Dr. Fischer brings together educators and researchers in biological sciences, cognitive science and education to create a strong research foundation for educational practice and policy — informed by input from educators and includes the roles of the brain and genetics in learning.

Refreshments and conversation follow Dr. Fischer’s talk.

This seminar is co-sponsored by the Center for Science Education, the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience.  Check with Duke Center for Science Education for more information or download a flyer.

Owen Astrachan (Professor, Computer Science at Duke) invited a graduate of Duke, Ge Wang, to be a guest speaker to his Technical and Social Foundations of the Internet course (CS 82). Dr. Wang, at Stanford University, used Skype to connect with the 340 students at Duke, alternating between a video of himself talking, and sharing his computer screen for his presentation.

Astrachan reported “it just worked” and was delighted with how easily he was able to share a guest speaker with his students.

OIT’s Learn IT @ Lunch series offers Duke faculty, students and staff an opportunity to get some information on new technologies in a relaxed setting. Two upcoming session might be of particular interest to Duke faculty:

• Wiki Tricks: DukeWiki Advanced Formatting – highly recommended for those interested in using Duke’s Wiki tool to better manage research groups, projects and documentation.
• VoiceThread – this session will be led by the developers of the VoiceThread tool: Monte Evans & Andrew Synowiez

Over 2300 Blackboard course sites have been automatically created for Spring 2010, based on data from STORM (Peoplesoft) .  Certain course types, such as Independent Study and Tutorial, do not get created automatically.  To see if your course site has been created, log into Blackboard and new courses will show up in your “My Courses” module.

If your course site does not show up, you can request that your course site be created by clicking “Request a Site” on our Blackboard Support web site.

By default, courses are set to “unavailable” and can only be seen by instructors and other course administrators (teaching assistants, course builders, etc.) and not by students.  Make your course “available” once you are ready for students to see the content.

If you run into problems, contact the OIT Service Desk at 919-684-2200 or by clicking “Get Help” on our Blackboard Support web site.  For assistance with configuring your course site to support your teaching goals, contact the Center for Instructional Technology, cit@duke.edu.

How?  Here are three ideas:

Cell phones and internet-capable phones can be used as polling devices, like clickers, to engage students during class. Poll Everywhere will supply an easy to use interface for small classes for free, or large classes for a fee.

Students could access information during class, to contribute to discussions or to inform critical thinking. How? Students could query Google or Google Scholar, access the library or librarian, use news sources, or specific applications for your topic.

Leverage student interest in texting to learn about their thinking during class, by setting up a backchannel, like Hotseat at Purdue University. A teaching assistant or other instructor can monitor the backchannel, and alert you to questions, problems, and student interest at appropriate points in the class.

Come to a discussion of using mobile devices for education, both in and out of class, on the second Tuesday of each month.

1. DOWN ARROWS

Blackboard 8 introduced new  “contextual menus” – the down-arrows icon on the Grade Center. Don’t be afraid to click through some of these icons. You will discover many familiar features you have been used over years as well as some new ones. Mouse over a grade and a student name; you will see even more.

2. DRAG AND DROP

We all like to “Drag and Drop”  because it is so easy. For example, can you  re-arrange your Grade Center to make sense to you and to your students simply by dragging and dropping? Yes, you can. Go to Manage–>Organize Grade Center.

Watch the short movie below to see Neal Caidin shows you how to reorganize your Grade Center along with some other tricks.

3. HIDE GRADE COLUMNS

Often it is easier to enter student grades if some columns are temporarily hidden from you*. Also, you may want to hide grading columns you will never use that appear by default in Blackboard (such as Student ID, Availability status or Username columns, etc ).

*WARNING: “Hide” only affects the instructor’s view of the Grade Center, not the student’s view.  Students can still see their grades that you “Hide”.  “Hide” in this context means “to hide from my current view of the overall Grade Center.” To hide grades from students, choose Modify Column, and then choose “No” for “Show this column in My Grades”.  “My Grades” is what Blackboard calls the student view. By default, students see all grades.

4. FEWER “SUBMIT” AND “OK” CLICKS

Use the “Next” or “Previous” arrows, or “Go” at the top right to jump to an individual student or assignment column, or to navigate sequentially. This will save you a few clicks when you “Submit” and “Ok” and go back and forth between the main grade view and Grade Details.

5. SMART VIEWS

You can create subsets of grade views (so called “Smart Views”) which meet specific criteria.  For example, Smart Views enable you to look into individual users in more detail, examine specific groups to investigate, or filter students based on their performance on a specific item.  Once created and saved, a Smart View becomes an item on the Current View drop-down menu of the Grade Center page.  To create a Smart View,  go to Manage, and Add Smart View.

Bonus tip: ICON LEGEND

Many people have asked me what the symbol  or  next to grades means. I didn’t know either. So, I looked up the Icon Legend and found out what I wanted to know. The Icon Legend is located at the lower right corner of the Grade Center! Hope at least one icon (the error icon) never occurs on your Grade Center.

To learn more, see our help page for the Blackboard Grade Center and visit the Blackboard support website. If you would like more help with Blackboard, request an office visit and we will come to you.

• learn more about events we’re sponsoring and ways you can participate in the conversation (Get Involved), including an event for faculty coming up soon on Thursday, November 12 (register)
• stay in touch with (and comment on!) what we’re hearing from members of the campus community (Your Feedback)
• monitor our activities for the 2009-2010 academic year (Our Goal and Our Timeline)

Jonathan Mattingly

Features:

• Participants in a group can get an RSS feed to be notified when new documents are added to the library.
• For PDFs already stored on your computer, Zotero searches the internet for trusted bibliographic information, so you do not have type or copy-paste bibliographic information.
• Zotero learns how to resolve URLs to restricted sources.
• Zotero can output references in many different styles.
• Zotero can save searches across your saved references, so a saved search becomes like a continuously updating folder.
• Zotero is open-source, so it is continuously improving and anyone can add new features.

Want more?

• Watch the video to see how Zotero works, then download and try it.
• See some of Dr. Mattingly’s papers listed on Zotero to see the data Zotero saves for each source.
• Read more about it on the library hacks blog, and our blog (Zotero is a reason to use Firefox)

For keeping track of citations and managing your references, there are other options

CiteULike is also popular among researchers for managing and discovering scholarly references, and can provide sharing either publically or with devined groups. Unlike Zotero, CiteULike will work with any browser.

If you already have a computer full of PDFs, you might want to try Mendeley, It is both academic desktop software for managing & sharing research papers, and a website where you can back up and manage your research papers online, discover research trends, and connect to other researchers. Library Hacks explains the difference between Mendeley and Zotero.

Connotea is another online reference management system for researchers, put out by the Nature publishing group.

Duke has licensed EndNote and RefWorks, two commercial bilbliographic tools. Compare them with Zotero.

Because each tool handles references differently, evaluate them for your specific needs. Try each of them as you search for scholarly references in your field, to see how they handle your journals articles, and meet your needs for sharing.

Instructor Survey

This survey is designed for use by Duke faculty, instructors and others with direct classroom instruction responsibilities. It is intended to elicit information about how instructors want to use capture (recording) in the classroom setting.

Staff Survey

This survey is intended to elicit general information about the specific features and requirements Duke technical staff would like to see be included in the centrally supported capture service moving forward. Lectopia site administrators and IT/classroom support staff who are currently supporting the use of DukeCapture (or a similar capture tool) in their local settings are most likely to have in interest in the questions this survey asks, although anyone is welcome to participate.

https://wiki.duke.edu/display/OITASCollaboratory/DukeCapture+Migration+Project+-+2009