Welcome to the CTL Blog

Welcome to the CTL Blog! This blog represents the work of the Center for Teaching & Learning at Berkshire Community College. At the upper right, there are links for subscribing, registering for events, and for visiting the Classroom 2.0 Wiki. You can also:

• Click the tabs across the top of the blog
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NEEAN Conference in March – UMass

Discipline-Based Assessment Workshop Announcement
“Dialogues in the Disciplines,” takes place March 26th at UMass Amherst

DDPRSheet10.pdf (application/pdf Object)

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Nostalgia for 4 hours of TV

OK, this is truly scary, from a study of 8-18 y.o.’s by the Kaiser Family Foundation:

“A national survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that with technology allowing nearly 24-hour media access as children and teens go about their daily lives, the amount of time young people spend with entertainment media has risen dramatically, especially among minority youth.  Today, 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week).  And because they spend so much of that time ‘media multitasking’ (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes (10:45) worth of media content into those 7½ hours.” http://www.kff.org/entmedia/mh012010pkg.cfm

Digital Storytelling resource

This is from the Visible Knowledge project at Georgetown, and consists of a blog post featuring some very useful resources and how-to’s on digital storytelling. A useful skim if you want to pursue this, but also useful if you just want to know what the heck “digital storytelling” is!

http://cndls.georgetown.edu/crossroads/vkp/newsletter/0902/resources.htm

Copyright Resource at BCC

Karen CH writes:

” I have put up the following copyright page which  can be found at:  http://www.berkshirecc.edu/library_copyright_info

Faculty and staff may not understand, especially in the digital world, that copyright is a real issue.  Even in the classroom it is not unusual for some faculty to use the same handouts of articles or texts every semester, or every other semester.  That is an infringement of copyright law.”

I didn’t know about this last sentence at all… Please look for a CTL workshop that is in the planning stage to explore these topics in more detail. Thanks Karen

How Clickers are Used

Professor Jeffrey Henriques, Dept of Psychology, University of Wisconsin, has used Clickers since 2004, and shares some approaches: (Full article at: http://bit.ly/91xw58)
“Henriques said he typically asks four to six questions during a class period in which he uses the clickers for response. The purposes of the questions are many:

• As a concept check to see what students understand about a topic. “This gives me immediate feedback on my teaching and allows me to see if I need to go over a concept again to help students understand the material better,” he said. “Likewise, the clicker questions allow the students to assess their own understanding of the material, and they can see how they compare to their classmates. For instance, if they got a question wrong, were there many other students who also had difficulty with the material or were they one of the few who didn’t understand the question?”
• To describe a research study to the students and have them predict what the outcomes will be of the experiment. “This engages their critical thinking skills,” Henriques explained. “Can they apply what they have learned in class to a research question? At other times [the poll] allows me to show students how a study’s findings go against the commonsense explanation for what would happen.”
• To demonstrate different psychological concepts. “I use this specifically in the area of cognition and problem solving, demonstrating ideas such as the availability heuristic by asking students if they think that there are more words in the English language that start with the letter ‘k’ or more words that have ‘k’ as the third letter,” he said. “While it is easier to think of words that start with the letter ‘k’ and that leads us to conclude that there are more such words in the English language, it is the case that there are three to five times as many words that have ‘k’ as the third letter.”
• To get students thinking about the material they’re about to cover in class. “For instance, I may ask them a question that they can’t correctly answer prior to the lecture but should be able to understand and answer correctly once we finish covering the material,” Henriques said. “Other times I will ask them to reflect on their own experiences as a way to help them understand how the different theories arose that we are about to discuss. I just did this in my lecture on emotion, asking students to think about the last time that they had a strong emotional response and whether the feeling of emotion preceded, followed, or coincided with the physiological feelings of emotion.”
• To give students practice with the types of questions that they are going to encounter on exams in the course. “Oftentimes incoming students expect that college exams are going to be similar to high school exams–simple regurgitation of facts,” he said. “But I want my students to be able to apply the ideas that we are talking about in class. These in-class questions can help them start thinking in those ways before they encounter their first exam.
• To poll students about their behavior, “such as how many hours of sleep they get in a night as a lead-in to that course topic,” Henriques explained.”

Discussion Advice for Large Classes

A professor wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Ed:

I have this class that only enrolled about 20 students last spring.  So, as i re-prep the same class for this semester, I was expecting about 20 students.  Surprise, surprise!  I have 60 plus students and a reader/grader to toll along.  Because I had expected a small class, I designed my syllabus to have lots of discussions (15% of grade).  Now, I’m stuck with some 60 students in a lecture hall that is not conducive to discussions–seats are nailed to the floor and run from left to right in rows so students can’t easily get up and move around to be with groups.  Moreover, if I assigned groups of 5, that’s some 12 groups to monitor.  Whew!  I would really appreciate any ideas on how I should proceed with discussions.  I want discussions to be productive and not merely a gesture.  Help please.

Read on to see what advice he received (some of which will apply to any size class): http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php/topic,66097.0.html

Cushing Academy’s 100% Digital Library

As featured in a previous post here, Cushing Academy, a private high school in Eastern Mass, has eliminated all the books and gone to a completely digital library. The item below makes the argument that while eliminating books completely is surely a loss to learning and especially serendipitous learning, higher ed should perhaps try radical experimentation more often. We are frequently accused of being highly resistant to change: would more experimentation be accepted? Could it be done? Who would pay for it?? Read on –

Blog U.: Why Carr Is Wrong About Cushing Academy – Technology and Learning – Inside Higher Ed

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Counterclockwise

Harvard Professor Ellen Langer has been talking about mindful learning for three decades. She is now applying her mindfulness research to the question of aging brains and bodies. Her new book “Counterclockwise” explores the influence of language, belief, and society on our self-concept of aging. This is useful stuff both for ourselves and for our non-traditional and lifelong learners.. read on:

Psychologist Believes Stereotypes Lead to Premature Aging

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Go Green: “No print” option in Acrobat Pro

Do you want to share documents electronically, but also save paper, toner, and power by creating a “no print” document? This is very easy to do in Acrobat Pro (the Center for Teaching & Learning has copies of  Acrobat Pro on every computer):

• Create a pdf of your Word, Excel, Powerpoint, webpage document
• On the second top horizontal menu, select Security>Show Security Properties
• Choose “Password Security” under Security Properties, then click “Change Settings”
• Under “Permissions, ” click “Restrict Editing and Printing of the document,” and enter a password. Keep the default settings, which will prevent printing and copying
• Click “OK” twice to close the dialog boxes
• SAVE YOUR DOCUMENT
• When you re-open the document, you will see cut, copy, paste, and Print are greyed out in the menu, and the document can not be printed or altered

If you are interested in a short lesson on this, please contact Dori via Groupwise email.

College ‘gender gap’ stops growing

The Post reports on an American Council on Education study of gender in higher education. They found:

• The gender gap is stable. Men now account for 43% of undergrads
• Latino men are the exception to this growing male trend; they are falling further behind Latinas
• But, women are twice as likely to return to college after age 25 than men
• The largest gender gap is among African-Americans: 59% women/41% men
• Men still dominate in advanced degrees (no stats given)

Read the article: College ‘gender gap’ favoring women stops growing – washingtonpost.com

Read Inside Higher Ed article: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/01/26/gender

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