Running with Scissors

My colleague Martha Burtis has a great blog, The Fish Wrapper. But while I was vacationing in Charleston, NC a few weeks back I discovered it has been far more successful than I originally thought. Can I have a ride sometime Martha?

Today, many across the blogosphere are making posts in honor of Ada Lovelace Day, a day filled with blog posts featuring women excelling in technology. Why Ada Lovelace? She is considered to be the worlds’ first computer programmer, designing programs for Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine.

While some are focusing their posts on great women role models in history, I’ve decided to stay more contemporary, and local. Since we can post about whomever we like in the area of women and technology, I have decided to not just limit myself to one person. I work with some pretty amazing and inspiring role models right here at UMW, so the choice to focus on my colleagues was easy.

First off, Martha Burtis. As a colleague in DTLT, she is always inspiring, challenging, and pushing those around her to use technology in innovative ways for teaching and learning. Her tenacity in chasing down WordPress plugin issues, or thinking through new initiatives here in DTLT are equally important to the work we do. Martha is a rare combination of a person with vision and technical chops to turn vision into reality. Not only that, she is a gifted strategic thinker – many times that is more valuable in getting the vision to reality. Plus, she puts up with the rest of us in DTLT – this is not an insignificant point.

Cathy Finn Derecki is a person with much knowledge, depth and wit in the work that she does. And what is that work? You name it. The thing I admire most about Cathy is her ability to learn new things, and then apply them in interesting and innovative ways. If she doesn’t know a new system, give her a week – she will. Give her two weeks and the wild stuff starts happening.

Words to describe another UMW colleague, Dana German: trust, excellence, leadership, compassion, and humor. She is able to organize, communicate, and move a team through IT projects so big you don’t even know where to start, and she does it in a way that is all at once demanding, inspiring, and successful. Dana has a rare gift: she inspires you to WANT to do ridiculous amounts of work on short time lines. Plus, she is someone that always has your back.

Pam Lowery, a colleague and friend and one of the people who hired me here at UMW almost 10 years ago is a person who can get more done in one 24 hour period than most can in a week. Her ability to help almost anyone with anything tech related, and to do it with grace and good humor is inspiring indeed. How she is able to say “yes” when everyone else says “no” is a testimonial to the size of the heart she has.

I have two other colleagues here in DTLT that also are worthy of mention as role models, our student aides Serena Epstein and Shannon Hauser. They both work with DTLT staff to help us implement our crazy ideas while at the same time having some pretty interesting ideas themselves. Having two students of the caliber of Serena and Shannon help DTLT to do better, more interesting, and more relevant work aimed at student audiences. Plus, they are just plain fun to be around.

Each of these women give me something to aspire to, they show me a way to approach work and life that goes beyond doing what is expected, what is ordinary. I’m grateful to know them all as colleagues, but more importantly, as friends.

If you are interested in reading further posts from Ada Lovelace Day, you can see a list of others who have posted here: http://ada.pint.org.uk/list.php.

Just when you thought the whole “Edupunk” thing was over, Wired had this interesting item included in this month’s “Jargon Watch” feature:

Edupunk n. Avoiding mainstream teaching tools like Powerpoint and Blackboard, edupunks bring the rebellious attitude and DIY ethos of ’70s bands like the Clash to the classroom.

Congrats, Jim – the pebble you dropped in the pond is still rippling out.

For the last two days, I’ve been attending the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative’s Fall Focus Session on the campus of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis (great town, great campus). The topic of the session is Learning Spaces. We have been seeing and hearing about some interesting projects that other institutions have implemented to improve teaching and learning by creating more technology-rich spaces.
Some of the projects include “incubator classrooms” that are experimental spaces where instructors utilize different types of technologies and pedagogies.

As we see some of these projects, they often require elaborate and/or expensive equipment, along with the support personnel and instructional technology specialists needed to help the faculty member use the space to reach their instructional goals. One common concern from audience participants when seeing these projects seems to be “how do you scale that across the campus?”

On the surface, this seems like a legitimate concern, after all, who has all the time, money and support available to put these systems in the hands of all the faculty in every classroom? But the more I think about it, I’m leaning towards an opinion that this matters less than we think.

The assumption that you have a new experimental system, program, or technique that MANY faculty want to use out of the box is a false one. I’ve often found that with a new technology/technique, no matter how promising, there are some faculty who are ready to jump in and give it a try, there are some on the fence, and some who are simply not interested. This essentially spaces out the demand – you actually don’t need to deploy as widely as you think. And if you are trying new things all the time, you have different faculty ready for different techniques at different times. Thus, if you simply build the spaces that meet the needs of those that will use them, instead of over-building into every space assuming everyone will use it, you will be more efficient with your resources.

I love the idea of different pockets of effective teaching and learning technologies spread across the campus that have been tested and honed in the incubator setting. I know these pockets of technology can cause headaches as far as supporting these systems and faculty, but I believe they would be so effective and so accepted by a number of faculty as to be well worth the effort.

Yesterday I read posts by Alan, Gardner, and D’Arcy on a new web application to generate “prettier” tag clouds called Wordle.

First thought was, “oh, cool. Prettier tag clouds of my del.icio.us feed. I like pretty.”

But this tool can do much more than simply shine up your del.icio.us tag cloud. The really powerful feature here is that you can create a tag cloud from ANY text that you want to drop into it. Suddenly, song lyrics, poems, or news articles can be analyzed in a totally new way. Seeing the words this way allows sparks of different thoughts – it makes new connections.

Here is an example of the tag cloud from one of my favorite U2 songs entered into Wordle:

And here is one I created from the text on the Wikipedia page about a certain “ideology” making the rounds in the edtech sphere these days:

You also have control on how the tags get arranged, the colors, the font style, the number of tags to include and more. Jonathan Feinberg, the creator of Wordle, has also created a site that posts a gallery of the most recent Wordles that others have created. The gallery is an interesting browse as well.