UNC TLT Conference, Day One

Over the next three days, I'm attending the UNC-TLT (Teaching and Learning with Technology) Conference in Raleigh, NC, as part of my work at Duke. Here are some of my notes from the sessions.

Accelerating Educational Innovation and Transformation Through Learning Communities and Knowledge Networks
Presenters: Toru Iiyoshi

The opening plenary was a kind of overview of where we are in IT, with trends towards use of new tools like Second Life and movements towards open access to educational materials. The speaker, who works with the Carnegie Foundation, encouraged the audience to take a close look at what's working and not working about what we're doing, finding out why, for example, faculty aren't really using open courseware materials and what could be done to make them really useful for a broad audience. The overall message seemed to be to look beyond whether something is sustainable in a financial sense or seems like a good idea to use evaluation to really investigate what the best approaches would be in the future. At least, that's what I got out of it ....


Designing and Evaluating Online Critical Thinking Discussion
Presenters: Scott Chattin, Marvin Croy

Chattin is at Southeastern Community College and teaches two courses on Philosophy; the mehods he developed were also used in different courses at UNC-Charlotte by Croy. The courses are taught online through Blackboard and consist primarily of discussion board postings and papers. The students in his classes come from rural North Carolina and often have difficulty with critical thinking skills; they can be rather dogmatic in their views and have problems having empathy with other points of view. (Some students are initially offended by the material - one, after being assigned an early reading in the course on the existence of God, wrote him that the reading made her throw up and possessed by "demons", so she was dropping the course.)

He uses an evaluation rubric for the class activities based on two authors (McPeck and Richard Paul) that have written extensively about building critical thinking skills. He shares the rubric with the students and they use it for self evaluation of their work; he's found it is usually pretty close to how he would evaluate their work (if he doesn't agree, he sends them a rebuttal and his own evaluation). As part of the process, students have to include short extracts of their writing to demonstrate particular aspects of critical thinking skills in the rubric.

The rubric itself is quite detailed and includes items drawn from Richard Paul's textbook on critical thinking; the items, on intellectual standards and elements of reasoning, look at areas such as clarity, accuracy, precision, depth, relevance, logic, significance, breadth and fairness or point of view, assumptions, inferences, and implications. Students are given an understanding that he's not grading on their ideas, but on their adherence to critical thinking standards he sets ouf the for the course. He's found that many of the students, which are given controversial subjects like abortion or gay marriage to debate and write about, are initially unable to engage in critical writing about the topic and fall back on emotion or personal beliefs; after a few weeks, they're able to show more empathy to other points of view and draw upon readings and research to support their views in a more organized and detailed way. He showed some sample writing from the semester mid-point that was pretty impressive.

Connecting a Community of Educators: Building a New Online Journal with Open Source Software
Presenters: Katherine O’Connor, Terry Atkinson, Sue Steinweg, Sharon Collins, Dionna Manning, Courtney Maness

This presentation was a demonstration of the Open Journal System, an automated software tool that manages workflow for journal publication. I attended this session thinking that it might be useful in the context of a writing class for certain types of assignments or for managing special writing projects like a senior thesis. OJS is being used by the Journal of Curriculum and Instruction published at East Carolina University. The software is very full-featured and allows for a great deal of customization; it can manage users in different roles and manages the workflow in an automated manner. The software is free and is part of an effort funded by the Canadian government; the software authors also have published an automated system for managing virtual conferences. About 120 journals use the software and there will be a conference on OJS in Vancouver in July. Since the software is open source, the users at ECU had difficulty getting training and information to get started; they used an online manual and "self taught" themselves on the system; they also arranged a three hour teleconference training session with the publishers of a journal at Emory that were using the system, which might be a useful model for other institutions using open source systems on their campus.

Open Journal System
http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ojs


Poster Session

One of the more interesting posters was from UNC-Greensboro's Library. They've developed an online board game on information literacy, based on the UNCG Objectives for Library Instruction for First-Year Undergraduates.

http://library.uncg.edu/game

The game, developed with AJAX, is ADA compliant and incorporates Web evaluation exercises. You can download your own copy of the game and modify it:

http://library.uncg.edu/game/game.zip

They also have a blog on library games at:

http://librarygames.blogspot.com/


Image Quiz: Using Principles of Cognitive Psychology to Teach Visual Expertise
Presenters: Bruce Kirchoff

Unfortunately, I missed this session - I got into a really good conversation with a colleague from Winston-Salem State University about their development of online courses. However, I did some research on the Web on the software.

Kirchoff has developed a prototype software package, Image Quiz, which uses principles of cognitive psychology to help students learn to identify plants. He feels the principles used in the software could be applied in other subject areas where students learn to identify works of art or other types of materials. Basically, the software uses a set of quizzes that take the student through stages of learning visual material. One stage concentrates on distinct features of the object in question and identifying it with a "family" of similar objects; in another stage, the students examine the overall configuration or "gestalt" of the objects.

The prototype is available from his website, http://www.uncg.edu/~kirchoff/. (Note that it says his site hasn't been updated since 2004; the .zip file containing the software and an article about the principles behind it is dated 2006.)