After attending last week’s “Instructional Technologists at Liberal Arts Colleges” NITLE workshop, Jon B. and Joe B. turned right around and flew to Tacoma, WA to attend NITLE’s Moodle Community Meeting. Our hopes were high after the first workshop and the Moodle group did not disappoint. There are a some excellent changes coming down the pipe in Moodle, like an improved gradebook (woohoo!) and some better administrative tools. Moodle 1.9 looks to be a very solid upgrade from our current installation of 1.7. As with most Moodle upgrades, the interface stays the same for the user, but some of the features are improved or new features are added. Those using 1.9 already have very positive things to say about it.
There is a growing development and support community for Moodle. There were a number of great ideas suggested to further grow and develop this community, so that our schools may reap the benefits. One of these ideas was the “Moodle Museum” begun by Lafayette College. The museum incorporates screenshots of specific Moodle functions in use with 2-3 paragraph writeups from faculty members who are using these features in class. The idea is to have faculty members show faculty members what they like and don’t like, what works and what doesn’t. Suggestions were made to add a rating system and comments for each example, and the team at Lafayette already had some ideas on how to implement this. If you use Woodle in your teaching at the College of Wooster and have found a feature that you really liked, please contact Jon or Joe and we’ll help you get the screenshot you need to contribute to the Moodle Museum. It’s sure to be a great resource for teachers and technologists alike, and I look forward to growing its pages with successful practices from faculty using Moodle. I will post a link to the museum once it becomes available and we’ll of course also add it to Moodles help links.
In addition to the support planning we saw a lot of great examples of Moodle in action and some great inspiration on support and collaboration practices for our campus. It’s a great program and getting better all of the time. The community is working very hard on fixes and upgrades and it shows.
Jon B. and Joe B. recently attended a NITLE workshop hosted at Depauw in southern Indiana for Instructional Technologists at Liberal Arts Colleges. The event was incredibly productive and thought-provoking for the both of us and covered a very broad range of instructional technology topics. This sort of thing is especially useful for us because instructional technology is a young and wide-ranging field. There are not always a lot of people and resources to fall back on, so going to something like this and being able to exchange ideas and practices with 60-70 other instructional technologists was really wonderful.
The session began with a discussion lead by Carol Smith, Associate CIO for Instructional & Learning Services at Depauw. She talked about professional development and advancement for instructional technologists and had us do some break-outs to brainstorm some responses to prompts about various professional topics. It sparked a lot of intense discussion about what direction the rather young field of instructional technology may go and where we as individuals hoped it would go. I came away with it very confident that the future of instructional technology is bright and headed in the right direction. There was a real interest from participants in keeping the emphasis on “instruction” rather than “technology”, which bodes well for the future. Everyone seemed very keen on continuing to find, implement and support things that bring a real value to teaching and learning and not just introducing the latest and greatest tech “toy” to our campus communities. It’s encouraging to see this kind of attitude among our peers in instructional technology.
A wealth of other topics came up in formal presentations and casual conversation over the two day workshop. We came back with ideas on leading workshops, facilitating collaboration, managing student workers, organizing course projects, creating documentation, training users, assessing technology and much, much more. It was a lot to take in such a short time but inspiring and motivating at the same time.
The Wooster community is sure to reap great benefits from the workshop and I know we’ll be posting more here as we go along.
In the fall of 2007, students in Bill Macauley’s created online writing tutorials for the Writing Center’s website. The tutorials ranged from advice on how to avoid redundancy to creating metaphors and the proper use of commas. Each student or group chose their own method for creating the sites. Many are still works in progress, but they can be viewed on the Writing Center’s website here.
Many institutions of higher learning are expanding into the online virtual world of Second Life. It provides a unique interactive environment useful for a variety of purposes. The most common uses include distance education and collaboration, but many organizations are finding new ways to use the digital world to their advantage. Online conferences, trade shows and recruitment videos are popping up on some SL campuses, along with digital galleries for artists and lounges where students can watch short films submitted by other students. I took my avatar on a stroll through part of Ohio University’s SL campus and explored some of the ways they are making use of their digital space. Watch the video below. A more complete tour for OU’s campus can be found here.
The new Sharp DVD/VHS combos have slightly different interface functionality then the previous units we replaced. One change noticed by faculty is the pause function. On the previous model the movie could be paused and un-paused with the same button. On the new Sharp units in order to re-start a program (after pausing) you must press the play button.
We also found that some rooms are producing a blue screen after using the picture mute on the Pixie. We are currently in the process of adapting the program to address this issue. If you see a blue screen please call 330.201.6165 or X2204 and we will reset the input manually with the remote, the fix takes about 10 seconds.
When Kauke Hall was renovated one of the exciting changes we all looked forward to was the installation of DVD/VCR combo players that would play DVDs and VCRs from around the world. However, it quickly became apparent that the units were NOT “region free, multi-standard.” In fact, they even had some trouble with tracking older VHS tapes. Anthony worked with one of our vendors, Precision Multimedia, to find and implement a solution. We tested that solution in K038 and it has performed beautifully. This week ten more such units were installed in Kauke in the following rooms:
305
244
243
242
238
237
236
143
142
141
This summer it is our intention to replace the combos in the remaining rooms.
We’ve been meeting with faculty from math, computer science, and physics to design and implement a “demo classroom” in Taylor Hall—the home of these departments. Our intent is to try out educational technology that may then be employed across campus. The technology we are focusing on shifts the focus (no pun intended!) from instructor presentation to student/student and student/faculty interaction. The first installation will include:
Check out this blurb which is a blend of an NPR interview with DJ Spooky, who was one of our Forum speakers this fall, and our own professor of Africana Studies, Charles Peterson (CP).
The blended blurb:
CP agreed to work with us in instructional technology to produce something on DJ Spooky when we realized he had not gotten permission to podcast or otherwise broadcast his COW Forum as we typically do [see our podcast blog]. So CP sat down in our recording booth in Taylor 205 and in a sort of modern day call and response session, listened to the NPR interview and recorded his response to it.
This is an especially interesting “text” b/c it troubles the idea of authorship via content AND form—i.e. CP is encouraging us to think about Spooky’s message of the rich possibles of interpretation even as CP himself is part of producing a text that has no clear author. Is the author Spooky? CP? Liane Hansen of NPR? Me—b/c I decided where to digitally interject CP in the NPR interview—mostly I based this on where I thought CP wanted it but I also freely edited out CP at times? Our i.t. intern, Joe Benfield, b/c he carried out the final digital editing? Or…???
What does this mean for pedagogy—especially the sorts of texts we ask students to produce? Is this a novel form of writing brought to us by digital technology or is it plagiarism thinly masked…or something else altogether?
Our fab intern, Joe, found “the machine is us/ing us”
on YouTube and suggests it has something smart to say about this (and I agree).
What does it suggest about our practices/policies for podcasting our Forum speakers? If Spooky’s Forum had been podcast we likely would not have produced our own DJ Spooky/Rebirth of a Nation commentary but does this mean we are now bound to ensure each speaker is profiled? After all, COW via the efforts of Jon Breitenbucher and i.t. is registered on iTunes and we do hear from folks around the world about our podcast/podcast blog. This was worrisome to me—i.e. that Spooky would be absent from the page and was my impetus for asking CP to help out (well…that and I wasn’t sure too many folks, myself included, really “got” what Spooky was about).
I do know that this points out some serious issues around technology and the COW curriculum. Should faculty want to grapple more with these issues by, for example, assigning the production of such a digital text to students there will be trouble…
getting the equipment into the hands of students (b/c we just don’t have it or have much of it)
training the students on the tech (b/c we are a tiny tiny little dept!)
exercising good bibliographic skills (what is clearly illegal vs. what is fuzzily legal?)
providing meaningful feedback to students during production (this and the next point on assessment might give Bill Macauley et al in the writing center some fits! I mean…think about even the method of feedback—will it be traditional text or will instructors find themselves over here in the recording booth…?)
assessing the product
presenting student work (can we post their digitally sophisticated texts worry free or will the fuzzily legal inhibit this?)
As soon as classes end this May work will begin on a “prototype” room in Wishart Hall, room 102.
The room will typify the equipment and classroom layout that best creates a good learning space for the departments—communications and theater—that call Wishart home. The technological equipment includes a computer, data projector, DVD/VCR combo, speakers and amp, and a document camera—all controlled from the beloved Pixie Pro embedded into a podium at the front of the room.
The furniture will be flexible in order to accommodate various teaching and learning styles.
It’s been a pleasure working with the various groups involved and we are even more pleased at the precedent that is being set to foreground learning in the design of our classrooms here at COW.
Professor Rujie Wang and College of Wooster students studying Chinese had a video chat with faculty and students at Xi’an International Studies University in Xi’an, China. The program used to do this is called Skype. It is a free program which allows you to text message, audio chat and video chat with other Skype users. Below is a video of Prof. Wang and his students using Skype. What might it mean pedagogically to have students able to engage so easily and regularly with native speakers?
