Time: May 12, 10:30-11:45

Location: B124

No one said deprogramming would be easy.

Join other interested educators as we discuss ways break the co-dependent cycle created by a multiple choice testing upbringing. We’ll look at ways to scaffold creativity, to force deeper thinking, and to motivate students to take ownership of their own learning. Come prepared to discuss successes and failures on the road to creating students who are engaged and interested in more than a letter grade.

Time: May 12, 9:00-10:15

Location: B122

In the past two years, I have used short YouTube videos — between 4-6 minutes in length — in order to enhance my teaching. Accordingly, in this presentation, I would like to discuss the various uses of these videos in the literature classroom. In lower-level classes such as “Introduction to Literary Studies,” I have drawn on short interviews with prominent theorists or videos illustrating different critical approaches in order to connect abstract theories such as deconstruction or psychoanalysis with concrete examples of how they might be applied to literary or filmic narratives. In upper-level classes on Shakespeare or Renaissance literature, I have mined YouTube for stage and film adaptations of specific scenes from a play; for parodies of well-known plays, speeches, or dramatic texts; imaginative versions of an author’s life and work; and reflections on his or her influence on contemporary culture. In the classroom, YouTube has served as a rich resource for investigating the wide array of performative contexts that are available for studying a literary or dramatic narrative and, in doing so, has helped enhance my students’ understanding of a literary or theoretical work.

Time: May 11, 3:30-4:45

Location: B124

Omeka is a simple system used by scholarly archives, libraries, and museums all over the world to manage and describe digital images, audio files, videos, and texts; to put such digital objects online in a searchable database; and to create attractive web exhibits from them. In this introduction to Omeka, you’ll create your own digital archive of images, audio, video, and texts that meets scholarly metadata standards and creates a search engine-optimized website. We’ll go over the difference between the hosted version of Omeka and the open source server-side version of Omeka, and we’ll learn about the Dublin Core metadata standard for describing digital objects. We’ll also look at some examples of pedagogical use of Omeka in humanities courses and talk about assigning students to create digital archives in individual or
group projects.

Time: May 12, 10:30-11:45

Location: B122

Teaching a course that is usually done in a semester in a summer session with less than 20 meeting times offers a challenge. This past summer session a course about Internet technology, information, and issues was offered by taking a ’15 Things’ approach. Each meeting featured a feature of the Web. The course was also writing intensive and meets the general education requirement for ‘Global Inquiry.’ Content and student work was primarily done in UMWblogs. See http://theinternet.umwblogs.org for more information about the course.

Time: May 11, 11:15-12:30

Location: B122

During Fall 2010 I experimented with the use of PearNote to record and comment on student presentations in my Public Speaking class. PearNote records the video and audio and links typed comments to the point in the presentation when they were entered. I will talk about how PearNote works, how it functioned in the classroom during student presentations, and what the students thought of the final product. I will also discuss similar programs and apps that are currently available.

Time: May 11, 11:15-12:30

Location: B210

“How can we bring what’s happening over there over here?” – Global Engagement, Curriculum Development, and Digital Resources

This panel discussion will offer a group brainstorming session for those interested in finding new ways to incorporate global perspectives into university curriculum.

Starting points for the discussion:

- What resources (digital and otherwise) have we found for global studies — and for studies (sometimes phrased, albeit awkwardly, as “glocal”) that link our own sites and economies of being to the world beyond — whether in the social sciences, humanities, languages, environmental sciences, or other fields of inquiry?

- In what ways can we use these resources? E.g., as elements of curriculum, for research (undergrad and beyond), global networking, others? Methods of approach?

- Are there particular challenges that we encounter in the use of these tools and approaches? How might we identify, address, and/or make those challenges part of the project itself?

- Where do we go next?

Time: May 12, 10:30-11:45

Location: B122

Interactive white boards (IWB) and document cameras are now commonplace in a growing number of K-12 classrooms. Many of our incoming students will have seen this technology used on a daily basis and many will have used these tools themselves for creating presentations and reports for class assignments. Integrated document cameras are now starting to appear in a few UMW classrooms as new sympodiums are being installed. At this point though, there are only a few IWB. This presentation provides an introduction to this technology with suggestions for possible classroom use.