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A couple of weeks ago, Barb and I were awarded Georgia Tech’s Service Award for our work with Georgia Computes!. At the same awards ceremony, across the table, was David Collard of Chemistry who was getting the Professional education award.  He’s been part of an effort (described below) called cCWCS which teaches chemistry faculty how to teach better — and the program has taught over a thousand faculty!

A thousand faculty?!?  I’ve blogged about how hard it is to get CS faculty to come to our workshops, either Media Computation or Georgia Computes.  I’ve talked to other folks who offer workshops to CS faculty, and they say that they have to invite high school teachers, too, or they won’t have enough people to run the workshop.  Why do so many Chemistry professors show up, when we struggle to get CS professors to show up at teaching workshops?

Barb had an interesting insight: Maybe it’s because Chemistry is taught to everyone.  When you teach something to everyone, you have to teach…

Computing Education Blog

A new database is extending the life of the syllabus beyond the first day of class.

Dan Cohen, director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, hopes the repository of one million syllabi he posted today on his Web site will help fuel academic scholarship.

“What this provides is a really large cross-section of teaching,” he says.

The database is culled from more than a million searches made by users of Mr. Cohen’s Syllabus Finder, a service he created in 2002, and hosted on the center’s site, that allowed users to search for syllabi and information contained within them.

The database contains all of the syllabi retrieved through the Syllabus Finder from July 2002 until September 2009, when changes to Google’s search function disabled the program.

Mr. Cohen has analyzed the data periodically over the years, using it, for example, to identify the most popular syllabi in history and philosophy, and for a paper about the most popular textbooks in U.S….

Wired Campus

There’s division in the news media about iPads this week. Optimism about the tablets in the college classroom abounds in a  Financial Times article. But The Chronicle‘s coverage, “iPads Could Hinder Teaching, Professors Say,” pointed to serious pedagogical limits to the finger-touch computers.

How could this be? The two articles even reported on some of the same studies. One possible reason for the differing conclusions is that the FT story focused more on students’ reactions—the devices are great for reading, and just plain cool—and less on teaching.

For instance, both articles quoted Corey M. Angst, an assistant professor of management at the University of Notre Dame who tested the tablets in class. The FT reported, correctly, that students felt the iPad was easy to use and hard to give up. The Chronicle, however, also noted students’ complaints that it was hard to use iPads to take notes—the finger-touch interface isn’t good for writing. And one more telling fact: “For their…

Wired Campus

I blogged a few weeks ago about Sally Fincher’s project to gather teaching practice change stories.  There’s a deadline on the project of next Friday.  Please visit soon and tell her about how you change your practice at http://www.sharingpractice.ac.uk/changestories.html. Thanks!

Computing Education Blog

Jeremy Littau embraces social-networking tools like Twitter and crowdsourcing in the journalism classes he teaches at Lehigh University. So when the assistant professor began to prepare materials for his two-year professional review, he put a call out on Twitter for former students to give their take on his teaching philosophy—in 140 characters or less.

“I talk about the value of crowds, so why not tap into that?” he asks.

Mr. Littau says he was looking to see whether student perception of his teaching philosophy matched his own.

It did, for the most part, but he says he was surprised that many of the students focused on his use of innovation in the classroom.

In the classes he teaches, such as multimedia reporting, media literacy, and new media and social change, he uses tools like Twitter in his teaching—encouraging students to post questions during class via the social-networking site. But he didn’t see his use of new technology as core to his teaching philosophy. Thanks to his…

Wired Campus

When Sally Fincher started her Share project, I mentioned that I got a chance to see her related project, on gathering stories about teacher change using an interesting tool for doing quantitative analysis of qualitative data called SenseMaker.  Her Change Stories site is now live, and she’d love to get as many stories as possible.  Please do visit and tell her about how you change your teaching practice.

We are seeking stories of academics changing their teaching practice. If you’re interested in sharing your experience, please tell us what happened to you.

Most people report that it takes them about 15 minutes to complete the process. And some people find that putting in one story reminds them of another incident: that’s fine, you can enter as many stories as you like.

via Change Stories.

Tagged: computing education research
Computing Education Blog