In This Edition
- Upcoming events in November
- Workshop and demonstration of Team-based learning
- Help Duke develop its roadmap for elearning
- Five Blackboard tips for managing grades more easily
- Sharing references with your students
- Duke faculty use Flip cameras for teaching
- ProfHacker blog: Practical suggestions by and for faculty
- The next wave of e-readers
Upcoming events: November 2009
Faculty may request a custom workshop for their department on any instructional technology topic by emailing CIT.
Workshop and demonstration of Team-based learning
Team-based learning (TBL) is a teaching strategy that transforms students into a team that uses course concepts and knowledge to solve problems, structured to hold individual students accountable. Team-based work has been found to enhance creativity and effective problem-solving. This workshop includes a presentation by a faculty member and an Academic Program Coordinator from Florida State University, followed by interactive, hands-on practice using a team-based approach to teaching. You may stay for the first hour and get practical information about this teaching strategy or you can join us for the presentation, lunch, and experience the essential elements of TBL as your students will experience it. Register to join us on November 20th for part or all of this event.
In 2009-10, Duke’s elearning Roadmap Committee is actively gathering input from Duke instructors and students about tools they use for teaching and learning. The Committee will assess the needs of the campus community to identify tools, support and infrastructure that should be centrally provided. Whether you use blogs or wikis, Blackboard or VoiceThread, Micrograde or Maple TA, Second Life or Flickr, the Committee needs your insight and ideas about what’s most important for the Duke community. What works well for the kind of courses you teach? What could be improved? What’s missing? Learn about the Committee’s process, findings and ways to get involved and share your ideas at a new web site, http://elearning.duke.edu. At this site, you can…
- 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)
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.
 Kathy Franz (Duke Chemistry) expects her students to gather resources from the chemistry literature, and share them in her course. She has tried some social bookmarking tools, but some have difficulty finding bibliographic data from her chemistry journals. She is now trying Zotero. Zotero is an extension on Firefox that helps you collect, manage and cite your research sources from your web browser. The latest version allows you to sync and back up Zotero libraries, and create public or private groups to share references.
 Jonathan Mattingly (Duke Math) enthusiastically uses Zotero to collect bibliographic data, and format citations for his publications. He uses the group feature to share papers with his students, and to add to their reading lists as he finds references. He’s also experimenting with sharing a Zotero library with the Math department, to benefit students.
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?
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.
 Duke faculty Jennifer Ahern-Dodson (Writing) and Kevin Caves (Biomedical Engineering) are featured in the article How Tiny Camcorders are Changing Education published in eLearn Magazine.
Ahern-Dodson and Caves participated in CIT’s Instructional Technology Faculty Fellows program, to share ideas about teaching with video with other faculty. In the article, they describe how they used Flip cameras from the Duke Digital Initiative for student projects in their courses.
ProfHacker “delivers tips, tutorials, and commentary on pedagogy, productivity, and technology in higher education.” Recent posts focus on topics such as not making assumptions about students’ technical skills, simple ways to enhance in-class group work, and handling Twitter spam. ProfHacker’s editors Jason B. Jones (associate professor of English at Central Connecticut State University) and George H. Williams (assistant professor of English at the University of South Carolina Upstate) are joined by a cadre of faculty and student authors from a variety of institutions to provide 2 or 3 useful posts a day.
Last year, Amazon made headlines with their release of the Kindle, a new generation of portable e-reader that uses E ink, a low power display technology that mimics the look of a printed page. The screen isn’t backlit like a computer display.
Since that time, interest has grown in the Kindle and similar offerings from Sony and we’re seeing a new generation of devices that add functionality, increased screen size, and partnerships with publishers to provide content for the devices. Some are predicting that the hot electronics item this holiday season will be the e-reader.
 Sony is offering three models this year. The Reader Touch Edition is a thin, touch screen version of the device selling for $299. An included stylus can be used for highlighting and annotation on the 6″ screen. The Reader Pocket Edition, priced at $199, has a 5″ display and is a kind of “entry level” model. Due for release sometime in the next couple of months is the Sony Reader Daily Edition, which includes a 7″ touch screen display and adds wireless capability, mainly aimed at downloading news content.
 The most well publicized and largest selling e-reader to date is the Amazon Kindle. The Kindle is notable for being a wireless device, which operates independently from your computer – you browse for content at Amazon’s e-book store and download material directly using a wireless technology that uses a cell phone network. If you want to read your own documents – PDF files or Word documents, for example – you email them to a special address and they are converted and downloaded to your Kindle for a small fee. The cost of wireless access is hidden in the cost of a book or document conversion.
The Kindle is available in two models. The Kindle DX, selling for $489, features a 9.7″ screen while the latest version of their entry level device with a 6″ screen sells for $299. The Kindle allows for annotations using a small keypad on the device.
Philips is introducing a new version of their iRex Reader, the DR 800 SG, in October. Priced at $399 and featuring a 8.1″ screen, it includes a stylus that can be used for adding annotations. The iRex is wireless using cellular network technology similar to the Kindle. For content, Philips is partnering with Barnes and Noble for e-book offerings.
Just announced is an offering from Barnes and Noble – the Nook. This e-reader has some features in common with the Kindle – access to a large library of titles for purchase through their bookstore, availability of subscriptions to newspapers and magazines, and wireless connectivity. The Nook also includes a touch sensitive color lcd screen along the bottom of the device that can be used for controlling options, selecting books, or entering notes with an online keyboard. One distinctive feature of the device lets you “check out” books to friends using a Nook.
There are two clear models that have emerged for content on e-readers. Amazon’s using a “closed” system – you can only download books from Amazon’s site and have to do a conversion to get other documents on the reader. All of the Sony models and the iRex support EPUB, an open format for digital books, so you can download books from independent authors and publishers or public domain material from Google Books. You can also create your own EPUB formatted documents with several online or desktop tools and EPUB files can also be viewed in e-reader software on other devices – laptops, netbooks, or even the iPhone.
Both Sony and Amazon offer programs for authors to self publish. Sony has a partnership with Smashwords while Amazon’s service is called the Digital Text Platform.
For faculty that are interested in using electronic books in the classroom, the main issues with ereaders are availability of content applicable to your course and whether your students have an e-reader or other device capable of displaying the file.. Both the Amazon and Sony e-book stores concentrate on current best-sellers and older catalogue titles in the areas of genre fiction, business, popular history and hobbies. Some textbooks are available for both devices.
The market for e-readers and e-books is small, but growing. Faculty that use primarily public domain texts or assemble a textbook and readings from documents available on the Web might find the use of PDF and EPUB files useful in courses – both formats can be viewed on a wide range of devices including e-readers, laptops and mobile phones.
Through our exploratory equipment loaner program, the CIT has an original Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle that can be checked out by faculty.
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