By the Numbers

Inventory of the First Four Months of Collaboration

1.5 terms
10 faculty members
3 departments
61 blog posts
107 learning objects, videos, quizzes and other digital resources shared
3 faculty member awards thus far

subtotal: innovation abounds!
total: an impressive group of Co-Laborateurs!

(inspired by "The First Four Months of My Journey," a poem by Guillermo Gomez-Peña from his Warrior for Gringostroika)

Digital Badges... coming soon to Moodle near you

Will digital badges be the next big thing? They are taking center stage at UC Davis as students in a new major in sustainable agriculture develop digital portfolios and earn badges while schools such as Harvard and Indiana University experiment with them. Purdue has even developed its own platform for badges, one that integrates with the Mozilla Open Badges project. Read about these and other schools dabbling in badges here.

The concept is a fairly simple one. Individuals earn digital badges by demonstrating skills just like a scout might earn a traditional badge for volunteering; however, with digital badges comes the ability to embed data including the issuer and criteria for earning the badge, making it more meaningful. In addition, digital badges are portable -- put them in your digital "backpack" and display them on any platform that supports them (e.g. Twitter, WordPress, a growing number of personal and professional social media sites, and even learning management systems).

Moodle 2.5, which should be coming to LCC in December 2013, will support digital badges and will be compatible with Mozilla Open Badges -- exciting news for those who are already experimenting with badges in teaching or who wish to start.

Will your students earn a badge for "summary writing," "fractions mastery," "creative writing," "online learning skills" or "information literacy?" The implications for pedagogy are multifarious!

Photo by looseends

Digital Co-Laboration Continues!

Barbi McLain taught two hybrid WR090 classes in Spring and provides insights on her pedagogical choices in her capstone video. Julie Pfaff  highlights digital badges and experiments with SoftChalk, sharing some innovative ideas for using its HotSpot activities while Jenn Kepka ponders a new approach to peer editing.

Image by Steve Johnson

New DIG Co-Lab Creations!

DIG Co-Lab participants are a vibrant and innovative group! Check out Vicky Kirkpatrick's video outlining her participation in this faculty fellowship and Julie Pfaff's review of her experience uploading curricular materials to the OER repository, Merlot.

Image by Barbara Dieu

Students decide if they are college ready...

According to a recent Inside Higher Education article, students in Florida will be able to decide if they need developmental classes or not. In addition, placement tests will not be required for recent high school graduates. This new state law is polemical, to say the least. As noted in the article, critics suggest that the policy will effectively limit student access to college by setting needy students up for failure. Further, the law is contrary to the ubiquitous student success adage, "Students don't do optional," which is supported by student success research such as studies outlined in this article from The Chronicle.

If the quintessential purpose of our community college system is access, and access is a fundamental cornerstone for equity and social justice, how do we ensure that access does indeed lead to success -- and that we continue to strive toward equity, which is inherent in the mission of community colleges?

Photo by Andres Musta

Making Popcorn!

Our local faculty technology specialist and dear colleague, Ian Coronado, recently presented a webinar on Mozilla Popcorn Maker -- the same free app Barbi McLain used to develop a guided pre-writting activity for her Writing 090 students. Popcorn maker is fairly flexible and easy to use. It allows for the creative combination of video, images, text, pop-ups, Google maps, Wikipedia sourced information, and even Twitter feed in a time-based media project that can be shared via URL or embedded in Moodle.

Check out what Ian has to say in his demonstration!

How do we learn to fly?

A new study released by NCEE (National Center on Education and the Economy) finds that much of the math needed for college success is actually middle school math. In fact, the study reports there is "strong evidence" that understanding and mastery of middle school mathematics are essential not only for college success but also for career success, suggesting that mathematics instruction at the K-12 level must be realigned to students actual needs with a focus on mathematical modeling, statistics, probability, data analysis, and applied geometry in order to serve students better than the commonplace cursory treatment of these concepts while rushing to algebra at the middle school level.

What does this mean for community colleges, especially given that a large percentage of students have had the opportunity to follow only one pathway prior to coming to college? Is Statway or a similar pathway to college level statistics a reasonable alternative to the traditional algebra sequence?

The study reports similar, yet not parallel, findings for English, suggesting that high school students do not read or write at a level required for success in college. It also suggests that, with the exception of English composition courses, first-year community college courses do not require rigorous reading or writing of  their students. It claims, "Our community college students clearly need better instruction in constructing arguments and in laying out their thinking logically and persuasively." The report concludes that expectations at both the high school and college level are too low.

In closing, the report suggests "the nation may have to learn to walk before it runs, which means that it is important, first, to enable our high school students to meet the current very low standards before we ratchet those standards up."

Given the context of nationwide redesign of developmental education coupled with performance-based funding models and 40-40-20 goals at the state level, the question remains: How do we collectively learn to walk or run when the expectations, specifically in developmental education, require that we fly?