Matt Hampel | matth.org

A post on the University of Michigan’s Community Information Corps (CIC) website announces the launch of Open.Michigan.

The CIC is a place for School of Information folks that “provides students with readings, lectures, practical engagement service opportunities, research projects and social and professional networking connections to launch them into careers as public interest information professionals”

Here is the Open.Michigan homepage. From this screenshot, what is the purpose of the site?

Heaven knows.

Design lesson: explain the purpose of the site on the homepage. “Connecting the global learning community” is not a sufficient explanation.

Ostensibly, it:

represents the diverse collection of Open initiatives on campus – from open access publishing and open archives to open source software and open standards. The site provides greater visibility to the various projects and attempts to expand the dialogue between campus participants and external collaborators.

That is not really a global learning community. It’s an internal site for the people who are already in the system. Cf. the text of the about page, which (unlike the homepage) actually says what the project is about:

Open.Michigan provides a clear view of the many places and ways U-M contributes to our world’s knowledge

…

the U-M Health Sciences Global Access project and the dScribe project; in open source software, the Sakai and SiteMaker projects; in open archives and publishing, Deep Blue, digitalculturebooks, MBooks, and OAIster projects; and in open standards, the IMS Global Learning Consortium work and conferences.

Do you know what any of that stuff is? Browse further, and woah, you’ll actually learn! I’m not quite sure that the site is so much a “part of an emerging paradigm for participatory education on a global scale” as it is a static collection of project abstracts, but it’s a start. A first prod at some sort of aggregation at Michigan, and a laudable one.

Some of the descriptions need a buzzword pruning, though:

This new program will combine continuous, formative and summative assessment of higher order educational outcomes with flexible learning paths for achievement in nine defined competency domains.

One thing interesting from the introductory post on the CIC is a link to a Wiki on some bizzaro Med School server that has lots of training documents. Of note: we learn that rich presentations are converted into (get this) JPEGs for dissemination through Open Courseware. Beautiful, and very Michigan.

The University of Michigan Administrative Information Services (MAIS) seeks a creative IT professional with strong business systems analyst experience in security administration and access management.  The selected candidate will join a team of customer service-focused BSAs to support multiple software products and functional areas.  They will be involved in a variety of projects with exposure to new technologies and process improvement.

Translation:

AARGH MAIS CRUSH DESTROY SOUL CRUSH

Breaking news:  CTools does not have an HIG document.

(raise your hand if you actually were surprised)

The latest in a string of little UROP technology incompetencies: a page of links to internships is actually… a Word document?

(See: Additional Links, bottom of the page, http://www.lsa.umich.edu/urop/summer_fellowships/srid/)

Why do I care so much about these details?

Stop naming folders after weeks — heaven knows I forget what week it is after the third. Instead, use date AND subject ranges. For example: Sept. 12 – 17: Mitochondrial DNA.

Bonus tip: the “Actions” dropdown and “access” information are useless. Delete them, and remove clutter.

Go CTools!

UM:

Real World:

That’s pretty much my job… bringing the Real World into the U of M.

Many UM undergraduate math classes have homework based entirely on the web — this semester, the dept. is actually looking to see if the system is working. This analytical spirit is rare, and I applaud it.

Here is the UROP project description (more on UROP later, hopefully I don’t have to file a FOIA request)

This [project] will specifically seek to answer the following research questions:

1. Do students spend more time working on the on-line homework than they do working written homework, and is this affected by the inclusion of the homework as a part of students’ course grade?

2. How does the use of on-line homework change the manner in which class-time is used?

3. Do students in classes using on-line homework perform better on the uniform exams in the course, and do they perform better on questions that specifically resemble homework problems in the course?

4. Do students in classes using on-line homework demonstrate better skills at finding antiderivatives and evaluating definite integrals?

5. Do students work a greater percentage of the homework when it is assigned as on-line homework instead of pencil-and-paper homework, and do they work on problems requiring greater thought when those problems are presented in the on-line format?