Tag Archives: Liaisons

Electronic Note-taking and Grading Workshop Summary

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Jason Mittell (Film & Media Culture), James Morrison (Political Science) and myself lead a workshop for faculty on taking notes and grading digital documents yesterday that was well attended (see: Moving Away from Paper: Useful Practices for Electronic Note-taking and Grading Assignments).

Jason and James described how they assigned and collected students papers.  Both used email as the primary means of collecting assignments from students for the following reasons:

  • emails are timestamped providing a simple way to ensure deadlines are met
  • email provides a single place to archive records of all papers
  • email ensures a definitive version of student work

James and Jason differed in the format they required their students to submit assignments and the tool they used to annotate and grade these assignments.  Read more about their annotation and grading workflow on the Teaching with Technology blog (see: Moving Away from Paper: Annotating and Grading Digital Documents – Jason Mittell & James Morrison)

Both James and Jason have also had their student use Google Docs for collaborative projects.  Unfortunately Google Docs does not support footnotes so that is cannot be used as a tools for writing scholarly papers.  That said, Google Docs may be a good tool for creative writing classes or for language classes.

Moving Away from Paper: Useful Practices for Electronic Note-taking and Grading Assignments

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The Faculty LIS Advisory Committee (FLAC) is sponsoring a workshop for faculty on taking notes and grading digital documents.  This workshop will be taught by Jason Mittell (Film & Media Culture), James Morrison (Political Science) and myself and will present some common tools and practices for inserting comments and notes into Word and PDF documents as well as Google Docs.  Here are details:

Moving Away from Paper: Useful Practices for Electronic Note-taking and Grading Assignments
4:30 – 5:30 pm, Feb 22nd
Axinn 219

This workshop coincides with the introduction of printing quotas (see: Notice to students about new printing system) and has the objective of outlining the benefits and limitations of a completely digital workflow as well as getting a sense of what kinds of tools faculty need to provide feedback and evaluate student assignments.

An email announcement about the workshop has been sent out to all faculty.  Faculty interested in participating in this workshop are encouraged to fill out a workshop form that will help us gauge interest and provide the opportunity to request specific topics.

The Middlebury Blog Network

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The “Blogging at Middlebury” blog has been renamed “The Middlebury Blog Network” and is now using the Translucence theme.  As well, it has been reconfigured to aggregate selected posts from the Midd blogosphere.  Blog owners interested in having their blogs listed on this site currently need to contact Joe Antonioli.

New WordPress Themes

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New WordPress themes have been added to WordPress at Middlebury.  This blog has been updated to use Translucence, an interpretation of theme designs drafted by White Whale as part of the Web Redo project.

Translucence, like ShadowBox, is a theme series that includes a number of variations and options for layout.  This blog is currently configured to use a flexible width such that the width of the blog will vary with the size of your browser window.  As well, it is configured to include  2 right sidebars (instead of a single left and right sidebar).

Feedback/comments/suggestions welcome.

Academic Consulting Services (ACS) Information Literacy Goal

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Goal Statement (The What?)

Document and assess ACS’s current student information literacy (IL) efforts and methods and identify areas (if any) needing improvement or alternatives in order to meet or exceed NEASC accreditation standards (especially standard 7: Library and other information resources and standard 4.6) and plan for future initiatives or IL curricular integration. Continue reading →

Some library statistics – needed? On new site?

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I currently maintain two types of monthly statistics.

In the folder O:\ORGS\LIS\LISstaff\ILS III Millennium User Materials\EZProxy statistics you can see stats relating to useage of on-line resources through EZProxy. These are in the form of a bunch of .html files accessed through an index file I’ve named +START HERE 2009.html.

The other is a spreadsheet of the record counts and numbers for the various record types in the III database. O:\ORGS\LIS\LISstaff\ILS Implementation-III\III record counts.xls

If anyone uses these, they should be accessed somehow through the new website. Or they can be abolished as a “not to do” task.  Anybody care one way or the other?

Preview of Next Version of Shadowbox Theme

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I attended part of the LIS website team meeting today and gave a presentation of the ShadowBox theme and some of the new features that will be available in the next version including updates to author pages, more custom header options and most importantly, higher contrast text in comment fields.  I also gave a preview of some new ShadowBox variations based on the new college website design.  Below is a screencast from that meeting:

[middmedia achapin achapin shadowbox-lis.mp4]