Check out the page for Sue Polanka, Head of Reference, Paul Laurence Dunbar Library to see how an individual page can be organized in the CORE. The College of Nursing has deposited several interviews from the Wright State University-Miami Valley College of Nursing and Health Oral History Project.

Many of us travel fairly widely, it would be great to come to the CORE and find digital images from around the world to incorporate into lectures for my classes!

Margie McLellan

In “Present, Not Voting: Digital Humanities in the Panopiticon,” Terras also points to pitfalls in the representation of digital humanities on the Web and within academe. This is an excellent response to the FAQ, “what is digital humanities?” Terras has a great sense of humor and uses visuals well–including images of twitter messages as well as Jeremy Bethan’s “auto-icon” and “panopticon”–to make the one hour talk engaging as well as provocative. The follow up discussion–”do those who control the faucet own the water?”–is quite good as well.

While you are thinking about Digital Humanities, read Daniel Paul O’Donnell’s advice on what one can do with a humanities degree in the digital economy in “Humanities, not science, key to new web frontier.”

“Putting the end user [or target audience] first” is the foundation of “Shaping Outcomes” and the first step is to consider audience needs that you might address; these needs “may be wants, deficits, conditions, or other gaps between skills/knowledge audiences already have, and those they want.” For targeted audiences, I identified:

• The university community (students, faculty and staff).
• Lifelong learners/informal learners.
• Teachers looking for resources.
• People in business, government, nonprofits, etc. looking for expertise, resources, speakers, contacts, and/or partners.
• Future students, parents, and high school/community college transfer advisors.

Below, I’ve brainstormed (guessed) a bit about the needs of each of these audiences that might be addressed by developing a Wright State digital commons. I would very much like to hear other ideas!

What are targeted end users’ needs (conditions, wants, and deficits)?

1. The university community (students, faculty and staff)

• Who we are at the university and our shared interests are difficult to tease out based on department and office web sites.
• Faculty and staff may miss out on partners to collaborate with.
• Within the university, we are not learning from each other and making full and effective use of the expertise and resources that can be found at Wright State.
• Students cannot identify faculty who can teach, advise, or mentor them on their academic and career choices based on particular faculty interests.
• Students want to know a lot more about particular courses and assignments before the term begins.
• Students cannot reliably find other students with common interests.
• Students want to be able to find what is going on in a department or program at Wright State (new courses, events, etc.).
• Faculty want examples or models, as well as support, in using new tools (Desire2Learn, Elluminate, Wings, DARS, etc.).
• Faculty are frustrated by the limitations of licensed learning management systems and want to experiment with more flexible and/or open source applications.
• Students would like their learning at Wright State to model and strengthen skills that they will need after they graduate.
• Everyone wants to find and keep track of resources and information easily.
• Students, faculty, and staff may want to serve and contribute to the public good.
• Students, faculty, and staff may want to engage with others about politics, social movements, and causes like the environment.
• Staff may want to communicate via blogs to reach the university community about their programs (International Education, the Bolinga Center, etc.)
• Students are looking for opportunities to get professional experience beyond the classroom.
• Students, faculty, and staff want to use and manipulate online environments without learning HTML and CSS.

2. Life long learners/informal learners

• Enjoy digging down and finding out more about a topic.
• Make worthy use of available resources known to them. The university, like a science museum, library, or cultural institution, is full of engaging resources including great lecturers, teachers, performers, artists, exhibits, collections but there is no easy way to tap into these resources based on the individual’s interests.
• Find their learning unnecessarily limited because many of the university’s resources are hidden from the public.
• Surprisingly, like to listen to lectures!
• Want to find lectures and other rich resources through ITunes, and other online platforms.
• Want to check out program information, maps, parking, etc. before attending an event at Wright State.

3. Teachers looking for resources

• Realize that the university is full of valuable resources for teachers, including curriculum, lesson plans, teaching strategies, professional development opportunities, and news, primary sources, multimedia educational tools, and expertise–but there is no easy way to tap into these resources based on the individual’s interests.
• Look for online learning opportunities, as well as face2face professional development opportunities.
• Want to find tools to help them organize, teach more effectively, and move ahead professionally.
• Want materials (such as educational games) to extend or reinforce learning for differentiated instruction.
• Want “hooks” and “connections” to engage students with their studies.
• Are often only able to look for and at these opportunities after 3:30 PM.
• Want to find and download resources that can be carried into the classroom and used.
• Want to be able to find these resources again, and to share resources with other teachers.
• Want to chat, learn, and collaborate with each other.

4. People in business, government, nonprofits etc. looking for expertise, resources, contacts, and/or partners

• Nonprofit volunteers and staff are looking for free or inexpensive tools and strategies to do their work more effectively.
• All sectors are looking for expertise to tap to produce better programs and/or fuel economic development.
• Nonprofits, schools, and government are looking for partners who will strengthen, deepen, and expand the reach for grant funded initiatives.
• All sectors are looking for training and professional development opportunities and information.
• People in all sectors would like to build ongoing, effective student internship, project, service learning, and coop programs with Wright State University.
• People in all sectors want to know who to call or email and how to contact individuals.
• They want to move beyond individual workplaces and businesses in order to connect with others in similar fields.

5. Future students, parents, and high school/community college advisers are:

• Looking for a college that will help the student pursue personal interests and obtain the skills, knowledge, and experience in order to fulfill their career goals.
• Looking to learn more about the people, opportunities, and everyday life at Wright State University.
• Looking for the best environment in which to thrive as a learner.
• Looking for connections.
• Living and working at a distance and have limited time to visit and become informed about Wright State University.
• Wanting to find the information online.
• Looking to pick up a summer course.
• Pursuing a degree at another campus and looking for distance learning opportunities in their field.
• Wanting the chance to interact in order to have individual questions addressed.

There are many more steps in the Shaping Outcomes tutorial. I plan to follow up in future posts. Next up is Audience Considerations: “What characteristics might create a barrier to the experience you want them to have or the changes you hope to see in this group?”

Margie McLellan

You can create your own homepage or webpage at Wright State with a little HTML or an editor, but many of us fail to update or delete these pages. You can use your WordPress site as a homepage–I created this as an example– you don’t have to blog on your “blog.” WordPress makes it a lot easier to create and update (or delete) your homepage. Right now, each web page is like its own fairly static document, called forth by institutional links (department, WSU directory) or searches. The links and content get pretty dusty on individual pages. Department web pages operate in pretty much the same way – an easily accessible source of information but not a platform for communication and interaction. Some programs and departments, as well as initiatives like the Digital Humanities Forum or Save the Campus Woods, have used Facebook to extend their reach and enhance communications, but finding one another on Facebook is probably still a bit hit or miss.

YOU should get online via WordPress. Through the topic “tags” in our installation of WordPress MU, we can find those with common interests at Wright State. We can create a network of connections that will help students find those who share common interests, including teachers, mentors, and advisors. When I first came to WSU, I browsed the required reading shelves in the bookstore to get a peek at what other faculty were doing. Many of us work within the confines of our departments, hallways, and colleges when we aren’t serving on university wide committees with specific responsibilities. WordPress provides the opportunity to break down these silos and share interests and even dialogue, if we choose, around those interests. For an example of what this might look like, explore the WordPress.com tag cloud.

Despite its apparent openness, the university is a pretty opaque place to the public. Nonprofits and others interested in service learning partnerships, student interns, professional speakers, expert commentary, or consultants will have greater access to university resources. Amateur historians, naturalists, astronomers, and others may learn from and engage with professionals. Teachers may access the support and resources that we have to offer. Future students want to know what to expect.

I want to encourage the Wright State University community–students, faculty, staff, departments, programs, offices, student organizations–to consider creating a presence on WordPress. We are still testing the Wright State platform this fall. We should be able to move beyond the “webapp3.wright.edu/web2/” URL soon. Let me know if you are interested in joining this effort.

Margie McLellan

I previously proposed the introduction of a new, interdisciplinary Digital Studies degree along the lines of the Liberal Studies degree at Wright State. Digital Studies would serve students in the STEMM areas as well as those in Liberal Arts, Education, Human Services, and Business. What would a CoLA Digital Humanities certificate or minor look like? First of all, the course of study would serve advanced undergraduate as well as graduate students looking to enhance their MA degrees in the college. The format of courses would vary with many delivered through a combination of online components and webinars. Core courses could include an Introduction to Digital Literacy, Visual Rhetoric, a Digital Humanities Toolkit (a heavily hands on course with a lab), Humanities Research in the Digital Age, and a seminar that looks at issues in digital humanities. Cross-listed seminar or elective course topics might include Cultural Institutions and Informal Learning, Curating Digital Collections, History and New Media, Digital News Media, Participatory Democracy and Social Movements in the Digital Age, Privacy and Identity, Copyright, Digital Project Management, Professional and Technical Writing, Digital Storytelling, Documentary Studies, Crowdsourcing News, Maps and Map Making, Games and Virtual Worlds, Hypertext and Text Mining, and so on.

Courses that meet face-to-face and address relevant themes would also be included. However, a new certificate or degree program should reflect the potential of digital humanities through far greater openness to both student interests and public access. Using the Open Courseware model pioneered at MIT and elsewhere, the content of courses can be made available online for a period of time and some webinars may be open to the public. As well as independent studies, a Digital Humanities program would offer collaborative studies opportunities for groups of students to define their own course of study. One of my best experiences in graduate school in American Studies was a collaborative independent study of photography, over two quarters, with three graduate students and Professor John Modell. We can certainly put our heads together and figure out how to respond to students, encourage collaboration, enrich learning, and compensate faculty fairly for their work in a digital environment.

Margie McLellan

Individually universities like Wright State have rich veins of scholarship, discovery, and interpretation as well as collections of data but we are only slowly moving beyond technologies of the last century to open these resources to the public. The Wright State University Core (Campus Online Repository), part of a state-wide effort to capture and share digital collections, is a significant 21st century initiative along these lines. Often what we find online is driven by the administration under the aegis of public relations, marketing, and statewide agendas for economic development. This makes sense when we are thinking about the strategic investment of public dollars in building Centers of Excellence across Ohio but the focus is still on silos. How do we get past the limits and boundaries to open up the resources of higher education in more comprehensive, dynamic, collaborative, and engaging ways? How do we provide open and democratic access to the information, data, analysis, and creative work that resides within university walls?

While I was in graduate school at the University of Minnesota, twenty plus years ago, my husband was a media producer for the university. He produced television courses and professional training media as well as documentaries and broadcast programs including one called “Research Journal.” The latter, broadcast on public television, shared fascinating stories about the research at the university with the Minnesota public.

Today, researchers can document their work in video and images without necessarily taking a production crew to Peru or Kenya. A webinar now integrates the opportunity for the audience to share questions and comments with the media production. The webinar recording can reside online to be viewed or integrated into a class at a later date. The web allows viewers to dig deeper, to look at the underlying research data, collections, and interpretation. Digging deeper at a university in Ohio may take the visitor into online repositories of digital resources managed through OhioLink. The web also allows viewers to move across resources via tags or searches and to make their own connections. Visitors could contribute content through crowd sourcing initiatives or guide others by leaving a comment, tagging information, or simply giving a “thumbs up” to what they find.

This is a small piece of what the Smithsonian Institution proposes to do (see my previous posts) through its digitization plan and the Smithsonian Commons. While Wright State or another state university is far different from the Smithsonian, in collaboration with other institutions in Southwest Ohio (SOCHE) or throughout the state (University System of Ohio), we could create an Ohio Commons as a hub for knowledge, creativity, and learning. Although work of national and international significance is done within state universities, in contrast to the Smithsonian, our mission includes serving the people of Ohio and making a difference for the communities, schools, natural environment, quality of life, arts, and economic health of the state. The Smithsonian Commons challenges us to reconsider both our engagement with others as well as the relationships and productions that define higher education. Will we be able to move beyond our silos to collectively make this kind of change?

To learn more about the Commons concept, check out Smithsonian Director of Web and New Media Strategy, Michael Edson’s “What is a Commons” presentation on Slide Share (Walker Art Center, June 2, 2010).

A must listen: the FIR (for immediate release) interview with Michael Edson (posted July 24, 2010). “Mobile is, I’m convinced, everything.”

Margie McLellan

Teaching Development Fellowships (TDF) support college and university teachers pursuing research aimed specifically at improving their undergraduate teaching. The program has three broad goals: 1) to improve the quality of humanities education in the United States; 2) to strengthen the link between research and teaching in the humanities; and 3) to foster excellence in undergraduate instruction.

Projects must improve an existing undergraduate course that has been taught in at least THREE different terms prior to the application deadline and will continue to be taught by the applicant. Proposals for new courses or for mere course preparation will NOT be considered. The research project must be closely related to the applicant’s core interests as an interpreter of the humanities.

Applications for NEH Teaching Development Fellowships are due by September 30, 2010. Contact your chair and dean as well as the WSU office of Research and Sponsored Programs if you might apply for this.

Margie McLellan

Distance learning should be motivated by both student needs and the instructional context (the learning outcomes, course size, content, the instructor’s strengths and teaching style, etc) rather than by the availability of classrooms. A great lecturer should not feel compelled to give up lecturing, and discussions that highlight the personal dimensions of power and politics may not lend themselves to online sharing. Others warn that our students themselves are unprepared for online learning and may fail at a higher rate as a result. This is a real concern, but one that has been addressed extensively in other institutions, including Sinclair Community College, where most students experience some online learning. Wright State already has recognized that “one off” distance learning courses may not be the best investment of faculty effort (it takes a lot of effort) or of institutional resources. “Random acts of distance learning” are a disservice to students who are not well informed about their choices.

In order to provide more choices while insuring that students are better prepared, we could develop a Digital Studies counterpart to the Liberal Studies major as well as a Digital Studies minor. Digital studies would be simply one more option among the many majors, minors, and certicates that we offer. This leaps over individual distance learning courses to a “born digital” course of study. Most, if not all, of these Digital Studies courses would be open to all students, but these would be selected from a digital studies list. Faculty and staff collaboration around these courses, offered by affiliate faculty, would support the extension of well designed digital learning opportunities within other majors.

The majority of courses, and for some students all courses, could be completed online. Digital literacy provides a connecting thread to the course of study. While students would have flexibility in how they build the individualized degree program, a crucial feature (as with Women’s Studies and other integrative, interdisciplinary programs) would be a sequence of core learning experiences leading towards a capstone seminar and project. The core experiences could include both interdisciplinary courses that introduce critical perspectives on, and skills for, digital studies, along with face-to-face learning communities that bring students together for a week-end at least twice each year.

Students could complete many or all of their WSU Core courses through existing and future distance learning options across many departments; however students would also reflect upon the online learning experience and resources as they examine digital literacy. Students would be encouraged to look outward, taking advantage of digital course options and learning experiences beyond Wright State. A Digital Studies option would mesh well with international education and service learning initiatives.

A Digital Studies program requires an institutional commitment to distance learning beyond “random acts.” It will also be crucial to guard against pressures to increase enrollment limits on online courses that will undermine the future of digital learning at Wright State University.

An open framework like Liberal Studies/Digital Studies could support the growth of born digital certificate programs as well. We might begin by looking at creating an undergraduate Digital Humanities certificate. More on that later.

Margie McLellan