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Crossroads
Report From the Crossroads Project Advisory Board 2003
Annual Report of the Crossroads Project Advisory Board
Under the extraordinary leadership of Director Randy Bass and his highly able and dedicated staff at Georgetown University, the Crossroads Project has enjoyed another year of major successes. Since 1993 the project has raised over one million dollars in foundation and grant support, and it has invested those funds in a series of exciting initiatives that have significantly benefited both the field of American studies in general and the American Studies Association in particular.
Among the year’s highlights for Crossroads:
*The successful completion of the third year of the Visible Knowledge Project.
*The successful implementation of the first year of the Crossroads Online Institute, a project funded by a FIPSE grant.
*The inauguration of a very promising collaborative arrangement between Crossroads and Washington State University.
*Enhanced service to a number of ASA committees, task forces, and caucuses.
*Technical assistance to the Association that should help lead, beginning with the 2004 annual meeting, to online submission of paper and panel proposals.
*The inauguration of new sections on the Crossroads site and the addition of new materials in existing sections, aimed at enriching teaching, research, and community-based learning in American Studies and related fields.
These activities are described in greater detail in the Director’s very informative annual report, which is attached to this Board’s annual report. Both Director Bass and I wish to express our thanks to ASA Electronics Projects Coordinator Michael Coventry for his central role in authoring of the Director’s report and for his numerous services throughout the year to the Board.
Houston Business Meeting
The general oversight responsibilities of the Crossroads Advisory Board are carried out primarily through its discussions with the Director and Coordinator Coventry at its annual business meetings, the most recent one of which took place this past year at the Association’s annual meeting in Houston.
The Houston discussions were stimulating and productive. The Crossroads leadership brought Board members up to date on a variety of Crossroads activities, including the on-going Visible Knowledge Project, the plans for the just-funded Crossroads Online Institute, and the establishment of Washington State University as a second institutional site for Crossroads. Board members expressed enthusiasm for all these activities. Of particular note is the “outreach” potential of the FIPSE-funded Institute: its capacity to bring the VKP research on web-enhanced learning to bear on assisting a large number of faculty in universities and colleges both in and outside the U.S. to use the web creatively in their own classes. The electronic “poster boards” being created by VKP participants will also contribute to such outreach efforts. And the contributions of WSU to Crossroads under the leadership of Project Associate Director Jeff Sellen will make it possible for Crossroads to expand its efforts in a number of important areas of interest to the Association, including the strengthening of transnational connections, the promotion of “digital diversity” through facilitation of community access to digital resources, and helping various ASA committees and caucuses (for example, the Environmental Studies Caucus) build links to Crossroads. WSU’s own successful ventures in community-outreach activities (e.g., through its Center for Social and Environmental Justice) will prove valuable experience that it can bring to the service of Crossroads. Crossroads Board members saw these developments as offering exciting synergistic possibilities. For example, one member pointed to the Multicultural Archive at the University of Georgia, which includes rich oral history materials generated by Cherokee women. Crossroads might well facilitate access to such materials. Both the FIPSE grant and the WSU involvement are also enabling Crossroads to engage in its first major rethinking of the content and format of the site.
Director Bass also discussed with the Board other possible areas that the Crossroads-WSU collaboration may wish to pursue, including developing a mechanism for peer review of faculty creating digital materials as a part of their research, teaching, and service activities. Among the factors involved in such a project: 1) development of a statement by the faculty member being reviewed of the nature of the digital materials, the history of their development , their use and potential for use, and their quality (that is, their scholarly or pedagogical value, etc.); 2) development by the faculty member of a reviewable “portfolio” of his/her digital work; 3) identification of potential reviewers for tenure and promotion cases who combine relevant field expertise with expertise in digital work; 4) persuasion of relevant academic parties at the faculty member’s institution (departments, department chairs, deans, campus-wide personnel committees, etc.) that they should take seriously submitted digital materials and comments of relevant experts.
The Board agreed to develop a statement for endorsement by the ASA National Council attesting to the importance of this kind of scholarly and educational activity and to the importance of developing systematic and reliable mechanisms for evaluating such work. The Board also suggested the value of working collaboratively with other professional societies such as MLA and OAH to promote the legitimacy of digitally enhanced scholarship and teaching. In addition, the Board also suggested developing a Crossroads-facilitated conversation among scholars and teachers with such interests, building perhaps on the VKP and FIPSE projects. The Board also expressed interest in the Project’s developing training for graduate students in VKP methods of research and teaching.
The Board found informative the data provided by Director Bass on the use of the Crossroads site. He noted that the most accessed Crossroads site is the listing of American studies, ethnic studies, and related dissertations. That site had received 27,000 hits as of the fall of 2002, followed by the American Studies Association site at 17,000 hits. The Board expressed interest in receiving periodic reports of use patterns.
International Connections
The Board learned with great interest of the web-based collaborations WSU has developed with international sites in the Ukraine, Mexico, and China. One of the goals of such collaborations is to increase the availability of primary and secondary texts at those sites. Another goal is collaborative e-teaching and e-discussions of pedagogy. A third goal is to add international and transnational aspects to courses at all the affiliated institutions, including WSU, and to help students undertake projects involving transnational dimensions. WSU conceives the project as establishing an “international classroom.“ Stimulated by the WSU activities in this area, the Board discussed the possibility of using the Crossroads site to post a master list, developed possibly by ASA under the leadership of the International Committee, of international American Studies scholars working in the United States. The list could be used to help American and ethnic studies programs take advantage of such scholars’ presence in the U.S., and could help such scholars make useful connections.
The Board was also supportive of explorations that it was told were being pursued by the National Council and the Association’s International Committee that could result in gaining web access by international users to primary texts not readily available in many international libraries.
Use of Web Materials at ASA Conventions
For several years the Board has been advocating the development of means of enabling paper presenters and panelist on ASA convention programs to access the web as part of their presentations. An increasing number of presenters seem interested in this service. Logistical complexities and expense have to date prevented the making of such arrangements. Director Bass had hoped to find funding for a digital area at the 2001 convention, located in the publishers’ room, but was unsuccessful in his efforts. More recently, ASA Executive Director Stephens has explored in some detail the costs involved in bringing live-web use into annual meetings and found the cost at the moment prohibitive.
Given the increasing number of professional conventions for which live-web access will be important, it is likely that convention hotels will begin to build such access capability into at least some of their meeting rooms. Wireless developments in hotels will likely further this web accessibility. At its Houston meeting, the Board suggested that the ASA leadership take “web access” capability (particularly wireless access capability) into account in the future when selecting conventional hotels. The Board recommended that, at the minimum, Program Committees identify one convention meeting room with web-hookup connections and schedule all web-using sessions in that room. To keep expenses under control, program presenters could if necessary bring their own computers and projectors with them. However achieved, live web access at conventions will prove of increasing value to ASA members.
E-Edition of the Encyclopedia of American Studies
At the Houston Board meeting, Miles Orvell, co-editor of the Encyclopedia of American Studies, discussed National Council-approved planning underway with Grolier, the Encyclopedia’s publisher, to put it on-line as a part of a packaged of licensed encyclopedias. In its e-form, the Encyclopedia will be annually updated with new articles and additional biographies. The form will make possible hypertext links between Encyclopedia articles as well as to materials and websites outside the Encyclopedia as well as use of visual and aural materials. The Board expressed its strong support of this project and discussed possible linkage of the e-edition to Crossroads. Among the possibilities: brief summaries on the Crossroads site of Encyclopedia articles; perhaps a featured article of the month. The Board also discussed the value of the project in stimulating an examination of the taxonomy of the Encyclopedia, and suggested that a synoptic table of contents might be useful. Links to Crossroads will be facilitated by the presence of Director Bass on the Encyclopedia’s advisory board. The Crossroads Board also agreed to explore with ASA leadership the possibility of inviting the Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia to serve as an ex-officio member of the Board.
Respectfully submitted,
Michael Cowan, Chair
Crossroads Project Advisory Board
September 5, 2003
Report of the Crossroads Project Director
It has been a year of new and renewed collaborations and exciting new directions for the American Studies Crossroads Project and its related initiatives in online learning and the scholarship of teaching and learning in the Humanities. This report highlights the collaboration with Washington State University, the Crossroads Online Institute (funded by FIPSE), the publication of a new edition of the volume, Engines of Inquiry, and the ongoing work of the Visible Knowledge Project.
Collaboration with Washington State University
Much Crossroads activity over the last year has been focused around solidifying and implementing the collaboration between Crossroads and the American Studies Program at Washington State University.
At the ASA Annual Meeting in Houston, Randy Bass (Project Director, Georgetown University), Jeff Sellen (Project Associate Director, Washington State University), T.V. Reed (Director, American Studies Program, Washington State University) and Michael Coventry (ASA Electronic Projects Coordinator, Georgetown) met to discuss overall direction for the Project and the collaboration between the two physical “locations” of the Project.
Out of this meeting came a general plan for collaboration with three overall directions:
Develop Crossroads to go beyond resources and links to resources, but create a site with a set of online activities around educational transformation in American Studies and related fields. These activities include the Online Faculty Development Workshop for Course Redesign (FIPSE grant, more below), and the Global Collaborative Research Workshop (as conceived by Judy Babbitts, along with Jeff and Randy), and other international education exchanges.
Develop new online resources related to American Studies and related fields, particularly those that enhance teaching and learning connections to contemporary world events, community-based learning and research, and ASA constituent groups.
Redesign the site as needed and desired, including greater use of database materials, new design look, and incorporation of WSU “branding” alongside Georgetown to evidence and represent the collaboration.
Progress is underway throughout the Project to take steps in each of these directions.
One of the first tasks was to begin to develop a process for cooperation between the two sites. Allyson Wolfe, an American Studies graduate student at WSU, functions as one of the sinews linking the two schools together. Allyson works with Michael Coventry at Georgetown to handle various requests and general site maintenance.
Responding to a request at the American Studies Annual Meeting, Michael Coventry has been working with the ASA’s Secondary Education Committee to develop some online resources and a mailing list. The Georgetown site is providing access to and administration of a listserv to facilitate communication among the committee members. The Committee has provided content for a web page which was developed by Allyson at WSU and is currently available on the Crossroads site. The Religion Caucus has also decided to develop a web presence, but they plan to develop their own pages which Crossroads will host.
The WSU group took the lead on the development of the new “Critical Conversations” feature of the Crossroads site. They have created a draft of the first of this series, on the USA Patriot Act (http://www.georgetown.edu/crossroads/drafts/critcon/index.htm). The draft is currently in revision and plans are in the works to include an interactive forum as well as some scholarly articles on the legislation. This site is, of course, made more timely in view of the current political controversy over the Act.
This Fall, Allyson and the newly-named second Crossroads-WSU fellow, Tina Krauss, are helping to support the ASA Student’s Committee. Each year, the students’ committee provides a variety of resources around the Annual Meeting. In addition, they will continue working on critical conversations site(s) and site maintenance.
The WSU group will also be working on the Community Partnerships section of the Crossroads site, using the VKP Poster tool developed at Georgetown.
Publication of the Second Edition of Engines of Inquiry
The American Studies Crossroads Project is pleased to announce the publication of the second edition of its publication, Engines of Inquiry: Approaches to Teaching, Learning, and Technology in American Culture Studies. The 500+-page volume presents essays exploring the intersection of teaching, learning, and technology in American studies classrooms nationwide.
The 36 essays and sample assignments (31 one of them new or significantly revised) come from faculty involved in the original Crossroads Research Project as well as the Visible Knowledge Project and include teacher reflections, sample assignments, essays on using documents in the classroom, essays on scholarship of teaching projects, and paper-based presentations of electronic scholarship of teaching and learning posters.
Under the general editorship of Randy Bass, Michael Coventry served as primary editor of the volume and Laura Kane (a fellow at CNDLS/Crossroads) served as the managing editor. The volume also represents important continued collaborations with the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and the American Social History Project at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
As in the past, the volume will be available for purchase from either the ASA office or from Crossroads.
Crossroads Online Institute
With funding from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning & Scholarship (CNDLS) is host to the Crossroads Online Institute (COI). COI consists of two main areas of activity: an online faculty development workshop, also known as the COI, and a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Object Repository.
The online faculty development workshop was conducted in the Spring, ending in late May, and involved 12 faculty from a variety of institutions nationwide. In the design of the grant, the first faculty cohort consisted of faculty drawn exclusively from the Visible Knowledge Project. In subsequent years, the workshop will be open to faculty from others schools. The workshop was facilitated by John Rakestraw of the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University (a VKP Core Campus Coordinator and former CNDLS Scholar-In-Residence), Cheryl Richardson (CNDLS Research Associate), and Susannah McGowan (CNDLS Instructional Designer).
In the workshop, faculty members worked through a process of designing online learning modules in American studies and allied fields. This Fall, 7 of the 12 participants are teaching using their online modules in American culture and history classrooms; three more will teach in the Spring. Two of the participants are librarians, and are using their modules for librarian instruction in topics such as academic integrity.
Each person teaching this semester will write a 5-page reflection on their teaching and learning experience as well as annotate one piece of student evidence that reflects what learning took place in the module. These three items will be housed in a web-based Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Object Repository. This repository’s technical specifications are currently in development by staff and consultants connected to CNDLS.
Using the evaluation data from workshop participants as well as feedback from a meeting at the VKP Summer Institute, the Project has determined and planned the revisions to the workshop for the Spring 2003, when we will welcome a new cohort of faculty to the COI.
Visible Knowledge Project
The Visible Knowledge Project continued its active, national role in scholarship of teaching and learning work involving technology in the humanities through a variety of means: continued work on individual scholarship of teaching and learning projects building towards collaborative inquiry, a variety of outreach activities coordinated on local campuses, two regional institutes, a developing Project mid-point evaluation project, and a new role as a Campus Cluster Leader in the Carnegie Academy for the Foundation of Teaching/American Association for Higher Education’s CASTL Program.
The Project continued to support and work with the 70-odd faculty from 21 campuses on their individual scholarship of teaching and learning projects in American Studies and related learning involving technology (follow the links for “people” and “posters” from http://crossroads.georgetown.edu/vkp/people/). The Project has been experimenting together with various means—including a series of conference calls conducted in tandem with the use of an online discussion space—to facilitate the process of building these individual projects in the direction of collaborative inquiry in which sets of faculty are exploring similar themes in student learning.
In addition to the discussion space, the Project has also continued development of resources to facilitate local group work in the scholarship of teaching and learning (http://crossroads.georgetown.edu/vkp/resources/kits/) and continues to publish a newsletter (http://crossroads.georgetown.edu/vkp/newsletter/ ).
Individual campuses of the Project developed a variety of means for presenting their work on their local campuses, in the year of the “local dialogues.“ Out of this process, arose two, more regional events: a West Coast Institute held in January at California State University—Monterey Bay and a day-long event for the three New York City campuses of the VKP (on Monterey, see http://crossroads.georgetown.edu/vkp/about/westcoastinstitute/ ) These events provided opportunities for faculty participation broader than opportunities for those who have been able to attend national institutes of the Project.
VKP staff are continuing work on the VKP evaluation project. Over the Spring and Summer, Cheryl Richardson (CNDLS/VKP Research Associate and an expert in qualitative research methods) conducted in-depth interviews with each of the campuses involved in the Project, asking a series of questions about scholarship of teaching and learning work, technology integration into humanities education, and the relationships between these issues. This Fall, the Project staff are working on a document combining a report on those findings with additional information gained from a survey of project faculty and a series of extensive interviews. This report, called “VKP @ Three,“ will focus on the effect of technology on student learning, the process of faculty development, and pushing towards an agenda for understanding the nature of scholarship of teaching and learning work.
In the Spring, VKP was also selected to serve as a Campus Cluster Leader in the Carnegie/AAHE Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching Program. Sherry Linkon (Youngstown State University), Michael Coventry (VKP Steering Committee and Web Resources Coordinator) and Cheryl Richardson represented the VKP at a poster session during the colloquium of the CASTL program held annually in connection with the American Association for Higher Education. Many of the 15 core campuses from the VKP are expected to join in the campus cluster, and the cluster is open to other campuses who wish to join due to their interests in our comprehensive audit of scholarship of teaching and learning issues on campuses, using technology to facilitate multi-campuses collaborations, the SoTL repository, and issues related to faculty work in the scholarship of teaching and learning and new media environments.
Related to the Campus Cluster work, this Fall CNDLS is hosting a version of the Crossroads Online Institute for 8 faculty from Cerritos College (a VKP core campus). This version will serve as a pilot for the revision of the Online Institute planned for the Spring.
In addition to the involvement in CASTL, Michael Coventry also presented on the VKP Poster Tool on a panel with Toru Iyoshi (Carnegie Foundation’s Knowledge Media Lab) and Barbara Mae Gayle (Portland State University, CASTL Scholar) during the annual meeting of the American Association for Higher Education in March.
Visible Knowledge Project Summer Institute
More than fifty faculty participants in the Visible Knowledge Project—representing about 30 different institutions—gathered at Georgetown for the Fourth Annual VKP Summer Institute. As always the Summer Institute was energetic and intensive, combining plenary workshops and discussions with smaller “working group” meetings focused on individual scholarship of teaching and learning projects.
The Institutes focused on three key: evidence of student learning, collaboration across individual projects, and publication. Several sessions focused on one of the key challenges in this work: engaging student work as evidence of student work. Sessions focused on adapting methods from the social sciences as well as hands-on exercises with transcripts of history students thinking aloud about a primary document. Collaboration was explored in plenary sessions as well as a being a major focus of the small-group “working groups.“ In the working groups, teams of faculty did a variety of exercises intended to help discover collaborative possibilities across projects. The third emphasis, publication or “going public with your work”, was explored in the final plenary session, as faculty in the Project explored various publication opportunities which have begun to be available for the Project. Later, a resource was created on the VKP site detailing some of these opportunities: http://crossroads.georgetown.edu/vkp/resources/goingpublic/. For more information, see the VKP Community Newsletter article on the Summer Institute:
Another new initiative emerging from this institute was the creation of “Writing Residency Fellowships,“ where eighteen VKP faculty (in groups of six) will come to the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship for 2 1/2 day residencies to focus intensively on articles or essays about their VKP Projects. The first workshop for the Writing Residency Fellows will occur this Fall.
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