I’m at a session right now about Top Learning Challenges at Educause. Someone just read off this quotation which I have seen before.
Yet despite the tremendous investment that all institutions of higher education have made in information technology, despite the number of classrooms wired and the number of laptops mandated, the vast majority of classes proceed as they have for generations—isolated, even insulated, from the powerful technologies we use in the rest of our lives. Moreover, the form in which scholarship appears has barely changed. Across almost every field, researchers, no matter how sophisticated the technology they use in discovery, translate their discoveries into simple word-processed documents.
I wanted to capture this here, because I think it does a good job of describing one of the main challenges of my job and my department at Wheaton. We need to help faculty and others at Wheaton explore this technology we’ve been investing in and the digital world that we are now all embedded in — so that we can discover or tap it’s potential for transforming teaching, learning and research.
In honor of the Text Encoding Workshops that I helped organize at Wheaton the weekend before last, I present a Bob Dylan TEI mashup. (Never thought I would say those words.)
Thanks to Chris Hyde in my department for finding that one.
The Workshops themselves were great. I am hoping we can get some good collaborative projects going with Mount Holyoke, Dickinson College, and NITLE around publishing the documents we are creating. Hopefully more on this soon!
I’ve blogged a couple times about Tech N Talks. In case you’re interested, here’s the full schedule along with the description that I sent out at the beginning of the semester to our faculty listserv:
Tech ‘N’ Talk Tuesdays:
12:30 – 1:30, the Faculty Lounge in Emerson
The Research and Instruction Department of LIS presents a series of brown bag lunchtime conversations about technology’s intersection with teaching and research. What does it mean to teach in an environment saturated with mobile devices and wireless Internet? How could sites like YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter help or hinder your teaching? Can you use digital maps to do more than just lookup directions? Is the digital age changing the way we engage in scholarship? Each Tuesday, faculty, library liaisons, and technology liaisons will meet in the Faculty Lounge at 12:30 to grapple with these and many more questions — a new topic each week. Please join us!
Schedule:
September 9th: iPhone Comes to School: Mobile Computing in the Classroom , Presenter: Scott Hamlin
September 16th: Getting your Voice Out There: Podcasting for teaching, research and class projects – Presenters: Michael Drout, Leah Niederstadt
September 23rd: Mapping your Research: GoogleEarth and GIS – Presenters: Domingo Ledezma
September 30th: Wheaton on YouTube? Making Video Lectures – Presenters: Tim Barker, John Partridge
October 7th: Facebook and Social Software – Presenter(s): Paula Krebs (faculty), Alex Friberg (student)
October 21st: Technology’s Role in Collaborative Writing – Presenter: Lisa Lebduska
October 28th: Teaching with Digital Images – Presenter(s): Touba Flemming and TBA
November 4th: Wheaton onCourse: a Pilot Exploring an Alternative to Blackboard – Presenter(s): TBA
November 11th: Keeping Current with the Literature: RSS & Alerts – Presenters: Mason Brown and Patrick Rashleigh
November 18th: Digital Humanities: New Approaches to Scholarship – Presenters: Kirk Anderson, Kathryn Tomasek
December 2nd: Managing your Citations: Refworks and Beyond – Presenter(s): TBA
Last Tuesday we had a Tech N Talk brown bag discussion on video lectures… or rather a version of video lectures that two professors have been experimenting with in their classes. This is not the typical set a camera up at the back of a classroom, tape a full class lecture, and then post it somewhere (like iTunes U — which we don’t have… yet). Instead, Tim Barker (Astronomy) and John Partridge (Philosophy) are creating short videos to supplement their classes… not video lectures… something smaller. Lecturettes?
Barker often thinks of content after the class is over that would help his students, sometimes information that he would like them to have before the class meets again or that would help them complete an assignment. So, rather than typing it out in an email, he decided to try creating video messages for his class. He hooks a web cam up to his Windows-based laptop and places it in front of a chalk board in his office, and then records. The software he uses (I need to check with him… I think it came with the camera he purchased) was cheap, fast, easy to use and had an “upload to YouTube” button built in. So, he was able to post his material and get it out to his students quickly.
Partridge used his Macbook, a USB microphone, and iMovie for the first time last semester to record four short supplemental lectures for student. The first one was an introduction to materials on his Blackboard site, and his others contained background information to materials his students were reading and discussing in class. He posted his “vodcasts” to the Blackboard forums for his students to view between classes. This was material he would have had to cover at some point and by having it in video form, he was able to win back some class time for discussion (as opposed to solid lecture).
Both professors’ work demonstrates how far the technology has come over the past few years. Barker said he tried something similar several years ago and was frustrated with how much work it took. Partridge discovered how easy it was to do after posting videos of his kid up on YouTube for his relatives. Both faculty members needed very little support — a fact that amazes me, because it used to be that you needed to work in a video lab or at least on a souped up machine to create digital video.
While making the videos and posting them was relatively easy, I don’t think that either professor was happy with where they ended up publishing them. Barker put his on YouTube, because it was easy to do. But he really only wanted his students to see it, and therefore didn’t take advantage of any of the social features there — nor did he want to. What’s funny is that YouTube forces you to be social anyway, by posting “related videos.” Since Barker’s work was not labeled in a meaningful way and he didn’t password protect it, he had some strange “related” things (and “things” is a good description of them) in his side bar. Patridge discovered that Blackboard (at least our basic version of it) was a little clunky for video, and we Academic Technology folks are a little concerned about videos taking up too much space on that server. So, the search for where to put our digital stuff goes on. Perhaps Moodle (which we are piloting this semester) has a plugin? Perhaps iTunes U? We’d better start searching…
