2013 Symposium on Teaching and Learning

Ninth Annual SUNY-Oswego Symposium on Learning and Teaching:
Digital Humanities

October 11 and 12, 2013

Registration is available here.

Friday, October 11

• 12:30 - 2 pm - Campus Center 114 - Luncheon reception for Lisa Glidden and Steve Granelli, the recipients of the President's Award for Excellence in Academic Advisement. (The luncheon will cost $10 per person.)

• 4:00 pm - 5 pm - 132 Campus Center (Auditorium) Keynote address by Lisa Dethridge: "Collaborative Online Learning between Oswego and Australia: the Transhumanism Project."
  Lisa Dethridge has worked as a research analyst for NASA, the UN Secretariat, and for Telstra and Telecom Australia. She recently designed story worlds and scripts for the multi-user virtual environment Second Life for clients including Telstra Big Pond and ABC TV. She is a cofounder of RMIT's islands in Second Life. Has 20 years' experience researching, writing, and producing for web, film, television, radio, theatre, print and telecoms in Australia and the United States.
  
  
• dinner off-campus. If you are interested in joining our guest speaker, contact celt@oswego.edu
  
  

 Saturday, October 12 

• 9:00 - 9:30 am - coffee, bagels, and informal discussion (no charge for those attending from SUNY-Oswego) - CC 114

• 9:30 am - 11:30 - workshop on "Design Issues for Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Worlds"  lead by Lisa Dethridge - CC 114 - A substantial portion of this workshop, co-presented with Damian Schofield, will examine how international collaborative work can be undertaken. This will involve a discussion of their collaborative work on one of SUNY-Oswego's first COIL courses as well as a discussion of other forms  of international collaboration.

• 11:45 - 12:45 - lunch - pizza and soda/water (no charge for those attending from SUNY-Oswego) - CC 114

Sessions on Learning and Teaching
1:00 - 1:18 - Rebecca Mushtare - "Student Collaborations with the Community: Considerations of Quality, Attribution, and Longevity " - CC 210

Community based learning opportunities are great "real world" experiences for students to apply what they are learning in the classroom into an interdisciplinary context. The focus of this discussion will be on designing projects that involve students working out in the world in a way that (a) there are safeguards for the students and the community collaborators that allow for students to fail safely and learn from their mistakes, (b) ensures that all collaborators are appropriately credited for their work, and (c) allows for the project to continue and evolve after the students move on.

1:20 - 1:38 - Christine Hirsch - "Internet Memes as Teaching Tools" - CC 210

This presentation examines the integrating of social media across curriculum as it focuses on using internet memes as discussion prompts and teaching tools.

1:20 - 1:38 - Doug Hemphill - "Who Needs a Textbook" - CC 211

Textbooks have long been the baseline of many college courses. They offer a number of advantages to faculty by providing a structure to work off of, a wealth of material available to students (sometimes offered in more depth than in the classroom), and more and more they offer additional resources such as test banks, prepared PowerPoints, and online aids. However, for all that, the text book itself has changed very little, it is still a block of text with some examples and pictures scattered through that costs students large sums of money. If faculty can step away from the comforts, convenience, and ease offered by traditional text books they will discover that the tools and resources are available to offer a broader, more engaging, and stronger educational resource to students, at no cost to the student or faculty member. This presentation will be looking at the openly available resources and tools that were used in the offering of an online Introduction to Physics course. For those particularly interested in Physics we will briefly looks at labs carried out with readily available home materials. Furthermore, those who are not interested in giving up their textbook will still find useful information on how to enhance personal lectures and material they want to offer alongside their textbook. Some specific resources that will be looked at are the advanced use of Adobe Acrobat, YouTube, and Khan Academy.

1:40 - 2:00 -  Sharity Bassett, Marie Romano, Lillie Ghobrial, Michael Evans, and Carolina C. Ilie- "Native American Women and Women in Physics" - CC 210

Though there are numerous initiatives to recruit and retain both Native American women into higher education, and women in general into the field of physics, rates of success are limited. Trying to improve percentages alone does not do enough to transform western institutions of higher learning into spaces of inclusivity for race and gender. The transformations that are taking place within the academy to these ends come from women of diverse backgrounds themselves. This poster will give examples of initiatives meant to increase recruitment and retention of women in physics, as well as Native American women into the academy in general. Alongside these important initiatives, this poster will demonstrate the ways women in physics are carving a home for themselves and shaping epistemologies and Native American women are 'Indigenizing the Academy.'

2:05 - 2:55 - Emily Thompson -" Support for Multimedia Assignments" - CC 210

Have you been thinking about adding a multimedia assignment to one of your classes, but aren't sure where to start? Are you worried about how to support such an assignment without adding too much to your workload? Penfield Library can help!

This workshop will discuss the resources the library has to support student multimedia creation, including iPods, Flip Cameras, microphones, and a librarian who will do instruction in how to use them!

2:05 - 2:55 - David Vampola - "A New Perspective for the Liberal Arts - Digital Humanities as a Pedagogical Paradigm for Teaching and Learning " - CC 211

The sprawling and ever-growing domain of what has been termed in the scholarly community as "digital humanities" can be divided into the subfields of information humanities, computational humanities and cognitive humanities. Aspects of information humanities involve techniques of data management (such as the encoding of text into electronic form) and the retrieval of digitally stored texts. But beyond these aspects, information humanities, like the related field of "information arts", also incorporates features found in the area of digital media that can lead to the introduction of hypertext and multimedia into the "artifacts" of the humanities. The activities associated with computational humanities center on algorithms that analyze and model data pertaining to the liberal arts and the use of abstract data structures (such as queues, lists and trees) that facilitate these operations. With respect to the cognitive dimension, model building and interpretation in the digital humanities can be aided by an understanding of the relationship between processes of thought (including emotions) and their products in the forms of artistic productions, literary creations, and other human activities. Finally, in addition to the practices found in the informational, computational and cognitive dimensions is the "critical enterprise" that provides broad appraisal of the methods and goals of the digital humanities.

This presentation will explore ways that the theories and practices associated with the domains of information, computation, cognition and critical appraisal in the digital humanities can inform both pedagogical processes within institutions of higher learning and, more broadly, the acquisition of knowledge within the cultural sphere of the liberal arts. In particular, key activities associated with learning and teaching -such as creativity, logical/mathematical reasoning, metacognition and critical thinking - will be explored in relation to each of these domains of the digital humanities.

3:00 - 3:50 - Natalie Shubert, Jason Zenor, Jennifer Knapp, and Gary Ritzenthaler - "Harassment and Technology in the Classroom" - CC 210

Harassment and technology in the classroom: Managing social media's presence in higher education. This panel discussion will review current issues found at the intersection of social media tools, student/instructor interaction, and sexual harassment from classroom management and First Amendment perspectives.

3:00 - 3:50 - Roger S. Taylor and Eric Olson - "'Science of Sailing' Exhibit at the CMOO" - CC 211

We will share our experiences designing and building a new 'Science of Sailing' exhibit that debuted this year at Harborfest as part of the Children's Museum of Oswego (CMOO). Discussions will include 'lessons learned' and our future plans for developing the exhibit.