a graph of potentially coherent 2 made at: websitesasgraphs

A couple of strategies that have worked well so far:

• consider the motivations of your prospective users – identify as many questions as you can like “what is this about”, “where can I get help?”, etc. etc.
• cluster motivations until you come up with some themes – which may end up as your main content areas.
• get clear about what you are offering – services,programs, etc.
• lead with examples – always helpful to give people a gist of what your site is about.

And, find some inspiration. Here are a few sites you might find inspiring for different reasons:

Sosweet Creative: Simple, clear, aesthetically pleasing design around a theme.

This Changed My Practice: Great example of collaborative content creation – examples up front and an innovative approach to gage impact (using polls).

Mind check: Just a cool, novel approach to navigation.

A List Apart: nothing new here – just a great site with engaging posts about design (if you like to read).

Why do we care?

Clearly, from those I talked to at the meeting, we care because we use social media and we’re pretty sure the CIO’s office probably has no idea the extent to which cloud based applications have infiltrated our teaching and learning practices at various institutions across the province. And, while we are not intentionally turning a blind eye to the privacy implications, we turn to these services because they work and they help us to do what we need to do – share perspectives and stories, collaborate, select who we learn from, communicate,etc, etc. ! They are easy to use and allow us to integrate our learning activities with daily life – and that’s what we want – right?  Of course it’s not that easy, which is why we are talking about this. Institutions have a role in “protecting” the personal data of those who entrust it to us. And we are trying to figure out what it means to protect while (at the same time) ensuring that individual’s have the capacity to manage their own digital content and identities.

I worked out some visual notes during the session (a beginning attempt at using Brushes with my iPad). Click on the diagram for a larger view. Here are a few of my additional observations from the discussion.

The frustrations:

• What constitutes a reasonable attempt for institutions to get informed consent from students for the use of specific services (where their personal data will be stored outside of the country)? Some helpful Guidelines have been developed, but they may be perceived as onerous for an already overworked prof just trying to engage students in process of learning.
• Where is the CIO’s office in all of this? What role do they play in helping institutions to developing some guidelines for using social media and cloud-based services?
• B.C.’s privacy office has a role in investigating complaints and mediating in those instances, so they perceive a conflict of interest in providing guidelines.
• We are not lawyers – interpreting the Act and legislation is often difficult.
• some institutions don’t have access to a Privacy Manager to help them with decision making.
• How does policy change? Is it keeping up with social change?
• It’s difficult to be at the begiining of something, people want answers guidance, where it doesn’t really exist yet. This makes us angry – but maybe that will lead to action? (Hope).

The way forward? (these are a few suggestions that came from our group):

• bring case examples (based on real teaching/learning activities) to the CIO through our institution’s privacy manager (if we have one).
• discuss, learn together, provide avenues for students to think about matters of privacy, the services they use and the privacy laws that may affect theirs or others access to their content.

I am still working my way through the fog on all of these issues.  If you are too and want some more background, BCcampus is developing a great resource list as a place to start. I also found this white paper from the  Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario very helpful in understanding the broad themes.  I appreciated their use of the term “digital ecosystem” to describe the complexity of our new reality.  From the digital microcosm of a single institution to the digital ecosystem of the entire world…no wonder we are struggling!

A brief googling of coffee culture reveals interesting timbits from history to dunk in your coffee, including a few excerpts from this little gem: The world of caffeine: the science and culture of the world’s most popular drug.

What I learned:

• coffee has been around (it seems) since 16th century (or maybe earlier)
• it was introduced to Europe in the 17th century by the Turks
• people gathered in coffee houses for imbibing, discussion and argument about the latest social/political event (not unlike a good coffee house today).
• some people became suspicious of the drink.
• women were banned from early coffee houses (except in Germany?)
• a chance meeting between the poet Goethe and a young chemist, Runge led to the discovery of caffeine. (There is a lovely passage in the book excerpt linked above that describes one of their encounters).
• prohibition was tried and failed.

• what are the qualities of a really great learning (or teaching) experience you’ve had lately?
• what are the necessary ingredients to make a great learning experience from your perspective?

Here are some of the results in graphic form (thanks to Victor and Wordle). Teachers on the left – learners on the right.

Detailed results were assembled on our  wiki

And talked about (yes, this was my least favorite part) during the Learning Conference last week – here’s the video:

If you have any responses to those questions – I’d love to hear them.

From Flickr by marleneangeja

I feel like sounding an alarm bell on this one.  Our collective capacity for empathy seems to be diminishing and the evidence is mounting.  Consider the recent Vancouver story of a brutal rape that was photographed  by a bystanding teen and shared on Facebook. What was he thinking?  Or was he? Clearly, the lack of empathy he displayed is shocking.  What’s equally disturbing is the rate at which empathy seems to be declining among young people.  Dr. Sarah Konrath (University of Michigan), recently presented a study of empathy among nearly 14,000 college students in the U.S. which found that students are much less empathic than they were 30 years ago:  40% less on some measures and in rapid decline since 2000.  The study has since been reported in the New York Times and the Globe and Mail.

As expected, there is speculation that social media is at least partly to blame – given that it makes it easy for us to disengage with  or tune people out when we feel like it – without the same level of social consequence as there might be if you did the same thing in person. This seems like an easy out and a gross simplification of the problem – which, I suspect, has many roots.  What scarier to me is that we, as a society, may have a tendency to slip into a collective coma and just avoid the challenge that faces us in turning this around.

Here are some of the opportunities we have to shift this:

• consider empathy a form of literacy and embed it in education. Christopher Sessums blogs about this and shares an interesting perspective in both his suggestion of a new role for colleges of education and adding empathy to the list of important 21st century competencies, where he states:

I feel that we should consider including empathy in our list of 21st century skills as a distinct category. Goleman’s (1995) research suggests that empathy is positively related to intrinsic motivation and effective problem-solving. The need for empathy is increasingly important in the workplace where teamwork and social competencies are a critical factor in success.

• spend time with the young people in our lives and get to know about theirs.  How do they feel about some of the stories they hear in the news (like the one I mentioned earlier in this post)?  How are they and their friends showing that they care about each other when something bad happens to one of them? How are they using social media and what do they share about each other?

And,  since empathy needs to be practiced in order to develop, it needs to be practiced everywhere, including the online spaces we occupy.  Maybe we need to expand the concept of digital citizenship and some of the work on the nine elements to include empathy in digital spaces – what does that look like? What’s important about taking the perspective of the other before you press upload or send?  How will you defend your choices to share information about someone else?

In our recent discussions with student teachers as part of our Digital Tattoo project, we know that the concept of digital citizenship is new to them and they are not entirely sure that they have a responsibility to teach this – nor are they sure that parents support it.  The teaching of empathy has a longer standing tradition in the public school system – maybe we need a way to bring the two together?

For us, the small pieces consist of:

• namespaces
• subpages
• dynamic page lists
• embed code

Our wiki page gives the gist of the presentation: Resource Management Framework

And (for a few not so subtle collage references) you can check out these slides on Slideshare

Recently, I’ve put together some supporting screencasts on Screenr  (specific to a recent project using namespaces). You can get a sense of the project shaping up on UBCWiki Learning Commons namespace.

Afterthoughts:

• there was much interest among the participants in our ETUG session for this approach to content management – bottom line though is openness.  The more protections and locks on content editing you want in place – the higher the cost in making this work. The discussion about open content editing is a thorny one.
• we are still arguing about the cost of maintaining namespaces subpages (which are sometimes locked for editing among a small group of users)
• we have some partners in the Library and Faculty of Arts who are trying out this approach in the context of some of their resource development projects.  It will be very interesting to see how these projects unfold over the coming months and what sorts of issues crop up.
• policies around wiki use (page creation, deletion, etc) needs attention and (ultimately) user contribution to make this work. Some recent issues have brought this to a head.

So, lots of work in progress on this front. Glad to be a part of it!

Workshop outline (using Novamind) – (which is a good personal tool, less good as presentation tool):

Supporting wiki resource: Mind Mapping Resources (in progress).

Handout (some people love this stuff):

What I learned:

• faculty not so keen on free form experimentation with tools  (this needed more structure maybe?)
• best to stick to demo of one tool in depth when time is short – I tired to show 3 for different purposes – think it was too much
• would have been better to have faculty who use a mapping tool co-present.
• some people like to know exactly how it applies to their context – not sure how to deal with this – sometimes need to let people sit with their questions for a while?