Project Notes Goal/Mission: Develop course modules and individual assignments that engage and take advantage of the LSBE alumni network; and, create and support engagement and community across the generations of LSBE students and graduates
Process Guidelines:
- Learning should be directly practical and positively involve and impact local communities
- Community-involved learning should have a low barrier of entry, specific pedagogical aims/content, and direct and immediate rewards for all stakeholders
- Development should be iterative, aggregating, and sustainable
Timeline and Stages
for business communications curriculum development Spring '11: Introduce E-Professionalism TrainingStudents create LinkedIN accounts; Learn social networking skills Fall '11: Alumni Networking Assignment Students find and select participating alumni on LinkedIN; Contact and interview over phone or Skype Spring '12 and Forward: Guest Speaker Event ProjectsStudents invite, promote, host, interview, capture, process, and publish; Grow UBizcom materials to promote alumni success (profiles, interviews); Grow UBizcom materials to share alumni wisdom (presentations, talks, tutorials)
Collaborative Learning CommonsBuild UBizcom community site and learning archive; share materials with other outlets (alumni site, LSBE site, etc.) Increase student and alumni interest, investment, and interaction: an ongoing and continually growing community of learners, teachers, professionals Tools and Miscellaneous UThink Blogs/Sites: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/Hosting sites; publication/publicity
Google Apps: http://www.oit.umn.edu/google/ Coordination, documentation, open scheduling for visiting professionals LinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/Social networking, professional community connection
Preliminary Outline for a Grant-based Research Project?
Exigence: Demand for collaborative skills in workplace; Contexts for professional work are increasingly cross-functional, asynchronous, and socially networked; Adoption of Google Apps platform by the University of Minnesota system provides a unique opportunity for college-wide use and curriculum growth based in collaborative and socially networked production processes
Create OPEN Source Collaborative Learning Environments (OS-CLE) Archives:
- Develop Google Docs template archives for instructors including word processor documents and survey forms (Assignment Sheets, Guidelines, Group Contracts, Team Building Exercises, Peer-review and Evaluation Forms, and Assessment Forms/Procedures);
- Develop Google Sites templates -- for instructors: Collaborative-based course and individual project templates; for students: club/organization, group projects, individual learning environments / study portals;
- Create Learning Modules on specific topics (Team Work, Conflict Resolution, Leadership, Facilitation) and Tutorials for specific Tools (Youtube, LinkedIN, etc.)
Develop Collaborative Learning Research Program (CLRP): Capture metrics on OS-CLE adoption and use by faculty and students; Assessment at all stages of deployment including user-based feedback for students and Faculty Assessment procedures for courses and assignments; ultimately, a longitudinal study of a sample of LSBE students from freshman year through 5 years out of school to measure the impact, value, and experience with collaborative work processes and infrastructures For Further Invention: Consider potential research partners and project stakeholders (from UMD community, UM system, and beyond); Investigate best practices and programs of Higher Ed institutions using Google Apps; Perform literature review and seek advice/feedback on study design; Explore grant opportunities and/or potential funding sources
Service DimensionUse google sites and docs to develop templates of group project sites and group project materials as well as disseminating How-to tutorials on the process structures that make use of these materials. Institutional StudyDevelop longitudinal study of google apps adoption, usage, and impact on teaching and learning in LSBE. Instruments should place especial emphasis on changes in the development, implementation, and outcomes of collaborative, group, and team processes in curriculum.
Individual Pedagogical InnovationBegin prototyping new version of the course with these features: - Professional Operations Infrastructure: course-site and work-processes based on social media, Web 2.0 style project management applications
- Skills Development: Emphasis on transferrable, functional skills and learning how-to-learn (collaboration, problem-solving, communication (invention, audience-analysis, editing, presenting), project organization, work-processes, etc., etc.)
- Team and Project Management: Multiple team and group structures producing a variety of deliverables on a series of overlapping project timelines (model complexity and cross-functionality of workplace interactions)
- Genre-based composition techniques: Develop competence with a wide range of professional genres including employment communications (resumes, cover letters, follow-up letters), business correspondence (positive, negative, sales, and persuasive messages), oral presentations, multimedia presentations
- Multimodal composition techniques: Develop familiarity with a wide range of writing contexts and tools including word processing, slide-based presentations, collaborative writing applications, software-based editing tools, face to face, video chat, visual/video media, etc., etc.
- Ethical Technological Commons: Implementing principles and processes for open source and collaborative learning (constructivism, connectivism, learn through teaching, etc., etc.): Students will produce and consume collaboratively produce multimodal learning materials and modules on topics relevant to business communicators
case study: interface and Community Learning Environment design ...walk through principles, specific choices, constraints/affordances, etc.)) the complex and situated work of GTD
for example: develop CMS for user(student)-generated content, instructor materials with multiple front ends: course-specific, public-instruction, and promotional / alumni community
right now: kalthura, CMS (wordpress, joomla, drupal?)
issues: ethics of interface design, methodological, constructivist, usability, context specific or ecological concerns
Recognizing that the lecture based format of my courses is leaving the Spring semester students a little flat, it may be time to consider some alternative approaches to using class time. One possible solution it take a more constructivist approach to arriving at the material. For example, begin class by taking a survey of common questions/issues/problems in writing resumes. Assemble a Question list and produce answers via google-search and web clipping from various resources around the internet. Students will build an interlinked FAQ for each topic. Ideally, the interface would involve easy web-clipping and linking as well as a interface for ranking the quality of potential answers.
The larger scope of such an approach would involve developing a common course interface for posting information whether it is web-clip, worksheet response, or final documents. Perhaps a common interface with sorting by tags and types? Ideally, the ability to create virtual organizations and/or representations: for example, before, during, and after snapshots of a single individual's resumes though the revision process; or, sort by type of resume (chrono, skills, combo) or by major (accounting, finance, etc.). The next question would be what set of tools to use? A common interface like a blog with a shared posting bookmarklet or loose federation of content sites (itunesU, youtube, delicious, etc., etc.).
Other factors include what kind of main portal or interface should be created. A web page feeding streams? A CMS site? Total decentralization? What about the potential necessity for mixing private and public streams?
aggregate, filter, remix, repurpose, feed-forward
http://timkastelle.org/blog/2010/01/personal-aggregate-filter-connect-strategies/
consider creating the course resources through student contributions
ask them to post guidelines and tutorials, resume and cover letter examples, etc.
then ask them to review, approve, and nominate best information (digg style)?
purpose of course, to teach students how to collect useful information and develop strategies for effective communication
each semester students collaboratively build the course site and collect its materials as the primary process of learning
the instructor's role is primarily interface design and to lead in the task of filtering and re-purposing relevant information
develop ple/gle ... set of tools ...
When considering web applications and services and the emphasis on usability or user experience, I think one of the most interesting developments is that the demands for greater and greater interactivity is not limited the individual user's relationship to single interface or application. Increasingly, the most successful web services and sites provide each user interactivity with a community of users and with across a variety of other services, applications, and database domains. More simply, the most successful web interfaces make a whole context of living more usable by facilitating greater connectivity.
A good example of this phenomenon is the web service: Mint.Com ( http://www.mint.com/). Users provide their financial account information and the site retrieves data across all accounts to provide a consolidated interface for reviewing and manipulating the financial data. Mint.com has partnerships with over 7000 financial institutions. Even though the site is likely to draw traffic away from individual banking sites, it is also likely to increase the individual's likelihood of taking advantage of advanced e-features (like "bill-pay") and increase overall volume of banking activity. In this case, we see the demand for connectivity and interactivity across discrete company-client relationships leading to the erosion of traditional proprietary logics. It seems that open standards, open connectivity, and the growing of the base of customer interest, knowledge, and engagement is good business for all parties. Another interesting examples of this emphasis of inter-operability and open-connections is the Scheduling Service, Jiffle ( http://www.jifflenow.com/) which promises to streamline the process of making appointments across a variety of possible modes of connection on the part of its users: email, various calendar applications (web-based and desktop-based). It is an example of web service that facilitates the streamlining of customer activity in a way that does not require regular use of its interface at all. Rather, the service works behind the scenes to coordinate and streamline existing structures and patterns of communication. A final example would be the entire ecology of services associated with the micro-blogging service, Twitter ( http://twitter.com/). As a sheer phenomenon the service's exponential rise in interest and traffic is impressive ( http://www.google.com/trends?q=twitter). Even more fascinating is the way the service's traffic is largely provided through a surprisingly robust and differentiated crowd of 3rd party interfaces ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Twitter_services_and_applications). Where some might dismiss Twitter as merely a fad or phenomenon, I think is a mistake to dismiss Twitter as popular way of announcing the inane activities of a unimportant people's lives. Rather it is an open source infrastructure for searching, finding, collecting, and aggregating social opinions, behaviors, and tendencies. In terms of my own research interests and technology practices, I am increasingly interested in thinking of my course procedures and assignments "virtual machines" or "virtual applications" which operate by connecting web apps, textbooks, classroom spaces, schedules, specific instructions in useful ways in order to maximize outcomes for involved stakeholders (I pursue the best balance between student needs and capacities and my own technology/pedagogy research agenda).
Over time, my interest is to develop courses which facilitate student production of multimedia learning modules on topics in business communication and professionalization. These modules will form a database, reference repository, and pool of examples which each successive course will be able to utilize. Former students will be able to continue to access and use archive and benefit from the projects that build on their efforts. The archive site would also act as a dynamic portfolio of LSBE student work for prospective students and employers. In general, I am interested in developing course architectures which leverage the principles of crowd-sourcing, service-learning for the production of learning spaces and materials that are geared for multiple audiences, purposes, times, and places. Ultimately, our current information age context requires forms of usability that emphasize increased connectivity, interactivity across multiple contexts of purpose, audience, interfaces, tool sets, and work flows.
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