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Scholarship of Teaching: Ricci Street
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Ricci Street
Gizmos, Inc. | Port 80 |
Ricci Green
What follows is an overview of Ricci Street: content, architecture, template system, and faculty and student users. In hindsight, what could have been done differently? Looking ahead, what comes next to build on the lessons learned?
As you can see on this series of screen shots of the Ricci
Street welcome page, I developed it to reflect how the students used it. Ricci
Street started with five sections. The monochromatic color scheme for each
section gave lots of potential for more sections.
Using the metaphor of a developing frontier community, the site divided traditional higher ed materials and activities into five groups.
Port 80 (blue) had textbook-type material and links to textbook-type material that is now available on the Web. The topics ended up being
CyberSea Inn (olive) had the textbook-type material about the arts and humanities.
Gizmos, Inc., (brown) had the textbook-type material about making webs and other digital things.
Digital Wares (red) had the course-specific material that passed between teacher and student. The teachers' handouts were in Lantern Lane and the students' homework in Parkside Plaza.
Ricci Green (green) had the site-specific information in Town Hall as well as the Gazette newsletter, Show and Tell Theatre student showcase, and Ground Zero Bistro discussion forum.
While this welcome page revealed the overall structure, the students had to know the metaphor. This welcome page was not very task-oriented.
I spent much of the 1999-2001 school years trying to get other faculty interested in joining me by making their material available to students online, too. After they had used Ricci Street for a while, I hoped to have them join me in a development process where we left Ricci Street behind and re-thought the information architecture from scratch.
As it turned out, no one was interested in joining me. I was patient, and spent the time adding pages where my students and courses called for it. In the first three years, I added over two hundred "pages", many of which would have printed out to dozens of 8 1/2 by 11-inch sheets of paper. These pages contained around twenty thousand links, all added by me by hand.
The content was constantly in flux. As a page grew too large, I broke it into multiple pages, and some of them grew enough to split again. This frustrated students who:
wanted school to be the linear transfer of a fixed body of
knowledge
needed the illusion of centralized, hierarchical authority
printed out the pages
The number of such students diminished every year.
It became clear that I was going to teach only MBA courses and that few faculty were interested in participating. Only Walt Kolt had started putting his course-specific material in the Digital Wares section.
By the beginning of the 2002 school year, I had three years of server logs and in-class usage to learn from. Based on that analysis, I made the changes shown on the screen shot on the right:
scaled back by taking
the CyberSea Inn section off the server and off the welcome page and distributing the content into the
Port 80 and Gizmos sections.
revealed the next levels of navigation, making commonly accessed content
directly accessible from the welcome page.
Some of those links were displayed on the page, for example the links to the specific MBA courses under "course webs" in the screen shot. The rest were accessible via pop-ups like the green one on the bottom right of the screen shot.
By this time, Parkside Plaza,
the section of student webs, had grown too large for my server. The link on the
welcome page went to ParksidePlaza.net, on a server in Hong Kong.
By 2003, again based on popularity of pages revealed by the server logs, I developed the Gazette, originally conceived as a newsletter, into a series of photo-laden pages documenting the events associated with the MBA program, from open houses to orientations to happy hours to graduation.
Finally, I moved the links to that topical material front and
center on the welcome page, as you can see in the screen shot on the left. The other links
got moved down.
By 2004, I had a welcome page design that I stayed with for several years. It had the link structure on the two side columns with pop-ups to reveal content down two or three levels in the hierarchy.
The wider center column had the announcements and topical material. Instead of trying to archive it, I just replaced it, usually adding the newest at the top.
In addition to Walt Kolt, Stephanie Argentine was putting her course-specific materials on Ricci Street. She was also, tentatively, putting material in the Port 80 section. Later, Lonni Wilson joined them. Neither Walt nor Stephanie is employed by Medaille anymore, and Lonni has rented his own server space from the same company I do, AIT.
By this time, link rot was starting to get bad. By this, I mean that increasingly many of the tens of thousands of off-site links were not working properly. Either the page they linked to was no longer there or the content of that page had changed.
Since Ricci Street is more like a customer-service library than an e-commerce revenue-generator, this link rot presented me with an interesting situation. The librarian/archivist in me said, "Let the pages stay there. Not all the links are bad, and the other content on those pages is still good. And you don't have time to keep it up." The housekeeper/marketer in me said, "But it's not tidy! It's not customer friendly."
The other structural problem was the uneven development. Some sections of Ricci Street, I had developed in great depth. Other sections had only a sketchy welcome page.
In terms of server space and traffic, the most popular part of Ricci Street was the section of student webs at Parkside Plaza. Every MBA student had to take my courses, and on the first night, each of them hand-coded a web page. Demystifying HTML was one of the best lessons they got because it led to demystifying other computer and Internet mysteries in my courses and other business functions like accounting and HR in other courses. I gave each of them a folder named with the student's surname and linked from the Plaza welcome page.
http://RicciStreet.net/dwares/plaza/lastname
example: http://RicciStreet.net/dwares/plaza/smith
That folder was theirs to do whatever they wanted to. At a minimum, all the MBA students' homework for the three or four courses that they took with me was handed in via a URL for it on each student's Plaza web. I also encouraged the students to use their Plaza webs for personal information, especially photos, that they could share with their family and friends. What I had these graduate students do is not unlike what most undergraduates are now doing on their own at MySpace and Facebook.
As a result, the student webs had a wide variety of text information that drew a lot of traffic, especially non-student traffic. Almost all this traffic came via a search engine, which the server logs faithfully note.
By learning to maintain their own web sites -- make and edit web pages, link them into self-contained web sites, and use FTP (File Transfer Protocol) software to create and maintain their folders on the server in North Carolina -- the students crossed what I call the geek line. This self-sufficiency gave them a job skill and sophistication that few, if any, other MBA programs provided and that our current off-campus MBA doesn't provide.
Many students have gone on to have their own web sites or to be
involved in their employers' intranet and Internet presence. It does their
careers no good to have their first attempts at webmaking publicly available, so
I have deleted almost all the student webs from Parkside Plaza.
The next highest-traffic area of Ricci Street was the threaded discussion forum called the Ground Zero Bistro. Over the years, I experimented with different ways of structuring this activity. My goal was to get the students to write and to do it in public where their classmates could read it and where it occasionally would be on the screen during class for everyone to read and discuss.
Course-related forums are discussed below. In addition, I started other forums for discussions related to the MBA program. For example, when we were putting together a course schedule for the following semester, we would post the draft at the Bistro and get student feedback. We always made changes based on their input.
When the program experienced the train wreck in 2001, the Bistro became very popular. Many students wrote, often at length, and almost everyone read what they wrote.
Looking back, I believe the public nature of the forum caused most students to take an extra moment to proofread and caused some to think more about the reception their ideas would receive.
Early on, other faculty did use the Ground Zero Bistro discussion forum, Vet Tech faculty, especially Val Macer, and Gen Ed faculty, especially Tom Callahan. When the College started licensing expensive proprietary systems like Jenzabar and WebCT, these faculty went in that direction.
As mentioned above, two MBA faculty, Stephanie Argentine and Walt Kolt, used Ricci Street extensively over the years for their course webs, modeled on mine. They reluctantly and involuntarily left Medaille in Spring 2007.
Lonni Wilson used Ricci Street for his course materials until January 2007, when he got his own reseller account with AIT and moved his files off my server.
Because Walt, Stephanie, and Lonni's students were such heavy users, I expect traffic to drop in Fall 2007.
A course web is a small set of interlinked web pages that contain the materials and activities specific to a course. On the assumption that information traditionally in textbooks could be used by multiple courses, I saw that text information going into the Port 80, Gizmos, Inc., and CyberSea sections of Ricci Street.
As you can see in the URL below, the Digital Wares ("dwares") section of Ricci Street contained the students' webs at Parkside Plaza and the teachers' webs at Lantern Lane. The course webs were organized by course.
A course web is a small set of interlinked web pages that contain the materials and activities specific to a course. |
http://RicciStreet.net/dwares/lane/coursenumber
example: http://RicciStreet.net/dwares/lane/mba600
The course web is my virtual classroom and office. It is where I spend my time communicating with students. Every class session starts with one of the course web pages on the screen. I spend the dominant portion of my teaching-preparation time on the course webs. The course web not only replaces all the traditional paper handouts, that is, lets me do what I did before but do it better. The course web also lets me do things I couldn't do before, as noted in the discussion below.
Information design, also called information architecture. How should the information on the course web be divided into pages? What should the pages be called? After some trial-and-error and a lot of feedback from students, I settled on a structure of half a dozen pages. The linked examples below all come from one course, MBA 600, a graduate course that I taught fifteen sections of over seven years.
Now that I have begun teaching traditional-age undergraduates at the school's PC's in a fixed-station classroom as opposed to graduate students with their own standalone laptops sitting around a table in a wireless classroom, I am going to have to adapt to the reduced circumstances. The discussion below pertains to the way I used Ricci Street in the wireless classroom for seven years.
On each course web's welcome page, I put the lecture
that I would give the first night of any course. In the old days, BW (before the
web), the problems with the live first-night lecture were always twofold: I wouldn't remember everything or express myself well. And
the students wouldn't remember much detail.
By putting this lecture on the course web, I could:
make it much longer, as well as add pictures and links
continually revise it to get the best phrasing and
greatest impact
hold the students responsible for its content in a way
that I couldn't when it was all oral lecture
say provocative and challenging things that I couldn't
easily say live in class on the first night without, I had learned over the years, making some
students very uncomfortable. On a web page, I could let it rip!
In the MBA courses, the students had all read the welcome page before the first class, so we didn't have to waste any time in a getting-to-know-you dance.
In the undergraduate courses I'm teaching now, most of the students are new to me and to Ricci Street and I have to be careful not to scare them off the first day. For those courses, all of which are in the computer classrooms, the welcome page really pays off because I can spend the whole first class session getting to know them and just assign that page to read before the second class.
The course page has the administrivia that every teacher is supposed to distribute during the first class session of every course, objectives, special requirements, office hours, etc.
The course pages tend to stay static except for the meeting times, course numbers, and my office hours.
This is by far the most used page of a course web because it provides a guide to the day-by-day progress of the course. It is most often open on my computer during course preparation and it is most often displayed on the screen during class. I update it several times a week while the course is ongoing. It is thus a page that can get very long, too long.
I struggle with how to organize the information. When I broke it
into a page for every class session, everyone got confused. It turns out that
it's much easier for the individual students to follow on one long page because
by looking at the scrolling bar on the right side of the browser window, they
can see exactly where on the page we are.
For most courses, the syllabus page is very messy. It's not like a tidy, proofread publication. It's more like a bulletin board, always changing, often hastily. I can change it during class and I'm constantly changing it in the hour or two before class. After a class session has passed, I don't change anything. Thus a record of the whole course is always available to the students.
Much of the material that ends up elsewhere on Ricci Street starts on the syllabus page for a specific course. As it grows, I will find a place for it in the Port 80 or Gizmos, Inc., section and just link to it from the syllabus page.
For me, much of the value of the syllabus page comes from teaching a course in a later semester and getting to build on the previous course web. At a minimum, what would, before the Internet, have been a lecture on any given nights is now on the syllabus page or linked from it to another Ricci Street page. If I find myself saying something important in class that is not on the course web, I put it there.
This written record has a huge advantage over the old oral transmission.
It can be consulted and re-read, where an oral lecture is
lost to the wind.
It is fixed, so there's no reason for students to suffer
the inevitable losses incurred by note-taking, which in turn causes
misunderstanding and re-work.
Finally, it frees up class time for student presentations
and student discussions and student projects. In short, it has the potential to turn a
teacher-centered course into a student-centered course.
All my courses are structured around student projects. The information on the syllabus in presented in a just-in-time order. The students get it when they need it, not when it fits some abstract, rationalized, conventional analytical structure.
The projects work best if they are grounded in a real life or at least a plausible story. Such stories are known in academia as cases, thus the name for this course web page that presents that story to the students. The case presents them with a scenario in which they would get paid in the real world for the project I am asking them to do in school's low-risk environment.
In all my courses, I have the students read or do something and
then respond or report back to the class at the Bistro. The roundtable page has
the links to the readings and activities, the context, and my instructions about
their response.
The MBA 600 web has a dozen such topics. The material on the roundtable page is repeated as the first message in every roundtable forum at the Bistro, where the students reply.
The course I'm using as an
example here, MBA 600, is a graduate course, so it has a lot of reading. The
central question of the course is how the Internet is disrupting old business
models, out of which new business models are evolving. As you can see on the
screen shot, the Internet can act like the reserve desk of a library by giving
students access to resources as diverse as an IPO prospectus, raw economic
census data, dueling PR campaigns, and videos of Senate testimony. Often, the
students' in-class presentations required the reading of texts linked from this
page.
As you can see by clicking through to the actual page, it's very long. Similar to the course web's welcome page, which contains the text of the traditional first-night lecture enhanced with pictures and links, so this readings page gives me the opportunity to contextualize all these readings without having to take class time, which is much better spent having the students presenting, discussing, and debating the results of their reading.
The reports page is for scheduling the students' activities. It
has a class roster, usually with pictures and email addresses. It has schedules
for student presentations, project topics (see screen shot left)
, and conferences with me. For the
undergraduates, I find it is a positive motivator if I keep on the reports page
a public record of attendance and homework completed.
For all of my courses, there are things happening in the world that relate to it. In the old days, I would barely have time to mention some of those things in class. Now, I can annotate it and put as many as I want on the course webs' news page. In the sense that
In addition, as you can see on the screen shot below, every
course had a section at the Bistro:
This forum wasn't used by the students of all courses, but when a discussion broke out, this was the place for it.
As part of my ongoing feedback, I asked students after every class session to respond to this message at the Bistro:
The students' responses to the Roundtable topics. Rather than have the responses spread out on each student's Plaza web, this discussion forum brought them all together so that everyone could easily read what everyone else had written and we could put them onto the screen for class discussions.
Ricci Street is full of
web "pages", some of which would print out to dozens of
paper pages, on a variety of topics relevant to the Business and Humanities
curricula.
An example of an extensively developed topic is the Toolkit Digital Technology Guide in the Gizmos, Inc., section. While designed as text material for MBA 504 eSkills for Management, it gets a lot of non-student, non-Medaille traffic because it approaches a comprehensive guide to increasing the self-sufficiency of business computer users, turning timid IT-dependent users into a power users no longer afraid they will "hurt something" or "lose everything". The six sections shown in the screen shot -- operating system, webmaking, collaboration, business media, webtop services, and office productivity -- contain four dozen pages, most of them very long.
Together, they provided up-to-date information about a quickly moving target, personal computing, that a paper textbook with its two-year production cycle could not begin to address. For the same reason, this section is soon (now) out-of-date.
The web makes data collection easy. In addition to the wealth of human behavior revealed in server log analysis.
It is easy to construct a form and place it online. In class, or as an assignment, I can have the students respond. The results can be passed to databases and email addresses. The students can see an immediate aggregation and presentation of their responses. I can pore over the results at my leisure.
Over the years using Ricci Street, I created dozens of forms. Some are on course webs. Others are in the section called the Lab. Some examples:
When designing Ricci Street, I was aware of its potential for primary data collection. Some of the forms were re-used in successive sections of the same course. For example, the Basic Skills survey was completed by several hundred students over seven years. It showed the expected trends of increasing incoming sophistication, which guided my development of my MBA courses, especially MBA 504 eSkills for Managers.
Unlike an exam, which at most the teacher might review when returning (and fight over scoring), this data collection always had a purpose for the students. For them, it was a learning tool. For example, the Web site critique form asked them to apply concepts learned in the previous class. In the following class, they made oral presentations to their classmates, taking them on a tour of the web site that they critiqued for the form. Thus, what for them was a learning tool -- homework and class presentation -- was for me a learning tool, too. After listening to their presentations, I would revise the form so that the next semester it would better address what I wanted the students to learn. It was a win-win situation.
They learned about the structure and functions of web
sites so that they could better design and construct their own later in the
course.
I learned about how they learned so that I could better
facilitate their learning about the structure and functions of web sites.
Their responses revealed the two levels on which the
students were operating:
users of the Ricci Street higher-ed customer service web
students learning in a hybrid classroom/online course
In my original vision of Ricci Street as being used by many faculty, this Lab section could have been the basis for primary research (the scholarship of teaching as distinguished from scholarly teaching) into these two behaviors or any other data faculty wanted that could be collected in this manner. As it turned out, I collected a lot of data but never took it beyond my own self-improvement cycle. There, I discuss in detail the way I used one form in MBA 504 eSkills for Managers.
As you can read in the screen shot, this title is a pun on "port", which has meaning in both the Ricci Street metaphor and the computers that access it. This section of Ricci Street replaced the textbooks in my courses.
The six sections were meant to be comprehensive, though
certainly extensible at this level of organization and scalable at the next
level.
While course-specific material went into the course webs, Port 80 material could be used by many courses. I used it much as people are using blogs today. Where blogs are organized chronologically and then tagged by multiple topics so they can be retrieved, Port 80 was organized by topic all along. I would get interested in a topic, research it on the Internet, and then record my research on a Port 80 web page. The recording often included excerpts from the source along with my comments and explanations. These pages became a set of annotated links growing into research essays as you can see on the screen shot on the left.
Because of the breadth of topics, Port 80 got a disproportionate share of non-student traffic from search engines. The topics it covered were topics a lot of people were interested in. When I say that Ricci Street was the most read faculty publication, this section, the Gizmos, Inc., section, and the Patron section of Ricci Green drew the bulk of that off-campus interest.
Now that I am no longer maintaining Ricci Street, this section will suffer the most significant link rot.
The Ricci Green section collected the Ricci Street functions that didn't fit elsewhere. The Gazette, of which I published only a dozen issues, was meant as an email-delivered update about the latest on Ricci Street as well as the people using it. It evolved into event-related web pages and finally into the area on the center of the welcome page that I updated as needed, usually monthly. The Bistro is discussed above because it was so integral to the course webs.
My original idea with the Theater section of Ricci Street was to feature outstanding student work, either with a link to the student's Parkside Plaza web or by creating special folders at http://riccistreet.net/riccigreen/theater/. I called it the Show and Tell Theater because I wanted to emphasize the similarities with the students' past educational experiences.
Linking to the students' webs turned out to be perilous because they would change and either no longer work or no longer link to the same material. Taking their files and re-creating their webs myself made it feel as though it was no longer their work. As a result, I did not make much use of the Theater after the first few years.
As of 2006, when I returned to teaching undergraduates, I used the Theater to feature their GEN 230 Creative Expression projects. However, as I will discuss in my 2007 self-evaluation, this is not a good solution and is part of the reason I finally decided to stop using Ricci Street.
The Town Hall section of Ricci Street collected everything else. The Principles section had three parts:
|
Ideals |
What is Ricci Street trying to be? |
|
Trade-offs |
What's happening in the larger world that Ricci
Street responds to and anticipates? |
|
Realities |
Colophon: what software and computer services were
used for Ricci Street? |
Three other sections focused on Ricci Street-specific Search, Site Stats, and Street Smart, the "help" section.
When I first made the Patron section of Ricci Street available in 1999, it was, as best I could tell, the most comprehensive collection of links to Matteo Ricci material on the Internet.
Through 2002, I updated this section every summer to ensure that it stayed the most comprehensive collection of Matteo Ricci links. This section attracted interesting responses, for example, from a Canadian actor who had been hired by a Chinese production company to play Ricci and from a Jesuit historian who gently corrected a couple of overstatements I made in my enthusiasm for Ricci's accomplishments. It also got a lot of responses from students who wanted me to write do research for their essays, that is, they would ask me questions they could answer themselves with a little reading.
As recently as 2004, this section came up on the first page of the results of a Google search for "matteo ricci". After that, I stopped keeping it updated, and it now doesn't appear until the fourth page of Google search results.
This web, offered in fulfillment
of
the requirement in the handbooks of
Medaille College, Buffalo, NY,
Volume IV: Faculty Handbook,
section 4.5.4.3 Faculty Portfolio,
is © 2007 and licensed under a
Creative Commons License.
web established: February 2007
page last modified: July 2007
by Douglas Anderson
http://toLearn.net/portfolio/scholarship/teachingriccistreet.htm