Segue from Segue: Open Sessions

The Curricular Technology team has scheduled a number of open sessions on the Segue from Segue project in Library 145.  Here are the dates and times:

  • 10:00 – 10:30, Monday August 2nd
  • 1:00 – 1:30, Tuesday, August 3th
  • 4:00 – 4:30, Wednesday, August 4th
  • 3:00 – 3:30, Thursday, August 5th

These sessions are an opportunity for you to tell us about the kinds of technologies for teaching, learning and research you think Middlebury should invest in.  We particularly encourage Language School faculty to stop by and give us feedback about your use of technology for teaching languages.

We will also discuss some of the ideas we have for alternatives to Segue including Moodle, Drupal, WordPress, Google Sites and MediaWiki.

Segue and Language Schools

The Language Schools have long been innovative users of technology.  Indeed Segue was initially developed to support the creation of web sites in other languages, particularly less commonly taught languages that use non-Latin characters such as Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and Russian.  We also designed Segue to support a wide range of language learning resources including images, audio and video and provide a simply way to download these media files to mobile devices such as iPods and iPhones using really simple syndication (RSS).  Finally, we did our best to make it easy to copy sites created in previous semesters for use in the current semester and to assign others, both individuals and groups, roles on any site.

Some of the ways in which the Language Schools have used Segue are documented in our usage analysis (see: Language Learning Resources and Audio Capture).  Language Schools have also made extensive use of Measure, our instance of Moodle, for placement, entrance and exit exams (see: Student Assessment).  As we research alternatives to Segue we will be certain to recommend tools to support these types of usage.

Many Language School faculty have filled out our technology needs survey which has also helped us understand how Language Schools use technology.  In the next couple of weeks the Curricular Technology team will be holding a number of open sessions for any faculty to stop by and describe their particular technology needs and tools that they have used and think would be useful for Middlebury to invest in.

We encourage anybody in the Middlebury community to tell us what they need in the following ways:

  • Email us at LISCurricularTechnologyTeam@middlebury.edu
  • Vote on existing technology ideas/suggestions or add your own
  • Complete any of our ancillary surveys
  • Comment on any post on this blog

James Morrison on Lecture Capture

The Curricular Technology team organized a number of sessions with faculty innovators to find how they were using technology (see: Presentations by Faculty Innovators).  More recently, the team invited James Morrison, Assistant Professor of Political Science, to do a presentation on how he creates podcasts of his lectures.

Prof. Morrison uses a USB-powered label mic that he plugs into his laptop.  He is currently using GarageBand to record audio.  Typically, he’ll make a copy of a previous lecture podcast to preserve the metadata and intro and outro audio.   When he’s done recording a class lecture, he can then simply update the title, date and description and adjust the positioning of outro audio.  The audio file can then be exported and uploaded to his course site.

Here are links to some of his podcasts:

International Political Economy (Fall 09)
International Politics (Spring 2010)