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Trip report Syllabus 2004 was held in San Francisco July 19th – July 22nd. The conference’s theme was “A Bridge to the Future: Technologies to Connect the Campus.” Syllabus2004 was billed as conference whose target audience was “administrators, IT professionals and faculty who want to explore the application of information technology in higher education institutions and discover how new media are best integrated into the teaching and learning process.” I found the keynotes and most of the panel and breakout sessions well-prepared, on-target, and highly interesting. What follows are my highlights from the conference. The opening keynote was the ubiquitous Dr. Clifford Lynch. As executive director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) I’ve heard Lynch speak at ALA, CNI, and Educause meetings. He is brilliant and attuned to many of the issues that we are following. His keynote address, entitled “Digital Learning Cultures in the Information Landscape,” got the conference off to an excellent start. Lynch joked that he had toyed with an alternate title for his keynote: “An Innocent's Adventure in the Land of Instructional Technology,” and drew upon the many distinct cultures that he says have evolved around IT-enabled learning. Having spent some time recently in the UK, he told us that in the UK they refer to the “virtual learning environment” a phrase that he likes because he finds it more evocative than descriptions such as “online learning.” Echoing events reported in a recent article in the Chronicle of Education1. Lynch said that it is tough to get object repositories going and that they are having less impact than we had hoped for in the teaching arena. He based his comments upon observations coming from his collaborations with IMS and NLII. From this experience, he finds that we are heavily invested in describing these largely granular objects and that the model we have developed is more focused toward individual faculty members than toward institutional objectives. He took the audience through a short history describing lots of incremental evolution in learning systems through the late 1990s. His description of learning management systems coming into our institutions “a little stealthfully” but rapidly becoming institutionalized fit my memory of how Martin Frické in SIRLS was the UA campus leader in using WebCT and in what seems a short timeframe WebCT, Blackboard, Desire2Learn, and Moodle have all become important edtech tools across campus. Lynch noted that actual use, especially in the early days of adopting the LMS, was often quite limited but that broad uses have evolved over recent years. Those studying these events find that students like having resources “up” and that administratively roll-out was faster than having policies to manage these systems. Licensing of e-text, he observes, has grown to include many types of resources. Today, he asked if our institutional repositories should be collecting local faculty work and recording the intellectual and social life of the campus. He encouraged the audience to read the January 2003 NSF report Revolutionizing Science and Technology Through Cyberinfrasturcture chaired by Dan Atkins a professor in the University of Michigan’s School of Information and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Among other things, Atkins report addressed the use of technology to facilitate scholarly communication. Lynch called for the creation of more discovery-based learning environments and suggested that the LMS should not be a closed space but should foster collaborative learning spaces. This is a concept that underlies the SAKAI project, as he understands it. (Duffy Gillman from the UA’s Learning Technologies Center is working on SAKAI and recently attended its meeting in Denver.) Lynch then turned his attention to discussing relationships. “Where do our LMS fit and what are the interfaces?” he asked. It is in this context that libraries, organizations that he said have largely been ignoring learning management systems, turned their attention to exploring roles and responsibilities. Lynch said one reason this happened was that faculty wanted to integrate material they captured into course environments. And a result of this interaction was that we found that our institutional authentication systems lacked appropriate mechanisms. LMS vendors, then started to license content and this got the librarians attention. It has led to what Lynch called the “Balkanization of the acquisition of digital content.” In terms of the big issues around our learning management systems are solutions to questions like who to involve, who owns what responsibilities, what is exportable, and what do we want to keep. In addition, Lynch ask how do we document teaching? Teaching is, after all, the key thing to our intellectual being in the academy. One approach is to develop e-portfolios for faculty and students. In the process we will create a record for the institution. However, he asked rhetorically, if we are keeping faith with our students can we keep their notes online for a long period of time. He quipped that some political candidate could have something that she/he wrote 30 years earlier in a listserv or discussion forum or blog drudged up. Another broad question to explore is what else can be done with our learning management systems? Perhaps the LMS can become a new form of scholarly communication. Within this framework we need to recognize and address the lifecycles within our courses. Courses are a complex multipart object. Who owns the course? What do we do about course sites that include external, licensed documents? What becomes of student contributions? What policies do we need to govern their use? How do we represent and tag these courses? Lynch said that the current metadata for learning objects is not useful for doing this. An important issue focuses on access. How public are these courses? In fact, Lynch said, we should be articulating policies to the university community about our use and treatment of these digital materials. Is it a record, a scholarly object, or a learning object? Lynch concluded by saying that he believes we have entered a very different landscape and that our challenge is to break down the silos. The LMS and scholarly communication environments are at the core. Tuesday morning’s keynote address was given by Dr. Joel Smith, Vice Provost and CIO at Carnegie Mellon University. The title of his keynote address was “Cognitively Informed Online Course Design” and focused on CMU’s Open Learning Initiative (OLI), described as “a new approach to making web-based courses openly available to any individual learner.” Dr. Smith reported that the sciences of learning have grown greatly over the past 30 years. The neurosciences, for example, are telling us more about how people learn. Still we struggle to move what we have learned into our applications. Accomplishing this is what he called “cognitively informed.” To be cognitively informed, we need three elements in place: 1) theory-based, 2) empirically-evaluated, and 3) iteratively improved. This stands in sharp contrast to much of our instruction which is “intuitively designed.” Smith spoke of the “expert’s blind spot” which makes us less able to teach novices. He reported on a study that asked elementary, middle and high school teachers to solve basic algebra problems. The results showed that high school algebra teachers did poorly at solving these problems while those more removed, such as teachers in elementary and middle schools, did much better. This was an example of how, as experts, we can become more involved in our specialties at the expense the basics. The implication is that we then are not properly teaching our students the skills they need to succeed. As many of us who are engaged in online instruction have learned, online instruction is much more challenging than teaching in a traditional classroom or even hybrid model. Smith says this points to our need for more cognitively informed design in our online learning environments. He suggested a team approach and that we should accept reuse when learning outcomes indicate better performance by students. Teaching, he said, is not a solo sport. His team includes cognitive experts, cognitive scientists, human-computer interaction experts, design experts, programmers, and a project manager to keep everyone on track and to task. To illustrate cognitively informed instruction, Smith demoed different modules from StatTutor, a statistics course developed at CMU. A key learning that he reported is the need to keep dropping students back into the big picture of understanding statistical ideas and analytical techniques. He referred to “scaffolding” the learning process. Smith concluded his remarks with a discussion of OLI’s overall goal to make these courses openly available to individual learners. From the OLI homepage: “The first courses developed through OLI are introductory courses intended to replace large lecture format courses in Economics, Statistics, Causal Reasoning, and Logic. The courses are highly effective, intellectually challenging sequences of instruction that reflect not just cutting edge technology but the most compelling ideas about pedagogy and content of introductory college level instruction.” CMU will develop a business model and he plans to charge for use on a cost recovery basis. He said that these courses will provide exemplars of “cognitively informed” online courses. Jeffrey Schiller, Network Manager at MIT, was Wednesday’s keynote speaker and his topic was “Can the Internet Survive?” Schiller crafted his talk around the history of the Internet and interspersed it with interesting anecdotal information. He took us from the origins of the Internet when its purpose was to facilitate use of remote computers by researchers to today’s peer-to-peer networks. He described how the Net’s governance has evolved from Arpanet to the NSF to the current free-for-all, which is anything but free … for … all. As MIT’s main network manager, Schiller is intimately familiar with the denial of service attacks we commonly face from spam, worms, and viruses. He talked about the horrendous terms we are all subjected to by ISPs in their Acceptable Use Policies. Anecdotally he told about a time the MIT network was under attack and he traced the source from a major ISP whose user was located in Louisville. He submitted a request to the ISP and got the usual autoreply that they would reply within 24 hours. Instead of waiting, he did some investigating and discovered that it was private user running is own linux server at home and this person was unaware of what was happening. This user was not perpetrating the attack but unwittingly hosting it, as often happens. Schiller called this person on the phone and spent three hours successfully talking him through how to fix the holes in his system. A week later Schiller got a message from the ISP that they terminated that user. Schiller’s point was that this the kind of customer service these ISPs provide, and they can be quite arbitrary and unfair. He concluded with these recommendations.
Thursday’s opening keynote was given by Annie Stunden, CIO at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and it was both fun and informative. Her keynote was entitled “Wandering the Technology Universe,” and gave us a look at where we are at and where we are going. Stunden started work in 1959 as a programmer at SAGE, the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, the first air defense system the U.S. was developing. This was back when mainframes were mainframes and her building was two acres in size and full of these huge, vacuum tube computers. According to the page linked above that I found giving a little history on SAGE, "IBM engineers installed two large, 275-ton computers in the basement of the building." Citing Al Guskin, widely known for his leadership roles and vision for higher education, she asked how can we use technology to transform the academy in positive ways. She began discussing the very complicated infrastructure underneath what we do when using many of our systems. The applications that we commonly use sit on a very complicated and expensive insfrastructure. In fact, she explained, it is not just a local infrastructure but a regional, national, and global infrastructure. Here is my version of her graphic representation of this infrastructure. Incidentally, she has described this representation to non-technical people as “underware” “middleware” and “outterware.” Stunden says that to make this complicated infrastructure work well requires a degree of collaboration that we don’t fully have it. The implication, I think, is that we expose ourselves to more problems trying to make it work than we would otherwise. After this discussion she showed a few leading edge projects from those outer edges of our technology universe. One was the U of Washington’s Project Neptune whose goal is to “establish a regional ocean observatory in the northeast Pacific Ocean. The Project’s 3,000-km network of fiber-optic/power cables will encircle and cross the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate in the northeast Pacific Ocean, an area roughly 500 km by 1,000 km in size.” She says to think of all the people who will be able to access it for learning, teaching and exploring. The only “must” is the infrastructure. Another example of a leading edge project is the Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War and a third she shared is the U of Wisconsin’s Croquet Project. In addition to the keynotes were panel presentations and breakout sessions. Two from Tuesday that I got a good deal out of were “The New Information Frontier – The Personalize Portal,” reporting on Lehigh University’s implementation of SCT’s Luminus platform for its campus portal and “Pushing Technology Into the Background – Services for Useful Collaborations.” The Lehigh presentation described a three-year initiative from the planning and procurement phase to the implementation phase. The presenters demonstrated the campus portal showing how customizable it is for faculty, students, and staff at the university. It interfaces with a number of applications at Lehigh, such as its Blackboard LMS implementation, has scores of channels to different content, can channel RSS feeds, and host daily opinion surveys. They are developing an interface to coming implementation of MyLibrary, a portal-like interface to collections of Internet resources. The project was truly collaborative and involved teams from around Lehigh's campus to address technical issues, content issues, training and project management. It is the sort of product that would be so good to have here at the UA. “Pushing Technology had two excellent speakers. The first was Lonnie Harvel a research scientist in electrical and computer engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology who said that for a learning technology to succeed it must be useful, ubiquitous and sustainable. But his emphasis for this audience was that we must meet the real need of the community of users -- for us our students. We need to understand our students’ motivation to use a learning technology and address the current practices behind meeting those needs. Harvel recommends that we perform more problem-based learning so that we can better understand how information flows. It varies, however, based on the instruction so we should not look for a one size fits all model. He explained a typical information flow as involving assignment, exploration (students Google), reporting, selection/de-selection, merging, and knowledge. William Griswold a professor at UCSD described a program in which HP donated wireless PDAs for use by students in a large class. It was interesting to hear about the dynamics of using these PDAs in class lectures. Students could anonymously ask questions of the professor through the PDAs, the professor could choose which to answer and, if the students felt that the professor should answer one he was ignoring, they could continue to transmit the question until it received the attention they expected. Griswold’s group has developed a software application called ActiveClass that was used, I think, to foster and manage interaction between the students and the instructor. I found a report on the web entitled The ActiveClass Project: Experiments in Encouraging Classroom Participation. Parenthetically, if the topic of fostering discussion in classes is of interest you might look at Brookfeld and Preskill's Discussion As A Way of Teaching: Tools and Techniques for Democratic Classrooms, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, c. 1999. I think there are many relevant ideas in this book and I am exploring applying some to the online environment. Besides these highlights, David Betts and I presented about our experiences using blogs in our classes. Our presentation was very well attended and we got a number of good questions. From the standpoint of Dr. Joel Smith’s call for cognitively informed instruction [1) theory-based, 2) empirically-evaluated, and 3) iteratively improved] our work fits it in a modest manner. The theories behind our use involve sociocultural and constructivist pedagogical theory, we have collected data on student use and attitudes, and have adjusted (or will be adjusting) the use of blogging in subsequent classes based upon the data. [view my powerpoint presentation] Foster, Andrea L. " Papers Wanted: Online Archives Run By Universities Struggle to Attract Material," The Chronicle of Higher Education [from the issue dated] June 25, 2004 <http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v50/i42/42a03701.htm> last accessed 072304. Stuart Glogoff |
