History, videogames, and Prezi
Apr 20, 2010 Education, public history
For the third year in a roll, I gave a lecture to a group of high school students visiting the University of Toronto. This year I returned to the lecture I gave two years ago on the myth and history behind El Cid. In the lecture, we start with a discussion of how El Cid is portrayed in popular culture as a larger-than-life Christian hero before turning to a quick run down of what we actually know of the life of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar and then end with an explanation of how the myth of El Cid was fashioned in the centuries after his death. It’s a fun lecture and this year I decided to move away from powerpoint/keynote and use Prezi instead. Check it out:
I have to say I quite liked using Prezi. It definitely solved the problem I had with how to properly combine images and text. I think it would work particularly well for presenting timelines as well as large images with annotations along the side.
Another interesting aspect of the lecture was hearing where students might have heard about El Cid. Of the 15-20 students in attendance, three had heard of El Cid. That in itself was not surprising. What surprised me most was to see that of those three, two learned about him from the videogame Age of Empires II. Which takes us back to the post I wrote two years ago when I first found out there was a videogame about the Cid.
Tags: lectures, videogames
New tools – VoiceThread
Mar 25, 2010 Education, Teaching, digital media, ditigital documents, tools
It’s the end of another insanely busy academic year and only recently have I found a few minutes to spare comment here about a few new tools that I discovered thanks to Rochelle Mazar, the emerging technologies librarian at UTM. One such tools is VoiceThread, a tool that allows conversations around images, texts, or videos. This video illustrates the many features of this tool.
I was immediately taken by the pedagogical potential of this tool. It could be an interesting way to foster discussion around an image or video before class, for example, or even to continue in-class discussion. In that sense, it would allow for more inclusive teaching as it would allow students who are shy to express their views as well as allowing students to express their views not only in written form but also in spoken form (allowing perhaps for more in-depth comments). The interface itself is very clean and intuitive and hopefully wouldn’t scare the computer illiterate students.
At the very least, it could be a cool way of going through the class syllabus. To test the system, I uploaded a pdf of the syllabus for my recent course and had Rochelle add comments (both types and spoken comments). The comments took a few minutes to appear on my end, but I liked the way the system works, allowing comments to be placed near points in the text. This might actually be a better tool than wikis, for example, for allowing students to comment on each other’s work. The good thing is that it can also be embedded on webpages – so one could embed it on blackboard, for instance, or in a wiki page. The example below is the syllabus example I mentioned above. What do you think?
Tags: VoiceThread
First class and wiki in the classroom
Sep 18, 2009 Education, Software, digital media
I taught my first lecture course this past summer. Entitled The Margins of Medieval Society, the course explored the way medieval people defined and dealt with heretics, Jews, Muslims, slaves, the poor, prostitutes, homosexuals, lepers, witches, and criminals. The structure of the course lent itself well for the intensive, six-week, summer schedule and the students seem to have enjoyed it as much as I did.
I had wanted to teach this course since I took an independent reading course on the topic as an undergraduate, about seven years ago. I proposed it to the history department last Fall, and to my great excitement, they took the course. I was to give two-hour lectures, twice a week for six weeks. Since I believe that the best way to learn is through a conversation, I split each two-hour block into a one hour lecture, followed by a 50-minute discussion after a few minutes break. Students were assigned a mixture of primary and secondary sources to read for each class, and were required to come to class prepared. Twenty percent of their mark was based on participation.
Such an emphasis on participation can be daunting, of course, since it shifts some responsibility for the course to the students. If the class doesn’t co-operate or students don’t come to class prepared, the instructor is faced with a wall of staring faces and an uncomfortable silence. In order to get the ball rolling and get a sense of what students got out of the assigned readings, I created a wiki page for the course. Each topic we covered had a wiki page and students had until noon on class days (we met at 5 pm) to post their reactions to the readings on the wiki site. I would then log on to the site at some point in the afternoon and bold passages that were particularly interesting or problematic to guide in-class discussions. I got the idea from Jeff McClurken, an American history professor at the University of Mary Washington who used it as discussion starter in many of his courses and wrote about it in his blog. He had had success in promoting engagement with the course material and interaction among students by using a wiki page. That encouraged me to give it a try despite the fact that I had never used a wiki before.
I have to say the wiki surpassed my expectations. I’ll know more when I get the students’ evaluations but several students told me they enjoyed it. One student told me she checked the site on her cellphone a few minutes before each class to see what I had marked off and felt it was useful for preparing for discussion. After the course was over she thanked me for introducing her to the wiki. She is currently using it at work to collaborate on a large project with several co-workers.
Having to post on the wiki led students to read more carefully and organize their thoughts about the topic covered before each class. They also began the discussion before class. Some students posted more than once as they often responded to each other’s posts. By the time we began discussion in class, they had been exposed to many different takes on the same readings. That allowed our discussions to reach a deeper level in the short time we had at our disposal.
Why I chose a wiki instead of a discussion forum
Although Blackboard offers a discussion forum tool, I felt setting up a wiki through pbworks was much easier than creating an effective forum, and the layout encouraged more interaction among the students. Despite commonly-held assumptions about younger generations, many students are not that tech savvy so I felt a forum structure would be more cumbersome. At the very least, students might simply post their individual thoughts without consulting other posts. I wanted a simpler structure, where each student’s reactions were easily available to the rest of the class. I also wanted a tool that would be simple to set up and maintain.
After seeing Jeff McClurken’s site, I knew a wiki could be the answer. I had recently started using a wiki when I joined a committee that is putting together an online portal of resources on the early modern Mediterranean. The group uses a wiki on pbworks to manage information and collaborate on developing the site. Having had to use it for that work showed me how easy it was from the user perspective.
After seeing how the wiki worked in my class, one of my friends implemented it in her summer courses at the University of Texas. After getting similar results, she decided to use it in all her classes. I’m now in the process of setting up a wiki for the class I’m TA’ing this year. In that class, however, I’m not requiring students to post at the wiki ahead of time. I’m basically going to use it to post guiding questions ahead of time and assignment instructions. I’m basically interested in creating a course website that is more interactive than blackboard, where students can comment anything I post and ask questions publicly. After I finished setting up the wiki, I started having second thoughts. Perhaps in that case, a blog might be a better option. I’ll design one and compare the results.
Nothing like combining my love for new technology with my love for teaching!
Educause
Jun 11, 2009 Education, digital media
Educause is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the application of information technology to higher education. At a conference in October 2008, Educause members began to work on a list of the top challenges in teaching and learning. Their main focus is not so much in highlighting the issues, but
to be an experiment in community interaction and participation, in organizing peers to develop solutions and approaches that can be shared across geographic boundaries and institutions. The list of challenges is merely the agenda, set by the community. The true focus of the Challenges project is on knowledge-building: challenging higher education not only to list the issues but also to put the power of collective intelligence into action to address those issues.
The Challenges project thus represents a shift in member engagement. Instead of “pushing out” content through webcasts, white papers, or articles, the Challenges project “invites in” content from members, asking the community to contribute ideas and solutions or to participate in “lightning-round” presentations. This is a shift reflected in the growing Web 2.0 culture. Whereas Web 1.0 was characterized by the ability to search for information, Web 2.0 has focused on the ability to contribute information and add to dialogues through rich tools like wikis, blogs, and social networks. [full text]
They have now narrowed it down to the top 5 challenges for 2009:
- Creating learning environments that promote active learning, critical thinking, collaborative learning, and knowledge creation
- Developing 21st-century literacies (information, digital, and visual) among students and faculty
- Reaching and engaging today’s learners
- Encouraging faculty adoption and innovation in teaching and learning with IT
- Advancing innovation in teaching and learning with technology in an era of budget cuts
It’s definitely worth a read. I’m applying some of the principles in my class next month and I’ll reflect here on how successful it was at the end.
Tags: Education
