2004-05 Mini-Grant Recipient Bob Giges, Porter College

Project Title: Social Software Workshop, May 2005

Project Summary

I attended the Social Software Workshop (SSAW), May 14-15, 2005 at USC's Annenberg Center which proposed “to bring together researchers working in a variety of academic disciplines to understand current and possible uses of social software in the academic context."

Topics of interest included: 

• How weblogs and wikis can be employed in support of teaching and learning

• The social/learning issues of using backchannels in the classroom

• Designing better social software tools for the classroom

In attending the SSAW, I had hoped to discover new technologies relevant to the Porter Core Course (Porter 80), a program in which I have been teaching since 1981. In my roles as supervisor of the Instructional Assistants (undergraduate writing tutors/section facilitators) and instructor of their Pedagogical Practicum  (Porter 180), as consultant to the provost on curricular matters, and as instructor of a section of Porter 80, I was uniquely positioned to bring innovative technologies into this 400-person class.

Project Assessment: Impact on Teaching and Learning

My participation in the SSA Workshop led me to attempt to import social software into the pedagogical frame of Porter Core. Porter Provost David Evan Jones and I conferred about possible applications, and we agreed to develop a Porter Core blog on a pilot basis. (This was a logical outcome of the SSAW in that the Workshop included strong representation from writing faculty who had implemented blogging in their classrooms--please see http://danm.ucsc.edu/~bob/ssaw.htmfor details and references.) We rejected a wiki structure because we wanted something with stable text (wiki’s traditionally allow users to overwrite each other’s work), and we wanted the blog look and feel (a blog mimics an online publication, instead of the threaded bulletin board of certain wikis). In addition, some wikis require mastery of protocols to post, overwrite, format, etc. Overall, we felt that a blogspace was more inviting to the user.

Although SSAW participants made recommendations about favored blog applications/software, we felt unsure how to evaluate the merits of each. Provost Jones and I agreed to seek the help of FITC director Robin Ove, given the great variety of software available. Robin was willing to evaluate the various options and to put resources in this direction, since FITC’s role in developing blogging was in its infancy, and she wanted to get a sense of whether or not her unit could support future such endeavors.

The provost and I drafted specifications we desired, and Adam Thompson in FITC was assigned to implement them, using freeware available from Word Press. Implementation was completed just as fall quarter began, and I brought the project to the full faculty of the Core Course. Given the option to join the blog experiment this year, the vast majority of faculty expressed an interest in doing so.  Most instructors were interested in using the blog for the specific purpose of creating a place where students could respond to the Monday night Core events (performances, lectures, etc.) While Core instructors in the past had required short response papers to these events, most were willing to suspend this practice and to initiate a blog dialog among students, knowing that we would be trading accountability (i.e. proof of attendance) in the hopes of promoting a new form of student-to-student interaction.

The faculty training session I gave at the start of the quarter was very well attended. Why was a training session needed? In selecting WordPress freeware, FITC was repurposing  blog software designed for a single blogger as a multi-user application; this created confusions in terminology and in posting processes. A further complication was that Porter added an outer layer of password protection because we wanted to protect our neophyte bloggers from the permanence enforced by archiving search engines (the password prevents such archiving).  The two layers of logins were confusing to faculty--as well as to students, and the idea of resetting permissions, daunting. Several of the “trained” instructors ultimately opted out. They reported feeling overwhelmed by the technical proficiency required for them to manage and administer the blogspace of their courses. It should be noted, though, that our particular difficulties are in no way intrinsic to blogging. They are rather artifacts of our specifications and the single-user software we applied to a multi-user environment.

In my section (Porter 80B-05), blog postings were required. Students had four blog assignments, each one based on a Monday lecture or performance. To achieve a high degree of participation, I was obliged to repeatedly state my expectation of participation. By the end of the quarter, nearly everyone had posted some of the four required, though many postings came in well after the stated due date. At its best, the blog  promoted substantive dialog, a kind that was distinct in character and content from in-class discussion.  The informality of the form mixed with the requirement to analyze proved productive in some spaces of the blog. Overall, I consider this pilot year to have been a modest, though qualified success.

Future Plans

The provost has indicated an interest to try and expand the blogs’ usage in next fall’s core course, provided we have FITC support in doing so, hopefully with a multi-user interface.