A few weeks ago I was asked to contribute to the proceedings from the NMC Summer Conference 2008, which I presented at with a few of the Digital Commons team. I thought that as I write this paper, I would post some snippets here so my ideas get some air.

The first snippet is from a section describing the workshops we offer at Digital Commons. One of the overall themes of the paper, titled "Building and Support a Large Institution Digital Media Service" is that of scaling the service without compromising quality. I decided to use the metaphor of bootstrapping to explain that the purpose of these workshops isn't to teach skills deeply, but get people motivated and comfortable enough with the software or equipment that they'll go out and start creating and learning more on their own.

Bootstrapping

Bootstrapping is the idea of "using minimal resources to get an enterprise started". In terms of the support services Digital Commons offers, bootstrapping is a metaphor for the short, intensive workshops we provide with the objective of motivating a student and providing them with enough instruction that they're confident to take the first real steps on their own. In this metaphor, students' ideas are like a precious payload we need to get into orbit, and we're the engineers trying to design the engine to complete that task. All the students responsibilities, their busy schedule, the thousands of distractions of an information rich environment are like gravity, fixing our payload firmly to the ground. We know we've got a lot of other payloads to get into orbit, and every one is important. So we need a safe and effective vehicle. But we can't afford to build hundreds of shuttles. Shuttles are reusable, but expensive, and once we're in orbit, we're not coming back to the ground anyway. What we need is an inexpensive way to generate a lot of thrust and sustain it for a short amount of time until we break escape velocity and our vehicle has safely deposited our payload in orbit. Launching a rocket by bootstrapping is like giving our students just what they need to feel confident that they can run with their ideas. It's intense, and even a little crude, but it works and it's empowering. And like ground control, we continue to be there to take status reports and provide guidance. This is training adapted for the digital native. It's "just good enough", not in the sense of being low quality - indeed our goal is to have exceedingly high quality training - but of looking at the problem holistically, prioritizing how we'll spend our resources, being honest about practical limitations, and making certain concessions so we can focus on catalyzing a self-sustaining process: a student with the tools, skills, and motivation to be bold and creative.

Filling in the Gaps

This process will not result in a student with any depth of skill, which is of course not the intent. Our assumption is that without the initial interest and motivation, we cannot expect the sustained attention required to complete the rote process of working through steps sequentially to learn how to operate a new video editing software or high-definition video camera. In our observations, this isn't even the next step students take after leaving a workshop. They're not hungering to go home and watch a video tutorial online. They want to start creating, and they now know enough to be dangerous. And just as significant, they know enough to know what they don't know. They can form at least a rudimentary mental model of what they want to accomplish and self-reflect about what skills they lack to get there. This self-reflection might not yield any self-improvement behavior until they've initiated a project and worked right up to a roadblock, when the problems (and their limitations) are a little more defined. What we provide in this context via our web-based video and text tutorials is focused instruction that answers their specific need. Their skill-set can be further deepened by additional workshops or one-on-one consultations. Since our objective is quality that scales, this "a la carte" approach ensures that we can provide targeted support with little wasted effort.