In an article recently published by the New York Times, author Susan Cain questions an idea she calls “the New Groupthink”, which can be described as the idea that people work better in groups. “Modern” offices, classrooms and other work spaces are now designed in a way that promotes group work–tables instead of desks, open offices rather than cubicles, etc. Office employees’ schedules are filled to the brim with collaborative meetings. From kindergarten to college, students are expected to work in small groups to complete assignments and projects.
Digital Media Lab: A Media Oasis
Have you had a chance to check out UW2-121? It is the University of Washington Bothell’s Digital Media Lab!
Inside you will find twenty-four high-end audio, photo and video production machines. The Digital Media Lab, or DML for short, is an open computer lab, a tutoring space and a digital media classroom.
We offer in-class workshops for a number of different software titles such as Adobe Photoshop, Final Cut Pro 7 and Audacity. Students can come in during our open lab hours to receive one-on-one help with pre and post production filmmaking techniques, Google Sites and an ever growing list of media production related software titles. Finally, the DML is a cool place to hang out and have fun!
Check out the DML website for more information at http://www.uwb.edu/learningtech/dml121.
Wait there’s more! UWB’s Digital Media Lab is expanding! We have received four new computers, located in the Open Computer Lab UW2-140, for audio, photo and video production. Also, a new 6400dpi color scanner will be installed in the DML towards the end of the winter quarter.
Developing Effective Learning Goals for Hybrid and Face-to-Face Classes
Having good course learning goals are essential for not only developing effective hybrid classes but for teaching courses in any format whether face-to-face, hybrid and online.
Essentially, learning goals answer the question of what a student will have learned.
For students, learning goals help to illuminate what’s important in a course and make it easier to reflect on their learning at the end of a course. This learning roadmap is especially important for students who are taking a hybrid course since there is more out-of-classroom learning which can sometimes lead to miscommunication.
For faculty, learning goals can help structure a course and make it easier to determine what will be evaluated throughout the course. Course-level goals can also be used to create learning goals for modules or units within a course.
So what goes into creating a good learning goal?
Blackboard 9.1 Close Up: Plagiarism Prevention using SafeAssign
There will be new online tools available for use once the campus moves to Blackboard 9.1 for spring quarter, 2012. One of those new tools will be SafeAssign which helps instructors prevent plagiarism by detecting unoriginal content in student papers. How it works is that an instructor sets up a SafeAssign assignment turn in area, and as students submit papers, they are automatically checked against the following databases:
- Internet – comprehensive index of documents available for public access on the Internet
- ProQuest ABI/Inform database – over 1,100 publication titles and about 2.6 million articles from ’90s to present time, updated weekly
- Institutional document archives – consists of all papers submitted to SafeAssign by users in their respective institutions
- Global Reference Database – containing papers that were volunteered by students from Blackboard client institutions to help prevent cross-institutional plagiarism.
Once papers are turned in, instructors will get a report back within a couple of days on each paper. You can view a sample report to get an idea of what you can expect if you use SafeAssign. You can also view other anti-plagiarism resources on Learning Technologies’ plagiarism web page.
As a reminder, all Blackboard courses with all of their content except for 2007-08 academic courses will be moved to Blackboard 9.1 starting Tuesday, March 20 at 6 PM. The 2007-08 courses will be archived (not deleted). You’ll have access to a test version of Blackboard 9.1 starting February 16. Learning Technologies has created a video that highlights the changes. There are also UW Bothell web tutorials available, and Learning Technologies will provide training sessions later in the quarter.
Student Perspectives: ePortfolios
UW Bothell student and Learning Tech Assistant Avalon Willows gives her perspective on ePortfolios:
As a student who has gone through two portfolio classes already, I have been around my fair share of ePortfolio frustration. Any UWB student will agree with me when I say that the process of compiling a portfolio, while technically easy, is very tedious. On top of that, many students just don’t “get” the ePortfolio; the reason for it is just unclear. This causes many students to have feelings of disdain towards the degree requirement.
This is unfortunate, considering that an ePortfolio can be a very useful tool for students. ePortfolios show things that a college transcript or GPA won’t. They showcase the hard work that goes into individual assignments, they reflect on individual learning styles and processes, and of course, they show what fantastic work you have the ability of producing.
Reflection is a vital part of the education process, and ePortfolios allow students to reflect on progress in the beginning, middle and end of their time in college. This allows room for improvement and perhaps the creation of set goals. Personally, when I was going through past assignments to build my ePortfolio, I came across a lot of work that I enjoyed reflecting on. Some assignments I had turned in in such a hurry that I didn’t even realize what great work I had produced. While reviewing other assignments, I often found things I didn’t like—so, I took note and used it for improvement in my future work.
UW Bothell Faculty Experiment with Tegrity
Since the Tegrity lecture capture system arrived on campus Winter quarter, Dr. Carol Leppa, Interim Director and Professor of Nursing, Dr. Kim Williams-Guillen, Acting Assistant Professor in Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, and Dr. Robert Turner, Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and Science, have all made forays into using the technology and all report positive results.
Tegrity is lecture capture software that allows instructors to capture video of themselves, audio of their voice and computer screen activity, such as Web browsing or PowerPoint presentation slides. Lectures (construe this term broadly) can be captured as they take place in front of a room of students or privately in one’s office as a way to create a video lecture for students to view outside of class.*
[Note: if you are interested in learning more about Tegrity as an instructional tool, contact Learning Technologies at learningtech@uwb.edu.]
New UW WordPress Blogs for Faculty and Staff
UW IT will soon be releasing a new “UW Blogs” service that allows faculty and staff to easily create WordPress blogs under the UW network. This new feature will make blogging with WordPress on a UW web server much easier. Previously, one had to manually install WordPress on their department page which required some knowledge of MySQL and Unix. With this new blogging service, faculty and staff can easily create a blog on the UW network with WordPress by simply activating the service under MyUW and logging in with their UW NetID.
Currently, UW Blogs is beta testing and is not public yet. More information can be found at the UW Blogs Documentation site.
UW Blogs can be accessed at blogs.uw.edu.
Making Lectures Effective
There’s no doubt that lectures are often student’s and faculty’s least preferred method of instruction. After all, many believe that lectures are always long, boring, and bad for learning. 
However, this is not true, because when lectures work, they work well. But how do instructors make them beneficial for both them and the students? The answer is a mix of planning, interactivity, and student engagement. In the September 2011 issue of The National Teaching & Learning Forum*, Jason N. Adsit of SUNY Buffalo offers some advice on how to make lectures more effective and engaging. In this post, we’ll summarize the tips Adsit gives in his article.
First though, why lecture? The fact is, lectures have stood the test of time because according to Adsit, they have “been shown to be particularily effective for
• Setting the context of a topic or field for novice learners.
• Disseminating a common set of material to a broad audience.
• Providing a synthesis of information from various sources.
• Clarifying complex information.
• Transmitting conceptual and systematic knowledge.
• Offering students a model of professional practice, i.e., the lecturer and his/her approach to the subject.”
In other words, lectures are a simple way to reach everyone in a common and effective manner. However, to maximize these benefits, one must design their lecture in a way that effectively engages students and serves as a tool to help the learning process. Here are the tips Adsit gives to do this:
In Case You Missed It: Major eTextbook Announcement by Apple
Last Thursday, Apple unveiled iBooks 2, the company’s new platform for interactive eTextbooks. TG Daily reports that since then, Apple has sold over 350,000 of their new textbooks.
Also unveiled (which may be more exciting for instructors) was a Mac App called iBooks Author. iBooks Author is a free app that allows anyone to create an interactive textbook for the iPad. It supports images, slideshows, and various other widgets.
Currently, there are only eight available textbooks in the iBooks 2 store, all seemingly at high school-level. This makes sense, considering the keynote presentation focused mainly on the education of K-12 students. However, we can’t help but cross our fingers in hopes that this new approach to textbooks catches on in the world of higher education as well.
If you have an iPad and would like to take a firsthand look at what these new textbooks are all about, E.O. Wilson’s Life on Earth is available for free on the iBooks 2 store. The other eTextbooks are still priced reasonably at $14.99/book.
EDIT: Chelsea Stark, of Mashable, posted the following chart several hours ago, comparing iBooks Author to other self-publishing software. Check it out:
Make 2012 the year you learn code!
In this day and age, computer skills are becoming more and more necessary for employment–especially in the field of technology. Additionally, as technology advances, it’s no longer just “the basics” that impress employers. Computer programming is a major advanced computer skill with a huge payoff…and one site wants to teach you how to master it in a year or less!
Codecademy is a brand new start up, launched on January 1st, 2012. The site offers completely free computer programming lessons to registered users, which according to TechCrunch, hit the 100,000 mark within the first 48 hours of the site’s launch. This is incredibly impressive for such a new company, and just goes to show how many people are interested in learning code.
Basically, with Codecademy, there are two routes you can go with learning code. There’s the independent, at-your-own-pace route, where users can log onto the site and take lessons whenever they want. The alternative to that is signing up for Code Year. If you sign up for Code Year, you’ll start receiving weekly emails that contain lessons. Code Year is a great option for those of us who have trouble remembering to log onto sites like this on a regular basis.
If you’ve always wanted to learn code, but haven’t had the time or money for a course, definitely look into this FREE resource!