I stumbled upon this faculty development site that has many links of use to both new and seasoned faculty. Maybe I’ll check out some of the links. I clicked on ‘Constructivist Teaching’ and found even more links…. maybe later. Too much good stuff to read now.
From weblogg-ed, you can find the wiki for the national curriculum of South Africa ( grades 10 – 12 ) at http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/South_African_Curriculum . There is already a free physics textbook there as part of the free high school science texts initiative. Also note that California is looking at producing its own textbooks to address the rising ($400M) cost of K-12 texts — California Open Source Textbook Project. Is the wiki going to shake up the publishing world?
With my recent posts about the articles about laptops in the classroom, this Wired Campus Blog entry seems appropriate. It points you towards a list of Universities that require laptops and provides some basic info on their programs.
The first comment posted on the blog raises the same concerns that I feel. Requiring students to bring laptops opens you up to a world of pain in IT. But with IT providing and managing the laptops you can control many of the (in)compatibility variables that can negatively impact the classroom experience with laptops, and hence the learning.
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.
Onto the next chapter, Laptops in Computer Science: Creating the “Learning Studio.” The Data Structures class in this example looks to suffer from the problem typical of a large lecture & lab course. The lab is taught by someone other than the main faculty member and the lectures get out of sync. There was also a lack in consistency in lecture and lab due to problems with who was leading them. With a small department Augsburg should have consistent courses. The problems they’re trying to solve shouldn’t be ones Augsburg has to worry about. While our Data Structures course does have a lab, the lab is taught by the faculty member.
The redesigned course used online self-assessment quizzes in the CMS to help shape the daily lecture. It’s interesting to see this strategy again. And it doesn’t have anything to do with laptops — just a student-centered just-in-time-teaching approach. In addition to the lecture, they added a lecture exercise (lex). The lex is a directed small-group exploration of the topic of the day with the faculty and TA available for help if needed. In their conclusion, they essentially say that this is an exercise in active learning. Again, laptops not required. But flexible space is key. And flexible space is inefficient and rows are efficient. Hopefully by the end of these articles I won’t be sneaking into work at 2 AM to re-arrange the labs!