Diving into ds106 at Wagner College

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Do you see those faces? That’s what a two hour dive into ds106 can do for you. At least that is what a group of faculty found out Friday at Wagner College a lovely campus on a hill at the tip of Staten Island. I was brought there by Robin and Neil Hayden, who have been working with the extremely dynamic Vice Provost Lily McNair on a Media Literacy in Teaching and Learning Program.

I’ve known Robin for years, but never met face to face until Thursday night, and was excited to be on the bill along with Matt Stoltzfus from Ohio State (who got a dose of ds06 from having seen Martha Burtis and Jim Groom present at two different events this Spring) and Karen Cowden from Valencia College.

We each had 20 minutes in the morning to talk about our interests and preview what we would each do in the afternoon as a 2 hour workshop.

Robin had asked me to talk about the student blogging in ds106 — I talked some about the structure and idea of ds106, the magic of the syndication bus, but the bulks was showing all of my current students blogs and used different examples to highlight the work they all did through the semester.

I did not quite make it through all the student blogs! You can find the slides, videos, and links for this presentation at http://cogdog.wikispaces.com/Five+Things+for+Wagner+College.

I like using this montage of UMW ds106 students to say in their own words what the experience is like

And later at lunch, a Wagner faculty came up gushing about what she found by googling “Cat Breading”

The afternoon workshop I set up first to have faculty explore each other’s digital gootprints, to see what they could find, good or bad, about each other (no bad was found, though Frank found a namesake who was in the mob), but mainly to make a case for being proactive in projecting the digital identity you want others to find, rather than leaving it up to third party services.

All materials I put up on a page at http://ds106.us/wagner-college

This was the set up for them to start some basic blogging, using a new hosted wordpress site for faculty. They each did two blog posts to seed their blogs, and I then had them register their blogs at ds106, using a feed for a ds106 tag. Then I showed how their posts are aggregated like any other class/group we set up for others

They also took on a Daily Create (a writing assignment) Compose the convincing cover letter a cartoon character wrote to win their job. I had plans for them to do a design assignment, but we fell short on time. That’s homework!

There was more to the day, including a chance to hear Wagner faculty share their technology projects and ideas. It was a great day all around, not to mention a beautiful sunset cruise into Manhattan on the Staten Island Ferry, and a wave to the gift from France.

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I was glad to be able to try out this workshop- I think there is a lot of potential in using ds106 materials in a program of faculty development (more than a 2 hour workshop).

If you are interested in this kind of thing at your place, well operators are standing by.

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