Instructional Technology

Faculty Retreat Idea

Here’s an email I sent to Len Clark, Tom Kirk, Wes & TomS about an idea for faculty retreat next year:

I had an idea for a topic for faculty retreat and Wes suggested that I contact you folks to see what you thought:

Virtual Learning at Earlham

presented by Information Services (Library Services, ECS & ITAM)

This might include the following topics:

• PALNI and other online bibliographic services.
• What Artstor can do for your course.
  Demo of Artstor, including images into Powerpoint presentation.
• Moodle as a Virtual Learning Environment.
  Faculty experiences using Moodle with class.
  Using discussion forums to expand class interactions
  Using Moodle’s pedagogical tools.
  Using wiki for student web pages
• Using ContentDm to create an image database
  The IDEAS project - how it can be used
• Social Software - what is it and why
  Blogging in the classroom - how it can improve writing.
  Wikis, Friendster, Thefacebook - social software

I’d like to propose two different kinds of speaker. The first is Barbara Ganley from Middlebury College who , besides being a lecturer in the English and Writing Program, is the director for the Project for Integrated Expression at Middlebury. She describes herself as:

“An active implementer of new media and blogging into literature and writing classrooms, my special interests include digital storytelling as a means of academic discourse and integrated web technologies (especially blogs) as a vehicle for expression, community-building, and student-centered learning.”

She runs several writing courses using blogs and reflects upon that experience in her own blog . I think that a talk from Barbara about her use of blogs to enhance creative writing would provide a good follow through from last year’s ‘Writing through the curriculum’ retreat when consideration of the role of this kind of technology was absent.

The second speaker could be a live video link with the author of Moodle, Martin Dougiamass in Australia.

This may be too late for the coming year but I thought it was worth mentioning.

Mark

————

I browsed to the Intro to Creative Writing blog :
EL170s05: March 2005 Archives and was entranced by the presence of podcasts of students reading their own pieces. However, the page took ages to load and the links to the podcasts were broken - time for a streaming server methinks.

Anyway, if this idea takes off I do hope that we invite Barbara cos I think it would do faculty here a lot of good to see a female humanities faculty getting to grips with technology and making it work.

Posted by markp at March 3, 2005 03:29 PM | TrackBack