PROJECT PROFILES

I2U @ VKP: A Community of Independents

One of the really valued components of VKP is the group of faculty known as the Independent Investigators. The Independent Investigators by design represent a group of participants who would conduct their work not on the core campuses, but on their own campuses and "virtually" in the Project

All of the Independent Investigators have come to the project to take their work to the next level, with the VKP model of reflective practice and public dissemination providing a formal, collaborative environment for their work over the next few years. Independent Investigators are expanding the sites of impact for this sort of work, including interdisciplinary field formation, faculty development, and online learning. Most of the Independent Investigators, or indies, are preparing to undertake their research projects this year.

In many ways, the Independent Investigators represent the struggles of innovative teachers across the academy: this sort of work can be isolating, and the risks can be great for those whose institutions make little effort to support their goals for improved student learning. As the Project got off the ground, the primary focus first had to be on the core campuses, with not a lot of attention given to the independent component. At the July VKP Summer Institute, we took a big leap forward in finding ways to integrate the Independent Investigators by creating a "virtual campus" parallel to the cores: I2U, or Independent Investigator University, as coined by the indies themselves.

Currently, seven Independent Investigators participate in VKP: Melinda de Jesús (Arizona State University), Gloria Harper Dickinson (College of New Jersey), Ed Gallagher (Lehigh University), Samira Kawash (Rutgers University), Mills Kelly (George Mason University), Lois Leveen (Reed College), and Jo Paoletti (University of Maryland, College Park). They have all done work with connections to the roots of the project, as each of them comes to us from one of three key groups out of which VKP emerged: the American Studies Crossroads project, the New Media Classroom project (NMC), and the Carnegie Scholarship of Teaching and Learning project. Visible Knowledge brings them together virtually.

Through VKP these scholars continue to ask the foundational questions about technology and student learning that inform good teaching practices. I2U is one response to the isolation that can challenge innovative teaching.

We will feature each of the Independent Investigators in the newsletter over time. Here we focus on the work of two, in particular: Ed Gallagher, of Lehigh University, and Gloria Harper Dickinson, of the College of New Jersey.

Ed Gallagher

Melinda de Jesús (Arizona State University) is looking at how an entire field of culture studies grows in relation to technology. In an essay included in Works and Days, de Jesús suggests that "Asian American Studies teachers must take time to become familiar with and adept at introducing new media technology. We need to delve into this area and define its parameters before the technology itself defines our discipline for us! One way to start would be to address the dearth of good web sites and multimedia in Asian American Studies. . . ." In her work with VKP, she is interested in looking at students' learning curves: "how they become more comfortable with both the subject [in her case, Asian American art] and the technology (web authoring)."

Ed Gallagher was chosen to coordinate the virtual campus for the first year. A professor of English, Gallagher has been teaching at Lehigh since 1969. He claims that VKP provides a certain "cachet." "I am at a university trying to 'move up,' and, naturally, faculty here feel the pressure for more and more [traditional] research. Participation in VKP gives me the 'space' needed to follow a different drum." Gallagher feels the most important question in pedagogy today has to do with the use of technology, and the VKP is a place for him to pursue some answers.

Gallagher's work includes Reel American History (www.Lehigh.
EDU/~ineng/ejg/rah.html), a project he says "flips Randy's 'novice in the archive' idea:

Reel American History is 'an archive built by novices.'" These web-based archival projects illustrate a prominent area for new media and the study of culture: student production of materials. The projects in the archive include the work of Gallagher's students as well as students from other campuses, and they reflect "substantial" investments of time and a range of skills.

http://www.lehigh.edu/~ineng/ejg/rah.html

Gallagher's decision to make "authentic" student work public raises several questions for him, which are useful for the Project as a whole:

Is all the (extra) work to do so worth it?
Are students learning more or better?
Are we just cluttering the web?
Are we just providing fodder for plagiarists?
Who will trust and use student work?
Are we just some technified vanity press?
Are we just speeding up the professionalization of students?

Gallagher is also working on what he terms "a garden-variety archive:" the Enola Gay Controversy. He hopes this project is the first step in a larger site called "History on Trial." "Through the new phenomenon of 'durable links…'" explains Gallagher, "the students have a large variety of material in databases such as Lexis-Nexis and Proquest available at virtually a click." A goal of this project is to make research incredibly easier and to expand enormously the amount of information students can access. Gallagher sees some overlap with the Reel American History project in the questions raised by the Enola Gay project. "Does the ability to reach more and more diverse material increase the quality of student work? And what kind of scaffolding do I need to have them take best advantage of the riches available to them?"

http://www.lehigh.edu/~ineng/enola/

A good working relationship with Lehigh's technical people and assistance from grad students provide Gallagher the support he needs on campus. Gallagher also says, "The main thing I need is to be scheduled into the kinds of courses where I can use the web projects," and that has been happening.

"Where I think VKP will be helpful to me," says Gallagher, "is in the "slowing down…" and in the reflection and assessment of what is happening in a course.

Gloria Harper Dickinson

Gloria Harper Dickinson, chair of the College of New Jersey's African American Studies Department, echoes this emphasis on "deepening," regardless of the technology that may or may not be employed. Dickinson's course for VKP is Africana Women in Historical Perspective. But unlike Gallagher, Dickinson lacks the full technical support she needs for these types of projects. She had started a web conversion of her course but she says "our campus is not moving toward online instruction at all…. If the opportunity ever presents itself someplace else, I guess I would go on and finish it. It was just a tremendous amount of work."

Ed Gallagher, professor of English at Lehigh University, was chosen to coordinate the Independent Investigator University for the first year. Ed says of VKP, "I have already experienced the substantial potential for change such programs can have. Even with the little I have done and know, I have become a kind of 'poster boy' on my campus for exploring the use of technology in the humanities." [See Profile.]

Dickinson is, however, ncorporating pedagogy that she believes is deepening the learning experience for her students. She credits VKP with helping her to use video in a more effective way in her classes. Her campus now has a lab for faculty to digitize video. Rather than using an entire video, she digitizes pertinent pieces and puts these smaller segments on a server that students can access outside of class and she can access during class. Similarly, Dickinson uses digitized audio interviews and makes them available to students via the web or on a server. "You don't have to spend class time playing the tape, when you could be talking about the tape because everybody listened to the tape before they came to class." In a different class, Dickinson has observed that using the audio book version of Malidona Patrice's A Water and Spirit enables students to suspend disbelief easier than when reading the text. Therefore, students have an easier time engaging with the story and its meaning.

A campus network of closed-circuit broadcasts helps Dickinson expand teaching and learning beyond the traditional classroom. I have "moved some of the video assignments out of the classroom entirely." For example, she assigns a video that was shown on the campus channel 3 times a day for one week. The technology and the access to it outside of class results in "freeing up more time in class so that the students are doing more group work, working online in the classroom as opposed to sitting there watching a video."

Samira Kawash, associate professor of English at Rutgers University, is most concerned about rethinking the role of writing in the literature class. She says, "The long seminar paper seems an obsolete form. Shifting attention from product to process, what writing processes are most useful for enhancing students' capacities for insight and critique?" Kawash plans to survey her students to "learn students' attitudes and their actual objective capacities."

In the classroom itself, Dickinson has merged traditional class meetings with the online world. Her classes meet in a computer lab and she uses the Speakeasy Studio & Cafe from Washington State University. During class she often posts questions then has students form groups to go online and find an answer. The lab allows more immediacy and students can work to find the answers themselves, post these answers for all to review and begin conversation outside of the class if appropriate. This has enhanced her students' learning by making it more student-centered and also by shifting the responsibility for student learning to the students themselves. Having these tools available right in the classroom fosters the kinds of research and skills a liberal arts degree is supposed to emphasize. For instance, Dickinson cites short writing assignments completed online, instantly in class.

http://www.tcnj.edu/%7Eafamstud/finalweb/part2/dustweb/

A big difference in her course after her involvement with VKP has been "actually articulating the set of goals for the course and putting them into the syllabus and then using them at the end of the semester, going back to them, and giving them to the students as a study guide for the final exam." Getting to the why and the how of establishing goals "made a lot of sense" and is something she is doing for her other courses. At the end of a course, Dickinson feels her students have learned what she actually intended for them to learn.

As Coordinator for Western Civilization Programs at George Mason University, Mills Kelly is interested in "the degree to which new media technologies facilitate collaborative learning among students in an introductory course." During the Summer Institute, Kelly showed examples of his Scholarship of Teaching project in his Western Civ classes at Texas Tech. He is now the Director for Educational Projects at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, where he teaches in the Department of History and Art History

A recent semester project by students in Dickinson's Honors Course in Diaspora Religion illustrates the potential for collaboration within the I2U community. Dickinson "fell in love with" Ed Gallagher's Reel American History site and used it as the basis for the course project. Students added to the archive the films Daughters of the Dust and Sankofa, thereby providing an African-American perspective, that previously had not been represented, to the issue of the relationship between film and history.

Lois Leveen, a visiting professor of English and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, sees advantages in her relationship with VKP: "It is good to have an outside attachment to VKP, to counter my isolation at my home campus." She looks to VKP participants to help her "define more specifically what the uses of technology will be in [her course, Fictions of Asian America]." On her role as an independent investigator, she adds. "If I'm not staying at the same school for the duration of the project, at least my status with VKP won't be jeopardized or altered the way it might if I were at a core campus."

Given that Independent Investigators work outside of the core campus model, they are challenged with finding ways to gather and disseminate information on new pedagogies and the scholarship of teaching and learning. Dickinson's organization for the Digitizing Divas conference held in June was one such independent model. The conference demonstrated how faculty are constantly developing their profession as they engage in this sort of work. The goals of the Digitizing Divas conference included helping faculty teaching about women of African descent to incorporate new media pedagogies in their courses and provide resources and examples of best practices. In addition, the conference addressed teaching and learning issues faced by minority faculty, African-American women faculty in particular. This included, Dickinson notes, the basic question of why many African-American women are reluctant to use new media. Dickinson feels Digitizing Divas actualized her vision of a conference that covers both the scholarship of a particular field of study and new media pedagogies.

http://abwh.tcnj.edu/divasmain.htm

Illustrating the effectiveness of her efforts at deepening the students' experience in her course, Dickinson tells the stories of two students. One student had taken and failed the course before, and she had returned later to take it again. In her end-of-the-term evaluation of the course, the student said she found it much easier this time around to understand the material with all of the new media components as part of the course. In particular, the student believed she had benefited from having the syllabus online and using the website. "She really did do better work," Dickinson says.

Jo Paoletti is an associate professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Paoletti's work in 100-percent distance learning environments illustrates some of the possibilities for online teaching. She serves as director of Undergraduate Studies in the American Studies department and co-director of the College Park Scholars in American Cultures.

Another of her students had raduated, was working on Wall Street, and had contacted Dickinson to ask to update his former web site project. Through his job he had come across pertinent new information and was eager to post it to the site. Dickinson incredulously summarizes this difference between old and new forums for student work: "Whoever comes back and says, 'Excuse me can I do more work on my term paper?'"

Dickinson aims to eventually reconfigure her course in such a way that students approach the material from completely different vantage points but they all end up in the same place. She points out that this goal raises interesting questions:

How do you reconcile giving the student the option to independently engage the material with a traditional class gathering?
What do you do in the classroom if all students are working from different vantage points?
Should a class that has students entering from disparate topics be conducted completely online?
Does this structure only lend itself to an independent study environment, where students communicate with instructors individually?

VKP hopes to convene the Independent Investigators sometime during the academic year for some version of an I2U local dialogue. According to participants, there is no substitute for f-2-f contact, and, as many will undertake their projects this year, the hope is that this planned meeting will move their work forward, not only for the VKP, but also for the teachers in front of the classrooms. Welcome I2U: "Virtually the Best Campus!"

October 2001

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