The Tenth Annual Midwest Conference
on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
April 3, 2009
KEYNOTE ADDRESS
“Learning in the Digital Age” 9:00 – 10:30 a.m.
Presenter: John Seely Brown, University of Southern California Room: DW 1001
ABSTRACT: This presentation will discuss how learning ecologies may be influencing teaching and learning and underscores the technological shift already underway in the lives of college students; a shift from using technology as a way to support the individual to using technology as a way to support the relationships between individuals. Such a shift challenges all of us to redefine what it means to be literate in the 21st century and also asks us to reassess the value of learning environments that encourage multiprocessing, as student s go about creating their own ecologies of learning and as the digital world demands that they be more discerning consumers, make better judgments and synthesize the wealth of information available to them as they interact with online communities of their peers.
SCHOLARLY PRESENTATIONS:
“Teaching Faculty Well with Technology: ELIXR Project as a Catalyst for Faculty Learning”
Presenters: Kathy Ross, John Minor Ross – IU Kokomo Room: DW 1175
ABSTRACT: The variety of faculty teaching times makes it difficult to schedule a group for a collaborative learning experience face to face. With faculty professional development resources from the ELIXR project at MERLOT, online workshops can be more easily built to offer flexible participation times, real-life teaching examples, and collaboration that generate new teaching activities. Converting a faculty workshop to an online delivery using ELIXR digital case stories led, in this case, to SoTL questions about how, why, and when faculty learn.
“PowerPoint 2.0 – Teaching and Learning with Google Docs”
Presenter: G. Alex Ambrose – University of Notre Dame Room: DW 1165
ABSTRACT: This year the University of Notre Dame Professor piloted Google Apps in Education. "PowerPoint 2.0: Teaching and Learning with Google Docs" aims to cover the issues and processes involved in implementing Google Docs and Sites into a intro Military Science and Leadership course. This presentation will examine both how these new technologies impacted the nature of class lectures and how they pushed students to higher levels of learning correspondent with Bloom's "Digital" Taxonomy of learning.
“Clickers in the Classroom: Increasing Student Interaction”
Presenters: Allison Fahsl, Linda Forbringer – Southern Illinois University/Edwardsville Room: DW 1135
ABSTRACT: The purpose of this interactive session is to review the research on personal response systems and become familiar with their use in a classroom setting. Participants will use the personal response system remotes (clickers) in a variety of activity formats, discuss how they might be used within the classroom for teaching and assessment, and explore ideas for conducting research.
“Video Podcasts for Teaching and Learning: Development Challenges and Benefits
Presenters: Marianne C. Bishop, Jim Yocom – IU South Bend Room: DW 1165
ABSTRACT: With the proliferation of iPods, educators are now using podcasts as an integral part of classroom instruction. This presentation demonstrates how videos may be produced in-house using commonly available tools and played on handheld video devices that facilitate the students’ procedural learning of key concepts in laboratory settings. Based on initial survey with end-users, this “iPods on a cart” project with the chemistry department was very well-received, showing great promise for similar applications with other departments on campus.
(Poster Session) “Legal Issues in Teaching Well with Technology: Hiding in Plain Sight?”
Presenter: Sara Hook – Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis The Grille
ABSTRACT: In thinking about how to teach well with new technology, we are overlooking an important issue, something that is hiding in plain sight. To teach well with technology is to be cognizant of any potential legal claims that could be raised and to adopt a practical, focused and commonsense approach. This presentation will provide a quick overview of the history and current status of the laws that impact technology used in teaching, provide a framework for dealing with specific legal issues when implementing new technology into courses or programs and offer a wealth of practical tips for providing robust and technologically-rich educational experiences for students while staying within legal boundaries that continue to be fluid and unpredictable.
(Poster Session) “Ubiquitous Professionals in the Classroom: Effective use of Pervasive Computing, Internet Telephony, and Video Conferencing Software to Expand Students’ Learning Experiences with Virtual Quests”
Presenters: Joshua Wells – IU South Bend, Cameron Griffith – IU Bloomington, The Grille
Daniel Osborne – University of Nebraska/Lincoln
ABSTRACT: This poster will address the practice of involving expert virtual guests in higher education classrooms as educational resources to help engage student learners. The potential for successful utilization of virtual guests in classrooms has been significantly enabled by the growth of ubiquitous computing and the increased quality of voice and video conference technologies. We describe the results of a series of virtual guest lectures, and suggest a series of best practices that will allow educators to effectively utilize virtual guests within classrooms and other learning environments.
(Poster Session) “Training Faculty at Andrews University in the Use of Online Course Software”
Presenters: Marsha Beal, Donn Whitehall – Andrews University The Grille
ABSTRACT: This presentation will explain in detail the history behind the development of the Assembly Plant, and will describe how the program is set up and functions. The presentation will also discuss why faculty development in technology use is important for preparing faculty for online teaching and describe why the Assembly Plant has proven to be the best means of introducing faculty members to new technologies and to improve their use of current technologies at Andrews University.
(Poster Session) “What Were Students’ Preferences and Related Reasons for an Instructor’s Feedback in the Process of Online Assessment?”
Presenter: Ni Chang, IU South Bend The Grille
ABSTRACT: This presentation shares 29 pre-service teachers’ voices with respect to feedback given by a course instructor through the online assessment process in the fall semester of 2008. The presentation will stimulate a promising discussion on how and why to interact with students electronically as an assessment approach.
(Poster Session) “A New Twist: Versatile Distributed Learning”
Presenters: Marianne C. Bishop, Hossein Hakimzadeh – IU South Bend The Grille
ABSTRACT: Educators are always faced with many issues to consider as they develop and teach their courses and many times these considerations call for versatility and flexibility in their pedagogy and practice. To assist students taking the online section of his computer programming course at Indiana University South Bend, the instructor encouraged his online registered students to attend his face-to-face section of the same course while his face-to-face registered students were encouraged to use his online course materials. Reflections and lessons learned from this innovative type of resource sharing will be discussed as well as a brief demonstration of the technologies employed to deliver the course and facilitate student-faculty and student-student interaction will be provided to showcase what the two presenters call “versatile distributed learning.”
(Poster Session) “The Potentials and Pitfalls of Distance Teaching and learning”
Presenters: Marianne C. Bishop, Yvonne Larrier – IU South Bend The Grille
ABSTRACT: There are several factors that affect the development of an online course. These factors include faculty preparedness to develop and teach the course, faculty and technological support, student preparedness and attitudes, institutional buy-in, administrative and financial support, information technology infrastructure, and others. This presentation will highlight the potentials and pitfalls of these factors, as well as plans to do research on some of these factors.
(Poster Session) “Technology Mentors: We’re Not Magicians or Miracle-workers, but We Certainly Add Pixie Dust!”
Presenters: Marianne C. Bishop – IU South Bend, Max Bishop – Culver Academies The Grille
ABSTRACT: Weaving educational technology into curricula requires not only the right set of tools at the right time, but also a strong support group of faculty to assist in the technology integration process. Technology mentors serve as the conduit between their departmental colleagues and educational technology centers. This presentation highlights how technology mentors have significantly impacted the use of technology as a teaching and learning tool in a college and high school campus, based on faculty surveys, as well as with a university.
