’s not clear yet how often I’ll feel compelled to write in this space, nor exactly who I think the audience might be for this other than myself.