Tag Archives: Academic Consulting Services

Faculty Innovators Tell Us What They Need

Our first priority with the Segue from Segue project is to make sure there are technology solutions available to meet the needs of as many faculty, students and staff as possible. That said, we would like to also be able to support innovative uses of technology, particularly those innovations that may eventually be useful to the broader community.

To this end, the Curricular Technology team invited a number of faculty who are innovators to show us how they have been using technology and tell us what they need.  Faculty who participated included Jeff Byers (Chemistry and Biochemistry), Hector Vila (CTLR), Enrique Garcia (Spanish), Hope Tucker (Film and Media Culture) and Roberto Veguez (Spanish).  A number of academic liaisons also participated in this session.  To learn more about what these faculty have been doing, see:

Segue from Segue » Presentations by Faculty Innovators

New Teaching with Technology Case Studies

Carrie Macfarlane has recently added two new posts to the Teaching with Technology blog on case studies she has done with faculty in the Biology department.  The first is on an evolution simulation model developed by Matt Landis for his course on “Ecology and Evolution” (BIOL0140).  The other is on the use of wireless projection by Chris Watters in his class on “Human Nutrition from an Evolutionary Perspective” (BIOL0222).

For Women’s History Month: an Online Resource

In honor of Women’s History Month (March), you might want to visit the Library’s online subscription to: Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000.

This is a resource for students and scholars of U.S. history and U.S. women’s history. Organized around the history of women in social movements in the U.S. between 1600 and 2000, the collection  currently includes 91 document projects and archives with more than 3,600 documents and 150,000 pages of additional full-text documents, and more than 2,060 primary authors. It also includes book, film, and website reviews, notes from the archives, and teaching tools.

Electronic Note-taking and Grading Workshop Summary

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

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

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.