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Scholarship
other sections
welcome page: table of contents
personal | teaching
service |
mentoring
other pages this section
scholarship of discovery
fiction | video
scholarship of teaching
webs | Ricci
Street | web
analytics
this page
scholarly teaching
microwebs |
sabbatical
keeping current | professional
conferences
While I am fascinated by research topics such as the future, I am far more interested in making things. In the past, I have focused on theater, fiction, and interactive webs. Now that the prosumer video production and post-production tools have become affordable and widespread, I am starting to produce video, to which I would like to add interactivity.
According to the types of scholarship discussed in Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professionals (Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1990), I engage in these:
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As an MFA (Master of Fine Arts), my scholarship emphasizes making things and acquiring the skills to
make things. To that end, I have been a lifelong learner of new skills.
At my
first teaching job, at Texas A&I (now Texas A&M - Kingsville), I had access to a
studio with all the tools I needed to make a book, so I did. (See cover on
right.) I did all the
typesetting and pre-press work, I inked and ran the press, I stitched the
signatures, I glued the fabric to the cover boards. Then with the help of three
students I trained, we made several hundred of these books, the University's
literary magazine, in hard and soft covers.
One of the attractions of the arts (I started in theater, went to playwriting and directing, and soon focused on novel writing), was the eclectic nature of the stories that I wrote. I needed to know a little about a lot of things, and that suited my learning style.
Through my career, that grazing style of research, while scholarly, is done in the service of whatever story or web and now video I am working on.
What business am I in?
If I teach biology, am I a biologist who is teaching? Or am I a teacher whose subject is biology? From the students' point of view, there probably isn't any difference. However, from a professional point of view, what is my scholarship directed toward, biology or teaching? Which better serves the student, that I learn more about biology or that I learn more about teaching? Which benefits the College?
The same question applies to faculty in accounting and writing, vet tech and political science. I can read the accounting journals and the small press novels. I can volunteer in the cat clinic and advise the mayor's re-election campaign. My scholarship can focus on those activities.
But what about my teaching? We speak of Medaille as a teaching institution rather than a research institution. That means that the faculty are supposed to put more relative emphasis on the teaching part of our jobs than we would at a research institution. Not only that, but teaching institutions generally have smaller class sizes than research institutions, giving less excuse for lecturing.
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If the trinity is teaching/scholarship/service, should some of the scholarship also be the same as done by the faculty in education departments? In other words, to the extent that all faculty are teachers, then we're all in the education department, which is applied social sciences. Thus while we should do scholarship in our fields of biology et al., we must do scholarship in teaching.
In this scholarship section of my portfolio, I have included teaching webs and their analysis, which fit Boyer's definition above. However, I have not used any empirical methodology or written up these efforts for submission to the traditional peer-reviewed journal.
Thus, it is more accurate to say that I engage in scholarly teaching rather than the traditional scholarship of teaching. I can't resist noting that my teaching webs have far more people reading them than would read my article about those webs in a peer-reviewed ink-on-paper, copyright-protected journal.
My next medium to explore is what I'm calling a microweb. That's not a term in general use, but I can't find anything better to label what it is I'm doing. To separate it from similar online resources:
Many webs have hundreds if not thousands of static pages or similarly large databases serving dynamic pages. These webs serve general organizational purposes, such as the L.L. Bean marketing web the Reuters news web or the Ricci Street customer-service web. They are designed for continual updating to give access to fresh content. For a consistent look-and-feel, they use templates. For efficient operation, they use content management systems.
What I call microwebs -- or "webs" rather than "web sites" -- serve more focused
purposes, much as a white paper or research project or event provides focus. While the taxonomy of web
sites is not settled, microwebs as I am using the term have several distinct
features:
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Sometimes they are embedded in larger organizational sites: the
microweb for the Vision of Puerto
Rico exhibition is part of the
National Museum of American History's web, which in turn is one small part
of the Smithsonian's web.
Others stand alone: Webyarns
Many microwebs have their own domain
names, such as the Integrated Taxonomic Information System's
Catalog of Life, which need to be renewed annually.
A blog, wiki, or discussion forum can be a microweb, as is the
History of the Button blog, though it is often part of a larger
web, as is Expatica.com's
discussion forum.
Sometimes, as with blogs, wikis, and forums, the information changes often. Other
microwebs are more like print publications, where the information will not be
updated. Each such microweb has a unique look and feel that will persist as long
as the organization allots the server space.
In any case, publicly available microwebs are a searchable part of the Internet's ever-growing resources, a part of the conversation.
In the late 1990's, I designed Ricci Street as a general-purpose web for whatever part of the Medaille curriculum and whoever on the Medaille faculty got involved. While that served its purpose, it doesn't fulfill its promise unless other faculty participate. And they didn't.
For my recent sabbatical, I moved with my wife
and daught
er to the Leiden, the Netherlands, for eight months, December to August 2008. I am
then returned to Buffalo to teach for the fall semester, August to
December 2008. For the next spring, January to August 2009, I am taking a paid
leave based on overload teaching assignments banked under the old faculty
handbook. 
I am returning to the Netherlands to finish the projects I started.
While my official sabbatical is only the spring semester of 2008, I am including the spring semester of 2009, also, when I speak of "my sabbatical" in this portfolio.
We decided on the Netherlands because we had three adults, all of whom had a veto. By September 2006, the Netherlands was the consensus least-objectionable. As soon as we plunged into learning Dutch language, culture, history, and geography, all three of us were very happy with our choice. As of this writing, we are in discussion with a realtor about this house on the left.
My daughter, a junior at Medaille, took a couple of courses at the University of Leiden (right). In researching her situation as well as doing the research for the dean's committee, I have learned a lot about several topics that could prove of service to the College.
I am grateful to the College for providing me with the opportunity to be a
scholar. I take full advantage of it by continuing to learn. I often say to my
students that I am the learner-in-chief, but most of them don't understand how
true that is. I spend my days reading and writing and, until recently, my weekday evenings in the
classroom.
My scholarly research interests are diverse and mostly not expressed in my
courses. Those others include fossils, especially trilobites, human genetics,
and evolution.
While I was in graduate school and teaching in Medaille's Humanities Department, the list of my scholarly research interests
included:
mastering the sentence
mastering linear narrative structures
the writing process
constructivist pedagogy; history of education
whatever topic I needed to learn more about for my fiction
The spread of digital networks and the immense computing power at our fingertips
was a development that I couldn't ignore. In
this portfolio's reflective overview, I
note this
mid-career shift. By plunging into it, I changed a lot. However, there is no
inherent reason why I had to move to Business. I could have moved to any other
department or have stayed in Humanities and pursued the same scholarship. The
content of the cases and simulations in my courses would have changed, but not much else.
My cross-disciplinary scholarly research interests include:
history, currently the history of science and the Dutch Golden Age
Web-supplemented classrooms, constructivist pedagogy
information theory, information architecture
organizational informatics
usability, human-computer interaction
active networked documents
effects of the Internet on organizations and information
how to do business online
intellectual property in public information spaces
Web technologies
For every one of these interests, the Internet is the best source of information
and contact with communities of like-minded people. While hardly anyone at the
College is as interested in these subjects as I am, I am only a click away from
the online communities, where I am an active participant.
Most traditional scholarship examines the past to understand the
human condition, but my
enduring fascination is with the future. The firs
t time (late 1980's) that I
clicked around in a hypertext environment, I "got" it. The first time (1994) a
web page appeared on my screen, and I clicked and another appeared, I got it.
Frustration set in when, even after I explained, other people, especially other faculty
members, didn't get it. By the time they caught up to me, I was on to something
else. In other words, the future of the Internet and its implications for
humanity
is the broad area of knowledge where I stay closest to the frontiers.
This field doesn't have a commonly accepted name yet and what I'm
interested in is understood by only a couple of my faculty colleagues,
so I know I'm on the right track.
For centuries, we have structured documents, but we haven't been able to structure information outside of the human mind. What's next is the semantic web, an architecture that will use metadata and semantic rules to make sense of, give meaning to, data/information on the Web. Currently, that meaning is provided by humans. The architecture for the semantic web has been developed enough that we can start to think about what it will enable -- it will transfer the heavy lifting to the network. The semantic web will turn much of that sense-making over to computers, scaling to vastly larger data sets (such as a genome or the weather), that will take knowledge work such as scientific research to more sophisticated levels of complexity and contextualization. The implications for everyday life and for education are as vast as the implications for the print medium in about 1500 A.D. Who then could have predicted the Reformation and the Enlightenment, both driven by the printing press?
I gain great value from professional conferences. Those below were some of the ones I attended that were paid for by the College, especially Title III. Several came from a Faculty Development awards.
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ATTW (Association of Teachers of Technical Writing) |
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NCHC (National Collegiate Honors Council) |
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CCCC (Conference on College Composition and Communication) |
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Title III Faculty Development Grant workshop |
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Tenth Annual Computers and Writing National Conference |
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AACE Eighth World Conference on Educational Multimedia and
Hypermedia (ED-MEDIA) |
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Information Technology: Transcending Traditional
Boundaries |
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ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems |
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Ninth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia |
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During my sabbatical semester in the Netherlands, I attended several conferences, as detailed in my sabbatical report.
While I was flogging First and Ten from 1993-95, I attended writers' conferences in Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia, Houston, and Pittsburgh sponsored by companies in the publishing and writing industry and by trade associations. I gave fiction readings and did book signings and appeared on panels.
These fiction-writing conferences, as well as annual AAUP conferences, annually since 2001, I paid for myself.
Over the years, I have gone to a couple dozen local seminars and conferences at hotels and on campuses. They inform me about a variety of topics on everything from bioinformatics to ebusiness to quality improvement to classroom assessment.
In addition to these face-to-face conferences, I have attended many conferences remotely, via audio or video.
This web, offered in fulfillment
of
the requirement in the handbooks of
Medaille College, Buffalo, NY,
Volume IV: Faculty Handbook,
section 4.5.4.3 Faculty Portfolio,
is © 2007 and licensed under a
Creative Commons License.
web established: February 2007
page last modified: September 2008
by Douglas Anderson
http://toLearn.net/portfolio/scholarship/index.html
