When the traditional blackboard or the whiteboard was the visual teaching tool of choice, the end of the lecture meant that the notes were erased in preparation for the next class.

But now faculty have the ability to call up websites, PDFs or other electronic materials on a large display, make notes directly on the screen and save the resulting products as PDFs or documents that can be posted on Emory’s Blackboard learning tool or in a WordPress blog.

While Emory has been using interactive whiteboards from SMART Technologies for about a decade, the more recent addition of Sympodium monitors is allowing professors more interactivity in the classroom, says Wayne Morse, director of Emory’s Center for Interactive Teaching. A Sympodium monitor is located at the lectern in equipped classrooms, and the materials that are called up are displayed on large screens that students can see. The teacher then can use the attached interactive pen to make notes, highlight key points and move elements around on the screen. At the end of the class, those screen shots can be captured and made available to students as study material.

ECIT recently installed a high-definition screen in the center’s Classroom 214 in conjunction with a Sympodium monitor that will be used to familiarize faculty with the functionality and practical classroom uses of the technology. Orientation sessions for Sympodium are scheduled this fall.

“We’ve had Sympodium in select classrooms for at least four years, but the number of units on campus has increased and the product is coming into its sweet spot to engage students more fully in the lecture experience,” Morse says. “The orientation sessions are a great opportunity to educate faculty and explore best practices on the use of the technology.”

For orientation information, visit the ECIT events page.

Related: Library upgrades enhance learning opportunities

Cheryl Crowley plans to use her newfound knowledge about blogging software to breathe new life this fall into the study of a 1,000-year-old Japanese novel.

Written in the 11th century, “The Tale of Genji: Sensuality and Salvation” details the exploits of a man and his many lovers, explains Crowley, an associate professor of Japanese language and literature in the Department of Russian and East Asian Languages and Cultures.

“It’s 1,000 pages long and fantastically complex,” Crowley says. “I will use blogging to help students navigate through it, with chapter sections and genealogies. It will be a collaborative space to study this incredibly important work across the Internet.”

Crowley was one of 10 participants chosen to participate in this summer’s weeklong Emory College Online (ECO). The topic was “WordPress and Anthologize as Digital Learning Environments,” attracting professors from music, economics, languages, math and computer science and environmental studies, says Wayne Morse, director of Emory’s Center for Interactive Teaching.

Now in its 14th year, ECO is a joint program between Academic Technology Services and Emory College. Last year’s ECO focused on digital storytelling.

WordPress is a popular open-source blogging software that Emory uses as its blogging platform (including this blog). Anthologize is an open-source plug-in that can create PDFs and epubs while allowing users to annotate and bookmark material.

“The course was about 40 percent on the nuts and bolts of the technology and 60 percent on the pedagogical aspects—how and when to use and best practices,” Morse says. “We spent a lot of time looking at blogs and other content.”

About half of the participating faculty use blogs as a place for students to collaborate, and the other half use blogs as a place to store content for student use. The combination of WordPress and

Anthologize will allow students to review content and create their own content using materials from a professor’s blog.

Coursework included the basics of WordPress, copyright issues, creating content and editing digital video clips. But just as much time was spent with faculty exchanging ideas and figuring out how blogs can be used in the classroom.

“The purpose is to not just expose faculty to technology, but to help them develop the content they’re going to use and then assess whether it worked or not,” says Morse, adding that participants were a mix of senior and junior faculty. Faculty receive a stipend for attending.

Crowley is enthused by using 21st century technology to study a 1,000-year-old work. “Technology has its uses, in this case to collaborate on the work and revise as you go,” says Crowley, who still likes printed materials and who does calligraphy in her spare time. “It’d be crazy to oppose anything that works.”

The desire to keep students engaged inside the classroom led to an innovative experiment in anthropology professor Melvin J. Konner’s “Disease and Human Behavior” class.

Konner’s teaching assistant Howard Chiou received permission this spring to use social media to enhance the classroom experience through the use of in-class texting and chat experiments, known as “backchanneling,” during selected sessions. Chiou is pursuing medical and doctorate degrees through Emory’s M.D./Ph.D. Program and is interested in research, teaching and clinical pursuits.

In a lecture class with more than 100 students, it’s often difficult to connect with students in a meaningful way. So Chiou sought to use real-time text messaging and chat to enhance the experience.

He called this “a focus distraction project,” the idea of which is to take people’s natural tendency toward distraction and focus it to increase learning. Chiou gave a couple of lectures during the semester and led the review sessions.

“Dr. Konner is one of my advisers and an absolutely tremendous mentor, especially about teaching,” says Chiou, who has completed three years of medical school and is working on his doctorate in anthropology. “He was excited about these ideas and willing to see how technology fits into a classroom.”

In one of the review sessions, Chiou used real-time texting from Wiffiti to allow students to post questions and comments that were shown on the Blackboard system. “The experience was instructive, but I found myself turning around during the review and seeing what was on the board,” Chiou says. “There was a lot going on at one time.”

The novelty led to text messages that weren’t particularly meaningful at first, but the second half of the class went better as the newness wore off and students began sending texts that were more germane to the review. Still, Chiou said it was a lot to juggle.

He had more success chatting electronically with students in real time during one of Konner’s lectures, leaving the professor free to teach and Chiou free to chat with students on LearnLink.

“In the actual chat room, the conversation was much better than I expected,” Chiou says. “It was an opportunity to tie previous lectures together and help students make connections.”

Because students had widely different academic backgrounds, their level of understanding varied. Chiou was able to answer individual questions about particular points that were unclear to them, refer students to previous lectures and discuss real-world applications.

An informal post-chat survey among those who texted questions and comments showed that those who needed specific help found that backchannel chat to be particularly useful.

“The chat room was a useful enhancement to the lecture, especially for learning,” says Chiou. “With refinements, backchannels can become part of our toolkit to make lectures more relevant for a new generation of learners.”

While there’s no doubt that digital textbooks have a place in the classrooms of tomorrow, the format of those texts remains unclear. It’s the 21st century equivalent of VHS versus Betamax.

At Emory, faculty and staff are exploring the frontiers of digital publishing.

Hard copy or digital? Law students can have both

The ability to customize course content each semester and ease of use led Morgan Cloud to self publish his book “Constitutional Criminal Procedure” and offer a digital copy to students.
Cloud, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law, was surprised that students still would want hard-copy books, but when offered the choice of hard-copy book, digital book or both, “90 percent liked the idea of a digital copy, but they wanted a hard copy, too,” says Cloud. “I thought our students in 2010 and 2011 would prefer some type of digital format.”

Several years ago, Cloud took over books on criminal law and constitutional criminal procedure that had been written by Phillip E. Johnson when he retired from University of California, Berkeley. When Cloud and West Publishing parted ways on “Constitutional Criminal Procedure,” he organized the book the way he wanted to see it using Microsoft Word and had copies produced at a nearby FedEx Office.

Once students purchase the required text, they can download a digital version from the law school server. The cost of the soft-cover edition is less than students would pay for a used copy of the previous edition.

“I wasn’t a happy user of casebooks, but I felt obligated to use it despite it weighing 10 to12 pounds,” Cloud recalls. “It was affecting my teaching and limited the potential to teach in a classroom. I love books, but they are fixed artifacts and are not dynamic intrinsically.”

Response to the soft-cover book and digital edition has been overwhelmingly positive.

Cloud supplements the book with additional materials available in the course listings on his faculty page. Enforcement of Arizona’s strict immigration laws began after the book was published, so Cloud added relevant material to his faculty page, which includes course materials.

The ability to customize content helps students learn and keeps Cloud engaged, he says.

“I’ve been teaching this course since 1984, and this is the first time the casebook has been organized the way I wanted to see it,” Cloud says. “The feedback has been tremendous, and I’ve never had more fun in the classroom.”

EPUB 3.0 supports rich-media content

A new standard for digital publishing could bring electronic books closer to the classroom, says Steve Bransford, educational analyst for video in Academic Technology Services.
“EPUB 3.0 supports HTML 5 and rich-media content,” says Bransford. “Apple already supported this, with the ability to add video and audio to epubs.” While many electronic book readers support the .epub format, Amazon’s Kindle is a notable exception. Bransford says Emory is excited about the standard because it fits well with the University’s popular iTunes U channel.

EPUB is a common standard in book publishing, much like .pdf is a common standard for brochures and .doc for word documents.

Bransford participated in the recent regional AcademiX 2011, a nationwide Apple-sponsored conference on education and technology held at Emory.

He recently experimented with epublishing, taking an article from Southern Spaces with rich-media content and making an epub. Bransford reported success but noted that using Pages in Apple’s iWorks did create formatting issues that he hopes the EPUB 3.0 standard can address.

“EPUB 3.0 opens up many exciting things,” Bransford says. “It allows for rich media and the creation of electronic notes that can be shared.”

A trio of educators shared their experiences using technology in the classroom during a recent seminar on best practices in academic technology at Emory, sponsored by Emory’s Center for Interactive Teaching.

Journalism adjunct Lee Clontz, the subject of an earlier Tech-niques blog post, explored the use of iPads, Twitter and WordPress as tools to enhance student learning (See “iPads get test during election night assignment”). English professor Sheila Cavanagh discussed using Skype to bring Shakespeare to life, and doctoral student Timothy Harfield discovered that Facebook may not be the best tool to facilitate student discussions.

Tales from the Bard

Chance encounters between two Shakespeare enthusiasts led to a widely successful course this spring on the bard, taught by Cavanagh and supplemented via Skype by a veteran actor and lecturer.

“At first, it was just a couple of classes,” Cavanagh says of the cross-continent collaboration with Kevin Quarmby, the Globe Education Lecturer at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, where he regularly lectures and chairs a variety of academic and public events. “The students were captivated, and he’s become a regular part of the class.”

Quarmby brings an actor’s perspective to each play, leading students through the rehearsal process, which brings Shakespeare’s words to life. Cavanagh and Quarmby became acquainted at a Shakespeare conference in India and later during the British Studies at Oxford (England) program, where Quarmby was a guest lecturer.

“At some point, the idea of a Skype collaboration came up,” Cavanagh says. “I have not been an actor, and it’s useful to have a real actor involved in the process of understanding these plays.”

The actor asked for student pictures before the first Skype teleconference, and he knows many of them by name. Students have been emailing Quarmby or contacting him through Skype for advice on their final projects.

“Student response has been uniformly enthusiastic, and I’ve recognized that these types of interactions really enhance the learning experience,” Cavanagh says.

Facebook not discussion-ready forum

Despite his best efforts, Harfield concluded that Facebook is not suited for the types of discussions he was hoping for from students in a “Basic Problems in Philosophy” class. He calls the experiment a “successful failure.”

Harfield, who has worked in the market research for a firm heavily involved in IT, believed that the popular social networking site would be an ideal platform for class discussions. For many students, Facebook provides the conduit for daily interaction and communication, but using the site in this manner created what Harfield calls “platform confusion.”

“I wanted to move away from Blackboard [Emory's central online course and content management system] and use technology that was readily available and that students were interacting with on a daily basis,” Harfield says.

However, he experienced some classroom attrition when some students didn’t want to set up an account. Privacy settings were another problem area to protect the privacy of the group. At first, students tended to submit brief opinions rather than thoughtful arguments. Harfield then tried providing guiding questions for the week and letting peers grade the participation of classmates.

Finally, Harfield adapted his methods to typical Facebook postings, with links and quick comments, which was more successful. He advises others who might try using Facebook as a teaching tool to keep discussions private, to discuss the Internet security and privacy issues and to use the site as a way to quickly disseminate information.

But Harfield cautions its use as a teaching tool. “My recommendation is basically don’t do it,” he says of Facebook.

Related: How to protect yourself on Facebook

Emory brings the world a little closer through two innovative distance-learning options, one for professionals pursuing Master of Public Health degrees and the second for English as a Second Language (ESL) students.

The Career MPH distance learning program offers an opportunity to earn a fully accredited MPH degree with the convenience and interactivity of online learning.

About 40 students enroll in the Rollins School of Public Health’s CMPH program each fall, says director Melissa “Moose” Alperin. Started in 1996 as a graduate certificate program for public health advisers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the University accepted its first CMPH students in 1999. For the coming academic year, a degree in applied public health informatics is being added to the current offerings in applied epidemiology, health care outcomes and prevention science, Alperin says.

“The course is designed for working professionals with a minimum of three to five years of experience and can be completed in seven semesters,” Alperin says. “This is not a correspondence course that students can just phone in. We focus on adult learning principles, information they can readily use in their jobs.”

In an asynchronous environment, students watch lectures, access material on Blackboard, participate in discussion boards and do a large amount of group work. Faculty are using the University’s Panopto system to record lectures that can be uploaded in minutes and accessed through a url. Emory uses Panopto to capture, manage, search and view multimedia presentations online. Faculty use web conferencing software to interact with students during office hours.

The CMPH program is supported by a student adviser, three instructional design staffers and two part-timers for general administration and practicum administration. While her team continually explores new technology, Alperin says that “technology has to add and not distract from the learning. There has to be a reason to use it.”

Anecdotally, Alperin believes that faculty in the distance learning curriculum are becoming better teachers. “You have to think about what you do in an online environment,” Alperin says. “You can’t walk into cyberspace and just wing it.”

The ESL program’s foray into distance learning is a course for non-native speakers designed to prepare students for the rigors of academic life, says ESL Director Jane O’Connor.

“We have tried to get people on campus before the fall semester, but obtaining visas in time often can be difficult,” O’Connor says.

Entering Emory students who successfully complete the course, which is for one credit, are exempted from the Emory English Assessment and offered a place in the appropriate 100-level English course.

The web-based instructional course – offered for a second time this summer — consists of a video introduction, followed by PowerPoint presentations with voice-overs. Students do directed readings and write and submit papers via Emory’s Blackboard system. O’Connor comments on the papers and sends them back for revision before grades are assigned. In addition to other coursework, students are expected to do a group wiki project where two students compare and contrast their lives in an interactive format.

“The 13 students that completed the coursework last year… received good preparation for life at Emory,” O’Connor says.

O’Connor credits graduate student Lynn Maxwell for much of the course design, including the wiki project. Chase Lovellette from the Emory College Language Center helped with the video introduction and PowerPoint voice-overs, and Jose Rodriguez and Leah Chuchran from University Technology Services provided essential technical support.

How does it feel to be a darling of iTunes?

Ask Wan-Li Ho, senior lecturer of Chinese in the Russian and East Asian Languages and Cultures department. Since April 2009, Ho has contributed 26 episodes of her “Chinese Beyond Emory” series to Emory on iTunes U that have been downloaded more than 145,000 times, according to Shannon O’Daniel, Emory’s iTunes U administrator.

“These free programs help students of Chinese improve listening comprehension while learning to distinguish differences in Asian cultures, Mandarin accents, grammar patterns and local dialects,” says Ho. The programs are available to students and the general public alike, with downloads being recorded from around the world.

Ho will present a paper about using iTunes to build language skills at the International Conference for Internet Chinese Education, which will be held in her native Taiwan in June. Before the conference, however, she will be a featured presenter at Emory’s conference on Knowledge Futures: Language, Culture and Technology and Technology, held April 16-17. The forum is part of the ongoing knowledge futures initiative at Emory that seeks to bring together thought leaders from a variety of disciplines to discuss new and changing models of knowledge management.

Ho began the series before Emory on iTunes launched in 2008, so she uploaded her backlog of podcasts to iTunes and now creates a half-dozen or so new episodes each year. Ho learned the basics of podcasting from Jose C. Rodriguez of University Technology Services, who was then technology director of the Emory College Language Center. She thanks Rodriquez and Chase Lovellette from the language center for their continuing help in the creation and maintenance of the podcasts.

“I do interviews during Emory’s summer and winter breaks, talking to Chinese people who are heritage speakers in different countries,” says Ho. “I have talked to professors, career professionals and friends in different cities. For example, I’ve done interviews in a Hong Kong shopping mall, which resulted in some very authentic material.”

Each episode consists of a short picture narrative: an audio interview with a native speaker accompanied by a photographic slideshow that follows the conversation closely. These unscripted interviews address real places and real issues in ways that studying from a textbook can’t touch. Using the standards set by the American Council on Teaching Foreign Languages, content difficulty is rated for intermediate and advanced Chinese speakers.

Past topics have included food, buildings, shopping, schools, animals and environmental protection. Upcoming episodes will address advanced cultural topics such as tea ceremonies, Chinese modern ink painting and the aboriginal festivals in Taiwan.

Ho gets students involved in podcasting.

She enlisted the help of three Emory students who are heritage speakers to conduct interviews while they were visiting their homeland in China. Ho developed a set of guidelines for the interviews that her students were able to follow. With the help of Lovellette, she then oversaw the editing of the podcast interviews and photographs to ensure they met learning standards, resulting in five new episodes.

The 26 podcasts were played during Ho’s Chinese courses in order to enhance student listening comprehension skills, increase cultural knowledge and facilitate class discussion in Chinese.

With the help of a Fund for Innovative Teaching grant from Emory, Ho held a student competition in her 300-level Chinese courses last summer. Students in groups of three prepared their own podcasts, which were posted on LearnLink or YouTube. Winners of the competition, which was judged by another professor, received $50. The Advanced Chinese 1 students created podcasts on their favorite non-governmental organization, while Advanced Chinese for Heritage Speakers students worked on topics related to Chinese culture and society.

“We are fortunate at Emory to have the resources that enable us to create this type of program, and we want to share it as much as we can,” Ho says. “The future of language instruction all over the world leads us in this direction.”

Brian Croxall’s “a-ha” moment is helping Emory faculty and students more effectively teach and conduct research in a digital world.

Croxall, emerging technologies librarian in Woodruff Library, and Wayne Morse, director of Emory’s Center for Interactive Teaching, will lead a workshop on Thursday, March 24 on Emory’s new Apps Lab, which evaluates the teaching and research capabilities of mobile applications. “Apps Lab @ Emory – What Apps Can Do” will be held from 11 a.m.-noon in ECIT Classroom 215, Woodruff Library. Register for the free workshop.

“There are over 250,000 Apple mobile apps,” says Morse. “Our job is to categorize them, understand what they do and evaluate the top ones for use in education.”

The current focus is on applications written for Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS, but the group plans to begin evaluating apps for the Android open-source operating system. An evaluation of e-reader apps for iOS is next, Morse says.

An Apps Lab @ Emory blog has been launched to publicize reviews on the software that’s been tested and solicit feedback on that software and suggestions for other apps that should be evaluated.

The evaluation team consists of Morse, Croxall, faculty from the School of Medicine and Candler School of Theology, a librarian from Goizueta Business School and a handful of IT staffers. The group has a modest budget to purchase apps and try them out. Their evaluations will be posted on the blog.

So far, the group has evaluated two apps for managing and annotating PDFs: GoodReader and iAnnotate PDF. ECIT maintains a few copies of each app on iPads so faculty, staff and students can try the software themselves before making a purchase.

The idea for the Apps Lab came to Croxall while using Skype to address a faculty workshop at Occidental College in Los Angeles on using technology in the classroom. Faculty recently had been provided iPads, and discussion turned to what mobile applications would be most useful.

“Once that idea had been expressed aloud, I thought this should be something that Emory does,” says Croxall, who’s also a Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) postdoctoral fellow.

Croxall and Morse spent the fall writing a proposal for the Apps Lab and obtaining university approvals and funding. The group began work this semester.

“Mobile devices are fundamentally changing the way people teach and conduct research,” Morse says. “Professors now can take attendance on their mobile devices, carry important documents and be able to annotate them and take notes with images and voice annotation.”

By Matt Bolch, for Emory Report

How does one become a great musician? Practice. Practice. Practice.

But with only a limited amount of class time, Director of Jazz Studies Gary Motley has discovered new ways to interact with students through the power of digital storytelling.

Motley has developed an Emory Jazz Studies channel on YouTube, and a robust number of offerings on Emory on iTunes U, including practice tracks, podcasts of lectures, interviews with guest artists and instructional videos that demonstrate performance techniques.

“It’s challenging to find new and unique ways to get jazz to students beyond traditional methods,” says Motley, a jazz pianist who’s been at Emory for 15 years. “Now, a student can listen to a 10-minute podcast on the way to class and be that much more prepared.”

Two years ago, Motley attended a digital storytelling session at Emory’s Center for Interactive Teaching. “It was a pivotal process that opened up new worlds for me, learning how to convey information in a digital age and communicate that to digital learners,” he recalls.

The next Digital Storytelling workshop is set for Thursday, March 17 at 11 a.m. in ECIT Classroom 215, Woodruff Library.

Motley created an interactive jazz studio, in the Burlington Road Building in 2008, as a “way to teach the tradition of jazz in nontraditional ways.” The studio has a SmartBoard that can be used in conjunction with musical notation and sequencing software to analyze jazz compositions. It also contains a digital audio recording work station.

Although jazz, like blues, is an improvisational genre, students still have to learn the basics. Using technology, a student can slow down a complicated piece of music to a speed he can understand.

Motley also has used Skype to bring lessons and performances from all-star musicians into the classroom. During a trip to Paris in November, Motley talked with Paris musicians about what it’s like working in the City of Light, broadcasting those conversations to his students.

Related: Jazz notes in Paris on Toni Morrison (Emory Report Nov. 12, 2010)

The professor says students have been receptive to digital storytelling and the interactive jazz studio because they’ve grown up in a digital world.

“All I’m doing is putting information into a format they’re used to,” Motley says.

Related: Digital Storytelling workshop participant examples: Why I fell in love with jazz, by Gary Motley

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