The Student in a Global Social Networking Community

Written by HETS Admin on July 30, 2014. Posted in English, Fall Issue: October 2010, Volume I

An ePortfolio Virtual Learning Community within a Traditional Classroom Space:

(A) Introduction

Queensborough Community College is one of six community colleges of the City University of New York. Located in Bayside, Queens, the college serves more than 15,000 degree students. Queens County in New York City is the most diverse county in the United States. The College reflects this diversity. Its White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian students or their families come from 143 countries including Paraguay, Venezuela, Korea, China, India, Guyana, Pakistan, Haiti and many more. Among the numerous languages they speak are Spanish, French, Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, Chinese, Pushto, and Farsi. Almost half of them speak a language other than English at home. This diversity generates both challenges and opportunities in a college community. Historically, non-ESL students have scored 20 percent higher in pass rates for reading and 10 percent for writing.Queensborough Community College is an Hispanic Serving Institution with a 26% Hispanic population.

In addition to the challenge of learning a second language, many of these students have strong family and community ties and obligations. Obligation to community and family is highly valued and identity with the country of origin remains strong. In order to meet the needs of these valued students who bring so much rich cultural diversity into our classrooms, the College has committed to promoting High Impact practices in the classroom that promote student engagement by encouraging active learning and that tend to appeal to diverse student groups. George Kuh (2008) has named practices such as service learning, learning communities, diversity/global learning, and project-based learning as High Impact. Queensborough has added to this list ePortfolio, an electronic archiving and networking system, because it provides an opportunity for students to store and reflect upon their own work over time, as well as to communicate virtually and asynchronously with other students in an academic environment. Queensborough’s commitment to High Impact practices emerges from its attemptto help students become a part of a new academic community that, in the end, will help them meet their family and cultural needs through good career options and a liberal education. Support of these students in the first semester of their experience at Queensborough Community College,it is hoped, will facilitate student efforts to learn a new language, join a new community, and manage employment obligations in a way that could foster reflection during this transition in their lives.

Queensborough’s strategy in the ePortfolio project involves synthesizing longitudinal goals in the General Education Objectives into one experience in the first semester Cornerstone course, an introductory course that teaches general education skills of communication, critical thinking, organization, and development of values. Through the design of the course, objectives that are usually achieved over time are combined into one experience of integrated learning in a Web 2.0 environment. In this High Impact synthesis, the ePortfolio collaboration facilitates social networking, information literacy through the world wide web (www), and interdisciplinary collaboration in a project whose end result is a new artifact of knowledge production created through teamwork. Through this synthesis, an incoming student makes social connections with a very diverse student population while also gaining experience in career options through collaborating with students in career disciplines by using cultural artifacts found on the world wide web.

The interdisciplinary collaboration joins Basic Skills (remedial Reading and Writing) classes with Freshman Composition classes (which encompass the above-mentioned cornerstone experience) and a content course reflecting a career elective (e.g., Education, Acting, Nursing)—to form a team of three classes that collaborate by sharing their stories and then enhancing those written by other students, working across disciplinary boundaries in a virtual community. Basic Skills students begin to see the skills needed for Freshman Composition while also gaining a perspective on career disciplines. Perhaps the most valued part of the project is that students with strong social skills and community values translate those values easily into understanding the global community in the classroom. Stories are shared among students with widely divergent cultural orientations, yet the students move with ease to appreciate the common values and experiential authenticity of their classmates. Students learn from other students.

Beyond this, students in all three of the collaborating courses undergo major learning experiences in the virtual collaboration. In a typical collaboration, a professor teaching Freshman Composition, a cornerstone or gateway course in essay writing, asks the students to write essays about a personal learning experience, that is, any situation where language led them to see the world differently: a conversation they overheard, a joke, a piece of writing, etc. In the link below the reader will find a student story from a Composition class before the process of collaboration. In this story a student remembers the way her mother shared stories with her sisters in an apartment in the Bronx, remembering her homeland and her relatives. After her mother dies, the student thinks back to that experience, that way of using language as the richest experience of her life.

http://media.acc.qcc.cuny.edu:8088/faculty/darcy/Velilla/Presentation4/Presentation4.html

In this highly scaffolded class, the teacher then starts a process through which the students can re-see their initial effort. The students are assigned a piece of writing characterized by excellent use of descriptive language. After reading it, the Composition students go back to their essays and rewrite key paragraphs to improve their sensory, concrete detail. In her article, “Attending to Student Voice,” Carol Rogers (2006) claims that this attention to “slow description” heightens the visibility of the student to fellow students and the teacher.

Then the Composition students read essays that stress the making of distinctions and problem-solving strategies, after which the students rewrite their essays using analysis to make clearer distinctions. Having done that, they reflect upon the ways their writing has changed as a result of using the reading assignments. In this way students see their own stories change as a consequence of meeting General Education objectives, such as developing effective reading and writing and honing critical thinking.

In the next steps, additional General Education goals are met as the students make connections across disciplines in a social/academic network that creates a sense of meaning and belonging. This begins when the Composition students upload their essays to the group wiki in the ePortfolio. There, these students join in collaboration with students in Basic Skills and, for example, History 101, who read the essays and then post artifacts—art, music, video, statistics, graphs, quotes, and so on—from the Worldwide Web (www) that express other, more generalized ways of understanding the content of the essays; in the case of the content course, History 101, the artifacts are specific to the disciplinary discourse of the course. By adding another dimension to the Composition students’ narratives, the artifacts help students to place their own personal experiences in a larger context, a context specific to the disciplinary discourse of their class work.

Then the Composition students select the artifacts that they think enhance their personal narratives. After that, the students create PowerPoint presentations in which they record voiceover narratives while the chosen artifacts pass across a screen. The artifacts from the www enhance the personal narratives by once again placing them in a broader framework that goes beyond the Composition students’ personal experience. For example, if the content course is History, one of the selected artifacts might be a graph showing the rate of immigration year-by-year from a Composition student’s country of origin during the era in which the student’s immigration experience occurred. Another artifact might be a photo of immigrants arriving in America.And so, individual experience becomes part of a broader phenomenon. In turn, the students in Basic Skills and the content course gain an understanding of how to apply their knowledge, share cultural experiences, and develop technological literacy skills. Students who came into our academic community facing challenging translation and adaptive tasks are able to actively engage in projects that allow them to emerge as leaders who speak in the language of art, music, and technology, using their social skills to collaborate in producing artifacts of new knowledge while learning a new language.

(A) History of the ePortfolio Program

The Queensborough Community College Student Wiki Interdisciplinary Group ePortfolio project is made possible through participation in three different grant opportunities:

• 2001–2004 “Learning to Look,” sponsored by The Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the American Social History Project and supported by the National Endowment of the Humanities, trained humanities educators to develop effective strategies for using digitalized artifacts to promote learning.
• 2005 The Georgetown “Crossroads” project, funded by the Carnegie Foundation, taught faculty members from across the nation how to use web-based resources for classroom projects.
• 2007–2009 LaGuardia “Making Connections” institutes were financed by the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE). Teams of faculty learned how to use ePortfolio spaces as “learning spaces” that showcase student projects and facilitate transfer and reflection.

In the Fall of 2009, 15 faculty members created 5 teams of 3 classes each to collaborate in producing student digital stories. The authors of this article—two of them professors in the English Department and one a professor in Speech and Theater Arts—brought together Basic Skills, Freshman Composition, and Acting I classes as one of the teams. That is the collaboration discussed in this article.

(A) Team Collaboration between Freshman Composition, Acting I, and Basic Skills: Fall 2009

In the collaboration between Freshman Composition, Acting I, and Basic Skills courses, three professors and their three classes collaborated to develop a virtual learning community with the theme of Family and Culture. As Sheena Gillespie and Robert Becker (2008) say of the texts in their anthology, Across Cultures, they were aware of “how much of our personal and cultural identities [were] rooted in our need for community” (p. 16) and wanted to help their students develop a similar awareness.

(B) Reflection on Narrative in the Freshman Composition Classroom

In the Composition class the assigned readings were meant to serve as models and inspiration. Students read literacy narratives and other essays by people who grew up influenced by more than one culture and language. Amy Tan was one such person. She writes in “Mother Tongue” of her Chinese mother’s “broken” English, which she says “helped shape the way I saw things, expressed things, made sense of the world” (Gillespie, 2008, p. 28). In “The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me,” Native American writer Sherman Alexie narrates his experience of growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation, where books were scarce except in his home, where his father kept an eclectic library that fascinated the young Alexie and led, no doubt, to his career as a man of letters (Gillespie, 2008, p. 72). Paule Marshall, in “Poets in the Kitchen,” tells the story of the West Indian women in her Brooklyn neighborhood who gathered in her mother’s kitchen and spoke in a language so imaginative that the young Marshall absorbed the poetry and power of that authentic speech (Gillespie, 2008, p. 196). In “My Pen Writes in Blue and White,” Vincent Cremona speaks of straddling two worlds, one white collar (his mother’s) and one blue collar (his father’s), so that he was exposed to two languages, both English (Gillespie, 2008, p. 206). Chang-Rae Lee writes in “Mute in an English-Only World” of the embarrassment and estrangement his Korean-American mother experienced as she tried to navigate the world of suburban New York, where people could be rude and impatient with those whose first language was not English (Gillespie, 2008, p. 157). Former boxer Jose Torres, in “Letter to a Child Like Me,” writes movingly of growing up “Hispanic” (Puerto Rican, in his case), arguing that “your best defense against the ignorance of bigots and haters is pride in your own heritage” (Gillespie, 2008, p. 163).

Composition students wrote reading journals that served as jumping-off points for class discussions and fodder for what would become their digital essays, but the seeds of the first formal writing assignment were planted the first day of the course when they wrote in class in response to a series of prompts about their experiences of reading and writing in their elementary, middle school, and high school years. Sometime later they were asked to write reflections on how race, ethnicity, language, gender, and education (the latter broadly defined) had contributed to their sense of who they were and what they wanted from their lives.

Then, Composition students revised and elaborated on their essays based on the comments, suggestions, and “gifts” they received on the group wiki from the Acting and Basic Skills classes. The professor reviewed the revised essays and determined if the students were ready to create their multi-media presentations, using PowerPoint slides and a voiceover. It was these digital stories that the Acting class used to create their video logs (vlogs). Finally, students in the Composition class were asked to reflect on how the experience of writing the personal narrative and creating the digital essay changed the way they thought about Family and Culture.

At first, several students were disinclined to discuss their family and culture, insisting that they were “Americans” without a need or desire to explore their heritage. It was essential to create a classroom environment where students felt safe from negative stereotyping and understood that their stories of family and culture would be treated with respect. They came to see that race and ethnicity could be defined in many ways and that they had a right to define themselves however they saw fit. When students realized that they had a sympathetic audience for their narratives, most of them came to embrace the project and revel in the stories of their racial and ethnic heritage (however they chose to define it), seeing, I think, an opportunity to discover—and/or make manifest—things about themselves and their families that had remained largely unexamined. In the end, most of the students became performers whose desire to show off their best work was evident in their oral presentations and on the page.

As Howard Gardner (2008) argues in 5 Minds for the Future, “In a world where we are all interlinked, intolerance or disrespect is no longer a viable option” (p. 3). With projects such as the one outlined here, where students see the world from many different perspectives, respect for viewpoints and experiences other than one’s own is essential. Students also see the enthusiasm of their professors as they collaborate and see their work and the work of their students in a broader context. Gardner (2008) proposes that “any lesson is more likely to be understood if it has been approached through diverse entry points: these can include stories, logical expositions, debate, dialogue, humor, role play, graphic depictions, video or cinematic presentations. . . . any individual with a deep understanding of a topic or method can think about it in a variety of ways” (p. 33). When the students in the Composition class viewed the vlogs that were created from their narratives, they saw their presentations in a stunning new way.

Mike Rose speaks of our country’s “extraordinary social experiment: the attempt to provide education for all members of a vast pluralistic democracy” (Gillespie, 2008, p. xxix), and Howard Gardner (2008) speaks of a “pluralistic view of the mind” (p. 3). Gardner’s (2006) theory of multiple intelligences recognizes “many different and discrete facets of cognition, acknowledging that people have different cognitive strengths and contrasting cognitive styles” (p. 5). The Digital Storytelling Project, with its interdisciplinary collaboration, embraced the pluralism to which Rose and Gardner refer. Students were given the opportunity to use or develop several of the “intelligences” that Gardner writes of in his groundbreaking work Multiple Intelligences (1993). When they told their own stories, they used what Gardner (2006) calls “Intrapersonal Intelligence” (p. 16). When they collaborated with their peers, they used an intelligence that Gardner (2006) terms “Interpersonal” (p. 14). Several students used their “Musical Intelligence” (Gardner, 2006, p. 8), and in creating their PowerPoint presentations they all used “Spatial Intelligence” (Gardner, 2006, p. 13). Finally, in writing their essays and editing the writing of their peers, they developed their “Linguistic Intelligence” (Gardner, 2006, p. 13).

Toby Fulweiler (1987), in Teaching with Writing, uses Ken Macrorie’s term “Engfish” to refer to “the stilted, evasive prose common to school and bureaucratic writing” (p. 10). “If we want writing (and thinking) skills to become useful, powerful tools among our students,” Fulweiler argues, “we must ask them to write (and think) in a context which demands some measure of personal commitment” (p. 10). The Digital Storytelling Project demanded such a commitment, and to judge from the work of our students, they felt—and wielded—the power.

(B) Student Reflections from Composition Class Fall 2009

Below, students in Freshman Composition describe how they benefited from the Digital Storytelling Project.

“The digital story presented me with the opportunity to share with others some of the reasons I am what I am today. It was great not only to tell others about my cultural background, but to show them as well. It was interesting also to see and share with others some of their cultures. It is said that pictures help one understand words better. That was what I got out of the digital story experience—a better understanding of the various stories that were being told.” — Beverly

“I found this learning process to be transformational not only for me but also for my fellow classmates. This multi-media activity has been an incredible experience which has made learning enjoyable for me. The best part about this was not going through pages and pages of boring written material but instead sharing my story via colorful pictures and slides. I also enjoyed listening to other classmates’ stories, which included music, pictures and videos of their cultures. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.” — Mariyam

“Last Semester when I took Digital Storytelling it was the best class I had. I thought it was awesome to be able to log into a program and read and comment on other people’s essays or help them out with them. And the PowerPoint presentation part of it was cool because it got to emphasize the words in the essays. Being able to put pictures, music, and videos just made it more fun to do and more enjoyable to share with the class.” — Eileen

“The project managed to bring out a unison of culture and literature, eventually culminating into a project that became worth spending time working on; it was fun. . . . This project should be used for all 101 classes because everyone wants their 5 minutes of fame.” — Brian

“Everyone has spoken about how their finished project changed the way they see themselves, carry themselves, and see life differently. Today you have watched all of our hard work and all of our dedication, come to life! With Kelsey’s experience on her Puerto Rican heritage and Billy’s experiences growing up on the island of Dominica, which allowed Ian to give a great performance. I would have never thought that this project would open so many doors to so many different people. We all learned a little something about ourselves. If you were to ask me how this project reflects on me I would have to say one word and that’s change! This also made me evolve as a student. I am starting to see how hard work really pays off. I see writing not as something not to be feared, but something that can inspire, change and yes transform you and your work into something beautiful.” — Oscar

(A) Reflection on the Narrative in the Elective/Career Content Classroom: Acting

This is an examination of the process and result of layering the Student Interdisciplinary Wiki Project into a first-level acting class titled Theater 120: Acting I. This class is an elective for most programs but fulfills a requirement in the Early Childhood Education program at Queensborough. It holds the same course objectives as the required class for the Fine and Performing Arts program with a concentration in Theatre Arts, and students who complete the class are eligible to enroll in the class Acting 2, for both Theatre and non-Theatre majors. In the same collaboration discussed in the previous section, the Acting Class partnered with a Freshman Composition Class and a Basic Education Class.

The project was titled Family and Culture. The three faculty members assigned readings from the dramatic text Autobahn, by Neil LaBute, and Across Cultures, an anthology, to offer shared reading assignments across the three classes and to prepare for the development of personal narratives that would become digital stories.

The ePortfolio virtual community offered an immediate opportunity to expand the established classroom practice of the actor journal. Constantine Stanislavski (1936), who codified modern actor training through such works as An Actor Prepares, said, “You must ‘live the part’ by actually experiencing feelings that are analogous to it, each and every time you repeat the process of creating it” (p. 14) Self-reflection and personal history are considered the essential first steps in approaching the craft of acting. The class responded to each other’s personal histories with gifts of photographs and films. This use of other ways of knowing is supportive of the acting techniques of sense and emotion memory, in which the five senses are employed to viscerally recreate the actor’s personal experience.

The artifact that became central to the Freshman Composition students’ personal narratives translated into personal object work to assist with triggering sense and emotion memory for the acting students. It also provided an opportunity to explore the concept of “Endowment,” described by Uta Hagen in Respect for Acting (1989), in which objects surrounding the character are assigned history and relationship by the actor to create a realistic environment (p. 89).

Self-reflection, sense and emotion memory, and endowment were all course concepts seamlessly integrated into the project’s structure. However, the most significant experiences in the classroom required some departure from traditional delivery of Acting I in an attempt to build a significant interdisciplinary cohort experience.

The personal narratives from the Basic Skills and Freshman Composition classes were used as texts by the acting students for performance. Traditionally, Acting I uses dramatic texts in the style of modern realism. Using personal histories afforded the acting students the opportunity to use critical thinking in asking the question, what is an “actable” or “dramatic” text? Most importantly, the student personal narratives gave acting students a deeper understanding of mapping analogous situations, a central concept of theatrical textual analysis for the actor. Stanislavski (1936)refers to the analogous situation as “the magic IF.” “IF acts as a lever to lift us out of the world actually into the imagination” (p. 46). A textual analysis for the actor requires the actor to ask herself, “If I was in this situation, how would I react?” The Practical Handbook for the Actor (Bruder, Cohn, Olnek, & Pollack, 1986), the textbook chosen for the class, unpacks the question using three levels of analysis. The first level is called the “literal action,” which describes what happens in the particular scene (i.e., the character is saying goodbye to his mother on his way to fight a war); the second level is the “essential action,” which articulates the action in more general terms (the character is leaving a loved one to face unknown experiences and does not know if he will ever see her again); and the third level asks the actor to articulate, “It’s as if I. . . .” With an understanding of the essential action, an actor does not need to have performed the literal action to empathize with the character and thereby play the character’s experience with a sense of appropriate reality. The textbook attempts to create a simple form for analysis and a bridge from the experience of the character that may not be in the students’ experience. However, students new to acting do require repeated practice to understand the difference between the literal action and the essential action and often resist articulating or find themselves unable to articulate the answer to the question “IF.”

The students analyzed and rehearsed scenes from a dramatic text in the style of modern realism before attempting to look at the personal narratives from the Basic Skills and Freshman Composition classes as texts for performance. They read essays and chose the ones they wished to perform on their own, as well as abridging the texts to create a short monologue. They were asked to reflect on the reasons for choosing these texts for performance. Their choices often crossed their own gender and ethnicity, a departure from most casting that takes place in the theatre. The choice to cross gender and ethnicity helped students understand that they were compelled by the “essential” story, not the “literal” experiences of the character. The class discussion held after a review of the student texts centered around identity and self-definition, which reinforced the lesson of self-knowledge that is the cornerstone of actor training.

Students also fluidly found the “magic IF” using other students’ texts. “I chose this character,” one student wrote, “because it reminded me of myself. When I was young my family moved from a predominantly black West-Indian neighborhood to a mostly white community. On my first day of the new school, I thought I was watching aHappy Days episode with a bunch of Richie Cunninghams. Her closeness to her family is the same as mine. Family is very important to me” (Navin, Acting I student, on an essay by Farimah, Freshman Composition student). The students placed their reflections and questions directly on the student essays using the wikis to share the information, so the Freshman Composition students had an opportunity to dialogue and revise their essays upon hearing the Acting students’ reactions.

The need to archive and share the performance asynchronously with the Basic Skills and Freshman Composition classes led to the choice of creating video logs for the assignment. The advent of video logging or “vlogging” came in 2004 with the emergence of the website Youtube (Show, 2007), and there are now several thousand active vloggers on Youtube and other video websites. Youtube itself defines vlogs as “a video of someone talking into the camera about their thoughts on a particular subject matter. Vlogs are generally a frequent posting of videos which are personal in nature keeping with the idea of a ‘log’ or ‘diary’” (Show, 2007).

The vlogging community values authenticity highly. To give an example of the community’s definition of the practice, a popular vlogger, “Lonely Girl 16,” was eventually revealed to be an actress with a script who had been hired by a production company, not a lonely teenager in her bedroom. Youtube vloggers felt betrayed and expressed their disapproval by way of thousands of vitriolic comments and response vlogs (Show, 2007). Some of the trained actors among the vloggers portray constructed characters in their vlogs and have achieved notoriety, which in some cases has led to some substantial film work, even though many vloggers express disapproval of this practice. The online dialogue on Youtube has raised many questions about the nature of presenting “the truth.” In Stanislavskian theatre practice, actors are requested to present their own personal truths as the truth of the character to create a believable performance, yet this very practice was suspect in this narrative format.

The choice to create vlogs for the personal narrative assignment arose from the opportunity to share the performances with the other classes. Vlogs presented a unique opportunity to create a sense of verisimilitude. The innate self-reflective nature of vlogs aligned with the nature of the essays themselves. The choice at first seemed problematic for a first semester acting class, as theatrical vocabulary and practices are challenging in and of themselves, and traditionally, camera technique is taught only after mastery of basic theatrical principles. Homemade video logs, which were often self-filmed with flip video cameras, also held the possibility of creating archived material that was not aesthetically pleasing.

A viewing of Andrew Neel’s (2007) documentary about his grandmother, titled Alice Neel, the artist, led to the decision to work with vlogs, despite the apparent drawbacks. Alice Neel focused on portraiture, and the documentary was filmed with a handheld camera in video emulation of the artist’s paintings. The visual story and the content of the discussion in the film’s interviews were reflections on the nature of portrayal. “Why portray anyone at all?” was a question the son of the artist posed back to his own son, who was interviewing him, and although the camera was unsteady, and the subject seemingly not well lit, the very presence of the subject and his use of physical gesture communicated meaning in a way that would have been incomplete in a narrative simply read on a page.

The departure from theatre into theatrical media in the use of the video log expanded the actor’s task to include direct address to the camera and observations of new aesthetic distances. Students began to discern the distinct requirements of fourth-wall technique (the convention in drama in the style of modern realism) when approached with direct camera (and, by extension, audience) address. Students were videotaped with a flip video camera while performing exercises based on the theories of Sanford Meisner, which incorporate repeating of text with an acting partner. The camera served as audience in this exercise, and the actors were tasked to create a circle of attention on their acting partners, with a sense of projection to the camera, which holds a very different distance than does a live audience. In the actual vlog, the camera became the acting partner, and the students were prompted to endow the camera with the attributes of a partner. The camera technique served to assist students in understanding live theatre technique in relief—the acting partner became more appreciated as a tool in the theatrical performance when acting students no longer worked with one.

Students were also prompted to employ physical gestures for the camera, which were more economical than those required for the theatre, yet which provided sublingual information. This lead to a more complete and complex interpretation of the personal narrative text, in much the same way that the digital stories, in their use of visual and aural information, provided other ways of knowing.

The following videos of Javier from the Acting I class portraying Oscar from the Freshman Composition class document the progression from actor exercise with a partner to vlog, as well as Javier’s on-camera reflection.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGxOzounOv0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGu9Q5xkgzg&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZS44PipGiiw&feature=related

The ePortfolio Virtual Learning Community Project in Family and Culture at Queensborough created a virtual learning community to assist students in meeting course and General Education objectives within the traditional face-to-face classroom space. This community provided an interdisciplinary space that examined and celebrated the students’ own experiences, and those of their families, while developing the students’ ability to think critically, apply aesthetic and intellectual criteria in the creation of theatrical performances, to make connections across disciplines, and to examine cultural commonalities. The addition of theatrical media and wiki collaboration posed problems for the delivery of class content that, through the creation of solutions for those problems, actually provided new and vivid information that assisted students in understanding performance techniques.

Conclusion

The ePortfolio Virtual Learning Community Project engaged within a traditional classroom would be described by George Kuh (2008)as delivering multiple High Impact Practices that appeal best to Hispanic students and other historically underserved groups in their alternative modes of delivery of competencies. There are elements of service learning in the support that students give to each other on their projects, learning communities in the online collaborations and shared assignments, diversity and global learning in personal narratives from largely immigrant students, and project-based learning in the creation of digital stories and vlogs. Kuh (2008) says that “historically underserved populations tend to benefit more from engaging in them but are less likely to participate in range of High Impact Practices than ‘majority students’” (pp. 17–19). It is the College’s intention to continue to offer and expand this model of service to student learning, and to reach out to other Hispanic Serving Institutions to extend the virtual community, and therefore extend access to those students who would most greatly benefit.

References

Bruder, M., Cohn, L. M., Olnek, M., & Pollack, N. (1986). A practical handbook for the

actor. New York: Vintage.

Fulweiler, T. (1987). Teaching with writing. Portsmouth, N.H.: Boynton/Cook, Inc.

Gardner, H. (1993). Multiple intelligences: The theory in practice. New York: Basic Books.

Gardner, H. (2006). Multiple intelligences: New horizons. New York: Basic Books.

Gardner, H. (2008). 5 minds for the future. Boston: Harvard Business Press.

Gillespie, S., & Becker, R.. (2008). Across cultures: A reader for writers. 7th ed. New York:

Pearson/Longman.

Hagen, U. (1989). Respect for acting. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley.

Kuh, George. (2008). High impact practices: What they are, who has access to them, and why

they matter. Washington, D.C.: A A C & U.

Neel, A(ndrew) (Director). (2007). Alice Neel. [Motion picture]. United States: Think Productions.

Rogers, C. C. (2006). Attending to student voice: The impact of descriptive feedback on learning

and teaching. Curriculum Inquiry, 36, 209–227

Show, R. (2007). The history of vlogs. Retrieved April 10, 2010, from

http://richardshow.org/vloghistory/aoir_vloghistory_abstract.pdf

Stanislavski, Constantine. (1936). An actor prepares. Trans. Elizabeth

Hapgood. New York: Routledge.

Youtube. Retrieved April 23, 2010, from

http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=95729

Acknowledgements:

This study benefited from support from a Challenge Grant 2009–2010. In addition, a “Making Connections” grant through LaGuardia Community College’s FIPSE grant has supported this work since 2007.
About the authors: Michele Cuomo, Jean Darcy, Joan Dupre

• Continue Reading
• No Comments

COBIMET Library Consortium: the experiences of a collaborative project of four Hispanic Higher Education Institutions in Puerto Rico

Written by HETS Admin on July 30, 2014. Posted in English, Fall Issue: October 2010, Volume I

Abstract

This paper describes the experiences of the only registered library consortium under the State Department of Puerto Rico, mostly composed by private higher education institutions.

The author explains how the Consorcio de Bibliotecas Metropolitanas (COBIMET) was founded and what were the challenges, needs and goals of this collaborative group. To achieve cooperation the members of the consortium considered the common needs of each one of the participating libraries. The areas to work on were technology, library services, information resources, budget constraints and professional development. Among the benefits derived from all activities the participating institutions were able to reduce costs, share knowledge, and explore diverse learning experiences.

Keywords: consortium, collaborative projects, COBIMET, virtual library, virtual media resources

Resumen

Este artículo describe las experiencias del único consorcio de bibliotecas inscrito bajo los criterios del Departamento de Estado de Puerto Rico. Está compuesto en su mayoría por instituciones privadas de educación superior. El autor explica como el Consorcio de Bibliotecas Metropolitanas (COBIMET) fue fundado y cuales fueron su retos, necesidades y objetivos de este grupo colaborativo.

Para alcanzar la cooperación se identificaron las necesidades comunes entre los miembros del consorcio. Las áreas con necesidades comunes fueron las de tecnología, servicios bibliotecarios, recursos informativos,presupuesto y desarrollo profesional. Algunos de los beneficios obtenidos de las actividades que participaron las instituciones fueron reducción en gastos, compartir de conocimientos y explorar diversas formas de aprendizaje.

Palabras Claves: consorcios, proyectos colaborativos, COBIMET, biblioteca virtual, recursos informativos electrónico

COBIMET Library Consortium: the experiences of a collaborative project of four Hispanic Higher Education Institutions in Puerto Rico.

Introduction

The Knowledge society uses communication and information technologies to restructure the production of goods and services, and to support the development of new services. Having reliable information is essential to develop new technologies, services and therefore wealth. According to Brindley (2009), Thomas Stewart was one of the first to discuss the emerging knowledge based economy. Stewart saw “intellectual capital as intellectual material – knowledge, information, intellectual property, experience – that can be put to use to create wealth” (p.4).

The involvement of libraries in the 21 century for the development of the intellectual capital is crucial to the economical and social development of a society. Libraries must provide user centered services that empower patrons to get information from the library at any time, independently from their geographical location, and encourage a flexible response to their unique and diverse needs (Atlas, Wallace and Van Fleet, 2005).Furthermore, libraries must provide high quality peer reviewed information to the users to help them create new knowledge and take well informed decisions.

COBIMET, acronym for Consorcio de Bibliotecas Metropolitanas, was designed considering these needs. Making quality information available to users through a virtual library and providing the necessary tools to critically evaluate that information. The following paper will present how COBIMET has addressed the common informational needs of four higher education institutions in Puerto Rico through a cooperative model of consortium.

According to Johnstone (2007) institutions that are prepared to collaborate and work cooperatively are the ones who are taking in their hands accountability and efficiency. There are many ways to improve programs and services throughout collaboration. Johnstone (2007) presents some examples about how higher education institutions can benefit from collaborative activities. Some of this benefits are: “1) Saving money with consortium agreements, 2) Allowing faculty to work on site and at other institutions to create course materials, 3) Sharing courses among institutions, 4) Developing electronic services for students and faculty, and 4) Creating resources in open formats that aid in institutional recognition and mission fulfillment” (p.147).

When organizations explore partnerships with other institutions is generally because they have identified a need that cannot be fulfilled using their own human or economical resources (McClure, 2003; Johnstone, 2006). That was inspiration to create COBIMET.

According to Fernós (n. d.) higher education in Puerto Rico has presented a sustained and diversified growth in enrollments, institutions and programs. Cámara (n. d.) presents that by the first semester of 2001- 2002 the enrolment was of 191,552. By the first semester of 2006-2007 the enrolment was 223,974 that reflects a 17 % increase from 2001-2002. The Directory from the Puerto Rico Council of Higher Education (2010) states that there are 6 public higher education institutions and 42 private institutions accredited by them.

COBIMET consortium is currently a nonprofit organization offering virtual library services, information literacy skills website and a library professional development program to private institutions of higher education and schools. The COBIMET consortium is the only non profit organization of its kind registered in the Puerto Rico’s Department of State.

COBIMET started seven years ago as a United States (U.S.) Title V cooperative grant, with the University of the Sacred Heart acting as the host institution. The four higher education institutions that participated in the cooperative grant were the University of the Sacred Heart (U.S.C), American University of Puerto Rico (A.U.P.R.), Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico (U.P.P.R.), Colegio Tecnológico de San Juan (S.J.T.C.). The participating institutions began by identifying the common needs, after an analysis they coincided in the following:

1. They were unable to keep pace with the Information Technology demands to adequately provide library resources to students and faculty.
2. They were unable to individually provide reliable and accessible Virtual Library Services to meet the information needs and the flexibility required by students and faculty.
3. IT staff and Librarians needed comprehensive, continuous training in networks management, strategic planning and security vulnerability issues.

The first identified need was partially addressed through the acquisition of a common multidisciplinary virtual library collection. As shown in Table 1, over the course of the project the collection grew significantly so that the universities had collective access to an enviable amount of data and information.

Note. The data in the table does not mean that there are 623 separate databases but is shown merely to demonstrate the progress and increase in and the number of databases now accessible at each institution.

As shown in Table 2, from 2003 to 2004 there was a percentage increase on most of the type of resources when compared with the baseline of 2003.

According to Grogg (2009) during this financial turmoil it is essential for librarians to demonstrate to higher education administrators that “the library is conducting business in such a way as to save the institution money while concurrently negotiating for the best possible content as the best possible price” (p.129). Furthermore Perry (2009) presented the results of a survey conducted in the spring of 2009 in which the two major issues for consortium were budget management and license renegotiations. Out of necessity, library consortium will be focusing a great deal of attention on managing their budgets, especially in times of economic uncertainty.

COBIMET Title V project grant produced substantial financial savings to each of the partner institutions during its operations; a minimum of $1,000,000 has been saved on acquisition of information resources since the project inception. By acquiring acquisitions as a group ,the negotiating power of the consortium with the data base vendors has resulted not only in savings for each institution but has enabled COBIMET to acquire more information volumes from each vendor with a minimal investment. Furthermore, value added exercises carried out by COBIMET, such as a review and elimination of more than 30% of duplicate titles, resulted in financial savings to date of approximately $60,000. Another example of strengthening the collection and generating even more savings for the institutions was the evaluation of over 100 open access resources resulting in 80 free titles being incorporated into the collection; 90% of them were databases.

The second identified need was addressed through the creation of a COBIMET Portal were the institutions accessed the virtual library. According to Vijayakumar, Kannappanavar and Mestri (2008) the main benefits of a portal resides in acting as a single access point for library information resources like catalogues, subscriptions databases, subject gateways and electronic journals. Furthermore, they state that the main benefits to a portal are easier access, simplified authentication, personalization and the resources presentation in a single place.

Since its inception, COBIMET’s portal has registered an increase of 36% in the number of visits while a decrease of 37% in the number of hits due in part to the WebMaster working on improvements to the portal, the introduction of the MetaSearch function, and the integration of the Private Virtual Library which sporadically slowed service during the 2007 year. Vijayakumar et al. (2008) indicate that changes in a portal can affect the use of patrons until they adjust to the new modifications. As Table 3 demonstrates, activity in the Portal increased gradually while students and faculty became more familiar with the tool and also as a result of the promotion of services by each of the participating institutions.

Training and Professional Activities

As demonstrated in Table 4 below, over the course of the 5 years, the project provided a total of 39 professional development activities with a participation of 481 library staff (437 from the partner institutions). In addition, during Year 05 a total of 44 professors, administrative staff and students also participated in training activities.

COBIMET Technology Component

Technology is an essential component of COBIMET’s mission, because it ensures the smooth operation of the Virtual Library. The four institutions concurred that there was a need for a reliable and secure network that provides an efficient virtual library services platform. Hossain (2009) explains that without a “proper access management mechanism, confidentiality and integrity of information cannot be guaranteed” (p.21).

COBIMET’s technological goal was to implement a secure local network model for the participant institutions. The requirements for a local network followed the guidelines of the AN-MSI model from EDUCAUSE. The goal of AN-MSI (which stands for Advanced Networking with Minority-Serving Institutions) was to assist Minority-Serving Institutions as they developed the campus infrastructure and national connections to become and remain full participants in the emerging “Information Age.“

Improving security and vulnerability was one of the principal needs presented in developing the local network. All of the partner institutions had serious security risks at the onset of the project. Furthermore, there was limited knowledge and resources at their institutions on how to correct the situation. COBIMET made significant strides in the issues of security by providing:

• Network assessments to member institutions conducted by a network security expert.
• Acquisitions of state of the art network equipment
• Providing the IT Professionals training on network security.
• The implementation of security measures and tools such as corporate anti-virus servers with automatic updates, windows updates and policies has occurred in the institutions.
• Training in the development of the institution strategic plan for IT and security policies and procedures.

The principal outcome of all these activities was an improved, more secure and reliable campus network. Figure 1 show the number downtime hours and how they were reduced to zero in 50% of the member institutions and to almost zero in the other 50% per year during the last 2 years of the project.

Figure 1

Network Downtime by Institutions / Years

Conclusions

The COBIMET cooperative project developed collections of available electronic information resources and services for education, using virtual and physical networks. It identified common needs in the areas of information technology and Libraries. The common goals of the project members were achieved by:

• Developing and implementing a virtual library service information model
• Designing and Developing Information Technology Networks to support the Virtual Library Services.
• Developing a learning environment in virtual library services, IT and security vulnerabilities
• Adopting standards, policies and procedures in IT and virtual library services.

Other benefits obtained from this project were the reduction of costs, shared knowledge, and diverse learning experiences from all participating institutions. Best practices regarding budget, facilities, security and technology can also be learned from this collaborative project.

References

Atlas, M., Wallace, D., & Van Fleet, C. (2005). Library Anxiety in the Electronic Era, or

Why Won’t Anybody Talk to Me Anymore? Reference & User Services

Quarterly, 44(4), 314-319. Retrieved from Academic Search Complete database.

Brindley, D. (2009). Challenges for Great Libraries in the Age of the Digital Native.

Information Services & Use, 29(1), 3-12. doi:10.3233/ISU-2009-0594.

Cámara, L.R. (n. d.). Breve radiografía de la educación superior en Puerto Rico. Retrieved

May 5, 2010, from http://www.gobierno.pr/NR/rdonlyres/256BCAD8-E56C-4F11-895060251DBDE669
/0/BREVERADIOGRAFIADELAEDUCACIONSUPERIOR.pdf.

Consejo de Educación Superior de Puerto Rico. (2010). Directorio de Instituciones de

Educación Superior. Retrieved May 5, 2010, from http://www.gobierno.pr/NR/rdonlyres/0BF4C446-8C55-44DB-

9295-8D04016F3CB3/0/DirectorioIESENERO2010.pdf

Fernós, M. (n. d.). La reglamentación de la educación superior en Puerto Rico. Retrieved

October 27, 2009, from http://www.rlcu.org.ar/documentos/MarcosRegulatorios/MR_PuertoRico.doc.

Grogg, J. (2009). Economic Hard Times and Electronic Resources. Journal of

Electronic Resources Librarianship, 21(2), 127-130.

doi:10.1080/19411260903035817.

Johnstone, S.M. (2007). Advancing campus efficiencies: A companion for campus

leaders in the digital era. Bolton, MA: Anker.

Kannappanavar, B., & Mestri, M. (2009). Content Analysis of Indian Institutes of

Technology Libraries Web Portals: A Study. DESIDOC Journal of Library &

Information Technology, 29(1), 57-63. Retrieved from Library, Information Science

& Technology Abstracts with Full Text database.

McClure, P.A. (Ed.). (2003). Organizing and managing information resources on

your campus. (Vol. 7). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Perry, K. (2009). Where are library consortium going? results of a 2009 survey.

Serials, 22(2), 122-130. Retrieved from Library, Information Science &

Shoeb, Z. (2009). Access Management for Digital Repository. DESIDOC Journal of
Library & Information Technology, 29(4), 21-27. Retrieved from Library, Information
Science & Technology Abstracts with Full Text database.
Technology Abstracts with Full Text database.

About the author: Carlos Crespo

• Continue Reading
• No Comments

Waterfall method: A Necessary Tool for Implementing Library Projects

Written by HETS Admin on July 30, 2014. Posted in English, Spring Issue: March 2011, Volume I

Waterfall method: a necessary tool for implementing library projects

Carlos A. Crespo-Santiago

Consorcio de Bibliotecas Metropolitanas (COBIMET)

Sonia de la Cruz Dávila Cosme

Universidad de Puerto Rico- Recinto de Cayey

Abstract

This paper describes a methodology for implementing effectively library projects. The authors explain how the Waterfall Method for information system development and organizational design, created by Winston W. Royce can be applied to library projects. The proposed adaptation of the method for library projects is presented in stages; where each stage has a set of activities that produce deliverables that serve as evidence documentation for management or governing agencies.  The stages are given a percentage to establish relevance and a basis to inform progress to top management. The benefits of applying the Waterfall Methodology include maintaining the scope of a project within the requirements and needs of all stakeholders; establishing cost control and time management for all the required activities; and provide documented evidence of the activities that govern the project. . It can be applied to every project and discipline, including education. The technique itself is so flexible that it could be used to manage research proposals, investigations, and even operational plans, but as in library sciences, the lack of information in the educational area present some challenges to this method followers 

Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to propose a methodology for implementing effectively library projects. The primary emphasis of the methodology is to provide a project management strategy that will fit most library projects.  The basis of the methodology will be based on the Waterfall Method for information system development and organizational design, created by Winston W. Royce in 1970 (Royce, 1970, p. 328).

Today, librarians implement better services for providing resources through the internet and on-site physically to their users.  In traditional and digital libraries, services include access to informational resources like books, journals, magazines, videos, audio media, maps and historical archives (Digital Libraries, 2003).  Also, services like electronic reference, e-reserves and electronic interlibrary loans are becoming increasingly implemented by libraries. Furthermore, the need to market those services and resources has turned them to social networks by using Web 2.0 tools for help.

Libraries can manage the implementation of new procedures and projects by using project management methodologies. According to Winston and Hoffman (2005) project management methods can help libraries administrators to ensure the most efficient and effective use of resources and the completion of projects (p. 60). The completion of project activities requires a series of different and diverse skills, and having a structured methodology is necessary for setting the project environment (Cerrone, 2007, p. 23).

This paper will describe the Waterfall Methodology for information system development in terms of organization design, and its use in project management.  After examining this methodology, we then propose a library project management strategy based on the Waterfall Methodology.

Waterfall Methodology for Information Systems Development

The design of an information or computer system requires considerable organization and management; a planned approach needs to be taken to define how the development and implementation needs to be performed (‘Systems design and life cycle’, 2008). Winston and Hoffman (2005) explain the Waterfall Methodology applies the principle that the development process should be divided into phases to provide clarity of content.  Results of each phase are documented and the next phase only begins when all pre-requisites are satisfied. It is not permitted to return to a previous phase, once another has started unless the implementation requirements change. The project is completed when all phase gate reviews are satisfied.  Requirements change must be tracked and controlled so as to reduce scope creep.

The phases for a development of a system using the Waterfall Method are typically as follows (Systems design and life cycle, 2008):

1. Feasibility study: benefits, cost estimates, effectiveness from a new or improved system need to be determined.
2. System requirements: existing system is analyzed and requirement specifications from the system owner are gathered.
3. System design: involves the technical specification produced for the new system based on requirements.
4. Design Implementation: work begins on the development or production of the new or improved system.
5. Testing and Installation: protocols for testing verification and proper installation are performed.
6. Maintenance: after the system is implemented, operational modifications could be made to fit new requirements.

The successful implementation of an information systems project or any other project will be based on answering effectively the following questions:

Is the system acceptable to the customer?

Was it delivered according to schedule?

Did the project ended within the agreed budget?

Did the system development process have a minimal impact on ongoing operations?

Why use the Waterfall Method instead of other methods for Library Projects

According to Cerrone (2007), the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) developed by the Project Management Institute approximately 20 years ago, is the definitive methodology for theory and practice. Adherence to the PMBOK method assures a successful implementation.  The PMBOK method establishes that during the course of a project, activities occur within the following five process groups:

1. Initiating processes which focus on gaining authorization of a project or one of its phases.
2. Planning processes that define objectives and select courses of action that will be used to effect project goals.
3. Executing processes used to coordinate activities, staff, and other resources in order to put the plan into action.
4. Controlling processes which provide the context for measurement and monitoring of project results in order to prevent variance from the plan or correct the course of action when a variance occurs.
5. Closing processes that formalize the acceptance of the project and end the project activities.

The detailed activities that fall within the five process groups are 44 different in total.  Furthermore, detailed tasks can be applied differently depending on the objective.

The biggest difference between PMBOK and the Waterfall method is complexity. PMBOK is better suited for large scale projects and requires experience and the ability to apply specific activities to diverse processes in order to manage the project efficiently (Cervone, 2007). On the other hand, the Waterfall Method is simple and convenient while allowing the flexibility for managing both, large scale and small scale projects.

Oura and Kijima (2001) explain that the waterfall method is employed top down in the sense that the development process can only proceed if management approves each phase.  This could be an issue if the organization is a bottom-up and changes come from lower level personnel.  The simple process that the Waterfall method provides makes it ideal for libraries project management.

Waterfall Method for Library Project Management

The Waterfall Method divides the development process by phases.  The proposed adaptation of the method for library projects will be presented in the following stages: plan, design, implementation and operations. Each stage has a set of activities that produce deliverables that serve as evidence documentation for management or governing agencies.  The stages are given a percentage to establish relevance and a basis to inform progress to upper management.

In the Plan Stage, the scope of the library’s project is discussed an analyzed.  There is a need to establish the project feasibility, user requirements, map the current process, establish the team charter and get the buying from management. This stage corresponds to the Feasibility Phase and Requirements Specification described in the Waterfall Methodology.

Table 1

Activities and Deliverables during the Planning Phase

In the Design Stage, specifications described in the user requirements to be processed are designed.  The library systems procedures or guidelines, communication plan with end users and measurements that will show improvement are developed.  This stage corresponds with the design phase in the Waterfall Methodology.

Table 2

Activities and deliverables during the Design Phase

The Implementation Stage requires the library system to be installed or commissioned for testing by end user.  The end user is then presented with the procedures and training developed for them to test the system.  This stage comprises the implementation of design, testing and installation in the Waterfall Methodology.

Table 3

Activities and deliverables during the Implementation Phase

The Operation Stage refers to the formal use by library system’s end user.  The library system needs to be monitored for ensuring compliance with requirements specification.  Provide a presentation to management to close the project and archive documentation for evidence.  This stage is more comprehensive than the Waterfall Methodology as it comprises system compliance and operation and maintenance.

Table 4

Activities and deliverables during the Operations Phase

As we can see, the Waterfall method is very simple. It can be applied to every project and discipline, including education. The technique itself is so flexible that it could be used to manage research proposals, investigations, and even operational plans, but as in library sciences, the lack of information in the educational area present some challenges to this method followers.  Koskela and Howell (2002) present that:

The lack of theory has rendered education and training more difficult and has hampered effective professionalization of project management. Lacking theory, project management cannot claim, and will not be granted a permanent and respected place in higher education institutions. Also, the lack of an explanation of project management, to be provided by a theory, has slowed down the diffusion of project management methods in practice (p. 12).

There is a vast amount of information of project management methods, especially in the areas of engineering, software development, construction, architecture and telecommunications. Project management itself has been transformed through the decades by these disciplines, but the application of project management methods are more used in the industry by practitioners, rather than by educators (Hoon-Kwak & Ambari, 2009; Koskela & Howell, 2002). This presents a dichotomy between practice and scholarship because practitioners are using project management methods on a daily basis but higher education institutions are not using it as much as we expect. Further research and analysis has to be done in order to establish why scholars are not taking advantage of project management methods in the academy.

Conclusions

The present paper proposed the application of the Waterfall Methodology to library projects.  Library and information science professionals could implement this staged based approach to their projects.

The benefits of applying the Waterfall Methodology in libraries can help administrators to: 1) maintain the scope of a project within the requirements and needs of all stakeholders; 2) establish cost control and time management for all the activities required; and 3) obtain documented evidence of the activities that govern projects. The literature review shows that there was no research publications identified that applied the Waterfall Methodology to Library projects and education. Future research can be performed using the methodology and applying it to a specific library or educational project.

References

Cervone,  H. F.  (2007). Standard methodology in digital library project management. OCLC

Systems and Services, 23(1), 30-34.  DOI: 10.1108/10650750710720748.

‘Digital Libraries’. (2003). In Encyclopedia of Computer Science. Retrieved from

http://www.credoreference.com/entry/encyccs/digital_libraries

Hoon-Kwal, Y, & Anbari, F.T. (2009). Availability-impact analysis of project management

trends: perspectives from allied disciplines. Project Management Journal, 40(2), p.94-

103. DOI: 10.1002/pmj.20111.

Koskela, LJ, & Howell, G 2002, The underlying theory of project management is obsolete, In:

The PMI Research Conference, June 2002, Seattle, Washington. Retrieved from

http://usir.salford.ac.uk/9400/1/2002_The_underlying_theory_of_project_management_is

_obsolete.pdf

Oura, J., & Kijima, K. (2002). Organization design initiated by information system

development: a methodology and its practice in Japan. Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 19(1), 77.  DOI:10.1002/sres.415.

Royce, W. W (1970).  Managing the Development of Large Software Systems.  Retrieved

January 11, 2011, from http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2003/cmsc838p/Process/waterfall.pdf

‘Systems design and life cycle’. (2008). In BCS Glossary of Computing and ICT. Retrieved from

http://www.credoreference.com/entry/bcscompict/systems_design_and_life_cycle

• Continue Reading
• No Comments

Using ePortfolio to Improve Retention of Hispanic Students at a Predominantly Black College

Written by HETS Admin on July 30, 2014. Posted in English, Spring Issue: March 2011, Volume I

By Janice Zummo, Rosalina Diaz and Rupam Saran

Medgar Evers College

Abstract

This study investigates how technology is being used to improve the engagement of at-risk Hispanic students at a predominantly Black institution through the use of ePortfolio in a co-curricular context. Historically, attrition rates for Hispanic students at Medgar Evers College of The City University of New York have been high. In 2009, 5.6% of incoming freshman students were Hispanic. By Spring 2010 that number had dropped to 2.5%. Recently, concerned faculty have concentrated on improving Hispanic student engagement. In Fall 2010, the Education Department and the Association for Latino Studies Student Club (ALAS) were among a small group who participated in an ePortfolio pilot project focused on improving engagement, fostering integrative learning, and encouraging personal development through reflective writing. Preliminary findings indicate that Hispanic students’ connectedness to the College increased after participation in this project.

Introduction

Medgar Evers College (MEC) is one of eleven senior colleges of The City University of New York (CUNY) and one of the few CUNY colleges that grant both baccalaureate and associate degrees. Founded in 1970 as a result of actions of New York State elected officials and community leaders in Central Brooklyn, MEC is a Predominantly Black Institution. MEC is in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, one of the largest, most densely populated and ethnically varied sections of the borough. Its students represent all areas of New York City, especially the surrounding Brooklyn community. In Fall 2009, 75% of the student body was female and over 90% was of African descent, a group historically underrepresented in higher education. The other 10% was comprised of Hispanic (5.6%), European American (0.9%), Asian/Pacific Islander (1.1%), Native American (0.2%), and other (1.7%). The Hispanic population at MEC is growing but the growth rate has been unsteady.

The mission of the College is to develop and maintain quality professional career oriented undergraduate degree programs in the context of a strong liberal arts background. MEC is committed to strengthening its academic programs to provide students with the knowledge and experience necessary to enable them to be competitive applicants for graduate education, to attain rewarding careers, and to contribute productively to society.

The current student population at Medgar Evers College is comprised of typical CUNY “boundary crossers” (Eynon, 2009):  36.5% were born outside of the United States and a large percentage of MEC students are first-generation college-goers who struggle to stay at college due to various social, personal, and economic problems. The MEC academic community is committed to meeting the needs of its unique student population and creating a learning environment that will promote student engagement, facilitate active learning, and encourage students to address academic and personal challenges with the support of the college community.

Over the past year, MEC has implemented an electronic portfolio project, hereafter referred to as ePortfolio, to improve the engagement of high-risk students, to build a community of reflective learners, and to enhance social networking. Through the use of ePortfolio, MEC intends to develop a virtual learning community in which students feel comfortable sharing their lived-world and life-stories with peers and faculty. MEC’s ePortfolio project aims to address learning and competency objectives through a student-centered reflective process that ultimately benefits all stakeholders by creating a positive teaching and learning environment. It is anticipated that the ePortfolio project will increase student engagement by fostering integrative learning and encourage personal development through reflective writing. Given the longitudinal nature of the development of ePortfolios, it is anticipated that student reflections will become richer and more complex as they advance in their academic programs. As ePortfolios are developed, the digital documentation of students’ work should provide detailed information that can be used to examine growth and progress over time, and enhance our student, program, and institution based assessment efforts. We also anticipate that using ePortfolios will enhance Hispanic students’ engagement in the MEC academic and social communities.

Problem

According to a report released in October 2010 by the Community Service Society of New York, young people who identify themselves as Hispanics are the largest single ethnic group among 16 to 24 year olds in New York City (CSS, 2010). There has been a very measured and gradual increase in the Hispanic student population at MEC over the last five years. Yet, the enrollment of Hispanic students at Medgar Evers College, CUNY, a Predominantly Black Institution (PBI) in Central Brooklyn, continues to lag behind that of most other CUNY colleges. In Fall 2009, Hispanic freshman enrollment at Medgar Evers College was only 5.6 % of the college’s total full-time enrollment. What is even more alarming is that of the 5.6% that enrolled in the fall, only 2.5% remained by the Spring 2010 semester. This article will examine the factors contributing to the high attrition rate of Hispanic students at Medgar Evers College through a discussion and evaluation of a co-curricular ePortfolio initiative designed to address the issue of Hispanic student retention and encourage overall academic engagement and success.

In recent years, there has been extensive research indicating that a strong sense of school belonging is positively correlated with “student’s intrinsic values, expectations for success and academic effort” (Sanchez, Colon, & Esparza, 2005, p. 620). For Hispanic students, a sense of school belonging seems to play a greater role than for any other ethnic group. Hispanic students have a greater tendency to attend hypersegregated schools than African-American students (Gandara, 2010). As reported in recent studies, Latinos, as opposed to other ethnic groups, seem to thrive best when they are members of in-group peer networks. “Our results offer important evidence that co-ethnic friendship networks are positively related to Latino students’ achievement… additionally, in-group ties are an important source of maintaining cultural heritage, identity, and a sense of community” for Latino students (Riegle-Crumb & Callahan, 2009, p. 627-628).

The Medgar Evers College ePortfolio Project

In the Fall 2010 semester, the College implemented an ePortfolio pilot project. That project, now in its second semester, has trained 15 faculty and staff representing the Departments of Education, Public Administration, Search for Education Elevation and Knowledge (SEEK), Credit for Prior Learning, the Freshman Year Program, and the Library. The ePortfolio Implementation Group has designed and implemented a comprehensive faculty development seminar series which provides participants the opportunity to learn the benefits and uses of ePortfolio for improved teaching and learning through reflective, integrative pedagogy and to encourage faculty to create or revise assignments that will foster the use of ePortfolio for course and program level assessment. Faculty who participated in the initial training sessions in fall 2010 are offering 19 ePortfolio courses for the Spring 2011 semester. In the Fall 2010 semester, the Education Department offered two courses that included ePortfolio. Once the ePortfolio team began to see the benefits of ePortfolio firsthand, the use of ePortfolio was implemented within a student club as a tool for community building.

Current Uses of ePortfolio at Medgar Evers College

At MEC, one of our goals is to increase our focus on integrative learning through the use of reflective strategies. The MEC Education Department has been using print portfolios as an integral part of accreditation and graduation processes. Historically, print portfolios are a collection of student self-assessments in the form of reflective essays. In general, students view print portfolios as a cumbersome task that has “no practical use.” As one of our students expressed, “Portfolios are good for collecting dust.” Students reluctantly assemble their print portfolio as a graduation requirement. However, as we have shifted to ePortfolio, students are more engaged in creating ePortfolios and in the reflective process. Yancey (2009) explains the nature of the paper to electronic shift: As portfolios have gone electronic, reflective texts have taken myriad forms — from concept maps to written texts to streaming video. In this shift from print to electronic, the claims for reflection have widened and increased as well (p.5).

Aimed at improving student learning and holistic development, the ePortfolio project at MEC is currently focused on creating scaffolded assignments that foster deep learning through recursive processes embedded in ePortfolio practice. At MEC, participating faculty are helping students to integrate what they have learned through traditional instruction with their lived experiences through a process of reflection. ePortfolio is used as a system of productive teaching and e-learning that addresses students’ comprehensive thinking, cognitive skills, and learning process. At the same time, ePortfolio provides continuous documentation of students’ learning processes, which includes evidence of their learning in the form of self-selected artifacts and allows faculty to view learning from the student’s perspective through reading their reflections. Through ePortfolios, both students and faculty have ongoing access to student work. Simultaneously, ePortfolio provides an alternative form of assessment in addition to traditional paper and pen assessments.

ePortfolios provide students with a space to collect and showcase their work, making connections across disciplines and engaging in self- reflection about the learning process. Students are able to present themselves electronically to graduate school admissions officers and future employers. At MEC, students use a process and product format to create their ePortfolios (Carlson, 1998). In process/working, ePortfolio students collect their work throughout their enrollment at MEC. In the product/showcase ePortfolio, they select and present their best work.

The ALAS Student Club ePortfolio Initiative

In Spring 2007, a small group of Hispanic students and faculty at MEC formed the Association for Latino American Students or ALAS, which, translated from the Spanish, means Wings. According to the original club president and founder of ALAS, this small group of students felt isolated, ignored, and disregarded and decided to do something about it. Thus, ALAS became the first Hispanic student club in the history of Medgar Evers College. Beginning in the 2010- 2011 school year, the MEC ePortfolio Implementation Group integrated ePortfolios into this Club’s structure to document the effectiveness of ePortfolio as a tool for community building. The overarching goal of this project was to foster integrative learning processes that would encourage Hispanic students to link their lived experiences and extracurricular activities to classroom learning, with the hope of increasing their sense of school belonging and, consequently, improving retention.

The process of ePortfolio integration within ALAS began in August of 2010 with the training of the club president in the use of ePortfolio. Once she was fully trained, she was given an ePortfolio account for ALAS. She was not instructed about how to construct or organize the site. The ALAS ePortfolio began as a file cabinet, initially used by the president to document past activities and events that the club had sponsored and/or participated in over the last three years. This was its sole function for the first few months. Later the president added a welcome page with excerpts from the club’s mission statement. Gradually the ePortfolio began to be used to advertise upcoming events and activities. It became apparent that the ALAS Student Club ePortfolio site would become more than a repository as illustrated in the following quote:

Josie: I am a vastly different person today than I was just two short years ago and I owe the majority of this change to ePortfolio project and ALAS. I showcased my ePortfolio at LaGuardia College Showcasing Event…It was awesome…I earned prestige and recognition…

Why Use ePortfolio in a Co-Curricular Context

Seamless learning environments allow students to “make meaning of the academic experience by connecting classroom learning with their own lives outside the classroom” (Kuh, 1996, p. 136). Kuh explained that the use of the word seamless implies that what were at one time understood to be discreet learning opportunities occurring in and out of the classroom are now considered to be continuous learning experiences. The implementation of ePortfolio within the ALAS club initiated the creation of a seamless learning environment that would allow Hispanic students to assimilate learning across their life experiences. Current research has found that there is a relationship between “student engagement in educationally purposeful activities” and improving persistence (Kuh, Cruce, Shoup, Kinzie, & Gonyea, 2008, p. 542).

For most of the first semester of the ePortfolio implementation, the ALAS club president continued to be the only ALAS member actively involved in maintaining the ePortfolio site. This changed in November/December of 2010, when a new section was added to the ePortfolio. This section was titled “Why ALAS? – Member Testimonials.” This page was created to encourage members to share their experiences as Hispanic students at MEC and to discuss the reasons they had joined ALAS. In so doing, the students unknowingly began to build a seamless learning environment, bridging their experiences across classroom, lived, and reflective learning.

Reflective Learning

ePortfolios give students the opportunity to reflect on the learning process and to consequently identify the strengths and weaknesses of their own learning processes (Chen & Light, 2010). Reflection refers to the process through which students synthesize what they learn and explain their learning process to others, specifically the ePortfolio audience (Yancey, 2009). The structures created by students or provided in the ePortfolio format “invite, foster, and support reflection (p. 8). Students reflect on their learning in the context of lived experiences and begin to understand how learning can be transferred across the different parts of their lives (Chen & Light, 2010). Reflective learning within the context of ePortfolio begins with the creation of artifacts and extends to the selection of specific artifacts that illustrate learning outcomes. In addition to written reflections, students can provide video, audio, or visual reflections (Chen& Light, 2010, Yancey, 2009).

The first few students to post their experiences, aside from the club president, were ALAS alumni, the original founding members who had since graduated and moved on to employment or graduate school, but who had remained actively involved in the ALAS club. These former members expressed a desire to have their “legacy” as the founding members of ALAS remembered and acknowledged as ALAS moved into the future. Encouraged by these entries, the newer members began adding their statements, and the page has since continued to expand. At last count, 12 members had posted their statements. The following statements illustrate how students were able to make connections across learning experiences:

Mya: As a Latina woman I never had any issues concerned with race in all my years living in New York. After my first year as a college student at MEC I could write pages answering that question…

Sarah: Being Dominican-American in a college that is predominantly Black was not an easy experience for me. Most of my teachers at Medgar Evers College talked about the African Diaspora regardless of the subject they were supposed to be teaching, and I’m sad to say that I now know more about the struggles of African-Americans than I do about my own ethnicity.

These student testimonials illustrate how students were able to reflect on their personal experiences with race and explore issues related to their ethnic background. They were also able to transfer learning across the different parts of their lives as described by Chen and Light (2010) and synthesize their learning as discussed by Yancey (2009). As students reflect on the learning process they begin to make connections and integrate learning, which will be discussed in greater detail below.

Making Connections: Integrative Learning

One of the major benefits of using ePortfolio is how it allows students to make connections across different learning experiences. The process of making connections is also referred to as “integrative learning” which allows students to integrate learning accomplished in and out of the classroom and the development of skills and abilities across different courses (Chatham-Carpenter, Seawel, & Raschig, 2009-2010). “Portfolios are fundamentally integrative, being composed of heterogeneous artifacts, the connections between which are explored through reflection” (Cambridge, 2009, p. 41).

In the case of the ALAS club ePortfolio site, students were clearly making connections across different learning experiences and because of the ALAS ePortfolio site, they now had a forum in which to explore and share their views.

Mya: I was the only Hispanic person in all of my classes for my first year in college. I felt as if I didn’t belong. I had no one to relate to. My second year in college I became friends with two Latinas from the Dominican Republic. For the first time in my college experience I felt like I could express my concerns about attending an all Black College. We all had the same concerns and there wasn’t a person that we could voice our concerns to.

Sarah: When teachers continued to discuss this topic [African Diaspora] in their classrooms, it left out the rest of the few students who were from different cultural backgrounds, and caused them to feel neglected. When teachers did so, it made me not want to try as hard in their classes because I was not being acknowledged as the person that I am, a Dominican-

American.… I noticed that when exposed to these types of classroom environments, my grades were usually lower.

In a qualitative self-study, Brandes and Boskic (2008) found that graduate students acknowledged how the use of ePortfolio and technology enhanced learning. The students also noted the importance of creating an online learning community, which provided opportunities for them to work with other students in small and large groups and share ideas. The ALAS students built an online learning community in which they shared not only ideas but also their feelings of isolation. The combination of the use of technology and the creation of an online learning community provided a means for students to “move from the personal to the professional, sociological, and cognitive aspects of learning” (Brandes & Boskic, 2008 p. 8). The ePortfolio experience allowed students to “link ideas and make apparent connections between concepts” (Brandes & Boskic, 2008, p. 10). In addition to making connections between ideas, ePortfolios also allow students to make connections to each other (Bolliger & Shepherd, 2010).

The ALAS students were able to make connections between ideas. As they were exposed to and learned about the African Diaspora, they made connections between concepts related to Black history and their own Hispanic heritage.

Wilma: I believe that everything fell into place when I was feeling out of place. While Medgar students felt pride in belonging to a country or the history of Medgar, and ALAS students were being connected to illuminating Latin American history, here I was disconnected from the two. Because of the combination of both of these worlds I have experienced, I have now set out in search for my cultural lineage. I have now set out on discovering not only myself, but my people as a whole, and ALAS has helped make this possible for me.

And students were also able to create links between their academic and career experiences as illustrated below:

Sulnada: I am not out of place anymore. Like everybody else I have my ePortfolio. I am walking with everybody. I will take my ePortfolio with me for interviews at schools to show my computer skills and to show my work. Principals of schools can see beyond my Latina face and my accent and see what I have to offer. My ePortfolio shows who I am, where I come from, and why I came back to college…

Scaffolding

Scaffolding is the process of constructing learning that occurs across assignments, courses, and learning experiences. Assignments that incorporate multiple layers provide a framework upon which students build understanding through the construction of knowledge. Brandes and Boskic (2008) noted that as part of their ePortfolio, students were required to provide a site map that guided their audience through the ePortfolio with an explanation of how it was constructed and organized, and how artifacts were selected and interrelated. The process of constructing an ePortfolio, which includes organizing and reorganizing artifacts, reflecting on learning, receiving feedback, and revising assignments helps students to become deeply engaged in the learning process.

ALAS students constructed their own ePortfolio site, which provided them with a forum in which to highlight the mission of the organization, their own learning, and their feelings. The club mission statement, posted on their ePortfolio is as follows:

As the Hispanic population at MEC increases, ALAS seeks to fill the knowledge gap, left by the lack of academic courses on the history and culture of Latin America. We promote and support cultural diversity on campus and seek to educate the MEC population regarding the rich cultures of Latin America via cultural and historic events. We also seek to provide a safe welcoming haven for Latino students in the Brooklyn community here at MEC.

Through the reorganization of artifacts including the club’s mission statement, announcements and descriptions of upcoming events, and personal reflections, ALAS students became deeply engaged in the learning process. ALAS students were able to construct knowledge as their learning spanned across classroom learning, co-curricular learning, and personal reflection which resulted in a scaffolded learning experience and improved student engagement within the context of a student organization.

ALAS ePortfolio: A Tool for Community Building

Electronic access to clubs like ALAS through ePortfolio serves to address the issue of community building and creating a positive identity by bringing the benefits of club membership and participation to a larger group. In general, the MEC student population is non-traditional and many students have full-time jobs and families. In spite of the proven educational value of extra-curricular activities, the majority of our students have a difficult time attending meetings and events. But, since ePortfolio allows students to participate in the ALAS club online, Hispanic students who are using ePortfolio have indicated an increased sense of belongingness and connection to each other and to the larger college community. Hispanic students’ testimonies indicate that ePortfolio has provided them with a channel for self-expression and a forum in which they can write about themselves and reflect on the learning experience in an environment that allows them to include multi-media such as slides, pictures, videos, songs, and music.

Vicki’s comments illustrate the intensity of the ALAS experience as expressed in the ePortfolio format.

Vicki: In fall 2010, I found ALAS or they found me. Joining them has strengthened my feeling of belonging in the MEC family. ALAS provided that support and extra encouragement I needed as a Latino in a campus community that has a high percentage of African American and Caribbean students. I feel fortunate that I was able to join such a positive and energetic group of people that can express and encourage diversity in an already diverse community…I can honestly say that my future as an early childhood education educator would be because of the strong support I have received.

According to a recent article, The Latino Educational Crisis, by Patricia Gandara (2010),

Latino students’ extraordinarily high dropout rate is related, in part, to their lack of attachment to school and a sense of not belonging. A crucial means by which students attach to school and form supportive friendship groups is through extracurricular activities… Unfortunately, Latino students are less likely to participate in these activities, either because they perceive the club to be exclusive or because of logistical problems, like needing to work or help out at home after school or not having transportation or the money required for the activity (p. 29).

Gandara (2010) added the following related to developing a sense of belonging: “Schools that effectively address this issue, find ways to incorporate clubs, sports, and other activities into school routines and bring the benefits of these activities into the classroom” (p. 29). Electronic access to clubs like ALASmay serve to address belongingness as they bring the benefits of club membership and participation to a larger group of Latino students. Below is a student comment that expresses the impact ALAS membership has had on her educational experience at MEC since the integration of ePortfolio:

Josie: Having felt so powerless for the majority of my life due to having to conform to so many rules, I felt lucky to be part of a group that shared one voice, one mission, and one dream. No ideas are turned away without fully exploring the possibilities, which is why everyone feels that they can freely express themselves. Overall, being both a member and [officer] of the ALAS club has been for me a transformative experience that has helped me to grow and develop in unforeseen ways. I am a vastly different person today than I was just two short years ago and I owe the majority of this change to ALAS.

As a result of this initiative, ePortfolio has emerged as a tool not only for collecting and documenting club events and activities, but also as a means of community building through the sharing of personal experiences. When reading the statements, patterns emerge, similarities are highlighted, and it becomes clear that all the stories are really one and that none of the students are alone in their hopes, dreams, and struggles.

In January of 2011, ALAS became the first MEC club to travel out of the United States (to Puerto Rico) to institute an Intra-Cultural Initiative with the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez. The event was planned and advertised on ePortfolio. After the trip those students who participated shared their experiences by posting pictures and reflections on ePortfolio. Shortly after returning from the trip, the ALAS members emailed a link of their ePortfolio to the College President and met with him to discuss their accomplishments, goals, and future needs, using ePortfolio as their documentation and presentation tool. In the space of a few short months, the ALAS ePortfolio evolved from a one-person file cabinet to an interactive group sharing platform and a community building and advocacy tool. The students reported the following within the ePortfolio format:

Mya: It wasn’t until my third year in college that I became a part of a club that embraced my heritage. I met people that spoke the same language as I did and I was able to talk freely about being a Latina in an all Black College.

Johnny: When I first got to Medgar Evers, I felt like an outsider. I could not relate with my peers or professors, which in my mind was strange because most of my classmates come from the Caribbean, so one would think that I would feel at home. As you can imagine, at first I had some trouble adjusting… In addition, I think that most of my peers saw me as white because of my light complexion. And, to be honest with you I often felt white in class. When a discussion of racism arose in class, I used to voice my opinion and my classmates looked at me as if I had no right to be talking about racism because I’m “white.”

Tanya: For me sometimes being a Latina of color in the United States of America is very frustrating. Don’t get me wrong I love who I am and know who I am, but I am tired of not being considered enough. When I first came to Medgar Evers College I honestly did not think about it as going to a historically Black school, I just needed to go to a school that wasn’t too far from my family, and where I could take classes at night. I never thought about how being a Latina of Color would play out for me.

The reflective thoughts of Mya, Johnny, and Tanya indicate that they made a connection within the digital environment. As they shared their thoughts and feelings through ePortfolio, students explored their sense of self, feelings of alienation and worth, and sense of belongingness.

Use of ePortfolio to Address Needs of a Minority Hispanic Student Population

at a Predominantly Black Institution

In addition to sharing their personal educational journeys, Hispanic student statements reflect the challenges inherent in being a Hispanic student at a predominantly Black College, an issue that has not been sufficiently researched and/or discussed in the current literature. Of the 12 students who posted on the ALAS ePortfolio site, nine expressed difficulties adjusting and or “belonging” to the MEC community. Feelings of not belonging have been found to lead to attrition (Gandara, 2010). But, for the ALAS students, having the opportunity to share their concerns did improve their sense of belongingness. ePortfolio also impacted students’ personal and academic growth. A few ALAS club members have developed ePortfolio expertise and are working as Student Tech Mentors in the MEC ePortfolio lab assisting their fellow students as well as faculty members.

One of the benefits of using ePortfolio is its support of life-long and life-wide learning (Cambridge, 2008). Cambridge (2008) described lifelong learning as “learning that occurs across and between episodes of formal learning…” (p. 1228). The use of ePortfolio by Hispanic students at Medgar Evers College is focused on tapping into ePortfolio’s capability for enhancing life-long and life-wide learning to connect students’ learning across real life and classroom experiences with the goal of ultimately improving their engagement in the learning experience and academic success. Giving students the opportunity to share personal observations and learning in a safe and respectful environment provided a forum in which one Hispanic student was able to develop a teaching philosophy that reflected her own experiences incorporated with what she had learned in the classroom.

Another benefit of using ePortfolio is that it allows students to document and share their experiences with others (Bolliger & Shepherd, 2010). Through an examination of each other’s ePortfolios, students recognize similarities across experiences, which can increase communication and improve feelings of connectedness. Clearly, the students in the ALAS club were able to share their experiences which improved their feelings of connectedness where before they had felt alienated.

Chen and Light (2010) noted how ePortfolios “can be tailored to specific individuals and groups” (p. 13). Students who have used ePortfolio have reported developing an enhanced sense of community (Brandes & Boskic, 2008). In their study examining how students view “communication and connectedness, learning, and value in online programs,” Bolliger and Shepherd (2010, p. 296) noted that ePortfolio has been shown to address issues of isolation and improve community building. At Medgar Evers College, Hispanic students who are using ePortfolio have indicated an increased sense of belongingness and connection to the larger college community. And since ePortfolio provides a means of connecting to broader audiences (Cambridge, 2008), we anticipate that the broader Medgar Evers College community will also expand its connection to the Hispanic student population as they are exposed to the ALAS student club ePortfolio.

The preliminary success of the Medgar Evers College ePortfolio project has fueled the team’s desire to continue and expand the use of ePortfolio at the college. The number of participants in the small ePortfolio pilot does not allow us to make generalizations to other settings and populations at this time, but as we expand the use of ePortfolio in curricular and co-curricular settings, we plan to continue our research and to document how participation in ePortfolio is related to students’ sense of belongingness and their persistence.

References

Brandes, G. M. & Boskic, N. (2008). Eportfolios: From description to analysis. International review of research in open and distance learning. 9(7), 1-17.

Bolliger, D. U. & Shepherd, C. E. (2010). Student perceptions of ePortfolio integration in online courses. Distance Education, 31(3). 295-314.

Cambridge, D. (2008). Audience, integrity, and the living document: eFolio Minnesota and lifelong and lifewide learning with ePortfolios. Science Digest: Computers and Education, 51, 1227-1246.

Cambridge, D. (2009). Two faces of integrative learning online. In D. Cambridge, B. Cambridge, & K. Yancey (Eds),Electronic portfolios 2.0: Emergent research on implementation and impact. (pp. 41 – 49). Sterling, Virginia: Stylus Publishing, LLC.

Carlson, R.D. (1998). Portfolio assessment of instructional technology. Journal of Educational Technology System.27(1).

Chatham-Carpenter, A., Seawel, L. & Rashig, J. (2009-2010). Avoiding the pitfalls: Current practices and recommendations for ePortfolios in higher education. Journal of Educational Technology Systems, 38(4), 437-456.

Chen, H. L. & Light, T. P. (2010). Electronic portfolios and student success: Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Learning. Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Community Service Society. October 2010. New York City’s Future Looks Latino. Latino Youth in New York City: School, Work and Income Trends for New York’s Largest Group of Young People.

Eynon, B. (2009). Making Connections: The LaGuardia Eportfolio. In Cambridge, D.; Cambridge, B.; Yancy, K. (Eds). Electronic Portfolios 2.0: Emergent research on implementation and impact. Sterling, Virginia: Stylus Publishing, LLC.

Gandara, P. (2010). Meeting students where they are: The Latin education crisis. Educational Leadership Journal, 67(5), 24-30.

Kuh, G. D. (1996). Guiding principles for creating seamless learning environments for undergraduates. Journal of College Student Development. (37)2, 135-148.

Kuh, G. D., Cruce, T. M., Shoup, R., Kinzie, J., & Gonyea, R. M. (2008). Unmasking the effects of student engagement on first-year college grades and persistence. The Journal of Higher Education, 79(5), 540-563.

Riegle-Crumb, C & Callahan (2009) Exploring the Academic Benefits of Friendship Ties for Latino Boys and Girls,University of Texas.

Sanchez, Colon and Esparza (2005) The role of sense of school belonging and gender in the academic adjustment of  Latin adolescents. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 34(6), 619 – 628.

Yancey, K. B. (2009).Reflection and electronic portfolio. In: Cambridge, D.; Cambridge, B.; Yancy, K. (Eds).Electronic Portfolios 2.0: Emergent research on implementation and impact. Sterling, Virginia: Stylus Publishing, LLC.

• Continue Reading
• No Comments

Motivating at Risk African Americans and Hispanics Through the Study of New Media Technology

Written by HETS Admin on July 30, 2014. Posted in English, Spring Issue: March 2011, Volume I

Running head: MOTIVATING AT RISK AFRICAN AMERICANS AND HISPANICS

Motivating at Risk African Americans and Hispanics Through

the Study of New Media Technology

James L. Richardson

LaGuardia Community College

Abstract

The rising number of African Americans and Hispanics turning away from higher education is creating a problem that threatens many aspects of American society. Educators can help reverse this destructive trend by creating New Media based curricula that addresses the motivational factors impeding the academic success of these students. The recent advances in personal computing, as well as the rise of the Internet and global networks offer educators an unprecedented opportunity to reengage and motivate many of these students by teaching them to develop digital content that is technically advanced, economically viable, and which stays true to their core values. This new approach, which makes use of interactive technology, can bridge the gap and make it possible for many disenfranchised African American and Hispanic students to view academia in a more positive light.

The rising number of African Americans and Hispanics turning away from college and higher education is creating a problem that threatens many aspects of American society. It has been shown that increasing numbers of these students, many without sufficient economic and socio-political influence, can lead to increased levels of poverty, criminal behavior, incarceration (James, 2004), and greater family instability. However at the same time that some of these “at risk” students are turning away from higher education, new media centric areas of our economy and popular culture are experiencing incredible growth with this same demographic
(Smith, 2010).

In the fall of 2002 LaGuardia Community College created a two-year degree program in New Media Technology as one of the methods to address the growing need for digital media professionals. Recent technological advances in the fields of digital arts and computer information systems, gave LaGuardia educators an unprecedented opportunity to develop new media based curricula that directly converged with the interests, passions and cultural value systems of the predominately African American and Hispanic student body.  While the primary goal of the program was to provide quality instruction in new technologies, another key objective was to motivate many of these “at risk” students to embrace education and secure greater opportunities for their economic success.

What is New Media?

In order to fully understand the societal impact of new media and how it was utilized at LaGuardia to motivate “at risk” African American and Hispanic students, it must first be defined. The field of new media is an emerging discipline that encompasses numerous areas of study, all which have helped to fuel the union of science, news, literature, commerce, television, radio, film, and the recording industry into a new paradigm. According to the summary of findings from the Digital Youth Project (Ito, et al., 2008), new media is described as the convergence of traditional forms of communication, finance, and entertainment with new methods of Internet based delivery. The wide spread proliferation of high speed broadband networks, combined with more powerful computers and sophisticated software, has created a technological focal point for the creation and dissemination of much the multimedia content driving popular culture.

Established minority filmmakers have also begun to make use of these new technologies and distribution methods as a way of leveling the playing field in Hollywood. Noted filmmakers Spike Lee and Robert Rodriguez are possibly best known for their first films, “She’s Gotta Have It” and “El Mariachi”, which both defied the Hollywood conventions of the time because they were produced for $160,000 and $7,000 respectively (Lee, 2010). Despite the fact that Lee and Rodriquez have produced and directed numerous films over the course of their careers, it is only recently that they took the opportunity to work on large-scale big budget films. As a result of working predominately in independent films at the start of their careers, both filmmakers have been extremely conscious of controlling the production costs of their movies. Lee and Rodriquez were avid supporters of using digital technology to enhance filming methods long before it became fashionable, and have heralded the use of this new medium for up and coming African American and Hispanic filmmakers.

Speaking in an interview about “Bamboozled”, his 2000 satire about a modern televised minstrel show, Lee stated, “We decided to use digital video because we were dealing with the medium of television, and it gave us that video look. Plus, we didn’t have a lot of money” (Fuch, 2000). Bamboozled shocked critics on many levels due to it’s derisive subject matter and also because much of the film was shot using consumer quality Sony VX1000 digital video cameras. Lee said that while the learning curve of working with digital formats presented a challenge, the cost and portability of the smaller handheld cameras allowed him to create the film that he wanted at a price acceptable to the major studios.

Rodriquez echoed similar sentiments on the use of digital technology in film production. As an early adopter of computer based editing, Rodriguez noted that with the software, camera technology, and computer processing power available today, his first movie created for a total of $7000 in 1992, could be made for $70 today (Farber, 2006). He went on to say that “Technology can help you create happy accidents–you are writer, director, photographer, sound mixer. It’s not that I am better than anybody…I just know I will make it wrong in all the right ways that will charm people make it human and not make it feel manufactured. The technology makes it possible” (Farber).

Today, many of the African Americans and Hispanics who were influenced by the early independent works of Robert Rodriquez and Spike Lee are now acutely aware that they can create and tell their own stories for a fraction of the costs of their mentors. Such is the case with African American filmmaker and director Angelo Bell, whose 2009 released feature film, “Broken Hearts Club”, was promoted through Facebook and distributed on Amazon.com and Netflix. His decision to pursue this method of filming developed out of the desire to take his passion for storytelling into a visual medium and to profit from his craft (Bell, 2010b). The use of digital filmmaking equipment and Internet based distribution enabled him to achieve this goal. In addition to his Facebook and Twitter pages, Bell maintains his own blog (Bell, 2010a) for the purpose of marketing and promoting himself and his films on the web.

If the film and television industries have been transformed by the “new media ecology” (Ito, et al., 2008), it can only be said that the music sector has been irrevocably altered by this shift in technology and communication. For example, the early African American and Hispanic pioneers of Hip Hop used microphones, records and inexpensive turntables, in conjunction with freestyle poetry, to tap into their creative energies. The innovative use of common household items allowed many underprivileged African Americans and Hispanics to create their own musical renditions with limited resources. Today this process is again being recreated, but instead of using turntables and records, the tools of the trade are high-end personal computers and specialized music software.

Using computerized digital workstations to create entirely new audio compositions are only one area in which new media based technology has changed the music industry. The use of the Internet as a delivery medium, and the ability to digitize music collections into compressed and easily transmittable audio files called MP3s, has been a large factor in this transformation. The global reach of the Internet, and the negligible cost of transmitting digital information, has enabled authors to market and promote their music without having to rely solely on mainstream recording labels. The rise of non-commercial peer-to-peer file sharing networks like BitTorrent, and the commercial viability of music downloading sites like the iTunes store, have given artists the means with which they can communicate directly with their fan base.

Explaining the Motivational Landscape

Over the past decade there has been a great deal of debate over the concept of the “digital divide” and how the lack of access to computer technology and global communication negatively impacts African Americans and Hispanics. It is a widely held belief in many academic circles that access to these technologies may level the playing field for minorities and make opportunities for success and advancement possible (Sahay, 2006). While it is true that access to digital technologies is a key component of success in many areas of 21^st century society, the barriers facing the educational advancement of African Americans and Hispanics are more complex. In addition to providing access to technology and global communication, it is also important to address the motivational and systemic reasons why African American and Hispanics continue to shun higher education in numbers far greater than their counterparts from other groups.

According to Deci and Ryan’s Self Determination Theory (SDT), all human motivation can be allocated to three main motivational categories: intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, and amotivation (Deci & Ryan, 2000; 2008). Before we can determine how this theory may be applied to analyzing the motivational factors that affect the educational decisions of African American and Hispanic students, it is important to define these motivational categories.

The first of Deci and Ryan’s (2000; 2008) motivational categories, intrinsic motivation, can be described as a process that begins at infancy, where individuals are spurred on to action without the promise of external rewards. Individuals, in this case, are motivated by the internal self-satisfaction derived from the action, as opposed to being motivated by the possibility of an external reward that may be gained by engaging in the action. For example, a young musician may enjoy playing a style of music because the fast paced tempo of genre makes the songs instinctively pleasing. This behavior would be in contrast to the musician who plays a style of music merely for the financial and status based rewards gained as a result of performing. Deci and Ryan go on to explain that in spite of the fact that all humans have certain autonomic motivational tendencies, these patterns can change over time and cause individuals to deviate from the natural intrinsic motivational tendencies due to outside factors such as negative experiences and destructive reinforcement. Conversely, Deci and Ryan propose that positive experiences and constructive reinforcement throughout life can help individuals sustain their natural intrinsic motivational tendencies and, as a result, become more self-determined to achieve success. Out of all of the three categories, Deci and Ryan believe that intrinsically motivated individuals have greatest opportunity for academic success.

The second category type, extrinsic motivation, is when individuals are driven to actions solely by external factors, such as fear of punishment or expectation of a reward, rather than as a result of a natural innate sense of self-satisfaction for achieving a specific goal. Deci and Ryan (2000; 2008) hypothesize that extrinsically motivated people will only work towards achievement if a reward or threat of a negative outcome is deemed great enough to warrant taking action. An example of an extrinsically motivated person would be the child that works hard in school to get straight A’s only because their parents promised a reward for such an outcome. Deci and Ryan classify extrinsically motivated people as having a moderate opportunity for academic success.

The final category of Deci and Ryan’s (2000; 2008) three motivational types is amotivation. Amotivated individuals are at the bottom of Self-Determination Theory scale, as it pertains to maximizing opportunities for academic success. These individuals tend to avoid acting in their best interest by either not placing value on a given task, or not having the self-confidence to believe that they are capable of accomplishing the specific task. These individuals are the most difficult to motivate towards successful academic outcomes due to their negative mindset.

The Impact of Race and Culture on Student Motivation

Identifying what motivates individuals is a complicated issue in a best-case scenario. When we further convolute the setting by looking at it through the historical prisms of race, and American cultural conflict, the level of difficulty rises exponentially. The trials and tribulations of slavery, the backlashes against both legal and illegal immigration, the years of Jim Crow Segregation, the struggle to integrate into a new country and culture, the fight for civil rights, the subtleties of institutionalized racism, and the stigmas of affirmative action have all played a large part in shaping the collective motivational tendencies of African Americans and Hispanics. Utilizing the SDT developed by Deci and Ryan (2000; 2008), and understanding the historical context of the negative and destructive United States minority-majority race relations, a strong case can be made that the motivational tendencies of African Americans and Hispanics have been moving from intrinsic motivation, to amotivational over the years as a direct result of unfair treatment at the hands of the mainstream society.

Historically, African Americans have long been shut out of higher education. The roots of these barriers begin within the institution of slavery, where blacks were forbidden from learning to read and write, and arguably continued up until the nadir of civil rights movement when the Supreme Court case of Brown vs. the Board of Education challenged the concept of racial segregation through the guise of “separate but equal” education. It was only due to the outcome of this case that African Americans and other minorities legally, if not in practice, gained access the same educational opportunities as whites. While this was an encouraging development, some academics and social scientists believed that despite the civil rights movement helping to put in place structures that eventually would minimize systematic racism in education, the positive effects would not be immediate. As a result, many culturally destructive trends continued to be felt for years to come.

Although both groups have struggled to find equality and secure a place within American society, the historical landscape of Hispanics within America differs from that of African Americans. The Hispanic experience has its own unique and complex set of challenges that can explain why, when we examine their place in traditional educational settings, the motivational tendencies of some Hispanic students may trend more towards Deci and Ryan’s (2000; 2008) amotivation than towards extrinsic or intrinsic motivation. According to statistics by the Pew Hispanic Center (Pew Research Center, 2009). Hispanics have the highest dropout rate of any ethnic group in America. The Hispanic drop out rate (17%) is nearly three times as high at that of whites (6%), and nearly double the rate of African-Americans (9%). Many academics have pondered that some of the factors attributing to this ethnic disparity are language barrier challenges for non-English speakers, anti-immigrant perceptions, greater financial responsibilities as a result of providing for larger immediate and extended family members, and the effort needed to balance cultural identity against the need to integrate into mainstream society (Pew Research Center). However, while all of these challenges may present barriers to educational success and drive some African Americans and Hispanics toward amotivational behaviors, the current shift in education as a result the new media ecology offers hope that some of these students can be reengaged.

Identifying the Tools For Reengagement

If one is observant of the recent trends in urban culture in relation to the areas of fashion, speech, music, entertainment, and status, it is clear that Hip-Hop holds a significant sway over the attitudes of many African American and Hispanics. This is especially true in the urban inner cities in which Hip-Hop originated. Noted Hip-Hop artist and activist Chuck D of Public Enemy has long stated that “Hip-Hop is the Black CNN” (Mahoney, 2010) and merely reflects attitudes and experiences of many inner city minorities. According to Daudi Abe in his essay entitled “Hip-Hop and the Academic Canon” (Abe, 2009), the African American and Hispanic experience provides the theoretical framework for Hip-Hop’s origins. He continues on to say, “over the last 30 years, the hip-hop movement has risen from the margins to become the preeminent force in US popular culture”. Abe hypothesizes that one of the reasons for this dominance is because, despite the lower social standing that African Americans and Hispanics occupy in the US in relation to mainstream white society, America has always equated urban culture as “avante garde” and the “definition of hip and cool”. This impact on mainstream American culture becomes even more evident when we view the 2009 RIAA statistics on music industry demographics and learn that Hip-Hop is the second most popular music genre, only trailing behind Rock (The Recording Industry Association of America [RIAA], 2008). Further examination of music industry demographics underscores the popularity of the Hip-Hop genre across racial and socio-economic classes.

Once relegated to the fringes of society, Hip-Hop can arguable be described as firmly in the mainstream. When we consider that African American and Hispanics have primarily dominated Hip-Hop, the influence that both groups have had on shaping popular culture is difficult to contest. Academics seeking to reengage disaffected minority students would be severely remiss not to take advantage of this unique a form of popular culture in developing new coursework. The use of computerized software and hardware in the production of Hip-Hop music makes the synthesis of new media technology a natural instruction method in which to tie together the interest of African American and Hispanic students with marketable technical skills.

Countering Low Motivation: Mapping the Plan of Reengagement

Understanding the causes of why African American and Hispanic students may have greater amotivational tendencies concerning education, and what are potential motivators, would be the first steps in developing a plan of action to address and correct the problem. Based on Deci and Ryan’s SDT (2000; 2008), if academics want to reverse the negative impact of destructive reinforcement that is at the core of amotivational behavior patterns, we need to inspire “at risk” African American and Hispanic students to positive action. This can be achieved by designing a reward-based curriculum that takes into consideration, and identifies, their highest values. To offer African Americans and Hispanics the greatest opportunity for educational success, the ultimate goal of the curriculum would be to move these “at risk” students from the amotivational, to the extrinsic, to finally the intrinsically motivated behavior patterns highlighted in the SDT.

Phase one in designing a plan to combat low motivation in underperforming African American and Hispanic students is to create a curriculum developed within the confines of a supportive and nurturing environment. This nurturing classroom environment is needed to offset the lack of self-esteem and confidence that is usually inherent within those who trend towards amotivational behavior. In short, these students need to regain confidence in their ability to succeed if they are to shift toward extrinsic motivation from their current amotivational behaviors. The next step in guiding amotivated students towards the reengagement is to make them understand the rewards, whether monetary or status based, that are possible as a result from the successful completion of the coursework. The positive benefits of this academic reengagement should be demonstrated through the curriculum in a culturally viable way that enforces the teaching of critical core competencies in the technologies required for success in the 21^st century marketplace.

However, there will always be students who don’t respond to this approach of academic reengagement. In these situations where the student initially fails to shift their amotivational behavioral patterns toward extrinsic motivation, the new media driven course material should emphasize the possible negative outcomes if they do not strive to master the competencies defined in the curriculum. Essentially it is necessary for the amotivated student to understand how failure to perform will directly impact upon them and their cultural value system, if the shift towards extrinsic motivation is not achieved.

The final phase of the reengagement process involves encouraging the underperforming African American and Hispanic students to develop a sense of pride in their accomplishments that does not stem from anticipation of a reward, or fear of a negative outcome. To reach this goal of helping African American and Hispanic students move from extrinsic patterns to the more self-determining intrinsically motivated behaviors, the curriculum should be structured in a format that encourages students to enjoy learning for the sake of knowledge accumulation. This is without a doubt the most difficult phase of the reengagement process, as it requires a fundamental change in the way that many of these students have come to think about the traditional mainstream education system. It is for this very reason that a new non-traditional approach utilizing new media based curricula must be taken.

Turning Theory into Practice: LaGuardia’s New Media Technology Program

As the curriculum for the New Media Technology program at LaGuardia Community College was being updated in 2005, a number of LaGuardia’s institutional factors were taken into consideration. The question of how to motivate and instruct an ethnically diverse student population that has generally not responded well to the traditional teaching strategies was a main concern. The goal of the redesign was to create a program of study that would reengage disaffected learners while training them in marketable technology based skills.

To best appreciate the environment under which this redesign was developed, it is necessary to comprehend the institutional profile of LaGuardia Community College. LaGuardia is large urban community college located in Long Island City, New York, and is one of the 23 colleges that comprise the City University of New York (CUNY) system. The current 17,000 plus full time students that are enrolled at LaGuardia are predominately from poor and working class backgrounds, with learners of Hispanic and African descent encompassing more than half of the school population (LaGuardia Community College, 2010). However, while the school has a sizable African American and Hispanic student population, nearly 80% of all the first year students entering LaGuardia require some level of basic skills instruction in math, writing, English as a Second Language (ESL), or reading before they are ready to tackle college level materials. Based on the ethnic makeup of LaGuardia’s population, and the challenges facing these students, it was decided that the revised New Media Technology curriculum should be a hands-on and project-based degree that featured consistent reengagement throughout the program of study.

The structure of the new curriculum was set up to reflect elements of the SDT scale discussed by Deci and Ryan (2000; 2008). This decision was made in order to engage many of the underperforming students and help them to shift from amotivated behaviors, to extrinsic and intrinsic motivators that offer greater opportunities for academic success. Classes throughout all levels of the curriculum would be taught with an equal amount of time devoted to lecturing on the theory of new media, and similar time in the computer lab where those theories would be put into practice. This would permit students with difficulty staying focused during traditional classroom lectures to be constantly reconnected to the subject matter through hands-on exercises.

At the very beginning of the redesign, it was obvious to the curriculum developers that technology had created a new dynamic that was fundamentally changing the way in which this generation communicates. The designers surmised that the visual nature of new media was better suited to helping build the confidence levels of underperforming amotivated students than traditional degrees due to the creative and technical aspects of the discipline. Classes on topics such as video production and interactive web design, which rely more on visual acuity and creativity than on written and linguistic acumen, would limit some of the initial academic barriers facing many amotivated students. This approach would allow them to gain academic confidence as they developed marketable technical skills.
To address the concerns of how to best reengage amotivated African American and Hispanic students at LaGuardia, it was estimated that the creative nature of the new media courses would allow these students the flexibility to draw material from their own cultural and racial backgrounds in crafting digital content. By allowing students to connect their unique cultural and racial experiences to their class work, instructors would gain greater insights into the value systems of these learners and how to best motivate them towards academic success. For example, in the introductory course within the major, Introduction to New Media, students are required to complete a basic new media project that addresses a core digital competency every week. The syllabus for Introduction to New Media was developed as a series of staged assignments that increase in difficulty, from low stakes to high stakes, over the course of the semester and culminate in the creation of a student’s first digital portfolio. Since each assignment builds upon the theories and methods from the previous project, students must stay engaged in the coursework from week to week in order to be academically successful. To invest the learners in ongoing process, each student has total creative control on how to implement their weekly project in terms of design.

The final assignment for the class requires the student to develop an original creative project based on any topic of their choosing. The project can on any subject but must incorporate the material covered throughout the semester. The purpose of the staged assignments and the final culminating project is to build intellectual confidence by gradually introducing complex technical subjects, promote academic accountability by forcing the students to stay engaged, and empower learners by encouraging individual creativity and project ownership.

In addition to the introductory course, LaGuardia’s ePortfolio initiative was implemented at every level of the New Media curriculum in order to stay in alignment with the overall educational goals of the institution. Prior to graduation, students would be required to design a final professional portfolio to facilitate transfer to a four-year institution or market themselves to potential employers. During the time since these changes were implemented, students have created interactive portfolios containing multimedia web sites and video productions on diverse topics ranging from the child soldiers in Sierra Leone to the latest trends in urban sportswear. This open and creative format allows the student to personalize the course work to highlight the subject matter and issues that they value most. According to statistics on the effectiveness of ePortfolio based courses compiled in 2007 by LaGuardia Community College’s Office of Institutional Research (OIR) (Eynon, 2009), students in New Media focused classes were more likely to pass their courses than their counterparts in non technology centric courses. The pass rate for technology-based classes was 77.1% as compared to the 72% pass rate for courses not enhanced with digital media.

One of the anticipated benefits of the curriculum change was that the skill sets required to produce quality digital content would create lines of convergence across multiple disciplines such as business, mathematics, physics, technology, art, literature, music, film, and journalism. As a result, many of the African American and Hispanic students that were ambivalent towards the benefits of traditional liberal arts and science subjects, are now being prompted to discover the value in these disciplines. By incorporating a multimedia enriched pedagogical approach that enables African American and Hispanic students to merge popular entertainment genres like Hip-Hop and movies with traditional liberal arts and science coursework, they are able develop highly marketable skills while gaining a greater appreciation for traditional liberal arts and science coursework.

Examples of Successful Reengagement

To illustrate the benefits of instructing African American and Hispanic students with this pedagogical approach, the following case studies detail the experiences of two prior students in the New Media Technology Degree Program at LaGuardia Community College.

Case study A.

J. Singletary (personal communication, December 1, 2010) is a single 23-year-old African American male who graduated from LaGuardia Community College with an Associate in Applied Science (A.A.S.) degree in New Media Technology in 2009. He is currently working as a video editor in the corporate training division of a major international packaging and shipping company. In addition to his fulltime job, Mr. Singletary founded College Dropout Films after graduating from LaGuardia in 2009. College Dropout Films (http://vimeo.com/user3253499) is a consortium of independent video producers dedicated to using this new Internet based visual medium to benefit aspiring Hip-Hop artists. The name “College Dropout Films” is an inside reference between the various members of the group. The premise of the story being, that if it had not for becoming involved in digital film production, they would have all dropped out of college.
During the interview, Mr. Singletary stated that he was drawn to the study of new media as a result of the movies that he grew up watching. He was especially influenced by many of the 3D animation movies created by the computer-generated imaging (CGI) company, Pixar Animation Studios, made famous by Steve Jobs. Films such as Ice Age, Toy Story, and Monsters Inc. all played a significant part in sparking his interest in the digital arts. Mr. Singletary originally gravitated towards LaGuardia’s New Media Technology Program because it was the closest equivalent to a formal course in 3D animation that he could find at the time. In addition, the lower tuition rate that CUNY institutions charge in comparison to private universities made LaGuardia one of his only viable options for college.

During the course of his study, Mr. Singletary, an avid fan of Hip-Hop music and culture, discovered he had a significant aptitude for film and video editing. He stated that the more traditional majors in liberal arts and sciences did not interest him because he could not relate to their standardized lecture formats and content. Furthermore, he did not see a direct correlation between his life experiences and the subject matter contained within the liberal arts classes. It can be stated that he had a fairly negative view of traditional educational methods and it is doubtful he would have continued his education after high school if it were not for the program in New Media Technology.

Mr. Singletary stated that the study of New Media changed his views on education because it offered a different style of teaching and learning. What particularly interested him was the less structured and more “hands-on” approach to creating digital content. While lectures were part of the classroom organization, the lectures in new media were far more interactive. Some of the tools used to instruct students included Podcasts, special effects movies, cartoon animations, and power point presentations. The “hands-on” learning substituted task based projects for standard written exams that enabled Mr. Singletary to problem-solve and figure out methods that worked specifically for him. This individualized style of exploration gave Mr. Singletary a sense of personal satisfaction because of the freedom to express himself in the digital creations that he developed.

Despite working fulltime and pursuing entrepreneurial endeavors as the founder of College Dropout Films, Mr. Singletary is currently planning on continuing his education in 2012. His goal is to attend either Hunter College or Brooklyn College and obtain a Bachelors of Arts in film production. Examples of his creative work can viewed on his Vimeo page under his music production pseudonym, “Joey Snaxx” (http://vimeo.com/user4254885).

Case study B.

J. Batista (personal communication, December 4, 2010) is a married 26-year-old Puerto Rican male who graduated from LaGuardia Community College in 2006 with an A.A.S. degree in New Media Technology. He currently works as an interactive media designer for a New York based advertising firm creating Flash advertising banners and micro-sites.

Mr. Batista was initially motivated to study new media because of his interest in digital music production. He stated he was always fan of electronic music and had dabbled with the technology on his own. However, Mr. Batista wanted to expand his knowledge beyond his self-study efforts and believed a formal class would assist him in his goal to become a professional music producer.  His decision to attend LaGuardia was for a straightforward reason. At the time, the New Media Program was the most affordable equivalent to a formal course in digital music production that Mr. Batista could find.

Mr. Batista’s views on a traditional liberal arts and sciences education mirror that of Mr. Singletary. He found very few liberal art and science programs that spoke directly to his life experiences and interests. As a result, he described himself as fairly unmotivated towards pursuing a standard liberal arts or sciences degree and is doubtful that he would have continued his education beyond high school had it not been for the non-traditional pedagogies within new media.

While he initially was drawn to the New Media Technology Program to learn more about music and audio production, Mr. Batista developed an interest in online gaming and animation as a result of taking a Flash animation course at LaGuardia. The visual nature of Flash made it possible for him to create interactive web sites utilizing many of his interest such as graphics, movies, and music. Also, the way in which the classes were taught, with equal time given to theory and practical computer exercises, helped him stay focused during the lessons. Interestingly, during his time studying new media, despite having very little interest in subjects such as math and science, Mr. Batista discovered himself having to develop those very same skills as a result of his fascination with Flash animation and gaming. In order to create the interactive projects that he wanted, it became necessary for him to learn programming skills that made use of applied mathematics and physics to construct exciting new media based entertainment. Mr. Batista finds it ironic that he entered LaGuardia without a desire to study mathematics and now uses it in many of his interactive projects.
Since graduating from LaGuardia, Mr. Batista has started an online recording label in his spare time. Despite working fulltime as an Interactive Designer, he has not given up on his desire to be a successful music producer. His music label, Dangerbox Recordings, (http://www.dangerbox.net) specializes in Trance and Electro House music. The venture is still in the startup phase, but Mr. Bastista is hopeful that it will be profitable soon since he and his wife recently welcomed their first child into the world.

Mr. Batista has no immediate plans to return to school since the exceptionally strong demand for Flash programmers would make it difficult for him to pass up the money and attend classes. He has not ruled out the possibility of additional school in the future but he states that his current education has taken him to where he wants to be in this point in his life. Example of his work can be found on his web site (http://www.dangerbox.net/jbatista84/)

Conclusion

The benefits of the technological innovation we are experiencing at this point in history should not just be limited to enabling individuals to bank online or reconnect with old friends through Facebook. While many of us have participated in these activities and found them to be both convenient and exciting, the opportunity afforded our society by using new media based technology is far greater. We now have the ability to reshape long held negative perceptions about education and learning in some of the most disaffected and disenfranchised students within our midst.

In a recent speech on the future outlook of America’s educational competitiveness, US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan referenced a famous quote attributed to Nelson Mandela, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world” (U.S. Department of Education, 2010). Secretary Duncan was sounding the alarm that America must take immediate steps to reverse some of the destructive trends that are keeping our students, particularly minority students, from being more competitive on world stage. African American and Hispanic students have the highest dropout rates of all ethnic groups and comprise approximately more than a quarter of the US population (Pew Hispanic Center, 2009). If we do not address these educational divides, we risk the likelihood of the Untied States wasting vast reserves of human capital and falling further behind other industrialized nations.

The fields of digital arts and technology are among the most profitable and popular areas in our economy. It is quite possible for anyone with the proper training to develop a music demo, shoot a video, create an original video game, or start and promote a new business using merely a standard laptop computer. As educators begin designing new curricula they need to be mindful of cultural impact of technology and how these new mediums can be leveraged to reengage unmotivated and underperforming students. The convergence of established time-honored media outlets and new methods of hi-tech communications can make it possible for many “at risk” African American and Hispanic students to discover the benefits of traditional education in the liberal arts and sciences. In preparing these students to compete in the 21^st century workplace, it is essential that we help them realize how their unique cultural and racial backgrounds can connect to their academic experiences and place them on a successful path for the future.

References

Abe, D. (2009). Hip-hop and the academic canon. Education, Citizenship and Social Justice, 4,
263-274.

Bell, A. (2010a). About [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://www.angelobell.com/
Bell, A. (2010b). “Broken Hearts Club” illustrates new model for independent films and self
distribution. Retrieved from
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2567185/broken_hearts_club_illustrates_new_
pg2_html?cat=35

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: human needs and the
self-determination behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227-268.

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2008). Self-determination theory: a macro theory of human
motivation, development, and health. Canadian Psychology, 49(3), 182-185.

Eynon, B. (2009, January 7). It helped me see a new me – ePortfolio, learning and change at

LaGuardia Community College. Academic Commons.

Retrieved from http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/eportfolio-learning-and-change

Farber, D. (2006, September 20). Robert Rodriguez: Digital Film Making Evangelist [Web log
post]. Retrieved from http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/robert-rodriguez-digital-film
making evangelist/3646
Fuchs, C. (2000). Interview With Spike Lee. Retrieved from
http://www.popmatters.com/film/interviews/lee-spike.shtml
Ito, M., Horst, H., Bittanti, M., Boyd, D., Herr-Stephenson, B., Lange, P. G., Pascoe, C. J. &
Robinson, L. (2008). Living and learning with new media: summary of findings from the
digital youth project. The MacArthur Foundation. Retrieved from
http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/report
James, D. (2004). Profile of jail inmates, 2002. Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report.
Retrieved from http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=1118

LaGuardia Community College. (2010). Facts and Figures. Retrieved from
http://laguardia.edu/facts/20101_statist.aspx

Lee, S. (2010). Spike Lee Biography. Retrieved from http://www.biography.com/articles/Spike
Lee-9377207

Mahoney, E. (2010, June 25). The black CNN – when hip hop took control. The Guardian.
Retrieved from http://www.guardian.co/uk/tv-and-radio/2010/jun/25/black-cnn-hip-hop
took-control

Pew Hispanic Center. (2009). Statistical Portrait of Hispanics in the United States, 2007.
Retrieved from http://pewhispanic.org/factsheets/factsheet.php?FactsheetID=46

Pew Research Center. (2009). Between Two Worlds: How Young Latinos Come of Age in
America. Retrieved from http://pewhispanic.org/reports/report.php?ReportID=117

Sahay, R. (2006). The causes and trends of the digital divide. The Informational Systems Student
Journal. Retrieved from
http://www.Ise.ac.uk/collections//informationSystems/ISChannel/ISChannel2006/
Default.htm

Smith, A. (2010). Technology Trends Among People of Color. Retrieved from
http://www.pewinternet.org/Commentary/2010/September/Technology-Trends-Among-
People-of-Color.aspx
The Recording Industry Association of America. (2008). Music Consumer Profile. Retrieved
from http://www.riaa.com/keystatistics.php?content_selector=MusicConsumerProfile

U.S. Department of Education (2010, October 19). Education and International competition: The
Win-Win Game. Secretary Duncan’s Remarks to the Council on Foreign Relations, New
York City. Retrieved from http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/education-and-international
competition-win-win-game-secretary-duncans-remarks-council

• Continue Reading
• No Comments

Estrategias de andamiaje cognitivo en ambiente de aprendizaje colaborativo en línea y solución de problemas en una tarea auténtica: Prueba de un modelo

Written by HETS Admin on July 30, 2014. Posted in English, Fall Issue: October 2011, Volume II

Síntesis

Los procesos de solución de problemas, especialmente los problemas que presentan poca o ninguna estructura (mal estructurados), es una de las áreas más desatendidas por las investigaciones relacionadas al diseño de la instrucción (Jonassen, 2004). Estas destrezas son de particular interés en el desarrollo del aprendizaje adulto y la enseñanza en el nivel graduado. Algunos teóricos han propuesto el uso de estrategias (andamios cognitivos) basados en tecnologías que sirvan para apoyar estos procesos.

El presente estudio pretendió poner a prueba las estrategias sugeridas por Lin, Hmelo, Kinzer y Secules (1999), usando cuatro tipos de andamiaje (procesos, apuntes, modelaje y foro social) para facilitar los procesos de solución de problemas mal estructurados. El estudio se desarrolló como un estudio de caso múltiple, siguiendo el enfoque formativo (Reigeluth y Frick, 1999), enmarcado en el paradigma cualitativo, pero adoptando una metodología mixta. Su intención era auscultar la efectividad de los andamios en apoyar los procesos de solución de problemas auténticos del carácter mal estructurados mientras se desarrollaba el proyecto del curso en la modalidad en línea en la plataforma MOODLE. Se hizo énfasis en la herramienta del Wiki.

Los resultados sostienen que los andamios fueron efectivos en lograr su propósito. Aquellos que se caracterizaron porapoyar al estudiante en adquirir un dominio profundo, no solamente del contenido, sino de los procesos asociados a él y aquellos que le permiten monitorear su propio proceso de solución de problemas mientras aprenden fueron los más efectivos. Además, los estudiantes estimaron otros aspectos afectivos como importantes para este logro. La herramienta Wiki no produjo los resultados esperados.

Introducción

Los procesos de solución de problemas conforman un área de interés particular en el desarrollo del aprendizaje adulto y la enseñanza en el nivel graduado. Para algunos teóricos como David Jonassen (2004) el aprender a solucionar problemas es posiblemente la destreza más importante que los estudiantes puedan desarrollar. También señala que los educadores han ignorado por años justamente el enseñar cómo aprender esta destreza tan importante.

Según Ge y Land (2003) algunas estrategias han demostrado ser efectivas como recursos de andamiaje para los procesos de solución de problemas, tales como el modelado, el uso de apuntes y las preguntas guiadas generadas por estudiantes. Sin embargo, señalan que estas investigaciones rara vez han indagado la efectividad de estas estrategias en la solución del tipo de problemas caracterizados como mal estructurados, considerados como más característicos del tipo de problemas complejos que se confrontan en la vida diaria.

Un problema se considera mal estructurado si cualquiera de sus tres componentes básicos (estado inicial, operadores y estado meta) no se especifica claramente en la situación problema. Estos problemas no cuentan con metas ni condiciones preestablecidas, poseen soluciones múltiples, o múltiples brechas de solución, o simplemente no tienen solución. Su principal característica es que presentan incertidumbre acerca de cuáles conceptos, reglas y principios son necesarios para la solución o para cómo se organizan. Estos problemas no ofrecen reglas generales o principios para describir o predecir los resultados de la mayoría de los casos y requieren que los estudiantes emitan juicios acerca del problema y que defiendan sus juicios expresando sus opiniones personales y creencias (Jonassen, 1997).

Jonassen (1999) sugiere el uso de tres estrategias para facilitar los procesos de construcción del conocimiento y la solución de problemas del carácter mal estructurados en ambientes abiertos de aprendizaje, mediados por tecnologías: el modelado de procesos, el ofrecer guía y las estrategias de andamiaje. El modelado de procesos propone ejemplificar en forma conductual o explícita la ejecutoria o conducta o ejemplificar los procesos cognitivos encubiertos que la tarea de solución de problemas requiere. El ofrecer guía implica motivar, incentivar, proveer retroalimentación, dar orientación, provocar la reflexión y la articulación de lo aprendido. De las tres estrategias, el ofrecer guía se considera como la menos precisa, siendo un concepto un poco ambiguo. Los andamios cognitivos proveen sistemas temporales para apoyar el aprendizaje del estudiante y su ejecutoria, más allá de las capacidades del aprendiz. Los andamios cognitivos se orientan a facilitar los procesos de reflexión. Desde el punto de vista de los recursos tecnológicos, la integración de andamios cognitivos a la experiencia de aprendizaje plantea un cierto grado de manipulación de la tarea por parte del sistema que componen estos recursos. Los procesos de análisis cognitivos de las tareas de aprendizaje permiten y facilitan la identificación de los procesos mentales que necesiten ser suplantados por un andamio cognitivo. El modelaje se enfoca en la ejecutoria del experto; el ofrecer guía se enfoca en la ejecutoria del estudiante; el andamiaje cognitivo se considera un acercamiento sistemático para apoyar al estudiante, enfocándose en la tarea, el ambiente, el maestro y el aprendiz.

De igual forma Lin, Hmelo, Kinzer y Secules (1999) sugieren que la tecnología puede proveer un andamiaje poderoso para facilitar la reflexión tanto individual como colaborativa, de cuatro formas: a) mediante exhibiciones de los procesos, (b) usando apuntes o pistas para los procesos, (c) proveyendo modelos de los procesos, y (d) proveyendo un foro para el diálogo social reflexivo. Argumentan que un enfoque de sistemas que combine estas técnicas diferentes de andamiaje pueden hacerlas más poderosas que cuando sean usadas en forma individual. En el estudio conducido por Ge y Land (2003) ellas indican que el uso de estrategias como el modelado y monitoreo por parte del instructor pueden proveer andamiajes adecuados a los procesos de hacer preguntas, elaborar, explicar, construir argumentos, proveer retroalimentación constructiva y el auto monitoreo del aprendizaje.

La reflexión crítica, pilar del proceso transformador en el aprendizaje adulto (Mezirow, 2000), es otro de los objetivos que persigue la formación de un estudiante del nivel graduado. El poder de la reflexión en los procesos de aprendizaje es un fenómeno ya reconocido por teóricos y practicantes de la educación (Dewey, 1933). El desarrollo de la autonomía y el aprendizaje auto dirigido en el estudiante adulto requiere de la capacidad para pensar en forma racional y reflexiva, para analizar evidencia y emitir juicios; requiere, además, de la capacidad para conocerse a sí mismo y ser libre para formar y expresar una opinión; y finalmente, para ser capaz de actuar en el mundo (Tennant y Pogson, 1995). Siendo el desarrollo de la autonomía y el aprendizaje auto dirigido una de las metas de la enseñanza de los adultos, ésta favorece el fomento de la reflexión profunda y crítica como proceso facilitador del cambio transformador en su aprendizaje (Brookfield, 1995; Cranton, 1996; Mezirow y Asociados, 1990; Mezirow y Asociados, 2000). Aunque la reflexión no es un fin en sí misma (Lin et al.,1999), ésta es considerada la clave principal para el aprendizaje como producto de la experiencia (Schon, 1983).

Mezirow (1990) establece que la mayor parte de nuestro conocimiento como adultos proviene de nuestros esfuerzos por solucionar problemas que nos permitan acomodarnos a los cambios rápidos y continuos de la vida. Por lo tanto, la manera en que nosotros definimos y solucionamos los problemas se convierte en el contexto para casi todo nuestro aprendizaje. De aquí la importancia en distinguir entre los tres niveles de reflexión, al solucionar problemas: la reflexión acerca del contenido, la reflexión acerca de los procesos y la reflexión acerca de los supuestos o premisas que sostienen nuestros entendimientos, sentimientos y acciones. La reflexión crítica es aquella que tiene que ver con la reflexión acerca de nuestras premisas, la reflexión acerca de las razones, el por qué, de las cosas que hacemos, sentimos, creemos y pensamos, así como sus consecuencias.

Tanto la reflexión crítica como los procesos de solución de problemas del carácter mal estructurados, pueden ser auxiliadas por recursos tecnológicos, cuando estos sean apoyados por recursos meta cognitivos explícitamente diseñados con esa intención. Otros factores parecen incidir en la efectividad de cualquier diseño instruccional, como lo son la motivación personal y la destreza en el manejo de las herramientas tecnológicas (Negrón, 2008).

La literatura apunta hacia la necesidad de continuar explorando los efectos del uso de estrategias de andamiaje en los procesos de solución de problemas y explorar los escenarios de problemas reales o auténticos, aquellos que se caracterizan, por lo general, por ser de carácter poco estructurados o mal estructurados. Según Jonassen (2004), la literatura relacionada al diseño instruccional para la solución de problemas es casi inexistente.

La presente investigación se condujo como un estudio de caso formativo múltiple (dos grupos de investigación independientes) en la modalidad de investigación en acción, para la prueba del modelo sugerido por la investigación de Lin et al. (1999) y siguiendo las recomendaciones de Ge y Land (2003). Se quiso explorar la efectividad de la aplicación de andamios cognitivos como facilitadores del proceso de solución de problemas en el ambiente ofrecido por el curso EDU618-Evaluación de procesos y productos educativos– del Programa Graduado en Sistemas de Instrucción y Tecnología Educativa de la Universidad del Sagrado Corazón, en San Juan, Puerto Rico. El curso propone a los estudiantes organizarse en quipos para trabajar en el desarrollo de un proyecto, vinculados a una organización de base comunitaria (estrategia de aprendizaje en servicio) y responder a las necesidades expresadas por estas organizaciones, que requieren el diseño, producción y evaluación formativa de materiales y recursos educativos. El curso demanda de los estudiantes que actúen como expertos frente a las necesidades presentadas por las organizaciones, procediendo con el análisis de la situación problema, delimitando el alcance de su intervención, diseñando y delineando un producto, sometiéndolo a evaluación formativa durante cada fase de su diseño y desarrollo, y sometiendo su producto final al escrutinio y juicio público. Al culminar su experiencia los estudiantes deben presentar por lo menos un primer prototipo del producto mejorado ante la consideración de los representantes de las organizaciones para las cuales trabajaron. El contexto que se provee para el aprendizaje a través del curso es auténtico y los estudiantes deben aproximarse a los problemas actuando como lo harían los expertos en el campo del diseño de la instrucción. Los problemas que confrontan no están definidos de antemano, por lo cual son considerados del tipo mal estructurados.

El curso se ofrece en modalidad híbrida, combinando encuentros presenciales con virtuales facilitados por la plataforma de administración de cursos conocida como MOODLE y su particular herramienta de trabajo colaborativo del Wiki. Además utiliza de otros recursos y herramientas propias de esta plataforma. La investigación se llevó a cabo mediante la observación de dos casos, la primera durante el mes de junio de la sesión de verano de 2008 y una segunda implantación de seguimiento entre enero y mayo de 2009. La sesión de verano se extiende desde inicios de mayo hasta mediados de julio, pero la autorización para desarrollar la investigación solamente se otorga para el mes de junio.

La presente investigación partió de una valoración de los procesos formativos en la proposición de teorías para la enseñanza (Reigeluth y Frick, 1999). Partió, además, de un entendimiento de que los estudiantes aprenden pensando y que las tecnologías son herramientas que pueden facilitar ese proceso en la medida en que éstas se utilicen apropiadamente con esos fines (Jonassen, 1999).

Problema de investigación

Esta investigación se propuso estudiar cómo se pueden mejorar los procesos de solución de problemas auténticos y mal estructurados de estudiantes de maestría utilizando estrategias de andamiaje que asuman las cuatro formas sugeridas por Lin et al. (1999). El ambiente de aprendizaje colaborativo fue facilitado por la herramienta de Wiki en línea de la plataforma de cursos MOODLE, mientras los estudiantes trabajaban en la solución de un problema auténtico, integrando materiales educativos a un proyecto de carácter social. Específicamente la primera parte de la investigación interesaba saber: ¿Cuáles estrategias de andamiaje (exhibiciones de procesos; apuntes de procesos; modelos de procesos; y un foro para el diálogo social reflexivo) resultan más efectivas para los estudiantes al proponer alternativas de solución a los problemas reales planteados por la situación? ¿Cuáles estrategias de andamiaje resultan más eficaces en un ambiente de aprendizaje abierto colaborativo del tipo Wiki? ¿Cuáles de las estrategias de andamiaje resultan más atractivas para los estudiantes? ¿Cuáles estrategias de andamiaje favorecen el desarrollo de destrezas de pensamiento reflexivo profundo y crítico? Para la segunda implantación de los andamios en 2009, se añadió una pregunta de investigación: ¿Cómo perciben los estudiantes la efectividad de los andamios al usarse en forma integrada?

Método general de investigación

Vista general del método usado

Reigeluth y Frick (1999) plantean que el tipo de investigación denominada investigación formativa es el método más apropiado para crear y mejorar las teorías del diseño instruccional. Este tipo de investigación es una forma de la investigación en acción que tiene como intención mejorar la teoría para el diseño de las prácticas y procesos instruccionales. Su intención es orientar la práctica de la educación y su adecuación se juzga en términos de su efectividad, su eficacia y su atractivo.

La presente investigación se condujo como una investigación formativa, siguiendo la modalidad de estudio de caso múltiple, en el cual se diseñó la experiencia siguiendo las pautas señaladas por Lin, et al. (1999) sobre cómo la tecnología puede servir a los recursos de andamiaje. La experiencia se llevó a cabo en el ambiente tecnológico virtual provisto por la plataforma de administración de cursos en línea MOODLE. En la sesión de verano 2008 participaron 11 estudiantes de un total de 14. Tres estudiantes se negaron a participar de la investigación (aportar con sus datos) por diversas razones personales. La segunda etapa de implantación de los recursos de andamiaje se llevó a cabo en una sección subsiguiente del curso (enero de 2009), con nuevos estudiantes. En esta segunda implantación participaron 10 en la entrevista grupal y la apreciación de los andamios cognitivos integrados al curso. Siguiendo las recomendaciones de Reigeluth y Frick (1999), se procedió con la metodología sugerida con la intención de mejorar una teoría existente. Se hizo una aproximación a la investigación como un caso diseñado de acuerdo al modelo.

Procedimiento general de investigación

La metodología de investigación combinó diversas técnicas, asumiendo el paradigma cualitativo como el paradigma predominante, pero integrando técnicas cuantitativas en ciertas instancias del proceso. Según Hénandez-Sampieri, Fernández-Collado y Baptista-Lucio (2003), la gran ventaja del modelo de enfoque dominante es que se enriquecen tanto la recolección de los datos como su análisis. De igual manera, se presta para hacer análisis mediante la triangulación por medio de diferentes fuentes de datos. Esto aporta credibilidad a los mismos.

El presente informe recoge la investigación llevada a cabo durante ambas partes y resume los hallazgos de ambas instancias. Al comienzo de cada instancia, se procedió con la observación de los grupos para determinar el conocimiento pre representación del problema. En la primera etapa solamente se realizó el análisis de tareas para determinar los andamios cognitivos necesarios. Luego, en ambas etapas, se procedió con la implantación de los andamios cognitivos durante el desarrollo del curso y posteriormente se procedió a determinar el elemento de conocimiento post representación del problema de los equipos de trabajo y validar la efectividad general de los andamios cognitivos en apoyar la solución de problemas de los estudiantes.

Procedimientos de la primera etapa de la investigación.

Durante el desarrollo de la investigación en su primera etapa, se llevó a cabo una serie de actividades siguiendo la aplicación del método formativo adoptado. El curso había iniciado en el mes de mayo, pero las actividades apoyadas con andamios cognitivos se propusieron para la actividad de trabajo en equipo que iniciaba en junio. Para los propósitos de este informe, esta primera etapa se subdividió en tres fases que se describen a continuación.

Métodos de la primera parte

Fase 1: Análisis de tareas y propuesta de andamios cognitivos.

Como parte de los procesos del diseño de la instrucción, el diseño y desarrollo de los andamios cognitivos inició con el proceso de análisis de tareas. En los procedimientos de análisis de tareas se persigue tener una idea de cómo sucede el aprendizaje relacionado a la tarea de aprendizaje. Jonassen, Tessmer y Hannunm (1999) lo definen como “… a process of analyzing and articulating the kind of learning that you expect the learners to know how to perform (p. 3)”. El proceso de análisis de tareas siguió un formato multi métodos, combinando procesos y técnicas tanto cualitativas como cuantitativas. El acercamiento al análisis de tareas adoptado fue mucho más cónsono con los modelos de análisis de tareas sustentados por la teoría de actividad, que parte de un entendimiento del contexto como elemento esencial de este proceso (Jonassen, Tessmer & Hannunm, 1999). Esto dio curso al diseño y desarrollo de los diferentes recursos de andamiaje cognitivo sujetos a investigación.

En el caso bajo estudio, la tarea de aprendizaje requiere el diseño y desarrollo parcial del proceso de evaluación formativa para un producto educativo. Ésta es considerada como una tarea de solución de problemas auténticos en equipos de trabajo. Así que se optó por considerar, no solamente las destrezas relacionadas a la solución de problemas y los conocimientos básicos del contenido relacionado a los procesos de evaluación formativa, sino que a su vez se consideraron las destrezas cognitivas para el desempeño efectivo de los procesos de trabajo en equipo como una actividad importante en la solución de este tipo de problemas. Para el análisis de la tarea desde la perspectiva del contenido y sus procesos, se usó de los procedimientos de análisis mediante jerarquías de aprendizaje originalmente propuesto por Gagné (1985). El objetivo de instrucción primario que da base a la experiencia de trabajo en equipo se describe como: “Desarrollar un plan de evaluación formativa para el diseño y desarrollo del primer prototipo de un recurso educativo incorporando recursos electrónicos.” Del análisis jerárquico de tareas se derivaron unos andamios cognitivos para apoyar a los estudiantes en el manejo de los procedimientos y desarrollo de su experiencia educativa concerniente al objetivo del curso que orienta la experiencia del proyecto mayor.

Para el análisis de la actividad de trabajo en equipo se usaron como marco de referencia las destrezas cognitivas del funcionamiento de los equipos identificadas por Klein (2000). Estas destrezas cognitivas de los equipos son: (1) control de la atención, la comunicación y el manejo de la información; (2) conocimiento compartido de la situación o problema; (3) modelos mentales compartidos; (4) aplicación de estrategias y heurísticas para tomar decisiones, solucionar problemas y planificar; y, (5) meta cognición.

Los procedimientos de análisis de tareas jerárquicos no son aplicables a los ambientes que presentan tareas de solución de problemas auténticos, mal-estructurados. Esto es debido a que en problemas de esta naturaleza es imposible determinar de antemano cuál es el espacio del problema (Seitamaa-Hakkarainen, 2000). La solución de este tipo de problemas requiere de los estudiantes destrezas cognitivas que le permitan enmarcar el problema en un contexto particular, partiendo de representaciones inicialmente confusas y ambiguas, hasta lograr una representación de la situación que sea manejable y conducente a la operacionalización de posibles soluciones.

A raíz de esta perspectiva, se partió de la idea de que la tarea requería acercamientos multi metódicos para descifrar los apoyos o andamios cognitivos requeridos por los grupos de estudiantes trabajando en sus proyectos del curso (posición cónsona con la teoría de actividad). Se inició por determinar el conocimiento de los equipos de trabajo. Blickensderfer et al. (2000) definen el conocimiento de un equipo como el conocimiento compartido entre los miembros de ese equipo. Este conocimiento está compuesto por dos tipos de conocimiento: el conocimiento existente antes de llevar a cabo la tarea; y el conocimiento y comprensión que se genera en forma dinámica durante la ejecución de la tarea. El conocimiento pre tarea toma en consideración los modelos mentales sostenidos por el equipo antes de iniciar la tarea, sus expectativas y las actitudes que las nutren y las posibles destrezas que como equipo poseen. Partiendo de este enfoque hacia el entendimiento de los equipos como entidades inteligentes, se procedió a diagnosticar el estado de conocimiento pre tarea de los grupos. De estas apreciaciones del funcionamiento de cada uno de los grupos y el análisis de las deficiencias en el conocimiento pre tarea, se identificaron las destrezas que habrían de apoyarse mediante el desarrollo e instalación en el curso en línea de andamios cognitivos.

La situación general de los grupos al inicio de la tarea, se percibió como confusa. No tenían claro qué se esperaba de ellos. No sabían a ciencia cierta cuál sería el resultado final de su proyecto; se percibía ansiedad. Durante las primeras dos semanas, no usaron de los espacios provistos en el curso en línea para informar de los avances de su trabajo como equipos. Prevalece el entendimiento de la profesora como autoridad y fuente de conocimiento; no se percibe como parte del equipo. Se hizo evidente que la dificultad mayor de los grupos en este momento inicial estaba relacionada a la comunicación y el manejo de la información. Señala Klein (2000) que ésta es una de las destrezas cognitivas de grupos más importantes para los equipos cuya función principal es la de planificación; el desarrollo de modelos mentales comunes y la meta cognición son las otras destrezas críticas para los equipos de planificación. Más adelante, los estudiantes hicieron su Primer Informe de Progreso en reunión presencial.

A raíz de esta presentación se analizó el estado de situación para cada grupo de trabajo. Para este análisis se usó como referencia y punto de partida la escala desarrollada por la Academia de la Fuerza Aérea de los Estados Unidos (1995) para estimar los niveles de ejecutoria individual al enmarcar y resolver problemas mal estructurados. Se desarrolló una escala usando como base estos mismos criterios, pero dirigida a grupos de trabajo en lugar de a individuos. Los criterios de la escala son: estructura del problema, perspectivas personales, conciencia del contexto del problema, estructura del problema, representación del espacio del problema, acercamiento al espacio del problema, atribución de fracasos, generación de alternativas de solución, el uso de herramientas para enmarcar el problema y las soluciones, y la confianza y compromiso con las soluciones. Se hizo un recuento narrativo de las presentaciones y las interpretaciones de la profesora respecto al estado de desarrollo de cada proyecto, el entendimiento de los participantes de los grupos respecto a la naturaleza del problema, y las destrezas cognitivas de grupos demostradas hasta este momento, siguiendo las destrezas cognitivas identificadas por Klein (2000).

En resumen del análisis del estado preliminar se determinó que los proyectos se encontraban en su etapa inicial de planificación, con algunos adelantos en la pre-producción o diseño del primer prototipo del producto. Durante esta primera etapa, aproximadamente el 70% de los grupos habían enmarcado y definido el problema y presentado opciones de solución, sin ser todavía validadas contra los recursos y limitaciones disponibles para ellos. El restante 30% aproximadamente, todavía no había capturado la esencia de la naturaleza del problema que confrontaban. También se observó que los estudiantes necesitaban apoyo en las destrezas relacionadas a la comunicación y manejo de la información, así como en desarrollar un conocimiento compartido de la situación problema y las estrategias meta cognitivas que les permitirían lograr el trabajo propuesto.

Como resultado del proceso general de análisis de tareas, se desarrollaron cuatro estrategias de andamiaje cognitivo (Lin et al, 1999), con siete andamios cognitivos para facilitar tanto el dominio del contenido básico como los procesos relacionados al mismo y facilitar los procesos de los trabajos de equipo. Estas fueron integradas al curso en su forma virtual en MOODLE. Las estrategias fueron: (a) Exhibiciones de procesos (tecnologías que convierten un aprendizaje tácito en un aprendizaje explícito y evidente. incluyen la exhibición de procesos de solución de problemas y procesos de pensamiento); (b) Uso de apuntes de los procesos (se refieren a diseños en los cuales la tecnología plantea preguntas apropiadas y guía a los estudiantes a organizar, monitorear y evaluar sus propios procesos de solución de problemas mientras aprenden); (c) Modelado de procesos (donde expertos modelan los procesos para los aprendices novicios que están aprendiendo acerca de ese mismo dominio); y (d) Diálogo social reflexivo (el individuo reflexiona sobre sus propios esfuerzos y también sobre los esfuerzos relacionados a las metas de su grupo). El Anejo A presenta una tabla que hace un resumen y breve descripción de los siete andamios cognitivos desarrollados para esta investigación.

Fase 2: Aplicación de los andamios cognitivos durante el desarrollo del curso.

Los andamios se fueron desarrollando y se hicieron disponibles a los estudiantes en el momento en que la profesora los estimó como necesarios. Durante la primera sesión (junio de 2008), los andamios se desarrollaron a la par con el desarrollo del curso, en un período aproximado de cuatro semanas. Tanto en la primera sesión como en la segunda, la secuencia de presentación de los andamios se mantuvo igual.

Fase 3: Determinación del elemento de conocimiento post representación del problema de los equipos de trabajo.

A los efectos de poder determinar el grado de conocimiento generado por los estudiantes ya lograda la representación del problema, o lo que Blickensderfer et al. (2000) denominan conocimiento post representación del problema, se procedió en forma similar a la descrita para la determinación del grado de conocimiento pre tarea generado por los grupos de trabajo. Se analizaron los contenidos de las comunicaciones electrónicas y participaciones en foros, así como los informes presenciales de progreso, la efectividad de la propuesta y las destrezas cognitivas de equipo. Mediante este análisis se pretendía poder evidenciar el progreso de los estudiantes en su proceso de reflexión y si habían logrado evidenciar ser capaces de enmarcar y proponer soluciones al problema mal estructurado que la tarea del curso les presentaba, especialmente por el apoyo brindado por los andamios cognitivos integrados al curso.

En este análisis se pudo determinar que las diversas formas de comunicación electrónicas establecidas en el curso en forma directa (foros y chats) o como formas alternas (correo-e y comunicaciones sincrónicas en MSN) fueron utilizadas mayormente por los estudiantes con los siguientes propósitos: para informar las tareas rendidas, para aclarar dudas con la profesora, para solicitar ayuda a la profesora en algún procedimiento, para reportar problemas técnicos, o para la búsqueda de retroalimentación inmediata de parte de la profesora. También se usaban para darse estímulo y apoyo entre ellos mismos, creando un ambiente de camaradería entre estudiantes y profesora.

En algunas instancias se utilizaron para evidenciar sobre sus procesos del trabajo en equipo, reafirmando así las decisiones tomadas y reflejando que habían reflexionado acerca de la naturaleza del problema. Especialmente las comunicaciones sincrónicas a través de MSN sirvieron la función de auxiliar a los estudiantes en el proceso de establecer el alcance de sus expectativas para el proyecto de clase, permitiéndoles enmarcar mejor el problema, mucho mejor que las comunicaciones del tipo correo-e. Las comunicaciones vía el CHAT también facilitaron este propósito.

Según la apreciación de la profesora, en muy escasas ocasiones estas comunicaciones reflejaron procesos cognitivos profundos que identificaran avances en sus procesos de reflexión profunda y crítica. Según Cranton (1996) se identifican tres niveles de la reflexión: sobre los contenidos, sobre los procesos y sobre los supuestos. El nivel de reflexión demostrado por los grupos se limitaba a la reflexión acerca del contenido y en algunas ocasiones al nivel de reflexión meta cognitivo o de procesos, pero la reflexión crítica o reflexión acerca de los supuestos no se evidenció en estas comunicaciones.

En la entrevista grabada en vídeo existe evidencia de cómo los estudiantes reflexionaron acerca de sus propios procesos, tanto personales como de grupo. Aunque no hacen atribución a ningún recurso en particular, hablan acerca de cómo la experiencia del curso en línea con estas herramientas integradas, les permitió auto examinarse y aceptar abiertamente su responsabilidad por su propio aprendizaje. He aquí algunas muestras editadas de estas intervenciones en la entrevista grabada: “Esto de trabajar a distancia es algo novedoso… y muchas veces tendemos a resistirnos al cambio…” Otra estudiante señaló: “Al ser la primera vez que tomamos cursos en línea…nosotros tenemos que estar más en la disposición de tomar estos cursos y a la vez de orientarnos de cómo tomarlos…” Finalmente otro de los estudiantes señaló: “Tenemos que ser más proactivos en este tipo de cursos y cambiar paradigmas…Tenemos que ser más proactivos y más abiertos…romper paradigmas, ¡que no es fácil!”

Es evidente que los grupos incursionaron en procesos de reflexión, llevándoles a desarrollar un conocimiento compartido acerca de la tarea. Los procesos de reflexión individual se reflejaban en los procesos de grupo.

Se tuvo evidencia del grado en que los estudiantes lograron enmarcar y proponer soluciones al problema mal estructurado y el reconocimiento de la incertidumbre y ambigüedad. La siguiente comunicación a través del correo-e evidencia el tipo de situaciones que los estudiantes confrontaban en el proceso de enmarcar el problema mal estructurado: “Reconozco que al comienzo de cualquier curso, cada arranque, tiende a ser un poquito estresante, un poquito pesado, porque en ocasiones tú no tienes claro al 100% lo que tú esperas y posiblemente lo que tú esperas no es lo que es o lo que esperas es lo que es, pero no tienes seguridad de cuál va a ser el rumbo que vas a tomar…” Aquí se evidencia cómo este estudiante ha capturado la naturaleza incierta del problema auténtico que se le presenta. Desconoce el estado inicial de las cosas, desconoce con certeza lo que se espera (estado meta) o, de tener claro la meta deseada, las operaciones que han de llevarse a cabo son desconocidas también.

En ocasiones, confrontaban dificultades en poder articular las expectativas del proyecto de clase con las expectativas manifestadas por los representantes de las Organizaciones. Se sentían ansiosos y buscaban articular la multiplicidad de expectativas con los recursos de los cuales disponían. La propuesta de evaluación, según fue presentada en el WIKI disponible para ello, fue evaluada usando una rúbrica diseñada a estos fines (Anejo B).

Cuando se combinan en triangulación las observaciones hechas durante la presentación del informe de la propuesta, las comunicaciones asincrónicas y sincrónicas, y los resultados de la evaluación usando la rúbrica, es evidente la consistencia entre estas observaciones. Los estudiantes en su mayoría lograron enmarcar adecuadamente el problema y proponer una solución adecuada, según facilitados por los andamios cognitivos desarrollados para el curso. Aún así, a pesar de sus avances, recurrían a la autoridad representada en la profesora como proceso de validación de sus posturas y acciones. Son estudiantes auto-dirigidos, pero no independientes. El curso lo toman en su segundo o tercer trimestre en el Programa y para muchos la estrategia de enseñanza adoptada en el curso entra en conflicto con el paradigma de enseñanza y aprendizaje al que están acostumbrados. También para muchos es su primera experiencia trabajando en el contexto de aprendizaje en línea.

Resultados de la determinación de la efectividad de los andamios cognitivos (junio de 2008)

La determinación de la efectividad, la eficacia, el atractivo y la profundidad de los andamios fue el foco principal de esta investigación. Además interesaba saber cómo funcionaban estos recursos en un ambiente de aprendizaje abierto colaborativo del tipo Wiki y cuáles favorecían el desarrollo de destrezas de pensamiento reflexivo profundo y crítico. Para facilitar el proceso de establecimiento de consistencia en la interpretación de los resultados obtenidos para contestar las preguntas de investigación, se procedió a triangular tres fuentes de datos. El proceso de triangulación es una de las técnicas que aumenta la credibilidad de los datos en la investigación formativa. Se usaron tanto fuentes de datos cualitativas como cuantitativas. Para llevar a cabo la triangulación se tomó la encuesta de la primera parte de la entrevista realizada en la última sesión de clases como una primera fuente de datos; la segunda parte de la entrevista consistente en preguntas de contestación libre, se convirtió en la segunda fuente de datos; y las diversas comunicaciones en línea (chats, foros, correos-e y conversaciones sincrónicas en MSN) como la tercera fuente de datos.

Efectividad, eficacia, atractivo y profundidad de los andamios.

Para la primera fuente de datos se usó una escala de siete puntos para cuatro categorías generales o atributos de los andamios cognitivos. Las cuatro categorías o atributos fueron: su efectividad (entendida como el grado en que el andamio logró la intención para la cual fue propuesto), su eficacia (entendida como el grado de esfuerzo, energía y tiempo requerido por este andamio en relación a su efectividad), su atractivo (entendido como cuán agradable resultó ser el andamio), y su profundidad (entendida como el grado en que logró estimular pensamientos reflexivos profundos y críticos). En la segunda parte de la entrevista, los participantes evaluaron libremente los andamios. Se llevaron a cabo cuatro rondas de discusión, orientando cada ronda con una pregunta guía o una combinación de preguntas simples. A continuación se presentan los resultados obtenidos de esta triangulación.

La Tabla 1 demuestra que los andamios del tipo exhibición de procesos (uno y cuatro) y los del tipo apuntes de procesos (tres y seis) fueron considerados por los estudiantes como más efectivos, eficaces, atractivos y profundos. Estos alcanzaron sobre un 90% en valor absoluto de la escala total. Muy cerca siguieron los andamios dos y siete, con un porcentaje de valor absoluto en la escala total sobre 80%. El andamio que pareció no alcanzar un porcentaje alto en la estimación de los estudiantes fue el andamio cinco, con un 75% en valor absoluto de la escala total. Esto puede haberse debido a que estos recursos se instalaron un poco tarde y los estudiantes no supieron cuál era su verdadera función. Los andamios del tipo exhibición de procesos y de apuntes de procesos resultaron ser los más efectivos.

Tabla 1

• Continue Reading
• No Comments

Integrated Learning and the Value of VALUE Rubrics

Written by HETS Admin on July 30, 2014. Posted in English, Fall Issue: October 2011, Volume II

Background

We are engaged in nothing less than an effort to change the focus of the national conversation from artificial, shorthand indicators of learning to something that reflects the shared work and understanding of faculty members and academic professionals across campuses”

 –Terrel L. Rhodes

The Association of American Colleges & Universities focuses its approach on student learning outcomes through its LEAP (Liberal Education America’s Promise) VALUE (Valid Assessment of Undergraduate Education) Rubrics, a set of general education rubrics developed by faculty groups across the country looking internally at common general education outcomes. The process for developing the rubrics emerged from “Principles of Excellence” developed by a leadership council of educators, which include:  “giving students a compass (focus each student’s plan of study on achieving the essential learning outcomes–and assess progress), teach the arts of inquiry and innovation, connect knowledge with choice and action, assess students’ ability to apply learning to complex problems” (AAC&U).  The internal yet cross-national look at refined student outcomes through the VALUE rubrics has the potential to measure student outcomes across campuses, across classrooms and longitudinally through multiple iterations.

As one of 12 community colleges named by the AAC & U and MetLife as Giving a Roadmap: Enrollment to Engagement in Educational Achievement and Success Campuses, Queensborough Community College was invited to apply to the Collaborative on Authentic Assessment of Learning (CAAL):pilot, and  was accepted to participate.”  CAAL is currently being developed to provide a virtual community where institutions can upload, share, and discuss their campus assessment results using the VALUE rubrics. This collaboration among e-portfolio vendors and campuses is intended to expand communication across campuses regarding common instruments, compelling findings, potential benchmarks for student success, and best practices of assessment using rubrics and e-portfolios.” Queensborough was tasked to score the Integrative Learning Value Rubric on 100 student work samples. The scores and samples will be placed in a repository.Queensborough’s “Roadmap” activities, made possible by the Freshman Academy structure launched in 2009, will therefore be deepened and better supported, as the current student learning outcome work is currently being implemented as a teaching and learning tool as much as an assessment tool in small interdisciplinary faculty cohorts on campus approaching high impact strategies . The detailed attention to naming principles of excellence and general education outcome rubrics as in the LEAP VALUE project offer the opportunity for a culture of evidence that allows for a reflection process that focuses on student learning, as well as partnerships with business groups and state officials to ensure not only greater access but greater success in United States higher education and the workplace.Through the use of rubrics, students, notably historically underserved and first generation college students, are given a clear outline of expectations, assisting them in the achievement of the learning outcomes which will enable them to complete their educational goals.

Organizing a First Year Experience:

Queensborough Community College’s goal is to provide an academic environment that strengthens students’ commitment and makes it possible for them to graduate or complete their goals in a timely manner. In the fall of 2009, after 8 years of preparation Queensborough launched the Freshman Academies. All first-time, full-time students are enrolled in one of six Freshman Academies based upon his/her chosen field of study. The six Freshman Academies are Science, Technology, Engineering and Math; Liberal Arts; Visual and Performing Arts; Education; Health Related Sciences; and Business.  What is different about Queensborough’s Freshman Academies is that it is a scaled-up and institutionalized effort for activities which rarely move beyond the pilot stage and rarely reach the least prepared student, and concentrate all services into six academies for all first-time, full-time freshmen.    The Freshman Academies are mandatory for all 3241 first-time, full-time freshman who enrolled at this open access community college of the City University of New York during the fall 2009.

Academic Enhancement: High Impact Strategies & Integrated Learning:

The academic enhancement initiative centers on the directed focus of high impact classroom strategies in the first 30 credits. George Kuh, who first identified high impact practices through a study of the National Survey of Student Engagement (2008) writes. “The results of participating in these high-impact practices are especially striking for students who are further behind in terms of their entering academic test scores.  The benefits are similarly positive for students from communities that historically have been underserved in higher education.”

At Queensborough, the high impact strategies for freshman include cornerstone courses, e-portfolio, learning communities, service learning, and writing intensive courses.

1. 1.      Cornerstone Courses are introductory courses that teach general education skills of communication, critical thinking, organization and development of values.
2. 2.      e-Portfolio is a personalized, electronic archiving system which allows students to express their educational goals and see their own progress as a student as they move through college. It can also incorporate social networking.
3. 3.      Learning Communities are two courses taught by two different professors which are linked by a theme.  The same students are in each of the classes.  These classes assist students in seeing connections between disciplines, and help them get to know their fellow students and professors.
4. 4.      Service Learning employ class assignments that take students’ work out into the community.  Students learn more about the subject they are studying while making an impact outside the classroom, encouraging civic engagement.
5. 5.      Writing Intensive Courses are specifically designed to improve students’ writing ability through all the academic disciplines.  Two writing intensive courses are required to graduate.

All five of the high impact strategies had been adopted by faculty members before the launching of the academies.  The academies initiative has served to target, promote and scale up the high impact strategies, as well as to examine best practices and general education objectives in relation to those strategies.  As students began to hone an academic identity by virtue of membership in one of six academies based on field of major interest, the role of participating faculty expanded beyond individual discipline identifications into the multidisciplinary academies.  Greater faculty consciousness of general education and the students’ complete academic paths has been achieved through efforts to implement and assess high impact strategies on a larger scale.

To support and promote the high impact strategies and co-curricular activities, as well as to serve as a communicative bridge to the Freshman Coordinators (Student Affairs personnel described as “relationship guides” who provide enhanced advisement and referral to freshman), a group of faculty leaders have emerged who serve as Faculty Coordinators, Learning Outcomes Facilitators and Basic Education/Developmental Mathematics.  The faculty leaders meet regularly with freshman coordinators and participate in Freshman Orientation and other Academy gatherings with students. They also facilitate interdisciplinary faculty cohort groups which meet throughout the semester to discuss best practices as well as to support the development and implementation of cross cutting general education rubrics.  The General Education Objective rubrics, which focus on speech, reading, writing and quantitative illiteracies served not only as assessment tools, but as a method of communication of expectation and goal setting for students in the classroom.

By Fall 2010, the Learning Communities Initiative began to implement the Integrated Learning VALUE rubric as a tool to demonstrate student integration of the two disciplines that comprised each Learning Community. 

The interdisciplinary conversations that ensued among the faculty have created a greater consciousness of the general education objectives that had been voted on by the faculty as well as led to examinations of the  true ‘impact’ of the high impact activities in dialogue with the principal investigator of the Freshman Academies Assessment Protocol and the Office of Academic Affairs.

The feedback loop from faculty to student and among faculty have initiated greater articulation of integrative strategies in the classroom, such as the institution of supplemental education assignments in Freshman Composition, a cornerstone course in cooperation with the Kupferberg Holocaust Archive and the QCC Art Gallery.  Academy specific cornerstone courses have been created which feature readings which relate to students’ field of major interest and assist with making connections to student aspiration.  Additional academy specific courses address areas in which certain groups of students traditionally encounter roadblocks, for instance a remedial math class has been formed dedicated to visual and performing arts students which employ the arts to teach basic mathematics.  The Student Interdisciplinary Wiki Project incorporates groups of three classes which all participate in a virtual learning community through ePortfolio and shared interdisciplinary wiki assignments, which also layers service learning.  The Academies therefore are not only ensuring that students receive two high impact practices, but are attempting to ensure that the quality of these experiences are relevant and memorable. The Student Wiki Interdisciplinary Group began using the Integrated Learning Rubric in Spring 2011, attempting to demonstrate the active reflection on interdisciplinary connections that was inherent in that practice. In Summer 2011, the initiative “Moving Ahead with ePortfolio” incorporated a longitudinal exploration of the Integrated Learning VALUE rubric in classes using ePortfolio integrative learning assignments.

 As a result of the constant evolution of the high impact practices in their emphasis on interdisciplinarity, experiences beyond the five named high impact strategies occur through the vehicle of the Freshman Academies, such as diversity/global learning, common intellectual experiences and collaborative project based learning, which have also been named as high impact practices by George Kuh (2008).

The VALUE Rubric and Integrated Learning

The VALUE Rubrics reflect the emphasis the academy places on the ability to analyze and integrate knowledge in a variety of ways–                                                                                                       Terrel L. Rhodes

The definition of integrated learning on the VALUE rubric is: “An understanding and a disposition that a student builds across the curriculum and co-curriculum, from making simple connections among ideas and experiences to synthesizing and transferring learning to new, complex situations within and beyond the campus.” Integrated learning can take place when assignments develop students’ ability to synthesize knowledge and make connections, increasing the potential for personal success, social responsibility and civic engagement. Structures, assignments and environments where the exchange of experience and understanding is encouraged cultivates the opportunity for integrative learning, and is embodied in Queensborough’s practices of Service Learning, Learning Communities and the Student Wiki Interdisciplinary Group.

The rubric holds five dimensions:      

1. 1.       Connections to Experience, in which student connects relevant experience and academic knowledge
2. 2.       Connections to Discipline, in which student sees (makes) connections across disciplines and perspectives
3. 3.       Transfer in which student adapts and applies skills, abilities, theories, or methodologies

      gained in one situation to new situation

1. 4.       Integrated Communication
2. 5.       Reflections and Self-Assessment in which student demonstrates a developing sense of self as a learner, building on prior experiences to respond to new and challenging contexts (may be evident in self-assessment, reflection, or creative work).

Performance gradients begin at zero, in which there is no demonstration of a dimension, and then are staged on level 1 as benchmark, the learning skills and abilities among beginning students, levels 2 and 3 as milestones, which suggest key characteristics of progressive learning, and level 4 as capstone, which reflect achievement for the specific criterion for a student who graduates with a BA.

The Collaborative for Authentic Assessment of Learning Pilot Process at Queensborough

The purpose of the Collaborative for Authentic Assessment of Learning pilot was to gather information on how the process of gathering student work samples and scoring the rubric would interact with the life of the colleges which participated. 

Queensborough initiated a call for faculty participant / student permission forms collected along with their work samples –de-identified through an anonymous numbering system. The permission template provided by the pilot facilitator did not ask demographic information and first generation college status, and it was discovered that there was no database which collected first generation status, so a second round of student work was collected and a more extensive permission form was used.  Student work in the Honors Program and students in the Student Interdisciplinary Group from Basic Educational Skills in Reading and Writing, Freshman Composition and content courses in Chemistry, Math, Art History, Business and the Health Sciences comprised the first group of samples collected.   In addition, a second round of samples were collected from a homogenous group of students all  participating in the University Summer Immersion Program which the City University of New York provides for incoming students, all of whom were asked a series of reflective questions. 

Two separate scoring sessions were held, the first by a group of paid faculty which scored work samples from the honors students and Student Wiki Interdisciplinary Group, the second by tutors from the Basic Educational Skills learning center which scored the reflective essays.  The brief training and norming session was met with enthusiasm and vigorous discussion which led to consensus as the understanding and dialogue around the Integrated Learning rubric grew.

Preliminary Observations

Work samples had been gathered based on proximity—both the honors program and the Student Wiki Interdisciplinary Group had called for artifacts for demonstration of student learning, so it was an efficient form of collection for the purposes of the study.  It was clear from the results that the integrative nature of the Student Wiki Interdisciplinary Group assignments held prompts which led to higher levels of evidence of integrative learning, particularly in the dimensions of Connections to Experience and Reflection and Self-Assessment.  Some students in that group had also been introduced to the rubric in the classroom, and the higher scores suggest that inviting students to consider the learning outcomes of the class and providing articulation of what constitutes the ultimate goals in the assignment increases their ability to demonstrate the outcomes sought. The summer immersion pre-college students predictably scored at zero or benchmark levels. 

Additional qualitative information emerged from a faculty reflection on the process, in which themes of faculty’s deeper understanding of integrative and applied learning emerged from the process of calibrating the rubric and discussing the dimensions with each other. Said one faculty scorer, “Professor L.’s comment made me understand the difference between ‘connection to experience’ and ‘reflection,’” Another faculty member wrote, “I appreciated the time spent in groups collaborating on the scoring process—I now have a better understanding of integrative learning.”  A theme emerged in the reflections that faculty would welcome more such opportunities to dialogue on pedagogy. Based on this small sample, it may be suggested that faculty participating in interdisciplinary faculty development may uncover evidence of integrative and applied learning when implementing the rubric in their classrooms, as well as approach those competencies in their classroom informed by their development activities.

Reference List

Association of American Colleges & Universities.  VALUE: Valid assessment of learning in

undergraduate education. Retrieved on April 12, 2011 from

 http://www.aacu.org/value/index.cfm.

Association of American Colleges & Universities. Collaborative for authentic assessment of

learning. Retrieved on June 18, 2011 from: http://www.aacu.org/caal/index.cfm

Kuh. George D. (2008). High-Impact Educational Practices: What they are, who has

access to them, and why they matter. Association of American Colleges and Universities. Retrieved on July 18, 2010 from www.aacu.org.

Rhodes, T.L.  (2010). Assessing outcomes and improving achievement: Tips and tools for using

            rubrics. Washington D.C:  Association of American Colleges and Universities.

 By: Geralyn Marchisello, MSOL and Michele Cuomo, MFA

Queensborough Community College

• Continue Reading
• No Comments

Minority Student Access in the Online Environment

Written by HETS Admin on July 30, 2014. Posted in English, Fall Issue: October 2011, Volume II

Abstract

Using registration and transcript data, the authors explored differences in online course enrollment across different student groups.  This study revealed that minority students do not enroll in online courses to the same extent as their White student peers, but the effect size for the difference in participation rates was small.  However, the actual difference between minority students online vs. face-to-face enrollment was five percentage points, a difference equivalent to about 150 minority students per year, given the College’s current enrollment rates, so the impact of this small difference is not insignificant.  An even greater issue is that Black and Hispanic students, regardless of the course delivery medium, continue to have lower G.P.A. s than their White and Asian/Pacific Islander (PI) student peers.  This finding reinforces prior research that suggests Black and Hispanic student groups need additional support in order to be successful in college, and that greater recruitment efforts for online courses are needed for all minority groups. 

Prior research has also shown that students who enroll in online courses at the college have higher G.P.A.’s than students who enroll in face-to-face courses; however, this study reveals a notable exception to this pattern.  Black, Hispanic and White students who select online courses are better prepared (as denoted by G.P.A.)  than students who select face-to-face courses, suggesting that the weaker students in these groups are influenced by academic experience in their decision not to enroll in online classes.  Among Asian/PI students, however, there is no significant difference between students who select face to face versus online courses, suggesting that there are differences in the factors that determine online enrollment in this group compared to others.  This leaves open some important questions about online enrollment and its relationship to student G.P.A. among different ethnic groups.  In this case, why are Asian/PI students with higher G.P.A.’s choosing not to register for online courses at the same rate as students from other ethnic groups? 

Introduction

With recent social and economic changes in the United States, higher education has never been in greater demand.  College enrollments in the fall of 2008 increased at rates not seen in the past 40 years, led by growth in community colleges, increased enrollment of minority students and the rise of online classes.   Overall enrollment in community colleges in 2008 grew 11%, continuing their mission to provide access for minorities, students of lower socio-economic status and those students not served by traditional four year colleges and universities (Shannon & Smith, 2006).  Minority student enrollments in higher education that year, particularly Hispanic and Black students, increased 15% and 8% respectively, continuing a trend of higher high school graduation rates and college enrollments for these populations (Fry, 2010).  

Faced with unprecedented demand, yet also constrained by economics and space, colleges are responding by offering more courses online. Unlike in the past, when colleges added to their existing bricks and mortar to meet demand and a mature community college system was described as one in which 90-95% of the population resided within 25 miles of the campus, today’s community colleges no longer define themselves by geographic limitations, and facing fiscal constraints, look to technology to expand course offerings (Cohen and Brawer, 1996; Jones, 2003).    The result is an explosion in online course enrollments, surging more than 20% in the last school year alone and outpacing higher education enrollments overall for the past seven years (Allen & Seaman, 2011).

Providing another pathway to higher education, online learning courses have become a core feature of services offered at most colleges and universities (Downes, 2005).  Leading the way in this method of instructional delivery are public community colleges, with nearly all community colleges currently offering some form of online education (Parsad, Lewis & Tice, 2008).  Community colleges as early adopters is not surprising, as online learning has been touted as a potential agent of social change, offering minorities an opportunity to attain previously inaccessible education while addressing the unique needs of underrepresented, isolated and frequently marginalized cultures (Langier, 2003).  Students from minority cultures have been shown to exhibit feelings of isolation from the majority culture found on most campuses (Enger, 2006; Langier, 2003) and online learning may offer a social process that can allow students and faculty to transcend cultural barriers. 

However, the promise of online learning for traditionally underrepresented groups is under-researched and perhaps not being realized.  Buzzetto-More & Sweat-Guy (2006) conducted an extensive review of the literature that revealed that there is a substantial lack of research focusing specifically on Black college students with respect to online learning.  Additionally, there is relatively little research on Hispanic college students in the distance learning environment, and what is available suggests that community college online learners are typically not of Hispanic origin (Halsne & Gatta, 2002).   And at least one study found that ethnicity was not a factor in online course completion (Aragon & Johnson, 2008), however, these results have not been substantiated with further research. Overall, despite the rapid growth in online course offerings and the large numbers of community college students coming from traditionally underrepresented groups, there is very little knowledge about enrollment patterns in online courses in general (Frankola, 2001; Maxwell, 2003), and of minorities at community colleges in particular.  It seems clear from the gap in the literature that not enough is known about inclusiveness in online learning and that research is needed to guide potential interventions. 

Purpose of the Study

Instruction which relies heavily on technology may appear to be culturally neutral but in fact may make assumptions based on the dominant culture.  The internet is dominated by both English language and Western ideologies, and can also emphasize learning autonomy, all of which might disadvantage students whose identity is with a non-western culture or a culture which encourages cooperative learning or relies on external referents (Chen, et al., 1999; Joo, 1999).  African American and Hispanic cultures are more field dependent (reliant on external referents) for example than Anglo-Americans, even though all three groups may have been raised in close geographic proximity to one another (Duroyde and Hildreth, 1995).  Given the rise of online learning at the community college level, combined with high minority populations as enrollees, it is important  to address differences in student demographics in order to determine if the rise of online courses offers the intended goal of equity and inclusion. This study seeks to assess if students from traditionally underrepresented groups are accessing online courses, specifically:

• ·         Do Black and Hispanic students have lower enrollment rates in online courses, once G.P.A., course and instructor are controlled?
• ·         To what extent does prior college success, as measured by G.P.A., interact with ethnicity to predict online enrollment?

If there are differences in access for minority groups in online learning, it lends support to the argument that the digital divide is still a valid educational concern in higher education and that online learning may not yet be meeting the unique learning needs of minority students. Such a finding could have great impact on directing attention to culturally-sensitive online course design, the need for targeting recruitment efforts and the need for providing additional support services for traditionally underrepresented students who enroll in online courses.

Review of the Literature

The Digital Divide

For many years, interest has focused on the digital divide, which is “patterns of unequal access to information technology, based on income, race, ethnicity, gender, age and geography” (Mossberger, Tolbert & Stansbury, 2003, p.27).  During the last two decades, research has supported the existence of a digital divide in schools within the United States, with higher-needs schools typically having less access to technology than their lower needs counterparts (Chapman, Masters & Pedulla, 2010).  Within schools, data indicate disparities with traditionally underrepresented students, particularly African-American and Hispanic populations. In addition to access, ethnic differences in online interactions have been noted as a factor (Shachaf & Horowitz, 2006; Raymond & Blomeyer, 2007).

There are, however, a number of researchers who suggest that the digital divide is “disappearing on its own” (Compaine, 2001, p.334).  They point to data that poor families are adopting the internet at a faster rate than rich families as support for minimizing government and educational intervention or data which shows internet use in the U.S. growing faster among Blacks and Hispanics than among Whites and Asians (U.S. Department of Commerce, 2002). Yet, this contention may not be accurate.  Recent U.S. statistics indicate that ethnic background and other demographic characteristics still have substantial impact on the availability and use of computers by students outside of the school classroom (Morgan & VanLengen, 2005).  Blacks and Hispanics are less likely to have computers in the home than either Whites or Asians, a disparity which is even greater among children than adults. The leading causes for this disparity are education and income (Fairlie, 2007).

Regardless of the debate on the digital divide, there is no debate that minority students, particularly Hispanic and African American students, attend college at a lower rate, and graduate at a lower rate, than their White peers. Among students who began at a two-year college, Black and Hispanic students had the lowest rate of degree attainment after six years, at 28% and 34%, compared to an overall degree attainment rate of 41% (NCES, 2003).  Given this disparity in graduation rates, the increase in community college enrollments led by minority students, and the growth of online enrollments, more data on minority student enrollment in the online environment is crucial in order to better understand, and meet, the needs of different student populations.

Black and Hispanic Students in Higher Education

During the last three decades, college enrollments among Black and Hispanic students rose significantly.  The biggest gainers were Hispanic students, who accounted for 4% of college students in 1976, and 11% in 2007.  Black student enrollment also grew, from 9% to 13% during the same time period (U.S. Department of Education, 2009a).  Yet despite gains in access, graduation rates for these student groups lags behind that of their White student peers.  For students who began college between 1996 and 2004, degree completion rates among Black and Hispanic students at both two-year and four-year colleges were lower in every cohort.  Graduation rates were measured at 150% of the time required to complete the degree, or in the case of community colleges at 3 years versus 2 years.   The lowest graduation rates were at public two-year institutions, much like the one in this study.  For the most recent cohort, only 20% of students nationally received either a degree or certificate in three years, with Black and Hispanic students faring much worse at 11.5% and 15% respectively (U.S. Department of Education, 2009b). 

Grade Point Average as a Predictor of Student Success

Several researchers (see Rovai, 2003 for a review) have noted a significant relationship between previous academic performance (as denoted by G.P.A.) and completion of online learning courses.  Some studies point to a lingering effect of poor first-year college performance, with a very high risk of drop out if students have a first-year G.P.A. below 2.0 (Nora, Barlow and Crisp (2005).  This is supported by research by Diaz (2002), who found that successful students in an online course had a higher average G.P.A. prior to enrollment (avg. G.P.A. = 3.02) than unsuccessful students (avg. G.P.A. = 2.25) and Muse (2003), who cites G.P.A. as one of several significant factors affecting online retention at the community college level.  

Background

A preliminary investigation of data taken from 2007-2008, which prompted this study, revealed that both the percentages of students of each racial/ethnic group enrolled in online courses and the rates of completion for online courses by race/ethnicity show statistically significant variation among the different groups.  For example, online courses contain a higher percentage of White students and a lower percentage of all other ethnic groups than is present in the college’s population at large, and this difference is statistically significant for all groups (see Table 1). 

These preliminary data suggest that further research is necessary in order to determine if students in certain minority groups truly are enrolling in online courses at different rates.  Without a more controlled study, it is impossible for us to know if the trends in the preliminary data will hold once we control for G.P.A., instructor and course type. 

Table 1. Percentage Enrollment by Race/Ethnicity, Spring 2008

p < .05, **p < .01

Methodology

The Institution

The college which is the focus of this study is a large urban community college, classified as both a Minority Serving Institution and a Hispanic Serving Institution.  The Higher Education Act of 1965 gave special recognition as Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) to postsecondary schools whose enrollment of a single minority or a combination of minorities exceeds 50 percent of the total enrollment. The term ‘‘minority’’ is defined as American Indian, Alaskan Native, Black (not of Hispanic origin), Hispanic (including persons of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Central or South American origin), Pacific Islander or other ethnic group (Higher Education Act, 1965).  The college studied is also classified as a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI).  HSI’s enroll the majority of Hispanic students in the United States (Santiago, 2006) and are defined as “institutions that have at least a 25% Hispanic undergraduate (FTE) enrollment, with at least 50% of its Hispanic students coming from a low-income background and being first generation in their family to attend college and an additional 25% being low income or first generation” (Poley, 2008, p.76).  Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs), although they account for less than 3% of colleges and universities, educate approximately 35% of the U.S. minority population.  MSIs often have low graduation rates because their students share many of the risk factors that result in high attrition: part-time attendance, full-time employment, lack of parental support and a gap in enrollment after high school (Cook & Cordova, 2006; O’Brien & Zudak, 1998).

The community college in this study enrolls approximately 23,500 students from more than 150 countries, with 85% of students self-identifying as minority.  Black students comprise one-third of the enrollment, Hispanic students constitute 37%, Asian and White students each represent 15%.  The size of the institution studied is also noteworthy.  Large institutions, those with greater than 15,000 total enrollments, constitute 14% of all institutions with online offerings, but educate nearly two-thirds (64%) of all online students (Allen & Seaman, 2010).  The college’s mission to “extend higher educational opportunity to a diversified urban population…and to sustaining full access” speaks directly to the reasons cited by two-thirds of all colleges for offering online courses: to meet student demand for flexible schedules and to provide access to those who might not otherwise be able to attend college (BMCC, n.d.; Parsad, Lewis & Tice, 2008).

Data for this research was provided by the College’s Office of Institutional Research.  Online courses are those in which at least 80% of the course content is delivered online. Traditional courses are those which deliver the primary content orally or in writing, though these courses may have some online component (the instructor may post a copy of the syllabus online or accept assignments electronically) (Allen & Seaman, 2011).

Specifically, data was requested for 122 course sections, half of which were taught online and the other half of which were taught face-to-face.  The online course sections in this data set were chosen from a larger pool in the following way:  First all online courses taught at the college from 2004-2010 in either the fall or spring semester were identified.  Next, the list of courses were reduced to include only those course sections for which the same instructor taught the same course both face-to-face and online in the same semester.  Then the selection was further limited to only those courses for which there were at least three semesters during which pairs of online and face-to-face course sections were taught by the same instructor.  A wide distribution of courses that covered both upper and lower level courses in career, liberal arts, STEM and non-STEM disciplines across a distribution of course subjects were identified.  Then, from this selection of courses, a random number generator reduced the number of courses until for each course there were exactly three pairs of online and face-to-face sections, so that each pair was taught by the same instructor in the same semester.  Additionally, the sample was reviewed and reduced such that no one course by discipline, level of difficulty or instructor was disproportionately represented in the sample, and to ensure that the sample was representative of the breadth of the college’s online (and insofar as possible, face-to-face) course offerings.

For every student enrolled in the courses on this list, information was collected  on the student’s ethnicity and G.P.A. at the beginning of the semester in which the course was taken.  Ethnicity is self-reported by students on their admission forms.  In instances where ethnicity is not reported, the variable is imputed by the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment (OIRA) at the University of which this College is a part.   OIRA uses a statistical procedure called Discriminant Analysis[1] to assign a race/ethnicity value to students who did not report their race/ethnicity. 

Student data was provided without identifiers and with unique identification numbers. This resulted in a total data set with 2330 participants; an overview of the dataset can be seen in Table 2. For some students, G.P.A. was missing, so the actual N for many analyses was reduced (see individual analyses for specific N).  Certain categories were reduced to a smaller number of levels so that the subsample sizes could be large enough for reasonable analysis.  In particular:

• For ethnicity, there were four categories: Asian or Pacific Islander (often abbreviated as Asian/PI), Black, Hispanic, and White.  The college also has one additional category of classification, “American Indian or Native Alaskan,” but there were only three students total in this category in the sample, so this category was removed.
• G.P.A. was treated as a categorical variable for some analyses in order for the statistical methods to be more tractable; in these cases, the following groups are used: <2.5, 2.5–3.49, 3.5-4.0. 

• Continue Reading
• No Comments

Reconstructing Spaces for Writing at an HIS: How Blackboard Transforms Student’s Writing Behavior

Written by HETS Admin on July 30, 2014. Posted in English, Fall Issue: October 2011, Volume II

Abstract

            This discussion will examine how the introduction of the online hybrid environment of the Blackboard Learning System into the traditional classroom learning site impacts the writing processes of students at a mid-sized Hispanic Serving Institution on the U.S.-Mexico border. Rather than relying on Blackboard to enrich or supplement traditional writing practices, within Blackboard, HSI students construct a new writing and learning space that is at once real and imagined.  In the HSI environment, Blackboard exists as an alternative thirdspace located (nestled) among the spaces of students’ lifeworlds. Using examples drawn from Blackboard-based writing of over 100 students, I show that within Blackboard as an alternative space for writing, students’ and instructors’ goals come into alignment creating a learning environment that allows HSI students to successfully negotiate their home, work, and educational spaces. Students’ writing behavior within Blackboard allows a substantive view into how students at a large HSI campus, which is also a commuter campus, reconstruct themselves as writers, moving toward higher levels of writing achievement in the context of this hybrid learning environment.

Reconstructing Spaces for Writing at an HSI:

How Blackboard Transforms Students’ Writing Behavior

Introduction: Writing in the Era of Cyberspace

            The proliferating integration of electronic technologies into the production of writing has changed the college writing class landscape and the delivery of college writing instruction. Where once upon a time, the delivery of writing instruction depended on handwritten drafts and literal cut-and-paste activities, electronic venues have revolutionized the way students perceive and use spaces where writing happens.  Today, it is impossible to conceive of writing instruction in spaces that do not include cyberspace “writing tablets.”

            In a quantum leap that has left the traditional classroom behind, an increasing number of writing courses are being taught completely online with student-teacher interactions occurring completely in cyberspace. It is not likely that we will ever backtrack toward the traditional (now antiquated) method of delivering college writing where students wrote dutifully at their desks and submitted handwritten essays at the end of the period. Today, when we are not in a totally cyberspace environment, we operate in hybrid spaces that retain some of the aspects of the traditional writing classroom while introducing new pedagogies and reconfiguring student-teacher interactions within the alternative space of web-enhanced teaching, such as that provided via the Blackboard Learning System.

            However fluid and innovative writing instruction becomes as new technologies reconfigure the production of writing, there are several constants:

(1) For a multiplicity of reasons, many students do not feel comfortable with writing; many overtly admit that they hate writing.

(2) A great deal of time and effort is required to produce effective writing.

(3) Students’ perception of the writing classroom as an unsupportive environment impacts their attitude and achievement in writing.

(4) For students from non-mainstream backgrounds, the traditional writing process is necessarily disrupted—and in many cases truncated—because of the forces that pull students away from full attention to writing demands.

            This discussion will examine how the introduction of the Blackboard Learning System into the traditional classroom environment impacts the writing processes of students at a mid-sized Hispanic Serving Institution on the U.S.-Mexico border.  Drawing on theories of spatiality (Soja, 1996; Reynolds, 2004), theories of writing pedagogy (Elbow, 1973; Trimbur, 2000; Matsuda, 2006), and theories of learning (Wesch, 2007; Oblinger & Oblinger, 2005; Ambrose, Bridges, Lovett, DiPietro, & Norman, 2010), I suggest that rather than relying on Blackboard to enrich or supplement traditional writing venues, HSI students, within Blackboard, construct a new writing and learning space that is at once real and imagined.  As the cornerstone of my hypothesis, I use E.A. Soja’s theory of “thirdspace,” which he defines as “an-Other way of understanding and acting to change the spatiality of human life, a distinct mode of critical spatial awareness that is appropriate to the new scope and significance being brought about in the rebalanced trialectics of spatiality-historicality-sociality,” (Soja, 1996, p. 10). Soja’s term invites us to envision important spaces metaphorically, seeing those spaces not only as physical space that is occupied but also as sites constructed by “occupiers” to perfectly fit exigencies created by that particular place/space.  By extension, there is the possibility that for spaces occupied by multiple users, there will be areas of common reconstruction but distinctly individual reconstructions for each user. This thirdspace construct seems suited to exploring the ways our multiple student users have appropriated the space of Blackboard to reconstruct a new learning site for the production of writing. I suggest that in the HSI environment, the Blackboard Learning System exists as an alternative thirdspace located (nestled) among the spaces of students’ lifeworlds where the writing process is reconstructed as students “make adjustments and compromises . . . in the process of accommodating to [this hybrid learning] place” (Reynolds, 2004, p. 14). Within this alt-space for writing, students’ and instructors’ goals come into alignment creating a learning environment that allows HSI students to successfully negotiate their home, work, and educational spaces.

The HSI Environment

            Students at Hispanic Serving Institutions defy easy categorization. Historically, HSIs evolve because they are located in regions with large Hispanic populations; however, HSI mission and/or vision statements rarely make direct reference to an institution’s Hispanic enrollment (Laden, 2001, p. 74) which means that if accommodations are to be made for this special population of students, they are made at the instructor level only if the instructor is willing and able to make adjustments. For institutions with a predominantly Hispanic population, such as my institution, the HSI designation becomes the most salient aspect of the institution’s ambiance.  My south Texas institution has an 89% Hispanic student population, well in excess of the U.S. Department of Education 25% Hispanic full-time FTE requirement (UTPA Office of Institutional Research and Effectiveness, 2010; U.S. Department of Education, 2011). Additionally, as a regional institution, my institution draws 93% of its students from the four-county area of deep South Texas known as the Rio Grande Valley—and the majority of these students live at home and commute to campus. The conflation of the commuter campus environment (where students come and go to campus around home and work exigencies) and the HSI environment (where students feel the inexorable pull of familia) creates an educational landscape that pragmatically and pedagogically embraces Blackboard as a thirdspace for teaching and learning, allowing students to triangulate the spaces of family, work, and education.

            Commuter students many times appear to be indifferent students, but they aren’t; they are “just-in-time” students, driving into campus from home or work only minutes before class starts and frequently still arriving late to class. Unlike the on-campus residents, commuter students interrupt other activities (work and family) to drive to campus, sometimes for a single class. Because their real work and home lives are off campus, as soon as the last class is over, they exit; no time is allotted for studying in the library, working in computer labs, or conferencing with professors during office hours not because they do not want to participate in such traditional academic activities but because they must attend to family and work demands. Admittedly, the commuter issues apply to any institution that draws the majority of its student body from the local community or contiguous larger region.  However, when that local community is predominantly Hispanic and predominantly working class, the learning ambiance of the HSI/commuter campus is significantly influenced by these two factors. In other words, HSI/commuter students must not only uphold cultural expectations that sometimes interfere with institutional, educational demands, but they must also negotiate the realities of coming and going to campus while sustaining normalcy in their “real” world lifespaces.

            The real world work demands faced by HSI students are a direct consequence of the way Hispanic students finance their education.  National statistics reveal disturbing details about how Hispanic students pay for college: (1) they receive the lowest cumulative financial aid awards of any racial/ethnic group; (2) they receive the lowest federal aid awards; (3) they are less likely than all other students to take out loans (30% vs. 35% of all other students) (Santiago, 2008, p. 34). Laudably, the strong Latino work ethic propels Hispanic students into the work force early so as to contribute to the family coffers and to finance their education.  My institution has no published statistics on the number of students who work while attending the university despite the fact that mandatory student evaluations of teaching ask students to fill in the number of hours they work each week; anecdotally, however, we know from the explanations and excuses offered for late submissions, for absences, and for non-submissions that well over half the students in any given class have full or part-time jobs. Many students leave the university each day to go straight to work for an eight-hour shift which puts them back home late at night, and that’s when they start their school work.  Other students work night shifts.  Others work full time jobs and secure permission from employers to leave work for a class here and there.  Others work all day and then come to campus for back-to-back evening classes starting at 4:30pm and ending at 10:00pm. Many stagger work hours around class time, frequently driving to campus for a single class and then immediately leaving to return to work.

            In addition to the work issues, there are the issues related to family obligations. Because of their strong ties to la familia, Hispanic students sometimes appear to be distracted by family issues (and they frequently are). At my South Texas university, it is not at all unusual to have absences attributed to having no babysitter, to having to take a parent or grandparent to the doctor, to having to sit with a hospitalized family member, to having to collect a younger sibling from school—the list goes on and on.  And because Hispanic familias are closely knit, a tragedy in even a distant part of the family resonates among all members; so the metaphorical and material immediacy of family considerably changes the learning landscape.  One of my first-year writing students missed two weeks of class recently because his grandmother was dying in Mexico and the whole family went to be with her. During his protracted absence, he missed so much instruction and so many assignments that he was on the verge of failing the class.  A female student missed one of our once-a-week classes, but she walked in tearfully at the end of the period: her child had been left at daycare past the closing time because the person she had entrusted to pick up her four-year-old son had failed to show up.  Child protective services had called my student as she was on her way to class. In tears, she told me, “I can just see my little boy waiting there, thinking no one was ever going to come pick him up.” Another student missed many classes because her cousins were in a horrific automobile accident. The examples are endless. While these examples are drawn from an HSI student population, clearly these problems are not unique to Hispanic students.  My point is that at a campus where the population is 89% Hispanic and almost 100% commuter, these examples are not once-in-a-while situations, but are instead the norm, calling for teaching and learning adjustments that seem to be perfected in the thirdspace of Blackboard.

            Perhaps the most distinct difference between HSI students at my South Texas institution and traditional students at predominantly white institutions is the number of Spanish dominant speakers who populate our classrooms.  The English Language Learner label is not applied to college-level students because the untested and to date undocumented assumption is that if an ELL is able to get into college, he/she has attained a level of competency in L2 to succeed in university-level work. The reality at HSI campuses located in borderland areas is that many of our students are immigrants, many of them having been in America for only a few years.  They have remarkable stories of achievement, not just in mastering English, but in succeeding in other curricular areas.  One of my recent first year writing students had been in the U.S. only since his sophomore year in high school—and he ended the course with an A!  Another student, a dual enrollment student in another FYW class, had been in the U.S. only two years; if he were an elementary school student, he would have still been considered a newcomer (Hodge, 2001).

            Most poignant are the stories of immigrant students from Mexico for whom the classroom space is promoted as a place of hope but then is transformed into a hostile environment.  One of my advanced composition students described her experience of moving from Mexico to the U.S.:

When I was seven years old, I left Veracruz, México, with my mother, big sister, and my brothers. Arriving to Texas, I knew my journey would be difficult, twice as difficult, to find a voice in a language and a land not mine.  I was no longer living in my mágico world. I was now invisible; at least that is how I felt for a few years. Mother, always told me that just . . . living in the United States was a privilege and knowing el ingles would give me power, it would put me in the race for competitiveness, and progress.

            Another advanced comp student wrote about the trauma and “otherness” of being an immigrant student, with vivid details about the way the classroom space becomes a hostile space when teachers punish non-native English speakers:

Writing for me has been very challenging especially because I am an immigrant from Mexico. Back in 1984 when I first started school . . . at “S.” Elementary, Spanish was not acceptable in class. The way the teacher would ground me was during class by either facing the wall during recess or be put in a corner in class for speaking Spanish. Learning to read, write and speak English was very difficult mainly because the teacher was always getting after me, since I did not understand or spoke any English. I do not remember having any good experiences when I did writing in elementary school. The thing that I disliked most in school was when the teacher would ask for my journal and made me read it in front of the class, which I did, but sometimes I was too embarrassed to share with the class. I went home and cried alone without telling anybody. One day I even asked my parents to get me out of school but they told me that schools in the United States will give me an excellent education.

            Certainly, not all HSI students, even at a borderlands campus, are actual ESL students (Newman, pp. 23-24). Anecdotal evidence from my campus indicates that up sometimes, up to one-fourth of our students in any given class are true ESL students, having acquired L1 literacy in Spanish by living in Mexico and attending at least a few years of school there before immigrating to the U.S. Such evidence comes to light in classes where literacy development is a salient component of the classroom discussion, such as in English, rhetoric, linguistics, language, sociology, and education courses, admittedly small classes of approximately 30 students, where conversations about literacy matter and ultimately inform the learning experience.  No institutional data is formally collected on the provenance of the students’ English language acquisition at this campus; however, professors for whom such information matters are keenly aware of the rich literacy stories that students bring to their classes and their education in general.

            Other students were born in the U.S. to immigrant parents, raised in homes with non-traditional literacy practices where the child becomes the literacy coach for the parent, and where even after several generations of U.S. residency, the family preserves Spanish as the home language.  Though born in the U.S., children from these families are raised in Spanish-only homes, so entering the school system is a traumatic experience—so scarring that years later they remember it vividly and painfully.  In a talk at my institution, South Texas writer Viola Canales, born in the U.S. but raised in a Spanish-dominant home, recounted the trauma of her first days in school: “I used to cry every morning before going to first grade. . . . School didn’t reflect my world. There was no mirror in first grade” (Newman, 2009, p. 67).

            Hispanic students, especially those with backgrounds and life circumstances (such as low socioeconomic backgrounds, literacy histories shaped by having little English language support at home, and persistent memories of the traditional writing classroom as a hostile learning environment) must become experts at negotiating the academic spaces they inhabit.  Unfortunately, in higher education, we do not readily make adjustments for students whose language, cultural background, and lived experiences do not match the hypothetical educational hegemony; instead, we assume a linguistic homogeneity that fails to take into account the linguistic diversity of our students (Matsuda, 2006, pp. 637-638). In the absence of instructor-generated pedagogical practices that recognize cultural, linguistic, and experiential diversity, HSI students must autonomously make adjustments if they are to successfully triangulate home-work-education spaces. In the context of writing in the university environment, HSI students have demonstrated remarkable abilities of adaptation as learners in replacing the traditional classroom and its traditional blackboard with the success-oriented cyber Blackboard as a preferred site for writing.

The Traditional Blackboard:  “The information is up here”

            The Blackboard Learning System appropriates the label for what used to be one of the most recognizable sites in a classroom: the old-fashioned slate blackboard (now widely replaced by the laminate whiteboard and the screen for projecting media-based lessons). If we consider the way blackboards have been used literally and metaphorically in the delivery of instruction, we can begin to move toward conceptualizing the cyberspace Blackboard as a liminal thirdspace for writing and learning for HSI students.

            In “A Vision of Students Today,” a video produced by Michael Wesch and his introductory cultural anthropology students at Kansas State University (2007), several frames focus on a teacher at the bottom of a large, tiered lecture hall, writing on the blackboard, “the information is up here.” This short, declarative statement captures the pedagogical contradictories represented by the traditional blackboard: without the blackboard, there would be no vehicle for delivering the information that students need; however, to get the information, students must be actually looking at the blackboard.  In an extension of the statement, we could almost say that the information exists only if and when it is written on the blackboard.  The traditional blackboard, thus, is not just a classroom instructional site; it is also a symbol of knowledge and learning. Additionally, it functions simultaneously as an exclusionary as well as inclusionary device, depending on whether students’ eyes are trained on it or have strayed from the focal learning site in the classroom.  Furthermore, when the teacher assumes students have prior knowledge and mastery of a concept and therefore does not put that information on the board, the students who do not have adequate or appropriate prior knowledge are excluded.

            Within the spaces of historicality, sociality, and spatiality (Soja, 1996, p. 6), the blackboard metaphorically and realistically represents the dynamics of distribution and allocation of power in the classroom.  Historically, instructors’ use of the blackboard exists on a continuum, at one extreme as a site for punctuating a formal lecture or extended lesson with occasional words and phrases that the instructor wants to emphasize to the other extreme as a site for writing an entire lecture or extensive notes for students to copy, in some cases with the blackboard completely and overwhelmingly covered with teacher writing.  (Today, in the age of ubiquitous PowerPoints, the blackboard has been more or displaced by PPT lessons, but, like the blackboard, PPT exists on a continuum from well-planned effectuality to unconsidered overkill.)

            Socially, the blackboard has offered an opportunity for students to communicate random messages, usually surreptitiously, usually anonymously, before the teacher walks in, or as a site for reminders of all sorts, always with the appended “Do Not Erase,” or as a disciplinary venue when, in lower grades, students’ names are written on the board as a result of inappropriate behavior.

            Geographically, the blackboard moves the teacher from behind the desk when he/she approaches the board to illustrate a lesson, thereby actually, physically delivering the lesson.  The blackboard moves students to the front of the room as active learners when they are asked to demonstrate learning by working out a math problem on the board or writing a sentence.  However, the traditional blackboard site is also fraught with possibilities for failure in situations when a teacher writes something on the board and asks for volunteers to answer; a public incorrect response can trigger embarrassment for the learner.  In short, the blackboard as a classroom staple has existed in multiple dimensions, with these various configurations simultaneously existing and being perceived by students and teachers in a sort of “triple dialectic” (Soja, 1996, p. 6) but always with the teacher and students positioned in real time and real space in this environment and always as a symbol of teacher authority.

            The blackboard persists as an iconic representation of classroom dynamics. Consider the students who must be moved closer to the board so they can see; this movement marks them as deficient and different from the learners who can see the blackboard perfectly well from the back of the room.  Consider the students who sit at their desks with no pencil or paper in defiance of the tacit teacherly expectation that things written on the blackboard should be copied down and saved as learning resources. Consider the students who choose to sit at the back of the room distancing themselves from the teacher—and concomitantly from the blackboard.  Historically, a student’s choice to sit at the back of the room signals resistance to the usual power dynamics of the classroom.  However, choosing to sit at the back endows the student with a certain amount of power.  The teacher, noticing the resistance, is compelled to “win over” the student, to try extra hard with this learner—or in an unfortunate turn of events, in disciplinary action; regardless, the resistance results in attention. Consider the students who copy everything the teacher writes on the board in unconsidered allegiance to the usual power structure symbolized by the blackboard; after all, if it’s on the blackboard, it must be important and must be copied.

            Consider the teacher who, in deft and powerful appropriation of the blackboard dynamics, uses the board as a way of wrenching the students’ attention away from each other and toward the teacher at the front of the room.  A scene from the movie Dangerous Minds (Simpson & Bruckheimer, 1996) offers a perfect example of blackboard as attention-getter (and power-establisher).  New teacher Louanne Johnson, standing helplessly and ineffectually in front of a class of students indifferent to her presence, quiets her rowdy class by writing on the board, “I am a U.S. Marine. Does anyone know karate?”  Later, in a verb conjugation lesson she writes, “We _____ green beans for supper,” but the noisy students go on about their business talking so loudly to each other that her voice can’t be heard over theirs.  She pulls their attention toward her by erasing the first sentence and writing, “We choose to die.” The blackboard, then, represents teacher power and student submissiveness: writing on the blackboard forces students to look toward the teacher and, at least for a moment, to pay attention to what is on the blackboard. In the case of Louanne Johnson (a white female teacher), she wielded the authority of the blackboard to reconfigure the power dynamics of the classroom: until she wrote her attention-getting sentences on the board, the students (Latino and African American), noisy, disruptive, cohesive as a group, had ownership of the class and they had no intention of letting her teach them anything or even of acknowledging that she was in the classroom.

            The distribution of classroom power traditionally represented by the blackboard is particularly relevant for Hispanic students who have to negotiate language barriers raised and maintained by the teacher.  Such barriers keep the learner silent and excluded from classroom activities and transform the classroom into an unfriendly, frightening place, as illustrated in this passage written by the student whose comments about moving to the U.S. were cited earlier:

I am seven years old, in Mission, Texas in Mrs. P’s first grade classroom.  Mrs. P. writes an arithmetic problem on the board. I raise my hand, in hopes that she would pick me. Mrs. P., unsentimentally smiles and says, “M., Do you know the answer?” I do not answer.  I stand with a phony bravado and I feel the gringo children looking at me. “M., do you know the answer?” I stand there silent, wanting the earth to swallow me slowly. My heart wants to scream, “La respuesta es ocho!!…la respuesta es ocho!! (The answer is eight!! The answer is eight)! Beginning to wish the teacher understands my sign language, I start drawing a big circle in the air. Giggling, laughing, pointing, they cannot seem to keep their eyes off of me. Are they laughing at something I did, or something I am? I return to my desk, feeling degraded, humiliated, and overwhelmed with a longing for my native tongue. Defeated, I retreat into silence for the rest of the long, lonely school year.

            The student-teacher dynamics described in this story are emblematic of the worst type of student-teacher interactions, with the learner feeling powerless, voiceless. In this story, the traditional blackboard is the trigger for the experience, reminding us that the traditional blackboard can transform private achievement or failure (for example, writing or quizzes that students produce individually at the privacy of their desks) into public achievement or failure, with potentially disastrous consequences for Hispanic students trying to position themselves in the space of the American classroom.

            The traditional blackboard, then, functions symbolically as a fulcrum for shifting long-established (frequently negative) attitudes about the classroom toward reconceived notions about learning when a new system, such as the Blackboard Learning System, is introduced.  In the context of the HSI, Blackboard positions students in an imagined-and-real space where the traditional classroom (and its blackboard) is replaced with a far more student-friendly cyberspace site in which students reconstruct themselves as learners and writers.

Blackboard as a Thirdspace for HSI Writers

            The trialectics of historicality, sociality, and spatiality of the traditional blackboard transfer easily in reconceived form to the electronic dimension of Blackboard.  In many ways, the tensions of power dynamics represented by the traditional, physical blackboard are reconfigured and elided by the cyberspace Blackboard. In the traditional writing classroom, the teacher, associated with distribution and control of knowledge, is too often perceived as a critic bent on finding fault with student writing or as a presumed expert unwilling to guide students to satisfying and successful writing experiences as the following student comments show:

The words of a first year writing student: I do not like writing because I have never excelled in it.  When I was in 4th grade, I got a 2 on my writing composition and in 7th grade, a 3 (I have always wanted to get a 4 but the stories I write are never good enough). Grammar—that’s one of the things I don’t like about writing because if you mess up on part of a sentence, every single little thing in the sentence is messed up. When I was in 8th grade, my English teacher tried to make the whole class like writing, but, with me, she failed.

The words of a junior in an advanced composition class: When I was in Middle School I had an English teacher named Ms. M. who was severely demanding and hard headed with the way she wanted us to write our essays.  It was her way or the highway; she wouldn’t let us use our past experiences when writing essays in her class.  She pretty much said “forget about what you learned in middle school and elementary in regards to writing.”  I can remember learning as a young writer in middle school to always try and write in detail and add more to the story, but Ms. M. would always put me down by saying “You’re just blabbing on and on about useless nonsense, it doesn’t make sense.”  But in my opinion that was very crucial and useful nonsense because it shows more character to the point I was trying to get across.

The words of a senior in an advanced composition class: Throughout my elementary, middle school, and high school education, I’ve carried the trauma of my writing assignments being stamped on with red, circle pen marks and never positively commented on.   Discouragement was the end result of my fourth grade year.   Frequently being told “you’re not doing this right” or “you’re not doing it the way I showed you” and having my TEACHER writing all these red marks everywhere and to top it off in front of my classmates made me a discouraged writer.  As soon as I would turn in my assignments, there she was marking my paper with all these red scribbles. Dreading to walk up to her desk!

            These students’ comments point to the long-lasting negativity associated with the traditional school writing environment, an environment in which the teacher manages the distribution and control of knowledge and students associate the writing classroom with failure.  Stories like these are, unfortunately, not uncommon in the HSI environment.  Hispanic students are taught to respect authority, especially their teachers, and to accept the judgment (grades) unquestioningly (Newman, 2007, p. 20), a situation that promotes the adversarial relationship between learner and teacher that can occur in the traditional classroom when learners’ needs clash with teacher dictates.  In the writing classroom, particularly after years of enduring “arbitrary authority” wielded by the teacher, and particularly when that authority figure is a member of the dominant white culture and the student a member of a minority group, students come to see the writing teacher as someone who is preventing them from achievement and from access to power (Gale, 1996, pp. 8-9). Adjusting this unequal distribution of power is vital to promoting students’ writing achievement.

            In the realm of writing instruction, the reconstruction of pedagogical positions endows the learner with a powerful tool for controlling manifestations of the writing process. Blackboard space functions liminally as a “real-and-imagined” thirdspace that creates “another mode of thinking about space that draws upon the material and mental spaces of the traditional dualism but extends well beyond them in scope, substance, and meaning” (Soja, 1996, p. 11). In other words, understanding of the real blackboard with its long-standing representation of the power dynamics of the classroom makes the cyber Blackboard the preferred learning space. Consider the way we position the traditional blackboard: we talk about the blackboard, with the definite article giving it a realness and a fixed spatiality in the classroom.  But, cyberspace Blackboard is referred to sans article, positioning it everywhere and nowhere; each user constructs the real-and-imagined thirdspace by bringing together exigencies of space-historicality-sociality into this new learning venue.

            Something that is missing in Blackboard is a representation of the teacher: there is no teacher “visible” when the student opens up the Blackboard site, as shown in Figure 1 (the homepage for my first year writing class):

Figure 1. Blackboard Page

Even if I included an actual photograph of myself, it would operate as an avatar, for it would be a cyber representation: I’m not really there; my “presence” is manifested by my name, course information, and assignments.  In the traditional classroom space, the teacher presence can easily dominate the space, as evidenced by my analysis of the symbolic and real pedagogical implications of the old-fashioned blackboard noted above.  But in the Blackboard cyberspace, the teacher is a disembodied presence, and that creates a new learning environment for students, albeit an environment to which they easily adjust   Blackboard, the teaching/learning space remains figuratively a “teacherless” writing class such as the ones described by Peter Elbow in his classicWriting Without Teachers (1973) in which he argued for shifting focus away from teacherly didacticism toward self-motivated writing behavior:

The teacherless writing class is a place where there is learning but no teaching. It is possible to learn something and not be taught.  It is possible to be a student and not have a teacher.  If the student’s function is to learn and the teacher’s to teach, then the student can function without a teacher, but the teacher cannot function without a student. (p. ix)

Elbow’s metatext is that the traditional, spatially fixed classroom can be an antagonistic space that interferes with the real process of writing; he suggests that based on the years of school experience which teaches students to suspect that everything they write is error-laden, student writers erect a sort of filter and this filter interferes with the “natural way of producing words . . . voice—which is the main source of power in . . . writing” (p. 6).

            Clearly, there is a teacher in Blackboard, but he/she exists only as the student chooses to conceive of that individual.  In the absence of the spatiality of the real classroom—with its traditional blackboard (or white board) at the front of the room, students desks, teacher desk at the front, teacher with the red pen—the student writer is free to create an imagined writing space. In Blackboard, students reconstruct the traditional writing process in ways that give HSI students remarkable control over achievement, accomplishment, and self-satisfaction.  The cyberspace Blackboard easily usurps the real classroom space as a traditional learning site, as a social site, and as a site in which teacher-student interactions are carried out; now all of this is productively reconstructed in the thirdspace of Blackboard.  While much of this reconstruction may reflect the “migrating” of effective classroom interactions into the online environment (Warnock, p. ix), ultimately, when the walls and limitation of the traditional classroom fall away in Blackboard, students consistently seem to reconstruct themselves as empowered, diligent, successful learners, regardless of how they may have conducted themselves in the traditional classroom site.

How Students Write in Blackboard

            Writing in the thirdspace of Blackboard pivots on three fundamental reconstructions of classroom dynamics: (1) reassignment of the space where real learning happens; (2) revised manifestations of student effort and motivation; (3) reconfigured student-teacher dynamics.

Blackboard: Where Real Learning Happens

            Since I’ve begun using Blackboard as my vehicle for writing instruction, I observed how students relocate themselves in this academic thirdspace. Two student stories, one from a colleague and one of my own, shed light on how students reassign the space of real learning Blackboard.

My colleague’s story: A student in my sophomore literature class sent me a writing question on Blackboard, but I didn’t have time to write a response before class.  I expected she would approach me in class to ask the question, but she didn’t.  Previously, she had sent me a question about one of her Blackboard discussion question grades, again a question she could have asked in class. Instead, she chose to continue her questions about this grade over several Blackboard queries. In class, she acted as if we weren’t having this exchange over Blackboard, but I still left it up to her to bring it up in class—she never did.

My story: A student in my FYW class brought to our in-class conference a writing segment I found deficient, mostly because as demonstrated by the product he showed me, he had not done his assignment.  He didn’t say anything; he walked silently back to his desk—and I went on to my next in-class conference.  Late that night, I got a Blackboard message from him:

I did put forth plenty of effort in my paper. I included a strong topic sentence and thesis, but did not expand to the 500 words. I did, however, struggle with finding solid material on which to base my essay, starting and restarting my essay several times. What I mean to say is that I in fact spent quite some time in developing what I believe to be a very strong beginning to my essay.

            These stories suggest that for both of these students the space of real engagement has been deferred to Blackboard; the traditional classroom space, perhaps because of the historical associations, seems an inhospitable place where student goals clash with the instructor’s goals, so students choose silence rather than assertiveness.  For example, my colleague’s story suggests a mismatch between instructors’ and students’ views of raising questions in class. For the instructor, questions from students signal engagement and provide an opportunity to clarify points. As instructors, we welcome questions, but probably because of past classroom experiences in which a question became an opportunity for public humiliation (and my students offer endless stories of such classroom interactions), students seem reluctant, perhaps even afraid, to ask questions. For many HSI students, in part because of the power dynamics represented by the traditional classroom, asking a question in class involves risk-taking: the instructor might label the questioner as deficient or inattentive, or, worse, the instructor might humiliate the questioner (“you should already know that” or “If you were listening . . . “).  While the instructor might not respond this harshly, an insecure student prefers not to take the risk.  My story reveals a similar situation: by rejecting my student’s incomplete submission, I created a non-supportive classroom environment; but instead of defending his effort in the classroom site, during our face-to-face conference, he chose silence, and probably felt powerless, voiceless, and angry.  Both of these writers, however, relocated themselves in the thirdspace of Blackboard as serious, diligent students, and created a cyber instructor, faceless and presence-less in Blackboard, but more caring, less intimidating, more receptive to their needs.

            When Blackboard is an option for learning and writing, the real classroom is no longer seen as the primary learning site, so much so that students avoid classroom learning interactions and defer their engagement to the Blackboard site. I come back to the need for this “deferment”—at an HSI that is also a commuter campus, the time investment of getting to class is intrusive; in many cases, students have far more important things to do than to show up for class. This reality requires adjustment on the instructor’s part: on one hand, this reconstruction appears to be a rejection of traditional delivery of instruction (and concomitant resistance to the subject matter of the course).  However, I believe this reconstruction more accurately signals evidence of students’ interest in learning and achievement.  In short, when students prefer the Blackboard site as the place where their learning takes place, it is a pedagogical plus—as long as we recognize and adjust to the change.

Blackboard: The New Writing Community

            In pre-Blackboard times, conferencing with a student on a written draft involved one-on-one class time; he/she went back to his desk to tinker with the draft and exchange drafts with classmates while I worked with other students individually. In the traditional classroom writers’ community, the conferencing and peer review contributes vitally to the sociality of the writing process: so much so, that for years, this approach has been the staple of most compositionists’ pedagogy (Yancey, 2006, p. 5). That scenario has changed dramatically with Blackboard. Although I continue to conduct in-class one-on-one conferences, students resist working actively on their drafts in class following our conferences.  Despite my repeatedly entreaties that they use our class time to refine their writing and ask me questions, they choose instead to chat with each other.

            What has happened is that Blackboard has become a thirdspace in which the writing process has been reconfigured. While as a professor I value class time as valuable for revision and on-site conferences, my commuter students see this class time as an interruption, an unnecessary wrinkle in the triangulation of their work-home-education spaces. In the context of thirdspace, the sociality and spatiality of the writing classroom is no longer a time for improving writing in the presence of and with the assistance of the professor/coach and with feedback from peers, but instead for prepping for writing by sharing stories with other writers and by incubating rather than working directly.  From my perspective, it seems that they are wasting classroom time; however, I believe what they are really doing is deferring the real work of writing for Blackboard at the time and hour and physical space when they choose to inhabit that space. In the context of the production of writing, this act of deferment is a manifestation of the student writer’s need to withdraw from the immediate situation, to close his/her eyes so as to concentrate intently on the writing task at hand and to block out influences that might inhibit successful completion of the task (Ong, 1975, p. 10; Elbow, 1987, p. 50-52). At this point, I have considerable anecdotal evidence that this deferment of true learning activity to Blackboard is resulting in increased achievement in student writing: the 100 plus students on whose writing this current study is based have shown sustained improvement in depth of thought, quality of expression, development of ideas, critical thinking, and overall engagement with their writing tasks, the sort of improvement and growth that marks the progression of student writer from novice to expert (Sommers and Saltz, 2004). (I am currently working on a study that examines the quantitative and qualitative improvements in writing evidenced in the Blackboard environment.)

            Blackboard expands writing time and space metaphorically and realistically.  For one thing, deadlines, which I now allow my students to set as a class, are no longer anxiety-inducing for them. In allowing students to set the deadline (albeit within some parameters), teacher authority is relinquished somewhat, but the trade-off is writers who are more participatory. In Blackboard, drafts and final copies and other assignments are not due at absolute times as they are in the traditional classroom.  While there is a Blackboard dropbox due time and date, the liminal space of Blackboard makes all deadlines fluid. The traditional turning-in-your-paper-at-the-beginning-of-class in the real classroom creates a fixed, rigid deadline controlled by the teacher and resisted by the student (consider all the times students skip class because they were unable to complete the assignment by the deadline). The fluidity of the Blackboard deadlines stems from the freedom students feel to work within the writing spaces they have created—sometimes at 10pm, sometimes at 2am, sometimes at 5am.  They routinely vote for a midnight deadlines, explaining that they work until late evening hours. And the glitches possible because of Blackboard in many ways ease the submission anxiety: in cyberspace, there’s always an acceptable, viable excuse (“I had technical problems; I know my paper is three minutes late [or x number of hours late], but I hope you still accept it”). Somehow, a comment like this one pulls the instructor into the thirdspace of Blackboard and the “excuse” is not a feeble request for more time but instead evidence of student diligence.  Rhetorically, the student is posing as a serious, committed student whose work is there somewhere in cyberspace but just not in the dropbox; he/she is constructing me (the cyberspace instructor in the thirdspace of Blackboard) as an understanding professor who is more interested in the process of completing the writing assignment than in having the assignment in the dropbox by the cutoff time.  If we juxtapose this with the resistance to on-time submissions that students demonstrate in traditional classrooms, the thirdspace of Blackboard is a decidedly friendlier pedagogical space.

Blackboard: Where Every Student Is a Real Writer

            Blackboard also has transformed my role as reader of student writing. Perhaps not all Blackboard instructors read drafts and papers as they come in, but I do.  Students have on-demand feedback—and they expect it. One student wrote in his end-of-class essay that, on the day he submitted a writing assignment he found particularly challenging, he was checking Blackboard every 20 minutes to see if I had posted his grade—an assumption of my instantaneous availability. While no instructor can be available on demand, this student’s comment points to his interest in reader feedback, a mark of a writer who has moved beyond the novice stage and is progressing toward the maturity of a writer who recognizes the connection between the instructor/reader/expert’s commentary and the potential for writing improvement.  Another student grew nervous when her friends from class had already received their feedback for a major draft and she hadn’t; she sent me her draft again, just in case.  What I see in such student behavior is assumption of ownership not just of the submission but of the writing process.  In the thirdspace of Blackboard, students seem much more focused on succeeding on the assignment—and on being rewarded for that diligence—than they do in the traditional classroom setting.  When Blackboard becomes a major venue for instruction and learning, the power dynamics of the traditional classroom are reconfigured significantly.  Students take a far more active role in their learning and they seem far more interested in having their accomplishments acknowledged.

            Working in the Blackboard thirdspace, empowers learners to see themselves as serious participants in the writing community. I offer the story of “Sammy”, a first year writing student. For his first major writing conference, he had written only one sentence (he was supposed to have a 350-word segment), and he had no explanation, no questions, and unfortunately, we couldn’t have a productive conference if all he had written was a single sentence. He just shrugged his shoulders. Back at his desk, he pulled out his phone and spent the rest of the period texting and chatting with the kids in his group.  It is difficult not to think of such students as disinterested underachievers.  Sammy surprised me, however.  At 2:30am that night, he sent his Blackboard submission with a comment: “I’m still working on this but I have 500 words now.  I can’t work anymore; my brain is pooped.”  Sammy’s comment points to the way student writers locate themselves in the thirdspace of Blackboard. In class that day, his behavior, his lack of preparation, his apparent disinterest in his own success had given me reason to think of him as a potential failure.  In the classroom, because he was unprepared, he was unable to participate meaningfully in our class interactions; however, at home, in the space of Blackboard, he was a writer, proud of what he’d accomplished and he moved into my own writing world (I know what a “pooped” brain feels like after a long writing stint).

            A student in my advanced composition class included reflections about her completion of the assignment each time she submitted a draft or a final version, such as this one submitted with a short childhood experience narrative:

I enjoyed writing this narrative more so than the expository essay. I was able to expand a little more because I had details I could include but then again, I couldn’t keep it at one page. I tried to re-read it to see where I could cut out information but I found that everything I included was relevant to the story. I tried, but the length was a disappointment I guess since it should have been one page. It was fun though. I’m sharing it with my cousin as soon as I can. Thank you!

            Another student, who had to work until midnight, submitted his draft at 1:29am with a note: “I know its late and i apologize. Thank you for accepting it.” The notable thing about this message is that the student somehow envisioned me at the other end of his message—why else would he be apologizing for the late hour.  He crafted an image of his professor as someone eagerly awaiting (and receptive to) his submission: he didn’t say “please accept this.”  No, he pre-empted the acceptance by thanking me for it, not giving me a chance to refuse the submission (perhaps not even considering that I might refuse the submission).  While this may be evidence of the student trusting the instructor to want the assignment regardless of the time of submission, it is a trust that seems to be enhanced by Blackboard where time and space—and submission—boundaries are relaxed.  In contrast, the fixed beginning and ending time of the traditional classroom meeting can create a distrust in the student: if he/she doesn’t have the assignment on time, there is no submission and, while the instructor may accept a late submission, in the immediate temporality of the classroom, the student is marked as non-participatory, unprepared, disinterested.  Blackboard eliminates those markings.

            These students have found in Blackboard an entré into the community of writers.  Telling me about the experience of writing is a self-selected option. In the old, pre-Blackboard days, when I collected drafts in class, no one said anything about the process of producing the drafts (unless I asked them for a short reflective piece); they just added their submission to my pile of essays. And, if they didn’t have a submission, that was that. Perhaps, this absence of the visual pile of essays is significant in Blackboard.  Students see their submission in isolation; they envision me receiving only their submission. Where once upon a time in the world of the brick-and-mortar classroom, just getting the work in was the primary goal, now, the processes of producing and delivering the writing seem to be as important as the actual writing, eliminating a perceived problem in composition instruction: the isolation of writing from the actual conditions of production and delivery of writing (Trimbur, 2000, p. 189).

            The Blackboard submission format seems to have created an exigency non-existent in classroom submissions. In Blackboard, when students deliver/submit their writing, they are communicating: the dropbox exists in letter format (to: instructor, from: student), and the comment box perhaps compels students to talk, albeit in cyberspace, explaining their submission and their process. When they write comments about the process of producing their writing, they clearly are positioning themselves as a writer writing to another writer.  I see this as a reconfiguration of the student-teacher dynamic facilitated within the thirdspace of Blackboard where time and space boundaries are elided and student-teacher transactions become writer-to-writer communication informed by mutual trust born in a new pedagogical thirdspace, where the student projects the best teacher qualities onto the fictional/imagined cyberspace instructor.  In Blackboard and other cyberspace writing venues, the student’s professor is always a fiction, an extension of the writerly task of creating an imagined audience for every writing task (Ong, 1975, pp. 9-11). In Blackboard, students assume the task of creating an imagined teacher in a way not required by the immediacy and reality of the traditional classroom where the teacher is there, present in real form before the students. Clearly, a student who has had actual classroom interaction with an instructor will be better able to construct a cyber instructor fashioned from the best teacher qualities the student has observed; interestingly, however, operating in the blended environment of face-to-face instruction and online learning, students seem to ignore the teacher qualities that might jeopardize student success, instead, constructing an imagined instructor tailor-made to meet the student’s pedagogical needs.

            This creation of the fictionalized but ideal instructor enables students to erase and reconstruct the dynamics of traditional classroom interactions which frequently lead to opposition between instructor and student goals. Students have learned through years of reinforced experience how to navigate the traditional classroom space. When students enter a classroom, they are entering not just that particular classroom, but, in the context of Soja’s spatiality-historicality-sociality trialectic, every other classroom they have ever entered. The real-and-imagined space of the traditional writing classroom activates pre-existing negative perceptions of writing classrooms and writing instructors, triggering students to demonstrate work avoidance by submitting substandard work (Ambrose, Bridges, Lovett, DiPietro, & Norman, 2010, pp. 68-72): they admit to dashing off their work 10 minutes before class; they arrive late because they have been working in the computer lab up to the last minute; they wave their flashdrive before me and tell me, “my essay is in here”; they had to study for a test and “didn’t get” to the essay. Unfortunately, perhaps in an effort to avoid confrontations or perhaps in an effort to reward students even for a little effort, instructors frequently accept such excuses, thereby reinforcing avoidance behavior. Work avoidance creates feelings of failure all around: instructors chide themselves for accepting substandard work and perhaps see students as lazy or disengaged while students submit substandard work just to get the work done, knowing they could have done a better job if circumstances and motivation had permitted it (Ambrose, Bridges, Lovett, DiPietro, & Norman, 2010, pp. 67-68).

            In the year that I’ve been using Blackboard, these work avoidance issues have diminished significantly. Blackboard seems to have created a space where student and instructor goals are idealized and synchronized. Students seem to reconstruct themselves as learners and writers: in Blackboard, drafts are almost always longer than the minimum required wordcount.  Non-submissions are almost non-existent; and when someone does fail to submit an assignment, I immediately contact the student and almost always, the submission shows up.

            Admittedly, I am surprised—and quite pleased—with the higher level of student participation that I’ve seen in Blackboard. My explanation is that Blackboard has allowed students to create an unboundaried thirdspace for writing.  In the HSI environment, the home-work-school spaces grind against each other resulting in students’ resistance to writing because they have to interrupt activities in work and home spaces to comply with deadlines and productivity expectations. So, the classroom (and by extension the instructor) becomes intrusive and hostile.  In the thirdspace of Blackboard, however, students reconfigure the writing process and reconstruct themselves as motivated writers within that triangulation. In the unboundaried space of Blackboard, student achievement rises: the writer replaces his/her reduced expectations for success (quite common among student writers) with heightened expectations for success (Ambrose, Bridges, Lovett, DiPietro, & Norman, 2010, pp. 69-72).

            It could be that what I am seeing as a reconstruction of the writing process in this thirdspace is actually a manifestation of the larger shift toward learning contextualized in technology, a necessary shift given the way students variously labeled Net Gen or Generation Y have been immersed in technology from the time they were born, students who feel more comfortable producing and discussing their writing online than in the traditional classroom (Oblinger & Oblinger, 2005,  p. 1.2; Warnock, p. xxii). Evidence from my study and observation of the approximately 100 college writing students on which I’ve based my comments here suggests that Blackboard is much more than an extension of NetGen students’ technological savvy. Blackboard does indeed position students in a thirdspace where the old realities of their frequently negative experiences with writing instruction in writing classrooms give way to a new reality of student-centered, learner-managed writing.  My study of these college writers as they have repositioned themselves in the world of writing via Blackboard resonates with the findings of the U.S. Department of Education’s analysis of online learning (U.S. Department of Education, 2010): student writers feel more control over their writing efforts and accomplishments in the online environment; additionally, the opportunities for reflection about their writing—their comments about completing the writing task when they submit the assignment—move the writer toward a self-consciousness about writing that is vital to growth toward “expertise” (Sommers and Saltz, 2004).

Conclusion: Writing and Teaching in the Thirdspace of Blackboard

            My analysis of how Blackboard impacts students’ participation in writing is firmly grounded in my observations of the way students at my HSI commuter campus have adeptly located themselves in the thirdspace of Blackboard. Blackboard encourages learners and teachers to reposition themselves within reconstructed dynamics of classroom power.  Ironically, while the traditional slate blackboard represents the historically authoritarian means of distributing knowledge, the cyberspace Blackboard offers a means of democratizing the pedagogical field.

            This democratization is particularly important for Hispanic students whose achievements are frequently tentative and whose completion rates at institutions of higher learning lag significantly behind their white counterparts: in 2010, college completion rates ranged from 39% for whites to 19% for African Americans to 13% for Hispanics (U.S. Department of Education, 2011). Given the interruptions and interferences experienced by many Hispanic students as they navigate their way through college, it seems appropriate to take note of Blackboard’s potential for helping HSI students succeed.  For students whose lifeworlds (family, cultural expectations, work) function as constraints in traditional learning environments, Blackboard expands learning time, space, and opportunity.

            Without question, the evidence I have provided in this discussion is anecdotal rather than psychometric, but it is a starting point in considering how online instruction, even if it is simply blended into traditional instruction, can enhance the learning experiences of the vast numbers of Hispanic students at HSIs. And at HSIs such as my institution, where other issues (commuter status, limited financial resources, and literacy background, for example) significantly impact the general institutional ambiance, Blackboard and other online learning venues hold the promise of higher levels of student achievement and positive reconstructions of student-learner dynamics.

            As I have reconstructed my professor persona in the thirdspace of Blackboard, I have watched my students emerge as more confident writers within that liminal space that they control and that gives them ownership of their writing. Consider the way one student described his thoughts about our FYW classroom before he even entered the physical space: “My first thought [was that this] English 1301.03 class was a dreadful and condensed room with harsh teaching and un-wanted attention. This very thought was due to past experiences and teachers’ negative influences.” This comment encapsulates the trialectics of spatiality (the writing classroom as uncomfortable space)-historicality (the writing teacher as antagonist)-sociality (the learner’s adversarial relationship with writing instructors). Happily, at the end of our Blackboard-enhanced course, this student replaced his disturbing description with an image of a confident writer: “This semester may be over but I am going to continue to use my new outstanding skills in writing to help better myself for the future. I’m leaving this English class with a better attitude because the rhythm of writing is at the tip of my fingertips now and my confidence has risen from what it once was and will forever stay that way.”

            Clearly, numerous variables figure into transforming a reluctant writer into a confident writer.  While my discussion is focused on writing, my analysis of HSI students’ facile adaptation to the online learning environment of Blackboard suggests that we should look critically at online learning venues as routes to higher levels of achievement for Hispanic students: why do HSI students so readily position themselves in the thirdspace of Blackboard?  How do HSI students make the necessary pedagogical adjustments that lead to success in this cyber thirdspace?  What can we learn from these adjustments and adaptations that will enable us to promote achievement among Hispanic students? HSI students are by no means unique, but they do bring to the forefront of our national discussions on access and equity the need to create and sustain learning environments that promote achievement for historically underrepresented groups. As transition from traditional classroom spaces into cyberspace classrooms and cyberspace blackboards, we need to pay critical attention to how this repositioning can improve teaching and change learning. Blackboard, I believe, is a powerful tool for reconstructing teaching so that students’ writing goals are met and writing becomes a vehicle for academic and personal growth rather than an occasion for failure. In the context of an HSI, where many students’ literacy histories are tinged with unpleasant memories of classroom spaces, it seems appropriate to embrace the cyber thirdspace of Blackboard as a venue for successful teaching and learning.  In such an environment, student writers position themselves in the newly constructed dynamics of Blackboard as a real-and-imagined cyber thirdspace in which writing happens successfully and meaningfully.

References

Ambrose, S. A., Bridges, M. W., Lovett, M. C., DiPietro, M., & Norman, M. K. (2010). How learning works: Seven research-based principles for smart teaching. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Elbow, P. (1973). Writing without teachers. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Elbow, P. (1987).  Closing my eyes as a I speak: An argument for ignoring audience.  College English, 49(1), 50-69.

Gale, X. L. (1996).  Teachers, discourses, and authority in the postmodern composition classroom.  Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Hodge, M. (2010). A case study of the impact of newcomer centers on serving the needs of English language learners in a south Texas school district. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Texas A&M University-Kingsville, Kingsville, TX.

Laden, B.V. (2001). Hispanic serving institutions: Myths and realities. Peabody Journal of Education, 76(1), 73-92.

Matsuda, P. K. (2006). The myth of linguistic homogeneity in U.S. college composition.  College English, 68(6), 637-651.

National Center for Education Statistics.  (2003). Status and trends in the education of Hispanics.  U.S. Department of Education.

Newman, B. M. (2007). Teaching writing at Hispanic Serving Institutions.  In C. Kirklighter, D. Cardenas, & S. W. Murphy (Eds.), Teaching writing with Latino/a students: Lessons learned at Hispanic Serving Institutions (pp. 17-35). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Newman, B. M. (2009). Living authors, living stories: Integrating local authors into our curriculum. English Journal,98(3), 66-72.

Oblinger, D. G., & Oblinger, J. L. (2005). Is it age or IT: First steps toward understanding the net generation. In D. G. Oblinger & J. L. Oblinger (Eds.), Educating the net generation  (pp. 2.1-2.20). Washington, D.C.: Educause.

Ong, W. J. (1975).  A writer’s audience is always a fiction. PMLA, 90(1), 9-21. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/461344

Reynolds, N. (2004). Geographies of writing: Inhabiting places and encountering difference. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Santiago, D. A. (2008).  The condition of Latinos in education: 2008 factbook.  Excelencia in Education. Retrieved from http://www.edexcelencia.org/research/conditions-latinos-education-2008-factbook

Simpson, D. & Bruckheimer, J. (Producers), & J. N. Smith. (Director). (1995).  Dangerous Minds. U.S.: Hollywood Pictures.

Soja, E. W. (1996). Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Sommers, N., & Saltz, L. (2004).  The novice as expert: Writing the freshman year.  College Composition and Communication, 56(1), 124-149.

Trimbur, J. (2000). Composition and the circulation of writing.  College Composition and Communication, 52(2), 188-219.

U.S. Department of Education.  (2010). Evaluation of evidence-based practices in online learning: A meta-analysis and review of online learning studies.  Retrieved from http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf

U.S. Department of Education. (2011). Developing Hispanic-Serving Institutions program—Title V. Retrieved from http://www2.ed.gov/programs/idueshsi/definition.html

U.S. Department of Education. Institute of Education Sciences. (2011). The Condition of education 2011. Table A-24-1. Percentage of 25-29-year-olds who attained selected levels of education by race/ethnicity and sex: Selected years, March 1975-2010. Retrieved from http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/tables/table-eda-1.asp

University of Texas-Pan American. Office of Institutional Research and Effectiveness. (2010). UTPA Statistics at a glance fall 2010. Retrieved from http://oire.utpa.edu/publications/ minifactbook2010.pdf

Warnock, S. (2009). Teaching writing online: How and why. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Wesch, M. (2007). A vision of students today. Video produced by Kansas State University students. Retrieved from youtube.com.

Yancey, K. B. (2006).  Delivering college composition: A vocabulary for discussion.  In K. B. Yancey (Ed.),Delivering college composition: The fifth canon (pp. 1-16). Portsmouth, N.H.: Boynton/Cook.

By: Dr. Beatrice Mendez Newman

Author Note:

            Beatrice Mendez Newman is Professor of English at the University of Texas-Pan American in Edinburg, TX.

            Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Beatrice Mendez Newman, Department of English, The University of Texas-Pan American, Edinburg, TX   78541.  Email: bmendez@utpa.edu

• Continue Reading
• No Comments

Summer Faculty Immersion: A Program with the Potential to Transform Engineering Education

Written by HETS Admin on July 28, 2014. Posted in English, Spring Issue: March 2012, Volume II

Juan C. Morales, Ph.D., P.E.

Universidad del Turabo, Gurabo, Puerto Rico

Summer Faculty Immersion: A Program with the Potential to Transform Engineering Education

Abstract

This paper describes a faculty development program that was recently funded by the U.S. Department of Education as part of a $4.34 million Title V, Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) -STEM grant to Universidad del Turabo in Puerto Rico.  The overarching goal of the grant is to increase the graduation rates of Hispanic engineering students.  The specific objective of the faculty development program is to ignite innovative teaching in engineering and physics courses to assist students in achieving deep learning of fundamental engineering concepts.  The summer program was proposed as a solution to recent research findings that show that, although innovative teaching methodologies are available and well researched, adoption by faculty is rare because it exceeds substantially the normal course preparation.  The summer session will start with a two-day workshop on inductive learning methodologies by a highly esteemed researcher and innovator in engineering education.  It will be followed by a one-month immersion to continue studying additional learning methodologies, and to prepare the innovations for two courses per faculty member.  The effects of the innovations will be assessed to determine the efficacy of the proposed methodology.  Details of the summer faculty immersion program, as well as the assessment plan, are presented in the paper.  Additional features of the grant, which complement the summer immersion program, are also presented.

• Continue Reading
• No Comments

Reflection and Metacognition in First Year Experience at Queensborough Community College

Written by HETS Admin on July 28, 2014. Posted in English, Spring Issue: March 2012, Volume II

Dr. Jean Darcy

Queensborough Community College

Reflection and Metacognition in First Year Experience at Queensborough Community College

In data provided by Victor Fichera, Principal Investigator of Academy Assessment Protocol at Queensborough Community College, it is reported that students enrolled in courses in which reflection and metacognition are used in projects that engage active learners, students are retained at higher levels of passing grades.  In these projects technology is used in collaboration with scaffolded tasks that result in the student production of a “web object,” in this case a digital story.  It is our thesis that the use of technology in parallel relation to reflection amplifies and makes visible the metacognitive work.  In our project, The Student Wiki Interdisciplinary Group, students use ePortfolio learning spaces to build an   identity in terms of both personal goals and  the roles they assume within the academic community in the classroom.

• Continue Reading
• No Comments

La retención y la deserción en línea: fenómeno de un modelo educativo virtual

Written by HETS Admin on July 28, 2014. Posted in English, Spring Issue: March 2012, Volume II

Dra. Diana Rivera Montalvo

Inter American University of Puerto Rico

Ponce Campus

La retención y la deserción en línea: fenómeno de un modelo educativo virtual

Abstracto

Para las instituciones postsecundarias, conocer e identificar los factores que actualmente contribuyen a fomentar que sus estudiantes en línea culminen satisfactoriamente sus cursos,  es una prioridad para evitar el efecto contrario y adverso de la deserción. 

• Continue Reading
• No Comments

Community Colleges Growing Importance in STEM Education Benefits Hispanics

Written by HETS Admin on July 28, 2014. Posted in English, Spring Issue: March 2012, Volume II

Marilyn Gilroy

Community Colleges Growing Importance in STEM Education Benefits Hispanics

Community colleges have become key players in the effort to train a highly skilled and diverse workforce in STEM fields. Organizations such as the National Science Foundation (NFS), have acknowledged the importance of the two-year sector by awarding millions of dollars to community colleges to fund scholarships in STEM areas, especially for underrepresented students. In addition, the NFS plans to give $100 million to Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) for Stem and Articulation Grants to support transfer between two- and four- year colleges and to enhance STEM education at these institutions.

• Continue Reading
• No Comments

Techniques for Increasing Student Engagement for Contact Hour Equivalence: Online Courses That Are Flexplace, not Flextime.

Written by HETS Admin on July 19, 2014. Posted in Authors, Dr. David Sturges, English, Spring Issue: April 2013, Volume III

• Continue Reading
• No Comments

A Case Study in Developing a Fully Asynchronous Online Introduction to Business Course: Ten Big Surprises

Written by HETS Admin on July 19, 2014. Posted in Authors, Dr. Edward Volchok, English, Fall Issue: October 2012, Prof. Christine Mooney, Volume III

• Continue Reading
• No Comments