Playing with Technology» Teaching

The future of the Liberal Arts

Jon — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 02:36:23 +0000

I have written in previous posts about my fear that the Liberal Arts are losing their relevance in the eyes of society. In this TED talk ¹ Liz Coleman, president of Bennington College, highlights some of the things I have been thinking about the state of many Liberal Arts colleges. While I do not think that things are as dire as she makes them out to be, I do think that Wooster’s curriculum needs to change. We need to have more inter-disciplinary courses. It strikes me as odd that we offer over 400 courses a semester and yet less than 20 are inter-disciplinary. I’m not sure if our current curriculum was designed to address the principles she highlights (Rhetoric, Design, Mediation, Improvisation, and Quantitative Reasoning), but I would like to see us revisit the curriculum with an eye toward increasing inter-disciplinary work. I hope President Coleman’s remarks make you think about the nature of a Liberal Arts education and whether we have strayed from the path.

Video for The future of the Liberal Arts

Liz Coleman’s TED talk ↩

Get an MA in Social Media

Jon — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 17:33:27 +0000

This should not come as a surprise to anyone. Social Media is a somewhat different beast than print and television media and the skills required to use it to best effect are different. My involvment with the redesign of Wooster’s website has just highlighted how different social media is. People coming from a print background just can’t seem to figure out how to make good use of social media for marketing. A program such as the one at Birmingham City University begins the process of legitamizing what people skilled in the use of social media are doing. As mentioned by Stan Schroeder in his post at Mashable, the hardest part could be finding faculty that can be considered experts. No matter what this marks a change in the perception of social media.

Were faculty members justified in being concerned?

Jon — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 19:17:18 +0000

A recent study seems to indicate that students “who download a podcast lecture achieve substantially higher exam results than those who attend the lecture in person.” ¹ As the news article points out this doesn’t necessarily mean students can stop going to class or that professors are out of a job. There are a number of factors to consider with this study and with podcasts in general. I think this gives professors even more reason to make audio and video podcasts available to students. It provides students with another resource to reference as they are exploring a subject. It also allows faculty members the opportunity to provide more routine material in a podcast and spend the classtime to provide opportunities for active learning and open discussion.

New Scientist ↩

Some interesting posts from A List Apart

Jon — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 15:20:24 +0000

My RSS reader finally decided to pick up the two post made to ALA on Sunday: Brighter Horizons for Web Education and Elevate Web Design at the University Level. The articles are dealing with the state of Web education. The general feeling is that our educational system is doing a terrible job of preparing the next generation of Web developers. Brighter Horizons for Web Education covers the initiatives that are underway to help improve the curricula found in our schools. One such initiative is sponsored by Opera. The Opera Web Standards Curriculum is a series of articles which run the gamut in terms of Web standards and design. I started with Information Architecture – Planning out a web site since I am currently serving on the College’s Web strategy team which is overseeing the redevelopment of the College’s web site. I found the article to be a very good read and I found myself asking if I had considered the things being discussed when I redesigned the Instructional Technology web site. The other initiatives discussed in the ALA article also seem like they would be very interesting to explore. Both articles lead me to ask “What role do the Liberal Arts play in educating the next generation of Web developers?” I’m not sure the many Liberal Arts institutions have thought about their answer to this question and it may be time for them to do so.

A world without grades

Jon — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 18:54:55 +0000

I’m taking a small digression from technology stuff to think about what a world without grades might look like. Why? Because of this post on the Chronicle’s site. To think that grades or the lack there of could cause such a situation just seems absurd.

A google seach for “a world without grades” turned up no page with such a title. In fact the results on the first page contained two relevant items:

As I looked at these items I began to wonder just how our world would function in the absence of these “performance” indicators. I’ve known for a long time that grades are a very poor indicator of learning. I got straight As through high school and college, but my wife remembers a lot more from the classes we both took than I do. She clearly learned the material and understands how to apply it. What I learned to do was play the system. I learned how to identify what information I needed to know and when I no longer needed to know it. In my own teaching I see a lot of students that have learned the same thing. So I try to incorporate projects that require them to use the concepts we are learning, but in the end our educational system demands some way of identifying which students have learned the material the best. If grades don’t really fulfill this role then what does? What is the best way to measure learning and understanding? Is there a best way? Could the world function without grades?

Timeline 3D, why haven’t I heard of this before?

Jon — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 23:30:31 +0000

Actually, I feel stupid for not thinking that there might be faculty that want to create timeline presentations. You can see some examples at Bee Docs’ Web site. I can totally see art history, history, or any presentations where the timing of events is important for understanding the overall story finding a use for software like this. Check it out and see what you think.

What can you communicate in 60 seconds?

Jon — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 17:43:08 +0000

My news feeds brought me a little tidbit today from Apple. The story that caught my attention was about 60 second lectures. The University of Pennsylvania is featured in the story but this is similar to projects that we had students do to emulate NPR stories. The idea is to pick a short time frame (we chose 3 minutes) and communicate as much as possible in that time in an interesting manner. The U Penn recordings can be found here. The projects our students did can be found here.

iPhone educational apps (part 2)

Jon — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 05:44:49 +0000

After many hours of waiting with a bricked iPhone (like many others), I was able to get the 2.0 software loaded and download some apps. I’ll give you some of my initial impressions.

Molecules: Molecules seems like it could be a nice app to have available in a class where you want students to get a good idea of the structure of the molecule you are discussing. However, I think there is educational value and potential projects in creating more molecules to view. My version only has three molecules. It may be worth approaching some faculty in Biology and Chemistry about creating more molecules for the app.
Bookshelf: I did not spring for Bookshelf but there are a number of apps that allow the iPhone to function as an e-reader. Anything that allows people to read wherever they happen to be seems like a good thing.
QuickVoice: QuickVoice is another app that could have value in the classroom. It will allow students to record a class session for later review and it will allow faculty members to record lectures to be distributed as a podcast.
Mandelbrot: Mandelbrot is an app that allows one to explore the Mandelbrot set. It would seem to have limited educational value as it doesn’t really provide a lot of mathematical information to the user, but again it would allow students to interact with the set as the class discussed it.

My favorite apps right now are Shazam, Remote, VNC, Urbanspoon, LocalPicks, and BoxOffice. I think the apps that are the most interesting are the ones that make use of the GPS features of the phone. If I discover oher educational apps or if we develop any, I’ll make sure to post about them.

Game worlds as sets

Jon — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 12:48:23 +0000

Well, clearly, I have not been blogging more. Warcraft is still consuming most of my free time at home. So let’s put that to good use. There are several videos on YouTube and Google video of Warcraft game play and strategy videos. These hold interest for players like me but not the general public and certainly not educators. However, there is also Machinima (In an expanded definition, it is the convergence of filmmaking, animation and game development. Machinima is real-world film making techniques applied within an interactive virtual space where characters and events can be either controlled by humans, scripts or artificial intelligence.). What would such a thing look like? Here is an example.

One can also look at Machinima.com and the Machinima FAQ.

For me the above video is an excellent example of Machinima. There are a number of filmmaking techniques visible in this music video and for someone familiar with Warcraft it shows a tremendous amount of understanding of the game world.

Warcraft has over 8 million players and a large number of those players are sitting in our college classrooms. Some of those players are even in film studies courses. In the past we might have asked these students to create a short film by developing and filming a script or adapting an existing scene. Why not move the filming into one of these game worlds? Why not combine something we know students love with something we want them to love and understand? I hope to help some of our faculty to develop projects in this direction which will give some validity to the amount of time I’ve spent playing, at that point it will count as research

iTunes U goes public

Jon — Thu, 31 May 2007 13:55:02 +0000

On Tuesday Apple Computer added an iTunes U area to it’s iTunes store. This should be a very exciting thing for our faculty as it provides them with access to a myriad of educational podcasts and example of what they themselves could be doing with a little help fromInstructional Technology. Wooster has been accepted in iTunes U but hasn’t returned a signed agreement. Why? First there is a requirement in the contract to maintain a certain level of content on your iTunes U account and second to meet this requirement would require that we add significantly to the Instructional Technology staff. It is a chicken and egg type of problem. Anyway, I plan to let faculty know about this new resource and will do everything I can to help them produce similar types of material.