Jul

21

VOCAT and the Question of Openness

July 21, 2009 | by Mikhail Gershovich | 6 Comments

x-posted from cac.ophony.org
It recently occurred to me that very little has been written about the Schwartz Communication Institute’s most ambitious and potentially most promising project, our Video Oral Communication Assessment Tool, or VOCAT. I have presented on VOCAT a number of times over the years (most recently at the 2009 Computers and Writing conference in [...]

May

6

Protesting Blackboard 8.0

May 6, 2009 | by Will Millhiser | 12 Comments

This post is being written in response to the unreliability of Blackboard 8.0—outages, slowness and bugs, oh my! Are we beta testing? Some didn’t realize how dependent we’ve become upon Blackboard until it went down for three consecutive days in mid March 2009.
As I hear rumors that Blackboard is likely to remain unreliable with periodic [...]

Apr

22

Who Put Your Exam on the Web?

April 22, 2009 | by Will Millhiser | 6 Comments

The year was 1997. During a graduate school take-home exam in abstract algebra, one of my fellow students emailed the questions to AskDrMath.com and received answers before the exam was due.
Fast forward to 2005. One of my international graduate students showed me a website hosted in his home country (in a language not based on [...]

Jan

12

Web-based Homework?

January 12, 2009 | by Will Millhiser | 4 Comments

Have you noticed that textbook publishers are promoting web-based homework systems such as Prentice Hall’s Grade Assist (PHGA), McGraw-Hill’s Homework Manager and Wiley’s eGrade?
All 20 sections of Finance 3000 are using the McGraw-Hill product. Students do homework online and receive instantaneous feedback (with solutions), professors enjoy automated grading, and the coordinator appreciates bolstered grading [...]

Sep

15

Breaking Free of the Podium

September 15, 2008 | by Stephen Francoeur | 6 Comments

Let me say up front that I’m a walker, a roamer, someone who likes to circulate around the classroom while lecturing. My intent is to make sure that no part of the classroom feels like a neglected corner (and perhaps to ensure that the sleepy students or the ones drifting away remember that I am [...]

Sep

11

.ppt? . . . pfft!

September 11, 2008 | by Tomasello | 11 Comments

In 2002, after most of the initial kinks had been worked out of the Vertical Campus, I had the opportunity to teach a large lecture class (MSC 1003–the music appreciation course, a.k.a. Music in Civilization) using all the smart technology available.
I decided to try PowerPoint (known by its .ppt file extension). I slogged through [...]

Sep

8

Of Legos and Sock Puppets – Knowing When to Go Low-tech

September 8, 2008 | by Sarah Ryan | 5 Comments

My first-year students find Plato’s The Republic daunting – especially the part of the book that requires sewing. My M.P.A. students claim that creating nonprofit organizations is difficult – when another group has taken all of the yellow legos. Deprived of their i-whatevers and Power-thingies, my students reluctantly admit to the joys of low-tech learning [...]