MHC students and faculty discover i>clicker technology

About15 MHC faculty are participating in a pilot project this Fall and Spring semesters with an interactive classroom response system.  The i>clicker technology allows instructors and students to interact dynamically through question-and-answer polling in classrooms and other group settings.  Students can check their i>clicker remotes out at the Library Circulation Desk for the semester and use them for multiple courses using the technology.  We've heard that most students feel that the introduction of the i>clicker technology has made a positive contribution to their course experiences.

Here are some teaching challenges that i>clickers may help you to achieve:

• My class is large - I never have enough time to take questions or give students the chance to speak.
• Variety of voices - the same students always volunteer and I want to hear from others.
• Providing low-stakes assessment experiences for students before the real quiz or test.
• Maintaining student engagement after the first 20 or 25 minutes of lecture.
• Testing the waters when my class is covering sensitive topics.
• Providing students with a catalyst for discussion. 
• Promoting deeper learning by encouraging students to share their views and defend their positions. 
• Testing the prevalence of misconceptions or prior knowledge at the beginning of a class or a section of lecture. 

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Geneaologies of Feminist Knowledge in the Digital Age: LITS supports the FCWSRC's 21st anniversary symposium

     On April 4-6, 2013, the Five Colleges Women's Studies Research Center will be celebrating its 21st anniversary with a symposium entitled Mediating Public Spheres: Genealogies of Feminist Knowledge in the Digital Age. Since many alumni FCSWRC Research Associates are based internationally, and because the Center would like to make the event available to members of the wider public who cannot attend in person, LITS will be collaborating with the FCWSRC to broadcast select events all over the world via online streaming. Additionally, in order to make workshops easily accessible to students across the Five Colleges, LITS will also be providing videoconference support for many workshops. 

The symposium will feature keynote speakers such as Lisa Nakamura, author of Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet and Race After the Internet, and independent filmmaker and grassroots feminist activist Sonali Gulati, director of the documentary film I am.

LITS is thrilled to be collaborating with the FCWSRC on this event! We hope to see you there. 

PS: Ever wonder what what a feminist take on a MOOC would look like? A DOCC! And you can learn about it from Anne Balsalmo and Alex Juhasz at the upcoming symposium.  

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Stage Fright Survival School or 3 “Super Calm” Tablets a Day? Researching Stage Fright

This fall, student’s in Linda Laderach’s Music 110 First Year Seminar “The Performer: Stage Fright” needed to find information about stage fright on the web.  A google search produces thousands of varied results.  Wikipedia, a newspaper article on Stephen Frye, Stage Fright Survival School, herbal supplements, Anxiety Disorders Association of America: how can students learn to sort through thousands of results to get reliable information, right for their purpose?

The class and I met to tackle this challenge.  We discussed how we could move from having general impressions of the quality of a website to evaluating sources using clear and defined criteria; we made a rubric!  

Using a spreadsheet in Google Docs that linked to the class libguide, students worked in groups to contribute to a rubric that we could use to practice website evaluation in class with some examples, and students could use as a reference throughout the semester as they found information online.

The technology we used allowed us to create a collaborative document right in class.  Students left with an understanding of website evaluation, practice making and applying a rubric, and a tool that everyone helped make and can use going forward with their work in and out of class.

Image credit: Fruchterman, Jim. IMG_5543-42. http://www.flickr.com/photos/jrandomf/5607892090/

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Zeega. What is it? What is it for?

Zeega. What is it? What is it for?

Zeega is a storytelling platform.

It is a way of interacting with text, images, sounds, and animation. It's designed for creating online documentaries-- making interactive what formerly was passive.

Here's a particularly epic example: How I Got to Boston, by Ahmed Kabil, a community coordinator for Zeega.

Explore more Zeega productions at zeega.com. There are tutorials and videos to help you get started, or you can dive right in to this rich editing environment.




Remember: Zeega is optimized for the telling of documentaries, in a sense, but in a far more interactive way than the documentaries of our childhoods.











Imagine what Zeega could do with my favorite classic documentary films: here is Fred Rogers narrating the crayon making process, and here is another version, without narration but with one of my favorite pieces of music ever.

Imagine what Zeega could do with crayon factory footage. We're only beginning to experiment with this tool, but we're excited about it.

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