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Welcome Educators!
Elon University invites educators to the 6th Annual Innovation in Instruction Conference on August 20, 2009, from 8:00 to 4:00 pm. Attendance is free, but we do request pre-registration. Lunch is included for the conference.
For many educators, the ground rules have changed quickly and dramatically. Beyond traditional teaching methods centered on texts and talk, students and faculty alike are increasingly called upon to engage with and making meaning from information in new ways. The explosion of new material available to us as teachers and learners makes integrating insights and methods from multiple disciplines into our teaching and learning easier than ever before.
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What is the role of new media in teaching and learning across the disciplines?
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What are the potential benefits – and burdens – of integrating new technology or visual pedagogies into interdisciplinary work?
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In these evolving environments created by new technologies, what do we need to do or know to best empower students to transition from passive consumers to active co-producers of knowledge and culture?
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How can we most effectively support interdisciplinary learning
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What are the best ways access and use vast storehouses of data, primary resourcrs, and visual images previously unavailabe to students?
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What are we doing to help prepare students to analyze and make meaning from the many visual forms all around them?
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What does it mean to read an image, and how can teachers help students develop the skills to do so thoughtfully?
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How do we teach students to discern point of view or bias?
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How can we teach students to create imagery that informs, persuades, argues, illustrates, or entertains?
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What is Twitter?
That's a question that's more easily asked than answered. It's own website (www.twitter.com) is evasive about describing itself.
This short messaging service has been featured in the media extensively, especially after it was revealed that members of Congress "tweeted" during one of President Obama's speeches.
According to Educause Learning Initiative, "Twitter is an online application that is part blog, part social networking site, part cell phone/IM tool, designed to let users answer the question “What are you doing?” Users have 140 characters for each posting (or “tweet”) to say whatever they care to say. Many tweets do answer the question of what the user is doing, but plenty of others are responses to other tweets, pointers to online resources that the user found interesting, musings, or questions." Download 7 Things You Should Know About Twitter developed by Educause Learning Initiative.
A recent comprehensive sociological study by Harvard studied 300,000 Twitter users in May 2009 and compared this data with other social network users. The study indicated that men have 15% more followers than women, and that the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of "tweets". Their findings seem to imply that Twitter resembles more of "a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer commmunication network." (Source: http:// blogs.harvardbusiness.org) |
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Everyone in academia knows it and no one likes to admit it: faculty often have to teach courses in areas they don't know very well. The challenges are even greater when students don't share your cultural background, lifestyle, or assumptions about how to behave in a classroom.
 In her new book, Teaching What You Don't Know, Dr. Therese Huston, an experienced teaching consultant, offers funny, practical, and creative strategies for dealing with typical problems:
- How can you prepare most efficiently for a new course in a new area?
- How do you look credible?
- And what do you do when you don't have a clue how to answer a question?
Dr. Huston will conduct the plenary workshop at the 2009 Innovation in Instruction Conference entitled, "Enjoying the Adventure (and Managing the Chaos): Teaching What You Don’t Know", on Thursday, August 20 at Elon University.
Encouraging faculty to think of themselves as learners rather than as experts, Therese Huston points out that authority in the classroom doesn't come only, or even mostly, from perfect knowledge. She offers tips for introducing new topics in a lively style, for gauging students' understanding, for reaching unresponsive students, for maintaining discussions when they seem to stop dead, and -yes- for dealing with those impossible questions.
Original, useful, and hopeful, Dr. Huston will remind us that teaching what you don't know, to students whom you may not understand, is not just a job. It's an adventure.
Source: Harvard University Press Catalog, 2009. |
 Thinking about Facebook?
Consider this.... |
Information from Facebook about Facebook
"Founded in February 2004, Facebook is [an online] social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family and coworkers. The company develops technologies that facilitate the sharing of information through the social graph, the digital mapping of people's real-world social connections. Anyone can sign up for Facebook and interact with the people they know in a trusted environment.
Facebook is the second most-trafficked PHP site in the world, and one of the largest MySQL installations anywhere, running thousands of databases. Facebook has built a lightweight but powerful multi-language RPC framework that allows the company to seamlessly and easily tie together subsystems written in any language, running on any platform. The company is the largest user in the world of memcached, an open-source caching system, and has created a custom-built search engine serving millions of queries a day, completely distributed and entirely in-memory, with real-time updates."
General Growth
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More than 200 million active users
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More than 100 million users log on to Facebook at least once each day
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More than two-thirds of Facebook users are outside of college
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The fastest growing demographic is those 35 years old and older
User Engagement
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Average user has 120 friends on the site
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More than 4 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)
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More than 30 million users update their statuses at least once each day
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More than 6 million users become fans of Pages each day
Applications
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More than 850 million photos uploaded to the site each month
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More than 10 million videos uploaded each month
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More than 1 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each week
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More than 2.5 million events created each month
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More than 30 million active user groups exist on the site
International Growth
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More than 50 translations available on the site, with more than 40 in development
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About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
Platform
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More than 950,000 developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries
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Every month, more than 70% of Facebook users engage with Platform applications
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More than 52,000 applications currently available in the Facebook Application Directory
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More than 100 applications have more than one million monthly active users
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More than 10,000 websites have implemented Facebook Connect since its general availability in December 2008
Mobile
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There are more than 30 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
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People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are almost 50% more active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
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There are more than 150 mobile operators in 50 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products
Source:
Information directly from Facebook Press pages:
http://www.facebook.com/press
For more information:
Introduction to Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/facebook
Educators Using Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/
group.php?gid=7036945291
This group has also developed a document called Drive Belonging and Engagement in the Classroom
Using Facebook.
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About Therese Huston
 Therese Huston consults nationally and internationally about teaching and learning. She is Director of the Center in Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Seattle University. Since Therese joined Seattle University in 2004, she has published eight articles in higher education journals and co-chaired two national conferences. Therese Huston received her B.A. from Carleton College and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Carnegie Mellon University.
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 "Teaching outside your expertise can be intimidating, but you don't need to know everything to create an environment in which students learn new things. As Codrina the chemist remarked to me, "Students don't learn more when you're perfect." They learn more when you're human and you make the classroom a place where it's safe to ask questions. "
> .See article in Chronical of Higher Education
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Scheduled Interactive Sessions
Challenges of Using Imagery in Teaching: Selection, Copyright, and Meeting Your Learning Objectives
Karin Reese & Suzanne Cadwell
UNC-Chapel Hill
Documentary DVD: Listening to Voices of Others
Mary Knight-McKenna, Brooke Barnett
& Alexa Darby
Elon University
New Media & Digital Literacy in the Writing/Rhetoric Classroom
Paula Patch, Rebecca Pope-Ruark
& Paula Rosinski
Elon University
Student-Created Textbooks Using Wikis in Organic and Bioorganic Chemistry
Mike Winiski, Brian Goess & Greg Springsteen
Furman University
Interdisciplinary Approaches to Teaching and Learning World Languages and Cultures
Ketevan Kupatadze, Mina Garcia Soormally, Sarah Glasco, Maureen Ihrie & Scott Windham
Elon University
VoiceThread: Presentation, Collaboration, and Performance-based Assessment
Suzanne Cadwell
UNC-Chapel Hill
More Than Words: Visual Culture and the Liberal Arts Curriculum (Viz Cult at Elon)
Evan A. Gatti, Crystal Anderson, Samantha DiRosa, Ken Hassell, Lynn Huber, Alaina Pineda
Elon University
Maximum Motivation by Making It Real
Brooke Barnett, John Burbridge, Peter Felten
Elon University
Stranger in a Strange Land: Student-Constructed Interdisciplinary Online Exhibits
Diane E. Boyd
Furman University
Winning Wikis: Using Haiku to Cultivate Journalistic Writing
Glenn Scott
Elon University
Equalizing Voices: Student-Faculty Partnership in Course Design
Christopher Manor, Katie King
Elon University
Enjoying the Adventure (and Managing the Chaos): Teaching What You Don’t Know
Therese Huston
Seattle University
Scheduled Posters
and Demonstrations
Students’ Attitudes and Impressions of Online Course Delivery: What We Learned
Chris Burkett & Loren Ryan
Columbia College
STEP-Tech: Science Teaching Enhanced by PC-tablet TECHnology
Jim Ellenson
North Carolina Central University
Building Communities: Online Study Group (Concord Law School: SGA Model)
Shira Hedgepeth
Winston-Salem Sate University
Two Birds, One Stone: Integrating Biology within the Physics Laboratory
DorothyBelle Poli, Matthew Rearick & Matthew C. Fleenor
Roanoke College
Yes We Can Write: How Media Coverage of the Election Motivated Student Writing
Kathryn Wymer
North Carolina Central University |
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