I’m looking to do a presentation on DoOO as an aspect of humanizing infrastructure.
The presentation description is below. I’ll be wandering around DoOO sites looking for examples of this but would also appreciate any amazing examples people happen to have handy. Comments, expansions, etc. also welcome.
A great deal of energy and attention has been focused on using technology to automatically grade quizzes, to “capture” lectures, to make the most massive MOOC . . . to McDonaldize education. There is another path. Technology can humanize. It can augment, extend, and empower. There is real transformative power for learners when they interact with well-crafted experiences and build with well-designed tools. The ability to make useful products, to unite the abstract and concrete, to enable fluid and interactive presentation of data towards new and deeper understandings – this is where technology starts to matter. These are new possibilities that should not be ignored. We can rethink what we see as educational, consider how interaction shapes understanding, and take advantage of new ways to build what we really want. The work and worth of the academy can be more visible and powerful than ever before. We will examine the systemic support of this kind of work with special attention to Domain of One’s Own initiatives in colleges and universities across the country. The goal is technology options that have a low threshold (easy to get started) but maintain a high ceiling (don’t limit user aspirations). That’s a difficult balance to strike. Through a myriad of examples, we’ll see what students and faculty can do in this kind of environment and how to encourage the kind of use that takes advantage of this unique architecture.
One of my favorites here at St. Norbert College is the SNC Kid Books site. It serves as an archive of a Children’s Literature project some of the Teacher Ed students have done. Its just a really cool way to share the work that comes out of what I think is a really cool project. There is more info on the about page of the site.
A funny technical detail I love is that almost all of these books were created in old versions of HyperStudio if anyone remembers that (it was a clone of HyperCard). Because newer versions of that software allowed web exports these books get to live on!
There may be other things of interest to you on our community.knight.domains site as well, but I really need to push more folks at SNC to submit their stuff to that site.
Also, I’m not sure what you are creating this presentation for, but I’d hope you are able to share it when its finished, it sounds awesome!
I could give many examples here at Muhlenberg that I think support your description, but I think the best recent examples are from Professor Gabriel Dean’s dramaturgy course. Initially, these group projects formed out of the necessity of teaching remotely. But building a dramaturg’s portfolio in WordPress worked so well that I expect the project will continue in a similar form the next time Professor Dean teaches this course.
These were produced by small groups (3 or 4 students) over perhaps 6-8 weeks. I’m just blown away by them. They demonstrate a deep analysis and reflection, thorough research, and a strong sense of community and societal engagement. They also bring together, as a play should, all kinds of textual and visual and auditory elements and influences. I especially like the embedded playlists of songs and the video reels.
Here are two examples. Please let me know if you’d like to connect with Gabriel Dean, he’s awesome.
I have other examples from across the whole campus in mind, so let me know if you’d like to see other stuff happening here. Looking forward to this presentation. Best of luck!
Two suggestions here. Here at LCC, on the spur of the moment when we closed campus for pandemic in March 2020, on the spur of the moment, we started a site Learn Together, Live Together to see if we could try to get a few students to post about their experiences in pandemic. Well, 19+ months later, we’re still getting serious, funny, reflective, tragic, and even silly posts. The site was put together rapidly - a day IIRC - and is the unholy marriage of TRUWriter and TRUCollector sharing a common “home page”. Read through those posts and you’ll find humanity.
And then there’s one of our original sites: 400 Words. This is part of our “Transforming Learning Thru Teaching” 12 week prof dev course that all faculty take, usually in their few years. SInce 2015, all the students (they’re faculty or staff) write a 400 word essay sharing something about their jobs they are grateful for. Most have written about memorable interactions with particular students. This site started in 2015 as a rather plain WP blog conceived and started by our then Director of Center for Teaching Excellence, Leslie Johnson (with a little help from moi). In 2021 a colleague, Suzanne Berntsen updated the site to work off the TRUWriter SPLOT.
Both of these sites enable folk in our LCC community - and even the larger community of Lansing and beyond - to understand and connect our students, faculty, and staff as humans. We could never have done these with limited and narrowly defined platforms of most edtech. And even if we had, they wouldn’t have the same look and feel.
Now a request for you Tom. I LOVE your presentation description. In fact, I love it so much that I’m hoping in the next couple of weeks you’ll show me a location or citation where you’ve put it on the Web and, preferably, added a CC license.
I want to quote it in the book I’m writing now on my sabbatical.