Now to article #3, Incorporating Laptop Technologies into an Animal Sciences Curriculum. This was a challenging course as the students took the laptops to farms! Amazingly the institution ran fiber to the farms and installed wireless there. That was apparently easier than getting electricity to the barns. They had some excellent opportunities for students to use laptops to document their observations of cows getting ready to give birth — the students stay at the farms for a few days (day & night) when their cow is due. It sounds like they used some digital cameras. I bet with iMovie and a digital video camera they could do an impressive analysis.
One thing that I liked was how they used the laptops to keep up on current issues in animal science — something a static textbook cannot do. This seems rather obvious to me and I know many of our science faculty use the web for current science news. My hope is with the RSS module in moodle 1.5 we can incorporate news feeds into the course sites. With the class that I co-taught with Aimee at St Kates we had an RSS feed from the Shifted Librarian in the course site in tikiwiki. Having that constantly changing list of articles was great especially when posts would come up that were applicable to what we were covering in class.
The article goes on to explain how they use laptops with the various labs and activities — basically, I could never take that class or be a vet.
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