A Look Back
The week before Christmas in 2007 I received good tidings and great joy with word of tenure and promotion at Abilene Christian University. I had come to ACU in 1999 just beginning my dissertation, so looking back over the previous 8 years was a flurry of struggle and growth I had attempted to reflect in my T&P portfolio. Developing new courses and extending research in 18th-century British poetry alongside renovating our first home and beginning our family was a blur I was confident would begin to settle down as I found my footing at the university, in our church, and in the community.
At the end of the Teaching section of my 2007 portfolio I reflected,
Though this may be an elusive hope, one goal I have for the next five years is to select a focus for my concentrated, deliberate attention.
Scenario A. I’m fortunate to have a deep love of the material I teach in upper-level and graduate classes, so one option is to set aside time to develop my early research into the Augustan satirists (Swift, Pope, and Gay) and their relation to the social and artistic topographies of the city of London.
Scenario B. I’ve also been thankful to work closely with the Adams Center on several occasions, so a second strong option would continue work I’ll begin this fall as Researcher in Residence into media on converged devices like the iPhone and their impact on the 21st century classroom.
Anyone who knows me would know which path I’ve taken—with great respect for literary scholars in my field and on our campus, I have spent the last seven years working with faculty and academic leaders around the country to develop a more robust vision for media fluency and web-enabled teaching and learning. Anyone who knows me would also suspect my claims of a narrowing of professional focus to be laughably naive.
The years since I received tenure and promotion have not confined themselves into a single concentrated focus, and my work with colleagues and students at ACU has often blurred the categories of teaching, research, service, and collegiality, so I’d like to share my assessment of how classroom experiments and research started in a silo have continued to broaden their impact across campus and across higher education.
The 21st century classroom
Tucked away at the end of the two scenarios I outlined in 2007 is a reference to Apple’s iPhone, just released that January. Earlier that spring I participated in conversations with the LINK Team about the potential role new mobile devices might play in the lives of our students and faculty. We reviewed a 2006 EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research study that showed laptops replacing desktops as the primary computer undergraduates were bringing to college campuses. The ECAR study also noted a growing number of those same students arrived with smart phones, increasing 581% from the previous year. We discussed the New Media Consortium’s 2007 Horizon Report that identified mobile phones as “an ideal platform for educational content and activities.”
As a result of these initial conversations, I was one of two faculty members who helped write a vision document asking how new mobile realities were likely to impact a university campus, a document shared with Apple that June. I was asked by the Adams Center that fall to lead faculty planning about the potential impact of media tools and podcasting on new mobile devices, the first in a series of steps that led to my current dual-role as a faculty member and director of the Learning Studio.
In retrospect, mobile learning at ACU was a unique composite of vision, experimentation, rhetoric, and struggle of institutional identity that continues in many corners today. For me, it provided a series of unique opportunities to develop skills in leadership, collaboration, project management and negotiation, and ultimately in my own teaching and the teaching of dozens of colleagues as we asked students to share their unique voice through more authentic writing and media projects for a global audience.
In the years following the kick-off of the mobile learning initiative in 2008, my work set out to help ACU “build distinctive and innovative programs.” This is just a snapshot of a few of the projects I developed or contributed to alongside other faculty, administrators, and IT professionals.
ACU Blogs – worked with IT in 2009 to deploy a mobile-enabled course blogging platform with custom WordPress themes designed with Mike Wiggins
Conferences – presented regularly at national and international conferences, invited keynotes and workshops, webinars, interviews, and podcasts
Connected Summits – hosted tracks with national leaders in mobile media for conferences at ACU in 2009 and 2011
Campus Events – presented regularly at open house events, webinars, campus visits and tours
Connected videos – produced interviews with mobile learning fellows and faculty in 2009, 2010, and 2011 with Grant Rampy
Mobile LMS design – represented ACU as design partner in learning management system redesign with Sunguard in 2010 and Pearson beginning in 2011
HeadsUp – helped James Langford lead faculty focus groups to develop the core functionality of a mobile discussion tool in 2011
MindWire – worked with a software company and ACU faculty to develop and pilot a mobile study tool in 2008
Throughout this period I continued to teach a range of classes, including working closely with Core leadership to shape the Cornerstone experience and working with Al Haley to introduce more film classes to the English department. These courses were often the crucible where the blue sky of vision met the terra firma of actual curricula. In that time I continued to develop research in hybrid courses in British literature and continued to update and oversee the online version of ENGL 221: Major British Writers I developed, delivered to more than 60 sections since 2004 through Blackboard, WordPress, and OpenClass.
I included myself in pilots I was leading in teaching with course blogs and assigning media projects, developing student assignments like What the Enlightenment was Reading for ENGL 221 and the Mise en Scene DVD Extras assignment in ENGL 472: Film & Belief. Honors students were some of the most receptive in early work detailed in my 2007 T&P portfolio recording This I Believe audio essays, so I’ve looked for regular opportunities to work with them in Cornerstone pilots like digital storytelling or colloquia on Satire, Hitchcock, and most recently Short Film Production.
Learning Studio
In 2007 another trajectory began improbably in my work with the University Library Committee. I cycled on a year earlier after returning from a Study Abroad semester in Oxford and we began discussing, among other things, what to do with the Mabee Library Auditorium. Dr. Mark Tucker, dean of the library, asked me to lead a team that combined faculty and campus technology folks to see how the classroom might be reimagined in light of the new Core curriculum. Over a semester we met and drafted a proposal informed by new active learning classroom models we researched at MIT and NC State, among others. The classroom project combined new challenges in project management, learning space design, and technology implementation that I enjoyed.
Once the classroom was funded in 2008, Mark began asking the library committee about an assessment of the Learning Commons to include new services not currently represented on the ground floor of the library. This project began in the library committee and then spawned an external team he asked me to lead to develop a proposal for a Podcasting Center in the library. Initial discussions included faculty from Communication, Foreign Language and later Art & Design when we asked Brandon Young to help us begin thinking about space requirements. Provost Dwayne VanRheenen provided us with start-up money in 2009 and that fall I was named director of the Digital Media Center in the basement of the library, with 5 computers, 2 student workers and an adjoining facility for the Speaking Center.
As mobile learning continued to evolve, we had the opportunity to share a grant proposal I co-authored with AT&T in 2010 where an expanded Learning Studio vision was funded along with additional mobile research fellows and a K-12 teacher training program. In the years since the Learning Studio opened in 2011, we have worked with students and faculty to facilitate training and support for a wide range of media projects.
Digital Storytelling – worked with Center for Digital Storytelling at Berkeley to deliver 3-day workshops to dozens of faculty that turned into hundreds of student projects
Digital Academy – facilitated 2-day photography workshops with Nil Santana that spark faculty creativity and confidence in digital authoring
Advanced Workshops – brought professional photographers and filmmakers to work with ACU faculty and students (Scott Martin in 2012, Bill Frakes in 2013)
Annual Reports – edited and produced two interactive annual reports as opportunities to explore e-publishing platforms like iBooks Author
Cornerstone – managed production of all video of Spotlight speakers, design of WordPress portal, new assignments like the Design Challenge, and production of a custom e-textbook
Short Films – served as producer for a series of short films highlighting exceptional academic programs at ACU, or in case of We Are Makers, shaping conversation for an emerging program that became the Maker Lab
Tours and Workshops – have given countless tours of the facility to interested students, teachers, board members, and guests from other universities and school districts
Publications – have been interviewed for two books and submitted a chapter for another on future of academic libraries, consulted with academic presses on interactive publishing and media integration
The opportunities that the Learning Studio has provided me for rethinking teaching, research and publication, service to the campus and academic community, and collegiality are outlined in more detail in later sections.
Beyond campus
It’s hard not to hear Robert Frost in the distance as I think back on 2007 and the two scenarios I had in mind, and “knowing how way leads on to way,” see decisions that sometimes I have made and yet are increasingly making me. There are certainly opportunities I continue to stumble into that would have seemed all but impossible to me as a newly-tenured associate professor. Here are just a few of the opportunities to expand ACU’s influence nationally and internationally in the last couple years.
Horizon Board – In 2011 I joined the board of technology leaders invited by the New Media Consortium to help produce the Horizon Report for Higher Education each year. This is a remarkably diverse group and has provided me a seat at regular directors’ meetings and their Future of Education retreats sponsored by the Gates Foundation. In 2012 I was included in a video feature produced by the NMC, 20 Voices: Ideas that Matter.
EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research – I’ve already mentioned the role the Horizon Report and ECAR Study on Undergraduates in IT have played at crucial moments at ACU, so I was pleased to be invited last summer to work with ECAR as a subject matter expert developing a new faculty-focused companion study for 2014. We kicked off the project at EDUCAUSE in 2013 and worked through last fall and early spring to shape the vision of the study and contribute to findings in the spring. This summer I was asked to continue that role for the next year as well.
EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative – Since 2010 I’ve been invited on three occasions to present in featured sessions at the ELI conference that provide attendees greater access to speakers and hands-on experiences with mobile learning strategies and tools. In response to work with ELI, EDUCAUSE invited me to present as a featured speaker at the Technology in Higher Education conference they co-sponsored in 2012 with the Qatar Foundation at Education City in Doha.
World Maker Faire – In 2013 after producing a short documentary feature on the Maker Movement, representatives from the Maker Education Initiative asked us to present at the largest maker gathering on the planet about the potential we see for making in higher education. James Langford joined me and we were delighted to meet educators from around the country that had been impacted in their own work by our film, We Are Makers.
UNESCO Mobile Learning Week – This last spring I was invited to present in Paris at UNESCO headquarters on the work we’ve been doing the last three years in the Learning Studio. It was a remarkable reminder just how different the experiences of mobile tools are around the globe, as colleagues from Africa described professional development delivered by SMS even as we take the approach of mobile broadband and media delivery for granted here in West Texas.
EDUCAUSE Institute – In 2013 I was asked to join 5 others as a faculty member in a three-year appointment with the Learning Technology Leadership Institute for EDUCAUSE. In the spring we developed the curriculum of a 5-day program to be delivered to faculty, administrators, and IT professionals as they develop leadership skills for their campus roles. Then in June delivered the presentations and panels to a group of 50 participants drawn from major research universities to small private colleges from as far away as South Africa. Already looking forward to our next cohort in 2015.
ND Mobile – This fall I’ve been asked to keynote a conference at Notre Dame on our work over the last few years in the Learning Studio. We’ll talk for two days about the future of the textbook, the surprising impact of digital storytelling, and the potential of location-aware research tools in a library environment as well as meet with educational technologists and faculty at Notre Dame.
Looking Forward
Last spring when we began planning a short film to help introduce the idea of a new makerspace in the library, I remember talking with Dr. John Weaver about the fact that the Maker Movement hadn’t even been mentioned in our annual strategic planning retreat the previous May, yet the convergence of needs represented by a new engineering lab and broad campus access to emerging maker technologies appeared to us as self-evident 9 months later. So we spent the final months of the semester filming and editing a kind of vision statement for what is now the Maker Lab.
Looking back over this overview of the last 7 years, I have the same feeling about my annual academic goals. They tell one part of the story of my continued investments in my students and my discipline, but when opportunities arise mid-stream to partner with campus groups, to pilot new types of assignments, or to prototype new learning tools, I’m ready to help or, when asked, willing to lead.
In ways I couldn’t have foreseen when I first came to teach at ACU, an academic career is an attempt to connect immediate needs within the institution with the innate curiosity and giftedness of its faculty.
Looking forward, the challenges we face in higher education in the coming decade are real and immediate, but the road ahead will require institutions that reward the restless creativity of their faculty and academic leadership in adapting to new opportunities and strategic directions even as we connect with the bedrock of our common identity. I look forward to seeing where the next bend in the road may lead.