Tag Archives: OER14

Writing References. YUCK!

 

OER14 3M-DS106 Trailer

Collaboratively writing a paper and presenting at a conference with two people I’d never met in person was a fantastic learning experience from start to finish. It is totally amazing to me what can be accomplished within the digital realm I’ve landed in with the DS106 community.  I didn’t really experience anything different from doing something like this in person, except that when my ego or perfectionistic habits flared up I had a chance to step back, breathe and get myself focused back to what was best for the paper.  I’m sure each of us had that experience at one time or another, and our higher selves always won out. (The time zone differences helped with that too. 😉 ) I can’t express my appreciation enough to my co-authors Alan Levine and Mariana Funes for their skills, professionalism, creativity, and sense of adventure we’ve shared the last 6 months.

“This case study explores how DS106 tools, methodology and philosophy were adapted into the corporate world at 3M to build community, collaboration, and effective global communication skills. Our hypothesis was the pedagogy and assignments of the DS106 open course could be modified for delivery on a corporate intranet, using internal creation and communication tools standard for 3M employees. We hoped to learn how the course experience could work within cultural and technological constraints of a corporate environment.”

Lockridge, R., Levine, A & Funes, M. (2014). A DS106 Thing Happened on the Way to the 3M Tech Forum. In Proceedings of OER14: building communities of open practice. Newcastle upon Tyne, England.

But what I wasn’t planned on learning, and wished that I could take back those 6+ hours of tedious OCD inducing labor back in February, was how to write the required (and admittedly very important) references for our OER14 paper to conform to the styles of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (http://www.apastyle.org).  What kind of sick personality makes these things up?

Conform to the styles of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (http://www.apastyle.org). Citations in the text appear in parenthesis as (Author, year) or (Author, year: page). If the author’s name appears in the text, as Author (year) or Author (year: page). Full citation of literature referred to should be given in References. Arrange the references alphabetically by first author’s name, rather than by the order of occurrence in the text. Punctuate and capitalize as in References of this document. Do not use numbered references or footnotes. References should use the style “reference-list”.

Ku, G. (2008). Learning to de-escalate: The effects of regret in escalation of commitment. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 105(2), 221-232.

For further examples see a summary of APA guidelines provided at http://www.library.cornell.edu/resrch/citmanage/apa 

Seriously

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From: Rochelle Lockridge 
Date: Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 11:48 AM
Subject: Re: attached are my final edits.
To: Mariana Funes 
Cc: Alan Levine

Spent another 4 hours formatting those stupid references according to the American Psychological Association, 6th ed.  What kind of personality makes this stuff up? By the time I do this again it will probably be outdated and everything I’ve learned this morning will be a waste of time.  GRRR!  I’ve actually compiled the links to the references I used to learn how to create the references. Do I need to make references to those in our paper too. <maniacal insane laughter>

  • When and when not to use italics (boy is that a can of worms)
  • In-text citation verses reference formats (Those commas, periods, spaces, & semicolon placements are a bitch to get right.)
  • Formats for different media, e.g. video, blog posts, newspaper articles, on-line articles, publications by corporations, websites,   (Still a little fuzzy on the formatting for the DS106 website. I say put it back into the text of the document.  We know how to use it correctly there.)
  • The new addition says they favor [blog post] over [weblog post]
  • Citing a personal communication. “DO NOT include in reference list, only in text”
  • Do not include retrieval date unless the source material will change over time (like a wiki page) or it’s a link to a corporate website that doesn’t have a date listed on the source page.
  • Citing & alphabetizing multiple references in the same year from one author.
  • Multiple references from the same author but different years do not use the a, b, c designation.  The year is all you need.
  • Retrieved from not From

Link to paper A DS106 Thing Happened on the Way to the 3M Tech Forum. Do me a big favor and at least read a couple of the painstakingly formatted citations at the end of the paper.  I need to know that someone out there found them of value, other than the entertainment value had by the person or persons who create these insane style formats.

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Here you go. My links to references about formatting references in case you ever, like me, naively decide to write an academic paper that requires the apa style format.

Postlude:

After doing all this work and whining about it to my daughter, she tells me there are computer programs out there that will do this type of formatting for you in a snap.  And once you have the basic information entered, you can very easily ask it to reformat for another style, say the Harvard Reference Style for example. She just happens to have a quality paid version on her computer that I could’ve used had she known what I was doing.  AAAHHH!!!!

Gah

DS106 Rocks!

DS106 ROCKS! 3M-DS106 Salon Patroness admiring the work of her co-collaborators for their OER14 paper.

If you’ve been following my communications out to the world over the last few days you know that the OER14 paper, “A DS106 Thing Happened on the Way to the 3M Tech Forum” that Alan Levine, Mariana Funes and I were writing was joyfully submitted on 2/27/14.  We’ll be presenting our 3M-DS106 Salon work at the end of April in Newcastle, UK. (Link to keynote speakers and panel members) For more see my post 3M+DS106+P2PL=OER14+M2M,  which includes a video I created from interviews with the 3M participants and the original abstract for the paper.


The Art used for making the “art”:

With my focus on writing the paper (and my paying job at 3M that is making all of this possible) I haven’t taken much space to create something just for fun.  As soon as the paper finished I jumped back into the “art” game and used the opportunity to show my appreciation for my ‘partners in crime’:  Alan Levine, Mariana Funes, and Giulia Forsythe. (Who at our hopeful request in the final week, does what she does best, doodled a wonderful image to capture the paper beautifully.)

OER14-GiuliaForsythe

“A DS106 Thing Happened on the Way to the 3M Tech Forum” illustrated by Giulia Forsythe (@GiuliaForsythe on Twitter)

As usual, ideas emerged and morphed as I was in creation mode.  The first image created was of the three of us enjoying our time in the Salon. It was sparked by an innocent comment from Mariana on the final draft of the paper and the resulting Twitter DM exchange.

MF: This is now icing on cake – but did you not have a wonderful photo of the Patroness in the days of yore in one of your posts? Could we add it here? And gif it? No. Kidding.”

RL: Thx for final comments. Especially reference comments at end. Are you truly serious about inserting the Salon GIF into our paper?

MF: I would love it. You think it is too much? It would be still for printing but could be a lead in to gif 4 work? or the 1 with work process? would be nice to have something stand out in the dull dull proceedings 🙂 it is a work thing for u so yr call!

There were many layers and tools used in re-making the paintings.  All were produced in Adobe Photoshop CS5.  The more advanced transformation tools available over Photoshop Elements allowed me to do things like warp the little red 3M on the envelope on the side table and Giulia’s doodle seen in the lap of the Salon Patroness, Madame de 3M106 .

I was fortunate to already have Colin the Dog (seen at our feet), and our three heads cut out from previous projects. The biggest issue that took A LOT of time futzing around was matching the color and texture of the new heads to the rest of the painting.  With these two projects I’ve (rather painfully) moved beyond the novice stage of applying layer mask effects. It’s easy once you get it – sort of like making a GIF. But up to this point it was more of an accident than a purposeful action.  See that little check box (Which pops up when you are creating a new layer.) next to “Use Previous Layer to Create Clipping Mask”? We are now best friends.

LayerMaskWindos

Not yet totally familiar with all of the layer effects and filters, I just kept trying stuff out until it looked sort of like I wanted.  I’m not 100% satisfied with the results, but it’s a long way from when I first started. (Nana-Tina-Little Alan REDOI still need more practice.  Look closely and you’ll also find DS106 on the back of the couch on the left side of the portrait and an OER14 on the right side of the mantle. 

But I really like the efffect of the rocking DS106.  This was one of those instances of serediptity.  I wanted to turn the still image into a GIF.  Nothing in the new image stood out as a piece that could be GIFed without what looked to me a lot of work.  I decided to try making the DS106 flash.  Again, playing around with the layer style effects I ended up with some modified images that would give the original flashing illusion I was intending. But stepping back and taking another look, I noticed something I wasn’t expecting. It turned out that creating the animation frames by turning off and on the layer effects of drop shadow, satin and emboss, it gave the DS106 the illusion of rocking in 3D behind my head. I love it when these things happen.

Mariana explains this well in an early draft of our OER14 paper.  (We had to reduce the word count from 6,000 down to 3,500. A lot of good stuff was left on the cutting room floor.)

Default open cultures generate the environment needed for innovation and creative thought. Zweig (2011) suggests that generating an environment that enables ‘structured serendipity’  may help us be more creative. From a cognitive perspective, Funes (2003) research suggests creative thought has at its core ‘bridging’ activity; creativity happens at the point of discontinuity when bridging from one domain to another. DS106 teaches bridging through an environment of structured serendipity via its focus on what Rheingold (2014) describes as ‘product orientation’ but is referred to in the DS106 open community as ‘Just make art, damn it!’

Credits for DS106 ROCKS!

Original painting: ‘Madame de Pompadour’ by François Boucher

Wall Painting Riff:

I cut out the center section of this original painting by Jean François de Troy (Paris 1679 – Rome 1752), “Reading from Molière” around 1728 found on Salon (gathering) Wikipage

Jean François de Troy (Paris 1679 – Rome 1752), “Reading from Molière”

I use a riff of this painting as the 3M-DS106 thumbnail image.

DS106 walkers small

Side Note:

I was formatting references for the paper for 6+ hours all told.  I’m going to get as much mileage out of that tediously boring work as I can.

 

3M+DS106+P2PL=OER14+M2M

 

At the end of April 2014 I’ll be attending the industry’s largest global M2M (Machine to Machine) conference in London as part of my strategic analyst job at 3M. But what’s that got to do with DS106 or OER14? And what’s with that P2PL in this post’s title? Let me explain.

At 3M I get paid to study companies and technologies relevant to the Electronics and Energy business group that I work in. That’s how I discovered DS106. I was asked to look into this new phenomenon called MOOCs and see if there was anything of interest for the group.  What I eventually learned was that DS106 was no MOOC. But it was, at its best, a peer-to-peer learning (P2PL) experiment where we learn from and teach one another skills that can help us to maneuver and communicate more effectively in the social media and digital world. Dare I say it? …by playing and having lots of fun in the process.

3M-DS106-GoldGuys_ShakeHands-4My initial foray in the summer of 2013 into the open on-line Digital Story telling course DS106 out of University Mary Washington, led me to organize an internal version of the “course” at 3M (3M-D106) to run in parallel with the loosely organized DS106 “Headless 13” session (Aug 26th thru Dec 13, 2013). My intention was to modify the open on-line course materials and methodology for use behind the 3M Firewall to help myself and my fellow technical 3Mers become more fluent with the digital communication platforms provided by 3M.  There is a need and expressed desire to improve the effectiveness of our communication, especially with our global colleagues.

3M-DS106 Final Project:

As a final project for 3M-DS106 I created a short video of participant experiences. “3M-DS106 is Open For Business”

yu garden cropped

Bill Dower 3M-DS106 Participant

To make it easy and time efficient for scheduling and editing I recorded Skype conversations from five participants, then reduced 3+ hours of audio down to 8 minutes using GarageBand 11 on my Mac. Achieving a logical flow to the storyline of the audio was a bit of a challenge. I had originally intended to break it into sections with snippets from each person, but that turned out to be too choppy and disjointed. Organizing by person provided a better overall feel to the audio.  But I did choose specific topics to emphasize and made sure to include important points each interviewee themselves was emphasizing during our conversation: Like the concept of having tools in your tool box, participants teaching and learning from one another (the P2PL (peer-to-peer learning) reference in the title), and Bill Dower’s passion for more effective global communication where English is not the first language for all parties involved.

At this time 3M does not have a good way to stream audio.  We do, however, have what would amount to an internal version of YouTube. I could easily post a video that would be readily accessible by all 3Mers using the my video editing software Adobe Premiere Elements 11 for the Mac.  And since it was now in a video format, it was a logical extension to add a few images to liven it up.  I could add images of their projects and their photos.  I started out with photos taken from their 3M on-line profiles, but the resolution was very poor.  When I asked for higher resolution images, to my surprise people started sending me more personal shots of themselves out in the world. The interviewees also suggested the addition of the 3M division they worked for and their location. These were delightful additions that I hadn’t planned or anticipated.  They made for a better end product that could reach a wider audience internally and externally.

Jenna-Text

Jenna Sander: 3M-DS106 participant (Link to a sample of her 3M-DS106 projects.)

OER 14 & M2M Conference

And the whole experiment was successful enough that Alan Levine, Mariana Funes, and I submitted an abstract to present a short paper at the OER14 (Open Education Resources) conference on April 28-29, 2014 in Newcastle upon Tyne, England.  Our abstract was accepted with flying colors (See below) and hopefully all three of us will be in attendance.

This brings me full circle to how I have found myself attending the M2M (Machine to Machine) conference in London from the 24th-25th.  When I am traveling I try to find a conference nearby that may also be of interest for 3M.  In my usual fashion I went to Google and started a search for energy and electronics related conferences in Europe around the dates of OER14. Believe it or not, the first one that popped up was the M2M conference. I made some inquiries around the web and with people in the know in this area at 3M. (More peer-to-peer learning) It turned out to be a premiere conference and I was easily supported to attend.

3M + DS106 +P2PL = OER14 + M2M

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oer14_logo_web_HQ

OER 14 Abstract (Reviewer comments included at end.)

Newcastle, England 28-29 April 2014

Title: A DS106 Thing Happened on the Way to the 3M Tech Forum

Authors:
Ms. Rochelle Lockridge, Strategic Analyst, 3M
Mr. Alan Levine, Educational Consultant, CogDog It
Dr. Mariana Funes, Cognitive Coach

Introduction:
DS106 (http://ds106.us) is a computer science course in digital storytelling at the University of Mary Washington (UMW), framed on principles of the web as a platform for storytelling. Students learn to manage their own digital domain in the process of understanding storytelling and creating media. In 2011, ds106 opened up to a global community of online participants.

This case study explores how DS106 tools, methodology and philosophy were successfully adapted into the corporate world at 3M to build community, collaboration, and effective global communication skills.

Participants in 3M-DS106 were based in Minnesota, Texas and California. A majority were active members in the 3M Technical Collaboration chapter, a subset of the 3M Technical Forum (12,000 plus global members), which fosters communication across a diverse technical community.

Our hypothesis was the pedagogy and assignments of the ds106 open course could be modified for delivery on a corporate intranet, using internal creation and communication tools standard for 3M employees. We hoped to learn how the course experience could work within cultural and technological constraints of a corporate environment.

Methods:
The open ds106 course evolved from years of undergraduate courses at UMW. With no course offered for Fall 2013, a teacher-less open online version was built from previously offered classes.

3M-DS106 began with an open invitation to several hundred users on Spark (3M’s Twitter equivalent for their technical community). As a network connector, Rochelle Lockridge customized and re-published assignments from the open ds106 class and shared back to the open community the activities of the 3M participants.

The 3M-DS106 structure included weekly online web meetings held over lunch, to discuss assignments, which were done independently using 3M blogs and Spark as communication tools.

Results:
The 3M participants were interviewed at the end of their experience. Their blogs record their growth and reflective practice. In narrating their processes, they found value in giving and receiving feedback via comments, and were developing a greater capacity for relationship building. With more comfort in using creation tools and 3M’s social networking platforms, they increased their effectiveness for technology transfer.

Participants identified a need and desire for integrating the course experience into their technical work. Using tools in real time on 3M related projects within a community of learners to provide support, was deemed a highly effective practice.

Discussion:
The global 3M environment demands a quicker flow of information/ideas in a mode that is more conversational than the corporate norm, with the added challenge of consideration and protection of proprietary intellectual property.

With the success of this experiment, the 3M Technical Collaboration chapter will sponsor a yearlong 3M-DS106 course to provide participants more time, flexibility and practice with a monthly focus on topics, and incorporation of more communication tools specific to 3M.

This experiment shows that an open course can be adapted in a business environment, but more importantly a community that is larger than a single course enables success when the boundaries between groups are blurred.

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REVIEWER COMMENTS: Our abstract rated excellent for communication and overall impression for 2 of the 3 reviewers.

REVIEWER 1: I couldn’t imagine from the title what to expect from this abstract, but reading it gave me several moments of pure, unadulterated OER joy. I imagine this will be a VERY popular talk at the conference as it exhibits a rare – and highly successful! – interaction between an online, open course and an unrelated major corporation. This looks to have been a *very* important experiment and one of which the OER community needs to be aware, as OER segues into the mainstream. I wholly endorse acceptance of this paper for OER14.

REVIEWER 2: Excellent, this is a unique and engaging study that will attract large participation at the conference. Challenging corporate and open education norms with insights from participants working across groups and pedagogies, this abstract offers an unanticipated angle on the much loved DS106.

REVIEWER 3: I am very interested to see how these techniques translated to the corporate world and what 3M perceived value is as well as the participants.