We are kicking off our August workshops this week (Aug 10) with a variety of workshops. Look for our Blackboard workshops, Large Lecture sessions, and new writing workshops in partnership with the Writing in the Disciplines Program. Space is still available! Sign up at http://uvm.edu/ctl/events

Today I attended the UVM McNair Scholars Symposium and was struck by the poise, knowledge, and presentation skills these young people possessed. I was able to stay for three of the presentations. The topics were impressive: Refugee Resettlement in VT, Affirmative Action from the African American perspective, and Improving support for African American students at two predominately white institutions. I couldn’t help but think about the amazing experiences these scholars had over the course of the summer in the McNair program. Each scholar gained the experience of doing authentic research, presentation skills for their conference at Penn State, as well as UVM, and learned to answer complex questions about their research in front of an audience.
Each year the Center for Teaching and Learning works with the McNair Scholars Program to kick off the summer with a two day “Laptop Training”. We have the pleasure of meeting the Scholars and working with them on a variety of research software as well as presentation skills. I hope they get as much out of that training, as I did watching them present at the Symposium. I was very proud of them and all that they accomplished this summer. I know they all have bright futures ahead of them as UVM graduates and McNair Scholars.

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.”

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. …

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

Trent Batson, professor of English, director of academic computing, entrepreneur and bon vivant, has an article in Campus Technology exploring the role of Web2.0 in education, particularly higher education. He observes:

For decades, a minority among educators has advocated alternate forms of teaching and learning. The umbrella term for these alternate forms is “open education,” (cf Opening Up Education, Kumar and Iiyoshi, MIT Press, 2008). The litany of alternate forms is long: co-op learning, experiential learning, service learning, internships, semester abroad, field study, authentic learning, problem-based learning, adult education, extension courses, and on and on. Each of these alternate forms was designed with the assumption that traditional classroom learning was the norm.

…
from Trent Batson, “Why is Web 2.0 Important to Higher Education?”, Campus Technology, April 15, 2009. http://campustechnology.com/articles/2009/04/15/why-web-2.0-is-important-to-higher-education.aspx. Image from Batson’s Web2.0PortfolioInitiative, http://www.trentbatson.com/

First it was Flickr, now its YouTube. Hoorah for the Library of Congress as they begin to place portions of their vast video holdings on this popular site.

First collections include the 2008 National Book Festival author presentations, the Books and Beyond author series, “Westinghouse” industrial films from 1904, scholar discussions from the John W. Kluge Center, and the earliest movies made by Thomas Edison, including the first moving image ever made.

Watch for more in future:
http://www.youtube.com/user/LibraryOfCongress

Responding to Diversity Issues in the Classroom: A Developmental and Social Justice Approach
Friday, April 10, 2009 9:00a.m. to 12 Noon in Allen House, room 204.
This half day workshop engages participants in building an understanding of how to have meaningful conversations about diversity issues and how to confront difficult situations more effectively in the classroom context. Participants will gain a deeper understanding of both the dynamics of interpersonal conflict in general and practical responses that promote understanding and critical thinking. Using case scenarios, you will practice interpersonal skills and productive responses to interpersonal conflicts related to cultural and/or social justice.
Facilitated by Sherwood Smith, Director, Center for Cultural Pluralism and IPS faculty.
Register by sending an e-mail to: mheining@uvm.edu2.