I’m already excited to be a part of the team hosting this Instructional Video Workshop at Carleton in late July! Attendees will not only take-way a concrete and replicable process for creating process, but they’ll create [at least] 3 Instructional Videos they can start using right away. The seats filled-up so fast, there is no doubt we’ll be doing more of these in the future! More information on the workshop itself is available here. And if you’d like to be notified when we host another one, please complete this short form. — dann
Title: Social Reading and Notetaking: An Overview of Web Annotation Tools Blurb: A foundational activity for many courses is the critical reading of texts. This [un]workshop will demo and discuss how annotation of online texts (newspaper articles, scholarly pieces, pop culture artifacts) can help students better understand how scholars read, analyze, and synthesize different kinds of written materials. Please bring your laptop if you would like to follow along with the demonstration of Hypothes.is and PRISM.
10/26 (Thu) – 3-4p – LDC 104
Title: Oral feedback in Language Lesson Blurb: Providing contextualized feedback to students on their foreign language production is well-known to be a big contributor to student success. This [un]workshop will demonstrate Language Lesson, a tool designed to facilitate student recording of speaking exercises, and to allow instructors to respond by placing oral feedback directly into the recordings. Language Lesson is currently being piloted with several language classes this term, but has the potential to be used with audio recording exercises in any discipline.
11/02 (Thu)- 12-1p – LDC 104
Title: GIS, Spatial Analysis and You: Mapping your research data! Blurb: Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have become important tools within research, but can also give your datasets critical spatial contexts. This [un]workshop will give a basic introduction to GIS and spatial analysis, discussing what is possible with spatial databases for both traditional and non-traditional contexts.
Class time is precious and often we want to use it to hear from students, push content to them, and practice them in ways of thinking and doing. That’s a tall order! And even taller when students show up for any given class with varying levels of preparedness. In this session, we’ll showcase some instructional technologies that can–with minimal impact on instructor resources–that help students get ready for your class.
Assigning work for students to do outside of class so they come prepared to engage inside class can be a great pedagogical move. If all students don’t do the work though, this strategy can really backfire. In this session, we’ll look at some ways you can track which students have done what work, and even get a sense of the quality of their interaction with the content.
High Impact Practices suggest that much learning occurs outside the formal classroom. This likely isn’t the case for your classroom but how can you know? Grades are some measure of learning that has happened in class, but is there evidence for learning as it happens and for all students? In this session, we’ll showcase some instructional technologies that can make this case for you and your students.
Join Janet and Carly for a fun hour of talking about instructional technologies
Communicating arguments effectively through a visual medium has its own particular set of opportunities, challenges, and logics–and students often lack exposure and practice in these areas. In this session, we’ll showcase different approaches to design-rich assignments including tips for scaffolding, timing, and assessing student work.
Join Doug and Celeste for a fun hour of talking through visual arguments, possible assignments and assessments!
It was just a year ago that Carleton hosted Georgetown Associate Provost, Randy Bass, and I’ve been thinking of some of the work directly facilitated by Randy’s visit. I’ll talk about just two examples in this post.
In broad terms Randy talked about designing a liberal education for this moment in history. He asked us, “If you were creating a Carleton education right now, and with everything you knew about the past but also what you knew about the capacities of our current environment and the challenges we are about to face in the next 10, 20, 30 years, what would that Carleton look like?” He suggested our answers would almost certainly cause us to create pilot programs that would push against the constraints of our current Carleton model and that we would need “a different kind of approval process” to make experimentation possible. Enter example 1: CUBE.
CUBE (Carleton Undergraduate Bridge Experience) is a summer/fall experimental course taught by Melissa Eblen-Zayas from our physics department. Carleton’s Education and Curriculum Committee (ECC) made the experiment possible by flipping the usual process so that we got quick approval for a pilot with built in accountability and sunset if not approved for continuation. CUBE has two primary student goals: to strengthen quantitative skills and to support the transition to college. The summer part of the course is completely online and is followed by the face-to-face fall course that is being taught right now. Melissa and I look forward to reporting out to the community sometime this winter about this very exciting experiment and regardless of whether the course continues, I think we have taken a solid step toward that future Carleton Randy asked us to imagine. And for me, Randy’s framework and encouragement were crucial.
Example 2 comes in the form of an LTC lunch session and Winter Workshop. Both of these events are sponsored by Carleton’s Future Learning Technologies Group (FLTG) and both events center on creating flexible curricula that push against the 9 ½ week structure or our current term system. The LTC lunch session is Tuesday, October 11 and the Winter Workshop will be in early December. I can’t speak for everyone in FLTG, but I know I was (re-)inspired and (re-)energized by Randy’s question “what would a course look like that was less course-based, less term-based, separated credit from seat-time, thought about all 12 months of the year, thought about how faculty would deploy their energies in different ways? And this energy and inspiration is playing a shaping role in how I’m approaching my part of these two upcoming events.
Randy points the way in the Boundary Waters and to the futures of higher ed!A year ago, I really bungled my introduction of Randy before his big talk in the Athenaeum. I was tired and had left my notes behind and pulling them up on my phone just didn’t work. If I had the chance to hit “reset” I would say something like this: Just as I wouldn’t (yet) wander into the Boundary Waters without the wonderful Minnesota guide I have luckily found, I wouldn’t navigate the “future of higher education” without the wonderful Randy Bass along!
