dwedaman – THATCamp New England 2011

The Having of Wonderful Ideas

dwedaman — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 20:35:47 +0000

Eleanor Duckworth’s essay “The Having of Wonderful Ideas” (The Having of Wonderful Ideas and Other Essays, Teacher’s College Press, 1987) proposes a radical way to support learning and intellectual development.

In my paraphrase: her idea is to give the learner a relatively unstructured, but well-equipped space in which to explore, and create hypotheses, and construct experiments, and ask questions, and ultimately have wonderful ideas about, the stuff of the world. Which her research shows helps people learn better and intellectually develop more.

I propose a session in which we imagine what it would be like to construct these kinds of environments in higher education, in various traditional disciplines, and of course in the Digital Humanities, and in our various workplaces, and what it would be like to learn in them, and how we would assess them.

People interested in this will have to read the article prior, due to our shared commitment to intellectual rigor and general conscientiousness, which suggests we should hold it in the afternoon, but it’s only 14 pages, and I’m sure we can figure out how to get appropriate access to all interested.

Results will be gathered in a collaboratively-edited google doc and will revolutionize the world.

Immunity to Change Introductory Session

dwedaman — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 19:40:11 +0000

Immunity to Change is a self-improvement method used to help you do things you want to do but don’t. It comes from decades of research by Bob Keegan and Lisa Lahey of Harvard, most recently encapsulated in the eponymous and widely-available book.

Here Oprah talks about it (hint: she likes it).

I think it has a lot of benefit for a lot of areas in higher ed, professional development, and just life in general. If you’re trying to do something hard, like write a dissertation, or publish an article, or build an online data archive, it can help. Most people seem to love it.

It’s also one way to “surface assumptions,” a key move central in individual and team learning.

By coincidence I’ve been trained as an Immunity to Change facilitator and am willing to facilitate an introductory session, where we try the process out, in a safe, collaborative, supportive room (we’ll close the door). You can see what you think, and you might learn something about yourself!

A hypothetical value of $100 – $200 or so, yours for free.

DH dating service

dwedaman — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 18:49:50 +0000

There’s a DH person or two at every school, kinda isolated, sad.

They need to collaborate with other DH people at other schools. For lots of reasons.

Let’s make a platonic DH dating service. You put your interests in a database and you get a recommendation of a project or people to work with or on.

Outcome: a plan for such a database or recommendation service

the all-DH major

dwedaman — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 18:47:30 +0000

What if you had a major or a track or a school that was ALL-DH? How would you build that and what courses would be in it and what would people do with the degree during and after?

Let’s imagine it!

The outcome of this discussion will be the curriculum or program description of a four-year DH degree.

learning about learning

dwedaman — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 18:45:20 +0000

The trend of shifting from teacher-centric to learner-centric education is moving towards making the skill of learning itself part of the point of every class.

Some might but most schools don’t have a course on learning. Which is silly, because it’s what we expect people to do while here. And helping them think about it would probably improve their chances to do it.

I propose a session to develop a collaborative syllabus on learning itself, inventing, borrowing, imagining, as necessary. With an eye to DH-style learning (to be relevant to THATCamp). And I propose we envision this course on learning as a, um, syndicated course: that is, taught and attended by students and teachers from a network of schools (so no one school can suppress it).

I ALSO imagine, in my eagerness, that out of this might come a wonderful research project (with associated funding?): sending a cohort of students through LEARNING 101 (the intensive, introspective learning course we would devise) and comparing their development over their college career with a control group of um non-trained learners.

Product: a syllabus

course communication dump & analysis

dwedaman — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 18:39:51 +0000

I think we’re at the point that we can capture just about all communication in a course. Via email, yes, and via any journals and via and submitted papers (as in Word, etc.). But also (!) by recording things spoken in class and transcribing those spoken things with the aid of cutting-edge software (perhaps donated by an interested company).

This would give us a pool of virtually all expressed thought in course that we could analyze linguistically and temporally cross-referencing the topic and the person speaking to see what patterns emerge.

Worth talking about? Imagining? Throwing around some possible ingredients?

I propose so, and suggest we gather the results in a (where else?) collaboratively edited google doc.

syllabus analysis machine

dwedaman — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 18:35:05 +0000

Greg Crane had this idea to gather all syllabi, encode them, mark them up a bit, and then analyze them as a data set that could show learning “tracks” or assumptions or ways of thinking about learning or patterns of supporting information usage or varieties of instruction of key points. And THAT analysis could then inform the individualization of learning, in this way:

“David, I see you want to learn Economics. Our research shows that there are 12 ways to start, and no.s 3, 6, and 9 correspond to what you say your learning styles are. Here are some steps to follow, and here is a hyperlink to the most commonly-used texts, and here are the names of 3 tutors willing to help mentor you. When you’re done, come back for an assessment.”

I propose we talk about it and what would be involved. Maybe someone’s already doing it. Maybe not. I know the Brandeis linguistics department is quite interested, and I know that Brandeis syllabi (at least) are mostly online, in a pool that we might one day be given permission to study. I imagine others might be interested, including funding agencies interested in rendering education more cost-effective or individualized. We might be able to attract Greg to sign on as an advisor (why not, he suggested it! He founded the Perseus Project! Etc.).

The results will be gathered in a shared published doc and might include a preparatory document on the idea and its challenges, or thoughts about what it would take, or a list of other people doing something like this, or the name of a school willing to host this, or the idea of some funding agencies interested in this kind of thing.

imagine a commoditized university

dwedaman — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 18:28:05 +0000

The threat of the Khan Academy is looming over higher ed. Of course this is the idea of wholesale, direct-to-consumer, commodification of learning “chunks,” that the individual might subscribe to at a distance at their convenience without needing to enroll in all the trappings of the university/college and at great personal cost savings.

Sooner or later we’ll have to think about how to respond to this trend.

I propose we can use this session to make it sooner: let’s imagine a world where we ALSO provide commodified chunks of learning wholesale. What would the chunks be? How organized? What support structure needed? How produced at scale? And how could DH play a part? Could DH take the lead?

Ideas gathered into a collaboratively-created list to be published in ePub format.

Learning Organization Academy

dwedaman — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 18:23:26 +0000

NERCOMP is helping sponsor an interesting new professional development opportunity that might appeal to DHers trying to instantiate their work into an academy that doesn’t yet know how important DH is. It’s basically an intensive support structure for people developing projects that improve learning in their organizations; it is comprised of a 1-week intensive project-development workshop with training in workplace learning theory and a year-long scaffolding made of coaching support and quarterly gatherings of the cohort for refreshers and collaborative troubleshooting. You might say “this sounds like something for a company or an IT organization or a library, but not for my academic department,” but I actually think academic departments and schools need to ask themselves how well they do as learning organizations (for those who aren’t students) and could benefit from an experiment or intervention or two. I describe it more thoroughly here.

I propose for this session to discuss the academy and the kinds of projects we think it will support, share some of the workplace learning research (if folks are interested), and think we might collectively brainstorm possible projects, venues, or teams, and we’ll capture all thoughts and feedback in a document. There’s also room for participation in the administration of the academy (i.e. volunteering to join as a coach or in other kinds of supporting roles).

Discussion of Learning Analytics Project Development Workshop

dwedaman — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 16:57:26 +0000

New Media Consortium and the NorthEast Regional Learning Analytics group are organizing a collaborative let’s-think-about-possible-learning-analytics-projects opportunity Halloween week. Teams from 5 organizations will develop and give feedback on each other’s ideas; there is room for another. It’s a great place, if you have a feeling that you might have the spark of the germ of the soul of the shadow of the hint of the embryo of an idea, to explore that idea in a supportive, reflective, energetic, welcoming environment. And to learn more about Learning Analytics. And to network with some funky data-collecting learning-likers. And then subsequently to show off your idea to the world via an optional webinar preso. See my related blog post: wedaman.wordpress.com/2011/10/07/nmc-nerla-learning-analytics-workshop-webinar/. The product of this conversation will be discussion of the event, a brainstorm of possible learning analytics ideas (particularly those that include DHness) captured in a google doc, and possible formation of a robust and inspired team for participation in the aforementioned workshop.