Thoughts on Web Space at My School

So, as I learned from Twitter and the blogs of folks like Audrey Watters et al., a Domain of One's Own is coming to my school. But apparently it is coming to my school in the top-down, by-invitation-only way that other technology initiatives have happened over the past couple of years. Not a word about this at the Academic Technology blog or the Center for Teaching Excellence blog. Nope, you will not find an announcement about the workshops that are apparently (???) happening right now on campus, and certainly not any kind of invitation to follow and/or participate in this, even though there are surely quite a few faculty on campus who would be curious about this important experiment which might, for the first time ever, provide serious support by my school for online content development by both faculty and students. No call for volunteers (and you know I would love to volunteer...), not even a listserv to subscribe to (email is still the main way information gets spread at my school). In fact, when I contacted the director of the Center for Teaching Excellence week before last (by email) to ask about blogging and other online community options for the coming year, not a word of this was mentioned in the reply. Nada. Thanks to the openness of Twitter and other people's blogs, though, I did at least get to hear about it!

So, on the one hand, I'm glad this is happening, but I'm also discouraged that it is not happening in a more open way... and I'm also not surprised. Last fall, the Janux learning management system (in which OU is apparently prepared to invest millions of dollars) came to light without any preliminary warning and, it seems, that very expensive learning management system has been built to serve the needs of just a couple dozen faculty members, without any shared opportunities for the rest of us struggling to find ways to make our online courses more social and interactive than is possible in the Desire2Learn course management system.

Something similar happened a few years ago, when a WordPress/Edublogs installation was finally set up at my school... but individual faculty were not even allowed to request accounts, much less students. No, that blogging system was set up to serve the needs of departments and other academic organizations. The sad results can be seen here: http://blogs.ou.edu. Without the momentum that could have been provided by students and faculty who are really excited about the online world and the use of blogs to build online presence, that blogging initiative went nowhere. Was anything gained by excluding students and faculty from the experiment? Just the opposite: I would argue that the failure to open up the system for all interested members of the campus community is what resulted in its now moribund state.

I teach fully online classes, with student content creation and sharing being the heart and soul of those classes. Since Desire2Learn is completely inadequate to that task, I've relied on external tools for many years to make it possible for students to share their work online.

I've used a variety of blogging and discussion tools, starting out with EZBoard  and then Bloglines (remember the Bloglines Plumber?), and then Ning and now, because of the demise of mini-Nings for educators, I'll be recommending that students use Blogger next year, although any blogging option they prefer will work. It's still pretty rare for me to meet students who have built up an online presence and thus have a blogging preference already, but it's great when that happens — one of the students last semester did his class project as a section in his existing WordPress blog, which was super!

For websites, I recommend that my student use Google Sites although, once again, if there is another system they want to use, that's great. For example, last year one of my students wanted to learn how to use Wix, and that worked out nicely! After a disaster in August 2010, when the IT folks at my school erased, without warning, hundreds of the websites that my students had published in their students.ou.edu webspace (that webspace, which I think is still 3MB per account, was set up for students in 1999), I started recommending Google Sites. I've been very happy with the results: Google Sites is easy to use, and the sites belong to the students, so they can choose to leave them up or not after the class is over. I am so grateful that almost all the students leave their sites up, realizing as they do that the archive of previous student projects is the single most important resource for each new class! You can see the archive of student projects built with Google Sites here at eStorybook Central. One of the fun tasks I have next week is going through the archives to check for any sites that have gone offline (there are usually not more than a handful), while also adding the new sites from the wonderful stuff people did in the Spring semester.

So, naturally, as someone with a long-term interest in student web publishing, I have followed Jim Groom and his colleagues for many years, watching the development of the Domain of One's Own project with great interest.

I'm also impressed with the use of Google Sites for student portfolios at Clemson University, where online portfolios are used in conjunction with all the General Education classes.

The big question: what will happen now on my campus? Is Domain of One's Own going to go the way of OU Edublogs (dying out because it was not widely available to all faculty and students) or of OU Janux (by-invitation-only to a select few) ... or will it finally provide the catalyst for truly open, truly participatory web culture at OU...?

I await the results with great curiosity.

Meanwhile, since I've still got online classes to teach starting in just a few weeks, I'll be working on my Blogger and Google Sites support materials... because I cannot afford for the university to catch up to what my students and I have been doing since back in 2002: creating and publishing content online every single week of the semester, starting in Week One.

Which means....... SOON.

And thank you, Google, for making that possible!

Google Sites, Diigo, and the Storybook Archive

I just finished one of my very favorite tasks that happens at the end of each semester: I added the links of the Storybooks from this semester to the LONG lists of links for my Myth-Folklore Storybook archive and my Indian Epics archive. Then, I also updated the randomizing widget which shows some great Storybooks at random for each class separately (you see that widget at the top of each list) and which can also show Storybooks at random which you can see from both classes, as on the homepage of my wiki. All told, the process takes several hours, but it is a pure pleasure from start to finish.

This screenshot below shows a Storybook newly added from the Fall semester of Myth-Folklore:

And this screenshot happens to show a Storybook from Indian Epics year before last:

Given that I have now made Diigo a regular part of my content management process, I have also bookmarked all the Storybooks in Diigo and plan to start using tags there to sort and label them by both content and style. That is my next big project in fact! Diigo does handily let me know that I have over 500 Storybooks bookmarked there. That's a really good feeling; almost all the students do leave their projects online for future students to consult, and I am so grateful to them for sharing their work after the class is over.

It's an especially good feeling having all these Storybooks in the archive since it was about three years ago that my school's IT department deleted, without warning, almost all the Storybook websites that my students had built at students.ou.edu (the IT-provided web hosting I relied on, woe is me). At that time, I had over 1000 Storybooks in the archive, seven years' worth of student work - all thrown into the digital trash can by my school just a few days before the start of the school year. That was the worst day ever in my career as an online instructor!

Slowly but surely, though, the archive has recovered, and I have more confidence in Google Sites than I ever will in a service provided by my school, based on that terrible experience of losing my archive without warning. I know that Google Sites is not forever, but when the time comes to migrate and/or rebuild my archive, I am ready to do that again, hopeful that Google will give me more warning than my school did. More importantly, I am confident that there is ALWAYS wonderful work that my students are creating, if I can just find a way to capture and preserve that somehow. It's the single best thing I know of for inspiring future students to aim just as high, or higher! Unlike Rebecca Schuman (see her delightfully provocative article in Slate: The End of the College Essay), I love reading my students' writing, and the Storybook archive is a source of nothing but pride and joy for me, year after year after year.

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Postscriptum: I just sat here for a few minutes, banging away on the widget and watching the brand-new Storybooks from this semester pop up at random together with Storybooks from last year and the year before (it's a javascript widget built with RotateContent.com). Time moves on - and yes, this Fall semester is now really over and receding into the past . . . but with a wonderful new semester to come, and I'm already excited about what new Storybooks will take shape then!

Grading in a Digital World

This post is not about a specific tool, but instead a more general post about grading in an online class and what a big difference it makes. Elsewhere I've written up a statement about my grading philosophy which I share with my students (indeed, I consider it vital to share that with my students), and in this post I want to reflect on how the grading system I use is really possible only in a digital environment.

When I started teaching at OU in 1999, I was stuck with a very limited range of options. We didn't even have an LMS back then, so it was really all about what happened in the classroom: either quizzes and tests administered in the classroom, or papers that students handed to me in the classroom. As my professors had done, so did I: I graded based on some combination of quizzes, tests, and papers. I wasn't very happy with it, and the students weren't very happy with it either. Not that they complained; it was that way in all their classes. But still, I felt stuck - not just because of the limited assessment options in a classroom, but because of all the classroom's limitations. Not enough time, not enough "stuff," not enough of anything. I wanted more and better for my students and also for myself as a teacher.

So, when my school first decided to start offering fully online classes, I leapt at the chance. In fact, I resigned my job as a tenure-track professor and became an online instructor instead; my interest was always in teaching rather than research, and I realized that as a professor I could never give my teaching the time it deserved. The job my school had created was ideal: my only responsibility was teaching online, and I had three sections of 25-30 students each to teach. Perfect: 40 hours per week, and around 80 students to work with. The job of my dreams!

I realized immediately that the model of quiz-test-paper was meaningless in this new world of teaching abundance - an abundance of time, and an abundance of resources, too. So, I began the process of inventing classes that would take advantage of that abundance. Luckily, I made some very good choices right from the start; my classes have grown and evolved over time, but at the core is the same basic model I created when I first got started over ten years ago.

Time for reading and writing. There would be no more wasted time with students passively sitting and listening to me talk too much in the classroom (and I always talked too much, as you can imagine from the length of this blog post, ha ha). Online, the students could now spend their time - all their time - doing something really useful: reading and writing. I knew that I could reasonably ask about 6-8 hours per week of my students' time, and I knew that my main goal was to have them create things - to tell stories and share them online. I decided to divide the class into two roughly equal areas of activity which together would take appx. 6-8 hours of their time every week: reading stories (myths and epics) so that they could write new stories based on the old ones, along with a semester-long project where they would choose their own topic and do something similar but on a bigger scale, retelling traditional in creative new ways. They would do the weekly reading/writing assignments in a blog, and the semester-long writing project would be a website.

Then, after I had decided on the class activities, I needed to find the best ways to do the assessments, both for feedback and for grading. I was really not at all interested in assessment-as-grading, but I was very interested in assessment-as-feedback, and going online gave me so many great new opportunities for more and better feedback.

Feedback: Reading. For the reading, students could take quizzes that were graded automatically. I could build big question pools with questions coming up at random, allowing them to re-read and take the the quiz again if they did poorly. The reading quizzes were now a self-diagnostic tool to help the students make sure they had not accidentally slept through the readings or skimmed so quickly that they really got nothing out of it. Since students are not used to the idea of quiz-as-diagnostic, I make sure to explain to them how that works: Reading Tips. Right now I use Desire2Learn for this, but the way it manages question pools is incredibly poor, giving me no useful statistics from semester to semester; indeed, it does not even track questions re-used from quiz to quiz. I need a better quizzing tool (Quia.com, for example, is far superior).

Feedback: Writing. By having all the writing in blogs (Ning) and websites (Google Sites), it was now easy for students to give each other feedback, in addition to getting feedback from me. So, each week, the students comment on the stories in their blogs and websites, and they also get detailed feedback from me. I'll explain in a separate post exactly how all that works, but you can get a sense of the importance of feedback and revision from what I've written here: Web-Based Projects and Pacing the Semester.

Grading. In terms of my own teaching philosophy, I'd be happy to stop there, with assessment-as-feedback. My school, however, demands that I give grades, and my students (college seniors) have also become deeply dependent on grades - you might even call it an addiction - after 16 years of full-time schooling dominated by grades, grades, and more grades. So, as I explain in my grading statement, my goal is to find a way to take a feedback-focused system and have it result in letter grades at the end of the semester. To do that, I use a points-based system. The quizzes are worth 10%, the blog posts are worth 25%, the website project is worth 35%, and commenting on blogs and websites is worth 30%. Note that these are all points that accumulate week by week. There is not a final grade even for the semester-long project. No grades, just points. When they get the points they need for the grade they want, they are done. (Some students who are really busy with work in other classes opt just to get a B or a C in the class, and that's fine with me.)

Results: Fabulous. The end result of this system is that the students work hard, and they often comment in the evaluations that this class is more work than any of their other classes. I'm not sure whether that is true or not, but I am pretty confident that they are doing more writing in this class than in any other class - and getting far more feedback about their writing, too. As a result, they learn a lot, and they produce some amazing projects. You can see the projects for this semester in Myth-Folklore and in Indian Epics. Even students who openly declare that they hate to write end up with really good projects. Why? Because instead of putting everything off until the last minute (you know that is what happens in most classes, right?), they work on their project every week all semester long, with abundant, supportive feedback from me and from the other students.

Work: It Works! Although some people think of online classes as being less work than a classroom-based class, that is not the case in my classes. Just the opposite: the students work really hard. That's an inevitable consequence of how the class is set up; there is no other option. For almost all of them, it is the first time they ever created a website. Even more importantly, it is often the first time they ever made a commitment to their own writing and to sharing their writing in public. If you are a student who struggles with writing, you are used to giving the teacher something you scribbled off in haste, knowing you will get a bad grade - and you just say to yourself, "Whatever." This class is different: doing poor quality work is just not an option. Students revise (and revise and revise) their writing so that it improves, and they also share their writing with other students - it's not just for the teacher. For a lot of students, that experience is downright scary at first... but by the end of the semester, they see their own success and are justifiably proud. As for me: I am proud of what they do too!

Grade Inflation. And that is why I get angry - really angry - when I read articles like this one about grade inflation: Can Harvard stop awarding so many As?  by Stephen Joel Trachtenberg. It's fine with me if Dr. Trachtenberg has a different approach to grading than I do; everybody should do what they think is best - best for their students, best for their school, best for their subject matter. The problem, however, is that Dr. Trachtenberg seems to think that there is one way, and only one way, to grade. He apparently supposes that every teacher must be a "judge" whose success is measured not by the number of good grades earned by their students but instead by the number of bad grades. That may sound good to him; to me, it sounds like a recipe for failure. I could never teach that way, and I am very disappointed that Dr. Trachtenberg seems not to have even considered the possibility that there are alternatives to the grading model that he takes for granted. He may contend that I have "abandoned my responsibilities" by the way I grade, but I see myself instead as finally living up to my responsibilities as a teacher, making sure that each one of my students has a great learning opportunity, a chance to work hard and achieve more than they even thought possible at the outset. Does Dr. Trachtenberg think my class is easy because I give mostly As? Well, he is wrong. And since my students put their projects online, he has a chance - if he wants - to see just how wrong he is. I would say the single best thing we could do for our students, in fact, is to stop putting so much faith in the sacred formula of the GPA and instead have our students show what they can do online.

For me as a teacher, that online option has made all the difference.

Teachers open the door; you enter by yourself. 

(Chinese proverb)

Web-Based Projects and Pacing the Semester

This week is a holiday week for me, although I'm doing some schoolwork here and there (just the fun stuff!). So, I thought I would post a note here about something I've naturally been thinking about today: pacing the semester.

Right now, my classes are more or less done... but that is because we have been working hard and steady already beginning in the first week of the semester! In my Myth-Folklore class, 28 of 56 students are completely done, and the rest are very close to being done, and the same in Indian Epics, where 14 of 29 students are done. I am always glad when people can finish up early because I know they are often doing most of the work in their other classes in a big push at the end of the semester - staying up all night to write those final papers, cramming for that final exam, etc.

Well, that "last minute rush" is not how my classes work at all. Just the opposite! Instead, the projects students do in these classes are spread out over time, starting with several weeks of brainstorming, followed by alternating weeks of writing and revision, and then the three final two or three weeks consist of nothing but revision. That's a natural choice when students are publishing a web project (Google Sites is the web publishing tool I now use) instead of printing out a final paper! With a web-based project, of course it makes sense to revise (and revise and revise), to tinker, to evolve, working steadily all semester long. The Internet is a beautifully accommodating space for that!

Here is an overview of the Storybook project process in my class:

• In Week 1, students browse through past projects to get a sense of the kinds of topics students have worked on in the past, along with the various web design options people have chosen.
• Then, in Week 2 the students start brainstorming their projects while also learning the basics of how to create a website.
• Next, in Week 3, they continue brainstorming, and they also experiment with some more website design skills.
• In Week 4, a plan for the project now in place, they write up an Introduction to their project, while also creating a homepage for their actual project website.
• In Week 5, they revise their Introduction and add that as a new page at their website. Plus, they now start looking at each other's websites, offering suggestions and feedback.
• In Week 6, they are adding their first story to the site, and Weeks 6-13 consist of alternating writing and revision as they keep adding new stories. As they write and revise, they are also reading and commenting on each other's stories every week too.
• Then, at the end, in Week 14 they go back and revise the Introduction one last time, making sure it matches up with the final product. 
• Week 15 then consists of final revisions: checking on links, images, bibliography, etc., as well as one last good read-through of all the pages.

You can see details of all the assignments at my Storybook project page.

There are three key points I would like to emphasize about this process:

1. No trees were harmed in the making of these Storybooks. Seriously, the kind of revision-intensive process here would be depressing if it involved printing out reams of paper, but with the students creating and updating websites, the revision process is entirely natural.

2. Planning and revision take more time than writing. Notice that in the 15 weeks of this process, there are only 5 weeks which are "original" writing (Week 4, 6, 8, 10 and 12). All the remaining weeks are devoted to planning and revision. This is not the case in most college writing scenarios, sad to say. In most classes, students do no revising of their writing at all, and often the planning process is highly abbreviated or even missing entirely. That is a very unrealistic way to look at what is required for writing to be successful. The actual writing itself is easy! You just... write. What's hard is all the planning and the revision that is required to see a project through to completion.

3. Digital projects lead naturally to the creation of an archive of past student work. I consider the Storybook archives for my classes to be the single most important key to success. There is nothing more inspiring than to see great work by other students! Yet in most courses, what happens? Everything - EVERYTHING - just goes into the trash can at the end of the semester. Think for a while about what kind of message that sends to the students in a class. It is not good. Instead of throwing everything out, we need to send the message that what students are learning is of value, something worth keeping. If it is not worth keeping, then what was the point of doing it in the first place?

O this learning, what a thing it is!

(Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew)

Google Sites Tips and Tricks

In a previous post - Google Sites for Student Web Publishing - I explained how my students use Google Sites as a tool to publish their class projects online. I'm very happy with Google Sites as an extremely easy tool to use, while it is also one that allows for a lot of creative design and self-expression for students who want to explore those options.

To get started, students build a sample Google Site in Week 2 of class. Here are the instructions I provide for building that sample site: Building a Website.

For most students, this is the first time they have ever built a website, and they are really excited (and relieved) to find out how easy it is. Every semester, some students write me back about how they are going to use Google Sites to build a website for some other reason (another class, a student group, a family project, etc.). That makes me very happy!

Then, over the course of the semester, I have some tips and tricks that I share with students. The list reflects the kinds of questions that students ask and the problems they typically run into. You can see my list here: Google Sites Tips and Tricks.

Do you have some help pages for Google Sites tips and tricks? If you do, leave a comment here! I don't actively use Google Sites for my own web publishing (I prefer blogging software, as I've explained in other posts), so I'm not the world's greatest expert on Google Sites, which means I am always looking to learn new things.

One of the things that I like about Google Sites is that students can manage pretty much everything on their own using the basic instructions I've provided. I do very little technical support for their use of Google Sites, and of course they learn a lot by looking at sites created by previous students.

The biggest problem students run into has to be the Google Sites navigation options. Google Sites has some great navigation options, but it defaults to listing the pages alphabetically, so students have to go in and turn off the automatic navigation in order to sort the pages in the other they want. Once they figure out how to do that, it's not hard to get the navigation working the way they want - but this is the one topic on which I get some desperate emails since Google Sites does not make it obvious just how to reach this magical navigation options screen:

Google Sites for Student Web Publishing

I got some great news today (see embedded G+ post below for details) which was very affirming for me as a writing teacher. In both of my classes - Myth-Folklore and Indian Epics - the centerpiece of the class is a writing project that the students work on all semester: the Storybook. Each student chooses a topic of interest to them and then invents a way to collect and retell some traditional stories related to that topic (three or four stories, depending on the student's own preferences). Instead of me trying to explain the projects, just take a look and you can see for yourself what they are like: Myth-Folklore Storybooks and Indian Epics Storybooks.

With just a few exceptions, the students use the free Google Sites website tool to publish their Storybooks. When I first started teaching these classes over 10 years ago, the students published these websites in their university-provided webspace, using Mozilla's Seamonkey Composer to create the pages. Sadly, my university turned out to be an unreliable host for such projects, and on a terrible day in August of 2010, just a few days before the start of school, campus IT deleted without warning hundreds and hundreds of past student projects, and when they were done, my archive of over one thousand projects was almost completely gone. I cried for hours; it was the single worst setback I have ever experienced as a teacher.

Luckily, I had already started experimenting with Google Sites at that time because it had proved to be a convenient solution for students who did not have access to a laptop computer of their own and who were relying instead on computer lab access instead. So, starting in that Fall 2010 semester, Google Sites has been the tool of choice for almost all my students. The sites belong to the students, published with their own Google accounts (we do not have Google Apps at my school). Fortunately for me, the students are proud of their projects and almost all of them leave their work online. As a result, I once again have an archive with several hundred wonderful projects for the new students each semester to explore! This archive of student work is the single most important body of content for my classes, and I am very grateful to Google Sites for making it possible for my students to share their work this way.

Of course, as I learned in 2010, nothing lasts forever, and if I am lucky enough to keep my job for yet more years in the future (as I certainly hope to do), I know that, sooner or later, Google Sites will either disappear or morph into something else... and that's fine! And maybe it will turn into something even better! Meanwhile, I just hope I will get more warning when that happens - and any warning at all would be better than no warning, of course. But somehow or other the students and I managed to survive that awful business back in 2010... and the one good thing about such a bad experience is that I feel confident that I can really overcome any obstacle in my digital path in the future. :-)

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