Monthly Archives: October 2010

Laptops in the Classroom — Graduate Teaching Fellows Panel Discussion

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Laptops in the classroom discussion panel + moderatorThe Teaching with Technology Tuesday for 26 October 2010 was held as a panel discussion, a different format for the CLC series. With the special sponsorship of the Graduate Teaching Center, we featured three graduate students discussing their views and policies on laptops in classes they have taught and sections they have led. Our moderator was Jennifer Frederick, Associate Director of the GTC. Our participants were Maureen Canavan from Epidemiology and Public Health, Michael Meadows from Italian, and Alexandra Seggerman from History of Art. (A photo of each is on the GTC site.)

Jennifer set the stage by noting the near- or seeming-ubiquity of laptops and other mobile computing devices in the student population and asked us to consider the pedagogical implications as well as how we can manage their use. First up was the strong con position, taken by Alex, partly on the basis of the distractive power of the network as well as the laptop as physical barrier between the instructor and student. For her there is also a distinct drawback of the rapidity with which students can take notes, resulting perhaps in word-level comprehension without any learning occurring on the part of the students. Michael took a more favorable view, arguing that students can use the network to fill in their knowledge gaps during class discussion or lecture. He acknowledged that some students engage in off-task activities but that this has not been a majority of his students or a majority of the time, and emphasized that the instructor bears the burden of teaching students how to integrate their laptops into the course appropriately. Finally, our middle ground was supported by Maureen, who tries to focus on and foreground the course or section goals for her students and incorporating (or forbidding) laptops as needed.

The bulk of the time was taken up by thoughtful back-and-forth with the audience (though the contributions suggested it was more a group of fellow participants).

One commenter noted that she really only interfaces with education through a laptop. That is, she loses paper notebooks, but always retains her computer and consequently makes better use of class notes on a laptop. Alex responded that she feels students would just the same learn better by taking fewer notes and digesting them after class, implying that paper note-taking acts as an automatic throttle on note-taking speed for most students. Maureen added that she also organizes her education better on a laptop, but that having them in a discussion section pushes the instructor to be a “hall monitor”.

Another brought up lecturecasting as a way to discourage students from feeling pressure to record every word from the instructor’s mouth during a lecture. This, he said, might make it easier to forbid laptops and encourage thoughtfulness during class time. Alex wondered why students would bother going to class in that case. Michael suggested that lecturecasting continues to foster the negative behavior of students trying to record everything that is said during a lecture. Maureen suggested that lecturecasting would end up not serving anyone, since most students would be unlikely to access the recorded lecture later.

The conversation quickly broadened into the role of the instructor in the classroom and the role of the traditional lecture in a Yale education. Participants commented on gaming the undergraduate educational system, on the long tradition of students not paying attention during lectures (reading newspapers, sleeping, thinking about other subjects), and on problematizing lectures in the contemporary environment of multiple alternate avenues to much of the material shared in a lecture. We didn’t solve the problem, but it can be hoped that participants left considering how they will organize their teaching and learning efforts differently in the future.

Ken Panko asked for some closing comments from Michael Farina, an Italian instructor known for frequent and affirmative use of the network in his courses. He strongly feels that it is not an instructor’s responsibility to police students. Rather, it is the instructor’s responsibility to make the class engaging, to ask students to close laptops if there is a particular point in the class session that demands it, but also to encourage the students to take notes collaboratively, thereby contributing to other students’ learning and broadening their own.

Further reading:

Participants should add corrections, correct mischaracterizations, and continue the conversation in the comments below.

Beyond the Blog

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Prof. Sam See discusses his course blog projected behind him.

Professor Sam See, English department, and Alison Kanovsky, graduate student in American Studies, and Robin Ladouceur, Instructional Design Specialist from ITG, presented for today’s lecture.

Robin started with a recap of a NPR segment that pointed out Andrew Sullivan’s blog is 10 years old–blogs have been around for over a decade. She then posed a couple questions to the audience: What are the characteristics of a blog? Chronological reverse order, diary, updates were answers volunteered from audience members. What are some blogging platforms? Blogger, WordPress, etc. What about blogging in higher education? Specifically, using blogs in higher education? For a collection of outakes/b-sides (materials in addition to course work); student responses to readings (apt for English or Literature course that focus on reading and writing), were just a few of the answers blurted out.

WordPress as the blogging platform in courses was implemented at Yale in 2008 (multi-user) and it gained an immediate and sustained traction in English department as faculty used their course blog as a place for students to post reading responses from formal to informal. Robin posited that the ways in which a blog sustains active participation outside the class democratizes the sharing of ideas. She noted that the ease of use of WordPress is why ITG maintains it as their platform for course sites. It is easy to set up, easy to teach and get students set up, involving a 20 minute demo with faculty and an additional 20 minute demo with students. Robin noted that WordPress is a beyond the blog tool because of its flexibility. WordPress is endlessly customizable. She further explained how WordPress allows such such customization, mainly through its commitment to open development of plugins and themes. Hundreds or thousands of developers adding themes and plugins on a daily basis. WordPress sites are really not called blogs anymore, but instead called sites because of the infinite creativity of the developers. Yianni Yessios from ITG develops plugins for specific course site needs. Faculty come to ITG with ideas about what they want to do pedagogically and usually WordPress is the answer/tool to fulfill the learning objectives of the course.

Robin continued to show examples of course sites, some of which Yianni was able to customize for the course. Slavic 210’s site allowed students to provide examples of linguistic moments that they were talking about in class. Sociology 221’s site needed an anonymous forum given the sensitivity of the class topic (sex and romance in adolescence) and ITG developed “Anonymizer,” which allows students to post without their netid attached to the blog post. The “Modern Poetry” course mainly used WordPress as a course site with sections like units, timeline, primary sources. However, it did embed audio files of poems that were discussed in class. Additionally, the “New Directions in Legal Anthropology” course site gave students access to video clips to which they analyzed and responded to all in the same site. Lastly, “Medieval Manuscripts to New Media” course used WordPress as an announcement forum and also a one stop shop for access to course materials. Students additionally had their own blog, set up like an e-portfolio (all assignments were turned in here).

Sam See talked about using WordPress in two courses, “European Literary Tradition” and “Queer Mythologies.” He noted that he has been teaching for 7 years and used WebCT before for gathering student responses, but that WordPress is much more user friendly and aesthetically pleasing. He also mentioned that he is fairly “old-school” in his pedagogical approach. Sam believes in a close reading of text and that class discussion drives the course. He started to use online posting to fulfill the writing requirement for courses, but noticed that it developed into something else. Essentially, it presented a way for students to take writing seriously and as a communicative medium across the disciplines. His assignments require students to post reading responses that moving from subjective posts to objective ones that make an argument as the course develops over time. Evidence and analysis is given through each response and Sam responds to each of them in the first few weeks of class. The public nature of the course blog may ultimately encourage students to write thoughtful responses since their peers can read them. Around the 6th week of the course, the students begin to respond to one another with an argumentative post; respond to argument with an argument. WordPress functions as a public forum for sharing arguments and therefore fulfills a learning objective for the course. Robin suggested the plugin DigressIt as a means to workshop writing in the “Queer Mythologies” course. In DigressIt, students post drafts of essays and he asks the students to comment on each other’s drafts to create an online dialogue. With DigressIt, it is remarkably easy to do this. The students copy paper and paste their paper from Word into the site. it reads their paragraphs from word and creates a mechanism whereby students can insert comments about each paragraph as opposed to only being able to comment on the whole draft. Same noted that the students’ comments are really earnest and was very impressed with the investment of their time to each other. He does provide them with guidelines about what to comment on. Identify the problem statement, for example, is one such guideline. He ended his portion by posing the question: Could it be the technology that inspired the level of commitment to each other as well as how they think of writing as a serious craft?

Allison gave a demo of GalleryPress, developed by Yiannos, by showing a work in progress site. Professor Matthew Jacobson needed a site that could manage and present the thousands of photos that he is taking through a historian’s eyes and also that could take student image contributions and allow for comments. GalleryPress allows one to add a gallery of images with data through the upload of a folder of images and corresponding text file (which could be made from Excel). Essentially, a gallery of images is like making a post. It utilizes Lightbox to display a larger image and a metadata tab and a comment tab are available to show or hide. Allison took us through the back end, how to upload thousands of images in one post. This plugin’s strength is in its ability to match images with data and batch upload.

WordPress allows endless possibilities for your course site. Visit ITG to learn more.

For podcast coverage of this session, please click the video below (note a slight delay upon initial playback):

Library Digital Collections tool

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Carolyn Caizzi, Technology Specialist for Yale’s Visual Resources Collection, Mike Friscia, Web Developer for the Yale University Library, and Aaron Hyman, graduate student in History of Art presented the new Library Digital Collections tool and how to incorporate it in teaching and learning scenarios.

Carolyn Caizzi chronicled the history of the Digital Collections tool. She indicated that it had undergone two major transformations in the past 2 years. From about 1998 until 2008 there was a unified interface to Yale’s digital collections, but it was only a front door to the separate interfaces of the collections themselves. Searching was really only practical for advanced users, who knew what they wanted, precisely and in some detail. There was no browsing capability. In 2008 there was a reformulation and redesign, creating Metagallery [for a CLC blog entry on Metagallery, click here]. Metagallery was the product of a collaboration by the Library and the Yale Center for Media and Instructional Innovation [CMI2]. The biggest feature addition was the ability for a user to create groups of images and share them with other users. Metagallery, however, only searched the Visual Resources Collection.

The latest tool, the Library Digital Collections tool searches 15 collections with over 600K items (not all of Yale’s current collections, but about half — there are plans to include more collections subsequently). This newest iteration provides for many different ways to search and browse, allowing searches by a broad range of users. The most significant advancement is the ease of creating, annotating, and sharing groups of images with others. The tool also allows a variety of browsing modalities that enable users to maximize relevant finds that they would be unlikely to uncover with standard searches. Site statistics reveal that the tool is being used for at least 20K searches per month. The biggest challenge for users is the lack of standardization of metadata across collections; searching may return skewed results depending on the field(s) used and the values entered. Mike Friscia, the tool developer, is working with the various collections to standardize metadata conventions used to pull in search items.

The major features of the site are convenient browsing (top down, bottom up, lateral); the visual presence of related items fields; tagging (which will become more useful as more students and faculty tag items); the ability to save an entire page of results or a subset of them; searching within a result set; the slideshow presentation mode for a saved group, useful for displaying a small group of images in class; the ease of downloading images singly or from a group, all with a metadata text file; sharing groups publicly or to a specified set of netids; allowing students or colleagues to edit groups (useful for class/section assignments and collaborative work); storing recently viewed items and searches for subsequent logins; and uploading non-Yale collection images to a user’s group.

Aaron Hyman of History of Art has been using the Library Digital Collections tool in his course for the past month. Though an admitted technophobe himself, the tool’s ease of use has made incorporating it into his course a no-brainer. He and his students have found that the tool enhances both in-class discussion and the execution of a wide range of assignments. It helps in History of Art courses to start with a selection of images relevant for a particular section meeting and build the session around the selection. The Digital Collections tool allows users to do exactly this. Aaron would regularly create and save off a group relevant for a particular section and share the link to the group with his students. Students can then be assigned a group of images to evaluate/investigate ahead of class, just like assigned reading. To enhance class discussion with concrete examples, the image group could then be presented during the class/section. Images found in Library Digital Collections searches and grouped together by the section leader are often better examples of the artwork under discussion than poor reproductions of textbook images. Aaron has found that for teaching, the group feature is very useful for preparing for section. The individual image view with metadata can be used like flash cards to help students prepare for an exam. Aaron proposed that graduate students in History of Art, or any other visual media-heavy discipline, could use the Digital Collections tool to prepare for their PhD orals as the group tool allows one to created collections of images relevant to certain overarching topics.

Mike Friscia then ended the session by sharing what’s in store for the Digital Collections tool in the future. Development projects currently include location-based browsing, a mobile version (expected summer 2011), collection-specific browsing methods (e.g. searching a periodical collection by year), and improved language awareness (e.g. in search results sorting and search suggestions).

iPads

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There has been, and continues to be, much speculation about what role Apple’s iPad could play in education. Almost 6 months after the iPad’s release, ambivalence about the iPad’s place in higher education reigns. The device appears best suited to media consumption situations and not media/document creation scenarios. Despite hopes for the tablet to act as a collaborative learning tool, it does not work well as an in-class teaching tool due to the inability to project the screen from within most apps. Given the uncertainty surrounding the iPad as a teaching/learning tool, what plans does Yale currently have for incorporating it in the university’s Educational Technology toolbox?

Barbara Rockenbach kicked-off the session with a welcome and announcement of the new Fall 2010 TwTT series. [Please find the schedule here.] She then introduced the speakers – Scott Matheson, Web Manager for the Yale University Library, and Ken Panko, Manager of the Instructional Technology Group.

Scott Matheson revealed the Library’s plan to use the iPad as an interactive service kiosk as a part of their digital signage campaign. To render the device secure, the Library had a customized lockable case constructed. The case will be bolted to a podium so that library visitors may use it as an interactive touch screen to learn more about the collections. The kiosk has been designed to stand in the nave at Sterling Memorial Library. It will list staff, have an array of collections maps, and provide links to various catalogs. The iPad will connect to Library web pages via a wireless connection. A small charger may be stored in the case to power the iPad. Speakers may also be attached for audio, though at this time, such audio would be unwelcome in the nave of the Library. The iPad is currently using a template system that limits the options available to any user. The template can be altered by “pushing out” a new one to the folder structure for the iPad files. Scott also mentioned that an iPad is currently in use as a video display tool in the corridor in Sterling as part of an East Asian exhibit.

Ken Panko opened his segment of the session by lamenting the fact that not everyone had an iPad to experiment with during the presentation. He then posed a question to the crowd: “Why do we think we are here today? What is it about iPads that garners such curiosity?” Someone in the crowd commented that the iPad represents a fundamental change – in terms of mobility and media consumption. It’s small with a long battery life and thus, eminently portable. It easily and attractively packages a wide variety of media – newspapers, music, images, and movies. Ken reiterated that the iPad is the first truly mobile computer. Of course, any tablet fits this bill, but right now the iPad has the largest market share. It truly is superb for media consumption, but it currently is not a good device for an instructor to take into a classroom. It’s too expensive. Apple should follow Kindle’s lead and push the price point for the iPad way down. There are many other reasons why the iPad is not ideally suited to higher education teaching and learning scenarios than just the price point. At present you can not use the VGA-out cable to mirror your display or project from it. You can only project from a few applications or from a few functions within those applications (ex.: slideshow mode in Photos or in Keynote).

It is great for e-editions of some textbooks. This is a very promising feature as it is far easier to carry one iPad than 3-4 large textbooks. The catch is there are currently very few iPad versions of textbooks available. This will of course change in time, but who knows how long it will take for that market to grow? The other downside is that in e-textbooks, you cannot write in the margins. You can annotate and highlight, but is that function sufficient? There is currently no system available for selling back e-texts as there is for actual textbooks. That, coupled with the higher than one would expect pricepoint for e-textbooks makes them a less economical option. Scroll Motion, an iPad app developer, created the Iceberg Reader that allows one access to e-textbooks with a high resolution graphics-rich experience.

The course management apps developed for learners are more promising for higher education. Blackboard’s CMS app for the iPad is impressive. Itallows you to manage your courses from within your iPad. iStudiez Pro similarly allows students to organize and manage their academic life on their iPads. There are several note-taking apps available as well, but unfortunately, the electrostatic keyboard on the iPad is rather unfriendly. If you want to really explore taking notes with your iPad, you need to carry around an external bluetooth keyboard.

Other apps of interest:

Elements

Papers

Shakespeare Pro

ideaboards

Remote desktop apps:

Logb

SpaceTime