Designing for Agency in the Emerging Digital Ecosystem
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The document discusses designing for agency in the emerging digital ecosystem. It presents principles for designing learning experiences like proficiency, agency, integrative learning, and equity. It provides examples of learning that occurs outside the classroom through online communities and discusses scaffolding signature work using digital tools. Specific strategies presented include social learning through documentation, annotation, citizen science apps, text analysis, and storymapping. The talk addresses challenges institutions may face in implementing these ideas and strategies for overcoming challenges like building learning networks that dissolve course boundaries and support problem-based learning.
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Designing for Agency in the Emerging Digital Ecosystem
- 1. Designing for Agency in the Emerging Digital Ecosystem Rebecca Frost Davis, July 15, 2015 Institute for Integrative Learning & the Departments #ILD15 @frostdavis
- 2. Slides and References • http://rebeccafrostdavis.wordpress.com/ • Twitter: – @frostdavis – #ILD15 #ILD15 @frostdavis
- 4. GEMs Design Principles • Proficiency • Agency and Self-Direction • Integrative Learning and Problem-Based Inquiry • Equity • Transparency and Assessment #ILD15 @frostdavis
- 5. Where and from whom do you, as a professional, learn outside of the formal classroom, keynote, workshop or conference session? PollEv.com/seuinstructi670 #ILD15 @frostdavis
- 6. Where do you learn for personal, social, and civic activities? #ILD15 @frostdavis PollEv.com/seuinstructi670
- 13. Situating the Global Environment • Lewis & Clark College • https://sge.lclark.edu/ • Jim Proctor, “Situated Social Learning” • Interdisciplinary environmental research • Situated research – Local focus on global issues #ILD15 @frostdavis
- 14. Social learning • Document research process • Share research resources • Share references • Aggregate projects on blog – Maps – Tags – Concept maps – Mashups #ILD15 @frostdavis
- 15. Scaffolding Signature Work in the Emerging Digital Ecosystem #ILD15 @frostdavis
- 16. Critical Reading through Social Annotation #ILD15 @frostdavis
- 17. Citizen Science • iNaturalist app: http://www.inaturalist.org/ #ILD15 @frostdavis
- 18. Wild Basin Biodiversity #ILD15 @frostdavis
- 19. Playing with Text Analysis http://rebeccafrostdavis.wordpress.com/2013/11/12/reflections-on-a-text-analysis-assignment/ #ILD15 @frostdavis
- 22. Scaffolded Curriculum Using Digital Tools & Resources Contributing to Digital Tools & Resources Producing Digital Tools & Resources #ILD15 @frostdavis
- 24. Digitally-Informed General Education • Practice building learning networks & learning in the ecosystem • Dissolving boundaries of the course • Digitally-augmented problem solving— repeatedly. • Dancing with Robots #ILD15 @frostdavis
- 25. Breakouts 1. Draw learning ecosystem of your students. Where does your institution have links out? (5 minutes) 2. Design Signature Work for this ecosystem. 3. Scaffold this Signature Work in the curriculum. 4. List institutional resource and challenges for implementing this idea for signature work. 5. Post results: http://bit.ly/ecosystemsignaturework #ILD15 @frostdavis
- 26. Building our Toolkit • Briefly share signature work and challenges. • What are strategies for addressing these challenges? #ILD15 @frostdavis
- 27. Thank you St. Edward’s University Thank you. St. Edward’s University Thank you. St. Edward’s University Thank you. St. Edward’s University Thank you. St. Edward’s University #ILD15 @frostdavis http://rebeccafrostdavis.wordpress.com/
Notes de l'éditeur
- What does liberal education look like in the emerging digital ecosystem? How do we unite the world of a traditional college education and the world of digital culture? If you caught my tech talk you heard a bit about the shape of that ecosystem and the skills required.
- Slides and references from today’s talk are available on my blog. If you’re on twitter, you can follow me @frostdavis.
- I’ve been exploring this question over the last year and a half under the auspices of the Association of American Colleges and University (AAC&U). This association advocates for liberal education for all types of institutions of higher education. In the process they have defined and redefined liberal education. I served on the digital working group of the GEMs project or General Education Maps and Markers which seeks to provide “design principles” to create a general education that is equity-minded and digitally informed.
- GEMs specifies 5 design principles: Proficiency Agency and Self-Direction Integrative Learning and Problem-Based Inquiry Equity Transparency and Assessment In the digital group, we felt that agency was particularly important for students as they move from the controlled environment of the college classroom and campus to the wider digital ecosystem. Students face a world of constant change driven by technology and globalization. By agency we mean ensuring that students actively participate in defining, developing, and reflecting on their personal and educational goals and the ways to achieve them.
- So, I want to engage you in an exercise that gets at how you exercise agency to learn.
- Begin this part by 2:45 pm Ecosystem not binary—digital extends face-to-face networks (cf. work of dana boyd) Networked, connected, participatory Data driven, digital tools, algorithmic that this emerging ecosystem is fundamentally shaped by networks and 2) that it is increasingly driven by data and algorithms that personalize information for users and inform human judgment. What do these two modes of learning—data-driven and participatory—mean for the professions? What do they mean for our students civic and personal lives?
- In “Dancing with Robots,” Levy and Murnane analyze the trends in task-related jobs in the U.S. over a 30-year period, looking at five kinds of tasks. Based on these trends they posit that heading into the future, “the human labor market will center on three kinds of work: solving unstructured problems, working with new information, and carrying out non-routine manual tasks.” The bulk of the rest of the work will be done by computers with some work reserved for low wage workers abroad. Our graduates need the ability to deal with new information and solve unstructured problems across all facets of their life—professional, civic, and personal. The same skills and abilities that will serve them well in their careers will also help them in the face of social, political, and cultural problems.
- How can we help them develop those skills and abilities? AAC&U has issued the LEAP Challenge in response to this need: “The challenge of our time is to ensure that all college students are well-prepared to tackle unscripted problems with the broad knowledge and cross-cutting skills that will help them flourish in today’s world. We need to redesign our curricular pathways so that all students—at two and four-year colleges alike—experience multiple, high-impact assignments and projects that prepare them to integrate and apply their learning to complex questions and problems. Building from these preparatory experiences, all students should complete a significant project before they graduate. Students’ “Signature Work” should become the new marker of quality in higher education.” that new information will increasingly come from digital data and tools--students must be able to analyze, transfer, integrate to solve problems
- So, what does signature work look like in the emerging digital ecosystem? It looks like the Century America Project. Collaborative Digital Scholarship project. As Jeff McClurken writes when he curates this example for the keyword public in our digital pedagogy project: “One of the powerful possibilities that digital tools offer is the ability for students from all over to contribute to the creation of a larger public project. The Century America site is the product of students from 15 public liberal arts schools, brought together in two semesters, Spring 2014 and Spring 2015, under the direction of faculty members from UMW (me) and UNC-Asheville (Ellen Holmes Pearson). Students met twice weekly via video conference to talk about digital humanities tools as well as the subject of the semester and the project, life in their school’s town during the Great War and Influenza outbreak. [See syllabus.] Students built individual WordPress sites off of the Century America domain (e.g., http://truman.centuryamerica.org/), and used TimelineJS and Google Maps to add interactive elements to primary sources collected from their institution and town.”
- This is an example of a project linking liberal studies with community engagement. Students created digital history projects that commemorate the Great War as it happened in small communities with public liberal arts colleges. For example, at Truman college, “Rather than the typical presentation of Great War history, No Man’s Land seeks to reconnect the reader with the nuanced, personal experiences of Kirksville citizens and students.” http://truman.centuryamerica.org/ Key to this goal is the collection of letters written by soldiers during and just after the war, complied by E.M. Violette. Their experiences reveal much about life in training camps and in the trenches. These project are powerful tools to link students to their communities and to see the application of their studies in community life. Students digitize resources and use primary historical data to fuel interpretation. Then, they network their work together into a larger digital historical project. This class became a participatory culture of digital history of WWI. This is what signature work looks like in our emerging digital ecosystem enabled by digital tools and networks.
- What might that Capstone look like? Shawn Graham helps students learn both historiography and critical thinking about digital culture through Minecrafted History. They explore how history is represented in digital media, then practice creating history themselves, first using the game engine, Twine, then by creating historical simulations in Minecraft. Students worked in groups to create Minecrafted history for one of three sites: History of the Ottawa Valley The Canadians of the Western Front (WWI) Colonization and Resistance in the Roman World. Graham assigned written work alongside the digital project to help students justify their choices and provide substantiating data and citations. See his github site for presentations about these projects as well as some exemplary Minecraft worlds. These projects push students to use digital tools at the capstone level for historiography in a way that engages the emerging digital ecosystem. And you can download and play the worlds.
- Or consider the projects showcased in Lewis and Clark College’s interdisciplinary “Situating the Global Environment” that combine the high impact practices of undergraduate research, community engagement, and study abroad . . .
- . . . with social media and digital tools. Students document and share their projects and aggregate their work in shared digital bibliographies, maps, tags, concept maps, and mashups. Not only have students gained experience working in a networked way, they can demonstrate their experience through signature work to prospective employers
- If we want students to develop the agency to do those sorts of projects, we need to think about how to get the there. How do we scaffold signature work on the emerging digital ecosystem?
- Critical reading is a key skill for our students and a precursor for critical thinking, but when students read alone we find it difficult to know how they are reading. Reading is also a great metaphor for digital skills. Students know how to read, but they don’t know how to read critically. Likewise, they know how to use technology but not how to use it critically. You are all far more sophisticated users of the technology you use. Social annotation tools like Classroom Salon (pictured here) surface student reading practices and provide peer modeling. Here the text highlighted in red is the most highlighted of this passage. This heat map can then guide the instructor who can validate this as a critical insight of the passage or redirect student learning to a more important point. But, you don’t need Classroom Salon to do this. You can also use google docs & ask students to annotate a text you’ve pasted in.
- Beginning students can also practice partnering with technology by using mobile devices to access, collect, and analyze data. For example, students at St. Edward’s can use their mobile phones to take geo-referenced pictures of flora and fauna in the St. Edward’s Wild Basin Wilderness Preserve using the iNaturalist App. This is a special form of crowd-sourcing termed citizen science.
- Students are empowered to create knowledge and are linked to a larger network of citizen scientists, who all contribute to the Wild Basin Biodiversity Project, a database created in the app by the director of Wild Basin, that aggregates and maps the data. This database in turn is a tool for students at a higher level of approaching the unstructured problem of the environment and conservation in central Texas, or to use a term coined by Ed Ayers—an example of generative scholarship.
- In the humanities, computer-assisted text analysis using free web tools can offer a similar avenue for generative scholarship. This word cloud of a translation of Vergil’s Aeneid illustrates the most basic version of that analysis and what happens when you don’t know how to use the “stop words” functionality to leave out articles and prepositions. But, it also helped my intermediate Latin students gain insight to Vergil’s use of the ablative and dative cases, and was a starting point for using text analysis data to think critically about themes in Vergil.
- At the intermediate level, students might take on more agency both in and out of the classroom. FemTechNet is a project that connects nodal courses in feminism and technology at all types of institutions in a larger network spanning across the US and into Canada and the UK. Beyond this academic network, students were encouraged to engage in their community through digital tools that leverage the power of digital networks for collective action. In the wikistorming activity of the 2013 course pictured here, students and faculty worked on Adding feminist scholarship to already existing content on Wikipedia Creating and expanding articles on women who played and are playing important roles in history and current events Making Wikipedia readers and editors more aware of the systemic gender bias inherent in the encyclopedia’s structure Encouraging feminists, academics, and activists to contribute to Wikipedia and help revolutionize its culture Participating in Wikipedia’s processes They learned not only how to edit Wikipedia but how to make their edits stick. In other words, this was community-engaged learning in a virtual community.
- But students can also use digital tools to get closer to their local communities. Lora Taub’s students at Muhlenberg use digital storytelling to engage local community members, then aggregate those stories in the storymapping project. As the project website explains, “Students in COM 231: Documentary Research have been exploring the theory and practice of documentary research in the context of Allentown. The course examines what Robert Coles identifies as the “moral dilemmas and ethical tensions” inherent in doing documentary work, including the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity in representing the lives of others, doing justice to the human particularity of documentary subjects, responsibility to the community, and their own location as documentarians within the community.” Digital mappings lets them view the stories through a different interpretive lens and to build networked knowledge.
- What I’ve been describing is a vision for scaffolding digital signature work to reach the capstone level. I often hear the fallacy that because students are digitally savvy they should be able to apply digital tools in sophisticated academic ways, that they should be able to achieve higher order thinking skills with those digital tools. But, just because they can use a pencil doesn’t mean they can write, tech familiarity is no guarantee of critical application. To help students get there, we start with social reading and contributing data through crowdsourcing and move toward more self-directed projects, like wikistorming, or creating their own digital resources. This intentional arc of learning is a differentiator for the education we provide. The traditional student gets that; when we get the new majority we must help them develop the agency to find this arc of learning from their past, current, and future learning experiences.
- The digital learning ecosystem also dissolves the boundaries of the traditional academic structure of the course by extending activity. Across time: Larger faculty project with student contributions every semester like wild-basin Across space by intercampus collaboration or Into virtual spaces like wikipedia or Minecraft Into the community, both locally and globally This learning is both formal and informal.
- So what does liberal education look like in the emerging digital ecosystem? What I’ve done so far is lay out a vision for a digitally-informed general education. In such a curriculum, students would: Practice building learning networks & learning in the ecosystem Learn beyond the boundaries of the course Practice digitally-augmented problem solving—repeatedly. And both students and faculty would be Dancing with Robots
- 30 minutes Give them reminders of when to move on
- 3:30-3:45
- 2:45 – 3pm