IT Integration and Interaction and Engagement

How can we bring authentic learning, with real-world outcomes and assessments, into the history/social science classroom? This session will discuss the presenter's efforts to design and teach digital history seminars in partnership with museum professionals at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Monticello.

Current theories suggest that learning is facilitated when embedded in the context in which it will be used, but the constraints of the traditional classroom make implementing this difficult to impossible. This session will focus on exploring how new technologies such as virtual environments can situate learning in a "real" virtual context, motivate students while helping them develop scientific habits of mind, and support teachers in leading complex scientific inquiries.

Tablet PCs used in undergraduate field courses in archaeology and ecology have transformed the way we teach field-mapping and data-collection concepts. Curriculum redesign and assessment strategies were applied to two unique classes, introducing tablet PCs, an emerging mobile technology, with the goal of improving how spatial data are handled, viewed, and collected.

How would students answer the question, "What would your ideal education look like?" See for yourself in the student content showcase, produced in collaboration with Apple. Five Apple student representatives will informally respond to the question through short videos they have created, which they will present in the Rio Grande West Ballroom at various points in the program.

These "video poster sessions" will give you the chance to discuss with them their views on teaching and learning as well as the technical and creative processes behind their videos. This is a great opportunity to talk with students about their expectations for Learning 2.0 while learning some techniques and tips for creating your own videos.

In addition to conducting the showcase, these students will also capture and present their conference experience. Links to their videos, podcasts, blogs, etc., will be added to the ELI Web site as they become available, adding a student voice to our citizen journalism activity.

Digital storytelling assignments involve students in firsthand multimedia authorship. But what does the story-making experience feel like from the learner's perspective? What can students tell us about the impact of these types of assignments on their learning? Student interviews about their story-making experiences provide insight into the gestalt of digital storytelling.

We will present learning outcomes from Science and Culture, an interdisciplinary course in a wireless laptop classroom. In-class activities involve pushing content out to individual laptops. Students process this content in groups and publish their results globally. This teaching technique, which greatly increases student engagement, will be demonstrated during this session.

Successful higher education e-learning environments exemplify clear alignment among seven factors: objectives, content, instructional design, learner tasks, instructor roles, technological affordances, and assessment. Objectives and assessment are commonly misaligned, but misalignments can be addressed using instructional designs focused on authentic tasks and assessments.

Engineering Informatics for Bio-Inspired Robots is an NSF-funded project trying to break down barriers to collaboration between engineering and computer science departments. Faculty members participating in the project are teaching the next generation of engineers and computer scientists to produce intelligent design by reaching across disciplines. The goal is to ensure that students are better prepared to tackle the multidisciplinary demands of the engineering and computing industries. As part of the project, participating institutions are leveraging cyberinfrastructure to share expertise, store research results, and advocate for multidisciplinary instruction, demonstrating the power of inter-institutional cooperation for teaching and learning.

CyberBridges trains graduate students how to use cyberinfrastructure (CI) -- a combination of computing systems, applications, and virtual organizations. Supported by NSF, CyberBridges hinges on the hypothesis that technical training of graduate students will not only lead to more rapid scientific discovery but will also trigger greater CI adoption in academic departments. Students are trained in networking and grid computing and then integrate what they have learned into their research to develop innovative tools or approaches. Due to the success of the initial program, CyberBridges has gone "global," involving students in China, Hong Kong, and Brazil.

Transformational faculty-development efforts must involve systematic, goal-directed, sustained activities that are integral to the daily work of academic community members.