Improving class discussions
with online journals
Free web-based
writing tool helps manage the process
Michael Murray, Philosophy,
is using journals as a medium to help his students prepare for classroom
discussions. In order to help focus on the next class discussion, Professor
Murray's students read one to two assignment questions, then write
about half a page for each class in their journals. This is an important
semester-long exercise which comprises 20% of the student grade. It
is, however, not something new for Professor Murray; he has successfully
employed and refined this technique for years, which "enhances
understanding and improves classroom discussion."
One of the challenges, however, has always been reading and commenting
on all the student writing. Originally, students submitted physical
journals, which tended to be cumbersome to carry around. Technology
has proved to be somewhat helpful over the years, and Professor Murray
eventually substituted a digital version of the journal for the hard
bound ones. In past semesters, he has had students submit WORD files
on eDisk and Blackboard. But these previous technological solutions
lacked some of the control and features Professor Murray wanted.
 This
semester, there has been a slight technological twist to the exercise.
The 26 students in his NTW course, Science and Religion, are
using a new, free service for their journals called Google
Docs and Spreadsheets. This simple, web-based, collaborative
word processor and spreadsheet application represents a new model for
software development and delivery - applications dynamically delivered
to your web browser instead of statically installed on your desktop.
After a brief in-class demonstration by Professor Murray of this application,
his student all created private accounts on the new service and made
Professor
Murray and the course preceptor "collaborators." Collaborators
can access, edit, and comment on the students' work. In addition to
the collaboration features this service provides, it also offers a
secure and convenient online writing space, which means it is available
anywhere there is a web browser and an internet connection.
If you'd like to learn more about how Professor Murray is using this
tool to enhance understanding and promote class discussion, please
attend the upcoming Discussions
on Teaching, Learning, and Technology luncheon!
Bridging
an ocean
Using internet conferencing technology
to create an "e-tandem" learning experience
“Tandem learning” is the process of pairing two students
for conversation with the goal of each learning the other’s native
language. During the Spring 2006 semester, Jay Anderson, Mathematics
and Computer Science,
and Curt Bentzel, German and Russian, used Apple
Computer's iChat
software to connect Professor Bentzel’s third-year German
students with native German-speaking students learning English at Free
University of Bolzano, Italy.
The classes had four bilingual meetings that were carefully scheduled
to compensate for time differences. During the first session, each
student introduced themselves for about five minutes each. At the second
and third sessions, each gave a 10-minute presentation about their
hometowns. Students asked and answered follow-up questions during the
final session.
Professor Anderson said the two Franklin & Marshall colleagues spent
time carefully planning both the technical and pedagogical aspects
of the
exercise.
Professor
Bentzel felt it was a positive experience, but continues to harbor
reservations about the tradeoffs involved. “How do you measure
the educational value added by interest?” he asked. “We
traded [valuable class time that would’ve been spent speaking
German] in for English-speaking time” but learned about Italy.
It’s difficult to quantify tradeoffs like this.
In the past, Professor Bentzel's students giving German presentations
to their own classmates felt inauthentic. There was always "something
fakey" about it, he said with a chuckle. Having the opportunity
to converse with native German speakers was invaluable, but he plans
to incorporate the sessions into his syllabus differently next time.
"If you don’t try, you won’t know," Professor
Bentzel said. "I certainly would like to do it again."
If you'd like to learn more about this "tandem learning" experiment,
please attend the upcoming Discussions on Teaching, Learning, and Technology luncheon!
So, what's a facebook?
If you're not sure, just ask your students
Facebook is the second largest
social network on the web, behind only MySpace in
terms of traffic. Originally focused on college students,
Facebook has been gaining market share, and more significantly a supportive
user base that now also includes high school and community college
students.  Since
their launch in February 2004, they’ve been able to obtain over
8 million users in the U.S. alone and expand worldwide to 7 other English-speaking
countries, with more to follow.
Unlike its competitors MySpace, Friendster, Xanga, hi5, Bebo,
and others, Facebook isn’t available to everyone — which
explains its relatively low user count. Currently, users must be members
of one of the 30,000+ recognized schools, colleges, universities, organizations,
and companies within the U.S, Canada, and other English-speaking nations.
This generally involves having a valid e-mail ID with the associated
institution. Franklin & Marshall's Facebook site is on the web at http://fandm.facebook.com/.
For those college officials who don't yet "get" Facebook, a useful primer on the popular social-networking
site is now available online. Facebook
- The Complete Biography includes details about the social
network’s history and features that should be familiar to most
readers. But it also throws in a handy compendium of studies about
the site – according to one survey, users spend an average of
20 minutes per day logged on – and a summary of Facebook’s
financial backers. For more information on Facebook in higher education,
see the EDUCAUSE Series: 7
Things You Should Know About Facebook.
Around the Web
A snapshot of what's going on around
the World Wide Web
Google:
These Books are Free
Google Book Search now
offers PDF files of scanned books that can be downloaded and printed
for free, Google announced on Wednesday. Readers can find the books
by choosing the "Full view books" option on the Google
Book Search home page before they activate their search. Once they
have chosen a book from the results page, a download button is clearly
visible on the top-right corner of the page. The PDFs are offered
only for those books that fall into the public domain and are intended
for personal use.
c|net News.com
E-Mail is for Old People
College officials around the country find that a growing number of
students are missing important
messages about deadlines, class cancellations, and events sent to them
by e-mail because, well, the messages are sent to them by e-mail. The
article cites research reported in a Pew
Internet & American
Life Project called "Teens and Technology," which found that
while college students still used email to communicate with their professors,
they preferred to use instant messaging, text messaging, and services
such as Facebook and MySpace to interact with their peers.
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Can Wikipedia Ever Make the Grade?
As questions about the accuracy of the anyone-can-edit encyclopedia
persist, academics are split on whether to ignore it, or start contributing.
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Ivy
League Shuns Anti-Plagiarism Tool as U.S. Cheating Rises
Plagiarism on U.S. college campuses is on the rise. Of 51,611 undergraduates
surveyed in a 2005 study by Duke
University's Center for Academic Integrity, 37 percent admitted copying Internet
material without attribution, compared with 10 percent in 1999. Yet about half
of the 4,140 colleges and universities in the U.S. -- including the entire Ivy
League -- don't use commercial programs, according to the software makers. " I
thought our first clients would be Harvard, Princeton, Yale," says John
Barrie, president of Oakland, California-based iParadigms LLC, the maker of Turnitin.
``I now think our last clients will be Harvard, Princeton and Yale. They have
the most to lose.''
Bloomberg.com
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How many podcast listeners are there in the
USA?
More than 22 million American
adults own iPods or MP3 players and 29% of them have
downloaded podcasts from the Web so
that they could listen to audio files at a time of their
choosing. That amounts to more than 6 million adults who
have tried this new feature that allows internet "broadcasts" to
be downloaded onto their portable listening device.
[Source: Pew
Internet & American Life Project]
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Featured Podcast:
All
Songs Considered
Producer: NPR
MP3 (0:15:00) 
An eclectic mix of fresh music by emerging artists and breakout
bands -- from NPR.org's web-only music show. With host Bob
Boilen.
Podcasting, a portmanteau of Apple's "iPod" and "broadcasting",
is a method of publishing files to the Internet, allowing users
to subscribe to a feed and receive new files automatically
by subscription, usually at no cost. It first became popular
in late 2004, used largely for audio files.
Do you have a favorite podcast you'd like to share?
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Recycling a Blackboard Course
The Recycle Course feature allows instructors to select information
to be deleted from a course and maintains the rest of the
course for future use. Recycle Course feature will remove
all users with a role of Student from the course. Teaching
Assistants will not be removed.
ATS
QuickStarts are designed to provide short, concise instructions
for using hardware, software, and facilities managed by ATS.
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Quick Calculations
Type a math expression into the Google search box and hit the
Enter key or click the Google Search button. The calculator can
evaluate expressions involving basic arithmetic (e.g. 5+2*2 or
2^20), more complicated math (e.g. sine(30 degrees)), units of
measure and conversions (100 miles in kilometers or 160 pounds
* 4000 feet in Calories), and physical constants (1 a.u./c or
G*mass of earth/radius of earth^2). You can also experiment with
other numbering systems such as hexadecimal and binary.
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Professor Susan Dicklitch, Government,
reviews student presentations in one of the College’s Technology
Enhanced Classrooms. Professor Dicklitch frequently integrates
a variety of instructional
media in her courses.
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Click to
view larger image and description...
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 ATS
eNews
November, 2006
Volume 2, Issue 3
Tips, techniques, and tools for using technology
to enhance teaching and research
ATS eNews is published by Academic Technology
Services. http://ats.fandm.edu/enews/
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