How can we use Twitter productively in liberal education?  We’ve been studying this closely at NITLE, ever since the microblogging tool first launched.  We have used Twitter in events, crowdsourced questions, Twittered discussions, and used Twitter for networking.   One such Twitter experiment now yields results you can see.

We recently picked out a “hashtag” for NITLE.  A hashtag just means a single word preceded by a pound sign (“#”) that Twitterites use to link a tweet to a topic, like “#haiti”.  There are many hashtags out there in the Twitterverse, covering nearly every subject the service’s tens of millions of users can think of.

So what have people been saying, or tweeting, when they tweet with “#NITLE”?  What do people share and link to that term, our group’s name?

You can see a week of such Twittery (March 10-17 2010) in a single image, a tag cloud created with Wordle.  This is based on what comes up when we simply search Twitter for the hashtag.  Content authors are from all over, as some Twitterers inhabit liberal arts campuses, some are from other locations, and a few are NITLE staff:

A first glance at this image reveals a number of  framing words, such as “NITLE” and the hashtag itself. Some NITLE staff names also loom large, as we Twittered and were replied to.  Perhaps most apparent is “RT”, for “re-Tweet“, a Twitter term for copying and sharing a favored tweet.  The huge amount of re-tweeting going on does suggest a key use of the #NITLE tag, to share and re-share useful Twitter content.  In this way, #NITLE might be serving as a sort of public flag for some valued content, perhaps a sort of filter.

Let’s remove those framing terms and generate a revised cloud:

Now content is more apparent, although retweeting is still huge, and the NITLE word remains.  Google, laptops, students, changes, and ever-daunting “reality” now loom out of the Twitter fog.  It seems that #NITLE is being used to anchor tweets about discussions of teaching, technology, and their intersection – a very appropriate mix, given our organization’s mission.

We’ll return to this tag cloud scan in another week, to see what persists and what changes.   Then we’ll run this visualization again for a third week, one including NITLE’s Summit in New Orleans.  In the meantime, what do you make of it?

(Previous NITLE blog posts on Twitter can be found here.  Our bloggery about Wordle can be found here.)

Sondra Smith, St. Lawrence University

Assessment = angst. Does this equation seem true to you?

We all want to understand the impact of technologies and information literacies on teaching and learning in the liberal arts environment. Most of us have developed some measurements and methodologies to do so. However, few of us are completely confident that we are getting it just right, yet.

At St. Lawrence University, in close consultation with Christine Zimmerman, Director of Institutional Research, we’ve leveraged instruments like CIRP, HEDS, and the NITLE-supported Research Practices Survey to gain insights to the undergraduate student experience with technologies and research. We’ve used MISO to cut across constituencies in measuring IT and library resources and services. We’ve relied upon the EDUCAUSE Core Data Service to benchmark our IT organization. We’ve worked consistently toward a comprehensive IT assessment plan for several years and have become much more strategic about assessment as a result, but sometimes I still become anxious about all that we have yet to do.

Read the rest of this post »

Introduction to Neogeography - From O'Reilly Media

Several years ago the geospatial community was abuzz with talk concerning neogeography and the proliferation of online maps created by amateur cartographers (i.e., web mapping). These conversations often revealed an ambivalence among traditional GIS practitioners who on the one hand welcomed the advent of new tools and data, and the promotion of maps for visual communication, and on the other sought to distinguish their practices and training from the novice.

These tensions were palpable within many small liberal arts institutions where expectations for GIS support and instruction, propelled by the rising popularity of map-making and spatial studies, exceeded those resources available to support these desires.  In this new environment, trained GIS educators/users intermingled with ambitious, but less experienced, colleagues who sought a quick foothold in the field. How these new participants and accompanying transformations in mapping technology would impact the perception and practice of GIS on campus remained unclear. Would neogeography dilute traditional cartography or evaporate as yet another fad? Read the rest of this post »

Scott Hamlin, Wheaton College

Scott Hamlin adds his perspective to those of other planners on the NITLE Summit’s theme, “Advancing towards Liberal Arts 3.0.” Hamlin, a Summit planning group member this year and also a presenter in the digital humanities breakout session, is Director of Technology for Research and Instruction at Wheaton College. His thoughts:

Whether it’s a new epoch for liberal arts colleges or a soup that we are trying to perfect — I think there can be little doubt that “times they are a-changing” for liberal arts institutions. We are living through a time and in an environment with the potential both to disrupt and to transform the liberal arts college culture — a culture that traditionally includes things like high cost education, a residential four-year undergraduate experience, small student populations, low student-teacher ratios, a value placed on face-to-face, highly personalized interactions, etc. This kind of experience has to change, it seems, when pitted against tough economic times, social and professional interactions that are increasingly mediated through technology, and a trend toward decentralizing the way we access information and technological tools. Indeed, much has changed already.

The members of our classrooms are changing. We’ve been talking for years now about our students as digital natives — a generation who have grown up online, an environment that has shaped them, impacting how they learn and what they expect of library, information services, and (more broadly) their educational experience. It’s true that some characterizations of our students have led to false assumptions, gross generalizations, and oversimplifications, but I think the kernal of the idea is essentially correct. Our students have changed. Read the rest of this post »

Collaboration, Technology, Information Literacy – will this be on the test?
Definitely… So, how high will you score?

Or, to put it another way, when we as technologists and librarians partner with the faculty to enrich an assignment, a course, or an entire curriculum, how do we know what grade to give ourselves? How do we assess the effect of these collaborations on student learning outcomes?

At the upcoming “NITLE Summit 2010: Advancing toward Liberal Arts 3.0,” Sondra Smith (St. Lawrence University) and I invite you to explore with us the assessment question at all scales – from the assignment to the institution. Using post-project video interviews with faculty and students at Colgate University, we evaluate the effectiveness of our support, the engagement of the students, and the depth of their understanding as judged by their professors. Projects to be highlighted include the Marginalized Conflicts Podcast Series (see https://sites.google.com/a/students.colgate.edu/podcasting/Home ) and Introduction to Anthropology poster projects (see http://offices.colgate.edu/Video_Console/Preview_Player.asp?VideoID=478 ).

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Dave Baird
Director, Academic Technologies
Colgate University