EdTech provides consulting, training, outreach and educational services
for faculty, instructors and staff using educational technologies.
EdTech provides consulting, training, outreach and educational services
for faculty, instructors and staff using educational technologies.
iTunes U is an Apple-sponsored service provided to universities and colleges allowing them to take advantage of the iTunes Store infrastructure to deliver their multimedia content. The University of Illinois has a growing presence in iTunes U which is available at itunes.illinois.edu. Once logged in, the site will launch the free iTunes software (available for Windows or Macintosh at http://www.apple.com/itunes/) and take you to the Illinois site. There you'll find audio, video and "enhanced" podcasts (audio with synchronized images) on topics ranging from the Library's creative podcast on "Popular vs. Scholarly Articles" to 17 of the presentations made at the "Race, Diversity and Campus Climate 2008" conference in April. More..
At our training sessions and consultations we provide instructors with a number of tips and tricks regarding Illinois Compass. Our top 10 Compass tips can help you save time and avoid frustrations, customize and personalize your course site, and add to the educational value of your online content. The simple trick of using Power View to move content between folders and the course Home Page can save considerable time if you wish to reorganize material on your site. Other tricks, like creating your own icon sets, not only personalize a course site, but can turn the navigation into a teaching tool by using discipline specific images and terminology. The Selective Release features in Compass can also be used to greatly increase the educational value of a course site by creating conditions for students to receive material, or to create specific learning paths based on a student's performance. More..
In this issue of Trends, we revisit PicLens and check out some cool features that let you navigate in "3D". We also take a look at Lake Forest College, where a group of academics, students, and technologists have inaugurated the Virtual Burnham Initiative to recreate and rebuild a past (and sometimes alternative) vision of Chicago. Using the century old Plan of Chicago, a landmark urban planning scheme by Daniel H. Burnham and Edward H. Bennett, initiative members are developing 3-D models, rich, multifaceted maps, and other virtual renderings of the original plan. Finally, Robert Baird tells us about the Illinois Digital Newspaper Collection, which includes a growing selection of electronic scans of the campus Daily Illini (1916 to 1936) and the Urbana Daily Courier (1916 to 1925). More..
The evidence from learning science suggests that adding visuals to the text of instructional materials can help students learn better (Mayer 2001). If you are looking for a way to improve the usefulness of your lecture presentation slides, exploring ways to include visual explanations might be time well spent. See the "Visual Explanations" sidebar for typical examples of explanatory graphics used in instructional materials. More..
How does a faculty member develop a sympathetic view of the students in her class and come to grip with the issues entailed in learning the course content that those students face? Suppose the faculty member is teaching a subject that she knows inside and out and hence the content doesn't pose intellectual challenges for her, but the subject is difficult for the students who have not had prior experience with the content. What should the instructor do to place herself in the shoes of her students and thereby develop an approach to instruction that makes sense for them? More..
Professor Michael Wesch (Anthropology, Kansas State) created a class assignment where his students commented upon their current lifestyles and learning contexts using Google Docs. Using this student-created data, Wesch and his class produced a short video that visualized their results. Prof. Wesch then posted this short video on YouTube, and the rest is web history. With over one million views, the video went "viral" as they say, generating attention, comments, and feedback from numerous students and academics around the world. The collaborative, student-driven mode of production of "A Vision of Students Today," its quick dissemination across the web, and the subject itself (time demands on students and their use of technology) exemplify why educators should pay attention to the revolutionary possibilities of Web 2.0. More..
In Atmospheric Sciences 120 (ATMS 120) - Severe and Hazardous Weather, Instructor Eric Snodgrass teaches students to interpret and use satellite imagery to study weather phenomena such as hurricanes, super cells, blizzards and El Niños. The class, while guided, allows for significant independent student exploration.In class, Eric uses multimedia presentations such as vodcasts (a podcast that includes video) to colorfully explain complicated concepts such as why rotational velocity changes with latitude. Finally, he likes to end every class with interesting facts that may leave an impression on the students. By thoughtfully integrating satellite imaging technology in service of his course learning objectives, Eric has created a truly interactive class environment. More..
This edition of Trends in EdTech discusses Google Earth and how Professor Gerald Nelson of Agriculture and Consumer Economics uses Google Earth in both his teaching and research.
If you thought YouTube and other online video sites were just for posting home videos of pets and life's embarrassing moments, think again. Mike Wesch, an anthropologist from Kansas State University has been exploring YouTube as a medium for disseminating and critically responding to academic work.
We also take a look at Jing, a very cool screen capture utility that will capture images or video of your Windows or Macintosh desktop, allow annotation of the images or audio commentary of the video, AND allow you to share your captures immediately via the web. Finally, we encourage you to check out the library’s homepage (http://www.uiuc.library.edu) that recently has been redesigned to offer easy access to commonly searched items. More..
Economics Professor Hadi Esfahani works hard at helping the first semester freshmen enrolled in his ECON 103 course succeed in the transition from high school to university. ECON 103, Macroeconomics, is a required course for all econ majors but meets a general education requirement as well, so there are students from all across campus and from many different backgrounds. Professor Esfahani's section is specifically for first semester freshmen. More..
Encouraging frequent student writing has been a central component of teaching strategies in higher education for the past 30 years. Education reform movements such as Writing Across the Curriculum and Writing in the Disciplines have helped popularize the theoretical and empirical research that demonstrates that frequent writing helps students better comprehend, synthesize, and evaluate course material in any discipline. Because writing can be such a vital component to the higher education classroom, CITES EdTech has been exploring how online technologies can promote student writing by evaluating new technologies and working with faculty. Recently, we have been very impressed by how developments in both discussion board software and newer Web 2.0 technologies, such as blogs and wikis, have facilitated new opportunities for using writing in the classroom. More..
This issue of Trends takes a look at the trend of many large class instructors on the Urbana campus turning to clicker systems such as the iClicker to encourage class participation. We also discuss an initiative to create a $100 laptop suitable for use by children anywhere in the world. Finally we take a look at what the UIUC Library is accomplishing by digitizing books. More..
In this Trends in EdTech, Robert Baird discusses the new writing tools in Illinois Compass and the Online Writing Lab at Purdue. Al Weiss introduces Calibrated Peer Review (CPR), a free online software package developed at UCLA. More..
How many computers do you routinely use? Maybe only one if you're a dedicated laptop user and in that case perhaps your bookmarks (or "favorites") are always available to you. But still there are cases when you wish you could remember that cool site you'd really like to show a colleague or your brother-in-law and you don't have your laptop handy. And for the rest of us who haven't yet sold out entirely to the laptop revolution, we may routinely use at least two different computers - a desktop at work and another at home. Not to mention random computers perhaps when traveling. Then what about sharing your bookmarks with others? Or keeping them organized? Or having access to them from multiple web browsers even on the same computer? More..
For more than 50 years, the mission of the Division of Disability Resources and Educational Services (DRES) has been to meet accessibility needs by ensuring “that qualified individuals with disabilities are afforded an equal opportunity to participate in and benefit from the curricular, co-curricular and vocational opportunities available at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign through the collaborative promotion, provision and/or pursuit of innovative accommodative and educational services, and interdisciplinary disability research”. More..
Managing grades at the end of the semester is one of the last tasks instructors must do before taking a break. There are always questions. How do I create a calculated column? Can I use Illinois Compass to submit grades to Banner? I forgot what happened in training and now I don't know how to add a letter grade column to let students know their final grades. If you have pondered any of these questions, CITES EdTech provides help resources available in many forms to aid in managing and submitting final course grades. More..
Between May 21st and mid-June (2007), Illinois Compass will be shut down. (Instructors teaching during Summer I and Summer II as well as continuing courses can get course sites on our "Pilot" Illinois Compass system that has been running with limited users since January 2007.) During that time, we will be transitioning to new and improved hardware for Illinois Compass, and upgrading from WebCT Vista 3 to Blackboard Enterprise Vista 4. This Illinois Compass Upgrade offers an improved look and feel, smarter navigation, and new teaching and learning tools and options, as well as a more robust and powerful backend. More..
Like many instructors of large classes, Lecturer Donna Charlevoix (Department of Atmospheric Sciences) wondered what her students were getting out of her course. Charlevoix worried that she focused too much on the motions of teaching, and that her students concentrated more on memorizing information that would help them correctly answer questions on a test, rather than acquiring knowledge that would remain with them once the semester ended. Reflecting on these concerns, Charlevoix came to understand that her teaching practices mirrored those of many professors she had encountered in her own education, and that these common teaching practices were not conducive to the types of outcomes that she believed were important for today's students. More..
In this Trends in EdTech, Al Weiss showcases a new social networking site, Ning, which is the latest enterprise of Illinois grad and Netscape founder Marc Andreessen.
Doug Mills highlights the advantages and disadvantages of using Flickr and Fototagger for annotating online photos. More..
Taking the concepts behind social networking sites to the next level, sites like Social Note-Taking with stu.dicio.us and MyNoteIT help students manage and share their schoolwork.
Everyone has Kodak moments! To help us produce better photographs we take a look at Kodak's Top 10 Tips for Great Pictures.
A Mashup, what's that? Among the hot phenomena on the web these days are mashups - web sites integrating information from multiple sources with the intent of providing something greater than the sum of the parts. More..
In this Trends in EdTech, Dan Jacobsohn highlights a free program, gliffy.com, which can be used to create flowcharts and diagrams. Doug Mills reports on an article published in the Journal of College Science Teaching that discusses the use of 3-D imaging in a U of I Anatomy and Physiology of the Speech Mechanism course. Finally, in "Very Cool Web 2.0 Primer" Mills highlights a video that introduces the power of Web 2.0. More..
Nowadays, everyone knows that you can get useful search results using Google. Back in the day, however, before Web 2.0 and Web 3.0, we used Lexis-Nexis to do the same sort of search. A decade or so ago, if you wanted to find out about, say, Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, a search of Lexis-Nexis would be your best bet. Nowadays, if you didn't know anything about Mitt Romney, you'd just Google his name. For most students today, researching a topic starts with a web search. Instructors hope that research doesn't end with the web, and that students will also use other library databases to find information and ideas. So, it’s worthwhile to know and point out to students what advantages these old school databases still have. More..
In this Trends in EdTech we introduce Second Life and note how Curriculum and Instruction Professor Sharon Teggegah is exploring this new virtual world, revisit answers.com and see how it has improved as a quick online reference tool, and offer a mini review of a great new plugin for Firefox called Flickrfox. More..
We thought we'd offer our educational technology friends a fun, festive web toy for the holiday break. When I'm in the garage tinkering around I like to use my old music technology: my early-1980s receiver and record player. Cranking up the Allman Brother's Eat a Peach on vinyl in a garage has a certain symmetry to it. However, when I'm out and about and riding my bike, I'm much happier to use the new technology of the iPod. I have music on my iPod, but I tend to listen to National Public Radio programming and pod-casts on science, history, and media topics. The newest music technology I employ, however, is a Web 2.0 music player called Pandora. More..
Managing grades at the end of the semester is one of the last tasks instructors must do before taking a break. There are always questions. How do I create a calculated column? Can I use Illinois Compass to submit grades to Banner? I forgot what happened in training and now I don't know how to add a letter grade column to let students know their final grades. If you have pondered any of these questions, CITES EdTech provides help resources available in many forms to aid in managing and submitting final course grades. The following list provides five different EdTech Grade Book resources: More..
Google's online word-processing and spreadsheet applications provide excellent collaborative learning environments. In "Google Docs and Spreadsheets," Doug Mills shares some of the features of these services that educators and students are sure to find both exciting and practical.
Leslie Hammersmith provides a summary of Leanard Low's article "Connections: Social And Mobile Tools For Enhancing Learning." Low describes how the convergence mobile and web technologies can impact the classroom.
Finally in "View Online Images Full Screen," Doug reviews a nifty online image viewing application for the Mac OS.
More..
ARTstor is a digital image database with over 400,000 images and growing. It was purchased and then activated in August 2005 with funds from the University Library and the College of Fine and Applied Arts. ARTstor has contracted with galleries, museums and private collections to digitize collections and portions of collections. Some of the more notable collections include; The Carnegie Arts Collection, the Hartill Archive of Architecture and Allied Arts, the Museum of Modern Art Architecture and Design Collection and two general collections called the Image Gallery and the Art History Survey Collection. More..
Check out some of the latest trends in EdTech with some innovative tools and instructors. Read "Blogging With Barbara Ganley" to share her enthusiasm, strategies, and suggestions regarding blogs as dynamic teaching environments.
"Netvibes: Part Personalized Web Page +Part Web-Based Information Aggregator = Totally Cool" explores a web 2.0 tool that lets one create a personalized home page of links and information feeds, similar to the old MyYahoo page.
Finally, a recent article entitled "Social Software: E-learning beyond learning management systems" by Christian Dalsgaard, raises some provocative questions about the relationship between learning management systems such as Illinois Compass and Web 2.0 technologies, especially as they relate to the social constructivist approach to pedagogy. More..
One of the challenges instructors face when they build content for their classes on the web is finding the most efficient method of uploading files from their desktop to the remote server. Time is a scarce resource for most instructors so choosing the most efficient way to upload files is essential. More..
Over 100 Illinois faculty, CITES staff, and other campus technology professionals joined us Friday, September 15, from 2:00 P.M. ~ 5:00 P.M. at our CITES EdTech Open House. After our move from the Armory, we were ready to show off our new location in DCL (second floor, east side). Roberta Knapp of Apple Computer provided food, an iPod Nano giveaway, and showcased the iLife software suite facilitated by Robert (Morrie) Reece. Other giveaways included an iPod Nano from EdTech and t-shirts from Blackboard. More..
In a recent EdTech Showcase article on Web 2.0, I described some of the possible educational uses of online image repositories such as Flickr. Among them I mentioned enabling student contributions, creating persistent URLs for multimedia, and taking advantage of extended resources. In this article I'd like to expand on those possibilities and also introduce a new web browser that facilitates the use of online images, as well as other Web 2.0 services. Flock is a cross-platform web browser built on the foundation of Firefox but designed to be Web 2.0 friendly with such features as a built-in blog editor, automatic sharing of bookmarks with a social bookmarking service, and, of particular interest in this article, a very nice interface with Flickr. More..
Each semester CITES EdTech hosts 4 or 5 brown bags that showcase campus teachers who use educational technology in dynamic ways. Joining us this semester, along with exemplary U of I faculty who will discuss teaching with technology, is Barbara Ganley from Middlebury College who will be here on November 1 to discuss her nationally-recognized work on blogging in the classroom. More..
Educational researchers have for some time argued that individuals learn differently and that outcomes of learning are not adequately represented by traditional measures of intelligence from hierarchical standardized tests such as the IQ test. Instead, many educational researchers have posited that intelligence assessments require a multi-dimensional representation to adequately capture the human difference in the way we learn. More..
The term "Participatory Web" refers to the explosive use of the World Wide Web as an open forum where users quickly and easily make personal contributions through weblogs, wikis, annotated bookmark lists, multimedia repositories, podcasts, and tagging and commenting on any or all of the above. For these users, the emphasis in web browsing has largely shifted from consuming to producing information and from individualized experience to community. This phenomenon, also commonly expressed in the term "Web 2.0," is evidenced in the rapidly expanding number of free providers of such services (often with a premium option at a price). More..
The conventional wisdom about technology in the classroom includes a number of ideas that reflect individual experience and preference, but shouldn't be accepted as eternal truths:
If I add technology my lecture material will be more interesting...Professor of Animal Science Walter Hurley's course in lactation biology challenges all of these commonplace assumptions. More..
I won't bother with all that work - it's just bells and whistles...
Technology has nothing to do with pedagogy - It's just a delivery method...
Each semester CITES EdTech hosts 4 or 5 brown bags that showcase campus teachers who use educational technology in dynamic ways. This spring two of our brown bags focused on emerging technologies, and provided thoughtful suggestions for how teachers can incorporate emerging technologies into their teaching. Professor Gary Cziko of Educational Psychology described how many broadly available web-based resources can help language learners to master a second or third language. English Department Lecturer Joe Grohens and Program Coordinator for CTER (Curriculum Technology and Education Reform) Norma Scagnoli showed how wikis can enhance writing instruction, discipline-specific learning, and student participation in public, scholarly discourse. Please explore these outstanding Spring 2006 Brown Bag Presentations, many of which include a text summary, list of related links, and a complete streaming video of the original brown bag presentation. More..
CITES Educational Technologies is moving! On June 20th, we will take up our new residences on the second floor (east side) of the Digital Computing Lab (DCL). Please stop by the main desk (2304) of our EdTech offices to say "Hi!" and to see our new space. We will be happy to show you around. CITES EdTech will not be changing any of its services during the move. We will continue to provide instructional advice, consulting, training, and technical support for Illinois Compass, WebBoard, and Mallard as well as training and consultation on integrating other digital technologies into classroom teaching. More..
Researchers at Cambridge University had a problem: they were so busy working at their computers that they didn't want to climb a couple of flights of stairs to a shared coffee maker, only to find that the coffee was still brewing. So in 1991, the same year the World Wide Web was getting started, they came up with a bright idea: they invented the webcam, showing a live image of the coffee pot on everyone's computer screen. More...
The recent article in this series on Dialcasting by Gary Cziko presented a great way to create an audioblog using nothing more than a telephone (once it's set up). This approach is elegant in its simplicity and will meet many needs and be especially suited to specific situations as mentioned in the article. However, there are also situations where there is a need for something more. One example would be the desire to include multiple sound tracks or synchronized images with the podcast. More...
Podcasting has become a runaway success ever since June 2005 when Apple first provided support for podcasts in its iTunes music software for Macintosh and Windows computers. Podcasting was first used as a way for individuals to produce audio programs that listeners could automatically download and listen to on their computers or portable media players (such as Apple's iPod). More...
Unless you've been shipwrecked on an uninhabited island for the past year and a half, you've heard of podcasting. The amount of buzz generated around the word, in fact, has earned it the distinction of being chosen as the New Oxford American Dictionary's Word of the Year for 2005. Nevertheless, some common misconceptions continue to obscure what podcasting is about and why it may matter to you. More...
Not sure how to create a wiki (or not even sure what a wiki is)? If you're a novice to the world of wikis, this article provides basic information about wikis and shows how getting started is easy, fun, (and free)! More...
Not sure how to create a blog (or not even sure what a blog is)? If you're a novice to the world of blogs, this article provides basic information about blogs and wikis and shows how getting started is easy, fun, (and free)! More...
Each semester CITES EdTech invites award-winning faculty members, instructors, and IT staff from the Urbana campus to discuss teaching with technology at our lunchtime brown bag series. This semester our series offers presentations on using new digital technologies in the classroom, using standard software and technologies in innovative ways, and on new campus IT initiatives for teaching and learning. We hope that anyone interested in improving their teaching or creating a better learning environment for their students will benefit from these lectures and discussions. More...
Many instructors begin a new semester with a copy of a previous Illinois Compass course site. This can save a great deal of time, but there are a number of updates that must take place for that old course web site to become a new online course. And, more importantly, the revision process is the right time to consider changing and improving teaching and grading strategies, or adding tools and features to your Illinois Compass course. The tips below are assembled from our training and consulting staff and provide a good overview of some of the things you'll want to consider while designing and revising your Illinois Compass course site...
Nancy Oliver, University graphic designer and web developer with the Biomedical Communications Center, and Dr. Ann Johnson, Professor of Veterinary Clinical Medicine, recently won the national 2005 Macromedia Innovation Award presented to outstanding digital communications projects by students, faculty, and staff at higher education institutions. Kerry Helms as illustrator and Karen Edward as Flash animation developer for some of the images, also contributed to the final version. More...
Managing grades at the end of the semester is one of the last tasks instructors must do before taking a break. There are always questions. How do I create a calculated column? Can I use Illinois Compass to submit grades to Banner? I forgot what happened in training and now I don't know how to add a letter grade column to let students know their final grades. If you have pondered any of these questions, CITES EdTech provides help resources available in many forms to aid in managing and submitting final course grades. More...
According to a November 2, 2005 report by the web analysis firm OneStat, 20% of American web-surfers are now using browsers other than Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE).* Only three years ago, just 4% of surfers were using non-Microsoft browsers. This dramatic swing away from IE has been largely due to the emergence of Mozilla's cross-platform Firefox browser and, to a lesser degree, the development of Safari, a native Apple browser for the Macintosh. While it is far too early to write the obituary of Internet Explorer, which still retains an 85% share of the global market, there is a definitive trend away from the one-browser world of the early part of the decade. More...
The web is a powerful medium for distributing instructional materials to students. It is common for many instructors to convert their Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents into web-based materials that can be easily accessed by their students. Unfortunately, however, the "Save to Web" feature typically used to convert Office documents into HTML documents does not support accessibility for students with disabilities. The University requires all instructors to provide accessible versions of instructional materials to students with disabilities, ideally at the same time as all other students. More...
It has become increasingly easy to enrich online instructional materials through the use of multimedia. Tools such as iMovie on the Macintosh and Windows MovieMaker on Windows XP have brought the capture, editing, and online publication of video within reach of most instructors. But it isn't necessarily the case that "if you build it, they will come." There are many features that separate a compelling online video experience from a ho-hum online video experience including the content and quality of the video, the editing of the video, and the user-friendliness of the video. More...
At our training sessions and consultations we provide instructors with a number of tips and tricks regarding Illinois Compass. Our top 10 Compass tips can help you save time and avoid frustrations, customize and personalize your course site, and add to the educational value of your online content. More...
The Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that can help students imagine their creative works as being produced for real audiences and having an effect on a community of other artists, and at the same time protect their rights. Faculty who work with students producing writing, photography, film, music, and other media that can be displayed or shared online may find the Creative Commons an important resource for their students. More...
The educational technology resources, services, and support staff at the University of Illinois are diversely positioned and widely scattered. Historically, the campus has allowed a great deal of freedom for colleges, departments, and units to explore and develop their own software, services, and programs. Innovation has been high, with many firsts in the world and bests in the nation (PLATO, Mosaic, the Beckman Institute, the National Center for Super Computing Applications), but campus-wide coordination is not always in place. More...
Respondus and StudyMate, available for free from the CITES Software WebStore, are user friendly programs designed for instructors looking to create assessments, surveys, and study activities for their students. Both Respondus and StudyMate can be used as standalone programs, or they can be seamlessly integrated with Illinois Compass. Best of all, CITES EdTech provides a comprehensive 1.5 hour workshop for Respondus and one for StudyMate that teaches instructors what they need to know in order to get started using these programs. More...
One of the great things about online course material is that we can share many different types of media with relative ease. Over the years, digital video, audio, and images have become increasingly easy to produce and share. With hardware and software that are readily available on campus, instructors can integrate media forms that help the greatest variety of learners grasp and retain information. More...
Making money on a first-time investment in today's financial market is not ultimately an advantageous experience, suggests Elisabeth Oltheten, Professor of Finance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Oltheten believes that when individuals effortlessly build capital in today's financial markets they are likely to assume that anyone can benefit monetarily without first developing an understanding of the theories and applications associated with finance and investments. More...
Every teacher with any experience assigning papers can tell stories of lackluster prose, meandering topics, and worries about plagiarism. Some students have been known to begin the writing process a mere day or just hours before a paper is due. Others begin early, but flounder as they attempt to narrow their topic and thesis. In desperation, some students may resort to the Internet, where whole papers are available for sale, or, for just a little help, one can google for passages of nicely composed text on any topic under the sun. The availability of texts through the Internet makes mosaic plagiarism (splicing together uncited text from various sources along with some of the writers' own words) easy and tempting. Fortunately, teachers can exert a great deal of positive influence on students, not only by their words and actions, but also by the types of assignments they develop for their courses. More...
Like many teachers of large classes, Professor Donna Charlevoix (Department of Atmospheric Sciences) wondered what her students were getting out of her lectures. Prof. Charlevoix worried that she was too focused on the motions of teaching, while her students were concentrating on little more than the acquisition of information that would help them correctly answer questions on a test. Reflecting on these concerns, Prof. Charlevoix came to understand that her teaching practices mirrored those of many professors she had encountered in her own education, and that these common teaching practices were not conducive to the types of outcomes that she believed were important for today's students. More...
Thanks to the Ethnography of the University Initiative at the University of Illinois, a number of undergraduates and first year graduate students enrolled in Professor Nancy Abelmann's introductory anthropology courses explore the history and workings of the University to the point that they become experts on their particular research topics. More...
While there are a growing number of interactive features and communication tools available to teach with on the web, basic file sharing of static content remains an easy and effective way to enhance the educational value of any course. More...
We should think of the tools in a course management system not as buttons to push but as ways to communicate with students. Technology does not determine how we teach, and new technologies will not have a magically transforming effect on our teaching. However, technologies can serve as an occasion for rethinking some of what we do in the classroom. More...
Joe Hinchliffe designed his Introduction to Political Science course to rely heavily on online quizzes delivered through Illinois Compass. For years, Joe had been looking for a way to help his students stay current with the readings and lectures and garner some feedback on how well his students were following the material and concepts introduced in the course. After trying a number of different strategies, including giving pop quizzes and short papers, Joe wanted a more systematic and targeted process to achieve his goals than other strategies provided. Moreover, because there were over 250 students in the class, Joe didn't want to be burdened with either the logistical problem of giving in-class assignments or having a huge grading load. After evaluating his options, Joe settled on using the online quizzing function in Illinois Compass – it would meet his educational goals without overly impacting the students' class time or his own workload. More...
One interesting aspect of providing support and training for Illinois Compass is learning how faculty members apply the technology to accomplish their pedagogical objectives. I interviewed two instructors who use Illinois Compass online Quizzes in a dynamic, atypical manner: online quizzes given before in-class lectures to better prepare students for the traditional classroom. While there are similarities between the approaches used by both of these instructors, the differences are noteworthy and help to underline the power and flexibility of the Illinois Compass assessment too. More...
Technology has been changing education for half a century, and the Internet Age seemingly transformed it radically; however, a lot of instruction on our campus remains in the lecture format. Indeed, due to lack of TA support, some classes have eliminated the recitation and moved to straight lecture. More...
For a number of years I've taught a film studies course called Film in the Age of New Media. As in most cinema studies courses, our main objectives are to develop in students a critical awareness of the medium and the ability to analyze particular films, which is essentially the ability to explain how a film uses form, style, and cultural references to create meaning and to generate emotions and responses in viewers. The particular spin I take with Film in the Age of New Media is to study feature films that are simultaneously traditional (drawing from the classical Hollywood cinema) and innovative in their pronounced use of new media, that is, video games, computers, the Internet, and digital production and presentation technologies. Each week we watch, critique, and discuss a new film such as Forrest Gump (for its extensive digital effects), Groundhog Day (for it's video game-inspired narrative form), or Toy Story (the 1st feature-length fully digital animated film). More...
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