In the interview, I talked about the challenge of developing a mental map of the IndieWeb and all of its pieces and why the pieces are needed and so on. Part of the reason for this difficulty, I think, is that the documentation for IndieWeb is in the form of a wiki which means no one has imposed a structure on the knowledge contained there. There is no linear path through the knowledge. Instead, you follow links and look things up as you need them. This is a good thing in a lot of ways but when you’re getting started in such a technical area with so many pieces, it can be difficult to understand how things fit together.

Chris Aldrich saw Greg’s summary of our interview where he mentioned my comments about the mental map. So Chris created a pencast to explain the hows and whys of the IndieWeb. If, like me, you’ve never heard of a pencast, here’s how Chris describes it: “It’s a technology that has been around for a while courtesy of Livescribe.com digital pens which not only record an audio file of what is being said, but also record penstroke by penstroke what is being written. Even better the audio and the penstrokes are crosslinked, so you can more easily jump around within a lecture or talk.” It’s a really interesting way to present information. I want to investigate it more. And by the way, I’m loving the community of the IndieWeb so far. People are so helpful!

Chris’ explanation helped me to gain a better understanding of how everything fits together and I’ll work on my own explanations as I continue to move forward. In the meantime, Chris taught me about POSSE (Post on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere). I have the JetPack plugin installed which facilitates POSSE. I didn’t realize that before Chris’ explanation. So this is my first post in which I’m not manually copying the URL for the post to Twitter, Facebook, and so on. JetPack will post it to Twitter and Facebook when I publish it on my own site. Very cool!

The book is full of cogent arguments, research summaries, and practical examples. Davidson starts with a history of the last time that higher education was overhauled–the 1850s and 60s. In 1869, Charles Eliot, the young president of Harvard, wrote an essay called “The New Education” for The Atlantic Monthly. In the essay, Eliot argues that the American people are “fighting the wilderness, physical and moral, on the one hand, and on the other are struggling to work out the awful problem of self-government.” The old education, Eliot argues, requires radical transformation to prepare young men for this important work. Eliot and his contemporaries embarked on this radical transformation , succeeding in completely remaking higher education. Taking the title of Eliot’s essay as the title of her book, Cathy Davidson argues that we continue to live by the values, assumptions, processes, and structures implemented by those reformers. But the new education of the late 19th century was designed for an industrial world. Today’s digital world has changed so drastically, Davidson argues, that we are no longer adequately preparing students for it. Davidson lays out her ideas for what we must do to revolutionize higher education to serve the students of today.

Nearly every page of this book contains nuggets of wisdom and truth worth quoting. In a short blog post such as this, it will be difficult to capture the richness of her vision. I’ll try to point out some of her most important observations and recommendations but reading this post will pale in comparison to reading the book.

Davidson’s discussion of the current structures we use to organize what we do–credit hours, semesters, exams at the end of a semester, grades, grade point averages, majors, minors, and so on–was one of the most thought-provoking parts of the book for me. She writes, “Eliot and his colleagues were part of the zeitgeist of industrialization, data-driven scientific methods, quantifiable outcomes, professionalization, specialization, new modes of manufacturing, and new ideas about labor and management.” (p. 36) Many of their ideas about structuring the modern university came from the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor, “whose principal objective was to apply quantifiable or ‘scientific’ measurement to labor to increase economic efficiency and productivity.” (p. 37) (By the way, Taylor was the first professor hired in one of the first business schools in the country–Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business right here in NH.) Taylor’s work focused on quantitative metrics, standardization, and time-and-motion studies, all designed to maximize efficiency of specialized labor. Understanding these roots for our current structures helped me to see that there is nothing “natural” about these structures and this in turn helps to free my thinking from some of those structures.

The third and fourth chapters of the book are called “Against Technophobia” and “Against Technophilia.” As a computer scientist who felt out of place in that field because of my interest in true human-centeredness in our technology development, I couldn’t agree more with these two chapters of the book.

In “Against Technophobia,” Davidson argues that we must incorporate technology into everything we do in higher education. For example, she argues that classroom device bans make no sense. Why would we ban laptops in the classroom when the students live in a world with nearly ubiquitous technology? Instead of banning these tools, our classrooms should make productive use of them. She writes, “It’s odd and even irresponsible that formal education is the one place where we’re not using the devices on which we do our learning all the rest of the time.” (p. 78) She challenges us “to rethink higher education so that our students are digitally literate–so that they understand, gain insight into, and maybe even exert more control over the technologies that have changed and sometimes dominated our lives and will do so even more in the future.” (p. 80) To effectively use technology in a classroom, she continues, the teacher must employ active learning strategies. Often, students have been indoctrinated to expect lectures where they takes notes, pass the class, and never think about the material again. The new education, Davidson writes, requires us to really put the students and their learning at the center. This challenges us all. A true focus on learning “requires more engagement from the student; it also requires more imagination from the faculty than simply standing in front of a lecture hall for a few hours and reciting what you already know.” (p. 86)

On the other hand, in “Against Technophilia,” Davidson warns us to be critical of the idea that technology is a panacea. Technology use for the sake of technology use is not the way to go. In fact, she argues, many of the ways in which technology is imposed upon higher education is actually damaging to student learning. She uses the MOOC craze from about 5 years ago as an example of bad use of technology that was doomed to failure, at least the way it was practiced in nearly every case. In case you were not paying attention to higher education or the news in the early 2010s, a MOOC is a massive open online course. They were supposed to disrupt education and put most colleges and universities out of business. The idea is that “MOOCs deliver ‘courses’ in the form of a sequence of digitized video lectures posted to an interactive Learning Management System … .” (p. 101) Davidson goes on to say (and I agree), “The MOOC pedagogical model of experts pontificating in half-hour videos feels retrograde to me, a digitization of the tired, passive, broadcast model of education, the one-way transmission of information straight from the expert’s mouth to the student’s ear.” (p. 102) Since the early 2010s, MOOCs have failed to live up to the hype and the promise of millions of dollars of venture capital because the vast majority of students failed to learn using this model. Davidson was asked during this time to teach a MOOC and so she decided to try to create one that embraced Seymour Papert‘s ideals of constructionism–student-centered, active learning (which I’ve written about before). The design and implementation of this MOOC were the subject of a series of Chronicle of Higher Education columns, which are worth reading on their own. Davidson’s point in this chapter is that preparing students to live in the digital world means that we have to help them look realistically and critically at technology design and use wherever they encounter it.

The final thing I’ll point out about Davidson’s book is that the last chapter provides “Ten Tips for Transforming Any Classroom for Active, Student-Centered Learning.” She has written about some of these ideas before. I won’t explain all ten of the tips. But the last one from the book is called Public Contribution to Knowledge. Davidson writes, “Students work best when they know their work is for their future beyond school, not just for the test, and when they realize their work contributes. For the last decade, I’ve refused to assign students any term or research project that they do only for me for the purpose of a grade.” I read this idea a few years ago and saw it as a challenge in my own teaching. This simple idea has transformed everything I think about how best to teach my students. My thoughts and skills in meeting this challenge evolve with every class and every assignment. I think this tip is at the core of getting students to own their education. It is the key to helping students change their relationship to knowledge. And I find that very exciting and promising for the “new education.”

There is so much more to think about and write about in this book. I haven’t even mentioned any of the inspiring and enlightening examples she provides. If you read only one book about higher education this year, it should be The New Education.

The real problem is the ad-based business model used by many social media sites. We rely on these sites to help us connect to others, to build community, and we pay with our data. In other words, these sites make money by collecting our data and selling it to advertisers…and to whomever else will pay for it. Like the Trump campaign. This was not a new phenomenon in the 2016 presidential campaign. Shoshana Zuboff wrote about this in The Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization. Nate Couldry wrote about it in The Price of Connection: ‘Surveillance Capitalism’.” Neither of these articles are about solely about Facebook. So where are our #LeaveGoogle, #DeleteInstagram, and #DumpTwitter campaigns?

As I said, I’ve been thinking about this issue for a while now. One of the main reasons that I personally would find it difficult to get rid of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter is because of the community that I find there. From Facebook and Instagram, I learn about the lives of friends and family that I don’t see everyday. And Twitter helps me connect professionally with colleagues whose interests are similar to mine. Some of these colleagues are people that I know in real life. But many are people that I’ve never met. I learn a lot from Twitter about my fields of interest. Five days ago, my friend Robin liked a tweet from someone I had never heard of: @jgmac1106. He asked:

Why do we need a platform at all? Ca’t we use our own websites, #oer markup, and a variety of tools like rss or #indieweb tools while connecting everyone together without the need of any centralized repository? #oer18

This is exactly what I’d been wondering myself and so I had a ready answer. I tweeted:

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I think the thing that a centralized platform gives you that the tools you mention miss is a way to easily discover other people you might want to connect with.

In fact, this short exchange is exactly the kind of discovery and connection I was talking about. I began to follow @jgmac1106 because he was talking about issues that I’m interested in. So I stay on these sites for the community they provide. If we all only published content on our own individual web sites, we wouldn’t be able to easily find others interested in the things we are interested in.

A bit later, he told me about a community that is working on an alternative to the surveillance capitalist online culture–IndieWeb. This community builds tools that allow people to engage with the various social media platforms while owning and controlling their own content on the web. The IndieWeb is a people-focused alternative to the “corporate web”. The IndieWeb web site says:

Your content is yours

When you post something on the web, it should belong to you, not a corporation. Too many companies have gone out of business and lost all of their users’ data. By joining the IndieWeb, your content stays yours and in your control.

You are better connected

Your articles and status messages can go to all services, not just one, allowing you to engage with everyone. Even replies and likes on other services can come back to your site so they’re all in one place.

You are in control

You can post anything you want, in any format you want, with no one monitoring you. In addition, you share simple readable links such as example.com/ideas. These links are permanent and will always work.

For example, @jgmac1106 is Greg McVerry and he owns a web site called  http://jgregorymcverry.com/. On this web site, he has a microblog that is also connected to his Twitter feed. The content on his microblog is duplicated on his Twitter feed. Through the use of some plugins on his site, he can interact with Twitter but capture the content on his own site. Through some other plugins, he can register his site on Micro.blog which is an open web site designed to pull together independent microblogs like Greg’s.

I have spent the last five days working on my own web site (which I’ve owned for a long time) to IndieWebify it. Check it out at cathieleblanc.com. Be warned that I’m in the early stages of setting my IndieWeb site up so things will evolve. This work has inspired me and I’m sure I’ll be writing about these efforts and my thoughts about them as I move forward.

Wicked Problems

April 27^th, 2018, 12:30 to 1:30 at HUB Hage Room

Rachelle Lyons and I will be presenting a workshop on wicked problems for anyone interested in the topic. This will be especially interesting for First Year Seminar instructors.

Additional details can be found here.

What is signature work? Here’s what AAC&U says:

In Signature Work, a student uses his or her cumulative learning to pursue a significant project related to a problem she or he defines. In the project conducted throughout at least one semester, the student takes the lead and produces work that expresses insights and learning gained from the inquiry and demonstrates the skills and knowledge she or he has acquired. Faculty and mentors provide support and guidance.

Signature Work might be pursued in a capstone course or in research conducted across thematically linked courses, or in another field-based activity or internship. It might include practicums, community service, or other experiential learning. It always should include substantial writing, multiple kinds of reflection on learning, and visible results.

This definition of signature work pretty accurately describes the opportunities for students that we at Plymouth State University are trying to create through the cluster initiative. We applied to be part of this free institute, proposing to work on the fourth of President Birx’s Four Tools of Clusters–the General Education capstone experience. Our team was comprised of Gail Mears (the Dean currently responsible for the General Education program), Elisabeth Johnston and Rebecca Noel (two members of the capstone task force), and me (incoming Coordinator of General Education, a new position).

In the morning, we divided ourselves up to attend four of the concurrent sessions in each of two time slots. We convened over lunch to talk about what we learned during those sessions. In the afternoon, we first attended a keynote presentation and then worked on our proposed task (the capstone) as a team with an advisor from an institution that has already been engaging their students in signature work. For me, the afternoon was very helpful.

The keynote was given by Rick Vaz, Director of the recently created Center for Project-Based Learning at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). Even though the Center was only recently created, WPI has been engaging their students in project-based learning for nearly 50 years. Rick told us the story of how projects became central to their undergraduate curriculum and then talked about the findings of a large alumni study that WPI recently completed. The project-based curriculum is described on the WPI web site:

The curriculum features integrative project work across four years, both in the major and in general education, in classrooms, and around the globe at our more than 40 project centers. Under the Plan, students work closely with faculty and each other to develop solutions to real-world problems in their own communities and in communities around the globe. Participating in team and individual research settings, students tackle authentic, open-ended projects under faculty guidance.

Rick explained that many courses at WPI are team taught with both an engineering faculty member and a humanities faculty member. One of the main goals of their project-based curriculum (which they call the WPI Plan–by the way, I’m putting a lot of links in here but I think the one to the WPI Plan is the most interesting) is for students to develop the skills that employers say are most important to them in hiring, skills that a humanities-based education provides excellent opportunities to develop, skills that I’ve written about before. I found the particular emphasis on “Learn How to Learn” to be most exciting because we’ve been talking for a long time at PSU at getting students to “own” their education and one of the Habits of Mind that we have said is important to us is self-regulated learning. The other particular skills that WPI focuses on are: “learn to achieve collaboratively, think creatively, and better communicate your ideas.” These skills are all embedded in PSU’s Habits of Mind. So even though WPI is a different kind of institution than PSU, I think we can learn a lot from them.

A few years ago, WPI distributed a survey to 10,000 of their alums to determine the impact that project-based learning has had on their lives. They received completed surveys from over 2,500 of their alumni (which is a very impressive return rate!). The results were overwhelmingly positive in that the alums attribute much of their post-graduate success to having engaged in these undergraduate projects. Rick presented a lot of different statistical analyses that I don’t have access to at the moment. But no matter how they looked at the responses, it was clear that the focus on project-based learning throughout the undergraduate curriculum is a good thing.

WPI found that two groups of people benefited the most from the projects: women and those who engaged in projects at off-campus sites. These two groups reported bigger benefits from their project participation than did other groups. WPI then drilled down to determine the reasons that some people didn’t do project work off-campus. Not surprisingly, cost was cited as the number one reason. To remove this obstacle to off-campus project work, WPI did some fundraising to develop a fund to allow them to give every student a $5,000 grant for their project work. As a result, students can engage in their project work wherever they like, regardless of their personal resources. This equity of access to these high-impact experiences was something Rick emphasized.

After Rick’s keynote, the four of us on PSU’s team met with faculty from the University of Southern Maine to talk about our project of revising the Integrated Connection course to act as a project-based capstone for the General Education program. They asked us four questions to start our discussion. 1. Where are you now? 2. What obstacles are you facing? 3. What opportunities exist? 4. What are your learning outcomes? The conversation was a good one.

A discussion point that resonated with me was that this capstone course is one of the ways that we ensure that EVERY student has the opportunity to engage in high impact experiences multiple times throughout their time at PSU. I’ve written before that I think that we have always been good at providing high impact experiences for some of our students. But the cluster initiative is exciting precisely because it challenges us to provide multiple high impact experiences for ALL of our students.

A major revelation from the institute is that there are a lot of colleges and universities interested in doing this kind of work. There were 8 institutions at the institute that have already embarked on providing opportunities for student signature work. These 8 acted as advisors for the rest of us. And there were 40 institutions attending to learn more about signature work and its relationship to what we’re trying to do on our campuses. This shows that doing this kind of work is not out of the mainstream. I think that what sets PSU apart is that we are also trying to rearrange our organizational structure to make doing this kind of work (and maybe some more radical things?) easier. More about that in a future post.

The reason this essay called to me is that I’ve been thinking about a new major, a new discipline even, called “experience design.” I started to think about this area after a meeting with George Epstein of the Echo Group in September 2016. With all the other things going on, I haven’t followed up with George but I have done some research to see what other institutions are offering that might be related to this field but as I said in 2016, there are few (none?) undergraduate programs focused on what I think could be a really valuable knowledge and skill set.

Let me clarify what I mean by experience design. (An aside: there is a lot of material available about “user experience design” but that tends to be more narrowly focused on technology interface design than what I’m imagining.) Let me use the Churchill War Rooms in London to explain. The museum is housed in an underground bunker that British leaders used during World War II as a safe(ish) place from which they plotted their war plans. I have no interest in learning about the life of Winston Churchill and very little interest in learning more than I already know about the British experience of World War II. I first went to the War Rooms with a colleague who was planning a travel trip and thought we would spend an hour or two there. We ended up staying for four hours and only left because the museum was closing. The designers of the museum have created a multi-media experience that provides multiple levels of engagement with the facts of Churchill’s life and involvement with the British war effort. There are artifacts from Churchill’s life (diaries, letters, documentary footage, possessions) with didactic materials to explain the importance of each. But that’s the stuff of a standard historical museum. This museum also uses technology in really interesting ways to present material at varying levels of detail. For example, there is a large flat table whose surface is a touchscreen. On the screen is a timeline of Churchill’s life with a “folder” for each year. When you look at the overall timeline, you get a broad view of Churchill’s life. But if you touch a particular year, you get details about what he was doing in each month of that year. If you then touch a particular month, you see digital reproductions of artifacts related to that month with a nearly daily account of his life. As I said, I’m not particularly interested in Winston Churchill. But I found this presentation of his life was fascinating, giving me as much or as little detail as I wanted. Other parts of the museum have motion-activated sound presentations. For example, if you walk through a particular portion, you might hear authentic recordings of bombing raids. If you stop in that area, you might then see video footage of those same raids along with text explaining what you’re hearing and seeing.

I am describing this museum because it is a very well-designed experience. How does someone learn to do that? But I’m not thinking just of museum experience in this experience design major. Another example that I think about is Plymouth State University’s on-boarding experience for new students. Once a student decides to come to PSU, they will need to choose either a major or to come in as undecided. They will need to choose a dorm, a meal plan, their classes, a roommate (or not). How do we engage students in these processes? The experience begins even before the student sets foot on campus for orientation. For example, last year, we created a Moodle site with video explanations of how to search for classes, what First Year Seminar (FYS) is, how to pick a schedule, and so on. Based on conversations in my sections of FYS this fall, I don’t think this experience was particularly effective. (To me, an effective experience is one that meets the goals of the designer–there’s lots to talk about there!) So I’ve been thinking about how to get current students involved in the design of our orientation experience (starting before new students are on campus) so that we might figure out how to be more effective.

I see a huge potential demand for graduates who understand how to design effective experiences. As I said, I’ve been researching other experience design programs and the field doesn’t even really exist yet. The closest I’ve found are museum studies programs and a few human-centered product design programs. So I was really excited to see the essay in this collection. And it helped me to think more clearly about the program I have in mind.

Because the essay focuses on experience design in the humanities, the authors are especially concerned with opportunities for interpretation. The idea is that audience members attend a cultural event and are given the opportunity to view the event through a variety of interpretive lenses. For them, experience design is about designing “interpretive environments (p. 261)” that enrich the cultural experience for the audience member. One way to do this is to invite “audiences to ‘customize’ an augmented reality exhibition by enabling them to select the kinds of content they prefer …, reorganize content in ways predefined by the app’s designers …, and endorse or ‘share’ content … (p. 260).” The authors go on to say that “technological enhancements to audience experience have numerous features. First, they overlay or operate in parallel to embodied, material experiences. … Second, they communicate expert interpretations of artifacts or events. … Third, at least in some cases, technological enhancements allow audiences to customize and endorse exhibits through their own comments. Fourth, they ask audiences to facilitate the process of engaging a broader public (p. 260-1).” I think teaching students how to incorporate these features into their designs would make for a compelling curriculum.

An additional insight from the authors that I found helpful was: “Experience design gives particular attention to the temporal movement of a participant through an event (p. 262).” The authors suggest using a framework called “the 5Es” to think about how the participant move through the event. The person must be enticed to come to the event. They then enter, experience, and exit the event. Finally, the experience should be extended through things like souvenirs, social media activities, or recordings. If we think about this framework in relation to the PSU orientation experience, we can see that it is useful. For example, if we’re trying to get a student to register for a FYS that they are interested in, we have to entice them to engage with whatever explanatory materials we have created. We have think about what they see first as they engage with those materials, what the actual experience of the materials looks and feels like, and then how they leave those materials. Finally, we need to think about extending their experience with those materials so that they remember which FYS they signed up for and why. Or maybe they extend their experience by signing up for an on-campus orientation session which is designed once again using the 5Es.

Although the essay is geared toward designing the experience of cultural events so that they become interpretive experiences, I think most of the material can be adapted to all types of experiences. This essay makes me feel even more strongly that this emerging discipline warrants our attention as we look for interdisciplinary major that require many existing disciplines to work together.

And it also explains why my latest sabbatical read feels like it was written especially for me at this particular time in my professional life. Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities is a collection of essays written by digital humanities (DH) practitioners and theoreticians that was published January 15, 2018. The essays are organized into five sections: Making and the Humanities; Made By Whom? For Whom?; Making as Inquiry; Making Spaces and Interfaces; and, Making, Justice, Ethics. I’m only going to focus on the first section in this post but there are a couple of the essays later in the book that I plan to write about because they have helped me to think more clearly about some aspect of the cluster initiative in general and pedagogy in General Education in particular.

The book asks the question of what it means to “make” things in the humanities. Because of DH’s focus on technology as a tool for making things, the book is also concerned with the artificial boundaries that we typically draw–between disciplines, between communities of practice, “between thinking and doing, hacking and yacking, writing and building, scholarship and service, creating and critiquing, breaking and repairing, innovation and maintenance, and making and not making (p. 9).” The articulation of these boundaries and their implications was particularly helpful in getting me to think about technology use in new and exciting ways.

The author of the first essay (Julie Thompson Klein in “The Boundary Work of Making in Digital Humanities”) provides a bit of history concerning the dichotomy of thinking versus doing, tracing the distinction back to the Greeks. Plato in particular argued that knowledge is found, not made, “distinguishing discovery of true knowledge from actions producing practical knowledge (p. 22).” Because of this long-standing distinction, DH from the beginning had to confront the higher status given to “interpretation, analysis, and abstraction over fabricating, application, and production (p. 22).” As might be expected, Klein goes on to argue that the working at the boundaries of thinking and doing (what some researchers have called “thinking-through-practice”) “brings the creative practice of design to the center of research, favoring process over product as well as versioning and extensibility over definitive editions and research silos (p. 25).”  The “emergence of making” also “dismantles the dichotomies of thinking versus doing, production versus interpretation, and application versus theory (p. 27).” These ideas appeal to me for a lot of reasons, not least of which is that this seems to me to be the main work that an integrated cluster curriculum is trying to accomplish.

David Staley in “On the ‘Maker Turn’ in the Humanities” provides more context for a turn toward making. He argues that digital humanists will use technology as tools “to fashion and trace new forms of evidence of their readings” of various kinds of texts (p. 32). He provides a definition of “digital humanities” that starts with an examination of what we mean by “humanities.” He acknowledges the challenges of defining the humanities but ultimately settles on a definition proposed by Geoffrey Harpham (p. 23): “The scholarly study of documents and artifacts produced by human beings in the past enables us to see the world from different points of view so that we may better understand ourselves.” Staley goes on to state that “humanists interpret texts, and the evidence of that reading is a written performance (p. 34).” Text is, of course, defined broadly to include pretty much anything that is created by humans. Staley’s argument is that, given the broad definition of texts that humanists interpret, there is no reason to privilege writing (academic writing, in particular) as the mode through which humanists provide evidence of their interpretations.

Staley’s essay is definitely worth a read for anyone who is interested in DH or project-based learning or interdisciplinarity or what we’re trying to do at PSU with integrated clusters. He makes the point that the traditional interpretative texts created by humanists are manufactured objects but we rarely acknowledge their material production. We have templates for what the final product should look like (in the form of guidelines for what constitutes academic writing and persuasive arguments). Digital humanists provide evidence of their interpretations using digital tools, creating interpretations that take forms other than writing. We have few templates for what these artifacts will look like and so we end up spending a lot of time talking about the particular material production of the interpretation.

Staley’s main point is: “In the same way they have expanded not only the definition of a text but also the range of texts to read, humanists may approach the maker turn as an occasion to expand their definition of reading and interpretation by treating creativity as a scholarly act (p. 40).” This feels like a strong justification for project-based learning in classrooms where it has not traditionally had a place.

Several other essays in the collection articulate the affordances provided by digital tools so that we can create different kinds of interpretations than we can with writing alone. Bill Endres, for example, in “A Literacy of Building,” writes, “DH scholars recognize that the digital brings something new to the table and can contribute to answering questions that could not be answered prior to the computer (p. 47).” Endres studies manuscripts and recognizes that “comprehending a text requires more than interpreting its symbolic meaning. … For a manuscript, especially an illuminated one, size, layout, and grandeur are part of its expression, part of the complex layering of embodied knowledge (p. 47).” Like Marshall McLuhan, Endres believes “the medium is the message.” The physical embodiment of the message matters as much as the content of the message. Endres’ DH projects include creating 3D digital representations of manuscripts which “renders the contours of a page and restores an awareness of text as three-dimensional (p. 47).” But unlike the physical page, the digital rendering allows new kinds of exploration of the manuscript. For example, some features of manuscripts such as dry-point glosses (“etched with a stylus but no ink and meant to go unnoticed (p. 49)”) are difficult to see in the original manuscript but digital rendering can highlight them.

I can’t do justice in a short blog post like this to breadth and depth of what I learned about DH from this collection. It is an inspiring set of essays which I think will inform the way I think and talk about project-based learning (especially in the humanities) moving forward. And as I said, there are a couple of essays that I think warrant more exploration and so I probably will be writing about this book again.

Last February, a group of faculty from the Gen Ed Committee, the cluster guides, and one member of the Curriculum Committee attended the Association of American Colleges and Universities‘ (AAC&U) conference on General Education and Assessment. As I wrote at the time, the conference reinforced much of what we had been talking about concerning the role that design thinking could play in our General Education program. At the conference, we also learned about several AAC&U nation-wide initiatives, including the development of the VALUE (Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education) rubrics. Around this time, I also had read Beyond the Skills Gap as part of a reading group which prompted us to start thinking about “habits of mind.” Based on this work, two different groups developed PSU’s habits of mind (which are described in the First Year Seminar’s open educational resource) as the learning outcomes of the General Education program. We also developed a set of benchmarks to assess the habits of mind. These steps were based on the work done by AAC&U and were a great start in figuring out how to assess the Gen Ed program as a whole. The next step is to develop an assessment plan. So I decided to go back to the source of our work to see what steps AAC&U recommends next.

To get me thinking in that direction, I read Assessment That Works: A National Call, A Twenty-First Century Response. Published by the AAC&U, this is a comprehensive guide to the work that the organization has done to create a new kind of assessment framework for liberal education programs like our Gen Ed program. The author, Peggy Maki, writes, “A liberal education helps students develop a sense of social responsibility, as well as strong and transferable intellectual and practical skills such as communication, analytical and problem-solving skills, and a demonstrated ability to apply knowledge and skill in real-world settings (p. 1).”

The underlying goals of the work described in this short book (only 52 pages including appendices) are to “articulate what contemporary higher education institutions commonly expect students to demonstrate as a result of a liberal education (p. 1).” The book describes the process used to develop the national Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) twenty-first century Essential Learning Outcomes. One of the early steps was to survey employers about their needs. One finding of these surveys is that “Today’s students must be able to solve the kinds of complex, unstructured problems that technology cannot solve (p. 5-6).” AAC&U researchers also articulated the kinds of realities faced by today’s colleges and universities that challenge our traditional notions of what a college education looks like. The main finding here is: “The full-time, traditional-aged, white student with ‘acceptable’ standardized test scores who begins and completes a degree at a single institution, following a two- or four-year trajectory, is no longer typical in American higher education (p. 9).” Given the many challenges facing American higher education, the author asks, “Is there an equitable way to certify or credit learning across all higher education institutions and providers that does not compromise the integrity of an individual institution’s curriculum, that helps facilitate transfer and access, and that enables students to develop a coherent understanding of education as something more than checking off courses or credits on the road to a degree? (p. 11)”

In response to this work, AAC&U launched the Greater Expectations Initiative. The goal of the initiative was to determine what all graduates should know and be able to do as a result of a college education. In addition, the initiative sought to clarify how all students could be prepared “to achieve the high levels of expected performance needed to address the emerging demands and challenges arising from the workplace, American society, and globalization (p. 13).” From this work, the LEAP Essential Learning Outcomes and the VALUE rubrics used to assess the outcomes were developed. These have become “a guiding compass for student accomplishment in the twenty-first century. They also have become a guiding compass for students themselves as they seek to connect general education to their majors (p. 15).” This “shared framework for undergraduate liberal learning” is designed to help students understand the value of general education. To further support students’ view that general education is important, the author suggests that students should not be required to complete gen ed “before they begin study in their majors” since that may cause them “to view that body of courses and experiences as an unnecessary roadblock (p. 15).” “Furthermore, holding a general education course hostage as the sole opportunity for students to learn a specific liberal arts outcome, such as quantitative reasoning in a required general education mathematics course, may limit students’ understand of how that outcome is relevant to and can be applied in a range of other contexts (p. 15).” In other words, the LEAP Essential Learning Outcomes should be seen as outcomes of an entire college education, not just of the general education portion of the experience.

What are the LEAP Essential Learning Outcomes? They can be found on the AAC&U web site (here). They include things like excellent written and oral communication, information literacy, teamwork and problem solving, foundations and skills for lifelong learning, and integrative and applied learning. These are the kinds of outcomes that we at PSU based our habits of mind on. The LEAP report has suggestions for how to support student achievement of the Essential Learning Outcomes. The Principles of Excellence, for example, “identify ways to engage students in their learning (p. 16)” and include things like “Immerse all students in analysis, discovery, problem solving, and communication, beginning in school and advancing in college” and “Prepare students for citizenship and work through engaged and guided learning on ‘real-world’ problems.” The report also suggests that we engage students in high-impact practices such as first year seminars, collaborative assignments and projects, and capstone courses and projects. I particularly like the report’s recommendation that we focus on students’ signature work which means that we “prepare all students to complete a substantial cross-disciplinary project in a topic significant to the student and society, as part of the expected pathway to a degree.”

In addition, the report suggests that we engage in “authentic assessment” via the VALUE rubrics or adaptations of them (p. 16). The idea is “to value the results of student assignments that are organically related to the pedagogies, educational practices, and expected outcomes that shape the educational experience to be assessed (p. 17).” This means that we should assess work completed by the student in the course of their studies rather than developing an assessment plan where there is a separate assessment event for the student.

The VALUE rubrics were designed for “institutional-level assessment” so that we can identify and “address patterns of underperformance in student work and to create a program-wide commitment to continuous improvement (p. 18).” When such patterns are identified, faculty should engage in discussion that are “focused, first, on why these patterns occur and, second, on how they can be improved through changes (often systemic) in pedagogy, instruction, course sequencing, or assignment design (p. 18).” In other words, our assessment activities should be focused on improving the environment in which student learning occurs.

The book goes on to provide some examples of how the VALUE rubric approach to assessment can be implemented. This section of the book is in direct opposition to the movement towards standardized testing to determine student learning. The author describes the program at the University of Delaware where they used adapted versions of the VALUE rubrics to score examples of student work. The author says, “In contrast with the direct and indirect costs associated with using standardized tests–purchasing test booklets and Scantron sheets, for example, and covering processing fees–the cost of using VALUE rubrics to score student work was ‘far more modest,’ even after the compensation provided to faculty scorers is taken into account (p. 19).” These costs, she says, “while expensive in terms of faculty time, involve reallocations of internal spending rather than a net outflow of resources (p. 19).” In addition, scoring student work using the rubrics “yielded results that were more useful and actionable than test scores (p. 19).” “Collecting student artifacts was less disruptive than addressing the scheduling and oversight issues related to administering a standardized test (p. 19).” And finally, “The sampling of student work can be expanded or designed purposefully to capture data of specific interest to the faculty and the institution, such as data from first-year students enrolled in multiple sections of a general education course for comparison with data from seniors enrolled in capstone experiences across all majors (p. 19-20).”

Focusing on Essential Learning Outcomes and VALUE rubrics to assess those outcomes allows American higher education to “publicly identify what liberal learning looks like across” our institutions (p. 41). Increasingly, the evidence of student learning is presented in ePortfolios, the medium that “is emerging as the best way to demonstrate a student’s ownership of his or her learning and to document levels of achievement (p. 41).” This approach is valuable to students as well because the rubrics “serve collectively as a compass that can be used to guide them on their educational journey (p. 41).” The use of VALUE rubrics can ease transfers (especially when an articulation agreement is in place) by allowing the focus to be on shared learning outcomes rather than “common or comparable course titles and textbooks (p. 38).”

There is much more of interest in this short book. For example, there are numerous case studies from institutions and groups of institutions about the implementation of the Essential Learning Outcomes and VALUE rubrics. As we move forward with our own assessment plans, I highly recommend that more people read the book. Having done so myself, I feel like we are on a good, proven path for implementing assessment of our General Education program.

Through reading this book, I also learned about AAC&U’s newest initiative, General Education Maps and Markers (GEMS). The initiative’s guiding principles for designing General Education programs seem promising to me. I look forward to learning more about the initiative as we move toward rethinking our program in response to our upcoming assessment of it.

As you might guess, “B is for Belonging” discusses the learning benefits that come from belonging to a community. The authors say, “Belonging is the perception of  being accepted, valued, and included. Belonging can help learning by increasing effort and decreasing negative distracting thoughts (p. 12).”

The authors go on to say, “Learning is social. It takes place in social contexts, such as classrooms and workplaces (p. 13).” Individuals perceive themselves (and others) to be members of various social groups. And when an individual does not feel like they belong to a group associated positively with learning, it can have a negative impact on their own actual learning. For example, when a student doesn’t feel they belong in college, this can have significant negative impacts on their ability to succeed in college, especially when that feeling is reinforced by others (such as an unsupportive teacher). Many teachers are supportive but have a difficult time recognizing that belonging may be an issue for some students. “They never encountered the problem themselves and cannot recognize the student’s anxiety. … Without support for a sense of belonging, there can be a loss of engagement, anxiety, and avoidance (p. 14).”

Another way a sense of belonging can negatively affect learning is through stereotype threat. For example, there is a stereotype that women are not good at math. “Even though the stereotype has no basis in fact, it can still cause the woman to dwell on whether she belongs to the group that does well at math (p. 14).” This distraction takes cognitive resources away from math learning and can lead to poorer performance and learning. Without the anxiety, the woman would do just fine in the math class. “The negative social attribution causes the poor performance, not anything about the woman’s math abilities (p. 14).”

The obvious solution is to help people see that they do belong. How can we do that? The authors suggest two types of interventions: 1. shift the individual’s perceptions about whether they belong, and 2. change the environment and social structure to facilitate social connection and belonging. Any intervention should recognize that individuals belong to multiple social groups and should never ask someone to forego their membership in one group to become part of another.

The main way to shift an individual’s perceptions about whether they belong is to help them “reframe beliefs about their place in a community, particularly when it comes to setbacks. People can misinterpret short-term failure as reflecting that they do not belong, when in fact it may be very common to the group (p. 15).” The authors describe a study (by Walton and Cohen in 2011) in which some first year college students read survey results where seniors described their own struggles with belonging. This one-hour intervention cut the achievement gap for African American students by 79%. The authors mention several other studies that show targeted interventions can make a positive difference in an individual’s performance. For example, Spencer, Steele, and Quinn in 1999 found that telling a group of women that a challenging math test was gender-fair and would not produce differences in performance based on gender resulted in women doing as well as men on the test. Stanford University has published a list of “empirically validated strategies” for reducing  stereotype threat.

The second strategy for improving students’ sense of belonging involves changing the environment. “This can occur at the level of the whole classroom, the relationship between student and teacher, and the relationships among students (p. 17).” Engaging the entire class in the development of shared classroom goals, norms, and values can increase individual students’ sense of belonging to that classroom. Research (Goodenow in 1993; Osterman in 2000) shows that a caring relationship between teacher and student increases the student’s sense of belonging. To me, the most surprising study that the authors mention is one by Master and Walton in 2013. Their work showed that just the perception of belonging to a group increased the motivation and persistence for learning among preschoolers. Identifying with the group “increased persistence, even though the children never saw any other members of the group (p. 19).” Walton, Cohen, Cwir, and Spencer showed similar results for adults in a 2012 study.

Based on the National Survey of Student Engagement results (which I previously wrote about), I think PSU seniors have developed a sense of belonging at the University. I’m interested in how we can create that sense of belonging in our first year students. As I said earlier, Residential Life is thinking about ways to create learning communities within the dorms. I think this is a great step. But I’m also interested in thinking about what instructors can do in their individual classrooms to create community. Some departments work hard to create a sense of community for their majors, both in their introductory classes and outside of the classroom. The First Year Seminar Fellows talked about this quite a bit as we were preparing our sections to be taught this year. I think these are also important steps. But I also think we are missing an opportunity if we don’t try to create community in ALL of our classes, including General Education classes. As individuals trying to positively impact the success of ALL of our students, a great place to start is to improve the environment so that students feel that they belong at PSU.