Professional Development

Demonstration: Active Learning in the Library: The Library Is Not Just for Books

Presenters: Cotina Jones, Phyllistine Poole, Julie Dornberger, Carl Leak, Chris Screen

• Instruction team includes both librarians and webmasters
• Realized a need for new types of library instruction
  • Blackboard, active learning templates, gaming, and vodcasting
• Blackboard
  • A place to house the projects
  • Liked: students familiar, stats, assessment, updates
  • Use it for documents, images, presentations (including Flash), audio, and video
• Active Learning Template
  • Less lecture, more hands on/critical thinking
  • To appeal to the next generation of students
  • Different learning styles, asynchronous, etc
  • Though the learning materials are online, there are offline components (like a scoring sheet)
  • They have students come up and try things in front of the class with a laptop & projector
• Gaming
  • Interactive games based on PowerPoint
  • Decided to do this b/c so many students play a lot of video games
  • Games
    • Electronic Resources Raceway
    • O’Kelly Choice Game
    • Danger
  • Chose racing games b/c of curriculum
  • What learned:
    • promotion, promotion, promotion
    • don’t assume they will play or know material
    • account for all levels of learning
    • incorporate into classes
    • They used prizes for incentive
  • Demo-ed Electronic Resources Raceway
    • Based on maze, right answers move you ahead on track, wrong answer takes you to a dead end, where you crash.
• Podcasting/Vodcasting
  • Literally on iPods
  • Alternative to traditional instruction, adapted for short attention span
    • 2-4 minutes & subject specific
  • Follow up library instruction/reference
    • Some on catalog, databases (searching, on & off campus)
    • MLA/ALA citation
  • Began as a powerpoint
    • used audio, screenshots, and music
• Handouts on TLT page
• Q&A
  • Not part of iTunes U, no RSS feed right now
  • Some students disappointed they were educational games, but went over well, should be teaching & testing tools
  • Use lectures & the games in classes (didn’t stop the lectures)

Opening Session Info (Frank Prochaska)

• Theme: Building Connections
• 8th UNC TLT conference
• largest yet, close to 500 registered attendees
• large number of private, community college, and K-12 folks here (in addition to UNC system folks)
• ed tech no longer an add-on, it’s a mission critical component for learning in 21st century
• Pointed out UNC Online program (to be announced later this spring)
• A discussion of “online quality” (a group is working on this in the UNC system)
• Another major initiative in course redesign across the system
  • National Center for Academic Transformation
• Pointed out workshops (they’re at another location). This is what I’m doing with Bob King.

Plenary session: Accelerating Educational Innovation and Transformation Through Learning Communities and Knowledge Networks (Toru Iiyoshi)

• Sr. Scholar/Director, Knowledge Media Laboratory
• The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
• Should accept the reality we’re facing, broaden & deepen understanding of teaching, shouldn’t stop asking “why”
• Studio Physics transforms traditional classroom teaching into studio-based active learning (somewhat similar to our info lit classes, no?)
  • don’t rely on lectures
  • learn from peers
  • faculty as mentor/facilitator
  • some students don’t initially like it; came to university to learn from faculty
• New Modes of Learning: MySpace, blogs, SecondLife, World of Warcraft, Google, Wikipedia, YouTube
• What can be taught and learned in these participatory spaces?
• Virtual U as an educational World of Warcraft?
• Open Education: Open Technology, Open Content, Open Knowledge
• Open Tools: Increased quality, more use, greater pedagogical knowledge
  • Sakai CMC
  • Help customization, innovation, deepen understanding of tech in ed, “catalyze new ways of collaboration and innovation”
  • Goal is not to just create another Blackboard: create something new!
• Open Content: Sharing teaching and learning resources
  • MIT Open Courseware, by November, around 1800 courses
  • What is most sustaining model? Public Library.
  • Then we got a brief history of public libraries, not unlike what you get in the Foundations course at UNCG!
  • Book: Opening Up Education
• Opening up education: sustainability?
  • Open Learning Initiative, Connexions, Merlot, Open Courseware, Carnegie Foundation for the Development of Teaching are all expensive!
  • What is the ROI?
  • What would success look like?
  • Look at demand to see what to offer: all courses, peer reviewed content, just the 10 best?
• The presentation then went into great detail about open courseware, the who, what, where, when, whys of it all. Also, pretty technical. If you want to chat about it, let me know!
• Use instructional design principles in developing open courseware in a community:
  • design, development, formulative evaluation, revision improvements, use/summative evaluation (the last three loop)
  • Community necessary! (Like Wikipedia and other social softwares)
  • Merlot, Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative, Connexions (from Rice) OpenLearn (from Open University) as community models
• Open Knowledge: pedagogical, content, pedagogical content knowledges
  • tacit/explicit, local/global knowledges
  • Gallery of Teaching and Learning
  • Power of conceptual organization templates: flexibly designed (see KEEP toolkit)
    • Many universities are involved
  • Lesson Study Project uses KEEP toolkit to create videos into useful learning tools
• Web2.0 Collaboration, discussion of buzzwords & excitement, but correctly questions where we want to go with these technologies. Suggests a change in values.
  • Discuss long tail concept
  • teaching and learning in “fat head”
    • 85000 presentations, etc, belong in long tail, but might be useful for someone out there, allows reaching out to niche communities
  • What’s next? A commons for teaching and learning.
• Sharing
  • H2O Playlist
  • Creative Commons
• Cultural and institutional change IS needed
• Open Education: A Prelude to Learning 2.0 (Minds on Fire)