|
For 20 years, astronomy professor David Helfand has been fond of telling his students that the human eye can only perceive two of light's 50 "octaves."
But when he mentioned this analogy to staff at the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL), they responded, "We could probably show that -- with Beethoven's Ninth."
At a recent conference dedicated to promoting the use of new media in education, Helfand played Beethoven's Ninth first with all its glorious swells and complexities, then as CCNMTL's one-octave version.
"It only took a few hours for that 20-year-old analogy to turn into something everyone in my field could understand," Helfand said, going on to say that he'd received a standing ovation and hundreds of requests for the filtered song when he presented it at a recent astronomy convention.
Begun in March 1999, CCNMTL works closely with professors and other experts to develop teaching and research tools that aren't merely bells and whistles but that significantly enhance teaching and learning capabilities. The conference highlighted a number of the center's recent success stories, including interactive textbooks, multimedia glossaries, wikis, "case-based" online curricula and scaffolded "road maps," to name a few. Also featured were workshops on RSS feeds, blogging and podcasting -- this last under the auspices of Apple Computer, which helped to sponsor the event.
Addressing the topic of "partnership in educational innovation," Helfand said CCNTML's response to his electromagnetic spectrum analogy had so impressed him that he'd subsequently engaged the center in creating the " Frontiers of Science," a new science course in Columbia College's core curriculum.
CCNTML had been particularly innovative, he reported, in developing the online course text , Scientific Habits of Mind . Within the text are embedded what Helfand called "huh?" links. Students who don't understand a concept or equation can click on these links and see a detailed explanation displayed along the left side of the screen. Students who would be bored or slowed down by this level of exposition are free to breeze past it. Thanks to this feature, instructors now find it much easier to accommodate the range of abilities and interests among the course's more than 500 students each semester, Helfand observed.
Another significant innovation was the decision to integrate Helfand's online materials with CourseWorks, the University's course management system. This has allowed document sharing among students and faculty; it has also given the senior faculty and post-doctoral students running the classes the opportunity for close collaboration as the course progresses.
So far so good, Helfand said. Not only is attendance higher than usual compared to other core science courses, but the students seem more engaged. He believes that the course's online components have given them a "heightened sense of ownership and investment" -- an experience replicated by others who spoke.
Joining Helfand on the panel was journalism school vice dean David Klatell, who likewise had partnered with CCNMTL to develop a new pedagogical approach: a curriculum based on online case studies for a new M.A. in journalism.
Klatell proceeded to demonstrate the first project he'd worked on with CCNMTL: " Building the Front Page of the Washington Post," an interactive, multimedia case study examining the paper's decision-making process for placing front-page stories.
The experience had gone so well, Klatell said, that he has become an advocate for developing a set of standardized interactive case studies for teaching journalism -- a method he feels is superior to the "teaching by anecdote" common among journalism school professors, many of whom enter teaching late and without any prior experience.
The afternoon sessions were dedicated to showing the range of educational goals that are served by the new media -- from film to literature to histology. Richard Peña, an associate professor at the School of the Arts, demonstrated the online Film Language Glossary he'd developed with CCNMTL for use in the classroom. The glossary currently offers definitions for 67 film terms, accompanied by actual film clips (as opposed to stills), which students can watch and review at their leisure -- and then cite in their papers with greater precision.
Lisa Gordis, an associate professor in Barnard College 's English department, shared her experience of developing, with CCNMTL's assistance, the "Reading and Writing Women in Colonial America" wiki. A wiki, she explained, is a special kind of Web site that allows users to add and edit contents without previous Web design knowledge. Gordis said she encourages her students to use the wiki for posting their individual assignments and for engaging in collaborative writing projects. Right now, for instance, her students are developing an online version of the "commonplace book," a kind of journal kept by American colonial women containing collections of poetry, reflections, transcriptions of letters and anything else that interested them.
Letty Moss-Salentijn, senior associate dean for academic affairs at the School of Dental and Oral Surgery, told of her collaboration with the center to develop the Image Annotation Tool (IAT), an online workspace for her histology classes. Dental students now have the option to take her class, Moss-Salentijn said, using either microscopes or the IAT. The latter allows them to annotate the slides and then clear them as a means of testing their memory. They can also print the slides out with their annotations to use as study aids.
This semester, 67 of 75 students have chosen the IAT, Moss-Salentijn reported, largely because they could access the database from anywhere at their leisure.
In the conference's final session, CCNMTL's executive director, Frank Moretti, explained that the center is now making efforts to use new media for applying the University's research to the needs of the broader community. Joining Moretti on the panel was Susan Witte, an associate professor at the School of Social Work , who has collaborated with CCNMTL to develop Multimedia Connect, an online, multimedia representation of her AIDS intervention training program.
Witte described the work the Center had performed to help her develop a computerized "road map" for her relationship-based approach to AIDS intervention. The result has been the creation of an online-directed learning environment, which allows counselors in training to follow all the steps through the computer and ask questions as they go along.
Both Moretti and Witte said they hope that Multimedia Connect can become a model for other researchers performing work in community settings.
For the conference agenda and write-ups on each of the sessions, go to http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/nme2006/agenda.html
Podcast Away!
Several weeks ago, Letty Moss-Salentijn, a dean at the School of Dental and Oral Surgery, provided one of the University's first podcast lectures, a discussion about the formation of the lower jaw.
This meant that her students had the option of sitting on the subway and listening to her lecture on their tiny Apple iPods as a means of supplementing their classroom experience -- which, as far as Moss-Salentijn is concerned, is a major step forward.
Maurice Matiz, director of technology at CNMTL, agreed. While some professors at other universities have complained that class attendance dropped after offering lectures as podcasts, he said he doesn't anticipate the new service becoming a replacement for classes.
Noting that videos of lectures have been available online for years, he said that podcasting provides the additional advantage of allowing students to "focus on content in a way that's impossible on a laptop, where you've got different programs distracting you."
Podcasts also offer a mechanism for "subscribing" to an ongoing series of audios or videos, which can download automatically to a portable player once it is connected to a host computer.
"We really see this as a way to liberate classrooms from the necessity of providing one-to-many communication," said Frank Moretti, CNMTL's executive director.
"Professors will always need to transmit information to their students in a direct fashion," he said, "but if that can happen elsewhere, then class time can become more flexible, and face-to-face meetings between teachers and students can become more dynamic." |
