Watch Videos about Experiments in Teaching at St. Edward’s University

Curious about what your colleagues are up to in the classroom? Looking for some new ideas for next semester?  Check out this playlist of two-minute videos from the “Experiments in Teaching” faculty innovation showcase held Friday, October 24th.

Want to try your own experiment? Consider applying for an Innovation Fellowship or Technology for Innovative Learning & Teaching Pilot Project Grant.

Presenters Announced for Experiments in Teaching

Green lightningJoin the Center for Teaching Excellence, Instructional Technology, and the Munday library for lightning talks and a discussion on pedagogical experiments, Friday, October 24, 3-5 pm in the North Reading Room (Library 137), Munday Library.

We invite all teaching faculty (full-time, adjuncts, and staff who teach), staff, and administrators to join us for talks and a reception celebrating pedagogical experiments on campus. Featuring a wide variety of St. Edward’s faculty members making brief presentations about their innovative teaching projects, “Experiments in Teaching” will explore the range of teaching initiatives at St. Edward’s University and the models they afford our teaching community. We aim to create a venue for colleagues to share the challenges and successes of teaching innovation. The event will be an open reception with food, drink, and “lightning” talks, followed by informal conversation among all participants.

Presenters will use the brief lightning talk format to share a “teaser” for their project then be available for more conversation. Lightning talks will begin at 3:30 pm and include the following faculty and topics:

John Abbott | Using the Citizen Science Website iNaturalist In and Out of the Classroom

Alex Barron | Service Learning in Bangladesh

Peter Beck | Teaching a field research course at Wild Basin

Mary Brantl & Charles Porter | Endurance & Excitement: 2012’s Enduring Women

Monica Cicciarelli | Teaching with a Tablet and Screen Video Capture

Billy Earnest | The iPad-enabled Classroom: Results & Recommendations

Jennifer K. Greene | A Citizenship-Centered Capstone Model

Raelynn Deaton Haynes | Food for Thought: Teaching Marine Conservation through the Eyes of Biodiversity and the Mouths of Students

Kendall Kelly | Bringing the World to Austin: Using the GDC to Create a Global Classroom

Judy Leavell and David Hollier | Anticipating Teachers’ Futures with iPad Technology

I. Moriah McCracken | Teaching Writing with Online, Self-Directed Resources

Jeff Potratz | Hodge Podge: Google Forms, Annotated Answer Keys,’Screen Capture’ Videos, and Pre-Lab Videos

Mark Poulos & Angel Tazzer | The value of classroom teamwork assignments: Is it to reduce the amount of time we spend in grading or is it to prepare students to work well with other colleagues in their future endeavors?

Jason Rosenblum | Gameful learning in Global Social Problems : Fostering impact through experiential engagement

Georgia Seminet | Real Time Quizzing, Polling and Assessment in Class Using Socrative

Tricia Shepherd | POGIL – focusing on both what (content) and how (process) using guided inquiry team based learning

Michael Wasserman | A Travis County Almanac: Using Nature Blogs to Connect Students to Their Local Environment

Pre-register for the event: http://ow.ly/BN5hy

We hope to see you there!

Experiments in Teaching –Save the Date!

save the date

Please mark your calendars for:

Friday, October 24, 3-5 pm
North Reading Room (Library 137), Munday Library

Co-sponsored by the Center for Teaching Excellence, Instructional Technology, and the Munday Library

We invite all teaching faculty (full-time, adjuncts, and staff who teach), staff, and administrators to join us for talks and a reception celebrating pedagogical experiments on campus. Featuring a wide variety of St. Edward’s faculty members making brief presentations about their innovative teaching projects, “Experiments in Teaching” will explore the range of teaching initiatives at St. Edward’s University and the models they afford our teaching community. We aim to create a venue for colleagues to share the challenges and successes of teaching innovation. The event will be an open reception with food, drink, and “lightning” talks, followed by informal conversation among all participants. Presenters will use the brief lightning talk format to share a “teaser” for their project then be available for more conversation. Lightning talks will begin at 3:30 pm.

Pre-register for the event: http://ow.ly/BN5hy

We hope to see you there!

Designing Digital Projects

Travis county AlmanacOn Thursday, August 21, Pongracz Sennyey and Rebecca Frost Davis will co-lead a session at the Teaching Symposium, 10:30 – 11:30 am in JBWS 261:

Designing Course-based, Student-faculty Collaborative Research Projects Using Digital Tools

In the 21st century we face complex problems that cross disciplines and require collaborative approaches. Digital tools and information networks make it feasible to design project-based learning experiences that integrate students into the research process. This presentation will provide examples of how such projects, when integrated into courses, help students develop skills to work collaboratively, apply appropriate tools, and learn flexible problem-solving skills.

Slides

During the session, participants will use this checklist to plan a digital project: Process Checklist for Integrating Digital Humanities Projects into Courses

Projects

Travis County Almanac, Michael Wasserman, Assistant Professor, Environmental Science & Policy

Latin 323: Tacitus, Professor Rebecca Benefiel, Department of Classics, Washington and Lee University

Wheaton College Digital History Project, Kathryn Tomasek, Associate Professor of History, Wheaton College

Enduring Women, Mary Brantl, Associate Professor, Visual Studies & Charles Porter, Assistant Professor, University Studies

Opportunities

Interested in getting your students into local archives? Check out the

Austin Archives Bazaar http://www.austinarchivesbazaar.org/

Teaching Symposium 2014: A Conference on College Teaching

Word cloud with largest text: classroom, global, digital, teachingInterested in how technology is being used in classes at St. Edward’s?  The Teaching Symposium will host a number of sessions that illustrate innovative uses of technology by faculty. This peer-reviewed teaching and learning conference organized by the Center for Teaching Excellence and the Teaching Symposium Planning Committee will be held in on Thursday, August 21, from 8:30 – 4:00 pm in John Brooks William South.  This year’s conference features a variety of formats for learning and interacting, including an opening plenary session, short and long presentations and interactive sessions, roundtable discussions, a poster session, and a resource fair.

 

Highlighted Sessions Featuring Innovative Uses of Technology

  • Designing Course-Based, Student-Faculty Collaborative Research Projects Using Digital Tools – Rebecca Frost Davis, Instructional Technology and Pongracz Sennyey, Munday Library
  • Teaching in the Global Digital Classrooms: Lessons Learned and Tips for Success – Michael Weston, Instructional Technology, David Altounian, Digital Media Management, Rebecca Frost Davis, Instructional Technology, Kendall Kelly, English, Writing, and Rhetoric, Kay Firth-Butterfield, Criminal Justice
  • Innovative Teaching with Technology: Utilizing Social Media and E-Communication in the Classroom — Monique Mercado, Psychology
  • The iPad-Equipped Classroom: Results from Two TLTR-funded Pilots – Billy Earnest, Communication, Judy Leavell, Education, David Hollier, Education
  • Three Ways You Can Elevate and Energize In-Class Discussions with Clickers – Michael Weston, Instructional Technology
  • The Syria Simulation and Global Learning Assessment—Chistopher Micklethwait, Literature, Writing, and Rhetoric, Mity Myhr, History, Jason Rosenblum, Digital Media Management, Christie Sample Wilson, History, Selin Guner, Global Studies, David Blair, Institutional Assessment
  • Using Rap Genius: How to Make Annotating Sources Engaging, Effective and Even Fun! – Amy Nathan Wright, University Studies

The complete conference program is available on the Teaching Symposium site.

Please visit Instructional Technology at the Resource Fair  during the Symposium.  We’ll answer questions, talk about opportunities such as the Innovation Fellowship, and discuss your instructional technology needs.

Reflections on a Text Analysis Assignment

In Spring 2013, I taught LAT312K: Intermediate Latin at the University of Texas-Austin.  This was the fourth and last required course in the Latin sequence at UT and focused on Vergil’sAeneid.

Word Cloud

Word Cloud of a Translation of Vergil’s Aeneid

The course functioned both as a cap to a student’s Latin experience (several of my students were graduating seniors finishing off their required courses) and a gateway into advanced study of Latin literature and culture for Classics majors.  One of my goals in the course was introducing students to a variety of approaches scholars take to the study of Latin literature in general and Vergil’s Aeneid in particular. This goal allowed me to include a digital humanities element in the course by having my students experiment with digital methodologies.  One such assignment focused on text analysis.  I include the assignment below, as well as my reflections on how this pedagogical experiment went.

Assignment Directions

Text Analysis

For most of this semester we have been focusing on a close reading of Latin.  Now we’re going to try distant reading.  You can find our more about this idea here:

Schulz, Kathryn. “The Mechanic Muse – What Is Distant Reading?” The New York Times, June 24, 2011, sec. Books / Sunday Book Review. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/books/review/the-mechanic-muse-what-is-distant-reading.html.

For this discussion you are going to play with distant reading Vergil’s Aeneid in English:

1. Read “What is Text Analysis?”: http://tada.mcmaster.ca/Main/WhatTA

2. Play with Text Analysis tools here: http://voyant-tools.org/

a. Find out more about Voyant Tools using the TAPOR Portal (http://www.tapor.ca/) by doing a search for Voyant.  Note that some tools have basis descriptions while others have reviews with more information on how to use them. Pick one tool to play with that you think might be useful in analyzing the Aeneid.  Please explain why you picked this tool.

b. Find a text of the Aeneid in English.

Try project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/v#a129

Be sure to note who the translator is. (see the bibrec tab)

c. Try at least one Voyant tool and compare and contrast the experience of using it to doing a close reading of the text. How useful might this type of analysis be for analyzing the Aeneid? What challenges do you see with this methodology?

Reflections

Kolb's Learning Cycle

Kolb’s Learning Cycle

This assignment was completed outside of class, with students sharing their results in an online discussion board.  Then, we followed our online discussion with an in-class discussion aimed at synthesizing findings and analysis from the online discussion and reflecting on the overall experience. This sequence was designed to follow Kolb’s learning cycle, with students trying out what they had learned about the Aeneid by experimenting with text analysis, leading to a concrete experience, then reflecting on that experience in the online discussion, and using the in-class discussion to draw conclusions from the learning experience.  In the in-class discussion I wanted my students  to come to the abstract concept of considering how digital tools might change interpretive practice.  Linking the online and in class discussions also follows principles of good blended learning design in laying out clear links between in and out of class activities.  In class discussion expanded online discussion rather than repeating it. Admittedly, I’m writing my own reflection many months later, but in my opinion I’d say this overall assignment was a partial success. Students were able to complete the assignment–both using the tools and writing the online discussion–but for the most part they did not fall in love with text analysis.  Still, our discussion in class did include reflection on issues of digital scholarship and revealed some insights into the text that they gained from the experience.

What Went Wrong or What I Would Change If I Did This Again

I was disappointed that these students didn’t fall in love with digital methodologies.  I think I fell prey to the fallacy that I often warn faculty members about–just because it is digital doesn’t mean students will like it.  The overall assignment needed better framing to explain why they might use text analysis.  I did try to give them some context for distant reading and chose a NY Times article on digital humanities rather than a more specialized digital humanities article because I wanted them to have an accessible text.  I think, however, that the article was more negative than I remembered and some students picked up on those negative parts, proclaiming how much they loved close reading and interpretation and how bad distance reading was.  (The next week I assigned an article that was a beautiful example of close reading and interpretation–some students criticized that reading because they felt the author pushed the interpretation too far.  Then I realized my students were good humanists trained to critique whatever they read.) If I did this assignment again, I would provide the general framing in class and assign only an informational article focused specifically on text analysis as a methodology, e.g., Geoffrey Rockwell’s “What is Text Analysis?”  While the debate on the limitations of distant reading is a good one for students to consider, it was also somewhat of a distraction when they hadn’t even tried any sort of computer-assisted text analysis.

I also framed this assignment very much as an experiment and let their own inclinations guide their choice of tool.  I wanted them to use the TAPOR portal so they would learn about it as a resource for the future.  I also wanted to introduce an element of play into the class.  Some of the students chose tools that were less successful than others, so for future assignments I might instead suggest that they choose from a pre-determined set of tools.  If this were a different class, I might also include this exercise in a sequence of assignments to scaffold engagement with computer-assisted text analysis.

I think my discussion prompt also unintentionally invites criticism more than a discussion of value.  In asking, “How useful might this type of analysis be . . .” and “What challenges . . . ” I set myself up for some negative answers.  Based on my past teaching experience, I know that students of the Classics can be very conservative when it comes to technology–after all the discipline of Classics does privilege old things.  From the point of view of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, even the codex is a new-fangled invention, not to mention the digital text.  While resources like the Perseus Project demonstrate the early engagement of Classics in humanities computing, in the undergraduate curriculum this project is often represented as a resource for texts (a tool for consumption) more than as a tool for analysis (a tool for “generative scholarship” to use Ed Ayers’ term).  In other words, undergraduate students of classics can be even more disinclined to think in terms of digital methodologies for scholarship.  Though my students mostly brought digital devices to class–laptops, tablets, smart phones–and used them to read our Latin text and take notes, they had not had much practice in using such tools for humanities research (which was, after all, the point of my assignment).  Overall, then, I would say I needed to provide more positive framing for this assignment–I misjudged how much I needed to “sell” digital scholarship to my students.  In the future I might also start from the tools for analysis built into  the Perseus Project, with which they were already familiar rather than Voyant Tools.  I had chosen Voyant because of the potential application outside of Classics, but a tool built for Classicists might have been an easier sell.

What Went Right

Despite my dissatisfaction with the results, I do think this assignment was valuable for a number of reasons.  First of all, it exposed my students to a methodology of digital scholarship that they might otherwise never have tried.  At least one student said that he liked it because it made more sense to him than close reading and interpretation.  This reaction demonstrates how quantitative approaches to the humanities can be a bridge to students trained in more quantitative disciplines like the sciences.

The most valuable tools for my students seemed to have been Voyant Cirrus andVoyant Links. Both of these confirmed themes that we had already discussed for the Aeneid.  Still, that experience validates the tools rather than offering the new insights I wanted students to gain.

A more interesting insight came from an unexpected place.  I was having students analyze translations of the Aeneid (an admittedly flawed approach–in a perfect world they would be analyzing the Latin texts), so some of these insights were based more on the translator than the work of Vergil.  I intentionally did not explain how to use stop words (common words like “the”, “and”, “of”, etc., that should be excluded from analysis) because I wanted to see if my students would figure out on their own that this is one challenge of doing text analysis.  Some of them did and used the the tool directions to discover how to exclude those words.  Other students didn’t use stop words and had some interesting grammatical insights.  Because prepositions hadn’t been excluded they noticed how prevalent the words “to”, “for”, “from”, and “by” are in translations of theAeneid.  As it happens, these prepositions can be used to translate the dative or ablatives cases from Latin.  While I had been drilling them on datives and ablatives for much of the semester, this exercise really drove home to them how important it was that they memorize the various uses of these grammatical cases.  Perhaps this insight also just confirms something they should have known already, but it gave them empirical evidence–they didn’t have to just take my word for it.  For this insight alone it might be worth it for students to do some text analysis of the Aeneid at the beginning of the semester rather than later.  They might also compare multiple translations of the Aeneid by using text analysis without having to read all of them–a truly distant reading–to get an initial look at what themes might emerge.

Learning Outcomes

I would definitely do such an assignment again if I were teaching the same class.  With some of the changes I suggested above, I hope it would be more successful.  And, whether my students love digital scholarship or not, I still think it is important to expose them to these new methodologies.  Even if they do not become professional digital humanists, as Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell have argued,

From search engine indexing to sophisticated methods of literary analysis, the computer has become an indispensable tool in dealing with the massive influx of digitized textual data in our information age. Liberal arts students need to understand automated methods of text analysis because they underlie how we find, use, and share information today.

Finally, for humanists and scientists alike computer-assisted text analysis affords a different way to look at a text one that might yield insights not easily realized by traditional methods of close-reading.

More Resources and Sample Assignments for Text Analysis

I’ve covered text analysis in many workshops introducing digital humanities.  Here are some other resources, sample assignments, and ideas for using text analysis.

Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell. “Teaching Computer-Assisted Text Analysis: Approaches to Learning New Methodologies.” Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics, ed. Brett Hirsch. Open Book Publishers, 2013, pp. 241-254.

Sample Assignments

Wordle: http://www.wordle.net/

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

Ideas for using Wordle

  • Use wordle on an assignment text to pull out key issues and themes. (by student in writing class)
  • Use wordle on a paper to make sure the right themes are emphasized. (by writing instructor)
  • Use wordle on text survey results to find hidden themes.

Digital Reading Practices for the Liberal Arts Classroom

IAnnotate screenshot

Reading and Annotating on My iPad with iAnnotate PDF

Today I’m leading a Tech Snack at. St. Edward’s University on “Digital Reading Practices for the Liberal Arts Classroom.”  Tech Snacks bring together faculty members, instructional technology staff, and others at St. Edward’s University to discuss the pedagogical uses of various technologies.  This tech snack will look at ways that reading has changed in the digital age.  My title is borrowed from a NITLE Seminar I organized last year in which  Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell introduced the NITLE community to computer-assisted text analysis via Voyant Tools.  When I first proposed this topic, I imagined that I would discuss how I had tried an assignment built around this methodology for the intermediate Latin class on Vergil’s Aeneid that I taught last Spring.  I still plan on sharing this example as a way of exploring how computers can offer a different way into the close reading that we typically teach in the literature classroom. That is, computer-assisted text analysis is one of the new methodologies championed by the digital humanities community.  But, I also want to spend some time discussing how we might continue traditional reading practices in a digital environment.  How do we translate our analog, print reading practices into a digital world and what other affordances might that environment offer?

Earlier this year at our tech snack on mobile devices we ended up focusing on the challenges of reading digitally and replicating print reading practices like highlighting and annotation.  One key challenge for students is that there is not a magic bullet in terms of platforms for reading nor even an agreed upon standard to allow for interoperability.  I use a variety of tools depending on medium and type of reading (I also documented my reading practices in this earlier post: How Humanists Read and Why We Need a Better (Electronic) Reading Ecosystem):

  • Diigo (http://www.diigo.com) for highlighting and annotating the web and saving bookmarks in the cloud with added tags, so I can find them later on any device.
  • iAnnotatePDF (http://www.branchfire.com/iannotate/): For reading, highlighting, and taking notes on my iPad.
  • Kindle for reading on my iPad and iPhone (I don’t usually use highlights).
  • Zotero for tracking bibliography  in the cloud with added tags, so I can find entries later on any device.  I sometimes export notes from iAnnotate and add them to these records.
  • Evernote (http://evernote.com/) for notes from meetings  in the cloud with added tags, so I can find them later on any device.  I can also clip articles (with annotation) from the web, add tags, and same them to notebooks, but I’m not ready to replace diigo with evernote.  I can also forward emails to a notebook with tags.  Since much of my work is done via email and meetings, this platform comes closest to aggregating all I need.
  • Instapaper (http://www.instapaper.com/) for saving online articles to read later, but I have a bad habit of never getting time to read these.

Most of my reading is done individually and requires ways for me to find things (articles, notes, etc.) later when I need it for some project, talk, workshop, etc.  I hope that today’s discussion will get at some of the reading practices we are trying to inculcate in students.  What should our learning goals be for student reading practices?  I’ll share results from today’s tech snack.

Social Annotation

I also hope we spend some time discussing social annotation because 44% of St. Edward’s faculty who responded to this fall’s survey on Academic Innovation reported that they do not use social annotation but would like to. (Of course, this was also one of the technologies that faculty members also reported they were least familiar with.)  The ability to read  and annotate collaboratively in real time is one of the affordances offered by a digital medium.

Here are some tools I know about for social annotation: