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Blog: Technology and LearningHave you been asked to sit on an edtech customer advisory board? If you are a decision maker for enterprise, school or departmental level edtech purchases you probably have been approached at some point about joining such a group. From the vendor viewpoint a customer advisory board is a great way to get unfiltered market feedback for product or service strategies. While I have not seen any empirical research on this (we are woefully short of research on our edtech world), I imagine that customer advisory boards serve a useful function for customer retention and perhaps referrals. In higher ed, where sales cycles are particularly long, it makes good sense to invest resources in developing strong relationships with customers. An advisory board, if done correctly, can be of enormous value in strengthening the partnership between the school and the company. Unfortunately, my experience with customer advisory boards is that their usefulness and utility tends to be all over the map. If done poorly, a customer advisory board can actually weaken a relationship. In evaluating if I am going to join (or stay with) an edtech customer advisory board I look at the following 4 attributes: 1. The Presence of Peers on the Advisory Board: An advisory board is a terrific opportunity to learn from our peers. How is this school or that department utilizing the hardware or software on their campus? What sort of integrations or customizations have they done? What resources are they devoting to running, evangelizing, and supporting the technology? The great thing about higher ed is our culture of sharing. An advisory board can be the perfect place to share best practices and lessons learned. This sharing, however, is dependent on having the right mix of people on the advisory board. I look for opportunities where I will be collaborating with peers, colleagues that are in similar positions at their universities as I am at my own. If there is nobody that I recognize from my other professional work on an advisory board I probably would decline an invitation to join. 2. The Purpose of Advisory Board Is Clear: The company should be very clear with itself why it is constituting an advisory board, and be able to articulate these reasons to potential members. Is the company looking for short, medium or long range advice and feedback on their services or products? Is the advisory board intended to help the vendor test out and share its messages, or is the focus on the product? One thing I definitely look for is buy-in at the leadership level for constituting an advisory board. I want to know that the this project has the backing and the attention of senior management. Without leadership sponsorship the advice board will not be able to address strategic questions, and any recommendations have a much smaller likelihood of being implemented. 3. The Company's Goals for the Advisory Board Are In Line with My Goals: In order to devote the time an an advisory board (which is always uncompensated and carries with it a high opportunity cost in terms of time), it is necessary for me to feel that there will be a strong return on investment. I look for opportunities to influence product roadmaps, as living with a particular product or service uncovers all sorts of ways that it can be improved. Often the improvements that I seek in the learning technologies that I use on my campus are about making the software or hardware simpler, more robust, and mrs resilient. Edtech companies have a tendency to want to bring out new products and new features, and an advisory board can be a good count weight. 4. The Advisory Board is Well-Organized and Properly Resourced: Running an effective advisory board is hard work. There are a ton of logistics that go into making face-to-face and online meetings productive. In my experience the return on

Blog: University of VenusIt's hard to believe but it was a year ago that the Primer Encuentro de Humanistas Digitales (First Meeting of Digital Humanists) was held in the Vasconcelos Library in Mexico City (17 and May 18, 2012). I participated remotely via a poster / flyer and a website entitled "HD/DC", which I set up to provide further context and references, as well as to keep track if anyone had followed the links included on it from the event on the days it took place. (Some indeed did, according to the stats provided by Wordpress.com, where I hosted the site). It was a way of communicating that in the digital humanities it is also necessary to examine how we practice "academia". For example, I wanted to say that not being able to be physically at an event in real-time taking place in a specific geographic location does not necessarily mean we can not participate on it. Digital/Web technologies do offer accessible means to participate remotely, if one is so inclined. I know that "Cognitive Dissidence" sounds pompous and naïve, but the intention was to suggest that in my opinion “DH” should mean not only new ways of doing things but also new ways of thinking about them. What are academics event for? What are the minimum requirements to hold them? When we say “meeting”, what do we mean? Can digital technologies help us think/do academic meetings differently? So, inspired by the Day of Digital Humanities in Spanish and Portuguese 2013 and by the next Postcolonial Digital Humanities Summer School (#DHpoco) I have now uploaded to figshare that poster / flyer as a slide in PPT format (not a PDF, which means it is editable by whoever downloads it, if such a thing were of interest). This means that a resource which is already one year-old is given a new lease of life by making it available on another platform. Figshare allows me to see some metrics of who views and downloads the file, and most importantly gives me a Digital Object Identifier for this work that would otherwise be at the mercy of the fragility of a free blog, buried somewhere in the vast expanse of the World Wide Web and completely ignored by the forms current academic recognition. Humanidades digitales: espacios para la disidencia cognitiva (póster para Primer Encuentro de Humanistas Digitales en la Biblioteca Vasconcelos, Ciudad de México, 17 y 18 de mayo de 2012). Ernesto Priego. figshare. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.705832 Retrieved 08:43, May 22, 2013 (GMT) --- Ernesto Priego is lecturer in Library Science at City University London and editor in chief of The Comics Grid. Journal of Comics Scholarship. --- Original Spanish (minus minor edits). Reblogged from https://epriego.wordpress.com/2013/05/22/en-mi-dia-de-hd-hd-dc/ Es increíble pero fue hace ya un año que tuvo lugar el Primer Encuentro de Humanistas Digitales en la Biblioteca Vasconcelos de la Ciudad de México (17 y 18 de mayo de 2012). Participé remotamente a través de un póster/volante y un sitio titulado “HD/DC” que abrí para ofrecer contexto y referencias. Fue una manera de querer comunicar que en las humanidades digitales es también necesario interrogar la forma en que “practicamos la academia”, es decir, el no poder estar físicamente en un evento en un lugar geográfico en tiempo real no necesariamente significa que no podemos participar en él. “Disidencia cognitiva” suena grandilocuente e ingenuo, lo sé, pero la intención era sugerir que las “HD” en mi opinión deberían significar no sólo nuevas formas de hacer las cosas sino también nuevas formas de pensarlas. Inspirado por el Día de las Humanidades Digitales y por la próxima escuela de verano de DH Postcolonial he ahora subido mi póster/volante en formato PPT (por lo

Blog: Student Affairs and Technology Recently, I was asked if I would be willing to give a keynote for a professional development event at a university. However, instead of coming to campus and delivering a presentation, the organizers wanted a "virtual keynote." While I've done numerous in-person presentations, webinars, and even a weekly web-based show, I've never done a virtual keynote. Conceptually speaking, I figured that it wouldn't be too difficult. A 30 minute presentation with slides, video, and audio…how hard could it be? Lecture capture is done all of the time. I went through the applications on my MacBook Pro…I had demo copies of SnagIt and Camtasia. After a quick peek at Camtasia, I went ahead and purchased the full version. After all, it's an app that I can use for future presentations. The latest version of Camtasia is quite nice. The recording interface is perfectly simple and the editor works really well. And then I realized that what I wanted to do didn't necessarily require Camtasia. Now, I'm not knocking Camtasia at all. It's an awesome capture solution. Except, I am much more familiar with using iMovie. And then I discovered the "cutaway" option in the iMovie editor and my 30 minute keynote went from concept to reality. The first step in creating my virtual keynote was to record myself giving the actual talk. In iMovie, you can capture and record video directly. Using the iSight in my external display and my external USB microphone, I recorded myself at my desk. I placed my slide show from Keynote in front of iMovie and gave my talk as if I were giving it to an actual audience. 30 minutes later, I had audio/video that was ready for editing in iMovie. A nifty feature in Keynote is that you can export every single slide as a separate, high resolution graphic. Alternatively, you could also just create amazing graphics in Adobe PhotoShop. But for this example, my tech recipe was iMovie + Keynote. I matched the resolution of my slide deck to the highest video resolution in iMovie so that my images would be sized correctly in each frame. After exporting my slides as independent images, I went back to the clip editor in iMovie. Dragging each slide over the clip editor to specific places in the video took a little bit of time. When you drag an image file over the clip editor, an option menu appears. I choose the "cutaway" feature so that the video would transition from me speaking to the image of the slide that I had just pasted. The best part about this option is that your voiceover continues while your slide graphic is displayed. You can edit the amount of time that a slide appears. Some of my slides only appeared for a moment or two while others were on screen for several seconds. The default Ken Burns effect gave each slide an extra dose of movement. Additional options for pasting images include picture-in-picture and side by side. All of the paste options work with video as well as images. Simply add video as an event in iMovie and you can create fairly sophisticated videos. For my keynote, I added some random clips at the beginning and end of the video, included some music from iTunes for the intro and outro, and exported the finished product after about three hours of production time. The video file was fairly large. At more than 1.5 gigs, it took a while to upload to YouTube as well as a cloud-based storage site. It's always a good idea to have a back-up for web video. In this case, YouTube was the back-up and the institution's video streaming platform was the primary delivery method. While I was busy speaking (in-person) at Chapman University in Orange, California, academic advisors at Davenport University were watching me give a talk. It was probably my most efficient day as a speaker! If you have access to iMovie and Keynote, the potential for all sorts of projects using this method is pretty grand. While you won't be able to do live-actio

Blog: The World ViewChina is much in the news these days—an article in The NY Times about China’s spectacular $250 billion investment in higher education; the announcement in Inside Higher Ed of $300 million for a Chinese Rhodes Scholarship at Tsinghua (covered also by The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Huffington Post, The Economist, Bloomberg, and more); an opinion piece in The Chronicle about the tensions between foreign-educated scholars and the home-grown variety; the seven words you cannot say in Chinese University classroom. Am I mistaken or is higher education in China covered more in the press than higher education in any other country outside of the US? Searching “China” on the Insider Higher Ed website brings up mentions in at least 60 articles and opinion pieces since January 1. That seems like a lot. It is difficult to imagine a university today that does not have (or is not considering) a China strategy. What is our preoccupation with China about? Are we fascinated? Hopeful? Opportunistic? Nervous? Threatened? Probably all of the above. China has certainly become a “major player” on the international higher education landscape in a very short time. Chinese universities are moving up in most international rankings. Chinese scholars are contributing in significant numbers to international journals. China has become a competitor for awards and prestige and likely to be a source of future innovation. How much of the future should we trust to China? China is an important source of talent for universities throughout the world as well as an important source of revenue from the fees Chinese students pay to universities abroad. But China is also becoming a competitor in this arena as more international students see China as a destination for study. After all, if China’s economic power and influence is going to continue to grow, it is a good idea to leverage language, familiarity with culture and networks for personal opportunity. Many foreign universities expect to earn revenue from joint programs and branch campuses set up within China’s borders. But China is not an easy partner. As the Chinese government continues to take aggressive measures to protect itself from disruptive ideas and behavior by controlling public discussion, Internet access and available publications, partners from more democratic countries can’t help but squirm. China appears to be walking a tricky line. The economy needs the kind of innovative and creative thinking that flourishes more often in open, unhampered societies yet the government is not willing to relinquish control and create a comparable environment at home. Can the Chinese government host larger numbers of foreign scholars and institutions along with growing numbers of returning foreign-educated Chinese scholars and continue to hold everything it finds objectionable at bay? Foreign institutions walk a difficult line as well. Will foreign participants make concessions to government control in order to receive the benefits that this wealthy and complicated country promises? How accommodating can the foreign conscience be? And in the end, who will influence whom? If we look to China hopefully and nervously, that’s about right. Show on Jobs site:

Blog: Mama PhDThere is a data set that I use in my statistics class called the “General Social Survey”, or “GSS.” Collected by the government, it includes a list of interesting questions that statistics teachers like me enjoy playing with. One question in the list has always intrigued me. It reads something like “if you suddenly became rich, would you continue or stop working?” As a labor economist, I have been intrigued by the determinants of the responses to this question. The data show that how much one likes their job is positively correlated to the responses to this question, but I am sure that there are other determinants that come into play in determining the answers. I found myself thinking of this lately as the “Power Ball” lottery reached a record level of return of $600 million dollars. Believing that such lotteries are a “tax on people who don’t understand math,” I must admit that the payoff was so large I was almost tempted into buying one ticket, just in case. In the end, I chose not to, but not until I participated in several conversations about what I would do if I was to suddenly come into such large sums of money. My response remained consistent. I would stay here and continue teaching college. I hope that someday my daughter finds a job about which she can say the same thing. While it is interesting to imagine being in a position of not having to worry about money, the truth is that I would not want to give up my job here, even if I was not financially dependent on it. This became all the more clear this past weekend as we watched graduation unfold. As I marched in two ceremonies, I realized that the energy I receive from my students is something that could not be bought for any price. Indeed, the opportunity to be part of the lives of such amazing students is something that could not be bought, even for $600 million. As I watched my students graduate, I was reminded of how my life had intersected with theirs these past few years. I watched one woman graduate who had worked for me as a work-study student and had helped me organize my particularly chaotic office, helping me dig out of piles of papers that were gathering dust on top of my desk. She will be attending graduate school at a nearby university, where she will earn a Master’s Degree in Social Work. I am sure that she will help many people find order and meaning in lives that, like my office, need such direction. I watched one student receive an award for having the highest GPA over the course of her time at Ursuline. Had I not run into her in the hall a few days earlier, I would not have recognized her. She looked completely different from the young woman who sat in my class a few years ago. From a country outside of the United States, I am sure that she is taking her knowledge and vision to a larger world. I am proud that I had the opportunity to teach her skills that I hope will be useful as she progresses on that journey. I learned that weekend that another former student was a co-author on a paper that was submitted to a top science journal. It was the result of a research internship that my former calculus student participated in on the way to earning a degree in Biology. I can imagine the paper becoming a stepping stone on the way to entrance into medical school. I am sure that the student will make an excellent physician, and I wish them well. As the evening unfolded, I listened to the roll call of graduates until I was startled into attention as I heard a familiar name called. One of our former math majors earned with a master’s degree in teaching, which gives her teaching certification that allows her to teach math. As math teachers are hard to find in Cleveland, I am sure that this degree will help her to find a position that will allow her to better support herself and her children. I am glad that I played a role in helping her future u

Blog: Getting to GreenTo begin, let me correct an error in my previous post. I stated that the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) had grown out of an earlier and more specialized organization called the Consortium for Environmental Education in Medicine. I thought that to be true based on governing documents published on the AASHE website, but the actual history is somewhat different. I've been told by One Who Was There that, functionally and operationally, AASHE started out as a grant-funded regional effort -- EfS West. When a decision was made to expand to national scale, conversion of the approved-but-inoperative CEEM charter was decided upon as likely easier and less expensive than starting a whole new non-profit application from scratch. Thus, the paper trail indicates one history but reality lies somewhere else. That historical misunderstanding aside, AASHE does currently face significant challenges including, but not limited to, those mentioned earlier. I don't want to kick a well-intentioned organization when it's down. Rather, I'd like to offer some thoughts and suggestions about how AASHE -- still the best candidate we've got for a higher ed sustainability professional membership organization -- can reshape itself for future success. First and foremost, AASHE needs to find a way to make absolutely clear what it's trying to achieve. The term "sustainability" is almost as broad as the term "virtue". I'm pretty much in favor of each, but saying that an organization is trying to promote either doesn't really tell me very much. It's OK for an organization like AASHE to chase a goal which evolves somewhat over time -- refining its vision of the end state it's trying to attain can be evidence of learning and growth. But it's not OK to avoid stating, as best it can, what the organization is striving to accomplish, at least in qualitative terms. The more precisely a goal can be expressed, the more effectively it can be promoted and justified. Other organizations (e.g., The Natural Step, ICLEI, the Global Reporting Initiative) have been more explicit in defining sustainability than has AASHE to date -- it's not easy, but it's not impossible. AASHE needs to be clear about just who it's trying to organize. Right now, the target audience seems to include sustainability staff, faculty who want (or should want) to teach about sustainability, leaders of educational institutions, directors and managers of administrative and auxiliary operations with sustainability implications, students, alumni, athletics departments, campus contractors and suppliers, and pretty much everybody else in town. Trying to communicate to such a diverse audience means that the message gets softened; soft messaging ne'er won anything. If AASHE determines to engage seriously with society's range of sustainability problems, its role will be far different from that of most higher ed professional membership organizations. The typical such organization focuses on standardizing, improving, promoting, fine-tuning the performance of an established organizational role which is likely to continue well into the future. AASHE, on the other hand, needs to position and organize itself to focus on creating, enabling, evolving, and empowering the performance of a nascent organizational role the purpose of which is to change the future. Significantly. Using higher ed as a lever. Promoting change is an inherently creative process. Creative processes can't be managed bureaucratically, nor can they succeed if they just muddle along. Dave Newport at UC-Boulder has a good blog post that describes (about half-way down) how AASHE has suffered from a management structure based on the generally messy and muddle-filled leadership pattern of higher ed itself. That's probably pretty accurate, and it's led to a situation w

An Inside Higher Ed webinar with Stacey R. Bolton Tsantir, the chair of the Health and Safety Subcommittee of NAFSA: Association of International Educator, presented May 23, 2013. Click here to download the accompanying slide deck. Section: Editorial Webinars (order here)File: Education Abroad_ Best Practices in Health and Safety_0_0.flv

Monday's ceremony marked the installation of the Born Learning Trail, a series of signs along a pathway through a playground at Springside Park in Pittsfield, aimed young children and their families to encourage outdoor activity and reading. The Born Learning Trail comes from efforts by Pittsfield Promise, a city-wide coalition that is working through a variety of projects with a goal of boosting reading proficiency levels among Pittsfield third-graders to 90 percent by 2020.

Books for the very youngest readers can be deceptively simple. Often, although not always, printed on thick cardboard pages (board books) and with an elementary text and straightforward illustrations, these books can strike many adults as rather boring to read and easy to create. Yet the truth is that books for babies and toddlers take a devilish amount of talent and an uncanny ability to synthesize information and illustrations while still making them entertaining and educational.

In a few more days Clarksville students will be dismissed for the summer. Weeks of relaxation, fun activities and vacation trips will kick into high gear after Memorial Day. For the director and teachers at Clarksville Youth Enrichment Programs (CYEP), the real fun starts on June 3 when their summer programs begin. Brooke Knight founded CYEP in January 2012, and wanted to create a learning center where students had the opportunity to learn academics within a fun environment.