HIST

Student Fellow Partners with Dr. Myron Gutmann to Introduce Wordpress into the Classroom

Anonymous — Fri, 07 Jul 2017 20:50:52 +0000

Student Fellow Partners with Dr. Myron Gutmann to Introduce Wordpress into the Classroom Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 07/07/2017 - 14:50

Dr. Myron Gutmann is a professor in the History Department and director of CU’s Institute of Behavioral Science. He describes himself as an interdisciplinary historian, with interests in the history of Europe and the United States, ranging in areas of the environment, economics, and demography. Dr. Gutmann requested assistance from the Teaching Technology Assistance Program for the Spring 2017 semester, and was paired with Student Fellow, Jake Brauchler. At the end of the semester, Jake had an opportunity to meet with Dr. Gutmann to reflect on the successes of the semester and also to discuss some of the areas that were more challenging in teaching his course, HIST 4526 - Recent US Social History.

One of Dr. Gutmann’s goals for this course was for students to gain an understanding about how to do research using digital resources, and how to present them effectively using the web-based blogging tool, “WordPress.” Dr. Gutmann was pleased to have someone like Jake working with his students to explain how to use this blogging tool. Although many of his students felt that they had a good understanding of technology, he was glad to have Jake’s technical expertise to walk his students through the process of creating an online blog using this tool.

This was Dr. Gutmann’s 41st year teaching, and he exclaimed that he has seen a lot of changes regarding technology since he first started, including moving away from pencil and paper to an online format. Dr. Gutmann felt that the impact that the TTAP service had on his class was that students learned about a technology in a friendly environment from a student like themselves, while learning a great deal about writing about history. Some of the challenges he faced was that he wished he had had the students start on their projects earlier in the semester, a change he feels will be easy to make for future courses he teaches using this technology. Within WordPress, some of the issues he felt that hindered the project, was the commenting feature: for future projects, he wants the students to use the theme options that allow the commenting to be turned on automatically. When asked if he would recommend the TTAP service to other faculty members, Dr. Gutmann said, “Absolutely! Yes it's been really great. I mean it's one more smart brain helping me figure out these things!”

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Vilja Hulden Integrates Team-Based Learning

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Feb 2017 15:37:44 +0000

Vilja Hulden Integrates Team-Based Learning Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 02/14/2017 - 08:37

The problem I grapple with is in the broad realm of critical thinking. More specifically, I want students to experience studying history as a process of reasoning - asking a question, speculating on an answer, looking up information, modifying the answer (and/or the question), asking new questions.

Part of my concern with this emphasis on reasoning is that it makes studying history more fun. But I also want to put it to more history-specific uses. To that end, I explored team-based learning in this seminar. It provides a structure for group work that holds promise for improving students reasoning and professional skills.

Challenge

The problem I grapple with is, I suppose, in the broad realm of critical thinking. More specifically, I want students to experience studying history as a process of reasoning - asking a question, speculating on an answer, looking up information, modifying the answer (and/or the question), asking new questions.

Part of my concern with this emphasis on reasoning is just that, well, reasoning is important; part of it is that it makes studying history more fun. But I also want to put it to more history-specific uses.

First, I want students to understand that context matters – historical actors lived in a different context and therefore their values & thoughts & concerns & assumptions were different from ours. BUT that does not mean that they were less intelligent than we are, or even more ignorant.

Second, I want students to realize that because context matters, it is less than useful to think of history in terms of the golden path that led us to this best of all possible worlds. At least to some extent, we need to understand historical actors on their own terms.

Third, I want students to at least begin to draw the conclusion that context matters not only in history, but in fact in the present as well: we are not loosely floating individuals, nor simply “products of our time,” but something rather more complex. Because we aren’t the former, it matters what the structures around us are. Because we aren’t the latter, we can change those structures.

Context

I am concerned with this problem in most classes, but especially in survey-type classes (e.g. HIST1015, America to 1865). The pressure to “cover” material is so heavy in those classes that breaking from it is not easy, at least for me. It seems to me that there’s also quite a bit of student resistance to breaking away from coverage; that is how they’re used to measuring their learning, and that is what they know how to deal with (read the textbook, do the exam). Also, these tend to be large lecture classes (I usually have 80-90 students), which limits the kinds of exercises we can do.

At the same time, I’m aware that people are using various kinds of technological interventions (having students tweet responses to questions and displaying these through Tweetwall or similar tools, for example) as well as effective group work and other active learning strategies to address these problems.

I have no wish to teach history as one damn thing after another, and I don’t think the students benefit much from it if I do (though I’m not claiming that coverage classes are worthless — some people enjoy them and retain much information, but I don’t think that describes the majority of my students). Thus, the implications are basically that most students — especially those not inclined to like history — will learn very little in my survey class that they take with them to other classes, let alone beyond college.

Plans for Implementation

Given that the problem is most acute in the survey class, I’m going to try to do an intervention in that class specifically. Fortuitously, I am scheduled to teach a smaller version of the survey (33 students) this spring (2016), so that gives me a little bit more flexibility.

I’m drawing on what I think have been the most successful features of the survey as I have taught it up to now: group work on specific tasks and assignments involving the students in imagining other, historical, lives.

Group work on specific tasks has been fairly successful in earlier iterations of the class in getting students to reason using data and facts, one of the main goals I have for the course.

For example, I have had students examine tabular data drawn from the census and figure out whether there’s more social mobility in the U.S. or in Great Britain in the 19th century, guided by specific questions; this has been fairly successful but could be more effective if there were a better way for students to report their findings (something I hope to address; see below).

Similarly, imagining other lives has seemed to engage students. Twice, I’ve had an essay assignment where students read about the young women working in the Lowell textile mills in the 1830s (aka the Lowell Mill Girls) and then write a letter pretending to be one of those girls. They are required to provide an explanatory footnote for each statement in the letter, as in “Here I am, working with my sister Sally…. (footnote: Most women came to the mills because they already knew someone who worked there [citation]).” This has been a fairly popular assignment and students have done surprisingly well with it.

Below, I describe how these will be leveraged more fully and formally in the new iteration of the survey.

In-class team work

Here, I’m drawing on the principles of “Team-based learning” (see http://www.tblcollaborative.org/), which emphasizes structured group work that holds each group member accountable and encourages discussion through demanding that the group make a specific choice based on the data. In TBL, this is done through group quizzes (individuals take the same quiz and then take it in a group) and through in-class application assignments that pose a more complex question that the group must answer, usually in the form of “choose the best X” or something similar.

I don’t aim to completely revamp the course in the TBL mold, but rather to draw on it for ideas.

I will use a modified version of the group quizzes, and will use the application exercise principles as a resource, but I will keep some lecture days in the course and some of the group work will diverge from the TBL guideline of having all groups work on the same problem.

As in TBL, the teams will be the same throughout the semester. Each team will be the expert on one broad demographic category (urban workers, Northern middle-class women, Native Americans…) throughout the semester, and their team assignment is also related to that category.

To offset student fears that they will be stuck doing the work for the whole group, each team member is accountable to his/her team: each student’s grade for team work is adjusted using a percentage multiplier determined on the basis of peer evaluations from his/her teammates (this is lifted directly out of TBL as well). Also, the final exam will be tied to the team assignment, so students will need to demonstrate that they at least know what their team was doing.

Team project & leveraging imagination

Each team will have an assignment that mirrors the Lowell Mill Girls assignment I have used before: using our class reader and some other assigned readings, the team will construct a life story for a character they imagine into being but that must be historically plausible and that draws on the readings assigned to the team. The readings reflect the broad demographic categories assigned to the team. Like the Lowell Mill Girls assignment, the team project requires both the imaginative portion (the life story) and the documentation (footnotes explaining how we know how this person might have lived and what they might have done).

In addition to the life story, each team will write a letter from the subject of their life story, dated April 20, 1865 (that is, a few days after the fall of Fort Sumter, thus tying their character to the Civil War).

In each assignment, there is a draft and a final version; the draft version is created on Google Docs and gets feedback from me and from one other team.

Technologies to make group work more efficient

As already noted, the team assignments will be created on Google Docs, enabling the team to collaborate on writing without having to arrange meetings outside of class (we will also build in time in-class to work on the assignment at least enough to make plans and to brainstorm).

The other part where technology is crucial is in bringing out the results of in-class group work. This is even more important in larger classes, of course, but even in my 33-student version it can be helpful (and of course, I am hoping to scale this up to the larger survey). The main issue is that having groups report sequentially is terribly boring, and if all groups are working on the same task, becomes very repetitive. Thus it would be desirable to have a technology that would enable one to display the groups’ results simultaneously.

Originally I had planned to use Padlet (https://padlet.com/) , but though it looks neat, the problem is that at least as far as I can tell, there is no way to prevent groups from seeing other groups’ submissions when they submit their own results. Also, I don’t really need the ability to add images etc., as group reports will almost always be textual. So I’ve decided to use PollEverywhere (https://www.polleverywhere.com/), which, though very expensive for the paid versions, has a free version that allows 40 submissions per question/task, which is quite sufficient even for my large classes when using it for the group reports. The reports are free text, can be submitted on the web or by text message, and can be hidden until I want to display them. Then they can be displayed either as a text wall, a grid, or a word cloud.

Indicators of Success

The success of the intervention is measured both through the quality of the work students produce, individually and in groups, and through a goals writing assignment (beginning of term) and a self-evaluation writing assignment (end of term). I may add a survey using SALG or similar, though I haven’t decided on that yet.

Reflection

The main goal is to get students to think about history as something that requires them to use their reasoning skills, not just their memorization skills, and to recognize that indeed, history was made by real people just as stupid and faulty and persevering and sentimental and brave and petty as ourselves, and that those people were shaped by their environment even as/if they tried to change it. The in-class group work will particularly highlight the reasoning skills; by doing these tasks in groups and then comparing the results between groups, students get to see their peers thinking, and possibly outperforming themselves, hopefully underlining that reasoning is hard work but that it can be done. The team project will emphasize the human element in history by asking students to put themselves in the shoes of an imaginary historical person.

[video:https://youtu.be/SHSQFv-fr-s]

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TTAP Program Fall Highlights

Anonymous — Tue, 22 Nov 2016 19:25:55 +0000

TTAP Program Fall Highlights Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 11/22/2016 - 12:25

Student Fellows (SFs) working for the Teaching Technology Assistance Program (TTAP) were busy this fall semester helping Arts and Sciences faculty across campus. The TTAP program is a new initiative that was launched this fall, with the goal of enhancing the classroom experience for both faculty and students. The following is a brief synopsis of the exciting work that TTAP helped support:

Kubi - Student Fellow Austin Chau supported the use of Kubi technology in Susanna Pérez-Pàmies classes in the Spanish & Portuguese department. The Kubi is a remotely controlled tablet or iPad stand, which greatly enhances video conferencing. This pilot explored Kubi’s capability in allowing students to attend class remotely. Austin was integral to the success of the program, supporting Susanna and her students.
Online Presentation Tools - Austin also supported History professor Vilja Hulden and her students by introducing online presentation tools, as well as tips on effective presentations in her classroom. He continued his support by being an “outside expert,” giving students feedback on their presentations.
Wordpress and Google Maps - Student Fellow Jake Brauchler supported the use of Wordpress and Google maps for History professor, Anne Lester. Over the course of several classroom visits, Jake helped guide Anne’s students in setting up their own Wordpress sites, and also showed them how to integrate Google maps, videos and images into their blogging sites.
Wikipedia - Austin held a workshop for PhD candidate Emily Frazier-Rath’s German class this fall. During this workshop, Austin helped support student’s learning on how to edit Wikipedia articles, as well as helping them understand the formatting and citing standards.
Upcoming Projects - The TTAP program is also looking forward to supporting Theater professor Beth Osnes during the Spring 2017 semester. Her course, “Creative Climate Communication” offered this spring, will bring together theater, discussion about climate change and technology, and a Student Fellow from the TTAP program will help facilitate this exciting project.

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Dr. Anne Lester Integrates Wordpress & Google Maps in HIST 1800

Anonymous — Mon, 21 Nov 2016 16:02:02 +0000

Dr. Anne Lester Integrates Wordpress & Google Maps in HIST 1800 Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 11/21/2016 - 09:02

This month’s faculty spotlight celebrates Dr. Anne Lester’s work to innovate HIST 1800 - Introduction to Global History. Lester developed an opportunity for students to share what they are learning while also developing their technology skills with WordPress and Google Maps. WordPress is a web-based tool for creating websites and blogs which enables students to develop writing skills for a variety of purposes and audiences. Google Maps allows students to cultivate a spatial understanding of regions the class focused on, in this case, to become familiar with the vast extent of the Silk Road during the premodern period. Students articulated and published their insights online to share with peers.

Dr. Lester led the students through a process of using analytical academic writing to create research essays focused on different topics throughout the semester and then turn that technical writing into informal blog posts. This process enables students to continue working on their formal writing techniques yet finessing an ability to translate that into conversational pieces that explain historical concepts for a wider audience. Giving students the opportunity to create research-based content for an online blog also helps bolsters students’ ability to think critically when reading blog articles in their daily lives. These valuable communication skills transfer to multiple real workplace scenarios and prepares students for engaged citizenship.

Student Fellow Perspective
Reflection by Jacob Brauchler

I aided with researching and explaining how to use WordPress, as well as techniques for how to properly cite information found on other websites and blog posts. WordPress is an excellent choice because it is a widely used blogging and website building tool. It also has a robust online help forum that supports students’ ease in using it. After discussing with Dr. Lester the specifics of what she hoped to accomplish, I visited her class multiple times throughout the semester in order to teach different techniques that students would need and to aid in supporting their use of a new technology. In my presentations to the class, I explained the process of creating their own blog site, addressed how to add images and videos to a blog post, instructed them on how to embed maps, and answered questions for the group as a whole. I also worked individually with specific students to help them problem-solve challenges they faced with Wordpress.

From my perspective as a 3rd year Computer Science student, it’s really important to celebrate professors who integrate new technologies into the classroom to make learning more obviously relevant to students’ lives. Digital literacy is a 21st-century skill-set that takes time to learn and practice and I enjoyed seeing students develop these skills in this project. I look forward to helping other professors innovate in their classes in the future.

Authors: Jacob Brauchler, Tara Gilboa

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Creating Virtual History Exhibits with Young's ASSETT Development Award

Anonymous — Mon, 15 Jun 2015 16:35:00 +0000

Creating Virtual History Exhibits with Young's ASSETT Development Award Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 06/15/2015 - 10:35

��ý�Ļ��Ʒ Professor of History Phoebe Young won a Spring 2014 ASSETT Development Award to obtain student training support for digital exhibition software. Young integrated Omeka digital exhibition software into her course, History 4546: Popular Culture in Modern America. Young's students created online exhibits of pop culture themes. They uploaded images and sound clips and recorded the items' source information. The source information, such as the date of creation and who owns rights to it, is searchable through Omeka. Then, students selected artifacts and collaborated with one another to create exhibits about particular pop culture themes. Students wrote captions about the pieces that they selected. Each exhibit consists of several web pages that explain how a collection of artifacts exemplifies their chosen pop culture themes. The exhibits are like illustrated, digital, research papers, except they're written so that the visitor can approach the artifacts in any order.

Young's students learned to digitize objects--upload photos and sound clips--and write source information and captions about them. Students collected artifacts into a digital exhibit--like an online webpage. Young used the ASSETT Development Award to hire an undergraduate History Major as a Technology Learning Assistant to serve as a peer trainer for students. Young said, "[The ASSETT Development Award] paid for student labor to help fellow students do peer-to-peer teaching around technology." The student assistant created a Sandbox on the class's Omeka site with How Tos to support students technically.

Young's Students Created Virtual History Exhibits. This exhibit is about the history of portable music.

Young taught her students about what metadata is and why archiving a large amount of information into a searchable database is important to scholars of history. She asked Norlin Library to speak to her students about public domain rights to information. Young said that students' creating a public exhibit, "demonstrated the value of students of being able to create work that will have a public audience." She said that in creating an online exhibition, "[Students] make their work a public object, and it gives them a sense of agency."

Young contrasted creating something online with writing a traditional term paper. "The sense of permanence of students' work was incredibly valuable." She also said that an online exhibition is something that students can take with them after the course is over and share with friends and family.

Young said that in creating an online exhibition: "Students may see more value of what they do. Students may take more ownership in the project itself when it's something that belongs to them." Even further, Young sees a bigger picture for History students' creations of digital exhibits. She says, "For the Humanities, it enhances the work for people outside of the University to see what your students are doing. Students can say, 'This is what I've done. This is what I've produced. This is what I've learned.'" See Young's students' exhibits here: https://omeka.colorado.edu/hist4546/exhibits.

Young also said that once she received the ASSETT Development Award provided a first step to further matching grants from the History Department to support the project. The History Department's grant provided a one day Omeka training session. The one-day training session was led by a national expert on Omeka. Faculty, staff, and students from across the university attended.

Omeka is an open source software that was developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Washington University. Young says that she thinks that, because of the metadata searchable software that Omeka software provides, it would be most appropriate for a larger digitization project. ASSETT is hosting Omeka through the end of 2015, and CU Libraries and other CU departments are welcome to investigate.

This past spring, Young joined the ASSETT team as its Interim Director. She continues to teach History at CU.

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History Professor Yonemoto Nominated for ASSETT Teaching Award

Anonymous — Wed, 27 Aug 2014 06:00:00 +0000

History Professor Yonemoto Nominated for ASSETT Teaching Award Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 08/27/2014 - 00:00

"Visuals are important," says ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ History Professor Marcia Yonemoto. Yonemoto includes maps and photographs of woodblock art and historic Japanese architecture in her PowerPoint lectures about Japanese history. This spring, students nominated her for an ASSETT Teaching with Technology Award for her well organized presentations in the History seminar 4738, Age of the Samurai in the Early Modern Period. Students wrote that Yonemoto's class featured, "Meaningful usage of media to enhance learning and understanding. [She] created a memorable and educational digital discussion using modern pop culture media as submitted by students to create a better understanding of arts importance in understanding historical content." Yonemoto says that following along with a PowerPoint presentation can be helpful when students are less familiar with Japanese language and names. She shares the images that she uses in PowerPoint presentations on her D2L course pages.

Yonemoto says that her History 4738 course investigated the samurai as, "... a cultural icon ... We watched several dramatic films about the samurai ... Now with D2L, you don't have to take class time to watch a movie." To complement students' readings of historical documents, Yonemoto streamed both historically accurate and less than historically accurate films (including 47 Ronin) onto D2L for students to watch for homework to complement their readings. She asked her class to consider, "Why do we represent Japan in this way?" Yonemoto also plays cultural music that may better inform students about World War II fervor or the differences among regions within Japan. She assigns alternating Discussion Group Leaders to post discussion topics for upcoming class discussions onto a D2L discussion boards before class.

Yonemoto says that much of teaching is about learning from students:

I like talking to and engaging with students. Teaching is a learning process where you learn from your students. You find out interesting ideas ... It keeps everything moving. It's always exciting. It's what makes this a great job. It's always a new generation. They have different responses. I may assign the same book over a period of teaching, and I get different responses ... I learn so much from how [students] engage with the material ... I think that can inform the way we teach ... It's always a work in progress.

Yonemoto says that she is interested in the digital humanities. Yonemoto explains that having access to digitally archived historical documents and search engine features allows historians to draw historical conclusions that would have taken much more time before this technology existed. She wants to get students excited about the prospect of more easily investigating a larger amount of historical documents. Yonemoto says:

To expose students to the excitement of doing research in documents; being the first person to analyze the documents in this way or come up with the data in this way ... What can we study that we don't already know? There's so much we don't know. Students can be on the ground floor discovering it for themselves ... Basic search engines and digitization have revolutionized what you can do ... The possibilities are great.

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Miriam Kingsberg Incorporates Shared Class Notes into Lecture Course

Anonymous — Tue, 10 Jun 2014 06:00:00 +0000

Miriam Kingsberg Incorporates Shared Class Notes into Lecture Course Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 06/10/2014 - 00:00

Watch Dr. Miriam Kingsberg's video podcast about how she incorporated shared notes into her lecture course, as inspired through her experience in the 2014 ASSETT Teaching with Technology Seminar.

[video:https://youtu.be/LjLjHnPhrgo]

Teaching and Learning Challenge

This semester (Spring 2014), I taught a large (approximately 90 students) introductory survey of Japanese history (HIST 1708). The students’ collective performance on the midterm, in the seventh week of the semester, was disappointing. Although I gave them sample essay and short-answer questions to prepare in advance, it appeared that few students had studied effectively. To give them an opportunity to think through what might have caused a low grade, and to help me structure the second half of the course more effectively, I offered students the opportunity to fill out a mid-semester evaluation. (Unfortunately, due to the timing of the exam and other factors, this exercise took place on the Thursday before spring break, when many students were absent.)

From the evaluation, I gained a clear sense that many of the students were not taking notes effectively during class. Like most large history surveys, my course is lecture-based, with much of the tested material conveyed and explained during meetings. I generally put some information on PowerPoint slides and make these presentations available after class on Desire2Learn, but do not share my own lecture outlines, in the expectation that students will learn more by generating their own notes. Whereas I liked the idea of holding them responsible for their own education (and encouraging attendance), I noticed that many students, including several who seemed enthusiastic about the subject and often asked good questions, did not routinely take notes in class. The midterm evaluation suggested that they would benefit from some guidance in how to take useful notes and in having these notes available for studying.

Plans for Implementation

In conversation with ASSETT, I devised an intervention to this effect with the following aims:

1) modeling the construction of useful lecture notes

2) making available comprehensive notes for the material covered in class

3) encouraging collaboration among students in a large course

I put the intervention into action on Apr. 10 (unfortunately close to the end of the semester). I selected a student who had performed strongly on all class work to date and had come to office hours several times to discuss material she had missed due to absence, or had not understood adequately during lecture. I emailed her to ask if she would be willing to take notes in front of the class during lecture. Luckily, my classroom (EDUC 220) is equipped with two screens. Because it has only one projector, I requested a second one from OIT. The student worker came on time and with all of the requisite equipment, and even stayed until I was fully confident that everything was functioning correctly.

The lecture normally runs the full course period of 75 minutes, but, to minimize the burden on the note-taker, I lectured for only one hour (devoting the remainder of course time to preparing the students for their upcoming paper assignment). I looked over the notes briefly before posting them online. The student chosen for the exercise did a great job—they were extremely comprehensive and easy to follow, and had the added benefit of filling me with confidence that my lectures were accessible to the class..

After the session that day, I asked my TA if she had noticed any impact on the attention level in the class (she generally sat at the back of the room and was vigilant in policing technological distractedness). We agreed that the students seemed no more or less engaged than usual. I had feared that the second screen might distract me as I lectured, but I soon became immersed in the material and forgot all about it. The only drawback was the reduced amount of blackboard space. I am accustomed to writing down concepts for the students as I lecture, and with two screens obscuring most of the blackboard, I had to erase constantly.

In class the following week, I circulated an anonymous and confidential paper survey to learn the class’s reaction to the exercise. (I devised the survey after the exercise took place, when I had a good sense of what kind of feedback might be useful.) I’ve pasted it here for reference:

Feedback on Note-Taking Exercise

Do you usually take your own notes during class? Are you satisfied with your note-taking ability?

Did having the notes on the projector change your own note-taking in class? If so, how?

Did you review the notes after class?

Will you use the notes to prepare for the final exam?

If you were not confident in your note-taking prior to this exercise, did the model give you a better sense of what is important to listen for and write down during lecture?

Would you be willing to take notes on behalf of the class during a future lecture?

Circle as applicable:

· I found the second projector distracting.

· I prefer to take my own notes.

· I like the idea of having notes constructed by my peers available.

· I like the idea of having notes constructed by my peers available, but I don’t need to see them being written.

· I find it helpful to watch the notes being written.

· I am less likely to go to class if notes are available online.

· I am less likely to pay attention in class if I can rely on someone else’s notes.

· This exercise was useful in showing me how to construct good notes.

· I was absent from class on Tuesday.

Are there any ways this exercise could be improved to be more useful to you?

Indicators of Success

The reaction to the intervention ranged from enthusiastic to neutral. Of the 57 students who took the survey, 52 were in favor of having the notes available online. Of the five students who were indifferent, four said that they would likely use the notes to prepare for the final exam. Only two students admitted that access to someone else’s notes would reduce the likelihood that they would attend class (in all probability, those who did not regularly come to class probably were not present for the survey). The second projector was not viewed as distracting, but a few of the students had a hard time seeing it from where they were seated. Almost half of the students said they liked having the notes posted online, but didn’t need to see them being constructed. A few made interesting suggestions regarding possible improvements to the exercise (I may take these into account in future semesters.) Only 17 said they might or would definitely be willing to take notes for the class. Excuses included poor handwriting, the lack of a laptop, fear of being distracted, poor grammar and spelling, and fear. Comments included numerous variations of the following:

“It helped me get some of the facts/details I may have missed otherwise.”

“If I missed something I was able to look at the notes to catch up.”

“It helped me organize my thoughts better.”

Based on student responses, the feedback from my TA, and my own impressions, I decided to continue modeling note-taking during the final two lectures of the semester, and called for volunteers. Unsurprisingly, no one came forward, so I directly approached two other high-performing students (one was willing, the other as not). When I taught a similar course during Maymester, I avoided this problem by building credit for notetaking into the structure of the course, requiring each student to take a turn at some point during the semester. I also had the class seat themselves so that the students who wanted to see the notes being constructed had a good view of the projector.

In addition to feedback, I used the final exam to determine the effectiveness of the note-taking exercise. On exams, I normally ask the students to identify and state the significance of four out of five concepts presented during lecture, drawn from a “bank” they are given in advance. These answers are generally approximately the length of a long paragraph. I selected one concept from the days for which note-taking was modeled and the results subsequently posted on Desire2Learn, and four others from lectures earlier in the semester. The students overwhelmingly elected to define the concept for which notes were available, and their definitions were significantly better than those they supplied for the other concepts.

Although I have made some modifications to this exercise for Maymester and will continue to tweak it, I would consider my intervention a success!

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When Technophobe Meets Technology

Anonymous — Wed, 15 May 2013 06:00:00 +0000

When Technophobe Meets Technology Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 05/15/2013 - 00:00

Dr. Julie Lieber, a professor of History and Jewish studies, is a self-declared technophobe. That is why she was shocked to receive recognition from ASSETT for excellence in teaching with technology. Lieber recognized that while technology was outside her comfort zone, it made up a large part of how her students learn. “I recognized that while writing on the board and reading from textbooks is my comfort zone, that’s not the way students are learning today… Meeting students where they’re at has been something that I’ve learned.”

Lieber uses technology to enhance her in-class experience, by barely including it inside the classroom at all. Instead, Lieber does things like administer quizzes and stream movies on D2L, so that the in-class time she has with her students can be the most productive. “I try to spend most of class time actually engaging with students and having that face-to-face encounter. So a lot of ways I use technology is to preserve that within the classroom.” Lieber says too that technology can maximize the amount of material as well as the quality of learning in a class.

There is a concern that technology, if used improperly, can mean the loss of the human element. Lieber has noticed a significant decrease in the number of students who come to her office hours when they can simply send her an e-mail. In moderation, however, Lieber sees how technology can help students perform better. “The more visual material I give them, the better. Students seem to connect a lot more with images and short clips from films. I have gotten a lot of positive feedback when I’ve used those.” Lieber also allows her students to take their exams on their laptops instead of with blue books.

“Asking students to go into a final exam when they’re being asked to really perform, and write in blue book was dissonant to me. So instead, I have students write their exams during the exam time on their laptop because that’s the way that students can process and produce information in the most productive way… Technology was a way to allow them to perform at their best.”

Lieber advises professors to not be intimated by technology and to be open to experimenting with new things. Lieber utilized the numerous help resources to learn about new technologies. “Find your tech person,” she says with enthusiasm. “They can be of great help.”

While Dr. Lieber may not be breaking the mold with her use of technology, she uses the existing resources to realize her classroom vision. She listens to the needs of her students, stepping out of her comfort zone to give them the best learning experience, and the most full in-class experience.

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Susan Kent: Creating Screencasts for Flipped and Hybrid Course Delivery

Anonymous — Wed, 15 May 2013 06:00:00 +0000

Susan Kent: Creating Screencasts for Flipped and Hybrid Course Delivery Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 05/15/2013 - 00:00

I love the questions, I really love the questions, but it has meant that I am falling behind on my lectures. Were I able to deliver the lectures ahead of time online, then class could be devoted to discussions of a lot of interesting stuff and I could take questions till there was no tomorrow.

Teaching and Learning Challenge

I had originally thought I could create animations that would help me to explain various historical processes--shifts in agricultural practices, for instance--but after having learned from Mark and others that it wouldn’t be practical, I have thought more and more about Beth’s idea of creating a hybrid course. I would like to implement it for the Fall 2013 semester in my HIST 1800, Introduction to Global History. I am teaching it this semester (as three case studies of resistance to the British empire--India in 1857, Ireland from 1916-21, and the Igbo Women’s War in Nigeria in 1929) to about 55 students, and have found that they are so unaware of some basic information that they constantly, constantly ask questions. I love the questions, I really love the questions, but it has meant that I am falling behind on my lectures. Were I able to deliver the lectures ahead of time online, then class could be devoted to discussions of a lot of interesting stuff and I could take questions till there was no tomorrow.

My only concern with this is that I’m not sure students would actually listen to the lectures and do the reading ahead of time. They don’t do the reading ahead of time now, so what would get them to change? The online portion could contain quizzes on the lectures and reading that have to be completed by a certain time, after which they close and are inaccessible. That would compel the students to do the work before they came to class.

I teach an online class for Continuing Ed, and could simply record lectures as I did for them. But it would probably be more interesting to record my class sessions now, and be able to edit them for clarity and continuity. The students’ questions might prove to be instructive for planning for the in-class portions of the hybrid course.

I truly believe we have to accommodate online learning, and I think this is the way to go--the combination of accommodating students’ schedules and lives through online lectures with in-class face-to-face instruction/discussion/debate that enables students to raise questions and concerns and benefit from the contributions of classmates and the expertise of the instructor.

Plan for Implementation

I would like to arrange for the video-taping of my lectures in HIST 1800, Introduction to Global History, and HIST 1020, History of Western Civilization II, both of which contain 75-200 students. The idea would be to place the lectures online for students to see and hear ahead of class, and to create a series of online quizzes covering the material from them and from the assigned reading for the week. The quizzes would only be open for a certain period of time so as to ensure that students do watch the videos and read the assignments. Then the actual class time could be used to discuss various issues and questions that go beyond the basic lecture and reading content.

The taping of lectures would take up the entirety of a semester, and obviously would not be of use in a hybrid online class until it was taught next. The online quizzes on the lectures and the reading would take only a matter of weeks to construct, and could be altered each semester to accommodate different readings or newly-added or revised lectures. Once the basics were in place, the online portion could be used unlimitedly by me or by others who teach the course.

The hybridity of this kind of online education makes it possible to address the concerns many of us have about the huge benefit of being in a live classroom with a professor. It builds in the flexibility that students are seeking with online courses, but ensures that they get much more than a completely online course can offer.

I have subsequently learned that OIT offers lecture capture facilities in certain classrooms. The problem is that I don’t teach in any of the rooms where the capture equipment is available, so I have submitted a proposal to ASSETT for purchase of the software (Camtasia for Mac) and equipment necessary to record my lectures.

Indicators of Success

On the most basic level, the quizzes on D2L covering the captured lecture and reading material will ensure that students have listened to the lecture and done the reading--the quizzes would be open only for a finite amount of time and would have to be done prior to the class meetings.

Having gained a baseline level of information from these exercises, students would then be expected to participate in a wide-ranging and somewhat freewheeling discussion. They would be asked to submit questions for the rest of the class, and part of their course evaluation would be drawn from these questions and from their participation in the class discussion. I am leery of putting too much emphasis on the evaluation of these aspects of the course, as I want the discussions to be interesting, stimulating, and fun. But I’m afraid there needs to be some grading element so as to keep students on task.

In these discussions, I am looking for students to demonstrate historical thinking--to make connections between a variety of events, to discern the difference between cause and effect from associations, to evaluate arguments, to assess the qualitative and quantitative heft of evidence and its capacity to uphold assertions, to understand context, and to appreciate chronological thinking and understand change over time.

I am not familiar with the classroom assessments from Carnegie et al, but am certainly open to utilizing them to ensure that the hybrid online course elements are doing what I hope they will do. Are they providing the degree of background information necessary to enable students to benefit from the classroom discussions? Do they help students to think historically and help them make the next step toward evaluating the strength and validity of arguments?

I anticipate that there will be students for whom discussion is awkward and even painful. They may perform perfectly well on the online portions of the required assignments, but not do so well in the discussions, which I regard as the most important part of the course. It may be helpful to survey students a few sessions into the course to ask what would make it easier for them to participate in this particular class. I am eager to learn about other assessment tools that will help me teach better and make the learning experience more complete for students.

Reflection

I learned a tremendous amount from the leaders and participants in the seminar. the collective knowledge of the group proved almost overwhelming at times, but always in the best sense. I would have benefitted from a bit more hands-on practical instruction--how to actually create the programs or applications that were presented, and it would probably be a good idea (at least for people like me) to schedule additional seminar sessions--perhaps optional--that could address that aspect of things.

My project will not be implemented until the fall semester, when I hope to be able to capture my lectures in HIST 1800. If successful, I will then put them online for students in the course when I teach it again, so that I can use the class periods for questions and discussions. I will report on my progress over the next year so as to keep you all apprised of its success (or otherwise).

I would very much like to stay involved with the OIT/ASSETT/Libraries community that is being built through the seminar process. I have a great deal more to learn just to know what is out there now for classroom use, let alone what may come along in the next few minutes.

Let me just finish by saying how much I appreciate the generosity/talents/skills/efforts of all the staff involved in the seminars. You provided us with a meaningful experience that proved worthy of every moment I spent in the seminar. Many, many thanks.

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Using Animations in History Courses

Anonymous — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 06:00:00 +0000

Using Animations in History Courses Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 07/09/2012 - 00:00

by Celine Dauverd

I first got interested in this topic, [Using Animations in History Courses] because I regularly teach Maymester sessions on core courses such as Early Modern Societies and was looking for ways to make sessions more interactive while educational. Attending Matt Koschmann’s session on Animation in the classroom opened my eyes to the multiple possibilities of animation in a history course setting. While his 15 minute-video was more a course synopsis than a direct application of animation from students, I found the technology inspiring. The aspect of animation that will draw students is the fact that text can also have a voice and that historical characters will seem to come alive. This tool will enable students to concentrate on topics of their choice while going over key points of the course.

Before I joined [ASSETT’s Teaching with Technology seminar] my Maymester classes consisted of:

power points
lectures
short video clips
exams at the end of each week
myself talking indefinitely
students becoming increasingly tired
losing track of the goals of the course
analysis of texts through textbook and reader
impossible-to-assign papers

My goals with creating an exercise based on animations are:

build a community of learners through interaction
incite peer activity
help students engage with the class material (i.e. primary sources)
mix in clicker questions, lecture material, sample of analytical and critical work rather than exams
create a community beyond the classroom
enliven history courses
emphasize the image component (through voice) over the text (making the material engaging in the classroom)
make history fun and interactive
use this technology in every class I teach in order to offer a wide sample of assignments to students
research making real videos (based on Dave Underwood’s experience and presentation) and use Voicethread (mainly as support for home assignment)

What will my classes gain from including animations?

animations will engage students with the material, if they will remember one thing from the course it will be the presentation they created
students choose the characters of their animations, hence acquiring a feeling of agency
team activity in-between class time
in-depth analysis of a particular segment of the course
tremendous amount of interaction among students because they will all comment on each other’s presentations
engage with the sources critically and creatively while being entertained

In concrete terms, how will animations be used as a testing tool?

in Maymester classes, this animation feature will enable me to lecture in the morning and have students work on their animation in the afternoon, hence not losing class time for testing
enable team activity. Many students feel embarrassed when speaking or presenting in front of the whole class. Since these animations are mainly meant to be designed by groups of 2 to 3 students, it will relieve the “stage pressure.”
it will keep me off the “Purgatory scene” for a while since the evaluation will be peer made. A good and well-articulated presentation will attract attention and praise from peers.
it will encourage creativity. Without diverging from the historical sources, students can explore the themes of most interest to them (art, travel, politics, war, cities, religion, etc.)
the exams are low stake. These presentations last 2 minutes but require quite an amount of preparation. Getting to class with a finished presentation will enable students not to feel the pressure of memorizing lecture material.
ideally these presentations should be combined with a short writing assignment. For instance, my sample video animation on Niccolo Macchiavelli would be handed in with a 3-4 pp paper addressing what part of the primary source was of most interest, it would quote pages from the book, it would also delve into some critical thinking about the significance of such work and the historical context.

Example:

Early modern society exercise: here are the directions that will be given to students

Create a team of 2 people and organize your own historical animation based on the primary sources assigned for this course. You have a choice between the logs of Christopher Columbus’s voyages to the Americas, the Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli, Giovanni and Lusanna, or the Travels of Ibn Battuta. The free video of GoAnimate will enable you to create and publish a video of less than 2 minute duration. Make sure to address a problem, a historical problem set in the context of a dialogue between two people. You may debate over a problem or a conflict and highlight how your characters discuss this controversy, try to solve the problem, and defend their positions. You may want to demonstrate how your historical characters affected their society (what were the changes, implications, outcomes). Use the primary sources for text (you can extrapolate but you should remain true to your character).

Before I send students to create their own animation, I will show them a sample of what would be an acceptable project: Samples animation exercise for History 2112: Early modern Societies

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HIST

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Susan Kent: Creating Screencasts for Flipped and Hybrid Course Delivery

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Using Animations in History Courses

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Student Fellow Perspective
Reflection by Jacob Brauchler