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Crossroads

Crossroads Report 2004

CROSSROADS ANNUAL REPORT

The mid-year report from the Crossroads Advisory Board, submitted by Michael Cowan, outgoing Chair, described the board’s discussions at the ASA meeting in Hartford.

Since then the board has met online to discuss ways it might support activities commemorating the 10th anniversary of Crossroads at the Atlanta meeting. There was enthusiasm for hosting a celebratory reception, and with the assistance of John Stephens, one is on the agenda for Thursday evening. The board suggested that the event be held simultaneously and in close proximity to the International Reception to encourage members to move between the two receptions and to enable Crossroads to introduce its resources and its potential to serve the international American Studies community.

Randy Bass and Judith Babbitts also solicited short essays from present and former advisory board members describing how Crossroads has influenced their teaching and scholarship over the past ten years. Randy collected these reflections for an article he will write for the winter issue of the ASA Newsletter.

As incoming Chair of the Crossroads Advisory Board, Judith Babbitts met with Randy Bass to outline the advisory board’s activities for the next two years. In collaboration with Jeff Sellen, the Associate Director of Crossroads, Randy will prepare a strategic plan to present to the board at its November meeting in Atlanta.

The Crossroads Advisory Board welcomes a new member, Aureliano DeSoto from Bard College who will serve until June 2007.

Judith Babbitts, Chair

Crossroads Staff Report
The American Studies Crossroads Project experienced another busy year, as work continued on initiatives such as the Online Panels Project and the 10th Anniversary Celebration, general Crossroads site expansion planning, and the beginnings of a strategic plan. Progress also continued on the Visible Knowledge Project and the Crossroads Online Institute.

Online Panels Project—Pilot of the New Online Poster Tool
For this year’s online panel project we will use the new version of VKP/Crossroads Poster Tool. For the pilot, the Program Committee selected panels which it thought would be well suited to an online presentation. Using an easy-to-use interface, panelists may post copies of their papers, relevant images and links, and summaries and abstracts of their work to an online electronic poster (a kind of web page). While several panels are in progress, as of this writing none are complete or made public. Therefore, we cannot share sample URLs at this time.

10th Anniversary Celebration
In addition to a 10th Anniversary Reception (funded with generous support from the executive director’s office), the Project is working on several other initiatives related to the 10th Anniversary Celebration.

* Depending on our internet-access negotiations with the hotel, Crossroads hopes to have a web blog (or “blog”) set up at the Annual Meeting. We hope to do this both at the reception and in the book exhibit.
* We also hope to make available for viewing both at the reception and in the book exhibit, the online poster pilot.
* We have staff coming to produce short video testimonials about American Studies. This project is conducted in collaboration with the International Initiative. These will be will be hosted as streaming video on the Crossroads site starting in the late Fall.
* We also plan to unveil a major new subsite of Crossroads, called the Crossroads of Teaching and Learning. This will provide a web portal to a variety of teaching, learning, technology, and scholarship of teaching and learning resources on Crossroads and elsewhere.

Recent work on the site includes :

Critical Conversations
Crossroads staff have produced Critical Conversations, a site for teaching and learning about current issues of interest to American Studies students. The first issue that the site addresses is the Patriot Act. In addition, Crossroads staff are currently developing materials on two additional issues: the Gay Marriage Debate and the United States and International Agreements. These issues will be added to Critical Conversations by the time of the Atlanta conference. The site can currently be viewed at: http://www.georgetown.edu/crossroads/drafts/critcon/index.htm

Community Partnerships
Crossroads staff have developed an online presence for the Community Partnership Grants Program. The website provides information about the program, links to existing projects, links to resources, and a downloadable application form. The Program may be accessed at: http://www.georgetown.edu/crossroads/AmericanStudiesAssn/resources/speakers/cpp.htm

Site Development
After consultation with President Shelly Fisher Fiskin and the Crossroads Board Chair Judy Babbitts, we are preparing plans for the Crossoads Board in November for the significant development of two areas of the site: International resources and Teaching and Learning resources.

Crossroads Online Institute
The FIPSE-funded Crossroads Online Institute (an online seminar designed to extend the number of faculty involved in VKP-type classroom research projects) began its Fall 2004 session with fifteen faculty participants, the largest enrollment to date. Participants come from schools such as Queens Community College, California State University-Monterey Bay, member schools of the Appalachian College Association, Youngstown State University, and Kent State University, will participate this year. Susannah McGowan, the Education Manager for SoTL Initiatives at CNDLS, facilitates the eight-week seminar where participants interact through a web log and online portfolio tools. Two more seminars are planned for Spring and Summer 2005. The FIPSE-funded project also supports the Washington State University Crossroads partnership through the end of academic 2004-2005.

Visible Knowledge Project
The Visible Knowledge Project (VKP) began moving itself towards final synthesis and reflection through a variety of activities during the 2003-2004 academic year. These activities included:
Writing Residencies
In support of VKP faculty synthesizing and publishing their VKP scholarship of teaching and learning projects, the Project hosts small groups of scholars 2-3 times a semester. Scholars participate in a combination of time writing alone interspersed with guided peer feedback. .Read more about one of the residencies in this article in the VKP online newsletter: http://crossroads.georgetown.edu/vkp/newsletter/0304/writing.htm

VKP Summer Institute: Collaborative Design Groups
This year’s VKP Summer Institute focused on synthesizing findings from the first four years of the project and making plans for further research. In addition to plenary panels, featuring the scholarship of teaching and learning research of fellow VKP participants, much of the Institute was spent in working groups. These working groups, dubbed Collaborative Design Groups, worked together to synthesize findings across three broad project themes: online discussion, student multimedia authoring, and active and critical reading. Groups produced many pages of notes from their meetings and the VKP staff have been synthesizing this work into an online gallery and a series of online thematic posters.

The forthcoming October VKP newsletter (http://crossroads.georgetown.edu/vkp/newsletter/) will have an article on the Summer Institute and the poster and gallery projects. In the meantime, the gallery has been updated with content produced at the Summer Institute and is available at: http://crossroads.georgetown.edu/vkp/themes/

Randy Bass, Director,
Jeff Sellen, Associate Director
Michael Coventry, Crossroads Staff