 Welcome to our presentation from the University of Oregon. This is Rebooting the Past, Uploading the Future, Web 2.0, and the Study of History through a Living Learning Community. I want to thank Joan Lippincott, who heard us give this presentation at the Education Cause Learning Initiative meeting in Austin in January, and really enjoyed it, and encouraged us to come and repeat the presentation here at CNI. So we're very happy to be here. Let me introduce our panel. First, I'm Andrew Bonamici. I'm Associate University Librarian for Media and Instructional Services. I've been at the University of Oregon working in the library system since 1985, and I've worked in a number of capacities in library administration and educational technology leadership. Heather Briston, on my right, is the Corrigan Solari University historian and archivist. That's an endowed chair. Heather's been at the U of O since 2001, and is a very active instructor and collaborator with faculty who integrate in archival content and primary sources into their instruction and research. Kevin Hatfield is Assistant Director of Academic Initiatives in Residence Life and Adjunct Assistant Professor of History at the University of Oregon. Kevin's been a real pioneer in adopting distributed education technologies to teach students in Bend. We have a central Oregon presence there, and he's an active partner with the libraries in many instructional and outreach projects. And our last panelist is Matt Villeneuve. Matt is a sophomore at the U of O. He's a freshman interest group teaching assistant, or FAA, in the first year programs. He's a sophomore from Seattle, Washington, and he spent his two years at Oregon as a history major. In his capacity as an FAA, he lives in the residence halls, works as a teacher, advisor, and mentor for first year students. And you'll hear more details about that as the presentation moves along. So, let me do a quick show of hands. I have to do what Cliff did in the last presentation and shade my eyes a little bit. But how many of you are librarians? Any academic technology administrators? You can raise your hand more than once. Many of us have to do that these days. Archivists, digital library developers, any other roles and responsibilities, feel free, well, maybe in the Q and A, you can share who you are into the microphone. So, let me, I'll start off by telling you a little bit about the University of Oregon. So, the University of Oregon is a new gene. We're 100 miles south of Portland, established in 1876. We're a comprehensive research university with eight schools and colleges, arts and sciences, a graduate school, professional schools and architecture and allied arts, business, education, journalism, music and dance and law. So, in addition to our Eugene campus, we have teaching and research facilities in Portland, in Bend and Marine Research Institute and Charleston on the Oregon coast. The total enrollment fall 2009 is 22,300. Our undergraduate enrollment is a little over 18,000. We are the smallest of the public university members of the association of the AAU. And we actually like this scale. It's a small university. It allows us to develop a cohesive campus community, but it's still large enough for significant research initiatives. Oregon historically has struggled with finances. We've had many extractive industries like logging through the years. There have been boom and bust cycles in the economy. There's also a streak of Western self-reliance and pulling together as a community. So, we think we also learned how to collaborate very quickly and look around at our neighbors on campus for help when we need it, because we know that there are a lot of things we just couldn't do by ourselves. If you want to, let's talk about some of the goals of undergraduate education. So we have a new academic plan that was ratified 2008. And the goals of undergraduate education as expressed in that plan are to question critically, communicate clearly, act creatively, live ethically. You know, nothing really radical about those. But we also see it as important to provide our undergraduate students to conduct with opportunities to conduct original research and engage in significant service learning projects. This reflects our role as a research university as well as a liberal arts institution that's providing a really solid undergraduate education. So why is this kind of collaboration and this fostering of scholarship so important? Well, first, it's the right thing to do. I mean, this is higher education. The U of O being a research university, we do feel very strongly that we want our students to become scholars. And we want to distinguish ourselves. Only 8 1⁄2% of the UO's budget comes from the state general fund at this point in time. So we're highly tuition dependent. So we want to focus on recruiting and retaining strong, you know, successful students. And we're doing that by increasing scholarships and financial aid, improving residence halls and developing partnerships like this one that help to foster academic engagement and success in the classroom and beyond. So we're trying to create that continuum of student experience that starts in the dorms, you know, extends into informal learning spaces, the classroom itself, and into the student's social life and their role in the community. So in the libraries, we've made some very conscious decisions to enhance our support of undergraduate learning. We've built out a service learning commons service model. We've established a new position to coordinate instruction and campus partnerships. We're staying open around the clock for much of the year. That's actually an initiative that's funded by the student government. The associated students of the University of Oregon are paying for a good chunk of our extended hours. And we're actively participating in first year instructional programs and academic initiatives like this one that get students off to a very good start. So what you'll hear about today is how this all comes together in a single class. A residential FIG, FIG is a freshman interest group for first year students who live together in a designated hall. So to describe that program, I'll turn it over to Kevin. Okay, thank you, Andrew. So I'm just gonna spend a few moments describing what I believe is a fairly unique learning environment, not only at the University of Oregon, but compared to some of our fellow institutions, and that's our freshman interest group program. And at the U of O of FIG, Cohen rolls 25 first year students in two general education courses during the fall term. That satisfy kind of core baccalaureate graduation requirements. And those larger courses are typically lower division, large lecture surveys that are open to non-FIG participants as well. So essentially we're drawing small cohorts of 25 students out of those two larger courses. And then that cohort is linked together by a one credit college connection seminar. And these seminars have a discipline specific prefix. They all have a unique title that reflect the intersections they're trying to make between those two core courses. The FIG that we're gonna talk about today is called Hidden History, and it links an introduction to world history with an introduction to folklore course. The residential FIG program at the University of Oregon has another layer to community development, and that is that the students are not only Cohen rolled in those three courses, but they also live together in the same residence hall. By design, they're not roommates. We don't wanna over-homogenize or narrow that community, but they certainly do live in a residence hall and Mack can elaborate on his role both in and outside the classroom as an undergraduate teaching assistant for the FIG. At the University of Oregon we have heading into fall 2010, 23 residential FIGs and 40 non-res FIGs, so about 63 FIGs overall. And so a majority of our first year students have this experience of transitioning to college within an academic context. The goal, kind of the objectives behind the freshman interest group program is to foster interdisciplinary thought and inquiry between those two core courses and hopefully help first year students start to discern both content and methodological intersections between the core subjects. And that's what we've been trying to do for the last several years with history and folklore. We also hope that the FIGs can enrich the investigation of the essential questions of the disciplines and again reinforce at an early point in their undergraduate career disciplinary thinking, practices, and habits of mind. The students enrolled in a residential FIG, as I mentioned, have kind of a dual peer community that exists both inside and outside the classroom. Not only do the students live in a residence hall, but the course itself is taught in the Living Learning Center, which is one of our newer residence halls on campus that has public access on the first floor for classrooms and various spaces for students and faculty to interact outside of class. And I would submit that one of our primary student development objectives for the first year program is to try to shift gradually students from solely course-based interaction with their faculty. So approaching professors to talk about a particular paper or an exam to mentoring relationships where you start to see the kinds of conversations about their major, their discipline, career paths, graduate school, letters of recommendation. And so students are being connected early on with someone who is more of a faculty mentor. And Matt, again, as an FA, really can model that for the first year students as a student within the program. I also want to emphasize that our FIG program at the University of Oregon is not that one credit course I mentioned that links the two core courses together. That seminar is not a disembodied study skills workshop or a quotidian welcome or transition to college 101 class. In fact, each of those seminars is really co-constructed and co-instructed by the faculty member and the FA. And a tremendous amount of thought goes into the selection of the FAs. They're pairing with faculty members and creating a unique experience where each of those seminar will follow a term-long project-based inquiry exercise. And so it's not a course that meets simply to kind of hold the hand of first year students. But it really is, as I mentioned, a way for students to transition within an academic context and making those disciplinary connections. One other thing I just want to mention briefly, and Matt can elaborate on this, but the role of the FA I would submit is very unique at the University of Oregon. They really do function as peer educators or peer mentors. And in many ways, model for students what does it mean to be a learner at a research university? In other words, that the tuition is paying for more than simply a seat in the classroom or access to faculty office hours. But in fact, at a university, you're becoming part of an academic and a scholarly community. And you can engage in the kind of life of the mind that occurs outside the classroom, whether that be a work in progress talk, an exhibit opening at a museum, a visiting scholar's public talk. And Matt, as a student who isn't too far removed from the first year students, can escort and help mentor them. So what does that look like if you're really engaging a life of the mind at a university? And so again, Matt's role is not relegated to performing perfunctory tasks of tabulating attendance or recording scores. He's sometimes moderating dialogue in the classroom, delivering a presentation, assisting me with classroom management and the dynamics that certainly can sometimes be challenging. For those of you who've read about first year interest programs, one of the challenges that's often faced is that these communities are relatively homogenous and narrowed. And the problem can be that there aren't upper class students participating in the classroom environment. There was a very good Chronicle of Higher Education article written in 2004 by David Jaffe from the University of North Florida looking at some of the divisive and sometimes disruptive behaviors that can develop within a small FIG model such as the one we have. But I have found at the University of Oregon that having Matt and not all FIG programs have an FA. Sometimes it's just the instructors that are teaching the class that the role of the FA's play can really mitigate and mediate some of those problems that might harden into a group think and create perhaps more of an adversarial relationship between the students and the professor. I've not experienced that as an instructor in the program and from what I've heard from my peers, they haven't either. And so I think the FA is pivotal in many ways. And that's hoping that those small communities remain very cohesive and don't have some of the potentially negative divisive elements that sometimes instructors have encountered in programs where there's not an FA. Before we get to the course that we're going to speak of at hand, this in many cases started way back in 2006 when I co-taught a course, a Writing 399, so an upper division writing course entitled The New Research, which took primary sources as their input with the idea of having new media be the output. We had a wiki for class discussions and work because the students did not like the course management software, so we decided to go off the range in that sense. And then we also gave the students an opportunity to do something other than just a traditional research paper for what was generally considered a traditional research class. And we did allow them to do a paper if they wanted to, but we also encouraged them to instead create involved PowerPoint presentations that could explore their research, create a research blog, or create a proposal for an exhibit to be displayed within the library. At the end of the class, it was a small class of just seven students, and we ended up with three PowerPoints, three papers, and one exhibit proposal. The course itself was co-taught with a professor in the English department. And in the end, we were not as pleased with the fact that we didn't have as many people trying blogs or trying alternatives, but at the same time, we were pleased that not everybody wrote a research paper. Significant in that class, however, was one of the students. His name was Connor Ross. And he was interested in researching student life on an issue and doing a comparison. He was interested in comparing the university during World War I versus, at that time, the new war in Iraq and what the student life was like. All I had to direct him to was a diary of a student from 1915. Her name was Lucille Saunders. And I had to explain to him that student life was not well documented from the student point of view. I had plenty of administrative papers, and I had the life of the university from the administrative and faculty perspective. But unfortunately, not as much from the students. In 1980, we ceased in putting together a yearbook for the university. And there had been no real way of systematically documenting a cohort that, on average, leaves every four to five years and continually, annually turns over. We do have a student paper, but ask any student at the U of O. And they will say that while that is a student voice, it's not necessarily their voice. So when Connor was presented with this challenge, instead of going off and doing nothing, he instead decided to take this challenge and his opportunity as a fig FA to come up with an idea to have freshman journaling, which then gets saved and preserved in the university archives. And so that's where we come to the origins of hidden history. So this is what we're kind of referring to as the analog era. The first two or three years we taught the class, as Heather mentioned, working with Connor, we had Lucille Saunders' diary and some correspondence between Lucille and her mother and her sister. And we used this to really approach three, what I would consider to be central learning challenges within the discipline of history. And the first one that's encountered by many students arriving at the university is improving historical thinking and inquiry skills. And in this class, and Connor was instrumental in helping us conceptualize kind of the pedagogy of the class, we deliberately invited the students to enter the fig within the framework of an apprenticeship within the historian's craft. And the learning environment then would allow students to actually learn how to practice history as opposed to simply learning an arbitrary body of information. The challenge that we encounter with many first year students is that the experiences they've often had, not always, but they've often had, as learners of history before arriving at the university, has conditioned them to become very passive, kind of passive receivers of information with a singular focus on the mastery of content knowledge, often largely through the rote kind of memorization and recitation of factual information. So we very quickly wanted to kind of shift and reorient students in terms of how they were thinking about learning history as a discipline. And the diary provided a platform to do that. We also hoped that the diary would allow us to introduce students to the concept of historiography. Again, I would submit historiography as a critical framework that students of history should have in their cognitive toolbox, long before they take a methodology sequence as master students, but unfortunately, historiography is something that many students have not encountered. And so to try to demystify this notion of how historians ply their craft, we were able to use the diary and have students working in small groups or individually pose a common set of questions to that primary source, and then begin to assign meaning and interpret the experiences of Lucille as a first year student. And very quickly, when these groups reconvened, they can discern a divergence of interpretations or divergence in narratives, the kind of secondary sources that they're writing. And very quickly, they could start to discern that methodology and perspective plays a significant role in the reconstruction of the past. And so we were very intentional about engaging the diary critically. It wasn't about giving them an exam on the content of the diary. And some groups started to tease out that, well, we were much more wedded kind of empirically to this primary source and kind of citing facts, where there were other groups that perhaps were a bit more inferential in their reasoning, or they perhaps weighed evidence differently based on what they considered to be its bias or its completeness or its accuracy. And so we had students kind of working through, again, that notion of what it meant to be a historian and what some of the tools are that historians use. The challenge for many of our students is that they can probably all recall the scientific method chart on their biology instructors while in high school. And they can remember performing empirical experiments in the laboratory, in the field, testing a hypothesis, analyzing that data. The challenge is there's often no analog to that in their history class. There probably wasn't a historical methods or historical inquiry thinking chart on the wall. And so some students have had an opportunity to maybe visit a local archive or museum, perhaps perform oral history, but often there are many students who just have not had an opportunity to work with the raw material of history to pose a hypothesis or to pose questions to primary sources and begin to interpret those and actually do the work of the historian. So that was the second goal, is introducing them to historiography. And then the third, and this is something we'll all talk more about, is we were hoping that we could frame academic writing as a process of disciplinary thinking. Again, by structuring the kind of writing they were doing, critical thinking and writing around a freshman journaling project. And so this was really the core pedagogy of the class. Students would be at one moment working as historians interpreting Lucille's diary and her correspondence. While concurrently they would be thinking about self-representation and the authoring or the creation of their own primary source materials through their weekly journaling projects. And so kind of keeping in mind what it meant to interpret a historical actor and what it meant to be a living historical actor, kind of in an autobiographical way, recording your experience and being intentional about. So what am I including? What am I not including? How am I constructing narrative? And so those questions I think in a reciprocity worked really well. And so that was our goal the first two or three years of the program. But again, before we started to introduce any of the new social media. Well this is actually where I got involved in this story and this process. I'm Matt, I'm a sophomore at the University of Oregon. I'm a history major, which seems like something I need to introduce is whenever I introduce myself. And I'm Matt Villanueva, I'm a history major. And I'm also a residential FA. And I can confidently say that I think I have the best job on campus. I'll do respect to your word. As a residential FA, I live in the dorms with my students and I teach the college connections course alongside Kevin. And my role is really is three fold. I'm a mentor, a teacher and an advisor. And as an undergraduate there's really no other experience like that on campus. It's unique, it's challenging, but it's very rewarding. And I was hired as an FA a little over a year ago so this is actually the first year that I've done this. And the powers that be connected me with Kevin and the fig hidden history. And the theme of hidden history as we talked a little bit about was really centered around preserving student life. And Lucille's journal and student journals really represent the best documentation methods of the past. I think about how Lucille busted out her journal on a typewriter back in 1915 using the same kind of keyboard that we use, my students use and I on our laptops every week to chronicle our experience. And the result of that really is the same. It's a stack of typed papers which are turned into class. And so my interest really lies in how technology, how it might affect the production and the study of history. So when I sat down with Kevin for the first time to put together our 10 week syllabus for this one credit college connections course, I pitched this idea. Instead of just journaling every week and having students turn in those hard copies to us for us to read and that would be essentially it. And then ultimately that whole stack of papers would go in a box to Heather and the university archives in special collections. Why not allow students to actually use the new media that they really use in their everyday lives to document their experience as a first year students on campus. And so this notion, which Kevin, I'm thankful to say immediately endorsed, raised some really interesting questions. In the past in history, letters, memoirs, journals, those are the types of things that served as the best primary sources for historians. But they're not the mediums that I use to communicate in my life. I think about I have my cell phone and I have my Zoom and I'm texting and I have, of course, use the phone, email. I only use email for business. That's not something I use socially. That's what the excuse me, the old people use. But that really, I was beginning to think about, we've talked about this all four of us. How does that, how's that gonna change the way that historians do their craft? And so this really answers some dynamic questions. How do historians of tomorrow access the experiences that are recorded today using new media? I publish Facebook status updates pretty regularly instead of writing a journal every day, but those aren't really recorded, they're not kept. I don't use Twitter, where do those things go? And the ether in the cloud, I don't record them. So that's an interesting question. Additionally, how does really using a textbook confine students to a certain perception of what history is about? We have a fascinating national dialogue due to the new Texas textbook curriculum requirements, which has been a great example to talk about what textbooks do to affect history as a student. And also, if the future of primary sources and thus history itself is in new media, how do we use technology to leverage the most effective student learning? And so we came up with a strategic map to try and answer and address some of these questions. And so Kevin and I decided that the best way to explore the issues with our students was to ask the questions using technology. And so this is a strategic map that we kind of developed for hidden history and we adopted a kind of a three pronged approach. We used a Wiki as an administrative platform for dialogue and discussion, which would kind of serve as our digital learning space. We also had a WordPress blog for student publication, distribution and preservation. And we finally had a Facebook group for social updates and kind of a ubiquitous presence in students everyday lives. All of this in addition to the rechristened journaling project which we called the Documenting Freshman Year Project. So we'll start with the Wiki. We use the Wiki as a hub for hidden history resources with links to the Facebook group, the blog, discussion materials, a calendar. And this really served as a vehicle to allow us actually to conduct a summer assignment where we asked students to read Lucille's diary before they arrived on campus. And then we asked them to begin a discussion on the Wiki before they even showed up for their first day of class. And it was actually a huge success. We had actually over a 50% return rate on those students before the first day, before they were even students at the university. And the Wiki really played a big role in getting students to hit the ground running. My peers, my peer FAs will talk about, we send out a welcome letter every summer to tell students, you know, hey welcome to the university, we're really excited to have you. And I think people will be like, man I only got two students to respond to mine. I got three this year, I'm doing good. And I said, really you only got three? I'm like, I got 15. And I also got them to start a summer assignment online. Like so they're already doing work. And people were like, what would you do? And I was like, I just used a Wiki and asked them to use it. And so I think that was pretty telling. Additionally, the Wiki also had a great effect. Heather, you'd mentioned. Yes, for me it was fabulous because for any of you who do instruction with students in some cases, the first time you meet them, you meet them once, you meet them for 50 minutes and then you never see them again. For me, this was an opportunity to get to know the students, get to know what they thought about, not only Lucille but what they thought about diaries and journaling and their experience with a primary source before they even walked into my classroom. And so then that way I didn't have to find that out and tease that out. I had that and I could start from that point. That's an excellent point. And then we also used a blog. We mentioned that as part of our strategic map and we used a WordPress blog. And this was kind of a part of our folklore component for the FIG. It was called Tales of the O and it was a place where students, we asked students to post a short nonfiction story about their first weeks on campus and stories about getting lost on the way to class, discovering new buildings and talking about what the best eateries on campus, all those stories quickly found their way online and students were really able to share a slice of their lives outside of the classroom with all the other students. Whereas if we had asked them to compile those stories and turn them into us to grade, they wouldn't have been able to read each other's experiences and really there's the whole phenomenon and we have a screenshot here of the comment, the fantastic comment box as a new form of literature. That would never exist if it wasn't hosted online and so that whole dialogue we think is really valuable, just wouldn't exist if we continued to do it the way that we do just to bust your things out in Microsoft Word and print them, turn it in. So the value there is really actually pretty exponential. And I think students had a lot of fun with this assignment thinking they were merely being creative but they were also really leaving it lasting digital historical footprint as well. And finally, Facebook of course needs no introduction and it's pretty straightforward. Our Facebook group served as a platform for social functions. We hosted events, posted updates, excuse me, shared links and photos. All in an environment where students were already plugged in. So it got them thinking about class in a new different way. We also got to do a Facebook assignment where in class where we asked students to bring in their laptops, break up into groups and use Facebook as a primary source collection if you will to draw some conclusions about what it meant to be a student at the University of Oregon. We asked students if today's Facebook was the only thing historians 100 years from now had to use as primary source material, what could they learn about what it meant to be a duck at Oregon in 2010 and how might this medium affect the historical understanding for good or bad? And students kind of looked at us and were like, you're allowed to use Facebook for that? And it was really fun. I think we had a good time looking through that. And that kind of all culminates in the documenting freshman year project which was really our central experiential learning project. And this is really where the rubber met the road. Instead of using just journals, we added a series of options for their autobiography projects every week that would prompt students to consider what it meant to be a historical actor in the world of new social media. And so students could really, we could still use the written journals, but we also asked them maybe use a blog, try a video blog, what about a podcast, a photography series, a visual series? Really the sky was the limit. And so this is actually the breakdown of the media chosen by students. And even though students had a wide variety of choices, the vast majority opted to record their experiences in a written journal, which I thought was a really interesting result which we'll talk about later on. So here's some kind of examples of the work that was made in documenting freshman year, in the documenting freshman year project. We had journals, photos, we had a video, some football games, we even had a podcast. We really accumulated all this material by the end of the term, which was really fantastic. And so that on the last day of class, we visited Heather in the University Special Collections and we were ready to donate all of this to her. And we come to donations. So with this class, I see them at the beginning of term and during the beginning of term is when we sort of set the stage and we talk about what it means to document what an archivist does. We get to know Lucille. I show them what the university looked like, what it meant to be a freshman in 1915. And then at the end of the term, they come back. And one of the things they do, as I tell them, you are the largest group of donors I ever meet with at one time. So I have 25 of them all at once. And that's a key point. This is the opportunity for students to be valued donors to a university archives. And it lets them know that this is not just an exercise. It's not just something that they turn in to Kevin and Matt, but they are actually contributing knowledge to a wider community. As I said, we have a very difficult time documenting the student voice and they are helping to rectify that. As I tell them, I said, we cannot tell the story of this university without you. And at the same time, they also learn about the challenges that a university archivist has in documenting that voice. In the time that they've been writing their journals and noticing what they've been doing, they've been able to see issues such as different voices, how they come through the university. And in this case, with this year, it was fabulous because I was able to bring up issues of what it means to preserve born digital records and what digital preservation is all about. But I also get to talk with them since they sign a deed of gift, just like all of our other donors do, I get to talk to them about issues of privacy, about issues of copyright. And so it's an early opportunity to make them aware not only of what they're doing and what they're contributing, but what it means to be an actor and creator in a historical realm. From the preservation standpoint, from the preservation standpoint, for me and I think for other university archivists, this is where the student content is. It's in the blogs, it's in Facebook. And what I want them to be able to understand is that as students, I need to be able to collect and preserve their digital content. And I hope that all of you who are out there, if you're not already doing so, please go. Talk to your university archivist if you're involved in projects like this. Because if we're not there, this is where we need to be. Also, because in many cases, or in all of these cases, these are electronic records. For those of you who are involved in that, you know that you need to be involved in the infrastructure and creating that infrastructure before the records are created and be involved with the creator. And so for me, this is an excellent opportunity to be involved with the students as they're creating their electronic records. What we do for preservation is not fancy, but it currently, it works for us. We have a dark archives on a server and we have a separate access copy that we provide access to, and I'll show you that in a moment. But then also, as all of us who are archivists now face, this is a blended collection. The scrapbook that was mentioned is an actual physical scrapbook. So I am currently managing and describing and making available not only the previous two years of paper journals, but also these electronic journals and the paper journals that we collected this year. And so in access, what we've done for this collection is to have three access points. Our institutional repository, a finding aid repository, and by a short description in our online catalog. Across the top, you can see scholars bank is our institutional repository and the Northwest Digital Archives is our finding aid repository. Our scholars bank repository has high visibility to Google for both the scholars bank and the Northwest Digital Archives, and that's something that is very appealing to all of our students. They love the fact that they'll be able to find their stuff on Google. And right now we currently use scholars bank not only for accessing this particular collection, but we also use it for the access copy for all of the electronic records for university archives. The Northwest Digital Archives is an online repository of traditional archival descriptive tools or finding aids for collections and they're used to describe both our paper and our electronic collections. And then finally the listing in the catalog is a traditional collection level description. And so Matt and I wanna share with you some of the feedback we had from our students and we put together a series of questions and so it's kind of a student self-assessment that they performed for us at the end of the term and we wanted to get a sense of what students had learned through the new social media and the one caveat that I wanna identify is the way this particular fig was advertised to students at high school visits and over the summer during introduction leading into the fall of 2009 did not suggest that there would be a new social media aspect to it. And so we think that perhaps the profile of students that enrolled in this fig may be different from this coming fall when we've kind of repackaged the marketing and the description of the fig and so that might account for why we had maybe a surprising number of students who decided to continue in a more traditional format. And so our intended learning outcomes we've kind of identified those and so I think what Matt and I are gonna do is share with you some of the feedback from our students to give you an idea of what their previous experience was with new social media. We found that it was very limited when it came to blogs and podcasts. There were only two of our 23 students that had written their own blogs before entering the class. Only five of the 23 who had read blogs and for podcasts a similar number, about four of the 23 had subscribed to a podcast and only one student who had produced something and went on to produce for their project. What we did find though of course very low barriers of entry to Facebook and all of our 23 students had Facebook accounts and so that was one way to connect with them very easily. So I'm just gonna briefly go over some of the student answers to this survey that we asked at the end of the term to kind of measure how effective we were. And one of the questions that the first question we asked was was the Wiki helpful in analyzing that diary? And most students said yes. 20 out of 23 students said that the Wiki was helpful in analyzing a primary source. And I think that most students enjoyed the summer portion. They don't know what it's like to be a college freshman and it's two weeks until the start of term and I think a lot of students are actually looking for a way in before to hit the ground running and so I think students said that this was a fantastic opportunity to actually get to meet people before they showed up on the first day of campus and so definitely that the Wiki was helpful in kind of debriefing a primary source. So that was really an excellent feedback for us which we plan on doing next year for sure. And to Matt's credit, we were very tactful. We didn't wanna show too much exuberance when students were posting over the summer. We wanted to give them some space of their own to connect but we also didn't want it to begin to feel like a busy work and so Matt consistently checked in and posted and responded to students throughout the summer as did I. Again, in a way where they weren't feeling overwhelmed in that space but so from the beginning it would seem like an extension of the community, extension of the dialogue from class into an online environment so we were weighing kind of exactly how much to jump in and how frequently. One of the other questions we asked was whether the communal nature of the tales of the old blog and these were the short nonfiction stories that the students composed about their experiences on their first few weeks on campus. How did that affect what they wrote, how they wrote and did it encourage them to return after their initial posts? Again, kind of getting at that idea if they were starting to see this as an extension of the dialogue from the class and again we had a pretty good response rate of about 15 so a majority of our students who were very clear about the reasons why they returned and not only wanting to read the stories of their peers but also interested to see if anybody had posted thoughts or responses about the stories they themselves has posed and what I find particularly interesting about this is we really do have three different communities that work in this FIG. We have the in class community, we have the community within the residence hall and then the online community and there were different dynamics to each of those and so it was something we were cognizant throughout the term as trying to get a sense of how one of those communities was affecting the other and we could really see online a lot of students being very engaged and not perhaps perceiving this as just some simply kind of checking a box or doing it for a certain number of points. One of the other things that's really important as an FA is to find a way to fill the gray space between these two classes, these four lecture courses. So for us it's folklore and history and so one of the questions we asked was was the Wiki in the blog helpful in making those connections. And on this one we only got 11 out of 23 students that said that the Wiki in the blog was helpful in making a connection between those two courses. I think that also, but there was positive feedback. They said that it was good and they saw themes that transcended both classes but I also think that students don't really think at a meta level, at a really strategic way to realize, well what am I doing and how am I supposed to be seeing things which is not their fault. So but it was still, it was just one more tool that we had in our toolbox to try and fill that gray space and draw some connections. We also wanted to know again, just a similar theme here if the Wiki in blog made their posts again feel more like a conversational dialogue and you can see we can go through this one relatively quickly. It reinforces what we've shared earlier. 17 out of 23 students, again I would argue that this goes back to the summer assignment and getting students connected even before they arrived on campus and then having Matt again living with them in the residence hall. I think that online environment was really successful as we can quickly go on. And this is kind of the same notion. Did the Wiki in blog contribute to building another community space? Kevin mentioned the three different separate communities and again only 12 out of 23 but I think most people identified the fact that because they lived together that was their primary avenue of communication which I thought was really interesting because not all figs are residential so technology serves as a really great vehicle to try and community build one of those more disparate programs. And then the last question we wanted to share with you which we were really astounded that 21 out of 23 students found this positive if using the Wiki in the blog did they leave the course with an improved understanding what it means to be both a student of history and a historical actor. And this again although our fig was connecting folklore and history we were both coming from a history background so we were very encouraged to see this. And again I would argue that that these digital learning environments allowed us to connect students to concepts that can be somewhat challenging for first year students studying history concepts of causation, of agency, of authenticity, the memory, provenance, these things that historians work with but can be a bit discreet and I think by having this reinforced in the different communities especially the blog and the Wiki students seem to really grasp that and I think that's by bringing in historiography early and in a way that demystified it. I found that these online environments really helped us with that because I certainly teach other first year courses where we don't use and haven't used new social media and again those are concepts that are very challenging for students to grasp at first. Okay so what are some of the implications of a model like this? Just thinking about the libraries it's really important to have the enabling technologies in place and the service layer to help provide the support. We didn't launch our institutional repository because Kevin and Matt started playing around with this idea of getting, or Heather, getting student work recorded for the archives. We had an institutional repository anyway and that's been a very solid platform for archiving and providing access to digital content like this. So you have to have those frameworks in place already. We have a number of media production facilities, the digital repositories. These make it possible for the students to contribute something that lasts and can be shared beyond the spatial and temporal boundaries of the class. And more importantly I think the partnerships and trust relationships need to be in place. As I was saying in the introduction we're a small enough campus. We've been driven to work together for such a long time in so many different creative ways that these conversations occur naturally. So it's been a really positive experience from that regard, but it does require having a certain amount of programmatic framework already in place. Now the implications for archives, I felt that there were three of them that were hugely important. I mean the first one was that for the students this is a contribution to knowledge instead of just classwork. This project has meaning beyond their class and it lets them feel and they've told me that they do feel that this is something that is bigger than just themselves or just their class. And then, I mean think about it. I mean how many people would love to have someone come up to them and say what you're doing is so important that I am going to dedicate myself to make sure that it lasts forever. And you're 17, 18 years old. I mean a lot of the students that actually really resonates with them. The other thing that I think is crucial about this class is that there are students involved in the course development conversation. From the very beginning with Connor Ross as the student FA in the development of the course and now to Matt Villeneuve and creating and bringing in the Web 2.0 technology into the course every time this class innovates, it innovates because of the students who take us there. And then finally, a huge implication for archives is just to make sure that we are a part of the discussion. And so any of you that are out there working in universities, no matter where at the university you are, if there are activities or if you are thinking about activities that will document student life, make sure you talk to your archivist and make them a part of this conversation because in some ways we can help not only in finding ways to make this happen but also in helping to preserve it and make it available. That's what we're here for. And just I'm gonna mention two brief implications. I think there are many more than that. The first is again the skills that students develop by learning history from a textbook are very limited and very different than the skills they would develop when they're analyzing interpreting primary source materials. And so on a practical level, new social media provides a platform to deliver and both to analyze in a collaborative way those primary sources. So for instance, I have students frequently that become very frustrated, even angry when they're presented with a set of primary source materials that are fragmentary, that are ambiguous, that have contradictory evidence. And again, it's because they've been conditioned to learn cognitively and to think about history from a textbook, which is a very tidy narrative. There's a single author, everything is very clear. And so they'll often ask you, what do you want me to do with these materials? I mean, I can't even read some of it. It's in handwriting. It doesn't really seem to make sense. And so I tell them, well, you're in the right space if you're frustrated because that's the work that historians face when they're working in an archive or a special collection or interviewing subjects. And so I would argue that the digital learning environment provides on a practical level, we can't always take students to the national archives. I would love to, but we can't. But what we can do is we can bring digital pieces of that back and share that in a classroom and set it up in a way that students can be working collaboratively with an instructor, with an FA, in analyzing a document online and then discussing it in the classroom. So not just the infrastructure, but also the kind of teaching and learning that takes place. And then secondly, just to give you one example of how media I think is a direct way to get students to some very challenging concepts of history. So one question that we pose to students in this class is traditionally, if you think about the profile of historical actors who are able to record their experiences and have those remain over time, typically race, gender, ethnicity, class, nationality, citizenship all play a role in whose voice is preserved, whose voice is not. Which voice has become marginalized, disremembered over time? And so we're opposing to the students if in a web 2.0 world there is this sense of kind of an amateur opportunity to create content. Does this create a more egalitarian space for the creation and preservation of the voices of historical actors than maybe we've seen traditionally? Or are there certain pitfalls that remain? And so we weren't giving them the answer, but kind of thinking through the kinds of limitations that historians have always faced, whether you're reconstructing the past of African-American slaves, or if you're reconstructing the past of female cannery workers. Often those are communities that we have very little manuscript materials left to work with. That doesn't mean we can't research those areas, but it's much more challenging. Because again, those voices weren't valued in the way that they are today. And so just kind of asking a very fundamental historical question of the discipline. I think there's a way to do that within new social media that gets students to that point. And finally, implications for learning spaces. As an undergraduate teaching assistant, what I learned from this experience is twofold. The bottom line is that using technology in the fig benefited and enhanced the learning of the students. That's what I felt like. That's what they told me. Most students and myself can really attest that these tools had a really positive impact in changing the nature of the assignments that we worked on from being really perfunctory to more conversational. And that was really important. And that's a distinction that I think goes quite a long way towards participation for a first year college student. And yet course requirements really remained the central motivation for utilizing that technology. There was no real organic or grassroots desire to use the new media. That really didn't arise from the group. Just because we were talking about blogs, then there wasn't a large contingent of students that got inspired to go use them. On some of those questions we asked, did you return to your assignments? We were those people who said, yes, said, yes, I did, because I wanted to see what my peers said, which was great and fantastic. Others just said, well, I thought it was part of my grade, so I'll do whatever I have to do to get the grade, which isn't exactly what we're going for, but at the end of the day, I can confidently say again that the experience was a positive one and we'll definitely plan on doing it in the future. And speaking of the future, we have a couple of notes for what we plan to do next fall with considerations that we've made, part of all of us have discussed and kind of contributed. I would say that we have a new angle, being this technology piece and how social media might change the study of history, which we talked about at length. We have some new marketing, it's a little more colorful, you can see our old marketing materials, it's kind of this gray, sepia tone picture with the Lucille Saunders who wrote the diary. Fantastic, interesting to me, doesn't look the most popping off the page, really interactive kind of thing that we're trying to teach and convey. So now we have this whole dichotomy of the past and the future and it's a little more colorful on our blog and hopefully that will attract some students that we think will be more conditioned in the world of social media. And we're also hoping and I think we plan on doing, having students not only work with Lucille Saunders diary next year and it's all about scaffolding, so kind of increasing the level of complexity of the primary sources that students are presented with when they're researching and having students go back and work with the previous cohorts materials that they've donated to Heather, both the written materials and the digital materials. And as Matt mentioned and Heather both, the digital capturing was able to preserve an aspect that wasn't there when they were just donating their journal projects because we have those wonderful conversations of the students on the blog and the wiki and so we were able to capture a larger experience of the class. And so we're gonna have students think about working through those as another form of primary source in addition to Lucille's diary. And I think we have enough of it now that it's a rich enough collection that it can be a fairly engaging opportunity for students to do the diary and then move on to the previous students. So we've had a lot of interest on campus lately in coming up with a community blogging platform, probably something like a WordPress multi-user instance or possibly Drupal that would help support projects like this, there are a number of other initiatives on campus, Student Life has something underway where they're talking about integrating all kinds of life skills and have the students reflect on those. So there's a portfolio potential. I'm sure you're all familiar with Jim Groom's work at University of Mary Washington with E-Port using WordPress for E-Portfolio. So we may be exploring something like that. And having a more consistent campus solution could be really helpful for when it comes time for Heather to start to harvest, especially if this grows. The scale is certainly an issue. I mean, this particular fig has 25 students and there's interest now in pushing the model out to many, many more sections. So at the same time, I mean, as much as that might help facilitate the process, we need to be careful that the systems don't compromise the student's sense of ownership and their capacity for personal expression and reflection. Of course, this is something we hear about a lot with Blackboard or other standard course management systems like that is just not where I wanna be. It's too administrative and it goes away at the end of the term. So there are some problems people have with using a tool like that to do something that's as potentially open-ended as a hidden history fig. So I think that brings us to the end of our slides I think we have just a couple minutes left to take questions but we can certainly hang around up here for a few extra minutes too if you're interested. So if you do have questions, please step to one of the microphones because the session's being recorded and that'll get your question. Hi, I think this is a really creative partnership and I think it's a wonderful project that you're doing. And I was thinking about scale as you were talking about it. It's not only scale of students but it's what of the faculty? How are you promoting the adoption of these technologies with the rest of the faculty so they can start to think of creative partnerships as well? I think, why don't you take a shot at that Kevin? It's a great question. We have about 65 to 70 faculty who participate in the FIG program in a given year and other than the incentive of working with first year students there's not a lot, there's maybe a little course buyout but it certainly doesn't connect to the tenorship or promotion or any of those considerations. And I think the, why faculty are excited about it, it's an opportunity to teach to their passions and they often have colleagues in another discipline who they would like to connect to the class. And so I think the challenge would be to have a model that doesn't feel like it's being imposed on faculty or maybe reticent or haven't thought through the pedagogical reasons to use the technology. But we have a wonderful Vice Provost of Undergraduate Studies and the Director of First Year Programs that does a wonderful job identifying faculty or interested in this and allowing faculty to really be creative with how they, their design of that one credit seminar. So I could see this being introduced, Matt has been asked to be one of the FA instructors, they train their new teaching assistants each year. And so I think gradually maybe it's from the bottom up, it'll be the FA is going to faculty and saying, hey, here's some great ways we can use this technology. But certainly those conversations are happening at a higher level too between some of our administrators and the faculty. The next time we give this talk will be for the campus's undergraduate council, which is a group of administrators and faculty and students, including Matt this year, who oversee in a participative way the undergraduate education program on campus. So there's a lot of interest in this from many sectors. The other sort of incremental change that's coming along, as I understand it, the summer, there will be a summer component now for all the figs. I don't think there's a fixed technology that's required to do that, but based largely on the success of Matt's students in connecting with Lucille's diary before they arrived on campus, all the other figs are going to be having something that brings the students and the FA and the faculty together. And I would just jump in and say that there are a lot of faculty, not only on our campus, but across the country who are kind of rethinking broader questions about undergraduate education, particularly the purpose and the role of a large survey lecture. And if it's not about simply delivering content and for history, it's certainly not. And we're looking for ways to engage students in that process of interpreting primary sources and then scholarly writing, expository writing about those sources. Difficult to do in a class of two or 300 students, even if they're meeting in small discussion sections once a week with the graduate teaching fellow. And so I know separate even from the one credit seminar, many faculty exploring ways, we have Blackboard as our course management system at the UVO, but I know we're considering adopting some others where folks are trying to think about digital environments where small groups within those large lecture surveys can engage maybe the same set of primary sources or different sets of primary sources and have conversations existing online that could then be evaluated either by the instructor or a GTF to kind of extend that classroom environment. So I think there's a broader question about how to maybe reform fundamentally the large lecture survey in some of the humanities disciplines at the UVO and I could see that being an incentive to use something like a fig as one kind of in room to that broader goal. More questions. Great, thank you. As a historian, I found this fascinating, but one thing about the technology, if I, when I work with paper documents, I can trace change, concept of draft, diaries and letters often show thinking, does your technology, do you have a method of, are the students asked to preserve drafts? Do they go back and rework material on reflection and how do they, in fact, how do you capture in this material the sort of, well, gee, if you think about it a week later or you have an intended audience so you change what you write when you think about it in terms of letters? Oh, those are all excellent questions and that's one of the ongoing conversations we have about how is posting on a blog or a wiki that's available only to your peers or that's available to the universe? How is that affecting what it is you're writing, what you're leaving out? And so that's an intentional conversation we've had. The question about though capturing kind of the marginalia and then the comments and the drafts, I know we're looking at incorporating, is it comment now or now comment or one of the platforms that would? I think that's one of the plug-ins for WordPress. We're trying to kind of a collaborative space where folks can co-construct or work on a document that would capture kind of the track changes of those elements. We weren't able to do that this last year but that's something that we certainly would like to be able to do because you're right, there's a lot of rich learning that takes place that wouldn't be captured in that case. So I know that's something we have on our agenda to look at what platform would be and probably Andrew or others are much more knowledgeable but as a story that's something that I've been concerned about. Well the wiki would be another option for that because wiki's track versions. So if you had enough accounts, to do it right though you'd really need to have individual accounts sort of feeding together which is one of the reasons. I find the WordPress multi-user model fairly compelling that each individual student can have their own site or as many sites as they want and then the instructor and the FA can harvest what they need from those sites with RSS feeds or tags. So that way the student has a much more personal learning environment that they can apply to a lot of classes just the way you might take notes and more than one thing in the same notebook. I don't know how people organize their notebooks but I have one little sort of moleskin type notebook and I take notes on everything in that. So I don't have a separate one for each meeting that I attend or I'd have a stack of them. So I think we're probably getting pretty close to the end of our time but we'd be happy to entertain a few more questions up here in the front. Thank you. Thank you very much.