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When Theron DesRosier met Margo Tamez in the fall of 2006, she was under a heavy weight; an agent from Department of Homeland Security had recently told her mother, Eloisa Garcia Tamez, that her land would be “taken either by signed waiver or by force”, she had 30 days to decide. Eloisa lives on El Calaboz Rancheria, in the Lower Rio Grande Valley on the Texas-Mexico border. These are ancestral lands that were passed down to Eloisa by her Apache foremothers /forefathers. Originally, 22,000 acres were designated for the family but over hundreds of years the land has been snatched bit by bit until now only a few acres remain.
Margo felt isolated from the struggles of her community and detached from her research. She began looking for a way to unite the two. She had no financial resources but she was determined to find a way to help her mother. In desperation she decided to go onto the Internet and share her struggle with the world. She wrote a post entitled URGENT CALL!, before thanksgiving, on a prominent blog and included her cell phone number to contact. As she was traveling home for thanksgiving people from all over the continent began calling. Her voice mail filled up. People told her stories, gave advice and encouragement. She made a point to answer every voice message.
Soon after this experience Margo wrote, “I was getting the sense that my journey home, to El Calaboz, and my ‘research’ journey were joining…suddenly keeping the two in separate spheres wasn’t appropriate anymore,”
The initial success encouraged Margo to develop the strategy further. She describes it as the Web 2.0 version of a basket communication strategy her foremothers used: designs on the baskets they carried communicated important information to the community as they worked. The key elements of this strategy are transparency and utility.
She wrote in Wikipedia and Native Wiki. She nurtured, organized and mobilized a dispersed community using blogs, myspace, facebook, and text msging. She asked members of her group to document the struggle with video cameras, then upload the videos to youtube so they could be broadcast to the world. She calls these tools her “palettes, paints, glitter”
Over the next six months her organization grew to over 300 individuals including NGO leaders, legal experts, tribal Elders, media professionals, environmentalists, artists, activists, policy makers, scholars, and Native American and Indigenous organizations. They have set precedent in two landmark federal and international legal cases and have received official organization status at the UN. And her mother still lives on her homeland.
The ePortfolio that she continues to build chronicles this journey. This experience has dramatically changed the way Margo thinks about teaching, learning, and research. Her course space is now a world accessible blog that acts as a hub for student blogs. Margo’s work has been the focus of many hours of reflection at CTLT. Our understanding of eportfolios, social networking, and distributed learning has been greatly enrich by her example. Margo’s accomplishment is also encouraging in this time of limited financial resources. With tools free to anyone on this campus, she has created a vibrant global network that joins community, research and action.
“CTLT is a core lab for my writing, thinking and being process as a researcher.”
Margo Tamez
We have been exploring the idea of “hub and spoke” course designs where the learners are using ePortfolios and Web 2.0 tools and working in communities and contexts where their chosen problem is being addressed. For such a course, we have been using the term Hub and Spoke to describe how the institutionally-operated course space (hub) relates to the learners and the learner’s electronic spaces. (see: Out of the Classroom and Into the Boardroom (PDF),
Out of the Classroom and Beyond, Case Study of Electronic Portfolios, and ePortfolio as the Core Learning Application.
Recently Blackboard has been adding “Web 2.0″ features, so we had a discussion to delineate the reasons to use SharePoint rather than Blackboard as the hub in a hub and spoke course design.
Worldware
Worldware is a double reason. First, students are learning skills in SharePoint that they can later in work contexts, where Blackboard skills are not useful outside the school context. Second, as our university adopts SharePoint for a variety of administrative purposes, there become a larger group of SharePoint experts who can provide support to both faculty and students using SharePoint as a learning platform.
Document Library and Tagging
SharePoint’s document libraries are very flexible, allowing users to add metadata that suites their purposes. In CTLT’s ePortfolio contest ctlt.wsu.edu/contest07/ we have had several examples of this, perhaps of the most developed is in this winner’s portfolio. (Its also worth noting that this contestant used email to send documents to the library (a SharePoint feature that integrated the “collect” phase of her portfolio work more completely with her other project work). We are now exploring how to mashup SharePoint document libraries with other tools to create timelines showing the evolution of ideas in the portfolio.
Authorization controls
While WSU has a mechanism for outsiders to gain an identity and login to university systems, as we have Blackboard configured, instructors can only authorize people into courses in the role of Teaching Assistant. Further, authorization to a Blackboard course gives access to the whole course, there is no fine-grained control to specific parts of the course. Finally, a SharePoint site can be configured for anonymous read, opening (portions of) the course to the world if needed. (see correction in comments below)
“Pre-cooked” webparts and tools
SharePoint has a concept for exporting sites and elements of sites (libraries, web parts, surveys, etc) as .STP files and then re-importing these into other sites or adding them to templates for users to choose. This allows time-savings such as configuring a document library with specific columns, or an RSS reader with specific feeds pre-installed.
Adding more tools
Finally, SharePoint’s architecture enables other linkages and mashups. It is a source and consumer of RSS, will support embedding of other Web 2.0 resources in its pages, and can capture email and originate email alerts. And with the SharePoint mySite, where the student is the owner of the SharePoint site over the span of their career, there is greater flexibility to support the hub and spoke models.
