2009

Impressions of Teaching a History Course Online

Anonymous — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 07:00:00 +0000

Impressions of Teaching a History Course Online Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 12/07/2009 - 00:00

American History Through Baseball is a unique course that uses baseball as a way to examine American history and society. When taught in person, this class is all about participation and interaction. Almost everyone knows something about baseball and can contribute to the conversation, but the same goes for those who have no knowledge at all of the sport. The key is an interest in history and society. As an instructor, Professor Tom Zeiler enjoys hands on teaching, feeding off of the energy of his students.

So how does this course translate to an online only course? What happens to instructor-student and student-student interaction? What do you have to do to get a course ready for delivery in a completely online format?

These are just a few of the questions that Professor Zeiler addressed when sharing his experience teaching American History Through Baseball last summer in an online five-week course. Though Professor Zeiler missed seeing his students face-to-face in the classroom, the online course had its own unique kind of energy.

Discussions did not go away in the online format. In fact, they became even more central to the course. Students responded (as required but also voluntarily) to discussion questions every week online and unlike the face-to-face class, almost everyone participates. Professor Zeiler believes that some students who may be quieter in class get more opportunities to participate online. As a result, discussion online was “much more deep and much more extensive.”

Though discussion quality improved, Professor Zeiler did have to make adjustments to his teaching. He learned very quickly that he had to be more clear and precise. In particular, expectations and assignments needed to be much clearer. This need for additional clarity online also means that there is less ability to make changes on the fly. Once he started the online course, Professor Zeiler had less flexibility in changing the expectations or the content.

Professor Zeiler found that the need to be precise and clarify every aspect of the course up front actually helped him reflect on his own teaching in the classroom. “It’s a different way of teaching and you learn something about your teaching.” He has taken the lessons he has learned back to his regular teaching. His experience with discussion online now informs his outlook on discussions in class. “I’ve been able to take back to my regular teaching to have more faith in really challenging my students to discuss.”

The move from teaching in the classroom to teaching online has its benefits and drawbacks but Professor Zeiler thinks it is worth trying. “I think the challenge for anybody new to it is it’s new. And you do not know what is going to work online. But you have a pretty good idea of what works in your classroom. So it’s not that big of a reach. You just got to realize that.”

--Written by: Amanda Porter, ASSETT Staff

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Teletherapy: Medicine is Going Global

Anonymous — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 06:00:00 +0000

Teletherapy: Medicine is Going Global Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/17/2009 - 00:00

Professor Gail Ramsberger, chair of the Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences (SLHS) department, realizes that technology is changing the way speech, language and hearing therapy works.

Something as simple as video conferencing, because of its affordability and relatively low cost, is creating a treatment option that never existed before: teletherapy. Teletherapy is the practice of using technology to provide professional therapy services from a distance.

The SLHS department at CU is taking the steps to implement this practice within graduate level classes; graduate students will not only learn how technology can provide treatment options, but will apply teletherapy to treat aphasia patients.

Professor Ramsberger is the resident expert on aphasia—an acquired disorder of language processing that wreaks havoc on a person’s capability to create and understand sentences, phrases or even choose correct words.

Research suggests that the most effective treatment schedules for those with aphasia are time-intensive: i.e., schedules in which patients attend therapy sessions at a hospital or outpatient clinic for several hours a day, 4-5 days a week, for several weeks.

Most patients with aphasia have experienced strokes or other neurological events that have led to the disease; their old age and impaired physical abilities makes traveling back and forth from a doctor’s office difficult if not impossible. Consequently, aphasia therapy is typically not able to be delivered on an intensive basis.

So what is the solution? Bring the treatment to them.

Professor Ramsberger and Clinical Instructor Barbara Rende are teaching a graduate class this Fall 2009 semester, and will use teletherapy in place of traditional therapy practices to bring treatment to patients. Each patient will be given their own Mac computer, complete with a built-in iSight camera. Using iChat, graduate students will be able to treat up to 2 patients at once, who are sitting in the comfort of their own home.

Each patient will be able to see the student therapist and the second patient simultaneously. The treatment will mirror an in-office experience—but without the hassle of getting to an actual doctor’s office. And besides this benefit to the patient, graduate students in the SLHS department will get plenty of hands-on experience using a modern treatment option.

The answer seems simple, so why hasn’t teletherapy taken off before this? Ramsberger explains, “People are hesitant because what we do as speech-language pathologists is such a human discipline."

In other words, therapists and doctors are more used to seeing their patients face to face—and are unsure about the idea that personal connections and therapeutic input are still possible from a distance. With teletherapy practice in Drs. Ramsberger & Rende’s class, students will learn to become comfortable treating a patient from afar.

“It will show students possibilities besides traditional delivery models,” professor Ramsberger shares. She hopes this practice will train students to be more capable and have a farther reaching effect in our technology-filled world.

There are health challenges around the globe. When people are unfortunate enough to have a disease or disability in an area where no expert resides, it used to be they were merely out of luck. Now, “telemedicine makes treatment global,” says professor Ramsberger.

Gail Ramsberger and Barbara Rende hope that the class they’re teaching provides evidence that teletherapy can be just as successful as traditional treatment. With more evidence behind the practice, she anticipates universities will begin to add technology-supported treatments into their curriculum.

This will contribute to the ultimate goal: providing a more relevant education to students and supplying the world with trained, competent and innovative individuals.

Written By: Kate Vander Wiede, CU '09, ASSETT Staff

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A New Era: Will Going Digital Change the World We Live In?

Anonymous — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 06:00:00 +0000

A New Era: Will Going Digital Change the World We Live In? Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 09/07/2009 - 00:00

Physical documents are coming online through Google Books and digital libraries around the world. The goal behind many of these projects is the idea the shift to digital documentation will lead to a new era: this wide-spread access to important information will cause leaps and bounds in research.

But this isn’t the whole story.

Jordan Stein, Assistant Professor of English, shares that having a database of accessible resources doesn’t make those resources valuable. “Digital archives make things available,” Stein agrees, “but to optimize them you still need to know what you're looking for, what they contain, how to search, etc.”

Stein, recipient of a Dean’s Funds for Excellence Award from ASSETT, delved further into these ideas while at the American Antiquarian Society’s 2009 Summer Seminar in the History of the Book. This seminar aimed to examine the complex relationship between book history and media history.

In addition to investigating the idea of access to digital archives, this seminar questioned the idea that books and libraries will become antiquated, replaced by digital documents.

Stein thinks not.

He shares that more important than knowing what to look for in a digital archive, is realizing what is missing. While not commonly considered, there is actually more to a book than the words it contains. Historians and typographers, among others, view how a book was published, it’s page size, and it’s binding as being just as, if not more important than the actual words on each page.

Following that line of thought, one of the driving points of the seminar, Stein shares, was that “digital technologies don't, can't, shouldn't, replace books.” But, Stein says, while digital archives are not the answers to all our problems, they can still be immensely helpful—especially to students.

“I’m really committed to making sure my students realize what kinds of resources are available to them when they do humanities research,” Stein impresses upon me. “I came away [from the conference] with a renewed sense that the kinds of interpretive skills we teach are still valuable—possibly more so than ever.” He realizes, though, that students will need to be taught the new ways of finding meaningful knowledge in a massive nest of possibilities.

While not teaching a class this fall, Stein has ideas to host a seminar on book history and media history, as well as creating a future course on advanced research methods for English majors.

As he teaches students how to become better problem solvers in an increasingly digital world, Stein reflects on the idea that digital technology can be an occasion for collaboration among humanities professors, students, researchers, and librarians. “What we’re working on," Stein says, "is only one part of the story of how digital archives can enrich the work we do.”

Written by: Kate Vander Wiede, Cu '09, ASSETT Staff

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Educause Interviews Mark Gammon on Social Media

Anonymous — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 06:00:00 +0000

Educause Interviews Mark Gammon on Social Media Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 08/25/2009 - 00:00

Our very own Mark Gammon, ASSETT DATC, is featured in a podcast on the EDUCAUSE site, "Social Media in the Classroom - One Size Does Not Fit All." The podcast is a follow up to Mark's presentations at August's COLTT conference. If you're interested in learning more about social media, please drop us a line or contact Mark. ASSETT will be hosting many activities this coming year relating to social media for education.

EDUCAUSE is a national center for research in transforming education through information technology.

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Learning Japanese With Technology: Frustration to Confidence

Anonymous — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 06:00:00 +0000

Learning Japanese With Technology: Frustration to Confidence Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 08/05/2009 - 00:00

Minori Murata has big plans for her teaching.

A Japanese instructor at CU ��«��Ƶ for 8 years, Murata has taught the language every year, always with physical materials and following a similar teaching process. In Spring 2009, this changed. It was then that she began to incorporate technology into the course.

Japanese, Murata shares, is a difficult language to learn. “If you’ve never taken a foreign language completely different from English, you might not have felt the kind of frustration my students feel,” she shares. She likens student’s abilities when they first start Japanese to a child’s, “My students have said that they feel like little kids; they feel they cannot say anything at their intellectual level.”

This led her to want to help her students learn the language faster, and better. She wanted them to get more practice, so they could get better at speaking and listening to the language. She knew that a technology like CULearn would help her easily provide listening exercises to her students.

She started slow, using CULearn to post grades, homework assignments and to upload listening exercises for her first year Japanese students. “In class we focus on speaking, which means they get to listen to their classmates,” Murata explains. “But they needed more listening, so I decided to put some online for extra at-home practice.”

Inexplicably to Murata, the same assignments that students had a more difficult time with on paper, became easier online. “Somehow, they felt like the process was easier. They got started faster,” Minori shrugs, slightly mystified. She decided that if student’s found the process of learning Japanese easier online, she would continue to use it.

So what began as using technology minimally will expand to further applications in the future. In Fall 2009, she will use the ASSETT funded Dean’s Fund for Excellence award to assist her in maintaining her use of CULearn. She will continue to post listening exercises and online assignments for her now second year Japanese students.

In the future, she plans to add grammar video clips and audio-capable online flashcards, as well as other technologies she and her students feel will assist in learning the language

Murata knows that putting all this information online, and making it accessible at home, will give students the tools to learn Japanese better. Her hope is that with these tools, her student’s will more quickly move from feeling like little kids to feeling like competent Japanese speakers.

-- Written by: Kate Vander Wiede, CU' 09, ASSETT Staff

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Innovative Practices for Learning Biblical Hebrew

Anonymous — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 06:00:00 +0000

Innovative Practices for Learning Biblical Hebrew Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 07/31/2009 - 00:00

If you learned a language in high school, odds are you remember snippets, phrases, or mere words of the language you studied.

Biblical Hebrew Instructor David Valeta’s goal is to teach a language so that students will remember it for years, using what is called Communicative Language Teaching (CLT). This change in his teaching pedagogy and practices will require the use of imagination, technology, and a touch of bravery.

“Usually, you sit down, you memorize vocabulary and rules,” Valeta explains. “But with CLT, they will hear it, see it, speak it. Grammar comes, but only after they’ve already been using the language.”

The approach is modeled after how children most often learn languages: often by hearing it and being immersed within it. Children learn to speak before they learn to read and write. Not only that, but they learn both of those things before they ever learn what a noun or verb is.

Valeta’s plan is to use CULearn, video clips, audio tracks and props to facilitate student learning in his brand new Biblical Hebrew (HEBR 1030 & JWST 1030) class in Fall 2009. All these parts combined will create an interactive and immersive learning environment for first year Biblical Hebrew students.

Valeta has used technology in the past to make his classes more appealing to students, but this will be the first time he will use it with the CLT model of language teaching. “Hopefully, this will be more effective. Hopefully it will be more fun,” Valeta imparts. He imagines that when students realize classes will be filled with videos, music and props instead of countless drills, that they will be more inclined to show up to class.

That’s what other professor’s around the country think as well. To learn the CLT method, Valeta earned an ASSETT Dean’s Fund for Excellence Award to attend the Pedagogy Workshop in Communicative Biblical Hebrew. At the conference, he met teachers around the country who are also implementing the CLT method of language teaching in their Biblical Hebrew classrooms.

Of the four day, 8-hours-a-day workshop, “probably a third of the course was in Hebrew,” Valeta explains. “They taught the method to us by teaching us, as if we were the students in the class.”

Using technology in the classroom should make learning Biblical Hebrew, a ‘dead language’ more accessible to students—allowing them to study in the car with a CD, at home listening to video and audio clips on their computers, and at school with their peers. It’s what you can think of as modern-day language immersion.

David Valeta’s new class is just another example of how pedagogy and technology can pair up and create opportunities to enhance teaching and learning.

Written by: Kate Vander Wiede, CU '09, ASSETT Staff

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Digital Storytelling: Media In Your Own Voice

Anonymous — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 06:00:00 +0000

Digital Storytelling: Media In Your Own Voice Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 07/15/2009 - 00:00

While searching for teaching ideas in the summer of 2006, Farrand RAP Senior Instructor Kayann Short “serendipitously” stumbled upon something that would change the course of her teaching interests: digital storytelling.

Digital Storytelling is about the story first and foremost: a first-person narrative focusing on a meaningful personal experience. Unlike text-only essays [traditional tales], these stories are then coupled with photos, video clips, music and personal voiceovers to create a short movie about the experience they want to share.

Short is planning to bring digital storytelling to CU classrooms, after applying and teaching it within the ��«��Ƶ community.

To Short, the shift from pen-and-paper stories to digital ones is intuitive; in a culture where YouTube videos gain world-wide attention, video is becoming the modern way to share information. The summer she discovered digital storytelling, Short attended a workshop held by the Center for Digital Storytelling at their satellite office in Denver.

After the three day workshop taught her how to produce a digital story, Short knew she had to share the experience with others. “Digital Storytelling empowers literacy,” Short explains as her reason for wanting to share the process with others. “The storyteller has a purpose, an audience. They feel like they see what literacy can really mean.”

Short speaks from experience. In the summer of 2008, with a CU Outreach Grant, she taught 4 women from ��«��ƵReads!, ��«��Ƶ’s literacy program, the process of digital storytelling. Two spoke English as a second language, and all had missed out on learning to read and write in her past. The opportunity to tell their story meant the world to these women, who otherwise may have not had the audience or the chance to do so.

Inspired by these women, Short received one of ASSETT’s Dean’s Fund for Excellence awards that allowed her to present what she’d learned at a MELUS conference this spring. Short showed one the women’s stories, and used it to illustrate how empowering the process of sharing through digital mediums can be.

The success Short has seen with digital stories has motivated her to include it in her teaching at CU. Besides using digital storytelling in her classes as a mode of inquiry for student learning, she is working to invite the Center for Digital Storytelling to host a digital storytelling workshop at CU. She hopes this will show faculty and organizations around campus what digital storytelling can do for them. Short will also incorporate digital storytelling into an INVST (International and National Volunteer Service Training) class she is planning to teach in 2010.

In case you didn’t know, the INVST Community Studies Program is filled with students whose interests lie in volunteering in the community. Short’s plan is to create a collection of multi-generational stories about activism in ��«��Ƶ. The students in her class will complete one portion of this puzzle, while elders involved with local organizations will fill in another. By the end, she hopes to have a compilation of inspirational stories that ask each person the question: What does community work mean to you?

These stories will then be put on the web, to inspire others to make a difference in their community. Finding the meaning in a personal experience is empowering not only for the storymaker, Short explains, but for the audience as well. She continues, “Once the digital story is out there, it can get a life of its own.”

Short hopes to show students that they can decide what is worth sharing with the world, and to inspire them to use these affordable technologies to expand the way they communicate with others. Short put it best when describing it to me:

“It’s not just those with a ton of money and access to media who decide what stories get to be told. Now the student makes the decision about what stories are important to tell.”

-- Written By: Kate Vander Wiede, CU '09, ASSETT Staff

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CUTeach-Math: Using Tech to Train Math Teachers

Anonymous — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 06:00:00 +0000

CUTeach-Math: Using Tech to Train Math Teachers Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 07/09/2009 - 00:00

“There is often a gap between the pure teaching of mathematics in math classes and students using it in application courses. The place in-between is where students need experiences analyzing and solving real life problems."

--Evelyn Puaa, Math Instructor

Preparing her students to operate effectively in this gap is paramount to Evelyn Puaa. As a high school teacher for 19 years and a college instructor for 15, she is in the unique position to give future teachers the skills she knows they will need.

Puaa is a part of what is called CUTeach, a campus-wide program with the mission to recruit and educate future math and science teachers to teach in the 21^st century. It is a replication of the UTeach program, which began at the University of Texas at Austin in 1997, and has been spreading to universities around the country since. CUTeach is a part of UTeach’s first wave of expansion.

CUTeach is a collaborative effort of the College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Education. It provides a 4 year program that leads to a degree in a math or science and also provides students with a Colorado teaching license. CUTeach’s aim isn’t to create the typical teacher, but to produce outstanding ones. The Functions and Modeling class Evelyn will teach this fall for the mathematics department is an outcome of the partnership of Education and Mathematics.

CUTeach classes incorporate strategies such as group learning and hands-on experiences emphasizing inquiry learning. Puaa's course will include the use of technology in classroom explorations and investigations to develop in her students a rich understanding of mathematical topics. The technological tools she will incorporate into activities will allow them to analyze real–world data.

Puaa noticed something important while she taught high school: many teachers’ skills were outdated. In high school classrooms today, students are exposed to many technologies that have cropped into classrooms in the past few years. These technologies are aimed at making learning more fun—using graphics, teamwork, and creativity to teach math and science.

But there is a problem. Many teachers graduating this year may have never used the technologies that are now becoming standards in the classroom. Teachers are now and will be expected to provide top-notch teaching while learning how to use these technology tools on the fly.

This is where Puaa's plan comes into play. Her students will be studying mathematics in the type of setting that they will soon be required to create as teachers in 21^st century secondary math classrooms. She intends to teach future secondary math teachers how to make learning math engaging and meaningful by using technology. The tools she’ll be using include:

Easy Math: After measuring things like acceleration of moving objects, temperature and distances, students will then use this data to analyze, compare, and contrast data sets and derive their functions.

TI Viewscreen: This allows the instructor, or student, to project their calculator screen, allowing everyone to be involved in one assignment.

Geometer’s Sketchpad: This will allow students to create a hypothesis regarding a function and quickly test it, as well as provide support services like lesson materials and training.

Through these technologies, Puaa and math department chair, Eric Stade, hope that students will learn to play.

“Playing and learning are really the same thing. When you play around, when you experiment, that’s when you’re really learning,” Stade shares. By allowing students to play with technologies in hands-on activities, they’ll not only learn to be technologically proficient, but will also develop the skills to be creative in their future classrooms.

The goal to improve teaching and learning through technology earned Eric Stade and Evelyn Puaa an ASSETT grant through the Dean’s Fund for Excellence program, which will allow them to purchase the technologies they need for their class.

For Evelyn Puaa, technology is simply a tool to help students reach their full potential. The real goal is the most important: to work together “to better prepare future teachers.”

Written By: Kate Vander Wiede, CU '09, ASSETT Staff

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Ed Rivers: Integrating Technology, Multimedia, and English

Anonymous — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 06:00:00 +0000

Ed Rivers: Integrating Technology, Multimedia, and English Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 06/22/2009 - 00:00

By integrating music, movies, still images, web design, and podcasting, English Professor Ed Rivers highlights technology’s power to communicate both content and emotion. Rivers’ inspiration for his Multimedia Composition course came from student projects. An increasing number of students wanted to use technologies such as music, video, and still photography to augment their real-world English projects. Soon, demand was great enough that Rivers redesigned the course to intentionally integrate technology and original creative work.

Rivers’ goal for the course was to help students “learn how to say more through a combination of media than any one medium can say alone.” These various media may include photography, podcasts, original music, movies, and websites. Students create original works by using all the media applications in Apple's iLife Suite plus professional-level applications such as Aperture (for photos), Reason (for music), and Motion (for animation).

Rivers’ teaching goals and style complement each other. His teaching goals are oriented toward practical, real-world communication, using techniques that will capture and retain students’ interest. For example, last semester students expressed interest in the creative medium of podcasting. Rivers responded to their feedback by incorporating podcasting into his latest version of Multimedia Composition. Students are also challenged to explore their creativity and originality.

Rivers has developed a template for teaching technologies. He identifies the essential components of a technology, and then uses his computer to lead students through the step-by-step development of those components. Students, in turn, either use their own computers or ATLAS’ computers to mimic what Rivers does. This learning by doing approach helps students quickly feel comfortable with the technology.

Rivers recently received an ASSETT grant through the Dean’s Fund for Excellence program. This grant will allow Rivers to purchase additional technologies, such as Final CutExpress, Logic Express, and Dreamweaver, to augment his Multimedia Composition course. Rivers is also developing an advanced 4000 level course titled Digital Sound. This course is expected to be offered in the Spring 2010 semester.

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MCDB Professor Mike Klymkowsky Branches Out

Anonymous — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 06:00:00 +0000

MCDB Professor Mike Klymkowsky Branches Out Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 06/12/2009 - 00:00

“It’d be like if you lectured to someone about skiing and then expected them to be able to ski; it doesn’t work well. They’ve got to practice, they’ve got to fall down, learn how to do things.”

–Mike Klymkowsky, CU Professor, MCDB

Mike Klymkowsky knows that experience and practice are two things that allow students to learn effectively.A vigorous proponent of this philosophy, Klymkowsky hopes his new web-based resources are a step in the right direction. He forsees that they will mean spending less time lecturing on concepts and more time running workshops that require students to think critically and scientifically about what they’ve learned.

Klymkowsky’s goal is to create a class of students who can think like scientists. “We are completely uninterested in whether they [students] remember the right answer,” Klymkowsky intimates, “Because there is no right. In science, there is often not a right answer—but rather a productive way of thinking.”

In the past, Klymkowsky has used what is called a phylogenetic tree to teach his students about the origins and ancestors of species alive today. The idea behind it is profound: we are all derived from the same place, from the same ancestors, from the same time. We’re all equal.He usually uses a physical paper representation of the tree that lists 3000 species and shows how they are all interconnected with lines.

The number of species listed in such a small space makes the map difficult to read, hard to understand, and basically “overwhelming,” in Klymkowsky’s words. Students become more worried about reading the tree right than they are about understanding the concepts—exactly the opposite of what Klymkowsky is trying to teach.

So Klymkowsky’s plan is to completely rethink the diagram. To make it consistently available to students, he’s bringing it online. And instead of 3000 species, he’s going to whittle it down to 200 animals. He wants to make the site dynamic with links from all the species on the tree to information on the internet. Global climate history and continental drift timelines will also be added to the diagram, to show how geologic and planetary events affected origins of species.

All of this will be available online, at the student’s convenience.

After it is created, with the help of Erin Furtak (an Assistant Professor in the School of Education), Dan Timmons and Matt Hynes-Grace (Staff members in MCD Biology) Klymkowsky hopes that students will feel more comfortable using phylogenetic trees as a tool, and as a pathway to becoming more comfortable with scientific thought. “They’ve got to practice, they’ve got to fall down, learn how to do things.” Klymkowsky says.

This essentially Socratic philosophy is coupled with the idea that the professor’s job is to provide the path to understanding. This can be done by offering students the best resources and posing thoughtful questions, while teaching a disregard for the fear of being wrong.

The new phylogenetic tree will offer students the ability to focus on concepts, rather than semantics. Because it will be easier to grasp, Klymkowsky's hope is students will feel more comfortable stumbling, falling down and getting up again. In other words, they will learn to act like scientists.

Written By: Kate Vander Wiede, CU '09, ASSETT staff

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