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Scott Schopieray

Scott Schopieray

Workflow for voice annotating an image with Keynote and uploading to Digication

1 min read

Our Citizen Scholars program is using digication 

 

 

Scott Schopieray

Researcher tech toolkit -- using a team drive provided with an MS Teams site creation

2 min read

When the team and accompanying OneDrive space is  available.
 
The team is available like normal through Teams and the drive is available two ways...
  1. You can access it within Teams by navigating to the team and clicking the "Files" tab on the top. From here you can upload and download files that will be available to anyone in the team. You also can click on "Open in Sharepoint" and you'll get to the file space for the drive. Here you can better set permissions and/or use the "Sync" feature to create a desktop folder that will sync with the cloud drive. Note: working within this space assumes that everyone working on the committee is using Teams. If they are not you'll definitely want to use the space below. 

  2. Alternatively, you can go to http://spartan365.msu.edu and log in with your netid and password. From here you'll want to go to OneDrive and then on the left side under Libraries you'll either see it listed or you might need to click More Libraries in order to see it. When you click on it you'll be taken to the file space for it where you can upload things and modify permissions. This is the space where you can create files that are sharable with the group but which are not necessarily available in the MS Teams site. 

Scott Schopieray

CNAME changes in reclaim are done with the zone editor that is in the area where subdomains/etc. are. Can also be done from the WHM interface if needed, might be faster that way if one knows what they are doing.

Scott Schopieray

Draft 1 of tipsheet for installing Open Journal Systems (OJS) on Reclaim Hosting is available at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rWefadpf9CI7DkFZKVS8xcYSuyrp2OruwCVNVemzkgM/edit?usp=sharing

Scott Schopieray

why do we make the assumption that help@ or help. sites go to technology?

Scott Schopieray

Wrote a tutorial this evening for Fixing the Too Many Redirects Error Wordpress Multisite on Domain of One's Own after having a huge issue in getting it running for a fall course

https://docs.google.com/document/d/19gxnjRL3O14l23OoxeMcKR9BRpMXzgYyIEbn_TyH_ZU/edit?usp=sharing

Scott Schopieray

Questions for Formative Annual Review (FAR) App/Process - Draft 0.0.1

1 min read

 

Reflective Component

These are the questions to be considered as one reflects back on the prior year of work.

  • What are the things that you set out to do last year?
  • Did you accomplish these things that you said you would accomplish?
  • If not what prevented you from accomplishing them?
  • Are there things you accomplished this year that are not in your list of things you set out to do?

 

Critical Planning

  • What are three things you plan to accomplish in the coming year?
  • When will you know that you have accomplished them?
  • How do you plan to reflect throughout the year to understand your progress toward them?
  • What will you do on a daily basis to ensure that you were moving toward those goals?

Context-Making

  • How do these future accomplishments fit into the way you want to move your career forward over the longer term?
  • How are these things related to both shorter-term and longer-term goals?
  • How are you going to work with your supervisor, mentor, team, etc. to move toward these goals?

Scott Schopieray

Education 2035 Core Values DRAFT Statement

2 min read

** Note: This text was largely written by Sonja Fritzsche and Andrew Christlieb based off of conversations at a series of conversations during Fall 2018 with faculty from around the institution who have an interest in thinking about the values we must embody as we consider the technical futures of education.

The MSU Education 2035 initiative holds that technology and AI-enhanced learning must be adopted primarily for education improvement and not as a dollar-saving opportunity. When done well these are not inexpensive tools.

During fall 2018, we met three times to discuss a core values statement. The various participants found the following four values and subcategories/questions to be the guiding principles for successful technology adoption on campus in the area of teaching and learning. Only in this way will we be able to think critically around solving real problems today and into the future, rather than just streamlining and improving teaching. All activity of the Education 2035 initiative embodies these values.

Community – conversation, collaboration, shared decision making from community teams/brains that include faculty, students, staff, and administrators.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion – diversity of users reflected in the diversity of work groups, open source/open access, algorithmic literary, digital literacy, continual recognition of and measures taken to combat implicit data bias that reinforce existing cultural power structures

Transparency – student and faculty data usage ethics, data privacy rights, a culture of data usage consent, data implicit bias, decision making and policies, transparency of data, algorithm, process

  • Data collection (D2L issues?): what gets collected and how long is it stored?
  • Data ownership: who owns it?
  • Data control: who gets control? How can students edit/adjudicate?
  • Data access: who sees what, how is the data displayed, how do I ask for it?
  • What happens when the company is sold?
  • Data use (D2L): how does D2L use the data, how does MSU use the data, how to instructors use the data, how is any of this communicated to the students?
  • Data communication: how is data shown?

Accountability – equity audit process, development of a university code of ethics for data ownership, data ethics MSU data privacy statement and syllabus information, assessment of compliance with first three values (Community, DEI, and Transparency), tools must solve real pedagogical problems, not just innovate for innovation’s sake.

 

Scott Schopieray

iOS Design Lab At MSU

3 min read

ioslabThe iOS design lab is a project that we started Michigan State University to help our students gain valuable skills that they need to be successful in 21st-century work. The first year is a two-semester program, with an option for a summer internship to continue working on a project.

 

We start students out doing work in groups and teams that are arranged by connecting their interests and passions. The first several weeks of the semester the individual students look at what they are interested in, areas they want to work in or topics they want to focus on. They form teams and the teams engage in a lot of design thinking, brainstorming, and conversation over the course of the semester to design the idea for an application that they will develop. By the end of the first semester, the teams have thought about their ideas, developed some strategies for dealing with the ethical, moral, safety, cultural, etc. components of their applications and are preparing to think about how they will handle more of the technical components as they move forward.

 

During the second semester, they focus largely on the technical portions of app development. They develop a familiarity with the Xcode, create small apps that allow a sense of accomplishment and which develop skills with Swift, and 

 

software, and developing a level of competency with thinking computationally and learning to use different components of the programming language to accomplish their goals. We work over the semester to get them into some state where they are able to both develop things for the app, think confidently about what they are doing and need to do in the future, and to get themselves ready to move forward with finishing out the app over there summer time.

 

Across both semesters we work with them to do journaling and documenting their code or other thinking in various ways. We help them collect photos of themselves in practice and we help them to collect artifacts of their brainstorming and other creative activity. The portfolio they produce at the end of the first year of the program shows a holistic process where they’ve engaged in the social, technical, cultural and creative acts of creating an application that is designed to be successful. As we move toward year two we envision the year to be one of putting their learning into practice with a different project and working to develop applications for other people or projects as they continue to develop the portfolio.

 

Each student is eligible at the end of year one to apply for a World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) scholarship, to apply for the World Wide Developer Academy in Naples Italy, or to take the exam to gain a credential been certified in Swift. Additionally, each of the students who complete the year will receive a micro credential granted by the University, and a line in My Spartan Story (the University level co-curricular record).

Scott Schopieray

Birth of a framework

1 min read

"Don't Let Perfect Be the Enemy of the Good

Developing a process framework for doing just about anything is sometimes a daunting task, especially since the first step for many of us when we are asked to develop one is to hit up google, which yields somewhere in the neighborhood of 350M results. In my experience, this adds to the overwhelming nature of the request and yields a response of requesting time to think and work on it, pushing deadlines out further than what are ideal. Time is necessary to do a complete process framework, of course, but many frameworks are born out of a quick look at current procedure and documenting those, then returning to the pieces and detailing them.

Process frameworks contain the following elements - they are 

CAL a11y process overview

In the above example, we documented an existing set of procedures into the beginnings of a framework in about 5 minutes.

 

In writing this I found Leveraging Process Frameworks to Simplify Process Management by Jeff Varney to be quite helpful.

https://it.toolbox.com/blogs/craigborysowich/systems-design-principles-of-hierarchical-decomposition...

 

Scott Schopieray

Birth of a framework

1 min read

"Don't Let Perfect Be the Enemy of the Good

Developing a process framework for doing just about anything is sometimes a daunting task, especially since the first step for many of us when we are asked to develop one is to hit up google, which yields somewhere in the neighborhood of 350M results. In my experience, this adds to the overwhelming nature of the request and yields a response of requesting time to think and work on it, pushing deadlines out further than what are ideal. Time is necessary to do a complete process framework, of course, but many frameworks are born out of a quick look at current procedure and documenting those, then returning to the pieces and 

CAL a11y process overview

In the above example, we documented an existing set of procedures into the beginnings of a framework in about 5 minutes

 

In writing this I found Leveraging Process Frameworks to Simplify Process Management by Jeff Varney to be quite helpful.

https://it.toolbox.com/blogs/craigborysowich/systems-design-principles-of-hierarchical-decomposition...

 

Scott Schopieray

Digital Publishing Summit

3 min read

Traveled to Umich today with @cplong and @kfitz to attend meeting on digital publishing platforms.

 

Presented:

Humanities Commons - @kfitz

 

Manifold - https://manifoldapp.org/ -

presented by Susan Doerr

 You can easily convert your existing files into online publications, and Manifold’s open-source platform provides a beautiful, deep reading experience that fosters community and encourages discussion.

ruby based... should be installable by relatively savvy individual. 

Vega - Cheryl Ball

Digital publishing, focused on multimedia

https://vegapublish.com/

 

ENM - presented by NYU

Enhanced Networked Monograph - http://dlib.nyu.edu/enm/enm-web/

https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2015/june/nyu-libraries-nyu-press-lead-project-to-d...

Topic creation toolkit - ingestsand parses epubs

Platform for reading experience

jstor labs created some researcher persona's that were useful in thinking about what they were doing

 

http://readium.org/

 

Fulcrum

https://www.fulcrum.org/northwestern

This is an example of a publisher landing page.

https://www.fulcrum.org/beta/

they are looking at a hosted model where they are providing the hosting for other places so they can maintain some level of control. 

 

Developing Socio-Technical Ecosystems

Presentation by Kentaro Toyama

author of Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology - https://www.amazon.com/Geek-Heresy-Rescuing-Social-Technology/dp/161039528X 

Ecosystems Thrive when....

Developing Socio-Techno Ecosystems

recommended approach

1 - think through use-case scenaros -- e,g. how would one platform benefit from using another?

2 - identify the common, important or popular use cases and start with those

3 - agree upon and define the object types and interfaces (e.g. APIs)

4 - Consider other complex technical issues, such as secuirty/scalability. If the above is done well then much of this is left in the hands of technical teams

5 - implement using best common use cases

 

So how does this work...?

1 - Use case scenarios might be things like a Manifold Author gets an HC account etc.

2- The common/important things here would be ideally identifiable here

3 - now we start to say that in order for systems outside HC to create new accounts the following must be in place... 

This starts to become fairly "easy" for technical teams to start implementing.. How is technical leadership important in cases like this?

Chris expresses some concern about using a silicon valley model rooted in competititve work when that's something we are working hard to supersede 

How can the russian hacking as a "master class" idea help humanists see their work in the broader context. 

 

Scott Schopieray

Bill's research video link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iz9Yf15DIIk

Scott Schopieray

AAN Panel on Learning Assessment

3 min read

On Friday 2/16 I was part of a panel sponsored by the Academic Advancement Network on Learning Assessment. Fellow panelists Stephen Thomas, Justin Bruner, Becky Matz and I were asked the following questions with conversation among us and the group following.

The word “assessment” means different things to different people and roles. What does learning assessment mean to you?

For me assessment is about understanding what the student has learned, or how they’ve moved the needle so to speak in terms of advancing their thinking or understanding of an issue. In our work with credentialing we really need to understand how the student is making connections of these kind of seemingly disparate events or activities that they’re doing in order to show that the sum is greater than the parts.

How do you talk to people you work with about assessment? At the college or program level, how does that translate into helping faculty and colleagues understand what you’re trying to achieve or assess?

We really start by talking about goals and objectives and understanding what it really is that we want to know. You can’t assess anything unless you know what you want to assess and too often when we start thinking about assessment we haven’t considered what our initial goals were and so we have no real way to assess.

Stephen’s comment about classroom assessment and program assessment was a really good point, one that shows that we often think about assessment as on a programmatic level and mostly with a negative connotation. Michael Lockett pointed out as well that in post-secondary education we often conflate assessment and evaluation, and that if we were to think about it in a way like K12 or other areas where evaluation happens by combining numerous assessments.

How do you see technology impacting your assessment practices? What does that mean for you?

As always, technology should be used in support of the work that we are doing or as a lever to make things easier or more efficient. Sometimes it can make things more effective, but all too often the assumption is that the technology makes things more effective without some real planning about it.

For me the technology is allowing me to better show the goals and objectives that we’ve set out for the students ahead of time so so they are wandering around in a “fog”. The achievement system that I’ve been working with Nate Lounds and others has been a great way of showing how the technology can help the students to understand where they are in a program so that they can best participate and choose ways to participate.

How do you see assessment impacting teaching and learning practices in the classroom? Do you see an impact?

When we are better able to assess learning accurately, we are better able to make adjustments to our teaching practices that will ideally yield better learning. When we can understand what students are learning better, we can best scaffold and teach more or present more learning opportunity for the students and help them figure out how to support their own learning. This is really where I see and advantage for us if we’re thinking about these things early on in a student’s career so they aren’t spending the majority of their student career here not really understanding why, what and how they need could be learning things.

Scott Schopieray

CPIL Academy

1 min read

Pile of legosToday marks the start of morphing the CAL Research and Digital Presence Symposium that we’ve been offering for several years into the CPIL Academy, an umbrella for all of our work we are doing around paths to leadership, digital presence, public scholarship, research strategies, collaborative work and project management (among others). 

This post outlines some of the components we are working through as a part of the academy. We take a sort of bricolage approach to this work, with a number of the components that can be swapped into and out of the work.

Pathways to Intellectual Leadership

This is the stepping stones, milestones and horizon events

Digital Presence: Online Profiles

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Digital Presence: Domains

sdaaf

Creating a fundable idea/strategy

Afkhjo

Working as a collaborative team

khjdfsa

Project Management

dsjfkl

 

photo courtesy of justgrimes on flickr

Scott Schopieray

Cognitive disabilities and teaching/learning

1 min read

Some thoughts from the accessible learning conference and conversations around the conference. 

Concern for people with cognitive disabilities not being able to use their phones, etc as well because people may not have allowed them to use their phones etc in the way that normal students

Ux issues - how does ux focus on udl and helping folks with cognitive disabilities

Dignity of risk

D2L is what students are prepared to use but when someone uses other it can be distracting, confusing or otherwise have negative impact on the learner.

VR worlds - can they help us get feeback from students on built environments? For example, when we are desigining a new learning space can we do a virtual space that we then are able to use to see how people react to it/what feedback we might get?

Scott Schopieray

Tips and Options for Captioning/transcript generation

5 min read

As I’m working with video for my own courses and others, ways to think about caption/transcript generation often come up. The first place people seem to go on this is to think about either listening to the video and then transcribing themselves, or hiring out captioning companies and paying per minute. While these are certainly options that will work, I use a combination of other methods that I have never taken the time to outline in writing. This is by no means a comprehensive list of alternatives to self transcription or hiring out, but rather a starting point for developing your own methods and procedures.

Generally speaking, I find there are 3 types of videos that people create... those that are planned meticulously and scripted, those that are outlined but generally not scripted, and those that are totally unscripted and minimally planned. I fall into the last category most often, so my options for generating a transcript are different than those who might be more prepared when starting to talk. Those of us working in curriculum development, instructional technology and related fields also often find themselves working with videos produced before their involvement in the project and therefore with unavailable scripts even if they had been generated at a prior time. 

I find that whenever you are doing a recording, speaking slowly and intentionally allows auto captioning to do a better job than if you talk at a normal or fast pace. If the pace of your speaking is too slow, the listener can always speed up the pace of the video if it’s too slow for them. If you are creating screencasts that show how to do something technical, speaking more slowly and intentionally has the added benefit of it being paced properly for following along while doing it on your own computer.

If you are one of those who does plan and script ahead of time, you might not even need to worry about generating a transcript later, you might have already made it when you wrote your script, but for those of us who do a bit more "off the cuff" speaking I use the following in combination.

Google Voice Typing

Perhaps the easiest way to generate a pretty good transcript of an existing video or audio file is to use Google's Voice Typing feature. Built into Google Docs, you can easily turn it on by going to the "Tools" tab and then selecting Voice Typing as the option. this will give you a grey microphone that turns red when the feature is active. For simply voice typing notes, etc. you would activate the microphone and start talking. To use it for transcript generation I've found it works best to use an external microphone and to play the video on a second device (such as your phone). The video playing into your computer allows the Google Doc to use Voice Typing as if it were listening to you simply talking into the microphone. An advantage to Google Voice Typing over other options I've worked with is that it does a pretty good job of transcribing multiple voices on a panel or in a video that has more than one person. 

Media Space Captioning

MSU has the Kaltura Mediaspace system in place for hosting video on campus, which includes an automatic captioning feature. The benefit of this is that it automatically does it and also creates the captions that are aligned with the video and working. It’s relatively simple to use once you learn the media space interface, and has a built in editor for correcting any mistakes. Unlike the other options listed in this post, the captioning here happens without the need for tending to multiple devices with microphones connected. You can simply submit your video for captioning on the system and move to another task. The accuracy of the transcript with this particular product is not as high as other options. 

iOS Voice Typing

I find the iPhone is quite good at doing voice typing. Sometimes I use it to generate a script before create a video, but most often if I’m using it to generate a transcript I’ll just hold it up near the speaker and play the video I’m trying to generate the script for. More often than not it gets everything, doesn’t really care if the voice changes, and does pretty well. Downside to it is that it will only record for a short period of time, so there is a lot of stop, start, stop, start using this method. 

Apple Voice Typing

Enabling the accessibility feature of voice transcription on a mac can also work, though I’ve not been entirely happy with the pace it works at (it's quite slow to do the actual recognition). The advantage over the iOS version here is that it will keep transcribing without a need to stop. To really do this well it requires two devices so that one can play the audio/video back and the other can be recording/typing the text.

 

 

 

Scott Schopieray

Strategic Areas of Focus - December 2017

3 min read

Outline of a few areas of strategic focus that are at the forefront of our thinking this month. 

Badging/Competency-based learning

Our work with badging/competency-based learning continues to evolve, with a model for understanding the relationships between described competencies, experiences that support a student gaining some knowledge that they can then apply to creating an artifact (or set of them) which demonstrates the competency or sub-competency. 

competency, experience and artifacts triangle

We are employing this model in the Globally Engaged Leaders (GEL) program and in the Citizen Scholars (CS) program to ensure our requirements are matched up with the competencies we seek. 

process for competency based

Data Ethics

We continue to think about ethics as they are connected to the increasing amount of data that faculty members and administrators have access to. Ethical uses of student data need to be at the forefront of our thinking in this area, too often we are providing access to data without considering the reasons why it might not be good for broad access.

Some thoughts I'm working on...

How can data be ethically used as a "flag" for courses further into a sequence? For example, can we understand through course-level data that a student who performs in X way during a 101 course may be in need of further help or at risk in a higher level course? What are the implications for a faculty member knowing this when the student gets to the higher course? Is it better if the data is not connected to specific students... e.g you have X number of students who are flagged for issues in this course due to prior course performance?

When we have detailed access logs for each student how does that affect the way we look at the students work? e.g. if I know that Howard didn't access the course until the day before, but that Kate accessed it every day, but they created a similar quality final product does it matter? if it does, how(?) does my knowing that Howard didn't access the course much affect my view of his work?

Data storage issues are also at play. If we are allowing people to download and move data from one space to another, how are we ensuring these data are kept safe? How do we ensure that student identifying information is not released inadvertently, or used inappropriately?

Accessibility for persons with cognitive disorders and returned focus on courses

Thus far our focus on a11y issues has been mostly on sight/hearing impairments, but a growing area we should be thinking about is a11y for persons with cognitive disorders. How does this affect our work both with a11y for teaching and learning sites, but also for more public sites? What considerations do we need to be taking into account, and how do these affect our strategy?

Also negotiating returning our focus to teaching and learning focused a11y projects. Now that the mar/comm team has a web developer to focus on the public facing sites we are able to return our attention to teaching.

Digital Scholarship Lab

As we get closer to the launch of the DSL, how are thinking about growing interest and engagement there? On the VR side of things, how are we demonstrating capabilities for interested parties? What are other topics and areas that are connected to this work?

 

 

Scott Schopieray

Adapting the LMS Game to Other Educational Initiatives

1 min read

Recently several of us played the "LMS Game" designed by Bill Hart-Davidson at the MSU Hub. Our goal in that game was to map out the current status of an educational technology tool/genre on campus, to identify problems/gaps that exist with it, and then to identify possible solutions to address the gaps. My team chose to look at eportfolio initiatives on campus and in our mapping process we discovered that a lack of shared vision around collaboration 

In a conversation with @Craniumation about competency-based learning programs on campus he wondered if playing a modified version of the game might do the same thing as we did with the LMS game but with competency based learning initiatives. 

Scott Schopieray

Merging Faculty Interests and IT Policy

3 min read

Recently on our campus the IT administrators implemented two-factor authentication on our learning management system (LMS). All persons with "grader" level access to the system are required to use the two factor method to access the LMS when they access it. This was presumably put into effect to combat efforts by some students to modify grades or otherwise impersonate instructors, though the reasons for doing so were not clearly communicated to the faculty. 

Therein lies the question, how is IT policy implemented on college campuses in a way that merges faculty interests with the best interest of the institution at large? What mechanisms must be put into place to ensure that there is opportunity for questions, feedback on how a policy affects the classroom (whether virtual or physical), and how are these policies communicated to faculty in ways that allow them to understand the IT decisions and to not only work with them, but to promote them?

A rash of relatively high profile cases of digital identity theft on college campuses has occured in the past year, perhaps the most recent and high profile being that of a University of Iowa student who is facing federal charges for using a hardware keylogger to steal passwords of faculty members on campus. This is inarguably a possible threat facing faculty at many institutions, ours included. With the easy and inexpensive availability of a key logger, their small size and simple installation, one could easily imagine them being placed on computers across campus without the knowledge of anyone.

Clearly the threat is real, and two-factor authentication may be one of the easiest ways to thwart efforts on college campuses to steal faculty credentials, so in that respect putting two-factor on the LMS is a relatively easy way to protect faculty identities and prevent those who may have been able to steal their passwords from accessing and modifying grades.

So with all of the positive reasons to implement two-factor on the LMS or other relatied systems, you may be wondering what the big deal is... why not just let the implementation happen and move on? This is where the issues of ability to question and to provide feedback come into play.

What about the faculty member who has a valid reason for not bringing her phone to class? A phone which becomes necessary for receiving the sms message or which holds the app that has the access code? What about the person who teaches in a location where cellular service doesn't work very well? or the one who forgot their phone at home that morning? What about the faculty member who may be preparing to hold a conversation on a divisive topic, who has technical trouble accessing the course and therefore is seen by the students as being "technologically inept?" What are the feedback mechanisms in these cases? How are faculty able to share their experience with IT staff in ways that are meaningful and are considered in policy revisions or future policy creation?

There are answers to many of these questions that will surely be given, but it's not so much the answers I'm interested in as it is the openness to dialogue, and consideration of the fact that maybe there are a few faculty out there who have a good reason for not having to use the two-factor authentication on the LMS when they are in the classroom.

Scott Schopieray

Distant Visualizing Pippin

1 min read

Overview

I visited the Introduction to Digital Humanities class last week to talk about and show distant visualization techniques. Given the persistent theme of Harlem Renaissance used in the course, we chose a selection of paintings from the artist Horace Pippin ranging from 1930 until his death in 1946.

Caveat to this post, our dataset does not include the full breadth of Pippin's paintings during this period, and image processing was not done to ensure the paintings are accurately color corrected. The dataset was quickly obtained for the purposes of demonstration and while I make certain conclusions based on what I see, these are not necessarily correct.

Data Collection

 

Pippin Paintings

The above plot is color saturation of approximately 57 paintings on the y-axis and year of the painting on the x-axis. 

 

Pippin Brightness Median