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4^th Report from LSU to IMLS on the SAEC Project

Calendar Overview:

The Southeast Archives Education Collaborative continued its program during its fourth six months of existence and completed the following activities:

Management

We held monthly electronic meetings (April - September) of the Advisory Board, with the exception of August.

Course Delivery

We completed delivering our second semester's classes.

Evaluation

We administered a collaborative-wide evaluation for the collaborative aspects of the classes we offered the second semester. It sits on South Carolina’s Flashlight account where once again 28 of 33 students responded to it. We have "frequency” data, but have not picked over it carefully yet. A casual comparison indicates that it reflects very closely the first semester's data.

Dissemination

We delivered a panel presentation at the annual meeting of the Council on Public History in April, 2004.

We presented a panel at Educause in Atlanta, in June, 2004.

We presented a panel at the Archives Educators’ Forum, held the day before the beginning of the SAA conference in August 2004.

Activities Initiated and Still Ongoing:

In the past six months, we have continued some activities and have initiated others we have not yet completed:

Management

We continue to routinely update the Website to reflect project development.

Course Delivery

Classes began in September and will be completed in December. We’re giving two classes from SC, both with 11 students. Auburn has nobody enrolled in one of the classes. The SC students attend from two sites - one in Columbia, and one in Athens, Ga.

Evaluation

We will conduct student evaluations at the conclusion of this semester’s courses and integrate student responses into the previous semester’s evaluation. I had intended to spend a great deal of the summer time analyzing the evaluation data, but my husband moved to Baton Rouge and that threw off my work schedule. I will do a more thorough SPSS analysis over the fall.

Dissemination

We will deliver a panel at the MARAC MEETING IN Pittsburgh, in October.

We still have two articles underway for publication.

We have submitted a proposal to SAA for the New Orleans meeting in August, 2005.

Problems:

1. The technical troubles we experienced in the spring have abated a great deal, but some gremlins remain in the system. As always, the technical support people have worked together in search of a solution.

2. In January we moved classes around. Since the stipends for faculty reports at the end of a class must appear in the budgets in a way that reflects the distribution of the classes, I will need to re-work the budget yet again.

3. Bob Williams has offically retired from the University of South Carolina, but brings a great deal of wisdom to our discussions. He has agreed to stay with us until the end. Bob's replacement, Jennifer Marshall, has expressed some reservations about what she perceives as an absence of a “philosophy of archival education.” I’m not convinced she will stay with the collaborative after the grant runs out. Further, Jeff Jakeman has agreed to edit the Alabama Online Encyclopedia, a full-time job. Augurn has not yet fully committed to hiring an archives educator to replace him, but he assures us that they will. He also assures us that his administration thinks highly of this opportunity for its students; presumably a willingness to participate will be fundamental in the hiring decision Auburn faces.

Faced with the change of personnel above, we’ve begun to discuss a process for adding new partners and letting current partners go. We see nothing imminent, but it seems prudent to think ahead.

Comments:

When we held our first meeting in Baton Rouge in January of ’03, Tim Sineath (UKy) raised the issue of creating modules of educational content as a way to make multiple use of the work that goes into preparing a lesson. The obvious market for those modules would be the CD world. He suggested that the modules might raise revenue to sustain the collaborative’s effort. Given the start-up work that needed doing on the collaborative itself, we put “modularization,” the buzz-word we adopted to represent the whole concept, aside for the first year, but it came back in Baton Rouge in January as we discussed what we might do for a “follow-on” grant.

I did a literature review and shared my findings with the Advisory Board over the course of the monthly meetings. The Advisory Board discussed various models for “modularization” initiative in public health education and offered very specific details of what our initiative would entail. I created a basic “grant” to cover modularization, as the conversation continued. In September we abandoned the idea.

The more we talked, however, the more we came to understand that going off on a CE tangent at this point in the life of SAEC could undermine the success we have experienced. Doing modularization well would distract us at a time when we need to refine the model we’ve developed. In the end, Tim Sineath suggested that the time had not yet come. We fully understand the need for CE; the A*CENSUS data cries out for it. But we decided we must get our SAEC act fully together before we take up the cause.

We now focus on “institutionalizing” the opportunity we have demonstrated works well. We’ve begun to develop the agenda for next January’s meeting; assuring this sharing of faculty and students remains an onoging opportunity for our students will be front and center as a topic of discussion

Submitted by:
Elizabeth H. Dow
5/02/04