Category Archives: Events

Teaching Quantitative Reasoning using Technology

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Frank Robinson, Coordinator of the Yale College Science and QR Center, shared some of the ways that he and others have used technology to teach quantitative reasoning in Yale undergraduate courses.

Frank Robinson gesturing to a screen on which a clip from Monty Python and the Holy Grail is playing.

Frank Robinson describes how his students predicted the force exerted by a catapulted cow by observing a clip from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Professor Robinson has been deeply involved in Yale’s Quantitative Reasoning Initiative. This Yale College initiative established as its chief goal the improvement of undergraduate skills in Quantitative Reasoning. The focus on Quantitative Reasoning [QR] was generated by the CYC committee rulings in 2004 regarding course requirements. In the pre-2008 period, students could completely avoid taking any math courses while at Yale. The new requirements dictate that students must complete 2 QR courses. To satisfy the QR requirement, new courses must demonstrate that the exams and assignments be comprised of 50% QR based questions/equations. It often takes a few months to get a new QR course accepted.

Professor Robinson wanted to find new ways to engage the students in his QR courses. He initially worked with the Instructional Technology Group on making changes to an online QR assessment. Next, a partnership to offer a course on Natural Disasters was formed.

In Spring of 2005, Professor Robinson offered Astronomy 120, Galaxies and the Universe, a course for non-science majors with fewer quantitative reasoning skills. The course introduced two different types of sections: QR intensives sections and Conceptual sections. Wireless Polling devices, otherwise known as “Clickers,” were incorporated into class sessions. Questions focusing on QR and concepts were answered anonymously, thereby providing in-class feedback on general comprehension. The Clickers allowed Professor Robinson to course-correct in class. Pre-class web-based reading quizzes in Classes v2 were also included in the assignment structure for the course. The Reading quizzes also always asked the students whether there were any lingering concepts or quantitative points they didn’t understand. The professor and TFs would read the answers to the reading quizzes before the next class so that they could address gaps in comprehension during the next class. Two online multiple-choice QR assessments were given. These allowed the instructors to weed out the students who did “too well,” meaning they should have been in a higher level QR course, and give more individualized attention to the students who were struggling. Students who were having difficulty were triaged into the appropriate tutoring scenario. Professor Robinson tried to tailor the course to the individual needs of the students as based on their QR assessments.

For his course on Movie Physics, Professor Robinson focused on estimation as the chief QR component to be examined. The Movie Physics course was described in the course catalog as: “A critical evaluation of Hollywood action movies using the laws of physics and back of the envelope estimates to distinguish between fictional and real movie physics. Enrollment limited to freshmen and sophomores. Intended for students with little or no prior exposure to calculus and statistics.” Several contemporary movie clips were used as prompts for a variety of physics estimation assignments. The TwTT audience was treated to a sampling of the clips used in the course: the cow flinging episode from Monty Python’s “Holy Grail,” runaway train from Spiderman, and a spaceship’s encounter with an event horizon from Disney’s “Black Hole.”

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

Gaming in the Classroom

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sample card for Operation LAPISWe were happy to welcome Roger Travis, Associate Professor of Classics to the Bass Library on Tuesday to speak about how and why he uses video games in the classroom. Professor Travis first walked us through his side project, the Video Games and Human Values Initiative. This organization started from a base of doing traditional scholarly work on the connections between adventure video games and the Homeric epic a little over four years ago. They are, as their name suggests, hoping to move the conversation about video games in a more humanistic direction. Roger and his collaborators at the VGHVI find that, unlike studies of other media such as film, video game studies has seen insufficient humanistic discourse. As part of this effort, they and other organizations such as Games, Learning, and Society at Wisconsin and Meaningful Play at Michigan State University are exploring issues around what video games are doing to and for us.

Professor Roger TravisProfessor Travis proceeded to structure his talk around his personal narrative, describing how he came to study games and what he has done with them professionally. After casually gaming in childhood and at college, Travis had a breakthrough in playing the Microsoft game Halo for the XBox.  His experiences with this game and the kinships he saw with Homeric bard competitions led him to turn a course into an augmented reality game, or, more properly, into a role-playing game in an augmented-reality game wrapper. The 1:1 mapping he used for learning objectives and play objectives led him to coin the term practomime from praxis and mimesis, that is, a doing and representing.

Another important point in Travis’s timeline came when he attended the Game Education Summit and saw James Paul Gee’s 36 learning principles (discussed in Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy) as well as Ian Schreiber’s chemistry–Pkémon comparison. The former lays out in detail the argument in his book’s title, suggesting new directions for learning (or at least new ontologies for learning) based on studying video game players. The latter discussed resistance among students to learning data from the periodic table of the elements when they had already learned a greater amount of data in the Pokémon universe.

Students in Professor Travis’s first iteration of his practomimetic course were taken aback at first, confused by the overlay of a game onto the course with little or no additional explanation. However, by the end of the course, disorientation gave way to engagement; he saw excellent student work in the ARG framework and positive and constructive evaluations. He explained that students in his game-world courses perform equal to their peers on traditional assessments, and motivation in his courses tends to run quite high. As an example of this, he mentioned students expressing a desire to compose in Latin, something he never saw in his traditional courses. Students also appreciate the aggregative grading method Professor Travis uses, in which students earn points for their assignments that build up, in toto, to their final grade. One instructor remarked that this seemed like a more motivating way to grade than the common method, which only allows a decrease in grade standing over a term.

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

You can follow the writings of Professor Travis on his blog, Living Epic, and the as well as the latest thoughts of the VGHVI through their podcasts.

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):

TwTT: Teaching/Research Portals

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March 2nd, 2010

11:00 am

Bass Library, L01

We will discuss a small but growing number of web sites created and edited collaboratively by librarians, curators, faculty and students featuring collections and items available in Yale repositories relevant to specific areas of disciplinary research. These sites extend the possibilities of traditional subject guides by allowing for tagging and providing an environment where scholarship and teaching materials based on the featured collections can also be highlighted. We will also demonstrate how these portals are set up in Drupal, an open source content management system now being offered at the university.

Projects to be discussed include:

  • Yale Slavery and Abolition Portal
  • Yale American Indian Studies Portal
  • Unbecoming British: Material Culture in Early America

Presenters:
Christine DeLucia, PhD Candidate in American Studies
Miriam Posner, PhD Candidate in Film and American Studies
Ken Panko, Manager, Instructional Technology Group