Day One of Faculty Academy--Got Inspiration?

As always, I'm inspired by UMW's annual Faculty Academy, in its 14th year. I've been presenting here every year since I started full time at Mary Washington in 2001, yet I always seem to get more out of the sessions than I ever give in the presentations.

Others have done recaps, but I'll do a brief overview of my takeaways from today.

The day began with brief introductions and a welcome recognition of the talents of our DTLT staff by acting provost Nina Mikhalevsky.

We quickly moved into the first set of concurrent sessions. I attended Digital Resources and Global Studies: Working Projects, with Susan Fernsebner, Joseph Calpin, Alexandra deGraffenreid, Steven Harris. These faculty and students from my departent of History and American Studies showed how much has changed since I was the only history faculty member to attend Faculty Academy just four or five years. Sue and Steve talked about their projects to collect digital resources (or offline sources catalogued in digital form) related to their particular areas of interest, specifically the history of China and Russia/Soviet Union. Especially intriguing to me was the role that the two students played in shaping the structure of the resource sites, the categories that were used, and the general involvement in the creation of what we might describe as the information architecture of the sites and the resources. Excellent work all!

The keynote address by James Boyle of Duke Law School, "Cultural Agoraphobia: What Universities Need to Know About Our Bias Against Openness" was a delightful romp through the history of computer technology and the internet (making me think that there is a class to be taught in the "history of the 'future'") as well as an argument that our default position should not be closed/proprietary/walled, but open/shared/commons. His point that academia, a group invested in the sharing of information, has been the most closed, most inaccessible group in sharing that information hit home with me. Much to think on there.

Lunch was enlivened by a mock debate on "Is the CMS Dead?" that went nothing like any of us had expected. Jim Groom of EDUPUNK fame attacked CMSs in his usual passionate way as restrictive of innovation and old. John St. Clair both brought down the house with his laugh-inducing descriptions of Jim and other individuals, and made the argument that there are various teaching styles, some which lend themselves well to Blackboard, and some which don't, but that we should respect both.

PSU's Cole Camplese presented a new version of a talk I heard him give at the Chronicle's technology forum a few weeks ago, now entitled, "If this is scholarship, then we're all doomed" (an allusion to a quote from a Chronicle forum audience member who was resisting Cole's multi-modal argument about social networking (YouTube and/or Twitter) as both creation and conversation).

Finally I sat on a panel about grappling with one's own digital identity via purchasing individual domain names and (potentially) mapping onto current UMW resources. I think it was a fascinating conversation with the audience and between the panelists. Very cool.

After a leisurly evening disecting Jim's next move, most of us retired for the evening. Tomorrow is another day.

Strategic Planning for Academic Technologies and Libraries

So I posted almost two months ago about the strategic planning process going on at my institution and the subcommittee (now called a "discussion group") I was working with on Academic Technologies and Libraries. I wanted to post a link to what we came up with to recommend to the larger Strategic Planning Steering Committee. I'd appreciate any feedback that people had on what we came up with, especially since I'm on the Steering Committee and we'll be taking this report (and 14 others) into account as we write the school's strategic plan to present to our Board of Visitors in July.

Here's the report, in MS Word form.

AAHC--Teaching with Digital Tools

I'm pleased to be part of a roundtable on "Teaching with Digital Tools" at the American Association of History and Computing conference at George Mason on April 4.

The panel (with the classy Clioweb (Jeremy Boggs) and UCLA's Joshua Sternfeld), we've decided to avoid formal presentations and to organize our discussions around six key questions about the subject. We'll each give our answers and look to the audience for comments and further questions.

• What are your goals in terms of using digital tools in teaching?
• What evaluation standards do you employ in evaluating your students' digital work?
• How do you balance teaching historical content and teaching tech skills?
• How have you integrated historiography into your teaching methods?
• Tell us a particular assignment involving digital tools that was very successful (or very unsuccessful). What was it, and why do you think it was successful/unsuccessful?
• What do you see as the future of teaching and technology?

I know we're missing some things here, but these seem like a good start. What would you ask?

A Photo Walk a Day

I've started a new habit where I take a few minutes when I get to school to photograph the amazing campus setting in which I'm lucky enough to work. This is the Flickr photostream from the first of these expeditions.

Ada Lovelace Day Post--Women in the History of American Technology

I've had trouble deciding who I was going to write about for my promised post on Ada Lovelace day. [Don't know who she is? Look her up here and be sure to check out the references as well.] I'm glad to see that I'm far from alone in writing today. The task for Ada Lovelace Day is to blog about a woman in technology, but I'm going to write about my own impressions here on the subject of the history of women in American Technology before I get to discussing three specific women. This is not a scholarly exercise (hence no footnotes) or a complete history by any stretch (so don't use this to study for a test, or crib from this post), but simply a few musings that come after teaching a particular history class (History of American Technology and Culture) in a particular way for a number of years.

As an historian of American technology (and other areas including the 19th Century US, as well as women and gender), I've often been frustrated (though perhaps not surprised) by the relative paucity of the presence of women as individuals in this sub-field's historical literature. Of course, from before the arrival of Europeans American women have worked in agricultural fields, often beside men, and using various implements of technology while doing so. Women also appear prominently in accounts of Lowell's textile mills, and in the form of laborers in a number of industries employing technology, especially at times of war (the women in Civil War munitions factories and so famously represented by Rosie the Riveter in WWII are merely the most well known).

Yet, since my class is organized around the inventions (and reinventions) of twenty or so key artifacts of American technology, I've all too often talked about women's roles in technology as secondary or reactive, especially before 1900. The number of prominent inventions women had direct roles in creating before the 20th century is harder to highlight given the roles that women were expected to play, and the restrictions often placed on their educations and their actions.

Still, there are three women of the "long 19th Century" that I want to mention, women who were involved in some of the most significant acts of technological creation of their day and place.

• Catherine Green was a widow and Georgia plantation owner who certainly encouraged Eli Whitney to work on the problem of removing seeds from cotton. What's less clear historically speaking is how much of a role she played in helping Whitney discover what may have been the key aspect of that the cotton gin, the wire teeth that pulled the cotton fibers from those pesky seeds. [1793]
  
• Emily Warren Roebling was the spouse of Brooklyn Bridge head engineer Washington Roebling. When he was struck down and crippled by "caissons disease" after spending too much time in the pressurized diggings below the surface of the East River it was Emily Roebling who took over as the main contact between Washington and the bridge effort. For years while Washington apparently watched from the window of a nearby building, Emily was his eyes and ears, learning a great deal of engineering on what was the largest bridge in the world at the time. When it was completed, it was Emily Roebling who made the first official crossing of the bridge in 1883. [1869-1883]
• Finally, Amanda Jones is the least well known of the three, though I'd argue fairly important. Though women were often chiefly responsible for preserving food in their households in the 19th Century, most of the innovations in commercial preservation came from men like Gail Borden, H. J. Heinz, and John Torrence (of Campbell's Soup). In 1872, however, Amanda Jones was the inventor of a vacuum-based process for canning foods that made them last longer and taste better.
  

As I close this post, it occurs to me that it might be time to think about teaching a new course focusing on the history of women, technology, and culture in the US. Reactions, suggestions, reading lists? They're all appreciated.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

Contemplating Online Academic Publishing

This post began as a comment on Laura Blankenship's Emerging Technologies Consulting blog. Laura noted that the topic of online academic publishing and how it relates to tenure and other institutional academic concerns was going to be part of her formal role as a speaker/leader at this year's Faculty Academy. My response was as follows:

I can't wait to hear what you have to say in May. This is a particularly tough issue and one that has gotten a great deal of resistance when broached (at UMW and elsewhere) in formal or informal ways in a variety of conversations I've been a part of lately.

On one hand the change to a new system is always complicated (and frankly, even in the old system, the disciplinary differences are enough to make university-wide review committees shudder--e.g., how many psychology articles equal a book in history? I have my own argument, but all would agree that my perspective on this is fairly biased). So, that resistance isn't that surprising.

Yet, on the surface, online publishing should make a lot of things easier, not harder, to assess for tenure and/or merit pay:

1) Financial limitations that restrict #/size/scope of published works exist on a completely different scale in the online world, especially once a system for peer-reviewed academic e-publishing is built.

1a) It seems almost a no-brainer that scholarly journals should move on-line completely (or at least in part) given the large percentage of costs that publishing those journals entails.

2) Measuring impact -- There must be some way of measuring the number of readers/links/hits/formal citations in other peer-reviewed articles or books/presence in syllabi. Now, obviously these things could be gamed (i.e., hits and uniques) or narrowed by restrictive access to some of the examples (BB course syllabi aren't accessible, for example, nor are many online, but peer-reviewed articles in collections like JSTOR).


I'm sure there are many things I'm forgetting/overlooking here, but I'm really looking forward to Laura's exploration of the topic in May. Every institution needs to have that conversation.

Writing a Strategic Plan for Academic Technologies & Libraries

Our institution is going through a major process of strategic planning, and one on a fairly accelerated timetable. We need to have a complete draft by May and after feedback from the Board and the rest of the academic community, have a plan in place by November. I'm a member of the strategic planning steering committee, the group responsible for directing the process and for writing the final report, as well as being part of some of the discussions of the pieces of the report.

Now, strategic plans are funny things. Done right, they can set aspirational and practical goals for an institution that can drive fund-raising, shape organizational decisions, and determine the investment of key resources. Done wrong, they can create needless animosity, fear, confusion, and leave an institution in worse shape than before the process. But even when done well, the best strategic plan is useless unless the administration and the academic community as a whole relies on it, turns to it, uses it. So, the first question might be, why bother? Why invest time in an enterprise that has such a potential for failure? The answer is that I believe that this effort is a real opportunity for change, a true chance to articulate a vision for the direction of this institution, a remarkable moment in the life of the institution. I, and many of my colleagues, choose to see this as a time to think boldly about the future of the liberal arts university we care so much about.

One area in which I believe bold, visionary thought is both required and possible is in the area of academic technologies and libraries. I see the three key reasons why this area of discussion is particularly important for Mary Washington right now.

1. Virtually everyone who talks about the future of institutions of higher education sees academic technologies and libraries as critical vehicles (paths, jump-starters, incubators, facilitators -- choose your metaphor as you wish) for the growth of colleges and universities.
2. Academic technologies offer a chance for smaller institutions to compete with much larger schools with much more sizable resource budgets. Also, assuming a basic computing infrastructure is in place, digital tools and technologies also allow for a quick ramp-up time for projects, easier piloting of new ideas, access to significantly larger (and better organized) library and archival collections, and widespread changes to existing systems or practices.
   
3. Finally, UMW already has a number of critical resources in place with which we can build, create, and innovate boldly. [UMWblogs is perhaps the best known digital tool, and Faculty Academy may be the best-known event; but by "resources" I really mean a dedicated group of librarians, instructional technology artists, staff, and faculty. It is these genuinely creative, caring, thoughtful, reflective, and revolutionary people who must lead and effect the bold changes for which I'm hoping.]

In the next month, the strategic planning discussion group on Academic Technologies and Libraries needs to come up with 2-3 big goals in this area for the institution with several smaller objectives and a number of specific measurable benchmarks that would reflect progress toward those goals and objectives.

So, help me and UMW to think boldly about these critical components of a successful institution. What would be on your top list of goals for a small (~4,000 undergraduates, ~1,000 graduate and professional students) institution of higher learning? What are the necessary digital and/or library components of an liberal arts university of the 21st century? What could we do to be a leader among our peers in the fields of academic technology, library services and information resources?