Liveblogging NITLE, “Scholarly Collaboration and Small Colleges in the Digital Age”, 4th panel

Panel on faculty collaboration.

Scott Williams and Adam Johnson (Scripps and Harvey Mudd) on the IONiC/VIPEr (Virtual Inorganic Pedagogical Electronic Resource) project, collaborative project in inorganic chemistry.

Decided to look at how to improve pedagogical and collaborative approaches to inorganic chemistry in small institutions. Good context: broad distribution of inorganic chemistry in departments in many institutions, but also deep and varying specialization, plus inorganic chemists at small colleges tend to be highly isolated in that there is usually no more than one at a small institution. Inorganic chemistry is defined by what it’s not: not organic. So very broad field.

Personal note: this seems to me to be something true about many fields in small colleges. Which of course makes a successful collaborative and pedagogical framework of real interest if it’s sufficiently pliable to use in other contexts.

Community of practice: online libraries in many fields, try to build discussions between faculty about teaching inorganic chemistry, what has been successful and not.

Shows a Marratech interface–chat with video conferencing, some of the collaborators in the project appearing on the other end.

Whenever I see videoconferencing, I always feel like somehow it’s 1971 and I’m watching people who are in an Apollo capsule talking to Mission Control.

Building a repository: learning objects like labs, interesting problem sets: the stuff that works in teaching. Compensate for the lack of a good inorganice chemistry textbook with sharing of resources.

Want comment threads, rating systems, synchronous interaction.

Difficulty of keeping a good project idea going after people come home from a meeting: a really good point. They tried to use formal videoconferencing on a weekly basis to keep the collaborators’ attention to the project.

Lessons learned: need a group of people prepared to collaborate, who interact well. Collaborators need a personal investment.

Chemistry seems to be a discipline where there is a great deal of interesting stuff going on with digitally-enabled collaboration. I was really taken by Jean-Claude Bradley’s presentation at Swarthmore on Open Notebook Science at Drexel last semester, for example. But this also raises an issue about why people reinvent the wheel so often–it does seem to me that this group is going about creating some of what they’re doing from the ground up. That’s good in some ways and bad in other ways. I suppose I worry not just about the duplication of labor but also about creating inflexible collaborative architectures that don’t play nice with other collaborative architectures which then later on force faculty and students to choose which architecture they want to work within. The difference here is between focusing on teaching in one case (IONiC/VIPEr) and research and dissemination on the other (UsefulChem, Open Notebook Science, etc.) but in a way we don’t really want those radically separable.

Alternatively, I wonder if discussion of teaching is sometimes best done in a highly granular way: around a given individual class, in some resource devoted to that in specific. But maybe that’s me thinking as a humanist, because our courses and classrooms tend to have a much wider divergence than, for example, courses in inorganic chemistry.