service learning

Today I went to a teaching excellence workshop hosted by the provost's office. The presenters were from the speech and communications disorders department. That department won a university wide teaching excellence award, and they talked about their approach to teaching. One pillar of their strategy is that of service learning. I actually am pretty familiar with service learning, as I was a TA for a course called "instructional design and service learning" at purdue university, and was also co-advisor of a engineering projects in community service (EPICS) team at Purdue university. My EPICS team built exhibits for a children's science museum in Lafayette, IN. The three projects were worked on while I was there were (a) a working replica of the mars rover, (b) a small wind tunnel, and (c) a system that would track the visitors to the museum according to which exhibits they visited and for how long (through the use of RFID tags). Most of the students were engineering students - electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, and so on (at Purdue they have a plethora of engineering majors - they actually have seven or so different buildings each housing its own school of engineering). I helped the team think about how to help students reach educational goals through interaction with the exhibits.
Service learning is of course a great approach but does have its limitations. For example, some of the projects the communications disorders department did were in Mexico, and to go students sometimes had to pay their own way. Obviously something like that would not work in a K-12 environment. And at the university level, many students would not be able to afford to participate. But of course people right here in Utah have needs too, so more feasible service learning projects can be established on a more local level. Of course anyone who knows me knows that I value the role of international exposure in students' development, but I don't think it is a prerequisite to service learning.

fill out my cool survey:

Please take my survey on olympic sports

Please take my sample survey on winter and summer Olympic sports. I am using this to show my students the utility of Google spreadsheets, and specifically its form function (surveys take less than five minutes to set up on Google Spreadsheets):

blogging at 10,000 feet

As it turns out, on my flight back to SLC the wireless access was free. I never really thought I would pay for internet access on a plane, but since it was free I thought I would go ahead and check the scores and my email. But the really interesting thing is that the internet access up here is much better than it was in my hotel room. There, it was worse that a 28K modem. But here it is pretty fast. I guess the thing it makes me remember is the importance of making web sites accessible to people with disabilities of course but also to people with slow connection speeds. Blackboard, for example, does not work well at all when the internet access speeds are slow. Everything takes several minutes to load. So I am a little behind on helping my TA out with his portion ogf the grading, which he cannot do since the internet access where he is is even slower. So with case-based learning, since that is what my students will be learning about next week, videos can be crucially important to help describe cases. But videos can take up a lot of bandwidth. One way to get around that is to use really good compression technologies, and it have multiple options of people who can download lower quality versions if they have slow internet. Now if we could just get blackboard to create a low-bandwidth alternative....

conference reflection

One thing that has always been a problem for me at conferences is figuring out the layout. It always seems that it is not until the end of the conference that I actually understand how to get from one room in one building to another room in another building. So I have been wandering quite a bit today. But that is okay because my presentation went pretty well. People had questions and that is always a good thing. I also remembered what I was going to say pretty well. And some people want to read my paper (being a good academic I wrote out a full length paper before the conference....that's what we are supposed to do but some people do not do that), which is definitely a good thing.
Something I have learned over the years is that conferences are not only about presenting and attending presentations on interesting topics. Rather, they are about building relationships with other academics. Sometimes those other academics are professors, sometimes students, and sometimes industry professionals. Academics just like any other field is social. You have to build off of other's research to do any research of value. The way you know about that research is by a combination of doing a lit search and the snowball method of talking to people you know who do research in the area that you do, asking them for suggestions of what to read, asking people who wrote the stuff that you were referred to for some more stuff to read, and so on. You never can read everything that there has been written on a topic, and if you limit yourself to just library lit searches you can miss important lines of research just by not having the right keywords and so forth. But also there is the file drawer problem, in which people might have done a study that did not give significant or interesting results, and it never gets published, and thus sits in someone's file drawer. The only way you can know about those is by talking to people. Another benefit of building relationships is that it helps when it it time for job hunting and writing collaborative grant proposals. I knew 4 people at USU before I ever interviewed here. I knew them from conferences. Of course I know that they did not give me preferential treatment because I knew them, but I could ask them "what is it like in Logan?" (knowing about where you are interviewing is very important because you come out for two-three days and then if you are lucky you get a job offer which could potentially be the only job for the rest of your life). I could also guess what types of questions they might ask at my job talk.
So in short, yes, academia is a social enterprise just as much as other lines of work, but that is not a bad thing. Rather it helps open our eyes to previous work that might not have been discoverable by just going to the library.

Meetings galore

One of the things that happens at the beginning of a new school year is a bunch meetings - department meetings, college meetings, student meetings, other meetings with colleagues. But that is just part of academia, and it is of course extremely important to meet with students, because as my dean said, one of our most important jobs is to prepare the next generation of researchers. I'm very fortunate to have a lot of good students. We're here at the university to research but also teach.
It's funny that even how far technology has come, face to face meetings are the way things get done. I wonder if western governors or the university of phoenix - totally online universities - also have face to face meetings. Online conferences are making some headway, but even this conference on elearning is held face to face:
http://www.aace.org/conf/ELEARN/
It seems online conferences would be good especially given the current economic environment, and it would also help the environment since hundreds or thousands of people would not have to be flying across the country or the world to the same place at the same time. But I must admit seeing someone in person is very different from seeing him/her on a computer screen. Seeing colleagues in person helps to build collaborations, which is what we as university professors need to do. You can't build a truly successful research program entirely by yourself. Will videoconferencing or other technologies bring us to the point where we could have online conferences in which you can build collaborations in the same way? My guess is right now if you don't already know the potential collaborator, that would be hard. But who knows what future technologies will afford.

winding down

so as we are winding down the summer session I have had the chance to reflect a little on online courses. Though some people lament that you don't always have the human connection in online course that you do in face-to-face courses, I think it all depends on how you structure the course. I took a lot of pains to center the course on student-student interaction, and to have students construct their knowledge through their own effort and interactions with fellow students to the extent possible. Of course teachers are involved in online courses, and this course was no exception, but I tried to be careful to not insert myself into discussions too soon for fear that students would see my contribution as the final arbiter, as if there is nothing else to discuss. Though of course I have a phd in curriculum and instruction, I don't know everything there is to know about learning theories, and my students this semester have such a wealth of teaching experience that it would be a crime for them to not be encouraged to share with each other the insights they have developed. Theory should inform practice just as practice should inform theory. Just as good businessmen learn as much or more from their customers and business partners, professors learn from their students. Not that students and customers are the same thing. I think my students felt a personal connection. I know I feel like I know my students well even though i have only met in person two of them. But I suppose I will see most of them in person for graduation next year.
Of course online courses bring some other benefits....students can be anywhere there is an internet connection, so they can get an education and not have to quit their jobs. Or they can go on vacation during the semester. But face-to face courses are good too. Our department is likely going to have an online MS program starting in 2010, but we are still going to have campus MS and phd programs. For a phd program, it seems to be better to have an on-campus program due to the extensive one to one research mentoring. And many potential MS students just want to have the option of a campus program. And lets face it, Cache valley is beautiful:
http://www.tourcachevalley.com/
So with the online ms and med programs we can reach more people.