8:30-9:00 Opening Session
Teaching while everything changes:
Are emerging media and interdisciplinarity transforming what it means to learn?
Peter Felten
Elon University
This brief session will highlight central themes of the conference and will raise questions that participants will explore during today’s concurrent, poster, and plenary sessions.
9:10 -10:20 Concurrent Sessions I
Documentary DVD: Listening to Voices of Others
Mary Knight-McKenna, Brooke Barnett & Alexa Darby
Elon University
Myths and stereotypes about marginalized groups can be disrupted when individuals have an opportunity to share who they are with those who have more social capital. This interactive session describes a collaboration effort to create a DVD designed to dispel myths about the families of students in high-poverty schools. Teacher candidates sometimes express stereotypes that such families do not care about their children’s education. This DVD portrays successful partnerships between parents and teachers in high-poverty schools. Discussion will focus on how the DVD can be used as a model when the goal is to present the perspectives of marginalized individuals.
New Media & Digital Literacy in the Writing/Rhetoric Classroom
Paula Patch, Rebecca Pope-Ruark & Paula Rosinski
Elon University
Three presentations--“A Multimedia Rhetoric Course: Pedagogical Approaches & Student-Produced Texts,” “Approaching New Media through Old Media,” and “What do They Know?: An Analysis of Student Essays about Wikipedia”--provide interdisciplinary perspectives on the value of studying new media and digital literacy, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of various pedagogical approaches to teaching about new media, in writing or writing-intensive courses. Panelists will share a variety of new media and digital literacy assignments as well as a variety of student-created multimedia texts and engage the audience in a discussion about contextualizing new media in writing or writing-intensive courses.
Challenges of Using Imagery in Teaching: Selection, Copyright, and Meeting Your Learning Objectives
Karin Reese & Suzanne Cadwell
UNC-Chapel Hill
Thoughtful selection and presentation of digital images can result in a more engaging learning experience in and out of the classroom. Planning for using images begins with defining learning objectives. What do you want to accomplish? What resources do you and your students need to accomplish your objectives? How do you find the raw materials and how do you refine them for maximum effect?
10:20-10:40 Coffee Break
10:40-11:50 Concurrent Sessions II
Interdisciplinary Approaches to Teaching and Learning World Languages and Cultures
Ketevan Kupatadze, Mina Garcia Soormally, Sarah Glasco, Maureen Ihrie & Scott Windham
Elon University
Basic goals of postsecondary language and culture instruction are being redefined to address the need for educating translingual and transcultural individuals. What this means is emphasizing the development of students’ abilities to function as capable and bilingual interlocutors within their chosen profession. For this purpose, Foreign Language Departments have been urged to implement interdisciplinary approaches to teaching. The session participants will share their experiences with interdisciplinary approaches to teaching language and culture that they have adopted for their classrooms, particularly those that revolve around individual student’s personal interests or primary fields of specialization with the intent of connecting them to the instruction of language and culture.
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
Visual culture asks questions of the veracity of disciplines, the role or methodologies and the goals of a liberal arts education. In this session we will explore the role visual culture plays in challenging traditional “types” like literature, art, history, culture, race, nationality, ethnicity, religion, etc. Our discussion will explore the boundaries of our disciplines, research, or teaching in order to better define a 21st-century liberal arts education. In an ever more visual world, can we prepare our students to think critically if we don’t also teach them to see complexly?
Student-Created Textbooks Using Wikis in Organic and Bioorganic Chemistry
Mike Winiski, Brian Goess & Greg Springsteen
Furman University
While this example is specific to chemistry, we will share valuable lessons we have learned throughout our two-year implementation and strategies for effectively incorporating wikis that are applicable across the curriculum. We will also discuss technology limitations and exciting new trends and tools. Over the past two years, Furman students in organic and bioorganic chemistry classes have been utilizing wiki technology to create an online, student-authored textbook that engages learners in the creative process of science. The wiki provides a platform that supports the development of content that reflects students’ ways of learning, rather than our ways of teaching.
VoiceThread: Presentation, Collaboration, and Performance-based Assessment
Suzanne Cadwell
UNC-Chapel Hill
With VoiceThread (www.voicethread.com), students and instructors alike can easily create narrated slideshows from existing images, documents, and video clips to share with a group. Member of the group can easily contribute annotations to the slideshow with text, audio, video or digital ink. In this interactive session, participants will discuss examples of UNC-Chapel instructors and students using VoiceThread to support presentation, collaboration, and performance-based assessment activities, and learn how to create a simple VoiceThread of their own.
12:00-1:10 Lunch
Poster Sessions and Demonstrations
Students’ Attitudes and Impressions of Online Course Delivery: What We Learned
Chris Burkett & Loren Ryan
Columbia College
Undergraduate and graduate students at Columbia College were surveyed after completing education online or hybrid classes. Students answered questions that evaluated their experience with this new method of class delivery. From this data, information about students’ attitudes and impressions of the online format were revealed and analyzed. Results and recommendations were presented to the faculty.
STEP-Tech: Science Teaching Enhanced by PC-tablet TECHnology
Jim Ellenson
North Carolina Central University
Learning and learning attitudes in predominately minority students taking General Chemistry classes are being investigated using tablet PCs in both lecture and laboratory environments. The first phase of the study has involved the development of pedagogical practices designed to increase student learning and enhance student/instructor conceptual interchange. First year survey results indicated that students appreciate the learning and communication improvements brought about by the use of tablet PCs in the classroom.
Building Communities: Online Study Group (Concord Law School: SGA Model)
Shira Hedgepeth
Winston-Salem Sate University
Often educators overlook the power of online education and believe that the students are isolated. However, online student groups can provide an opportunity for students to plan an active part in the learning process. This poster looks at one example of a student group’s contribution to online learning, explores options for conducting online study groups and looks at the impact from one students perspective.
Two Birds, One Stone: Integrating Biology within the Physics Laboratory
DorothyBelle Poli, Matthew Rearick & Matthew C. Fleenor
Roanoke College
We present a successful model of interdisciplinary science education that has produced a dramatic increase in student awareness and engagement, as well as a healthy dose of faculty development for non-tenured science colleagues. This model is based on the restructuring of the introductory physics laboratories for life science majors through the College’s collaborative teaching grant.
Yes We Can Write: How Media Coverage of the Election Motivated Student Writing
Kathryn Wymer
North Carolina Central University
Motivating students to write is a perennial problem. In this poster, I describe how I assigned writing that took advantage of student interest in the media coverage surrounding the 2008 presidential election. My students looked at campaign websites, watched YouTube coverage of the candidates’ speeches, and wrote essays comparing the candidates’ stances on the issues. The student feedback from this assignment was positive, and it resulted in greater student motivation not only for ht essay in question but also future essays for the course.
1:20-2:00 pm Concurrent Sessions III
Koury Business Center (KoBC)
Equalizing Voices: Student-Faculty Partnership in Course Design
Christopher Manor, Katie King
Elon University
Who owns the educational process? Who determines what is learned and how? At Elon, faculty, students, and community partners have collaborated on course design and evaluation, exploring fundamental teaching and learning problems from multiple perspectives. Based on Elon faculty and student contributions to the new book Engaging Student Voices in the Study of Teaching and Learning (forthcoming by Stylus Press, 2009), we focus on issues of authority, voice, and identity; and discuss the impact of faculty-student collaboration on how faculty and students do their work and think about the educational process. Participants will be involved in exploring the benefits incorporating student voices in the educational process, and considering the practical and ethical issues involved.
Stranger in a Strange Land: Student-Constructed Interdisciplinary Online Exhibits
Diane E. Boyd
Furman University
In this interactive workshop, participants will investigate the advantages of web 2.0 interfaces as they consider ways to appropriately “shake up” student learning by assigning a project that requires students use a technology they don’t use regularly (or have never used). After sharing the learning goals and example student-created online exhibits participants will apply the motivational the motivational theories of Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and Carol S. Dweck to brainstorm how to transform existing learning projects by involving new media.
Maximum Motivation by Making It Real
Brooke Barnett, John Burbridge, Peter Felten
Elon University
When students get to advanced classes in general education, they often lack motivation because they have become so focused on their major. Three faculty who teach Elon’s capstone interdisciplinary seminars will discuss how they motivate students to become engaged by using strategies that make these classes relevant to them. In The Four Freedoms, students tackle on-campus issues with the first amendment. In Baseball and Statistics, faculty-produced videos of baseball owner Jack McKeon bring complexities of the sport into the classroom. In Law, Faith, and Tolerance, the structure of the class serves as a catalyst for students to write even more papers than are assigned.
Winning Wikis: Using Haiku to Cultivate Journalistic Writing
Glenn Scott
Elon University
Journalism students can feel so confined by the rules and conventions of news writing that they can miss some fundamental points. One is that virtually all forms of writing involve structure. Another is that, despite the variations in literary and journalistic forms, all writers work with the same resources: our words, experiences, and wits. This exercise, which we’ll cheerfully do in our conference session, involves a five-stage process of inventing, sharing (via a wiki), discussing, interviewing, and finally writing a brief news report about a classmate’s winning work. The objective is to stretch conceptions about the restriction of form, and the goal is to remind students that, at the most basic level, we’re all writers.
2:10-3:20 Plenary II
Workshop on interdisciplinary teaching
Enjoying the Adventure (and Managing the Chaos): Teaching What You Don’t Know
Therese Huston
Seattle University
Faculty members often find themselves teaching outside of their expertise. Well-intentioned professors have to get up in front of their classes and explain something that they just learned last month, or two weeks ago, or, in the most stressful cases, that same morning over a very hurried breakfast. Join us as we take an honest look at this remarkably common but rarely discussed part of teaching. Therese Huston has interviewed faculty from across the country and shares her research and their insights. What are best practices from faculty who teach material outside of their comfort zone and do it well? What are some of the common mistakes we all tend to make? Perhaps most importantly, are there ways to do this so that students learn what they should and your life remains manageable and sane?
