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Following up on the end of my romance with writing fiction and with being in the public eye, I proposed a sabbatical in September 1997 and was granted it for the 1998-99 school year. In the proposal, I outlined three career shifts:
research: from writing linear
novels to also constructing hypermedia
teaching: from teaching verbal
literacy with paper-based course materials to also teaching visual literacy and
hypermedia literacy in the paperless classroom
service: from serving as a
curriculum and program developer to also serving as a content developer
In my post-sabbatical report of September 1999, I assessed my efforts: "I can take the 'also' out of the first two and then say that I have made the first shift completely, the second almost, and the third about halfway." The most important development over the two years was gaining independence and self-sufficiency online.
Through 1997, I tried to work with the College's technicians to have my web presence at Medaille.edu and the files on College servers. I started by re-purposing my most-used classroom handouts. Instead of using a word processor and printing them, I used an HTML editor and posted them online as Course Supplements at http://www.medaille.edu/mcfaculty/danderso/. The most developed were for WRT 175 College Writing II, the course I taught most often.
The College Essay - rhetorical structures
Prove It - evidence
Your Language Is Showing - the history and
varieties of English
They are no longer available, but they whet my appetite for
more. When that
didn't work out on the College server, in February 1998, I registered toLearn.net and opened an
account with Advanced Internet Technologies in Fayet
teville, NC, to host my
files on their servers and use one of their IP numbers. I have been with AIT
ever since. When MBA student webs got too large for the server space AIT made
available, I got more space with a company in Hong Kong and hosted ParksidePlaza.net there for several years.
While I have one account with AIT and one IP number, the domain name at that address is the one I first registered, toLearn.net. There, before my sabbatical, I set up the toLearn.net Virtual Classroom Project, which ended up being half a dozen On-Line Course Guides. Three got dismantled and turned into course webs on Ricci Street:
WRT 175 College Writing II (expanded Course Supplements from the
College's server)
WRT 250 Writing for Business
HUM 298 Introduction to New Media
Three others are still available and still drawing traffic:
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HUM 298 Hypertext toLearn.net/hypertext/ |
WRT 350 Research and Advanced Report Writing toLearn.net/infodesign/ |
MBA 604 Marketing through New Media toLearn.net/marketing/ |
Over the years, I have hosted several dozen other domains at that IP number, including those listed below. You can see some of the screen shots on the toLearn.net welcome page.
AIT gives me access to the server at a deeper level than the College's technicians would. This access increases my independence, my autonomy. By analogy, where the College would let me use a room in a house, AIT ran the utilities up to the property line and lets me do whatever I want -- build a house, tall as I want to, or grow a garden, any flower I want to. I can even rent a room in my house to someone else. I don't have to ask anyone for permission to do anything. I have no hierarchy or bureaucracy to work through.
In addition, a decade running my own LAMP platform -- Linux operating system, Apache server, MySQL database, PHP/Perl scripting languages -- has given me the skills to install, maintain, and manage an organization's entire Internet presence as well as its intranet. I should mention that I have two computers on my home network running Linux flavors Red Hat and Knoppix. Few faculty anywhere outside of the computer sciences (and the minority of those in the computer sciences) have the knowledge or skills to operate an open-source web hosting service.
In short, leaving the College's web servers and striking out on my own was one of the best decisions I ever made professionally. This bird has flown.
In addition to independence, one of my precepts is self-sufficiency. With computers, I have been able to achieve self-sufficiency in two ways:
mastery of hardware and software tools
mastery of
Internet tools.
I have always prided myself on having minimal need for the help of technical experts. As a result, I know more about computers, the Internet, and open-source software than all but one Medaille faculty member. Without any formal instruction, a model of lifelong learning, I have taught myself the skills listed in the box below. Just as it is the carpenters' job to maintain their own toolboxes, so I contend that for faculty these are job skills. They are more usefully viewed as communications skills rather than computer skills.
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One of the objectives of my sabbatical for Spring 2008 is to learn some tools that I have not had the time for, especially Flash and AJAX. The other is to develop my video production skills.
I don't want to make too much of these software skills because, frankly, they aren't difficult to learn. On the other hand, many faculty use the perceived difficulty of learning these skills as a smokescreen for their unwillingness to change and keep up with the times. Calling them computer skills rather than communication skills is part of the resistors' dance. They fall into the mental trap of learned helplessness, often enabled by an IT department and by administrators who don't know any better themselves. As a result, many faculty have communication skills that are less than they should be. Why?
Perhaps because it is time-consuming. Attaining this software proficiency and then using it has taken the largest non-teaching chunk of my time in the past decade, by far.
All three shifts
enabled by my first sabbatical (teaching hypermedia literacy in a paperless
classroom) converged in Ricci Street,
a site on the World Wide Web, a proof-of-concept prototype for web sites that
can provide learning materials and interactive
services for higher education. You are welcome to explore it yourself.
Active for eight years from summer 1999 to summer 2007, Ricci Street supplemented, not replaced, the classroom experience. However, it easily replaced all the paper: the homework, tests, projects, feedback, and "papers" going from student to teacher as well as the textbooks, handouts, and returned work going from teacher to student. It thus enabled the students to replace any paper between each other, and they did.
A dozen of Ricci Street's other features are explained on the Principles pages: the ideals, the trade-offs, and the realities about pedagogy, usability, aesthetics, and technology that guided my design choices. You can learn more about why it's called Ricci Street on the Patron pages.
The image on the right was on the first welcome page. I saw Ricci Street at that time as the fragile settler community in a strange land. I was inviting it to grow, into what I did not know, which was part of the point. I provided the potential, a safe, fertile harbor.
On the Lantern Lane Welcome page, I explain:
My original idea was to design a scalable structure, a la Matteo Ricci's memory palaces, that could contain the materials for a whole curriculum or any part of it. All I built during the sabbatical was what I saw as a proof-of-concept prototype. I hoped to train enough other faculty to evolve it into a collaborative project that would be a tool to integrate the curriculum.
As John Lennon wrote, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." First, I totally mis-estimated the vision of my faculty colleagues as well as their willingness to collaborate. Second, Ricci Street lasted eight years, way too long a life for a prototype. Moving away from it in summer of 2007 was like burying a faithful old dog.
Ricci Street was used for eight years in a small graduate program that had five faculty and a hundred students. By far, most of its traffic was from non-students -- up to 15,000 unique visitors per month from over a hundred countries every month. Over its time, it was the most read publication of the College. Yet it had a mixed record of success and was ultimately a failure in the sense that it did not fulfill its design intentions.
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how big is Ricci Street? |
who uses
Ricci Street? |
welcome | community | course webs other parts of
Ricci Street |
Over a third of the requests are from non-U.S. addresses. Half a dozen countries turn up in the logs every month, usually in this order: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand, Singapore, United Kingdom
Other countries have missed only once or twice, but I'm throwing them in with the countries that turn up at least once:
June 2000 |
March 2007 |
Since I set it up in 1999, three developments on the Internet extend the ideas behind Ricci Street. The Wikipedia is like the Port 80 and Gizmos, Inc., sections of Ricci Street. MIT's OpenCourseWare is like the Digital Wares section. And Facebook and Flickr are like Parkside Plaza and the Bistro.
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The Wikipedia as "encyclopedia" was a polite metaphor to jump-start this project. Meanwhile, the Wikipedia and its sister projects have outgrown the encyclopedia metaphor as thoroughly as an 8-cylinder turbo-charged internal combustion engine has outgrown the "horse" power it is still measured by.
To the extent that Ricci Street involved students and faculty who all had FTP access to the same folders on the server, then Ricci Street had the same potential to develop into a collaborative library and classroom.
MIT's OpenCourseWare
Many of my faculty colleagues
were shocked SHOCKED that I would make everything on Ricci Street publicly
available. No textbooks, no paper; clearly, the end of eight centuries of
hard-fought advances in Western Civilization, about to end in a fizzle of bits
online.
When MIT did the same thing a couple of
years later with its whole curriculum, it provoked some of the same reaction
among MIT faculty. Where Ricci Street was voluntary, MIT's OpenCourseWare is
not, however, and MIT spent millions of dollars and several years developing a
homegrown content management system and letting the faculty get accustomed to
the idea. Ricci Street gave Medaille the opportunity to get there years before
MIT, but we didn't take it.
College students and millions of other people don't have any problem making their personal experiences publicly available online. When I started Ricci Street, in spite of the small successes of 90's sites like Geocities, such exposure and self-publishing was still in the early adopter phase. Almost all my students were doing it for the first time when I showed them how to use their Plaza webs for personal information, especially photos, that they could share with their family and friends.
Now, it is the rare student who comes to me without a Facebook, MySpace, or Flickr account. Many students spend more time and energy on these activities than they do on their academic work. It even has a name -- user-generated content -- and it has become part of US presidential debates. Its creators have even been Time magazine's Person of the Year.
As part of the feedback / improvement cycle, I studied the patterns in the behavior of users of Ricci Street. In short, over the past eight years, Ricci Street has been visited by several million people from all over the world. Learn more in the section of this portfolio where I discuss how I evaluate and improve my performance, in this case, improve the user experience at Ricci Street.
I had no intention for Ricci Street to continue as long as it has. I expected that by now, other faculty would have developed the technical expertise and the design expertise and have seen the value of my prototype proof of concept. I hoped that we would then together have developed a new web that would help integrate the curriculum yet serve our needs for ease of use and low maintenance.
That did not happen. Perhaps I should have been cynical enough to assume that. If so, I would have built a more personal site with more cutting-edge tools that would have been easier to change.
In retrospect, I overbuilt the information structure. By extending the Ricci Street navigation metaphor three and four levels deep, I created more space than I ended up needing. Note the cascading blue menus in the screen shot. Not knowing I wouldn't need that much structure, I spent the first several years steadily adding pages to Ricci Street in the hope that other faculty would link to them and begin contributing their own. In that way, community would grow organically.
In fact, many faculty linked to my pages, but none of them were
Medaille faculty. They were at other schools in other states and other
countries. They sent me a lot of email, especially in the first three or four
years when a lot of faculty were discovering the Web's rich resources in their
fields. To the extent that these links are like citations in the literature, my
work was often cited.
How to restrain change? The Internet in general and Ricci Street in particular have had the honor of being the subjects of higher education's argumentum ad metam, the classic appeal to fear, uncertainty, and doubt -- F.U.D. I would like to respond to three of these restraining forces, all challenging the public nature and open access of the Internet.
Education should be conducted behind closed classroom doors, not in public on the Internet.
Response: Over nine years and hundreds of students, only
one asked me not to use her full name on Ricci Street, so we used her initial
instead. It made students take more pride in their work to know that it would be publicly available instead of handed
in folded over to the teacher only.
The court of fresh air and peer pressure was a greater motivator than avoiding a teacher's red
ink.
Unless everything is locked down tight, password protected, and its security guaranteed way beyond the level any reasonable person would apply to the brick-and-mortar campus, then it is too risky.
Response: Other than a couple of password-protected Bistro discussions that I wanted to stay among faculty, everything on Ricci Street was open and the backstage access to the server was also shared. In other words, when students transferred files from their laptops to the server, they had access to everyone else's files, also. The opportunities for mischief were copious. The means were at hand. Yet in all those years, there were no cases I know of where anyone harmed anyone else's files. Just as the Wikipedia finds, the good drives out the bad.
It's one thing to hand out paper xeroxes to students in the secrecy of the classroom, but putting that same article online is illegal.
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Response: Ricci Street uses a
Creative Commons license.
Learn more. Over the years and tens of thousands of
visitors, there were only two instances of complaints. In one case, a student
put a made-up phone number on an assignment that turned out to be the real phone
number of a company in California that asked to have it removed. In the second
case, a student used a real site as a model and didn't delete all the links back
to the real company, which complained.
In short, all three of those fears turned out baseless when I went ahead and did Ricci Street anyway. Just as we find that we can put a token lock on an automobile and then leave it on the street overnight, just as we can dispense with the guards and ID inspections at the campus entrance, so we can leave our virtual classrooms open and public. The cost -- the minimal harm or loss -- is far outweighed by the benefits. Unless, of course, the point is to restrain change, and then any old strawman or foggy F.U.D. will do.
Don't try to build a community site unless you have a community. A faculty is not a community. A classroom of students can act like a community if you require it, that is, grade for it. If you do build a community site, don't assume that if you set a good example using it, anyone will come. At that level, an academic institution is a Theory X environment. People will only do things when they're threatened with a low grade or loss of income.
The teacher's authority is precious. Don't waste it. For example, I learned that if a discussion was going on among students at the Bistro, I could easily stop it cold by participating as a discussant. When authority spoke, the discussion was over. Instead, I learned to participate indirectly, by privately emailing the students. If I did post a message, it was most productive if I just asked provocative, challenging, even "dumb" questions.
Use a database and a content management system instead of what I used: static-page templates and individual contributor's file management system.
Consider using a wiki. Even in MIT's model, every course is its own self-contained silo. Nothing is hyperlinked to anything else. Also, MIT has staff to minimize the faculty's role in the mechanics of getting the material to the correct folder on the server. The organizing principle is still the course and the basic unit is the document. My vision of Ricci Street was closer to the collaborative wiki where the organizing principle is the information and the basic unit is the idea. Note also the plentiful links among Wikipedia pages and especially among the words (i.e., ideas) on Wikipedia pages.
Try to close the disconnect between the Internet and students' college experience, which is still paper-based. Most faculty when acting in their faculty roles don't know and don't care to learn how to leverage, harness, channel or otherwise turn this new medium to the students' advantage.
Content management systems (CMS) like Blackboard and WebCT are often
spoken of as transitional products. While the corporations developing and
marketing them are trying to prepare for the transition, they still must meet
their customers' needs. CMS software lets faculty make course material
accessible through a browser while having the minimal disruption to the way the
faculty did things before. The organizing principle is the course and the basic
unit is the password-protected, printable document. Faculty have to learn
neither HTML nor information architecture. Basically, all it does it replace the
faculty's need to print, duplicate, and distribute the course materials they
already have.
What's next? For the corporations, it will be serving the needs of enough
customers to stay economically viable. For the faculty, it will be running up
against the limitations of the software and venturing out onto the Web that was
there all along.
What happens when faculty start talking to each other and decide that the
organizing principle should be the ideas in the curriculum? What happens when
the faculty realize that HTML is less onerous to learn than the Blackboard or
WebCT systems? If, indeed, these are transitional products, what's next?
Ricci Street is a proof-of-concept prototype of what might be next. It is a faculty-developed content management system based on templates and style sheets. The features that most distinguish it from Blackboard and WebCT are its openness and its attempt to organize ideas rather than documents.
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/teachingwebs.htm
"Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely
share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment."
student, or self-learner.