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Contributed by Dave Guinee, Associate Professor of Classical Studies and Faculty Development Coordinator

At the beginning of the semester Tom Dickinson, Dave Berque, and I met a number of times with FITS to discuss absence preparedness, the theme of this issue of the FITS Newsletter. It is hard to ignore the many voices out there telling us that we need to be afraid of the coming flu epidemic, and we probably shouldn’t, but none of us really want to think seriously about what a real flu epidemic could mean for us (let alone bigger issues like global warming and shrinking oil reserves). The H1N1 virus, however, is a reality, and we need to consider how we can continue to meet the needs of our students when either they or we are unable to attend classes because of illness.

As we continued to discuss the issue, however, we saw that we were really dealing with a broader and much more interesting issue. How can we employ technology simply to communicate with our students better? As Tom Dickinson pointed out, we all have to accommodate student athletes and students with family emergencies on a regular basis. Students and faculty regularly miss class because of illness. And, frankly, it would be better for students to stay home when they’re sick, keeping their germs to themselves, rather than make a brave effort to attend class because they are afraid they will miss important information. Moodle and other tools can make it much easier for us to give students the security of feeling they always know what they need to be doing and when it is due. When they miss a class, they can be sure that they will receive handouts. They can find out for themselves how their grades look. When a faculty member creates an update to provide a more thorough explanation of an assignment, they can upload it to Moodle rather than waiting until the next class. I can assure you, after having read reams of student opinion forms on COF last year, that students appreciate this kind of security. What we realized in discussing the H1N1 issue was that we need not develop drastic new procedures, but to become more conscious and intentional about things we already do well.

One thing I have found in working with the FITS staff in last summer’s workshop and in various Moodle training sessions is that they have no agenda of making us all adopt unwanted technologies. They are not the Borg, and I have not yet heard a FITS staff member claim that “resistance is futile.” They are here to help us find ways to accomplish our teaching, research, and artistic goals, and they will meet us at our level. I have been surprised to learn that quite a few faculty do not yet use Moodle for their courses. To those faculty I can only say that the investment of about an hour of training time with a FITS staff member will give you the tools to ensure that your students always have access to your syllabus, assignments, and handouts; doing this will make your classes far more accessible to those students who must miss class for one reason or another.

Would you like an easier way of administering tests to student athletes away for competitions? Ways to get more students to visit office hours? What about ways to give students an expanded explanation of a difficult concept you didn’t have class time for? Can we find a cost-effective way of having a guest lecturer appear in our classes? All of these are teaching goals that instructional technology can support, and they are all relevant both to the issue of absence preparedness and the way that work is being done in the world awaiting our students after graduation.

Contributed by Linda Martin, Coordinator of English Language Support and International Services and Part-time Instructor of English

Finding new strategies to encourage my students to develop their writing skills is always at the forefront of my pedagogy. Although I am still a novice with technological methodologies, I am becoming fond of the idea of teaching beyond the walls of my classrooms with the use of technology. I’ve always been a student of alternative approaches to education when I see a clear benefit. With continued experimentation with Moodle applications such as its Forum feature, I have found innovative ways to teach my students and extraordinary ways for them to learn, not only from me, but also from one another.

There are multiple transitions for most international (and non-native speakers) students when it comes to understanding the teaching and learning styles in a DePauw classroom environment. Often, cultural and societal traditions are still active in their mindsets and can influence their oral participation among their peers. However, I have learned that with Moodle’s Forum feature, I can minimize these inhibitors and establish a more equal rhetorical environment. Here is one example that I find most useful.

One of my strategies is to establish robust discussions related to our weekly readings. Sometimes during these classroom discussions when we have achieved a heightened level of critical thinking and expression, I observe body language among the students that can alter or even inhibit the direction of our discussions. Who is really going to express themselves about the topic in front of their peers? Who would dare say something less than totally flattering about his/her government or even about America’s government? So, I created the Readers’ Discussion Forum. In this required weekly discussion group, teams are created for each week consisting of either three or four students – depending upon the total number of students in the class. The team members decide which role each will play: Initiator – the one who initiates the discussions; Provocateur – the one who stimulates the discussions with probing comments or questions; Summarizer – the one who reads and captures the essence of everyone’s comments and identifies the thread(s), or main ideas that connect the responses. Questions are developed by the team and sent to me by Monday morning of the week the readings are to be read and discussed. This means that a team must be “ahead” of the rest of the class in their reading of the materials. I review the questions to ensure that they will promote thoughtful and stimulating responses. All week, students are posting their responses to the questions as well as replying to each other’s responses.

What are some of the benefits of this type of teaching and learning? Students are comfortable writing from their own laptops; they can be reflective and take the time to compose more thoughtful responses than when speaking in an in-class discussion; they learn to respect other perspectives even if contradictory to their own personal values; they practice their writing skills; absences do not cause obstacles to completing their assignments or to miss interacting with their peers; active participation is guaranteed. In addition to developing critical thinking and enhancing writing skills, technological skills are also developed that can be applied later in different situations.

As an educator, I see an embedded value that I cannot always accomplish in the classroom - a level of intellectual curiosity that is cultivated through writing in a discussion format, which could also happen with our students who are native speakers of English. Through the use of forums, I have found that students’ thinking processes are enhanced by and developed through these extended opportunities for communicating and writing. Because classes are determined by time block parameters, time is a factor that limits group discussions and it can diminish both a charged discussion and/or the epiphany of a new concept. However, in the Moodle Forum, a student can continue to express himself/herself and other students will respond accordingly. It becomes an ongoing conversation throughout the week in and outside of the classroom.

I believe there are numerous pedagogical benefits to using technologies that allow us to extend beyond the walls of the traditional classroom. As these technologies become more sophisticated, staying familiar with them and their proper uses will allow us and our students, in general, to benefit from expanded learning opportunities.

Contributed by Kevin Howley, Associate Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Communication and Theater  (Ph. D. Indiana University, 1997)

When it comes to using new communication technologies, students often have the upper hand on teaching faculty. By the time they walk into a college classroom–ear buds in place, laptops fired up, and cell phones at the ready–our students are immersed in digital culture. The generational difference between today’s tech savvy students and teachers of, shall we say, a more mature vintage, can be daunting and not a little intimidating.

While my generation grew up with manual typewriters, vinyl records, and party-line telephones, this generation grew up in front of the computer, downloading MP3s from the Internet, and text messaging one another across the schoolyard. Without putting too fine a point on it, today’s wired students know a thing or two about connectivity that we children of the analog era could only dream of.

In saying this, I’m not being at all dismissive of technological innovation, or of the students who use these tools. Recent developments in communication and information technologies are truly astounding and their potential for enhancing teaching and learning must be harnessed, not ignored. My aim in this brief article, then, is to relate some of my impressions about using weblogs (blogs, for short) in some of my course work. This semester marks my third foray into using blogs in my classes and I daresay that I have learned a thing or two about how to maximize the effectiveness of this medium in the context of the liberal arts tradition.

Luddites Need Not Apply

The wired campus is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, I appreciate the utility of students making use of the Internet for basic research while sitting at their desks. On the other hand, I’m far less sanguine about students’ tendency to do a bit of online shopping while I am conducting class. But this is not a technical problem per se. This is simply a matter of classroom management, a skill set that most faculty have mastered over the course of their teaching careers.

Conversely, the technical proficiency of individual faculty members varies considerably. Some faculty members are quite comfortable with new technologies and make excellent use of these tools in their course work. Others are less comfortable with anything beyond word processing and email.

Whether you feel intimidated by new technologies or simply don’t see the need to incorporate such tools into your teaching, I’d urge faculty to give it a go. Students take to blogging quite readily and with proper incentives–a topic I will address presently–class participants make good use of a blog to expand their knowledge of course content, extend class discussions outside of the classroom, and relate course content to their daily lives and experience.

The thing about blogging is that you don’t need specialized technical skills to put together a fine learning resource for your classes. If you are familiar with WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text editors, common to all of the popular word processing programs, then you are “good to go.” What’s more, blogging software, like the WordPress program in use on the DePauw campus, is very easy to use. In addition, you can choose from a variety of templates to give the blog a professional look and feel. That said, if you need assistance, the good folks at FITS are always available for consultation, training and technical support.

The real fun starts when students incorporate multi-media elements–audio files, still images, and embedded video–into their posts. The web really is worldwide and students are willing and able to find material that relates directly to course content. In this respect, students are, quite literally, making the sort of connections between abstract concepts and real world examples that demonstrate their ability to think critically: the very stuff of liberal arts education.

Learning Communities 2.0

My motivation for creating a class blog stems from a longstanding desire to get students engaged with course content beyond the confines of the classroom and curriculum. I have had limited success using email distribution lists for such purposes, but I have found blogging to be far superior in this regard. That said, whatever success I have had has been part of an iterative process of trial and error.

For instance, in spring 2007 I had students conduct research on various issues in media and cultural policy. Working in small groups (4-5 people), students were responsible for investigating policy debates surrounding topics such as radio payola, low power FM, commercialization, net neutrality, and the rise of so-called fake news. As part of the blog roll–a list of links to external web sites–I pointed students toward a number of online resources such as the FCC, the bipartisan media reform group Free Press, and the Canadian magazine Adbusters, to name a few. Finally, students were encouraged, but not required, to post findings and short observations to the blog.

Some students took to the blog, and the multi-media and viral capacity therein, others less so. What I found was that in the absence of strict requirements, the blog would be under-utilized. The following semester, I altered the assignments and made posting to the blog a course requirement. Specifically, I required students to post no fewer than 5 substantive posts to the blog. While this new requirement fostered greater use of the blog, the majority of students waited until the end of the semester to post their thoughts to the blog. And only a handful of students felt the need to comment on one another’s posts, despite my repeated requests that they do so.

This semester, I believe I have hit upon the right formula to get students writing and reading blog posts. In the context of a writing intensive course, I felt I had the license to require students to post one substantive (500-700 word) essay per week to the class blog. I also require students to post two short (150-200 word) comments to another student’s work per week. While I do not have 100% compliance, the majority of students are thoroughly engaged in this ongoing exercise.

For instance, this semester we are looking at the rise of infotainment, or the blurring of news and entertainment. Students have located all sorts of material that illustrates this trend in contemporary media culture. Aside from embedded video from the likes of The Daily Show and Jimmy Kimmel Live!, students have posted examples of “happy talk” and celebrity news from traditional news outlets. In doing so, students are engaging in a thoughtful conversation about the state of contemporary journalism and the implications of all of this on democratic values and processes.

What’s more, students are discovering for themselves the value of diversifying their news sources. Students have posted items from foreign, alternative and independent news outlets that consistently produce hard-hitting investigative reports and first-rate analysis of the sort that is becoming increasingly rare in US news media. And in a recent post, one student offered her classmates a primer on Twitter, the popular social networking service, along with an explication of how this latest technology is being used for newsgathering and dissemination.

This last instance is illustrative of the community-building capacity of blogs. Nowhere is this dynamic more visible than in the comments section of the blog. Here, students respond to one another’s posts in a civil and, more often than not, an intellectually engaged fashion. The comments section encourages readers to become writers–an especially useful dimension of blogging in the context of a writing intensive course. That said, blogging should not be limited to writing intensive courses. Any course that is designed to promote critical thinking and self-reflection would benefit from a class blog.

To be clear, blogging is only one type of writing assignment I employ in this course. Blog posts are an instance of what writing instructors refer to as “low stakes” writing. In tandem with “no stakes” writing–in-class exercises that provide the basis for class discussion–and “high stakes” writing such as term papers, blogging offers students and instructors alike an opportunity to discuss course content outside of and in addition to class time. In so doing, blogging becomes a new tool for building and nurturing learning communities that support the goals and values of liberal arts education for the 21^st century.

Contributed by P. Foss, Classical Studies

Quite unintentionally at first, I’ve realized that the iPhone is a fantastic teaching and course management tool. From portable media, to grading and evaluation, to class communication, I can carry practically everything I need with me in one small and handy package. Not only can I take students and classroom technology anywhere, but I can also take my classroom with me wherever I go, and get things done in those small windows of opportunity that we have. I’ll present some of things I’ve used the iPhone for this term, and will be happy to discuss their pros and cons.

Features:

1. AUDIO FILES. In-class, whether in the classroom or after taking the students outside, I can play music files from iTunes (using the built-in speakers) for students that are directly relevant to class content, and which otherwise would have required firing up the whole tech classroom apparatus. For example, I’ve done this at the Nature Park to play Suzanne Vega’s Calypso and the Soggy Bottom Boys’ Man of Constant Sorrow when discussing the choice of Odysseus in Books 5-8 of the Odyssey whether: 1) to live forever with a goddess on an edenic island, or 2) endure great suffering and no guarantee of success in trying to return home to Ithaka and reclaim his house and family.
2. STILL and VIDEO IMAGES. When discussing Greek culture in the Iron Age (or some other subject with visual material), if I spontaneously think of an object I could show them but I don’t have the media projector and computer already working, I’ve pulled out the phone, done a quick Image search (using the fast Google App [Google, free]), zoomed in on the image, and walked it around the room to show students as I am talking, or to supplement a student’s presentation while they are talking. Searches are saved so they are faster the next time. You can even Save the image (by holding a finger down on the image) from the browser window, and it goes right into the Camera Roll album on the iPhone, so you can pull it or others up later for a slide show if you wish, make a flash card out of it (see below), or bring it over to my laptop the next time you sync the device. Panning or zooming is easy, using one or two fingers. You can also take ‘screen shots’ of anything on the iPhone by holding down the Home button, and then pushing the top button; the resulting image ends up in your Camera Roll album. The same can be done with YouTube clips from films (e.g., Monty Python’s Life of Brian clips for Latin or Roman Civ.); screen & audio quality are quite high, and clips can be bookmarked. Such images, including those you take with the built-in camera, can be combined with text and audio in a Flash Cards App (Jason Wentworth, $2.99) to be used for review or in-class pop quizzes. And if you want more people to see it, a mini media projector (8 x 10 x 6 cm)
with built-in speakers has been announced (Qingbar MP101) and should be available soon.

3. CLASS PARTICIPATION AND COMPETITIONS. Another App is called TallyCount (itention!, $1.99), which basically makes tallies. I have each one of my students as a separate tally, and then in-class or after class, when a student makes a great comment or contribution to class, I can ‘add a tally’ to their total, and thereby keep track of class participation
over the course of the term without worrying if I have a paper and pen handy. I can also easily keep track in a Latin class when I divide up the class into two or three competing groups over a collective translation or grammar contest.

4. MARKING PAPERS. Students are emailing me their papers as PDF files, and I use another App called Annotater (Jim
Brink, $4.99), which allows me to transfer the PDFs to my phone, where I can use the touch screen to mark up the papers
with transparicized lines, checks, circles, comments, and typed notes of any color I choose, and I email the
papers back, thus saving a few trees, and I can do my grading wherever I get a chance, and without having to carry around a stack of papers.

5. READING. Various programs such as AirSharing (Avatron, $6.99) or FileMagnet (Magnetism Studios, $4.99) connect wirelessly to your computer and allow you to transfer PDF, Word, Excel, RTF, Powerpoint, html files, etc. to your iPhone,
where you can read them at your convenience in portrait or landscape format. The legibility is excellent, and you can look over the readings you’ve assigned or catch up on that journal article without having to lug around the laptop or the printout. You can also use Annotater to mark notes on those files if you convert them to PDF.

6. GRADING ON MOODLE. I also can access Moodle on the iPhone, so I can easily grade posts to the discussion forum,
journals; see who has been accessing the assigned readings, consult the syllabus and course documents, etc.

Epilogue
Not only can I take students, and many elements of classroom technology, anywhere (manyplaces outside on campus have good WiFi), but I can also take my classroom with me, in one convenient device that I am going to carry around anyway. It is like the ultimate educational Swiss-army knife. One can also keep in touch by email, texting, and of course, phone.
There are other functions as well; Its built-in GPS and Maps App, with road and satellite coverage, allowing the placing of ‘pins’ to bookmark places as in GoogleEarth, could leverage geographical concepts and contexts. The camera can capture documents, images, persons, artworks, etc. (I could email students pictures of an unknown object as a pop quiz in an archaeology course, or lines from a poem to examine in a lit class.) There is a built-in accelerometer and gyroscope, so it always knows where in space it is oriented, and how fast it is moving (used mostly for gaming). It offers the potential of much spontaneity, and as we are in the early days of the Apps, all sorts of cool utilities are imaginable, and I’m sure I’ve not thought of everything one could do with the Apps that currently exist. But here are just three other useful Apps:

1. Writing Pad (Norman Wang, free): a novel and fast way to take notes, by ‘drawing’ the words.
2. TouchRPN (Daniel Staudigel, $7.99): a full-featured RPN calculator, like those great old HP models.
3. Recorder (Dan Walton, $0.99): a easy and clean voice-note recorder

There are flash-card programs for studying Greek, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and sign language (among many more); graphing/plotting utilities; periodic table aids; astronomical maps, etc. Universities such as Stanford have made their web and e-services available for iPhone/touch.

Contributed by Linda Elman, Associate Professor of Modern Languages

Tablet PC technology has proven very effective in all of my Spanish classes. For the literature seminar, I am able to annotate pdfs of critical articles and post the annotated version to Moodle for my students to peruse. In the intermediate grammar course, I can project a document saved in pdf format and annotate it (called “inking”) in various colors, including highlighted text. Compare this Tablet technology to using a transparency with four different color markers (that often stain your fingers), a wet paper towel for erasing your marks, and no ability to highlight important points. Instead, with the Tablet PC, one stylus “inks” and erases with just a click on the tool bar required to change colors, line width or highlighter tools. A final feature, perhaps the best, is that when class ends, you can save the annotated document to a file to use again and, more importantly, to upload to Moodle or email to the students for their review and file.

In this article, I will share a sample of a document for Spanish 330, a conversation and phonetics course. To teach phonetic transcription, I previously relied upon sheets of transparencies (which I had to bold and enlarge in order to make them visible to the class) plus the aforementioned arsenal of transparency markers. As we all know, the overhead projector has its limitations: glare, heat and, inevitably, the times when your hand or body blocks the projected image from view. Alternately, I could write the sentences on the white board at the start of class (time-consuming), then use wet erase markers to write the phonetic symbols. The big disadvantage to this instructional strategy, is that at the end of the class period, all the valuable transcriptions are erased. Again, with the Tablet you can save all your work, then, recycle it for the following class session or exam review.

Here is the sample for your reference. I might add that it is appreciably simpler to write these phrases out by hand, rather than typing with symbols (some not available) and changing colors of text. You can focus on one sound-symbol across all sentences or follow a sequence of steps within one sentence. Prior to my final exam, I plan to prepare a sequence of these pdfs to upload into a power point presentation for our review.

Contributed by Art Evans Laurel H Turk, Professor of Modern Languages and Professor of Modern Languages

I have two very large Blackboards, developed over several years. And I now find myself (somewhat grumpily) in the process of having to “migrate” them to Moodle. One course is my Honor Scholar FY seminar on science fiction; the other is an upper-level French seminar on the history of French song (1940-present). Scheduled to teach the latter course again this spring, I spent most of Winter Term 2008 converting the materials for this French song class from Blackboard to Moodle. Here are some things I learned.

Moodle’s three-column architecture is very different from Blackboard’s. Whereas Blackboard requires a kind “Russian nesting dolls” structure for organizing your materials (box-within-a-box-within-a-box), Moodle’s structure is more wide-open: the main “topic” boxes containing your materials are next to one another, running vertically down the screen. Personally, I don’t care much for Moodle’s three-column interface, but it’s open structure makes it much easier to navigate through the entire site. It is important to realize, in switching over to Moodle, that you will probably need to make some basic design changes to your original Blackboard course.

I found that there is no easy way to import foreign-language files from Blackboard to Moodle without a lot of cleanup. Some materials can be imported directly into Moodle’s “Files” repository. But, for me, opening both systems side-by-side and simply cutting and pasting from one to the other proved to be the fastest and most reliable way. Blackboard has always been notoriously unstable concerning accents and other diacriticals (I had to reenter them twice over the past three years); Moodle does not seem to have this problem, happily.

In addition to text and graphics, this French song course also contains approximately 250 music recordings in “streaming audio” format. These presented a special challenge. They were not functioning well in Blackboard—e.g., students using Macs could not make them work properly and sometimes, even in Windows, they tended to activate at odd times. To solve this problem, the original CDs were re-ripped, and the sound files saved in .mp3 format and then stored on a special streaming server (thanks to Roni Pejril). Throughout this process I discovered that Moodle offered one improvement over Blackboard in that the button to activate each song now could be placed on the same page as the song’s lyrics, allowing the student to follow along while listening. Bottom line: we have so far experienced no glitches at all with the “streaming audio” component of this class, a constant source of difficulty when they were in Blackboard.

I also include daily online mini-quizzes on each of the 50+ singer-songwriters featured in this Moodle site. These quizzes are short, consist of several true-false questions, and are timed at 5 minutes each. Since certain upgrades were added to Moodle in January, these quizzes and the gradebook have also been working perfectly. The students seem especially to appreciate the “countdown clock” that appears on the screen when they are taking a quiz, letting them know exactly how much time they have remaining.

I have not yet experimented with many of the tools available in Moodle (wikis, forums, workshops, etc.). But I must confess that the more I work with Moodle, the less grumpy I am becoming about having to migrate away from Blackboard.

Contributed by Thomas S. Dickinson, Professor of Education Studies

The questions rise to the surface each semester—

• How do I communicate effectively to my students about their writing, both drafts and final papers?
• How do I handle the paper load effectively and efficiently?
• Will a checklist or scoring rubric assist my students in their writing and how can I incorporate that with my comments.

Like most instructors dealing with a range of student writing, whether in a W-competency class or not, I have struggled with these questions across my university teaching career. As well, as an instructor who is trying to incorporate new technologies into his teaching, I have been moving toward “paperless” classes by employing Blackboard and now Moodle, discussion boards, blogs, and email. How to deal with writing comments and the “storage” of student papers has become a major concern within my courses.

This semester I have had the opportunity to participate in The HP Technology for Teaching Leadership Grant under the direction of David Berque and Carol Smith. The grant has provided me with an HP tablet pc that I have been using in two sections of a W-competency course, EDUC 170 Foundations of Education. While I have been learning the use of this new tool (even after half a semester I am still trying to turn the screen around the wrong way!) I have also been learning how I might answer my questions about writing and commentary. To date, this is what I have found:

• By using the hand-writing feature on the tablet pc I have been able to provide detailed commentary on drafts and finished papers just as I would if I were commenting on paper copy with my own handwriting. Additionally, since I have a range of color options and a range of pen styles (both pen and highlighter), I have been able to use color to add to or emphasize points I want students to learn from.
• The tablet pc has a responsive “eraser” feature that will allow me to quickly and easily change my mind and either erase an entire section of commentary or one individual letter (I admit to mis-spelling words on my rough comments but this feature lets me correct them easily).
• If students chose to print the draft paper with comments, the reproductions have been very good, even in black-and-white. Color reproductions have been excellent as well.
• The initial response from students has been positive, especially to the personalization through the electronic means. This was particularly evident during writing conferences with drafts that I had commented on and had sent to the student prior to the conference. On these occasions we were able to sit side-by-side to read and discuss the comments and at that time I could make additional written comments and remarks on that edited draft in a different color to indicate when the commentary had occurred.
• I have been able to incorporate my writing rubrics by pasting a blank copy at the end of the student’s draft or final paper and then annotating that document just as I did with the draft. Again, I have used both the pen and the highlighter feature to respond with my assessment of student work.
• The “archive” question has been answered as well. I have used the Digital Drop Box on Blackboard and the Moodle assignment feature to receive electronic copies of both drafts and final papers. While I have to save/send the electronic copies that I have commented upon, both my students and I have permanent archive copies of the documents that we can get to regardless of where we are.

Going into this exercise with the tablet pc, I began a journal noting the time I was spending on the electronic editing compared to the time I was spending on editing via paper copies. To date the difference is negligible. While I have to save/send papers I don’t have to print them, stand in line at the copier, or even worry if it is down. I don’t carry a bulging briefcase home at night as I normally have although I do have a laptop case for the tablet pc (I haven’t totally integrated all of my affairs with technology—I plead to preferring a paper daily planner and handwritten to-do notes). At this point I am still learning but the tablet pc does bring a new tool to both old and new questions.