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On December 19th, UVM’s Blackboard system will be upgraded to version 9.1.9.
What will I have to do?
Aside from the normal end-of-term backups and course management tasks, you won’t have to do anything at all to prepare for this upgrade. The system will be upgraded “in-place,” which means that there is no need for migrating or moving materials and data to something new.
What’s New? What’s Changed?
Most changes to this version affect the “look and feel” of the application. This means that the daily use won’t be that different from what you’re used to. That said, here are a few notable changes and additions.
- Contextual chevron menus are hidden until you move your mouse over them. This is perhaps the largest functional change, however it is mostly aesthetic, since the use of this content hasn’t really changed.
- Colors, typography, and overall aesthetic design has changed. While these might be the first thing you’ll notice, the changes here will be the least in your way. The aesthetic changes should make aspects of getting around your course easier, with improvements to readability and navigation.
- Less clicks to get from point A to point B. Speaking of navigation, this version advertises less steps to get to different parts of a course. For example, you can now jump from one course to another without having to go back to the “My Blackboard” tab.
Where do I find out more about this? Can I test
drive this new version?
For more information about these upcoming changes, and to get a sneak preview of the new version, take a look at the FAQ on the CTL website.
We’ve come to expect innovative ideas from CHNM and this week has been no exception. Funded by a grant from the NEH, the One Week/One Tool project’s intent was to bring together twelve practitioners in the digital humanities to decide on, and develop, a useful tool. The project was announced in June 2010 and the event was held in late July. True to the premise, Anthologize was delivered at the end of the One Week. There were several finalists that we hope will be developed in future.
Anthologize is a plugin for the WordPress blog application. It allows one to collect their own blog posts, or import blog posts from others, combine them, and produce a text. Currently the text formats are ePub, PDF, TEI, and RTF. An active community has sprung up around the project, contributing bug reports and feature suggestions. Work will continue on what promises to be a simple but useful tool.
There are several educational uses that immediately spring to mind:
1) Bringing together class blogs from a course
2) Collecting individual student’s blog posts as a ‘takeway’ for students
3) As an assignment or class project, having students search and compile posts on a topic
4) For organizations, an easy way to compile news and updates from the year as a document for use in applying for, or continuing, grant funding
5) Using WordPress as a drafting space, then compiling the results as a TEI document for forther markup and processing (Your WordPress postings do not have to be publically posted: you can build Anthologize documents from drafts)
6) Teaching students the importance of creating their materials digitally, especially using standards like TEI. Digital, done right, means multiple opportunities for repurposing.
7) Pulling together blog postings for a quick ebook that can be downloaded to your ereader device for offline reading.
8) Building course packs or readers of relevant articles
9) Building a CV or portfolio of your own work, or teaching your students to do the same for their own eportfolios
I’m sure we will all be thinking of more as the program develops. Meanwhile, here is a short video of Anthologize in action. It’s done without audio overlay as a way to show how easy it is to use, though I’ve also highlighted some of the current bugs that are already being addressed.
Unnarrated Screencast of Anthologize
If you are at UVM and would like to try it, contact me and I’d be happy to get you started (hope.greenberg@uvm.edu, Center for Teaching and Learning, UVM).
The CCP and CTL are pleased to bring Dr. Mary Meares, Assistant Professor, University of Alabama to UVM on April 1, 2010 for two workshops. Dr. Meares taught intercultural and organizational communication in the U.S. and Japan and has consulted for educational, corporate, and public service organizations in the areas of intercultural transitions, team building, and conflict. Her research focuses on intercultural groups, virtual teams, diversity in the workplace, and perceptions of voice.
Two workshops are offered:
- Culture, Communication, and Technology: Working with Culturally Diverse Students in the Online Environment, 2 – 4:30 pm on 4/1 (for faculty)
- Culture’s Role in Computer Mediated Communication: Checklist for
Culturally Competent Perspectives,
10 am – 12:00 pm (for information and technology staff)
For more information and to register please go to http://www.uvm.edu/ctl/events
Congratulations to the 2009 – 2010 Faculty Fellows! We are pleased to have such an interdisciplinary faculty cohort:
- Rocki-Lee DeWitt, Professor, School of Business Administration
- Tyler Doggett, Assistant Professor, Philosophy
- Nancy Hayden, Associate Professor, School of Engineering
- Thomas Hudspeth,Professor, Environmental Program, RSENR
- Laurie Kutner, Library Associate Professor, Bailey Howe-Info & Instruction
- Annika Ljung-Baruth, Lecturer, English
- Ernesto Mendez, Assistant Professor, Plant & Soil Science
- Donald S. Ross, Research Associate Professor, Director of the Agricultural Testing Lab, Lecturer, Plant & Soil Science
- Larry Rudiger, Lecturer, Psychology
- Hollie Shaner-McRae, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Nursing
- Leon Walls, Assistant Professor, Education
- Qingbin Wang, Associate Professor, Community Development & Applied Economics
- Richard Watts, Research Center Administrator, Research Assistant Professor
RSENR, Transportation Research Center, Com Dev & Applied Economics - Beverley Wemple, Associate Professor, Geography
- Bob Winkler, Lecturer, Continuing Ed
- Alexander Wurthmann, Lecturer, Chemistry
The UVM Sustainability Fellows Program announces its first Call for Applications. This program seeks to engage faculty from a variety of disciplines to incorporate principles of environmental sustainability into UVM’s Curriculum. We seek to develop a learning community – a multidisciplinary cohort engaged in a yearlong exploration of sustainability, the scholarship of teaching and learning, and collaboration.
Applications are due Sept. 30th. Click here for more information.
This program is presented by UVM’s Environmental Program, Center for Teaching and Learning, The Office of Sustainability, The Greenhouse Residential Learning Community and in partnership with Shelburne Farms.
News flash: The Chronicle of Higher Education suggests that PowerPoint is over-used and boring. This is not exactly leading edge news, but an article by Jeffrey Young (“When Computers Leave Classrooms, So Does Boredom” ) July 24, 2009.
http://chronicle.com/article/Teach-Naked-Effort-Strips/47398/ takes another look at the use, or non-use, of various technologies inside (and outside) the classroom.
While the first section of the article might lead the reader to assume that IT has no place in the classroom, the argument is not quite that simple. Rather, as many of us have been aware of for years, the challenge is to find where technology enhances learning and where it detracts from it. The questions raised by the article continue to be timely: how do we navigate between student expectations and student needs? how do we make in-class time engaging and how do we make out of class time support what happens in the classroom? how do we keep up with funding the necessary infrastructure? and, most importantly, how do we make time to learn, or support the learning of, the ever-shifting technologies that could enhance learning?
Summarizing quotes:
“José A. Bowen, dean of the Meadows School of the Arts, has challenged his colleagues to “teach naked” — by which he means, sans machines. More than anything else, Mr. Bowen wants to discourage professors from using PowerPoint, because they often lean on the slide-display program as a crutch rather than using it as a creative tool. Class time should be reserved for discussion, he contends, especially now that students can download lectures online and find libraries of information on the Web.”
“A study published in the April issue of British Educational Research Journal found that 59 percent of students in a new survey reported that at least half of their lectures were boring, and that PowerPoint was one of the dullest methods they saw.”
“Mr. Bowen is part of a group of college leaders who haven’t given up on that dream of shaking up college instruction. Even though he is taking computers out of classrooms, he’s not anti-technology. He just thinks they should be used differently — upending the traditional lecture model in the process.”
“Here’s the kicker, though: The biggest resistance to Mr. Bowen’s ideas has come from students, some of whom have groused about taking a more active role during those 50-minute class periods. The lecture model is pretty comfortable for both students and professors, after all, and so fundamental change may be even harder than it initially seems, whether or not laptops, iPods, or other cool gadgets are thrown into the mix.”
“His philosophy is that the information delivery common in today’s classroom lectures should be recorded and delivered to students as podcasts or online videos before class sessions. To make sure students tune in, he gives them short online multiple-choice tests.”
“So what’s left to do during class once you’ve delivered your lecture? Introduce issues of debate within the discipline and get the students to weigh in based on the knowledge they have from those lecture podcasts, Mr. Bowen says. “If you say to a student, We have this problem in Mayan archaeology: We don’t know if the answer is A or B. We used to all think it was A, now we think it’s B. If the lecture is ‘Here’s the answer, it’s B,’ that’s not very interesting. But if the student believes they can contribute, they’re a whole lot more motivated to enter the discourse, and to enter the discipline.”
“To encourage the kind of technology use Mr. Bowen did want, the school gave every professor a laptop and set up support so they could create their own podcasts and videos.”
“‘Strangely enough, the people who are most resistant to this model are the students, who are used to being spoon-fed material that is going to be quote unquote on the test,’ says Mr. Heffernan. ‘Students have been socialized to view the educational process as essentially passive. The only way we’re going to stop that is by radically refiguring the classroom in precisely the way José wants to do it.’”
“‘Initial response is generally negative until students start to understand and see how they learn under this new system,’ says Glenn Platt, a professor of marketing at Miami who has published academic papers about the approach, which he calls the “inverted classroom.” “The first response from students is typically, ‘I paid for a college education and you’re not going to lecture?’”
“Whatever griping students do about being asked to participate in class, though, it’s better than the boredom induced by a PowerPoint lecture, say fans of the new approach.”
“Now that so many colleges offer low-cost online alternatives to the traditional campus experience, and some universities give away videos of their best professors’ lectures, colleges must make sure their in-person teaching really is superior to those alternatives.”
Viruses. Malware. Network interruptions. Program bugs. Version incompatibilities. Now, add to this list of things that can go wrong add a vendor who sells “corrupt files” that can be submitted in lieu of homework, hopefully buying a day or two more to work an an almost done homework. That’s the latest twist we get from the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus Blog’s posting of ‘The Computer Ate My Homework’: How to Detect Fake Techno-Excuses .
The scheme is pretty simple:
Corrupted-Files.com, a Web site developed in December as a joke, its owner says, offers unreadable Word, Excel, or PowerPoint files that appear, at first glance, to be legitimate. Students can submit them via e-mail to professors in place of real papers to get a deadline extension without late penalties. For $3.95, the site promises a “completed” assignment file will be sent to the buyer within 12 hours, to be renamed and submitted by the new owner. By the time a professor gives up on the bogus file, in theory, a student will have been able to complete the actual assignment.
The article then goes on to explore ways to detect and possibly handle such events.
The comments section chimes in with two dozen or so additional suggestions – everything from “use paper” to “develop work process” with the selection of a topic, the submission of a brief reading list, then an outline, and finally the paper itself. The latter one appeals to me because it has the advantage of testing the assignment system, keeping students on track, and generally emulating best practices. The comments themselves could be edited to be a part of the “how to submit a paper” instructions.
Definitely a good read for courses with a writing requirement.
Marc Beja, ‘The Computer Ate My Homework’: How to Detect Fake Techno-Excuses, The The Wired Campus in The Chronicle of Higher Education (Online), June 10, 2009. http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3818/the-computer-ate-my-homework-how-to-detect-fake-techno-excuses
Image. A Google thumbnail found with a image search for [gremlin]. Alas, the source of that image is no longer on the page that google points to, illustrating another way the computer can eat your homework.
What happens if you ask Google to compare the GDP of France and Germany, or ask it how many cows were in Vermont each of the last ten years? You may find a web page where someone has posted that information, or you may have to search for several sites and gather the information for yourself, or you may find some references to follow to do some research. Google is fantastic, wonderful, certainly but is not designed for those kinds of questions.
Enter Wolfram Alpha.
Dr. Wolfram, of Mathematica and New Kind of Science fame, is launching a new type of web search engine that combines the symbolic representation and calculating capabilities of Mathematica with natural language processing. Or, to quote: “Fifty years ago, when computers were young, people assumed that they’d quickly be able to handle all these kinds of things. And that one would be able to ask a computer any factual question, and have it compute the answer. But it didn’t work out that way. Computers have been able to do many remarkable and unexpected things. But not that. I’d always thought, though, that eventually it should be possible. And a few years ago, I realized that I was finally in a position to try to do it.”
Natural language processing is still in its infant stage and “for example we’re still very far away from having computers systematically understand large volumes of natural language text on the web.” So, Alpha begins small with “trillions of pieces of curated data and millions of lines of algorithms.”
Read more or watch for the launch later this month, here: http://www.wolframalpha.com/
What happens if you ask Google to compare the GDP of France and Germany, or ask it how many cows were in Vermont each of the last ten years? You may find a web page where someone has posted that information, or you may have to search for several sites and gather the information for yourself, or you may find some references to follow to do some research. Google is fantastic, wonderful, certainly but is not designed for those kinds of questions.
Enter Wolfram Alpha.
Dr. Wolfram, of Mathematica and New Kind of Science fame, is launching a new type of web search engine that combines the symbolic representation and calculating capabilities of Mathematica with natural language processing. Or, to quote: “Fifty years ago, when computers were young, people assumed that they’d quickly be able to handle all these kinds of things. And that one would be able to ask a computer any factual question, and have it compute the answer. But it didn’t work out that way. Computers have been able to do many remarkable and unexpected things. But not that. I’d always thought, though, that eventually it should be possible. And a few years ago, I realized that I was finally in a position to try to do it.”
Natural language processing is still in its infant stage and “for example we’re still very far away from having computers systematically understand large volumes of natural language text on the web.” So, Alpha begins small with “trillions of pieces of curated data and millions of lines of algorithms.”
Read more or watch for the launch later this month, here: http://www.wolframalpha.com/
This morning’s Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, May 5th) fills out some of the details of a rumored “large screen” ebook reader, a device expected to provide a paperless platform for newspapers, magazines, and … academic textbooks.
Geoffrey Fowler and Ben Worthen report:
Beginning this fall, some students at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland will be given large-screen Kindles with textbooks for chemistry, computer science and a freshman seminar already installed, said Lev Gonick, the school’s chief information officer. The university plans to compare the experiences of students who get the Kindles and those who use traditional textbooks, he said. …
Five other universities are involved in the Kindle project, according to people briefed on the matter. They are Pace, Princeton, Reed, Darden School at the University of Virginia, and Arizona State.
The road to e-textsbooks will likely be rough – publishers are reluctant to give up distribution control to Amazon (or Google, or Sony, or Walmart …), campus bookstores are nervous, and students are likely reluctant to abandon the used textbook marketplace.
Geoffrey A. Fowler and Ben Worthen, Amazon to Launch Kindle for Textbooks, Wall Street Journal, MAY 5, 2009.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124146996831184563.html