Summary of the curriculum design project

I've gotten a lot of queries about setting up a web portfolio, etc. lately, so I've been hacking on a little workshop series on "web presence for academics." It's being tested out as a standalone workshop series but is also designed to ultimately fit into an introductory graduate school class whose larger objective is to get graduate students comfortable reading, decoding, and beginning to participate in the common formats of scholarly discourse in their field. (Other course topics outside this module include topics such as the preparation of conference posters and the review of journal papers.) Since one of the key points of the workshop is to introduce students to participation in a distributed world, some participants are remotees from outside the primary institution hosting the (in-person) class.

This workshop is designed to introduce students to online conversations on their research. By the end of the workshop, participants will have a website and a research blog, and you'll have tapped into the online networks of other academics studying around your topic of interest. This is challenging; students are being asked to both consume and contribute to a highly uncurated, fast-moving conversation and to practice realtime transparency about their thinking. This is significantly different from the culture of academia they're used to. They may need to learn new software tools, demonstrate an understanding of copyright on the fly, and (most terrifying at all) engage with other researchers who they've never met in person. Some of the learning objectives therefore focus on affect as well as content -- how students feel about this sort of exposure and uncertainty, and how to acknowledge and manage those feelings.

Description of the setting for the curriculum project

This material is being piloted in the format of a 4-week summer workshop, but the summer workshop is being advertised to participants as something we are testing and developing for a particular class in Purdue's engineering education department, so they are the setting and audience I will describe below.

This module is being specifically designed for first-year graduate students in engineering education at Purdue. It's intended to be integrated into the "Inquiry" course, one of the first classes in the core sequence for a PhD in engineering education and a required part of the program.

Inquiry is designed to introduce students to journal papers and conference presentations as methods of idea-sharing within their new community of practice, and the instructors are interested in extending this to include online communication as a third. The class typically consists of 20-25 students, and is oftentimes the first class taken by a student in the program.

Salient characteristics of the institution or sponsoring organization

Purdue's Engineering Education department (called "ENE" by its members) was established in 2004 as the first place in the world one could earn a doctoral degree in engineering education. 8 years later, with fewer than 25 alumni and 50 current students in its ranks, Purdue ENE remains one of the largest and most visible of the small handful of institutions offering such a course of study -- which says something about the infancy of engineering education as a discipline. The doctoral degree program is focused on training students to become excellent and rigorous researchers in engineering education, though many students also enter with a strong interest in teaching and a desire to improve their pedagogical skills.

The department stands within a giant public midwestern research university in the middle of the Indiana cornfields. With approximately 40,000 students (including many international students, most from Asia) on its main West Lafayette campus, Purdue has a long history as an international powerhouse in training scientists and engineers. This means that ENE researchers sit in the middle of a living laboratory, with the education of thousands of engineers a year playing out before their eyes.

Salient characteristics of the intended learners

The "home site" of the workshop is the Inquiry course in Purdue's ENE department. (Streveler, personal communication 2/6/2012). Nearly all of the 20-25 students in the course have STEM undergraduate or graduate degrees, and at least half of them are engineering education students; the others are typically pursuing related degrees in an engineering or STEM field. Many have engineering research experience. It is assumed that no students enter with engineering (or other qualitative) research experiences, and may be unaware of the assumptions (positivism, etc) their current viewpoints on the "research process" imply (Borrego, 2007). It is also assumed that participants are reasonably good writers compared to the general population of graduate students in engineering; the graduate program specifically filters applicants based on writing quality.

However, the workshop is also open to participation from others who wish to learn more about online scholarly communication, and it is expected that at least a few remote participants will join in on every run of the modules. This is by design; by building a distributed community within the workshop participants themselves, students get to see from the beginning what it looks like to collaborate with folks from other institutions before meeting them in person. Broadly speaking, the material applies to anyone who's investing in building expertise in a particular domain and is interested in how a public web presence could enrich their scholarly lives. The most likely remote participants are graduate students and faculty members from other universities, or perhaps those at the same university but not enrolled in the class. Most of these participants will also have STEM backgrounds or some interest in computing, possibly from the perspective of the Digital Humanities movement.

All participants are expected to be able to use computers for basic tasks such word processing, but are not expected to have any particular exposure to coding, social media, or the internet beyond the basics of email and search engine usage.

Other important contextual issues

The internet is transforming scholarship in visible and accelerating ways. Detailed information on all sorts of topics is now available to anyone with a computer and an internet connection; you need not be one of the scholarly elite near an university library in order to get access. Institutional repositories and the open access movement work deliberately to lower the barrier to information access even further, and researchers who take advantage of open access tend to find their citation factors dramatically improved (Swan, 2010).

Scholarly papers are faster and cheaper to distribute online than in print, leading to the rise of software tools like Mendeley, EndNote, and Zotero to help researchers track their resources. As more researchers begin using various forms of social media to manage their information, the metrics attached to those forms of social media become increasingly accurate measures of scholarly impact (Priem et al., in press). Several research blogging communities have sprung up, and blogging itself has been examined as an activity that advantagouesly impacts the lives of knowledge researchers by helping them with their processes of sensemaking and knowledge articulation and providing a fertile ground for reflection and reuse of ideas that may otherwise have fallen by the wayside (Efimova, 2009).

I'll continue by putting a few conjectures on the table.

1. Becoming successful within a community of practice (for example, the community around a specific academic discipline) is a matter of becoming recognized as one who does good work by that community.
2. Having your work recognized as good (and yourself recognized as a valuable contributor) within a community of practice comes from being visibly useful in that practice; other people need to see you performing as a member of the community for multiple cycles, because it is in that venue that conversations with you about and within your shared practice can be situated.
3. If you are able to tap into faster "conversation cycles" for a community, you will be able to become a member of that community faster. In other words, someone who has a conversation once per month will "get into things" faster than someone who does it once per year.

The question then becomes "how do we step into that faster conversation cycle?" Well, what conversation cycles do we have in academia?

One obvious conversation cycle is peer-reviewed journal papers, one of the primary metrics of scholarly output as evaluated by tenure, hiring, and dissertation committees. However, this is a long, slow cycle. Years may pass between papers, and months will pass during review. Is there something faster?

Yes, there is; conferences and conference papers or posters typically happen every year, and academics usually go to multiple conferences each year, giving them opportunities to share the up-to-date work you have from the past several months, including work-in-progress towards a journal paper. But again, several months is a pretty long time. How do we go faster?

We've already given ourselves a clue in the above two paragraphs. We already think of the journal and conference proceedings ecosystems as being linked; it is perfectly acceptable to refine a work-in-progress via multiple conference posters before finalizing it into a journal paper. In effect, we can think of conference publications as rough drafts of journal papers. Similarly, we can move one level up to books, and see them as being composed of the ideas from multiple journal papers.

How do we move in the opposite direction? What's the rough draft of a conference publication? What's the analogous step towards higher speed and lower formality? I posit that one possible solution in this general niche is academic blogging. If we continue this trend of taking steps towarsd higher speed and normal formality to its logical extreme, we up with radical realtime transparency, which is about discourse exposure of "how work in a discipline is done."

Motivation

Why should we care about discourse exposure? One word: access. As http://radicallytransparentresearch.org (accessed May 2, 2012) states:

Research is a black box to those outside it... and to some extent, those inside. For those involved in a project, the process of creation involves a rich and delightfully messy discourse, a conversation between teammates and technology, components, codes, analysis, and constraints. This conversation is situated in a particular context; one cannot learn "how to talk about research" through textbook memorization or reading university brochures any more than one can learn "Italian conversation" through vocabulary memorization or reading tourist guides.

However, for those not already involved in the creative process, that's the equivalent of what they're stuck with. The invisibility of "what researchers do" doesn't exactly encourage people to participate in research projects themselves, whether that's as subjects or as researchers. Understanding how research is produced is vital for the formation of a scientifically literate public. Showing people our processes whenever we can helps them trust our results. It can also help us become more self-aware as researchers; why do we do these things in certain ways? How do we assume the world works? What can we learn from people who may come from a completely different context?

The idea of "exposing the discourse" of research has implications for issues of access to research, because non-privileged groups (especially groups already underrepresented in the sciences) don't often get exposure to the "language" of the scholarly realm. It's a lot harder to speak a language you can't hear. It also touches on the notion of cross-disciplinary work; even within a university, researchers from one discipline have little opportunity to "overhear" conversations from another discipline (and thus intuit how or why they should collaborate with those departments). Learners with speech/hearing/language disabilities and non-native speakers may also be aided by the capture of transient information in textual or other concrete artifact formats. Finally, there is potential for dialogue on open access and the culture of academia as it relates to transparency, publishing, and attribution.

As an academic, you might think: "Well, if emerging research shows that researchers who participate in online dialogues and radical transparency practices get all these career benefits, I want in!" Unfortunately, having data that says "doing X is good for you!" does not necessarily help you get started "doing X." There's a dearth of resources for researchers who want to get started, and this workshop is motivated by a desire to help close that gap.

Content aspect

Learning outcomes

At the end of this workshop, students will be able to...

Analyze and evaluate the online scholarly presence of others

I want you to be able to find, listen to, and take inspiration from messy realtime online conversations on a topic you're trying to learn about.

This is both an "analyze" (break into parts and detect how the parts relate to each other and an overall structure or purpose) and "evaluate" (make judgements based on criteria and standards) goal based on Anderson & Krathwohl's 2001 update of Bloom's Taxonomy. You will be able to critically assess the quality and usefulness (to you and to others) of someone else's online scholarly presence because you will be able to deconstruct that presence into multiple elements, determine how that person's scholarly thought flows between them, and choose which one(s) (if any) work best for specific reading purposes.

• This is an enduring and transferable big idea that pushes students out of the classroom to find value elsewhere; if you are not confined to the resources and circles of your own scholarly institution, your world becomes far larger.
• This is a big idea and a core process at the heart of the practice of radically transparent research. In order to contribute to a conversation, we must first be able to consume it; we must be able to survey the ever-changing landscape of the dialogue of others and assess what we think is "good" and what sorts of examples we may want to emulate and become ourselves.
• This is an often-misunderstood topic because of the high degree of irregularity and chaos present in online conversations that usually get abstracted and edited away in the "formal" scholarly conversations we claim to be used to. The truth is that we have informal scholarly conversations all the time; we scribble in our lab journals, debate with our classmates over lunch, go with confusions to our instructors during office hours... and we are, in all likelihood, far more comfortable with those informal conversations than we are with sitting down and writing formal scholarly papers. Nonetheless, the apparent "chaos" and "noise" in online conversations cause some people to dismiss it as "useless chaff" because they don't know how to rapidly hone in on the parts that will be useful to them at that moment.
• This is a big idea embedded in the activity of daily reading of a self-selected blogroll, which provides an opportunity to exercise the various directed reading skills that enable you to reach this learning objective.

Translate their existing daily scholarly activity into public online artifacts

I want you to have the courage and habit of exposing your daily thinking as it comes out, without polish, in appropriate venues and in a way that facilitates the creation of more polished pieces down the line.

This is an "apply" (carry out a procedure in a given situation) goal based on Anderson & Krathwohl's 2001 update of Bloom's Taxonomy. You will be able to recognize when a content-creation situation is one that could be done "in the open," and go through the process of "opening it up," which means finding an appropriate venue, checking relevant permissions, uploading the content, adding any needed context, and pointing others to the public conversation.

• This topic is an enduring and transferable one that centers around students making their existing work visible and valuable to others beyond the classroom.
• It is a big idea and a core process at the heart of the practice of becoming a radically transparent researcher; you're already a researcher, so what we're adding here is the radical transparency.
• This is a topic that requires a great deal of uncoverage; academic training specifically conditions us to regard the opposite process ("closed by default") as normal and intuitive, so we will have to specifically examine and deconstruct this conditioning and discuss when and where each behavior is situationally appropriate.
• This is a topic embedded in the activity of "opening up" individual pieces of our own thinking, which often requires the metacognitive skills of sensitivity to and management of one's own emotions. (Which is a topic we sometimes don't like to talk about in academia, particulary in STEM disicplines that are supposed to be abstracted from all that... but fear is an emotion, and quite often the thing that blocks us from moving forward, so we'll have to tackle that to make any progress on this.)

Propose collaborations that combine your existing scholarly momentum with that of others you have never met in person

I want you to have the guts to reach out and make direct connections with other people doing the same, even if you may never have met them in "real life."

This is a "create" (make new things) goal based on Anderson & Krathwohl's 2001 update of Bloom's Taxonomy. A "collaboration proposal" may be anything from a reply tweet to an introduction email to a full-out grant co-authorship -- all are invitations to engage at some level. In this case, you will be collaging elements of someone else's online scholarly presence with your own in order to come up with (and possibly support) the proposal you are making, either explicitly (in an actual proposal format) or implicitly (putting out something they can respond to).

• This big idea is one that will endure for the remainder of your scholarly career; as long as you need to collaborate and network with other scholars, it will serve you well. It is also transfereable to non-scholarly and non-career contexts, since you can use the same sorts of techniques to reach out to more people about your hobbies, interests, and even establish closer contact with old friends and family members (think about Facebook; if you're an avid Facebook user, you're probably doing this already, and the question is how to transfer those skills in from that context).
• This is also a core process at the heart of being a radically transparent researcher. The reason others are invested in our transformation into a radically transparent researcher is that it becomes easier for them to participate -- at any level, including occasional reading or lurking -- in our work. For watchers of our research, the increased ability to connect with you is the entire point.
• This topic is frequently misunderstood from two directions: being "too hard" and being "too easy." It's tempting to say that reaching out is "just about meeting people," and that you can "simply introduce yourself and start saying something," but this ignores an awareness of the factors that make your introductions more likely to be listened to and followed-up on. It's also tempting to think that launching yourself out there is intimidating and that nobody's going to pay attention, but in a way, this is "just" about meeting people, and we've been doing that all our lives. We'll need to play with that duality.
• This topic is embedded in several variants on the activity of reaching out and making connections, which is something we all know how to do from early childhood when we first began making friends. It's just a different context.

Concept Map

Needs to be done

The Great Content Egg

Enduring understanding

• it is possible (and preferable) to follow other academics in as close to real time as possible
• you already do things that are worthy of being exposed to public participation
• reaching out to people is worth the little time and risk it takes
• when done right, it is safe to allow others to take/reuse/edit your work, because nobody can change your copy of your work without your permission; it will otherwise be marked as a variant on your original and then point back to your original so people can see what you intended them to see.

Important to know

• what a blog is
• what an aggregator is
• what a feed is, and why you might want to use one
• how to apply an open license to your content
• how to write an introduction email to someone else
• how you might be able to use blog posts as materials in larger and more polished works down the line

Good to be familiar with

• how to use and cite open-licensed content from others
• different types of blogs (microblogs, career-focused blogs, personal blogs, group blogs, etc) and what they are used for
• different blogging platform software options
• different reader/aggregator software that makes it faster and easier to follow other people in a variety of email
• different open content licenses (creative commons etc)
• existing content repositories / feed aggregators for your particular scholarly interests -- specific blogs to follow and so forth
• the altmetrics movement and ways that you can turn your blogging and online activities more directly into "scholarly credit"

Structuring content

What we're doing

We're taking a somewhat unusual approach to thinking about structure for this workshop: Stephen Krashen's hypotheses on second language aquisition.

Wait, what?

Humor me a bit. I've been wanting to experiment for years with how engineering can be thought of as a foreign language and culture -- and therefore how techniques of foreign language instruction might be applied to it. (For instance, see http://blog.melchua.com/2011/02/07/open-source-as-an-alternative-study-abroad-experience for a reflection of how open source participation is almost like studying abroad in a "technical country" rather than a national one.)

The main points here are that foreign language instruction is explicitly thought of as having a communicative end; implicit procedural learning is used as one of many means to scaffold students towards that end, not as an end in and of itself. Awareness of cultural nuance is considered valuable, nonquantifiable sorts of learning are highly legitimized, and emotions and fears are specifically designed for. Krashen's hypotheses have heavily influenced American second language instruction and serve as a useful way of thinking about a different sort of learning environment we might create.

Let's go through them, with the disclaimer that (1) I am not a student of linguistics, and (2) this is at best a loose interpretation of Krashen's hypotheses that uses it as inspiration for the content structure of the workshop. I'd love to see what language scholars think about the transferability of these ideas into engineering.

The Acquisition-Learning hypothesis says that learners acquire language in two ways: subconsciously (acquisition) and consciously (learning). Acquisition is more of a "feel" you get when you "pick up" things from being around them, whereas learning is direct instruction of formal rules, and the two types of learning work together. The implication for this workshop is that we will try to foster both acquisition and learning of what we're loosely calling "online conversation" ability; we'll expose students to a lot of it to see what they implicitly "pick up," but we'll also look at some of the underlying "grammatical" structures of web conversations in the hopes that they will help with the understanding of the "real-world" data participants will be dealing with.

The Monitor hypothesis states that students have internal "monitors" that they use to correct and censor themselves from producing "wrong" utterances. It's possible to under-utilize your monitor, resulting in sloppy quality control and messy utterances, but it's also possible to over-utilize it and terrify yourself into not speaking at all for fear of making a mistake. We'll be specifically referring to and trying to calibrate your monitor during the course of this workshop; new academic bloggers inevitably start out with one tendency or another, but the overriding tendency is to over-monitor and be afraid to post at all.

The Natural Order hypothesis says that grammatical structures for a certain language tend to be acquired in a certain order, the "natural order," for that language. (Later language-learning research seems to have expanded on this and critiqued it; "natural order" for a second language seems to depend on the structure of your native language, for instance.) The implication for language instruction is that teachers should be sensitive to this natural order and to try to teach following its progression. The implication for this workshop is that blogging and online communication skills seem to be picked up in a particular order by those who sucessfully practice it, so being aware of and perhaps explicitly modeling that progression may be useful to new practitioners.

The Input hypothesis states that students learn from being exposed to large amounts of comprehensible input, and that the most optimal comprehensible input is that which is just beyond the student's level. Krashen states this as being at the "i+1" level (taking the student's current level as "i"). This leads to such things as graded readers in the language learning classroom, and to the creation of a graduated series of reading assignments in this particular workshop.

The Affective Filter hypothesis is simply that non-language factors can influence language acquisition; stress, anxiety, self-confidence, and the like can block learning, so a good learning environment will design for emotional comfort as well as the provision of intellectual material. In this workshop, we will specifically be addressing the emotional reactions we are having to going through the exercises, since fear is a challenge to anyone becoming a radically transparent researcher.

Other ways we could have done it

We could have done this in a number of other ways.

By fear. The core "syllabus" of the course would be a list of things that participants are apprehensive or afraid of (seeded by the instructor before class starts, but collaboratively built participants at the beginning of the workshop), and every reference, technique, discussion, and exercise is tied explicitly to the fear(s) it addresses. I still think this is a valuable exercise to do, and may still choose to do it during the workshop, but ultimately using this structure would cause us to jump around between activities in what seemed like a confusing manner.

Chronologically. The course would chronologically step through the development of a research blog, starting from installation and going through engagement. While this might be a good way to step students through the rote acts of setting up a blog, it wouldn't cater to the needs of global learners (cite Felder) very well in terms of needing to see the bigger picture, especially the short 1-month timeframe of the workshop. I ultimately wanted to draw out the interdependencies and lifecycles in the "online ecosystem" so participants could see where they are and where they're headed and how this form of discourse might impact their journey, so while the final schedule still contains elements of the chronological structure (participants do set up blogs during the course of the workshop, and there are some dependencies implicit in that -- for instance, you need to have a blog before you can make a post) this isn't the overall organizing scheme.

By faculty (or graduate student) evaluation and competency criteria. Each item in the workshop would address one or more of research, teaching, or service (or the equivalent structure used for faculty promotion decisions), and be tied specifically to one or more criteria within these areas, to show students how this would "count" for their future (and current) portfolios. I decided against this, as promotion criteria will vary widely between institutions and this workshop is going to be cross-institutional with remote participants. However, echoes of it will remain in reflection prompts to participants, who will be asked to tie the activities they're engaging in with the career goals that are relevant and important to them.

What are ways people go about learning in the target domain? (cite)

Needs to be written.

• Communities of practice framework
  • Learning how to "talk" within a community
  • Changing the community as well, by bringing new practices into it
  • Legitimate peripheral participation -- your blog doesn't need to be peer-reviewed, but it can still be a good source for you to try your ideas out.

What's hard to learn and why

(cite Perkins)

Some topics (note: peg this to specific topics) in this workshop are...

• Continuous (vs discrete) and simultaneous (vs sequential) -- you'll be carrying out multiple concurrent discussions in a variety of fora, and will need to move between them fluently. This is hard to learn if you haven't done it before.
• Organism (vs mechanism) -- if a community isn't an organism, I don't know what is. This means that boundaries are socially defined and change over time rather than being defined or bound by a ruleset, among other things; you can't just look at it once and think you've got it figured out, you'll need to reassess it each time you engage. (This isn't as hard as it sounds; you do it already, by looking at your classmates before you speak to them and realizing that wow, this morning she looks really tired so maybe I'll start off with a hug instead of launching into a critique of her biology report.)
• interactive (vs separable) -- the point of this communication is interaction with others, so it's at the interface of these interactions that we'll we be peering into. But yeah, you can't dissect a dialogue without losing something in the process.
• conditional (vs universal) -- this is a more minor note, but it's important to know where "default to open" is appropriate based on surrounding conditions, because it is not an universal truth that "default to open" is the right thing to do.

Additionally, we'll run into a lot of:

• inert knowledge (knowledge you 'know' but which doesn't activate in your new context) and tacit knowledge (stuff you don't realize you know), because so much of this communication is stuff you already do in your normal daily in-person (and even email) context; the leap is doing it in public and realizing you can do exactly the same thing there.
• foreign knowledge (hard to put yourself in that situation, unfamiliar, unintuitive) which we'll need to combat with anchoring in your existing experiences; we can use your intuition about moving and talking in physical spaces with known friends and then extend it to see how to deal in virtual spaces with unknown people.

Assessment aspect

positivist objectivity is not the holy grail of assessment -- subjectivity can be valuable and having students realize there's no one ideal platonic truth in their subject is really valuable.

Create a list of all learning objectives for the unit. Mark the three most important learning goals.

See #Learning_outcomes -- there are only 3 learning objectives, so they're the 3 most important.

Assessment triangles

<For the three most important learning objectives -- Create an assessment triangle (with cognition, observation, and interpretation corners represented) that represents your learning unit as a whole. (cite)>

Analyze and evaluate the online scholarly presence of others

A conversational formative assessment. Students will be discussing the online scholarly presence of others during the course of the workshop in various formats; every week, each student will receive a quick email indication of the highest stage of analysis the instructor has seen them exhibit in any format. The goals is for students to exhibit operations in the "proficient" stage of analysis at least once during the workshop.

• Cognition
  • Cognitive theory of development: We will use the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition (CITE), which describes phases learners pass through as they move from novice to mastery in a domain. Mastery is characterized by an increasing ability to handle context in a sophisticated manner; whereas novices need step-by-step instructions, they soon learn to sort signal from noise and eventually become able to intuitively react to their environment.

The first two columns of this table are from p 162 of "Professions, Competence And Informal Learning" by Graham Cheetham & G. E. Chivers, which in turn was taken from Eraut, Michael, Developing Professional Knowledge and Competence (1994) p. 124, Taylor & Francis, London.

Level	Characteristics	What does this look like for blogging?
Novice	Rigid adherence to taught rules or plans Little situational perception No discretionary judgement	Few thoughts beyond "it's good" or "it's bad" Unable to articulate why an online presence is "good" or "bad"
Advanced beginner	Guidelines for action based on attributes or aspects Situational perception still limited All attributes and aspects of work are treated separately and given equal importance	Begins comparing features - "this website has X, this website does not" May be applying a specific rubric by rote (self-created or not) Still sees items as objectively "good" or "bad" universally
Competent	Coping with crowdedness (multiple activity/information) Now sees actions, at least partially, in terms of longer-term goals Conscious, deliberate planning Standardized and routinzed procedures	Can quickly and consistently assess a site that fits a standard "template" they're used to, but only looks at sites of one "type" because they don't know how to roam beyond that template No longer overwhelmed by complex websites; can ignore irrelevant parts while acknowledging those parts may be useful to someone else Begins to say "this is good for this purpose"; talks about websites as useful or not-useful towards their specific goals, instead of being universally "good" or "bad" Starts saying things like "but this site might be useful for someone who..." and thinking of passing information on to other people with different interests/tendencies Can make concrete suggestions on how an online presence might be improved, but mostly mechanical suggestions aimed at bumping up one's score on a particular rubric
Proficient	Sees situations holistically, rather than in terms of aspects Sees what is most important in situation Perceives deviations from the normal pattern Decision making is less laboured Uses maxims for guidance whose meanings vary according to the situation	Can analyze any site whether or not it fits into a "template" they're used to Has built a personal taxonomy of "types of online presences," and can quickly categorize a new site into that taxonomy Can say things like "this website does X, which is unique because most others of type Y do Z instead..." Can quickly state why a new site might be useful to them, or why it would likely not be Can think-out-loud confidently enough to lead someone through exploring a site unfamiliar to them both Can identify improvements that could be made, and rank suggested changes in terms of likely impact on a particular audience for the site May still use rubrics on a regular basis, but likely has multiple to choose from, some self-developed
Expert	No longer relies on rules, guidelines, or maxims Intuitive grasp of situations based on deep, tacit understanding Analytical approaches used only in novel situations or when problems occur Vision of what is possible	No longer using rubrics, yet analyzing and comparing online presences consistently even across different types Can propose complete redesigns of online presences (not iterative improvements), including ones that translate it from one "type" of presence to another, or make it serve an entirely different audience

• • How students progress from less expert to more expert in the domain of interest
  • Identify knowledge and skills representative of different levels of expertise
  • Identify what students know and are able to do at several levels
  • What is the theory or theories that inform how experts and novices in this content area represent knowledge?
  • What are the features of proficiency?
  • What are the features of misconceptions, inaccurate or incomplete understandings?

See table above. Students progress from less to more expert via a process of cognitive apprenticeship (CITE) in online community participation. Specifically, it is beneficial to go through the stages of modeling, coaching, scaffolding, and fading. (CITE)

• Modeling -- seeing experts "think out loud" through the same task. This can take place during realtime discussions, but can also be done through reading written critiques and reviews afterwards. Since people are trying to use the internet for many sorts of scholarly-related communications purposes, and the "quality" of an online presence is highly dependent on the context of what a reviewer is trying to use it for, it is useful to have multiple (in some cases conflicting) models of expertise for this part -- whenever possible, learn from multiple "masters." (CITE)
• Coaching and scaffolding -- being stepped through the process of critique yourself. The instructor (or a willing peer) can ask questions so the student does not have to remember the entire rubric at once (scaffolding) and help the student probe more deeply into their answers by asking them to elaborate on certain aspects of their responses (coaching).
• Fading -- the support described above should gradually be withdrawn, allowing the student to take on more and more responsibility for making and guiding their own critiques.

• Assessment type: Conversational formative.
• Claim: The student will be able to formulate original critiques of how any given web presence is relevant -- or not -- to their research interests, and how it might be improved for their purposes.
• Task:

The student will provide evidence of meeting this learning objective by contributing constructive critiques of the online presence of others during class discussions. The online presence being critiqued may belong to other workshop attendees (peer feedback) or may belong to people outside the workshop. The online presence being critiqued may include websites, blogs, multimedia, mailing lists, etc.

• Evidence:

The evidence will consist of student critiques. They will occur in a wide variety of formats, since students can choose the conversational output format they're most comfortable with (in-person, online video, mailing list posts, blog or microblog posts, etc). The class discussions may be synchronous or asynchronous, but must take place in the "workshop space" (i.e. private emails to the instructor or hallway conversations outside of class do not count; they must occur during meeting time, on the workshop mailing list, or on one's workshop blog).

Critiques must link directly to the online artifacts they are critiquing (students providing in-person critiques should provide others in the conversation with a link) and both critique and the material being critiquedmust be publicly viewable (i.e. no password is needed to see the content). Critiques must also be in a format understandable by the instructor (who is a native English speaker and deaf -- so if you are posting a video or audio file, please write a summary of it in English text nearby. Written German will also be accepted, but that's because this summer's instructor is slightly masochistic.) The material being critiqued can be of any type and in any language.

Acceptable evidence will include indicators as listed in the table above. This assessment will be scored according to the highest skill level exhibited by the student at any point during the workshop. Students will receive individual emails indicating the instructor's impressions of their exhibited levels each week of the workshop. If they believe they've exhibited a higher level of skill than the instructor's assessment indicates, they have the option of replying with pointers to their conversational artifacts (in other words, "if you think I missed something, tell me what I should have looked at.")

• 0 points: Did not participate / did not submit a serious attempt
• 1 point: Novice
• 2 points: Advanced beginner
• 3 points: Competent
• 4 points: Proficient or Expert (it is expected that few, if any, students will exhibit "Expert" performance by the end of the workshop).
• proficient

Students will be encouraged to use some portion of their analyses as inspiration for building elements of their own online presence, but this is not required, nor assessed.

Citations: LoBiondo-Wood, G., Haber, J. & Krainovich-Miller, B. (2002). Critical Reading Strategies: Overview of the Research Process. Chapter 2 In LoBiondo-Wood, G. & Haber, J. (editors). Nursing research: Methods, critical appraisal, and utilization. (5th Edition). St Louis: Mosby.

Translate their existing daily scholarly activity into public online artifacts

A written formative assessment. Students choose 12 consecutive days during a 2-week span during which they are to write a daily blog post. The goal is to be able to generate a blog post in less than 10 minutes by the end of the 12 days.

Cognition: make-from-scratch to reuse & link Observation: post sources, timelogs, links Interpretation: faster writing & higher reuse

• Cognition:
  • Cognitive theory of development
  • Students progress from neophytes to experts in blogging... by blogging. (Surprise!) When you discipline yourself to produce text on a regular basis, you find strategies to produce good content faster -- reusing content, drawing on a network, providing commentary, etc. (I may add things from journalism programs in here, or books on "how to write a lot.")
  • Identify knowledge and skills representative of different levels of expertise.
    • Pre-beginner: "I can't write that much. I am not even going to try."
    • Beginner: "I can write, but it's going to take so much time and effort because I am doing it all from scratch, and producing long, polished things in a laborious manner. This is exhausting."
    • Intermediate: "I'm still writing mostly from scratch, but I'm okay with incomplete thoughts -- I just say they're incomplete! I ask questions in my blog posts and am more okay with putting half-baked ideas out -- my blog is about thoughts and work in progress, after all."
    • Advanced intermediate: "Ooh, I can reuse content I'm already writing for things that aren't my blog? Papers, reading notes, emails, proposals, scribbles from an awesome lunch conversation, other people's blog posts and papers, online videos, and that sort of thing? Excellent. I'm going to start mixing that into my content, and suddenly my writing is a lot faster."
    • Advanced: "I post blog content quickly because I think of it primarily as "what have I already done that I can reuse?" and I have the habit of linking to, citing, quoting, pinging, etc. sources in my posts in a way that makes them easy for my readers to find this network of sources I get my ideas from, and for that network of sources to find me."
  • What is the theory or theories that inform how experts and novices in this content area represent knowledge? I have no idea. I made this up because I could not find anything.
• Assessment type: Written formative assessment.
• Claim: The student will be able to consistently create a daily blog post in less than 10 minutes by drawing on existing sources and transforming that material in appropriate ways, using proper (but not necessarily formal or scholarly) citations and annotations to give their readers context.
• Task: The student will provide evidence of meeting this learning objective by writing a publicly viewable blog post related to their research topic every day for 12 consecutive days. The blog location will be known to the instructor before the start of this exercise. Students will also log their time and sources.
• Evidence: For each of the 12 consecutive days of the exercise, students will create:
  • A public blog post related to their research, viewable from their primary blog.
  • An entry in a log (Excel spreadsheet) on how long it took to generate that blog post.
  • An entry in a log (the same Excel spreadsheet) on what sources they drew upon to create the post (online material, prior emails, old papers, books, conversations, etc). Log entries are not intended to take more than 1 minute to write, and sample blog posts and log entries will be provided by the instructor at the start of the exercise.
• Acceptable evidence: The exercise is evaluated based on the number of blog posts successfully completed.
  • 1 point for each daily blog post that meets all the following criteria:
    • Is publicly viewable on the student's blog
    • Has a complete accompanying log entry
    • Is related to the student's research topic (as stated by the student at the start of the workshop)
    • Would be considered interesting by someone in or interested the field (basically, "student isn't trying to game the system by creating single-nonsense-word posts" and so forth -- taking the assignment seriously).
  • 1/2 point for each blog post that has any of the following criteria:
    • Has an incomplete accompanying log entry, or no log entry
    • Is "late" (i.e. there are 12 total blog posts, but a day was skipped and later made up, etc)
    • Is not publicly viewable on the student's blog (but viewable via some other means later made clear to the instructor)
    • Is not related to the student's research topic
  • 0 points for each daily blog post that meets any of the following criteria:
    • Does not exist.
    • Is clearly not taking the assignment seriously.

Propose collaborations that combine your existing scholarly momentum with that of others you have never met in person

• Cognition:
  • Cognitive theory of development
  • What is the theory or theories that inform how experts and novices in this content area represent knowledge?

Legitimate peripheral participation "concerns the process by which newcomers become part of a community of practice," (CITE: LPP book) often through working and talking with others both within and about the domain they are attempting to master. Talking within a domain is to communicate in the midst of practice in order to facilitate that practice -- for instance, a basketball player may shout "I'm open!" to signal to a teammate to pass the ball in the midst of a game. Talking about a domain is more reflective and metacognitive; a discussion of the same basketball game being analyzed after the final buzzer sounds is a good example of this. In both cases, identity and skill as a practitioner is being built through the process of conversing with other practitioners -- in addition to actual participation, students need to "learn to talk as a key to legitimate peripheral participation." (CITE: LPP book)

Part of talking is beginning the conversation. You need to learn how to walk up and introduce yourself to someone -- both literally in the physical sense, but also online in terms of writing introductions to people you may never have encountered face to face.

• • How students progress from less expert to more expert in the domain of interest

Students progress through the stages of expertise through the cognitive apprenticeship techniques described above.

• Modeling
  • They can read records of existing successful contacts (via private emails that mentors are willing to share, or via public mailing lists and so forth).
  • They can look at examples of unsuccessful (or likely-to-be unsuccessful) emails and identifiy potential problems with them, based on the stages of expertise listed below.
  • They can receive such communications themselves from others (a peer or the instructor).
• Coaching and scaffolding - students can co-author an introduction email or reply with a peer or mentor.
• Fading - Gradually, students can move towards having their introduction emails reviewed by others, but written alone. Eventually, review will be optional.

• • Identify knowledge and skills representative of different levels of expertise
  • Identify what students know and are able to do at several levels
  • What are the features of proficiency?
  • What are the features of misconceptions, inaccurate or incomplete understandings?

Pre-beginner: "I can't reach out to that person. They're too important to bother with me. I'm not even going to try." OR: "I can eventually get in contact with that person, but only through an intermediary. I will find someone else to make the introduction for me, possibly providing them with a canned resume or research statement in order to explain why I want the introduction, but mostly leaving them to grasp at what they think they know about me in making this introduction on my behalf."

Beginner: "I am still reaching out to the person through an intermediary. I am going to provide the intermediary with specific information to help them make a customized connection. I will do this by taking an inordinate amout of time crafting my extremely formal introduction/portfolio from scratch, which will be daunting and exhausting."

Advanced beginner: Same as beginner, but reaching out to the contact directly.

Intermediate: "I am reaching out to the contact directly, using elements from my existing online profile (both text and links) in my introduction to save writing time and space instead of crafting my introduction from scratch."

Advanced: "I am reaching out to the contact directly using elements from their existing online profile (and offline artifacts) in my introduction, commenting on it and drawing comparisons to my own interests and work -- which I illustrate with examples from my own existing online profile. In fact, I may already have used/remixed/linked-to some of their work in mine."

• Assessment type: Written summative assessment.
• Claim: The student will be able to start and sustain a conversation with a stranger about their overlapping research interests using only online communications, with skillful use of both their own and their conversation partner's online presences to facilitate that conversation's rapid progression. Note that this does not mean that all conversation attempts will be successful -- indeed, managing expectations for this is part of the communicative skill! Ultimately, we can't make another person write back. This means that you will probably have to start early, and contact multiple people, so you can have a better chance of getting someone to write back.
• Task: The student will provide evidence of meeting this learning objective by...
  • Finding someone online with related research/work interests; they should have no existing working relationship with this person and must never have met face to face. Basically, the person should be a stranger.
  • Initiating a conversation with that person.
  • Carrying out a conversation -- at minimum, the other person must reply once, and you must reply to their reply.
  • The conversation can continue past that, of course (and you're encouraged to set up phone calls, videoconferences, meetups at upcoming conferences, campus visits, etc) -- but this is not required.
• Evidence: Students will provide artifacts from their conversation as evidence. This will usually take the form of several back-and-forth emails, but in the case of dialogue moving to an alternative format, other artifacts can be turned in (for instance, notes from a phone call).
• Acceptable evidence: The exercise will be scored as follows.

• • 0 points: Did not do assignment / did not take seriously
  • 1 point: Artifact(s) show clear attempt at reaching out to others, but there are no artifacts documenting responses, OR artifacts document responses, but no replies.
  • 2 points: Artifact(s) show the student initiating contact, the person responding, and the student responding to their response, but nothing more.
  • 5 points: Same as above, but continuing into a more extended conversation that is summarized in a paragraph about the outcome of the extended conversation and its potential or known effects on your future work. You may include further conversation artifacts if you wish, but this is not required.

Assessment matrix

<For the three most important learning objectives -- Fill out the assessment matrix (which links learning objectives to assessment tasks and scoring criteria).>

Captured in the extended "assessment" sections above; may want to break these out into their component parts again.

Explain how the content and assessment sections are aligned.

This should be pretty obvious, but I'll write something about this when I get all the pieces together.

Pedagogy aspect

Philosophical statement

All right, folks -- it's philosophy statement time. Here's the sort of thinking you can expect from me as we go through this workshop, based on the 7 principles of Making Learning Whole (CITE).

• We're going to play the whole game of scholarly communication by acknowledging that formal, peer-reviewed publications are only the tip of the iceberg -- the majority of our "real" thinking is messy, informal, but no less worthy of capture, examination, and respect. You're going to be exposing and sharpening a vital stage in your research process you may have mostly dismissed up to this point
• Exposing this oft-ignored stage in the process is a game worth playing because it's going to immediately enliven and inform your academic work in ways measurable by your existing metrics of success, whether that's building a professional network, producing more high-quality publications, reaching an audience of students and colleagues, or some other means; you tell me what game you're playing, and we'll see how this can improve your score there.
• There will be hard parts, and we will work on them. I'll warn you in advance: the hard parts of this workshop are going to be primarily emotional, and we don't talk about how to address emotions in graduate school (we're researchers, pursuing objective knowledge that's far removed from all the squishy messy "feelings" stuff). Transparency is scary; how can you let others see things you've made that you don't fully understand yourself? There's uncertainty and fear, and we will push ourselves fast and hard so that each of us hits that fear as soon as possible -- and then we're going to share those fears with each other, and we're going to stare them in the eye and get past them, consistently and repeatedly.
• We're going to spend most of the workshop playing out of town instead of in a sheltered sandbox, working online in full public view, poking ourselves into the conversations of other people in our field, each of us engaging with a world we've not engaged with before. We'll have a dugout -- a safe space -- where we can breathe together and decompress when we're tired, but the point is always going to be to launch ourselves and each other into the outside world.
• We're going to learn from each other. Though we come from very different domains and will be journeying into very different places, we're going through the same process of exposing our journeys to each other. You'll learn what your fellow bloggers are doing and how they're doing it, and you'll learn about yourself by listening to their reactions and interpretations of your work.
• All of these things are getting us to learn the game of learning -- we're going to be picking up, experimenting with, and in some cases developing new ways to show and share our thinking with others, and I hope that you'll continue these experiments in different fora and with different groups of people even after the workshop ends.

Syllabus

Course goals, objectives, and expectations

This workshop is a small step towards a big goal: transform academia by bringing radical transparency into it. This will change not just the nature of the work of the academy, but also who is able to do it -- we're experimenting with a pretty fundamental change in the nature of our practice, not an incremental improvement in the techniques we're already familiar with.

That's a tall order, but we've only got four weeks together, so we'll be focusing on a bite-sized chunk of the cake this summer. There are three learning objectives we'll be working on. By the end of the workshop, you'll be able to:

• Analyze and evaluate the online scholarly presence of others
• Translate their existing daily scholarly activity into public online artifacts
• Propose collaborations that combine your existing scholarly momentum with that of others you have never met in person

I expect the same things any other teacher expects from their students -- that you show up, participate, respond to feedback, and engage in dialogue with your fellow learners. More than that, though, I expect you to be co-creators of this experience with me; although I will be driving the drumbeat of the workshop forward, I'm just as much a student as you are, and you're just as much teachers as I am. This is an experiment, so we all need to be willing to suspend and revise our expectations, spot and pursue opportunities for trying out new ideas, and being honest about what is and isn't working. Ask forgiveness rather than permission, and when in doubt, be bold.

Grading and grading criteria, or: what we have instead

This is a summer workshop; you're not taking this for credit, and you're not going to get a grade. This doesn't mean you won't be getting actionable feedback, though. We're going to be doing several exercises through this workshop, both group and individual. Each exercise will link back to one or more of the learning objectives and present a clear (or at least I hope it's clear!) set of criteria for how to gauge your progress. You'll find the specific criteria for each exercise in the materials for the exercise itself.

I will give you feedback on each of the exercises you complete; it's up to you to decide what you want to do with that information. When exercises build upon each other, there will be specific instructions in the later exercises how to incorporate the actionable feedback you've gotten for the earlier exercises, so you can simply follow along with the new exercises.

Description of what the class will be like, including a description of and rationale for your teaching methods.

The workshop will be 4 sessions of 90 minutes each, with up to 2 hours of weekly "homework" assigned after each of the first 3 sessions, though I will scope them so they are minimally completable by most attendees in 1 hour. (I will stick around for an extra hour or two after every session to help those who prefer to get their "homework" done all at once and in person.) There is also pre-work you must do in order to sign up for the workshop, which I estimate will take you 30 minutes to complete. In total, the time commitment is expected be 12.5 hours maximum, 9.5 hours expected, over a 4-week span.

The workshop will have an in-person option, since many people seem to prefer that method of learning. However, since this workshop is centered around developing the ability to participate in and build communities even when they're distributed and asynchronous, remotees will be fully accommodated, either synchronously via attending the in-person sessions remotely, or asynchronously catching up on sessions afterwards. Either methods of remote learning will give you the equivalency of in-person attendance.

You may need to adjust to my teaching methodology; it's likely different than what you're used to (unless you've participated in a craft apprenticeship or have had extremely experimental, hands-on courses in the past). I tend to start by plunging my students into the chaos of the real-time, real-world complexity of the world we're attempting to inhabit, then zoom out to give us a global picture, then work through that picture sequentially. I do this deliberately because the world we'll be exploring in is far more large and complex than what we'll be able to cover on foot, and I want to show you what you're in for and give you the chance to have "ooh, I think I'd like to explore there on my own later on!" moments, since I don't know what parts of this big world will ultimately be most useful and interesting to you.

For people who are used to sequential learning, the first two parts of this process can feel like an overwhelming firehose of information that later gets replaced by a "proper" teaching method of giving clear instructions and steps, which leads to the question "well... why didn't you just teach us the proper way earlier?" There is no "proper way." There are existing techniques, but they're very recent and raw, made-up by people who are just like you -- we're at the forefront of this sort of experimentation. In other words, I give you the structure last because I want you to see how you handle the chaos first; we're treading in such new territory that it may well be that the techniques you inadvertently develop to deal with the chaos will actually be better than any "expert" methodology that already exists.

How to prepare for and behave during a class session

My expectations for your participation may not be quite what you're used to.

I do not expect you to come to class on time, stay for the entire duration of class, or even come to class at all -- there's an asynchronous option for a reason. We all have different learning styles and crazy schedules, and you know what works best for you. However, I do expect you to show up and participate in the online forums for the class every week, regardless of whether you're in class or not; the internet is our canonical gathering place, so "if it's not public, it doesn't count." If coming to class in person gives you the support, scaffolding, and time you need to get things online, then come to class.

I don't require you to prepare before coming to class, if you decide to join us synchronously either in person or online. It's perfectly acceptable to show up, sit in the back of the (virtual or physical) room, and do the prepwork while you listen to the other students working; sometimes that co-working space is what you need to get moving. However, you won't be able to do the in-class exercises because they require you to build things with the components the prepwork has you prepare. During class time, I will be focusing on helping people through the in-class exercises, so if you're doing prepwork then, you're probably going to be on your own. And I can't promise I'll have time available to help people with in-class exercises outside of class time and office hours. Therefore, especially if you think you might need help getting through an in-class exercises, prepare -- or don't prepare -- at your own risk.

I do expect you to be proactive about reaching out to your classmates and to me with questions, comments, advice, frustrations, and so forth -- the more you initiate things (of any sort) in this workshop, the more successful you're likely to be. I expect you to be receptive, welcoming, and curious when someone approaches you with something they're initiating. And I expect you to be open to reconsidering your own perceptions and automatic reactions, even when doing so is frustrating, hard, or does not appear to have an immediate benefit. You don't have to be comfortable feeling lost, but you do need to be willing to sit with the feelings of unfamiliarity and discomfort.

Statement describing what students can expect from you as their instructor.

Here's what you can expect from me.

• I will complete all the exercises I ask you to complete before those exercises are assigned to you, so you have at least one model for what a finished product will look like.
• I'll be at class and in office hours at the times they're listed for, leading the activities that I've said I would lead.
• I will do my best to not change the times of classes and office hours (and with a 4-week workshop, I shouldn't have to). In the rare case this happens, I will let you know about schedule changes to classes and office hours at least 24 hours in advance, and make sure that anyone relying on a particular scheduling can be accommodated if it changes.
• Since this is an experimental workshop, the content and activities for subsequent weeks may shift slightly based on what's happened in the week before -- for instance, if we have a class discussion on why a particular topic is more tricky than expected, I may revise an exercise to focus more on that hard aspect. However, you can expect me to always accept the old version(s) of an exercise and do the extra legwork needed to "convert" your work to the new format if needed. In this way, if you complete exercises ahead of time, you'll always be perfectly in sync with the rest of the class; I'll take on the burden of the migration.
• I will respond to emails within 24 hours on weekdays. I will probably respond faster and I might respond on weekends, but don't use those new/faster times for expectation setting.
• I will give you feedback on everything you submit before June 13th, which gives you a few days to decompress and ask questions after the end of the formal workshop period (June 8th) and catch up or do extra work if you want to.
• I will be open to new ideas, criticism, feedback, change, and other thoughts you might have on how to improve my teaching, this workshop, or the world in general.

Advice on how to read/approach the materials for this class.

Here's how to think about handling the information stream for this class. Imagine yourself going into a jungle with a basket and a machete. You're not trying to cart home the entire rainforest, and you're not restricted to taking a particular path -- your job is to roam around looking for interesting things, selecting a few of them, and then bringing those few things home. Don't worry about finding the most interesting fruit in the jungle; what you're aiming for is to go out and consistently find fruits that are interesting enough, and making sure that nothing in your basket is rotten.

Our jungle, in this class, is pretty much the entire internet. As such, there will be a lot of potential reading material for this class, but you get to decide what your actual reading material will be. The biggest favor you can do for yourself in this class is to get used to skipping stuff. You want to expose yourself to more than you can read -- actually, more than you can triage and prioritize for reading -- and learn to trust that if you find a few things that are interesting and useful to you, that is enough; you will be missing things, but "missing" things in this context isn't going to hurt you. It's the same sort of strategy most of use for food when we go to a buffet restaurant; it's fine that you didn't try the prime rib, especially if you're happy with the macaroni you did get. The point is that you leave happy and full.

When there are things you have to read, they will be clearly marked, and you'll get them all together in a bundle at the beginning of the week. Trust me, it'll be impossible to miss. Ask me if you've ever got questions about whether you need to look at something, because (1) the answer is probably "no, it's optional -- do it if you're interested, though!" and (2) that's an indication of a lack of clarity on my part, and I appreciate these sorts of things being pointed out to me so I can fix the class and make it better!

Advice on how to study for quizzes and exams.

There are no quizzes or exams. Please don't study for any -- get some sleep and have some fun instead!

A schedule of material to be learned each time the students meet (e.g. at every class meeting).

We have four weeks, each with a different focus.

• Week 1 - how do academics use blogging and social media?
• Week 2 - setting up your web presence and making your first post(s)
• Week 3 - using your web presence for citations and networking
• Week 4 - wrap-up and next-steps

Each week will be split into two portions: a preparation part (Monday-Thursday) where you will prepare the components you need to build a portion of your online presence, and a project part (Friday, but extending into Saturday-Sunday for those who want extra time or are participating asynchronously) where you will build it. More details and specific materials for each week will be posted to the course mailing list before that week begins.

Overall synthesis

<Identify how your choices in content, assessment, and pedagogy align.>

More Schedule

Before First Friday

• Follow the 5 blogs you listed in your application, reading at least one post from one of the blogs each day. (I recommend setting up a feed reader for this.)
• Pick one blog (perhaps your favorite of the 5) to focus in on, and answer the following questions based on the 5 (or more) most recent posts on that blog.
  • What makes you interested in this blog? Why did you choose to focus on it instead of any of the other blogs on your list? Is there anything that made it the "best" (or perhaps the easiest) to focus on?
  • Who do you think the intended audience of this blog is? What makes you say that? Do you fit into the category of "intended audience" you just described?
  • What is this blog about? Who writes it?
  • How did you come up with the answers for the previous question, and what might the characteristics you chose to highlight tell you about the frame of reference you use to view blogging? What other answers -- and frames of reference -- might someone else have answered with?
• Look at the blogs on your list (and at others, if you like). Deconstruct the "anatomy of a blog" -- what components is it made from? If it helps to do this in "write a letter to a martian" format, do that.

First Friday: How do academics use blogging and social media?

Before Second Friday

Second Friday: Setting up your web presence and making your first post(s)

Before Third Friday

Third Friday: Using your web presence for citations and networking

Before Fourth Friday

Fourth Friday: Summarizing your (new?) online self and moving forward

(rough draft)

Prework: build a blogroll, read.

share blogrolls, compare experiences and common elements. homework: bring in the pieces for your homepage/blog, write to Mel about your research, keep reading.

set up your web presence, converting emails etc into blog posts, scheduling posts. homework: first week of daily blog posts, keep reading.

compare reactions, talk about networking, share someone else's post witha non-Purdue person. fears again. homework: 2nd week of daily blog posts, keep reading, find an aggregator OR an example of social media use.

OPTIONAL debrief: review each others' blogs.

Bibliography needs

• Background of professors in general -- who's NOT involved in curricular reform?
• What sorts of faculty are usually involved in curriculum reform? (Are faculty with some backgrounds more successful than others?)
• What sorts of faculty workshops already exist?
• Are they effective? (How do we tell?)
• What are professors evaluated on?
• What are the pros/cons of having institution-specific workshops vs multi-institution workshops?

• Michael Polanyi is "learning about" (explicit) vs "learning to be" (tactic)

For content:

• svinicki
• perkins
• coyle

• Overcoming fear in art
• psych lit on phobia treatments like stage fright
• bandura on self-efficacy and the things that make us confident
• Kegan - "over our heads" and "evolving self" books on change
• contact Natasha Perova, who's working on reflective teaching

This is going to be experiential learning.

• stanford institute on clear research writing from the FIE workshop Robin and Ruth did in 2011

deliverables:

• webpage
• blog
• blogroll

How graduate students learn the basics of scholarly comunication in their field

Links

• http://www.scidev.net/en/practical-guides/how-to-set-up-a-science-blog.html
• http://swasey-graphicallydangerous.blogspot.com/
• https://www.google.com/search?&q=starting+a+research+blog
• https://www.google.com/search?&q=starting+an+academic+blog
• https://www.google.com/search?&q=getting+researchers+to+blog
• https://www.google.com/search?&q=why+academics+should+blog
• https://www.google.com/search?&q=getting+academics+to+blog
• https://www.google.com/search?&q=why+researchers+should+blog