Office Hour Wiki
Julie Nishimura Jensen, faculty member in Classical Studies Department and Director of the Post-Baccalaureate Program in Classical Studies in the College of Liberal and Professional Studies, is using a wiki in her Blackboard site to streamline the scheduling of advising sessions and office hours. She says,
I have to say that I’m really loving my wiki office hours sign-ups. It has made my life so much easier - no more back-and-forthing to figure out times for everyone; I just post time slots and they sign up. My students seem to like it too; I worried that it would make things too formal - I like the option of people being able to drop by - but it’s much more efficient for them to know for sure that they will have some face time. I think it could be really useful for other people too!
How to Create a Wiki in Blackboard
Before you can add the wiki tool to areas of your Blackboard course site, you first need to configure it. Go to the Course Tools area in the Control Panel and click on Configure Wiki. You’ll see lots of options for authoring and editing permissions and access dates. Choose which best suits your needs, click OK, and then add it to your course site as you would any other tool.
To highlight its functional significance for Advising Meetings and make it easy to find, Julie added it right to her navigation menu.
If you’d like help making changes to your Blackboard site, send an email to the Penn Blackboard Support.
What other ways can you envision wikis streamlining your teaching practice?
Michelangelo 3D Slideshow
Penn Libraries recently announced a cool new way to explore the image collection at the Anne and Jerome Fisher Fine Arts Library. Here is a Michelangelo Slideshow I made in a few seconds - click the blue arrow at top to start. The CoolIris 3D software may require a plug-in download. You can create a rich browsing experience for images that you choose to include.
To make this show, I started at the image collection page, chose Michelangelo from the Artist box at right and narrowed my search to records with digital images. You can make slideshows for a particular class session and email your students the link, or use PennTags to collect them for later use. The collection also has more than 100,000 high-resolution images you can add to your PowerPoint presentations. I also foresee uses in conference presentations.
Keep students informed about their performance
At a recent meeting about technology support for SAS students, several student pointed out that they would like to see their instructors make better use of the Grade Center function in Blackboard. In particular, they were urging their instructors to use the Grade Center to track all graded assignments - not just mid-term or final exams. By having a complete picture of how they’re doing in the course, they’ll know if they need to get help or make adjustments to how they approach their coursework.
The Grade Center in Blackboard is a very versatile tool for recording and communicating grades, but it can be a little intimidating to instructors because there are so many options. A good place to start is the Blackboard Quick Start guide, which offers an overview of the key functionality and brief summaries of how to perform common tasks.
On December 1, 2008 Penn Library courseware support specialists will be offering a workshop for faculty on how to use the Grade Center. See http://wic.library.upenn.edu/workshops/#SBBG for details.
Or contact the instructional support staff for your School for help in learning how to use the gradebook effectively. SAS faculty can contact instructional-support@sas.upenn.edu
Zack Lesser’s Comments on Teaching with Technology
I want to draw everyone’s attention to a recent Almanac article that Zack Lesser, an Assistant Professor in the English Department, wrote about how he chose to use technology in the classroom. Dr. Lesser calls on all of us to think first about why we would use technology before we get excited about the “bells and whistles.” It is also fantastic that this essay is about successful use of technology in a Shakespeare class and worth reading for how he transformed his class.
He also discusses his experiences in the Center for Teaching and Learning’s Teaching with Technology Seminar. These seminars are discussion groups aimed exclusively at faculty where they can discuss why they use technology in their classes. There are people on hand who help with questions about how to use the technology but the real focus is how technology can benefit student learning. These events are a useful place to send faculty who are interested in using technology or who want to use technology more effectively to engage students. I would advocate sending any faculty who use PowerPoint to the upcoming event on PowerPoint (Monday October 20 from 2:00-3:30 in the seminar room of the Weigle Information Commons). I used to malign PowerPoint but after the conversation with Drs. Mike Kaplan (Biology) and Jay McInerny (Classical Studies) I have come to see how it can be a great tool for engaging students (rather than letting them sleep in the dark while the slides pass by).
Getting students engaged using “clickers”
Audience Response Systems, or “clickers”, are an increasingly popular way to get students in large lecture courses engaged both with the material and with their fellow students. More than a dozen courses across the University are using clickers this semester, with 10 courses and more than 1500 students using them in SAS alone.
Clicker and Receiver
These clickers allow students to vote on a multiple-choice question that the instructor displays on the screen, and then see the histogram of the voting results and, optionally, the correct answer . We have standardized on clickers from TurningTechnologies.com, which provides free software for instructors to insert questions into PowerPoint presentations on either a PC or a Mac. Students can buy the clickers next to the textbook for their course in the Penn Bookstore for $40, and sell it back like a used textbook at the end of the term - unless they want to keep it to use in future courses, which is becoming more and more likely. SAS Computing loans instructors the receiver for the semester.
Instructors have found a variety of ways to use these clickers effectively. Some use them to gauge student understanding of a topic and determine how much time they need to spend on it during class. Others use it to have students answer a difficult question, or one where there are likely to be a variety of responses, and then discuss the answer with their neighbor and vote again before the correct answer is revealed. Students’ responses can be completely anonymous, or the instructor can set it up to have the students register their clicker number in Blackboard and then have each student’s response to the questions recorded so that their scores can be uploaded to the Blackboard Grade Center. Many instructors take a middle ground between these two approaches, having the students register their clickers, but only recording whether or not a student voted at all - not grading the actual responses. All of these approaches seem to keep students from “zoning out” in the middle of a large lecture, and instead stay engaged throughout the 50 or 80 minutes. They also ensure that every student’s opinion is counted, so that students in the front of the room aren’t given more attention than students toward the back, and they also avoid the peer pressure of voting with the largest group when hands are raised.
If you’re interested in learning more about this technology, please see the SAS Computing page on Using Clickers in the Classroom or the Weigle Information Commons page on Clickers - Personal Response Systems. There’s a seminar on November 5, 2008 at the WIC where you can learn more about clickers and try them out - click here for information and registration. We’ve also recorded a short video of two instructors discussing their use of clickers in the classroom - it’s available here. Please just get in touch with the contacts listed on the SAS Computing page or the WIC page if you’d like more information.
Penn Law’s Second Annual Visual Legal Advocacy Roundtable
Professor Regina Austin has written to us about an upcoming event at Penn Law School on Friday, October 17 that should be of interest to public interest lawyers, entertainment lawyers, law students, law professors, ITS specialists with public interest organizations, documentary filmmakers, and members of the Penn community who are interested in nonfiction video production and social justice issues. Presenters include:
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 Visual Advocacy Roundtable Flyer |
Common Craft Video Primers
New to social media tools and web 2.o technologies? Check out Common Craft: Explanations in Plain English.
Common Craft owners Sachi and Lee LeFever are
dedicated to building a library of videos that are focused on helping influencers and educators create change through better explanations. Our videos are short, simple and focused on making complex ideas easy to understand.
Want to learn more about wikis? blogs? podcasting? social networking? You can find the free, online versions of their videos on The Common Craft Show.
Check out this four-minute video on wikis, for example. Ed Dixon describes how he uses wikis in his classes. How might you use wikis in your instructional practice?
Blackboard’s Wiki
Blackboards’s Wiki
I have found that wikis can provide students and teachers with a number of ways to collaborate with each other on written documents. A wiki is frequently an article that has been created, edited and developed by several authors over an extended or limited period of time. One of the prime examples of using a wiki in this way are the articles collaborated on by countless authors in wikipedia.org. Authors can add information to a text but also edit incorrect information. Most recently, a friend of mine discovered in wikipedia.org an article about the streets of Philadelphia an inaccuracy pertaining to the direction of the numbered and named street. The author supplying the incorrect information wrote that the numbered streets of the city ran in an east-west direction and the named streets ran in a north-south direction. Owing to the nature of the wiki, my friend was able to open the text online, edit it and correct the error, so that the information on the directions of the named and numbered streets was factual and true.
My point with the above example is that students like my friend are able with wikis to engage with texts in a way that actively involves them with vetting, checking, and commenting on the information they read or write. Writing with a wiki can encourage a critical eye for style as well as for the careful construction and veracity of information provided.
Collaboration can take the form of many different scenarios in a wiki, i.e., individual students can collaborate with a large number of students, e.g. with the all members of a particular class or in much smaller groups involving only pairs. Last year in one wiki project from my German 101 class, each of my students collaborated with me as the instructor (and not with each other) on an extended writing assignment. Each student had their own personal wiki in which they wrote an essay about their reactions to the characters and action in a film based on a novel by Heinrich Böll entitled “Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum.” Basically, my part in the collaboration involved providing each individual student with feedback and suggestions for correcting mistakes and improving the structure and content of their essays, which I did within the wiki environment. This project extended over a period of five weeks and as a result students produced texts with content and grammatical structures that surpassed those in both quality and quantity from my classes in previous years. Research would be needed to adequately explain the reasons for the students’ performance in the wiki but it is clear that the wiki created a different kind of learning environment that was more interactive then more traditional ways of essay writing where students hand-in hard copy versions of their work that the instructor corrects and later returns with hand-written comments. In one instance, a student using the wiki had edited and revised her text 24 times over the 5 week period. I was able see her revisions by tracing the development of her essay in the “history” which is a feature in the wiki application.
The ongoing feedback and also the fact that the students could read each other’s texts online produced for each student an audience for their writing that may easily have had a motivating effect to write texts, in which students tried harder to accurately communicate their ideas to me and to each other. Ultimately, I believe the wiki environment helped the students to be more conscious of their writing and to focus more on the task of writing as a communicative one.
In subsequent entries to this forum, I would like to describe other uses for wikis for teaching and learning.
Invite special guests to your class via web conferencing
Do you have a research collaborator, subject matter expert or other guest whom you would like to invite to speak with your class?
It’s no longer necessary to reserve special videoconferencing rooms in order to make a connection between your class and a remote participant. The new breed of web conferencing tools - iChat, Skype, Windows Messenger and others - along with a simple webcam and microphone makes it possible for your guest to connect directly from their office, lab or even their homes. SAS Computing has assembled a portable system that lets us bring these desktop conferencing technologies to your classroom. The system includes a laptop computer, video camera and wireless microphones; it connects to the classroom projection system. The result is that we can get good pictures and sound transmission in most classrooms with as little as 15 minutes of setup time. If your guest doesn’t have access to a webcam, they can simply connect via telephone and we’ll be able to set up an audio-only session.
SAS Computing portable conferencing equipment
Even though the technology is relatively simple, a successful videoconference session requires some planning. You and your guest will want to agree on goals for the session, and how to structure the conversation. Will they start with a presentation, and then open up to Q&A? Will your students be presenting their work for evaluation and comment by the guest expert? Will you need to display Powerpoint slides or other visual material in the session. Consider how you will moderate the discussion in the classroom. You’ll want to encourage a lively exchange but avoid having people talking over each other.
SAS faculty who want more information about videoconferecing for their classes should visit http://www.sas.upenn.edu/computing/mms/video_conferencing_services or contact the staff at SAS Computing Multi-Media Services. Faculty from other schools at Penn should check with their computing support providers to what options are available.
Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Several Penn folks from different schools have been meeting every so often to discuss Second Life and other virtual worlds. Here at the Weigle Information Commons, we have rented some space on a library-focused island - this SL space looks much like the real commons with a central conference area suitable for a class or meeting of up to 20 people and two data diner booths with six seats each. Three video screens in the space can play any quicktime video on the web. We welcome interested folks to join the Penn Libraries group and start to hold events in Second Life.
So far, we have held several beginner workshops (how to walk, chat and fly in Second Life) and one building workshop by the builder of our space, Tim Allen. There seems to be broad interest in Second Life as people try to figure out what role it could play at Penn. Our online resource links to some educational resources.
This Halloween, we will try our first SL event - an avatar contest to go with the Penn Reading Project’s Inner Fish activities. Do you have suggestions on how to reach students who may be interested in Second Life avatar building?
