LEM: Community Portfolio

Below is my response for the Learning Design Challenge #10: Sharing Individual Content via Community Portfolios. #DailyLEM10

This is something I really want to do for my own classes next year, both with memes created by the students (and their thoughts about those memes), and also the stories they write. For this example, I pursued the meme idea since that fits in nicely with the workshop on open content that we did earlier this summer, but without specifying the nitty-gritty of the community space: Incorporating Open Content.

Right now, students have their own blogs and/or websites as individual portfolios, and I curate content myself (I pin new stories to Pinterest Boards like this one: Indian Epics Fall 2016 which students see at the Project Directory class page), and I keep a lasting archive (eStorybook Central), but I would like to create something more student-driven, where they are putting content into the community space based on what they consider their best work. Right now I don't even have mechanisms in place to harvest the memes they share/create; I only curate stories.

As I've been wrestling with this question for a long time, I see it more as a technology problem than a design problem: I know what I would like to have happen but I had a hard time finding the technology to support it... until now! While on my evening walk yesterday, I had a real brainstorm, and I'm excited to share that here!

What is your desired experience for the activity?
* I want students to be able to share the best things they create (memes, stories) with other students in the class, and I want students to be able to easily discover that content. My goal is to diminish my curatorial and administrative role in order to hand more of that over to the students; after all, only the students know what they consider to be their best work!

How will you motivate participants to engage in “authentic” sharing?
* Students already create content in their own spaces, and they visit each other's spaces as a mode of sharing and learning, and motivation there is very high — so I don't need to do any motivating; students will be even more motivated if I can help them drive the curation process more actively.

What kind(s) of feedback make the most sense for this kind of environment?
* I already have some good student commenting processes in place; my goal here is to add new avenues both of sharing and of discovery which will improve the commenting: the more students are identifying their own best work and, consequently, finding content that is really high quality, the better the commenting process will be.

What are some possible constraints for this design?
* The real constraints are technological: specifically, the mechanisms for sharing (students identifying best content that they put into the shared space) and the mechanisms for discovery (students exploring the shared space to discover what they like best).

Plus: A technological nice-to-have...
* I would like to have one version of the solution be Canvas-friendly; I personally don't use an LMS for my class space, but if I could find a way to make this work in the Canvas space, it is more likely to be an option other faculty at my school would consider.


EURKEA: Inoreader! The key to my solution is this: I will use Inoreader (which currently aggregates all incoming content from my students' blogs), and specifically I will use Inoreader Rules. So, if students include a keyword in their blog post somewhere, I can use an Inoreader Rule to automatically assign a tag. I will just need to write up instructions for how students can add a simple but distinctive keyword (like MemeGallery, one word) when they want to flag something as best content. I can also manually add the tag, if needed, and if a student changes their mind, I can also remove the tag manually. (I already have some processes like this in place for student-generated content; for example, here is the stream of stories for the class — but without a student self-nomination process: Myth-Folklore Stories.)

Once the self-nominated content is tagged for the Gallery, I can then easily redisplay that content in all kinds of ways!

I can put it in Canvas, like this: Meme Gallery. To do that, I use Inoreader's export to HTML feature:


Even better: IFTTT will deliver that content to all kinds of platforms! In IFTTT, the trigger is "Inoreader: New tagged article" (including articles tagged by a rule). Then, the IFTTT action can really be anything. Just to show one example here, I set up a Tumblr that will be filled with content automatically. Here's the IFTTT recipe:

And here's the resulting Tumblr: Meme Gallery Tumblr. Of course, I can play with the gazillions of Tumblr themes to find the best display. I also have access to all the features of Tumblr too. Lots to explore there! I just set this up super-quickly as a test case.

Why Tumblr? An excellent Tumblr feature for my purposes is the randomizer. Randomizers are essential for browsing and discovery for this type of content, and Tumblr is great at delivering posts at random (just add /random to the Tumblr URL). Here's the link: Meme Gallery - Random! I also included that randomizing link in the Canvas page.

VERY happy with this. The real magic is in the technology here, not so much the design. I am so excited to try this out with real student blogs in the Fall!!!

Click here for full-sized view:


Update: I had faked the Inoreader tag to test this out, but I also put a rule in place that will scan all my blog posts just like I want to scan all incoming student blog posts... and it worked! I just published my Growth Mindset Cat meme and because the keyword appeared in the post, presto, there it is in Canvas!


Update: I also created an IFTTT recipe with Pinterest... and that worked too! There's the cat, automatically sent to Pinterest:

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LEM: Semester Project / Student Choices

Because I used my existing courses to do the Learning Environment Model design challenge for today, I decided to put the post here. Unlike the LEM challenge I did yesterday (see post), this time I did the drawing first and then wrote the narrative to accompany the drawing. The semester project has a lot of elements I cannot capture with the modeling tools, but I tried to surface the key aspect of the design challenge for today, which is the element of student choice. You can see that multi-stage choice process running down the middle of the diagram. See below for a narrative to explain that choice process.

(or click on image for larger view)


Exploration/Planning. What I tried to show here is how there is a brainstorming process that happens in the first few weeks of the class in which students brainstorm and plan their semester writing project (downward arrow flow on the left of chart; this process can last for up to 4 weeks), and then they create the project through an iteration of writing stories and revising for the rest of the semester (11, 12, or 13 weeks, depending on how many weeks they spend on the planning process — the writing process is on the right side of the chart). 

Project Choice. Each student creates either a Storybook Website or a Blog Portfolio. The Storybook consists of a set of interrelated stories on a topic of the student's choice (see Storybook Archive for examples), while the Portfolio consists of a curated section of the student's class blog, containing their best stories. I started offering the Portfolio option a couple years ago when it became clear that there were always a few students who were not really enthusiastic about their Storybook project (for all kinds of reasons); the Portfolio is a way to create the same type of semester-long writing project with the flexibility of choosing new topics/styles every week. The challenge, then, is how to help students choose which type of project will be best for them! As a general rule, it has turned out that about half of the students choose Storybooks and half choose Portfolios.

Iterated Choice. As students go through the 2, 3, or 4 weeks of planning, they are pondering a big choice, which I show in the middle of the chart; there are three vectors as it were that they can follow as they go through this iterated process. Since the Storybook is an entirely new kind of idea for most students in the class, I ask them to spend some time in Week 1 and Week 2 exploring Storybook possibilities. Then, after they get feedback from me about the Storybook topics they have proposed (I focus on connecting them with useful online resources), they can decide if there is a topic that grabs them... or not. If they really don't have a topic that grabs them, they can start their Portfolio in Week 3. If they do have a topic that they are excited about, in Week 3 they start planning how the Storybook would actually work (stories to include, styles to use). They then get feedback from me again, and again they choose: if things are not falling into place, they can start their Portfolio in Week 4. If the Storybook plan is going well, then they build their Storybook website in Week 4.

Writing Project. By Week 5 of the semester, everybody is engaged in their writing project. The Storybook and the Portfolio have the same writing "experience" — writing, feedback from me, feedback from other students, revision, more writing, more feedback, more revision, and so on. The difference is just the content (semester-long topic in Storybook versus weekly topics in Portfolio) and the medium (Storybook is a separate website while the Portfolio is a labeled section of the student's class blog). Everybody ends up on their own schedule since they might start the writing part of the project in Week 3 or 4 or 5, and any give story might require one or two rounds of revision. By the end of the semester, a Portfolio might have as many as six stories in it; a Storybook might have as many as four stories plus an introduction — but it varies a lot; there is no fixed requirement about how many finished stories each student might write.

Themed Portfolios. One really nice surprise that happened as a result of the students exploring the Portfolio option was that they started creating something like a Storybook inside their Portfolio, pursuing a theme over several weeks or even over the whole semester. That was not something I suggested, but the students started doing that on their own... so now I also suggest that in my comments on their Portfolio stories! Unlike the advance Storybook planning, these Portfolio themes evolve in an ad hoc way as the students react to the stories they are reading for the class or as they discover through their own writing a style and/or character that they use to connect their Portfolio stories.

As you can see from all the elements in the drawing, there is a lot that goes into this process, and I'll return to this drawing with more narrative in future posts... which will probably help me improve the drawing too! But for now, I am really happy with how this version of the drawing surfaces the element of student choice and how there is an overall learning process that the students can share together while each going through their own discovery process to launch their own project.
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Anatomy of an Online Course: Table of Contents

Scroll down for the complete Table of Contents. Here at the top of the page, you will find posts related to my school's D2L to Canvas transition. I keep my use of the LMS to a minimum, but I am excited that Canvas courses can be public and how they can also contain live content. See below for details!



Here are other posts related to the online courses I teach:

 Overall Course Design: These posts provide an overview of my course design strategies.
  • 10 Ways to Give Your Students the Gift of Slack. Yep, it's SLACK that matters... not grit. Giving your students slack is a great gift to give.
  • Un)Grading. This is a guest blog post for Starr Sackstein's Ed Week blog.
  • Grading. I wish I could not give grades at all; this represents my best attempt to reduce my participation in the grading process to zero.
  • Grading: What the Students Say. This is a collection of student comments about grading from the end-of-course-evaluations.
  • Writing-Feedback-Revision. Providing feedback that students use to revise their writing is how I spend most of my time each and every week.
  • Tech Tips. Even though it's just extra credit, teaching students about web-based tools is a fun part of the class for me!
  • Randomization Wonderland. This post explains how I use randomization both for course content and for student participation (comments).
  • Some Q&A about student choice, challenges, etc. Answers to some questions posed by a reader. :-)
  • Traditional Syllabuses. I recently had to prepare traditional syllabuses for my classes, so if you are curious, you can take a look.
Growth Mindset. Starting in Fall 2015, I've made Carol Dweck's "growth mindset" an explicit component of my classes, hoping to promote a growth mindset among my students and in my own work too!
Scheduling and Pacing: One of the most powerful aspects of teaching online is the flexible scheduling..
  • Self-Scheduled, Not Self-Paced. This post explains the overall scheduling strategy which I use in my courses.
  • Sample Assignment Schedules. These sample schedules can help the students turn this class into a M-W-F class, a T-Th class, or a weekend class — whatever works best!
  • Week 8: Review Week. During "humpweek" both classes have some special self-assessment and student-to-student interaction assignments.
  • The Grace Period. This post explains the "grace period," a no-questions-asked extension available for all class assignments.
  • Spring 2015: Grace Period Reminder Tracking. I am trying to find ways to intervene with students who get grace period reminders every day.
  • The Half-Reading Option. The "half-reading option" is another way I am trying to accommodate my students' busy and chaotic schedules.
  • Safety Nets. This post provides an overview of the various safety nets to support students with time management and workload management.
Orientation Week: These posts are dedicated to the special activities for the Orientation Week.
Storybooks and Portfolios: These student projects are the heart and soul of my classes!
Student Blogging: These posts describe the role of student blogging in my courses.
  • 10 Tips for Building a Student Blog Network. These are my thoughts about student blogging as of Spring 2016. Happy blogging, all! 
  • Student Blog Assignments. This is a listing of the different types of blog posts that my students complete each week.
  • Weekly Blog Comments. The students read and comment on each other's posts each week.
  • New "Comment Training" Strategy. Starting in Spring 2015, I'm trying to be more proactive in teaching students how to make detailed comments.
  • Comment Walls. Student create "Comment Wall" posts at their blogs where other students can leave comments on their Storybook projects.
  • Randomizing Blogs. This is a step-by-step tutorial for randomizing blogs using a simple spreadsheet... and it includes a screencast! :-)
Inoreader: I use Inoreader to manage the class blog network.
Communication Strategies: These posts explain the various communication strategies I use in my courses.
Content Development: This explains the various tools I use for content development and sharing that content with my students.
Indian Epics Untextbook: This is where I will document the development of an UnTextbook for the Indian Epics class.

And now . . . a cat from the Growth Mindset Memes blog:



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Revision Challenges: What Students are Choosing

I just flipped through the revision assignments that students turned in over the weekend, and it is so much fun to see the different "revision challenges" people set for themselves. I thought I would take a minute to write them out here and show the results of how that works. I guess it is my favorite innovation to my classes this semester! You can see the projects that the students are working on here: Myth-Folklore and Indian Epics.

In the past, I used to ask students to choose a revision focus but I did not have a specific list of challenges to choose from. Now it is going so much better! Here is the list of challenges the students browse through: Grow Your Writing: Editing Challenges. And, yes, the list itself keeps growing because sometimes I'll add a new challenge to the list when I'm reading a student's story during the week; a good challenge for one student might work for others too! Over the summer, I'll try to prune and reorganize (I don't want the list itself to become intimidating), based on the choices I've seen students making this semester.

Using the language of growth and challenges fits in nicely with the growth mindset theme I am trying to promote throughout all the class activities, and the element of choice is also powerful. Earlier in the semester, a lot of students were choosing the punctuation and other writing mechanics challenges, but now they have (re)learned how to cope with those topics. As a result, the research challenge is becoming more popular, which I think is great. There is always more they can learn by doing research, and they can share what they learn in the author's note even if they do not revise the actual story.

Most importantly: instead of seeing revision as just "fixing mistakes," the students can get a sense of revision as something open-ended, driven by their own choices from many possible strategies.

So, without further ado, here are what students chose as their challenges in the stack of assignments I am looking at right now from this weekend. I get such a boost from reading this list and seeing what the students wanted to learn about!

For this week I used dialogue punctuation check for my editing challenge. I liked it because I tend to add more commas than necessary to be safe, and this helped me edit them back out. 

 The editing challenge I used was the Author’s Note. My author’s note was pretty short, so I did some research and expanded on that.  

 For this story, I used the Research and Learn challenge. I worked on looking up more details about the animals that I mentioned in the end of the story so I can be better prepared to write the next story! I'd love to use this challenge again. It's very helpful!

 Active and passive verbs. It went well. There were a lot that I changed.  

 This week I chose “Slow down and read out loud”. I actually found quite a few typos when I read the story out loud. I read through the story silently before I turned it in, but it is obviously more effective to read it out loud when error checking. Hopefully I will simply do this every time I turn something in.

 This week, I did the ‘names’ editing challenged. I attached links in my author’s note to each pig’s name to show readers where they originated from. 

 I decided to do vocatives once again. In this story I added more vocatives in the middle of sentences rather than the beginning. It is also the biggest grammatical problem that continues to show up on my stories. I also decided to work on semicolons. I never actually payed much attention to the use of semi colons. Next story I actually made a goal to have no more that 2 vocative problems!

 I chose to give my author’s note a make-over for this editing challenge. After reading the comments, I saw that I was mostly just summarizing my story. I chose to provide a little history about the different religious practices in India so the readers could see that Vishnu and Shiva are still widely worshiped today and Indra is not.  I think this challenge went well and I learned a little history along the way.

 This week I decided to do the challenge that prompts the author to read the story more slowly aloud in order to catch more errors. I found this challenge to be extremely helpful because I caught so many more mistakes than I would have if I had just been reading on the screen! I printed my story out with size 14 font, which felt really big. It allowed me to really see the story as a whole, though. It also gave me the freedom to read each sentence individually and make notations as I went. All in all, I felt like this was a really good challenge for me. I should probably make a point to print out my story and read it very slowly aloud for the rest of the semester!

 I chose the paragraph length editing challenge. I thought about my paragraph lengths after reading some other peoples stories and thought I could break mine down some. I split a couple of my paragraphs in half and think it works well.

 I did a research challenge this week! It was interesting to see that Coyote had its own section on the Wikipedia page for "trickster." It seems that in many myths from all different cultures, the coyote has the role of the trickster that dominates over other land creatures.

 For my editing choice, I decided to add more clear details throughout my story. I also added a blurb at the  beginning of the story to tell where the tale came from. I wanted my readers to get a better sense of the stories background and history! 

 This week I chose the research challenge. I read a traditional version of this jataka where the tale was told by the Buddha himself. I found this version very interesting. I liked how the tale was given context. The Buddha was walking through the garden of a squire when he came upon area that was without vegetation. The squire's gardener explained how the bald spot came to be and the Buddha replied with the jataka. This gave it a parable-like feel that had reminded me of some of the tales that Jesus told in the Gospels.

 For my editing challenge I focused more on my author's note. A lot happens in the story of the twenty-two goblins and I had left a lot out in my story to make it fit. This made it important for me to include what the reader missed inside of my author's note. I think it went really well and it is something I think is very important so I may use this challenge again. 

 I read over the apostrophe rule and maintaining the same tense throughout a sentence and the use of commas.  I always thoughts that commas were used when you wanted to slow the flow of a sentence like you were taking a breath. Now I know there are different types of commas.

 I used the research challenge once again. I was really happy to find the video I included at the end, because it discussed a lot of symbolism surrounding the festival, and especially the gudhis, that I hadn't run across while writing the story. 
Keep on learning, people:



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