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Crossroads

Report from the Crossroads Project Advisory Board 2002

This annual report combines into a single report that of the Crossroads Project Advisory Board and that of the Director of the Crossroads Project. Such collaboration on the report is symptomatic of the excellent working relations the Board has enjoyed with the Director and his able staff throughout the year. The same excellent working relations have characterized the Board’s interactions with the Office of the Executive Director of ASA. The Executive Director and his staff have been quick, efficient, and creative in responding to questions and concerns raised by the Board.

Most of the work of the Board is conducted at its business meetings at the annual American Studies Association conventions. This past year, the Board held an agenda-packed and very productive business meeting on November 9 at the American Studies Association convention in Washington, D.C. Crossroads Director Randy Bass updated the Board on the exciting work of the Visible Knowledge Project (see below), a five-year project funded by a large private grant. Board members agreed that one of the challenges of the project will be to find effective, accessible ways to distribute the project’s results—ways that will have a multiplier effect. Members also suggested that campus administrators would be a likely audience for these results, especially with an eye to gaining their funding and other support for similar projects on their own campuses.

Director Bass also discussed his on-going efforts, building on last year’s search, to identify an Associate Director for Crossroads. The Board has been quite supportive of these efforts, and has also agreed with Director Bass that it would be very desirable for Crossroads to have a second institutional site. The Board was thus very pleased to learn, during this past winter, that Director Bass has been able to arrange for Washington State University to serve as a second university sponsor of Crossroads (see below). The Board looks forward to learning more about these arrangements at its upcoming business meeting in Houston.

The Board was informed that the Association, to enhance its electronic visibility and accessibility (its web location is accessed presently via the Crossroads site), intended to buy its own domain name. Such a step, Director Bass noted, will not only serve the Association’s interests but will enable Crossroads to focus on enhancing its service as the Association’s primary “research and teaching” e-space.

The Board noted with pleasure that the collaboration between Crossroads and H-Amstdy staff had resulted in a successful second year of on-line papers for the 2001 ASA convention. Three more panels at the D.C. than at the Detroit convention placed their papers on-line; and most papers took advantage of the on-line format to include images as well as text. H-Amstdy is building an on-line archive of these papers, which might well serve as models for other presenters at future conventions. Board members suggested that participants in these panels might be invited to evaluate their experience and to consider ways in which that experience might be useful to future panel proposers contemplating such a format.

Director Bass expressed disappointment that he had been unable to arrange for an “Electronic Village” at the D.C. Convention—a multi-PC-station space in which workshops, electronic poster sessions, and other collaborative activities could be conducted by conventioneers. The major sticking point was the cost (for wiring, computer rentals, assuring of security, etc.). After considerable discussion, Board members agreed that, if “IT” panels were to be regular parts of ASA convention programs, the impetus for such panels might appropriate come from the program committee in its soliciting of proposals. Program committees might consider arranging for one or more session rooms at a convention that would be devoted entirely to such panels—i.e., house appropriate equipment for the entire length of the convention. Among other options that might be explored: survey other professional associations to determined if any have had success in arranging for such IT facilities at their conventions; arrange for the use of a computer lab at a college or university near the convention site. Handling logistics and finding funding for such convention activities will likely present a considerable challenge, but the Board would be happy to work with future program committees to explore options for meeting these challenges.

A new member of the Board, Judith Babbitts, presented for Board consideration a proposal for a “Transnational Classroom”—virtual seminars that would connect classes in several countries. The “Classroom” would be an electronic site at which participating instructors could explore relevant pedagogical issues, at which students could participate in on-line conversations, and at which collaborative research could be facilitated. She suggested that women’s issues might be a promising initial focus for such activities. Board members responded very positively to the proposal. Discussion focused on a number of issues: ownership of the curriculum; the importance of equity among participating partners; the desirability of involving the International Committee in implementing the project; the developing of a page for the project on the Crossroads site. The Board agreed to support Professor Babbitts’ proposal for a session at the 2002 ASA convention in Houston devoted to this project and to the general question of such transnational electronic collaboration. The Board is pleased that this proposed session was accepted by the convention program committee.

The Board also agreed that it would be desirable for the ASA office to ask American Studies programs outside the United States to regularly update their links to Crossroads. Keeping such links current, Board members felt, would facilitate international collaboration. In response to the Board’s request, the Executive Director of ASA promptly asked such programs to update their links. At its Houston meeting, the Board will discuss whatever progress has been made on this front and will consider whether other steps might be taken that will further facilitate access to relevant international American Studies institutional information via Crossroads.

The Board discussed fund-raising issues with Director Bass. He reminded Board members that Crossroads had initially been launched in 1994 with a $180K FIPSE grant and that FIPSE considered Crossroads one of “a great success story.“ He was giving serious consideration to approaching FIPSE with a new grant proposal. Board members encouraged him to do so. Director Bass continued to pursue this possibility and, this past spring, did submit a major proposal to FIPSE (see below). The Board is extremely pleased to learn that the proposal has been funded and wishes, in particular, to note that only 5% of the proposals to FIPSE received funding. Director Bass and his staff are to be congratulated for such excellent work.

The Board also noted that other ASA committees, or the ASA Executive Committee or National Council, as they search for external funds to enhance their own activities, may wish to include technology-assessment elements in their own grant proposals. Director Bass said that he would be happy to serve as a consultant to these bodies to help them develop these pieces in their proposals. Further conversations between Director Bass and the Executive Committee led to an invitation to all ASA committees to consider using Director Bass’s expertise in developing grant proposals that might aid their work.

The Board responded encouragingly to Board member Miles Orvell’s report on an effort underway to gain an NEH planning grant for development of an on-line Encyclopedia of Washington, D.C., a project focusing particularly on the peoples of the D.C. area. Professor Orvell noted that the full proposal was due in June of 2002. The Board anticipates hearing a report on this effort at its Houston meeting.

Among other Crossroads possibilities briefly discussed by the Board: “current event” links to sites of great interest to ASA members (e.g., ones dealing with Middle East or Affirmative Action issues); links to “current American Studies news” sites (e.g., newspaper and periodical articles dealing with ASA scholars and American Studies programs). Graduate students working in the ASA office might be made responsible for developing these latter links. Since the D.C. meeting, Board members have watching with interest the increasingly visible work of HNN, the electronic “History News Network” run out of George Mason University. At its Houston meeting, the Board will consider ways in which Crossroads might augment its links to the increasing number of such professional websites.

Director Bass and Coordinator Coventry arranged on the Board’s behalf a very successful Visible Knowledge Project session at the D.C. convention. With around 30 attendees, the session focused on four of the early stages of a scholarship of teaching and learning project: 1) articulation of learning goals (Michael Coventry, Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, Georgetown University); 2) formulation of a question worth pursuing (Susan Kilgore, General Education Program, Washington State University, Pullman). 3) design of a testable activity (Colleen Tremonte, Writing and American Culture Program, Michigan State University, East Lansing); 4) overview of data collection (Sherry Linkon, American Studies Department, Youngstown State University). Bret Eynon (Center for Excellence in Teaching with Technology, City University of New York, LaGuardia Community College) acted as moderator for the panel. A VPK session has also been scheduled for the Houston convention, building on very productive work of the past year (see below).

Since the Board’s D.C. meeting, Director Bass and his able staff have continued to work productively on a variety of projects of great interest to the Board. This annual report concludes with his discussion of these projects.

Crossroads Project Director’s Report

http://crossroads.georgetown.edu/

Crossroads awarded a FIPSE Grant

The Crossroads Project received three years of funding assistance through a grant awarded to Georgetown University (Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship) by the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education. The $507,000award is for three years. Only approximately 5% of the total FIPSE application pool received funding.

The award is for a project entitled “The Crossroads Online Institute: A Collaborative Model for Sustainable Pedagogy.“ The core of the project is the creation—within the context of the Crossroads Project—of an online faculty development institute that helps faculty in American Studies and related fields develop improved teaching materials for new learning environments.

The new Crossroads Online Institute has four key components. The first component is the Online Faculty Workshop, which is a ten week course designed to help faculty create and implement significant course modules that emphasize technology-enhanced pedagogies and student assessment. The workshop will also help pull together a cohort of Cross-institutional working groups for module testing and refinement, as well as collaboration on assessment frameworks. Working in conjunction with the Cross-institutional working groups will be a online mentor, which is a key aspect of the scalability and sustainability of this project. The final component is a dynamic collection of Web-based Teaching and Learning resources, built upon a substantial archive/database of: (a) learning objects (modules); (b) learning artifacts (annotated evidence of student learning); and (c) teaching reflections.

Washington State University: Crossroads Expansion

The FIPSE grant will fund the new collaboration with Washington State University’s graduate program in American Studies. The grant will fund graduate fellowships and a course buyout for a faculty member at WSU (for three years) in order to develop a fully integrated relationship between Washington State and Georgetown as a way of expanding the leadership and development base for Crossroads. In addition to general sharing of these responsibilities, this will allow better outreach and collaboration among Crossroads and other ASA constituencies. One of our first thematic focuses for the collaboration will be the development of a Web presence for the Community Partnership grants. Our hope is that over the three years we will accomplish both an overall renovation of the Crossroads site and an expansion of its resources, including new emphases in international collaborations and in directions in line with WSU’s “Digital Diversity” project.

Site maintenance and development

The Crossroads staff continued to maintain and update the site. The four most popular directories continue to be: American Studies Web, American Studies Association, Syllabi, and Dissertations. Increasingly the ASA-related functions of Crossroads are being handled by the Office of the ASA Executive Director, sometimes in consultation with GU Crossroads staff, but mostly self-sufficiently. This past winter and spring, the Crossroads staff undertook a general link update and cleanup and participated in updating the Guide to American Studies Resources Online pages.

Syllabus Library and Index of Dynamic Syllabi

http://crossroads.georgetown.edu/webcourses.html

The Crossroads staff continued their work updating and adding the syllabi library and the index of dynamic syllabi, which continues to be a very-highly-used resource on the site. While a general call over H-AMSTDY did not yield a large number of new syllabi, we continue to receive both new syllabi and correspondence regarding updates to currently listed syllabi on a fairly steady basis.

ASA Students Committee

http://crossroads.georgetown.edu/interests/student/

The Crossroads staff continued to support the ASA Student Committee with their website (which received extensive use and updating in preparation for the Annual Meeting) and have begun discussions on the possibilities of Crossroads hosting a discussion board to facilitate their work. We are currently researching which option would work best, considering that their needs are for a fairly simple board.

Program Committee Website Project

This is an idea to have a web-based environment where ASA members could submit their Annual Meeting proposal online and also some tools to facilitate some of the work of the Program Committee online. Building off of a proposal created by the ASA’s Executive Office, we have mapped out a draft prospectus and “decision tree” as a step towards thinking about what would be needed to create such a site. We expect to continue working in a consultative role on this project as it develops.

Visible Knowledge Project

http://crossroads.georgetown.edu/vkp/

Throughout the year, the Crossroads Director and staff continued supporting and working with the fourteen core campuses of the Visible Knowledge Project as primary researchers on those campuses develop their Classroom Research Projects. Other activities include the development of multimedia resource kits for the scholarship of teaching and learning (cf. http://crossroads.georgetown.edu/vkp/resources/kits). These are resource kits designed for campuses to adapt for local conversations on teaching and learning. A Good example is Kit #1: “Getting to researchable questions in the scholarship of teaching and learning,“ developed in collaboration with Professor Sherry Linkon of Youngstown State.

Working with the VKP affinity group on academic labor, the Crossroads leadership created an online survey asking participants to reflect on academic labor, new media environments, and Scholarship of Teaching and Learning—this will probably build into a resource kit as results and narratives are gathered.
The Crossroads staff also continued development, improvement, and production of a newsletter (web and email) for the project. The newsletter profiles work on various campuses, gathers and highlights web-based resources of interest, and chronicles issues emergent across the Project (cf. http://crossroads.georgetown.edu/vkp/newsletter/).

VKP Leadership Meeting, May 10-11, 2002

Over May 10-11 the Visible Knowledge Project held a Leader’s Meeting at the Georgetown University Conference Center. Leaders from each campus joined VKP staff for a Friday afternoon and all day Saturday meeting. The purpose of the meeting was to share among the campuses about local activities, to develop plans for the documenting of the work of each campuses’ primary researchers (designated faculty on each campus who engage in scholarship of teaching and learning projects using technology), to garner feedback on a first draft of a VKP website redesign, and to begin to plan for the upcoming Summer Institute.

3rd Annual VKP Summer Institute

The Visible Knowledge Project convened a third Summer Institute at Georgetown University, August 1-3, 2002. Representatives from the fourteen core campuses, as well as several Independent Investigators and members of the research and design team, came together to examine what it means to undertake as a collaborative activity the scholarship of teaching and learning. Plenary activities focused on presentations of research and ideas emergent throughout the project, including talks by Viet Nguyen (University of Southern California), Paula Berggren (CUNY), Melinda deJesús (Arizona State University), Tracey Weis (Millersville University), and Gail Green Anderson (LaGuardia Community College). The Summer Institute also continued its “working groups” format, which creates groups of six faculty who meet together each day of the institute for a structured, revolving discussion of individual scholarship of teaching and learning research projects. Read the VKP Newsletter Article about the Summer Institute: http://crossroads.georgetown.edu/vkp/newsletter/0902/profiles.htm

New Website Design and Electronic Communication Tools Launched

Over the course of the first of the year, the VKP staff worked with a local graphic designer to rethink the organization and redesign of the VKP website. Concurrent with the development of the new website design was the creation of a set of electronic tools which enable VKP members to upload and edit their own content on the VKP website. Most importantly, the tools provide new spaces for collaboration: participants can use the posters and the profile pages to connect with colleagues who are exploring similar questions.

The tools enable the creation of three types of pages (please note these list pages are in design transition, and will become more user-friendly over the next several weeks):

Campus profile pages – these are pages created by local campus coordinators to represent their local campus to other members of the project. Each page contains space for photographs, links to documents and websites of interest, a clickable list of all the members of the local campus groups, as well as a space to represent that group’s key themes. http://cfdev.georgetown.edu/cndls/vkp/profiles/Public/dsp_campuses.cfm
Individual profile pages – these are pages created by individuals to represent themselves and provide a window to their work for other members of the project. Each page contains space for photographs, a place for a biography and narration of research interests in teaching and learning, links to documents and website of interest, a clickable list of electronic posters, as well as space to represent the key themes in the individual’s scholarship of teaching and learning project. http://cfdev.georgetown.edu/cndls/vkp/profiles/Public/dsp_list.cfm?all=false
Project posters and Project planning posters – in many ways, these tools are the heart of the new suite. Inspired by a proof-of-concept created by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and borrowing an idea from the “poster sessions” common in the sciences and social sciences, the new VKP Poster Tool allows project faculty to create electronic posters representing their scholarship of teaching and learning projects. Posters contain boxes for images, texts, bulleted lists, “more information” pop-up boxes, as well as links to websites and various sorts of uploaded documents. http://cfdev.georgetown.edu/training/levined2/vkp/posters/dsp_posterlist.cfm

Respectfully submitted,
Michael Cowan, Chair
Crossroads Project Advisory Board

Randy Bass, Director
Crossroads Project

October 1, 2002