First of all, I want to thank each and every one of you who took the time to attend my SpARC and CTL presentations last week. Both were a result of a lot of hard work (and not just my own!), and I was so pleased to see how many people turned out to watch me talk. Now, I know I’d mentioned along the way that my SpARC presentation would be filmed by the Technology Production Studio, which … it almost was. Unfortunately, there was some camera malfunction and the talk wasn’t able to be recorded. Normally, this would mean Bummertown, Population: Me. As luck would have it, though, my CTL presentation on digital portfolios with Nell Ruby and a few students was taped by my glorious supervisor, Emily Gwynn. Hark! Not all is lost.

In the meantime, I’ll be posting the PowerPoint I’d made for my SpARC presentation, for the benefit of those of you who were unable to attend. I’m an advocate of “short-and-sweet” PowerPoints, but I think the salient points come across — look for it on the Reports section of this site.

Some of today will be spent editing the CTL video for your viewing pleasure. Calvin Burgamy and I have decided we’ll be posting that on Agnes Scott’s iTunes U. page (which is accessible to the outside community), and I’ll let you know when it’s available!

I encourage everyone to check it out, and make time to see me yap about ePortfolios and the liberal arts education — 11:15-11:35 AM, in Room 210 East of the Bullock Science Center.

Here’s a screen cap of my presentation, in case you’re not inclined to download the full program just to check it out:

Around this time last year, I’d spent so much time writing my thesis, I thought my brainwires were going to short out. I was nearly finished with my labor of love by the time of SpARC 2010 (but not quite), and I knew I had to present the thing in French to my Senior Seminar class eventually. Having the option to present my year of labor, in my native language, at SpARC was an invaluable experience — if terrifying, at least at first. But at least I had a captive audience I could yap uninterrupted to about Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer for twenty minutes, which is a lot longer than I’d normally subject others (i.e., my friends). Beyond my own presentation, since classes are canceled on SpARC day I was able to attend my friends’ presentations, and whatever else sounded interesting on the program!

A few of this year’s presentations that caught my eye at first perusal: “Violence and Cruelty in French Nursery Rhymes” (9-9:20, Bullock Science Center 103W, and given by a fellow former French Senior Seminar classmate); “Drag Queens: Issues of Femininity Reexamined” (9:40-9:55, BSC 308); and, of course, “Whose Paper Is It Anyway?: Encouraging the Writer’s Ownership in Tutoring Sessions” (9:25-9:45 in BSC 209W, given by my good friend/work spouse and Writing Center Coordinator Neil Simpkins, as well as next year’s WC Coordinator and my soon-to-be housemate, Kate Whitney). I just wish I could attend all presentations at once — there are several during my timeslot that I would really like to watch.

Also, I promise I’ve got a new topic to cover on this site, one that doesn’t involve upcoming events! If it’s not up by tomorrow, expect it early next week — and no complaints from the peanut gallery, please, this week may actually be the end of me.

So, vanities aside, what were some highlights from the discussion?

• Identifying the “key players” of social media and how we use them;
• Managing your personal brand — at this point, is there really a distinction between your personal and professional profiles?;
• Appearing personable and professional — not necessarily mutually exclusive on social networks;
• Should you add your boss as a Facebook friend?;
• Googling yourself: it’s not as narcissistic as it sounds, and how much control you have over those search results;
• Monitoring your digital content, particularly in regards to microblogging platforms (who can see your Tumblr and Twitter content, for example, and the possible implications of that);
• The community-building (and, possibly, breaking) aspects of having an online life;
• Location-based apps like Foursquare: yay or nay?

There’s a lot of good stuff to be mined from our talk! I encourage you to listen to at least part of our discussion, and wish there were more time in the academic year to hold another one.

(Partially unrelated, but listening to this audio recording made me realize how quickly I speak! My Southern grandmother would not be pleased.)

http://www.mediafire.com/?cwbane6l2ua87ed

So, on my end: I’ll bring up a discussion topic about blogging and ePortfolios — namely, how to present yourself in the best possible light. As social networks have proven a force not only in job searches, but talent recruitment by potential employers, it’s important to put your best foot forward in terms of your online presence. Your well-designed, thoughtfully crafted ePortfolio could rise to the top of the Google search under your name, and has the ability to give you an advantage in a tough job market! On the other hand, the second search result might be that LiveJournal you forgot to delete from when you were 14 and angsty … which may not be the face you want to show off to HR for a position you’d applied for.

The underlying theme here is digital responsibility.

Key players of social media are constantly rotating (think MySpace to Facebook), and you want to make sure you’re on top of the digital dialogue you’ve produced. What is considered positive content? How can you contribute to productive discussion and content with social and digital networks? What are some “best practices” for blogging and building ePortfolios?

My fellow (heh) discussion leaders will be tackling issues of general social media Netiquette (think standbys like Facebook, Twitter, and others), building your online “brand,” and the significance of what (and how) you post. We’ll also talk about the impact and possible repercussions of certain digital content — and give some real life examples of the heavier implications of sharing.

The event is open to the community at large, and will be held in the Alston Student Center from 1-2 PM, so feel free to bring your lunch! The event will also be filmed by my lovely colleagues from the Educational Technology Center — so if you’re unable to attend, I’ll be posting that video on this site afterward.

Happy Wednesday, everyone! I hope I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon.

*Tennyson, Alfred Lord. “Locksley Hall.” Representative Poetry Online. University of Toronto Libraries. 6 April 2011. <http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/2161.html>.

Hope to see y’all there!

I linked to these posts because now is a terribly important time to acknowledge the impact that the digital humanities play in higher education. More specifically, I feel compelled to address why instructing students, faculty and staff in digital media/literacy is absolutely non-negotiable for institutions of higher learning. Let’s get things straight: interactive communications — inside the classroom and out — is not just a “fad” that will eventually die out, even if there are plenty of higher education professionals who would like to believe otherwise. Colleges and universities across the country are utilizing technology and digital/social media to engage their students in a more relevant manner. Quite frankly, the college or university that does not have any sort of program in place to help its learning community turn on to better, faster, more relevant technology is doing a disservice to itself and its students. There’s just no way around it. If students are not equipped with at least a basic understanding of digital tools by the time graduation rolls around, it is a reflection on the institution that it:

1. did not make those tools available to students, and/or
2. did not supply them with the resources and support necessary for them to successfully become citizens of an increasingly digital world.

In the two years that the Digital Design Fellowship has been a program/resource at Agnes Scott, it’s accomplished perhaps way more than was initially expected of it. As the Fellow, I wear a lot of hats when it comes to helping the ASC community achieve its goals as a real 21st century learning environment. I tutor students in creating content for their class blogs. I teach faculty how to incorporate blogging into their coursework, and help them understand the functional differences between “hub-and-spoke” class blogging and regular ol’ “hub” blogging. I assist my colleagues in the Educational Technology Center with non-ePortfolio issues that other members of the Agnes Scott community need addressed. I plan events. I collaborate with other campus tutoring services. I develop training materials for professors who are on the fence about utilizing digital media. Since I’m a full-time Fellow, I have the availability for walk-in tutoring sessions as well as scheduled class presentations. And that’s just a normal work week. In all honesty, if the Fellowship is to be considered a successful venture on the part of the College, it cannot function as anything less than full-time.

And not to have the position at all?

Well, that smacks of shooting oneself in the foot (or cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face … whichever you prefer).  Put simply: if the Fellowship does not exist as a campus resource, the entire community looking to toe the waters of the digital humanities has no support. And an institution without demonstrated support is like a car on cinderblocks. You ain’t getting very far, that’s for sure.

If you’ve been at Agnes Scott a while, you may remember the old program for ePortfolios. In order to take advantage of their network space allotted to site-building within the campus network, students had to learn Dreamweaver; on top of that, they built a site with (or without, as the case may be) the knowledge that once they’d graduated, POOF! Those hours spent learning Dreamweaver and building a site would be erased from the network. I don’t know about you, but the idea of vanished hard work is a turn-off for me. ENTER the Digital Design Fellowship, the product of a lot of campaigning on the parts of various faculty members, administrators, and some enterprising students. The Fellow was charged with staying current with digital media trends, and acting as a visual literacy resource on campus. We moved away from the network server, letting the community know that WordPress (/other platforms) is user-friendly, professional, and above all, kind of fun to play around with. The emphasis is less on the technicalities of site-building, and more on how students can effectively showcase evidence of learning, across disciplines, to maximum accessibility. That’s where the Fellowship is now. It’s become increasingly visible, and thus more reliable, so our community is feeling increasingly comfortable with the idea of incorporating blogs, and ePortfolios, and content management optimization, into its academic life.

This is all to say that the Digital Design Fellowship is an integral campus resource, one that indicates that Agnes Scott has crossed the threshold of the digital world, so to speak. The College recognizes demonstrated need for full-time support of ePortfolios and digital communication, and with the Fellowship, encourages digital learning in a way that separates us from similar institutions. It is cognizant of its commitment to digital engagement — from all ends of the College spectrum — and that, in enabling systematic support from the Educational Technology Center, it is fulfilling its mission. It is equipping its graduates with digital tools they can use to their utmost advantage.

I want to close with a quote I received from a faculty member I’ve worked with this year. To me, this quote validates the Fellowship and Why Agnes Scott Needs It:

Speaking from personal experience, you are the only reason I have been able to venture a toe into digital waters at all—I don’t think I’m anomalous as a professor who is interested and willing to expand my use of technological resources for pedagogical reasons, but lacks the knowledge, confidence, or time  that it would take to get there on my own.  The session you spent with me and my student intern (helping her create a blog for her internship as my assistant) was a revelation.  It’s the kind of front-lines, student contact position that I believe is core to the ASC experience; and it’s a front-lines, faculty contact position as well.

Do you agree, disagree, or have comments on anything I’ve said in this post? LET ME KNOW! Use that comment link right below you. Oh, and happy Monday uh, it has come to my attention that today is, in fact, Tuesday. Happy Tuesday.

(I’ve been itching for a reason to post that clip from Waiting for Guffman, otherwise known as one of my favorite movies of all time.)

Seriously, though. It’s mid-March, which means SpARC is right around the corner. What does this awkwardly-capitalized acronym stand for? (Confession: I have to sound it out every time I type it. No judging.) The Spring Annual Research Conference, held every year at Agnes Scott. Classes are canceled for the day, but that doesn’t mean vacation — students are not only strongly encouraged to present academic research topics of all stripes, but attend the presentations as well. Since I’m in the mood for personal disclosure today, I’ll be honest when I say I didn’t know much about SpARC (or how important it can be as a primer for future important presentations) until my sophomore year. And, as I may have mentioned many moons ago, I spent my junior year abroad, so I didn’t present until my last year of school. I can easily say that waiting until my senior year of college to present at the on-campus conference is one of the largest regrets I have about my time at Agnes Scott. Quelle chance manquée! (Read more about it on my other site.)

There is no substitute for this kind of experience, and nothing quite like defending your carefully chosen, endlessly researched topic of study to a room full of relative strangers. Take my word for it: seize the opportunity while you have it available to you, undergrads — the experience of presenting at this conference will prove invaluable in the long run.

Regrets aside, I have another chance to present at SpARC — though this year, instead of presenting my French thesis, I’ll be talking about e-Portfolios in our liberal arts community. In short, I’m going to discuss many of the points I’ve blogged about this year, possibly including (but not limited to):

• The benefits to (and relative ease of) creating individual e-Portfolios;
• Knowing, and Not Knowing, Your Audience: Ways in which blogging can enhance the quality of student writing;
• How class blogging enhances classroom discussion and collaboration, encouraging a heightened understanding of course material;
• How a student’s e-Portfolio can be an excellent representation of a liberal arts education;
• Super Important: Portability and accessibility of externally hosted e-Portfolios; and,
• Assessing success in the 2nd year of the Digital Design Fellowship: how’s the ASC e-Portfolio initiative coming along?

Well, cats and kittens, it’s obvious I have a lot of editing to do when it comes to writing my abstract. As a gentle reminder, those SpARC abstracts are due March 25; the conference itself will be held Thursday, April 28. I’ll keep you updated as to when my presentation will be that day (please come) — and strongly encourage all members of the ASC community to submit abstracts and present!!

imagining the possibilities for my new tote bag

So, attending the conference and other presentations. I am terribly grateful to the College , and my department, for funding my conference fees — they’re certainly steep, and I learned a lot by both presenting at and attending. One of the presentations I sat in on, “e-Portfolios and the First Year Experience,” attempted to explain the process of motivating and sustaining e-Portfolio development for students just entering college. This is right up my alley, as it’s one of the main challenges I face in my job. It’s one thing to promote the marketability and intellectual growth factor of creating e-Portfolios to upperclasswomen, and an entirely different can of beans to do so to first years who are dealing with a number of college issues, to say the least declaring (and sticking with) a major. That issue (namely, and for the sake of brevity, “assessment”) seems to be a constant one for institutions, and there is no single solution. While it may not have been the presenters’ goal (in fact, I’m nearly entirely positive it wasn’t), what I got out of their presentation is that last point: e-Portfolio initiatives, on a campus-wide level, are absolutely contingent on the institution and its particular goals.

So while I sat through this presentation (and took notes, obv), and was shown several “example e-Portfolios” which were, quite frankly, indistinguishable from one another, all I could think was that this type of approach would not be successful at Agnes Scott, nor could I imagine it being as much for any liberal arts college. Which is fine, because the presenting institution is not a liberal arts college, and it was clear their e-Portfolio goals were much different than ours. Primarily, that a student would initiate his or her e-Portfolio experience by building a basic website using Google Sites, and uploading various relevant documents, such as a couple of academic papers and a résumé. This is all fine and good from a pre-professional standpoint, if that’s all you want to do with your e-Portfolio. But it doesn’t give a whole lot of insight into the person behind the website. Now, Google Sites does allow for a blog-like function, but if there is no institutional push behind dynamic personal/intellectual growth (as would be evidenced, at least in theory, through promotion of the blog component), no student is really going to care about cultivating his or her e-Portfolio.

Agnes Scott has changed the way in which it encourages students to create and maintain e-Portfolios, and in my ever-demanded opinion, that’s for the better (and I’m not just saying that because it’s my job). e-Portfolios are relatively new ground to cover in terms of higher education, and as these things go, the technology for creating them has become increasingly sophisticated and user-friendly. The point is, of course, that not only are students able to showcase their work and intellect over the course of four years, but they have externally accessible (and easy-to-use) means by which to reflect on that work. So our students are creating sites that aren’t just a headshot, CV, and random papers or projects, they are creating dynamic, virtual representations of themselves that reflect the individual behind the block of text. Which, if you’ve managed to get this far and have also read my three-part series on Why the Liberal Arts Are Important, is a great way for a student to put her liberal arts education to work.

The main idea being: not all e-Portfolios are created equal, because then, what would be the point of making one at all?

And on that note, not all institutional e-Portfolio campaigns are equal, either.

Happy Thursday!

(a video representation of how I feel about e-Portfolios, and blogging, and Agnes Scott students, by proxy.)

As I’ve mentioned before in more detail, one of my goals for this semester involved piloting a project that would incorporate blogging/e-Portfolio-cultivating into the respective Senior Seminar syllabi of various academic departments on campus. In my initial presentations to each class, I was pleasantly surprised to find that students seemed pretty excited to take on the challenge! The largest of those classes, International Relations 400 with Dr. Eleanor Morris, is comprised of 13 students working on some truly awesome and inspiring projects. While IR400 uses a main class blog as a sort of “electronic hub” for weekly class discussion, each student has set up an individual project site explaining her research goals/processes leading to the final product (a paper) due at the end of the Spring 2011 semester. This class is going above and beyond what I’d expected for this Senior Seminar cross-disciplinary project! After perusing each student’s project e-Portfolio (as linked on that IR400 blog), I can’t wait to read more as the semester progresses for each one of them.

Truth be told, it makes me a little starry-eyed about my own Senior Seminar project from last spring. I guess it’s really taken a full year to start feeling nostalgic for long nights spent in the Alston Campus Center. Perhaps, also, I’ve become a teensy bit heartsick for perpetually red eyes (from stress crying and lack of sleep), and frustration over Henry Miller and the passé simple (more like so totally passé, am I right). Anyway, having made some peace with academia after some time apart, I’m having a great time reading up on these independent projects. We all know Agnes Scott students are brilliant, and these project e-Portfolios are a great example of that.

You should definitely check them out, leave them feedback, and let me know what you’ve thought, too!

This weekend/next week, I’ll be attending my first-ever academic conference. I’ll be part of a roundtable discussion/presentation for “Uncommon Ideas for Common Reading Programs” at the 30th annual Conference on the First-Year Experience, held this year in Atlanta, alongside some Agnes Scott Common Reading Committee members. That was a mouthful. To say the least, I’m excited and a little nervous!

We’ll be talking about the common reading project, which is an important first year tradition at ASC. I’ve written a little about the project in the past, but it’s a topic worth revisiting. The idea is just as it sounds: every incoming first year student is assigned a selected book to read over the summer before arriving on campus. This past year, that book was Outcasts United by Warren St. John, which profiles the Fugees, a soccer team in Clarkston, Ga. comprised of refugee children from all over the world, and their mentor, Luma Mufleh. First years are then required to compose a reading response open to any medium they choose — whether that’s a poem, written reflection, or artistic response. Those responses are then given to each student’s academic adviser, and then … well, what happens to the responses after that? That’s where I come in. Ever handily.

So, at the conference, the committee members and I will be discussing our “uncommon ideas.” One of those ideas has been utilizing blogs (and social media, by proxy) as a means to get first years engaged with the material they’ve been assigned. The eventual goal is to archive a sort of “Best Of” list of student responses, thereby showcasing students’ intellectual work and creativity in the short pre-college months. User Education Librarian Casey Long and I created an official blog for the Common Reading project during summer 2010, which currently houses some reflections on the book and announcements on related programming from Agnes Scott faculty and staff. On February 8th at 10:30 am, I will discuss the blog’s statistics and impact it’s had on the ASC community, and how we can better our efforts to WIN THE FUTURE for the Common Reading project.

As technology becomes more sophisticated, and the Internet increasingly accessible, it’s necessary not simply to imagine the future for even the most staid of traditions at Agnes Scott, but to actualize that future, and create goals accordingly. Amongst other things, it’s one reason I’m so excited the Digital Design Fellowship exists. I work to encourage students (and faculty and staff, natch) to incorporate responsible, thoughtful blogging into their academic lives. I don’t just do it for my health, but so our students will be better-acquainted with the demands of a competitive, technology-centric society. While the current Common Reading blog is an experiment in making students aware of blogging as a viable means of academic communication across disciplines, one of its goals is to get students blogging on their intellectual experience, thereby establishing a habit that continues over the course of four years.

How’s that for ambition? Anyway, so my first grown-up, super-fancy academic conference. I’m sure I’ll be the youngest participant there, which I find simultaneously amusing and exciting, so I’ll try not to embarrass myself (… or the College). The last time I was at the Atlanta Marriott Marquis was as a late-night spectator at Dragon*Con 2010.

Wish me luck for next week! Oh, and happy Monday.