Sideways Orion

Enriching Scholarship 2017 Lightning and Thunder Talks May 2, 2017

This year’s enriching Scholarship saw a new format of presentation: lighting and thunder talks. First each presenter gave a lighting talk about their topic. After everyone did their presentations, we settled in around some tables for small group discussion of their topic. Below I give the synopsis of their lightning talk, followed by any notes that came out of the table discussions I attended (two of them). Each of these people had a full length session later in the week as well.

Melissa Gross: Anatomize
This is a 3D touch enabled virtual dissection table in the Duderstat and available to anyone at the U. While she showed images of human anatomy classes, you can load any thing for which you have a 3D rendering, such as a mouse, or a flower. It allows you to engage your students in an active learning environment.

Jamie Vander Broek: book making
Last summer, the U acquired a letter press printing studio as part of the Alternative Press poetry magazine collection. In addition to art students, she also had a class in history and american culture that did field trips, like printing, as extra credit. Modern students did not grow up with this sort of technology (not even things like typewriters) so they develop a new appreciation for the difficulty in information sharing in the pre-digital age. Many have trouble setting the type, especially setting it in the correct order (backwards!) They also come away with a product they can show and share with others.

Benjamin Blankenship: using Twitter in the classroom
Twitter is everywhere, and many of the students see it, even if they aren’t active users of it. It provides a platform that extends beyond the boundaries of the University. It can be a place to obtain resources, to interact with other students, or with the instructors. However, there are some challenges. Not everyone uses Twitter, and even the ones that do may not be comfortable sharing class information with their followers (this is a Psychology of Education class.) Students will need help getting started, setting up accounts or creating new accounts for class and making sure they can switch between them, and understanding things like privacy and the way Twitter threads messages. Assessment can also be a challenge, especially with a large class. There are tools to help with this. Twitter archivers can help with assessment by saving tweets to a Google sheet, CSV, or proprietary report form. You can go simple, like an IFTTT applet, somewhat complex like Twitter Archiver, a Chrome Add-on, or a complete analytics platform like Tweet Archivist. In general, you are still going to need to sort through them all by hand to see if students did a reasonable job, just like you would with any other assessment. If you have a GSI, you can have him/her monitor the class twitter hashtag during lecture like a back channel, so introverts can still get their questions answered. You can also use an app like twitter fall to display a running feed of tweets. Students may use this as a reminder during class discussions if they tweet thoughts during lecture, or to share ideas. It can also be used for free association or warm up activities. If you do decide to do this, you’ll need a course hashtag. Think carefully about it, and test it multiple times before the class!

Perry Samson: Wireless Indoor Location Device (WILD) Learning System and Mining Student Notes
Students who are using the LMS Perry developed several years (LectureTools/echo360), ago already have their notes online. Analytics tools are able to parse the notes to do things like identify common themes and subjects students wrote about, connect resources like a link to the chapter in the eBook, and even relate back to notes from previous semesters that are also in the system! This system is still in early development stages.
WILD is a device that can pinpoint its 4 dimensional location to within a few inches. The device can also communicate with devices like smart phones and computers, so you can design activities that require the students to move around. For example, a windspeed can be assigned to each device, and students have to self organize into a hurricane. The instructor’s computer could display the result, so students can see if they’ve reached hurricane status, and what happens if they move out of place (I can see similar ideas for simulations of an accretion or protoplanetary disk.) Since it is 4 dimensional, you can include a height and movement, so you can do a scale model eclipse. You can also collect data on the other devices nearby, so you can do something like track social interactions, which might be especially good for something like a foreign language practice class. This is still in development, but he’ll be trying it in his class this fall, and soliciting ideas for more classes and applications over the summer and early fall.

Pamela Bogart: Gameful Canvas
Canvas has a robust multimedia discussions tool, and learning outcomes with rubrics, which lend themselves nicely to multiple methods of content delivery and assessment. Modules allows options or alternative pathways to success. Students do a set of activities that are required by all (such an the midterm and final), then select a subset of other material and activities, which allows tailoring of classes to what students need to get out of the course. Since the other activities have varying deadlines, it also give the student flexibility with his/her schedule. However, this works well for students with good executive skills. Procrastinators and students who have difficulty in unstructured environments tend not to perform well. I will be attending the full length session later in the week, so look for a future blog post.