George Veletsianos, PhD

The following is the message sent from President Powers to members of the UT community regarding the impact of the budget cuts on the university. This was also posted on the President’s blog.

Now that the 82nd Legislature and its subsequent special session are over, I’d like to give you an update.

The Legislature passed bills that are designed to make textbooks more affordable to our students, to make the financial aid application process more user-friendly, to improve student success, to provide graduate fellows with insurance coverage, and to relieve some of the costly burdens of state regulation of higher education.

But for UT Austin and our state’s other public universities, the biggest news is the budget.

The state revenue shortfall resulted in cuts throughout government, including higher education. UT Austin’s budget was reduced by $92 million for the biennium, which includes the 2011-2012 and the 2012-2013 fiscal years. That translates into about a 16.5% reduction in our state support.

This action extends a decades-long trend—UT Austin increasingly relies on resources other than state revenue. In the fiscal year ending this August, state support to UT Austin amounts to about 14% of our annual budget. In 2011-2012, our state support will decline to about 13.3%.

It is important that we recognize that our elected representatives faced great challenges during the legislative session. There were no easy solutions. I thank our friends in the Legislature as well as all of you who voiced your support for higher education.

Fortunately, we anticipated the state budget shortfall, and UT Austin has been preparing for these cuts for almost two years. My office, for example, has reduced total spending by more than 10% by trimming entertainment, discretionary programs, and staff.

But make no mistake, a $92-million budget cut will affect our core academic mission. While we have done our best to protect UT’s academic programs, our students will encounter reduced student services, course offerings, and financial aid. Our faculty and staff will have to do more with less, and we will be forced to eliminate jobs. I will share more details about the consequences of these cuts as we move forward.

I recently announced that we will provide modest merit-based salary increases for some faculty and staff. Funding for this has been created internally through our austerity. Remaining competitive for faculty and staff talent is one of our top strategic priorities. To allow our talent base to erode would betray our Constitutional mandate to be “a university of the first class” and shortchange the young people who will lead Texas in the future.

The most important message is this. We are resolved to pursue our vision for UT Austin, and this requires change. We are reinventing the way we do certain things, such as harnessing technology to teach more effectively and more efficiently. We are aggressively commercializing intellectual property and developing other revenue streams. We are working daily to streamline our operations and to make our campus more energy efficient and sustainable. And we are collaborating with other universities across the nation to define the public research university of the future.

But some things never change, such as our commitment to education and to nurturing the people and the research that changes the world.

I have heard from many of you in recent months. I cannot express how grateful I am for your ongoing support. Thank you.

Hook ’em Horns!

Update from STELLAR Mobility Fellowship #1

By George Veletsianos

On July 13, 2011

In my research, scholarship

This is just a quick update from my summer fellowship. So far, I have been:

Reading and re-reading my data,
Arranging the data in various structures, in an attempt to make sense of the relationships between them
Reading more and more about ethnography and its digital variants (digital ethnography, netnography, cyberethnography, etc)
Finalizing the themes that arise from prior literature

Destination: Cyprus. Purpose: STELLAR Fellowship

By George Veletsianos

On July 7, 2011

In NPS, online learning, open, papers, scholarship

I timed this entry to appear while I am flying across the Atlantic Ocean en route to Europe. During the next month or so, I will be in Cyprus under a STELLAR Mobility Fellowship. STELLAR (Sustaining Technology Enhanced Learning at a LARge scale) is a European Union initiative to foster Technology Enhanced Learning dialogue and collaboration between the young generation of researchers and experienced researchers. While I’ve worked with colleagues from Cyprus in the past, I haven’t had a chance to spend dedicated time working there, so this will be a good chance to explore and learn with others.

My STELLAR project focuses on educators’ and researchers’ participation in online networks. I will be analyzing a large data set relating to online participation and I will be working towards completing a set of manuscripts dealing with online practices, challenges, and activities, in an attempt to understand the meaning of online participation for the today’s “public” educator, scholar, and researcher. Anecdotal evidence suggests that scholars’ absence from online networks can be detrimental to teaching and scholarship, but empirical evidence as to educators’/researchers’ online practices is missing. This research is closely aligned to ideas of openness (open participation, open scholarship) and digital scholarship.

I hope to be able to post more about the project (and these topics) soon, so please feel free to tag (and comment) along!

Digital Scholarship Debate at #EdMedia 2011: Additional pressures

By George Veletsianos

On July 1, 2011

In sharing

This year’s debate at the EdMedia conference, focused on the following motion:

This house believes that in the next decade, digital scholarship (in open journals, blogs, and social media) will achieve the same status in academic settings as traditional scholarship

Martin Weller was in favor and has shared his slides (with audio) on his blog (thanks!)

My perspective on the issue is that we, as educational technology researchers and scholars, albeit early adopters and perhaps not representative of the population of scholars, have started paving the way for the recognition of digital scholarship in our discipline. I am hesitant to compare digital scholarship to “traditional” scholarship because I don’t consider “traditional” scholarship to be a monolithic concept, nor do I consider scholarship to be a binary divided between traditional and digital. But, I agree with Martin that there’s a move towards more digital forms of scholarship, and in addition to the pressures he identifies, I wanted to add the following:

Participatory cultures in existence outside of the university encourage us (academics, universities) to move towards a more social form of participation enhanced by digital technologies. For instance, as a society we have found great value in large collaborative projects (e.g., the development of GNU/Linux). We increasingly see such project taking place in academia (e.g., Crowdsourced Video).
Scholars as agents of change. Scholars have begun questioning a number of assumptions upon scholarship has been built. Examples include peer review, the value of collaboration, engagement with diverse audiences, etc.

While these pressures do not necessarily guarantee adoption (or reconsideration of traditional approaches), they point to a rethinking of the ways we do things. Conversations around these issues are important and valuable for they allow us to recognize the changing nature of scholarship in the 21st century.

SITE 2012 in Austin, TX

By George Veletsianos

On June 24, 2011

In sharing

I’m looking forward to this conference, and to welcoming any colleagues in town. If you are coming, let me know!

March 5 -9, 2012
Austin, TexasCall for Participation

Proposals Due: October 21, 2011
www.site.aace.org

March 5 – 9, 2012 * Austin, Texas

Sheraton Austin Hotel

Call for Participation

NEW! Call for Virtual Participation

Due: October 21, 2011

SITE 2012 is the 23rd annual conference of the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education. Join with 1,200+ colleagues from over 50 countries in Austin, Texas!
This society represents individual teacher educators and affiliated organizations of teacher educators in all disciplines, who are interested in the creation and dissemination of knowledge about the use of information technology in teacher education and faculty/staff development. SITE is a society of AACE.

The SITE Conference is designed for:

Teacher educators in ALL disciplines
Computer technology coordinators
K-12 administrators & school leaders
Teachers
Curriculum developers
Principals
All interested in improving education through technology

Call for Participation PDF to Print

Critiques of Openness (digital/open scholarship)

By George Veletsianos

On June 21, 2011

In my research, NPS, online learning, open, scholarship, sharing

While a lot of us embrace openness, there have been more and more discussion about its virtues in recent months. For instance, Frances Bell, Cristina da Costa, Josie Fraser, Richard Hall and Helen Keegan are discussing this issue during ALT-C 2011 in a symposium entitled The Paradox of Openness, Richard Hall has been contemplating this topic for a while, David Wiley has been thinking about the issue, and I have collected a few critiques in July 2010 when the topic started surfacing in the circles that I was following.

This is not to say that openness is inherently negative or positive: While early adopters have demonstrated the benefits of openness, these critiques help us be mindful about the future that we are creating, and help us develop tools, frameworks, and systems that enable democratic spaces and participation.

To that end, and extending the participatory scholarship work I started last year, Royce Kimmons and I will be moderating the following “Questioning our assumptions” session during the Open Education 2011 conference. The session focuses on openness in digital scholarship, but the arguments apply to openness overall:

Title: Does researcher participation in online networks democratize knowledge production and dissemination?

Description: An assumption of the open scholarship movement is that by participating in online networks, scholars can democratize knowledge production and dissemination. This feat is accomplished through openly sharing, reflecting, critiquing, improving, validating, and furthering their scholarship via publicly-availably online venues (e.g., blogs, Twitter, etc). To participate productively in online scholarly networks, however, scholars not only need to understand the participatory nature of the web, they also need to develop the social and digital literacies and skills essential to effective engagement with the open scholarship commons. Lack of digital literacies leads to a participation gap (cf. Jenkins et al., 2006), which, in the context of scholars, refers to those scholars who participate in networked spaces and are able to take advantage of digital literacies to advance their career vis-à-vis those who have had no exposure to participatory cultures or who do not have the essential literacies to engage in such activities online.

Understanding participatory cultures, developing digital literacies, and participating in online scholarly networks, however, does not necessarily mean that scholars will become equal participants in online spaces. Social stratification and exclusion in online environments and networks is possible. Indulging in idealized notions of participation and sharing may be misguided because interaction and collaboration may not be the norm across all individuals or scholarly subcultures. As Chander and Sunder (2004, p. 1332) point out while discussing what they term the romance of the public domain, “[c]ontemporary scholarship extolling the public domain presumes a landscape where each person can reap the riches found in the commons … [b]ut, in practice, differing circumstances – including knowledge, wealth, power, and ability – render some better able than others to exploit a commons.” Thus, in the case of open scholarship, issues surrounding the accessibility and use of scholarly networks by diverse audiences will arise and should be a matter of concern for participants when considering who profits from their collaborative work.

At the moment, the open scholarship movement largely reflects the values of the early adopters who already engage with it and includes notions of openness, sharing, and social-collaborative research. As with those in any community, scholars engaging in the open scholarship commons are susceptible to the risks of making decisions about the future of their community which may be arbitrary, prejudiced, or otherwise harmful to the community’s well-being. Thus, scholars should be vigilant and reflective of open scholarly practices as such practices continue to emerge and develop. Such vigilance should focus both on determining who profits from such practices and who is excluded from them, so as to combat both under-use by some (i.e. those lacking entry to or knowledge of useful networks) and over-use or exploitation by those with the wealth, power, and prestige necessary to effectively strip mine sources. While solutions to these problems may not be simple, we need to acknowledge, discuss, and act upon these issues proactively rather than retrospectively.

Design Challenges in Pedagogical Agent Implementations

By George Veletsianos

On June 20, 2011

In my research, pedagogical agents, sharing

When creating pedagogical agents for use in online learning environments, designers face numerous challenges. These range from technological (e.g., How do I ensure proper lip-synching when speech is generated in real-time?) to pedagogical (e.g., How do I ensure that the agent provides scaffolding that is appropriate to the students’ needs at a given point in time?) to social (e.g., How can I develop an agent that is sensitive to students’ varying social needs?). While designers deal with these questions frequently and decide on what we deem to be the best approaches to tackle them, we don’t often share the our design thinking with others.

My colleagues and I (Gulz, Haake, Silvervarg, Sjoden, Veletsianos), have just published a book chapter that deals with this issue. In this chapter we discuss design challenges we faced when developing a pedagogical agent, and the steps we took, and decisions we made to tackle those challenges. The challenges we discuss are the following:

how do we manage learners’ expectations of the agent’s knowledge and social profile,
how do we deal with learners’ who engage in off-task conversations with an agent, and
how do we manage abusive comments directed to the agent?

These issues were observed in studies that both Agneta Gulz and myself have independently conducted in the past, and sharing our design thinking with the community sounded like a great idea – hence the publication. A copy of this publication (1.7MB pdf) is provided below:

Gulz, A., Haake, M., Silvervarg, A., Sjoden, B., & Veletsianos, G. (2011). Building a Social Conversational Pedagogical Agent: Design Challenges and Methodological approaches. In Perez-Marin, D., & I. Pascual-Nieto (Eds.), Conversational Agents and Natural Language Interaction: Techniques and Effective Practices (pp. 128-155). IGI Global.

As always, I’d love to hear your input!