Leading Lines

In this episode, we talk with Gilbert Gonzales, assistant professor of health policy at Vanderbilt University. He discusses his interest in designing assignments for students that give them opportunities to make a different in the world outside their classroom. One of those assignments was “Health Policy Radio,” a podcast that he and his health policy students created. In the interview, he describes the assignment and the ways it enhanced his students’ learning.

Links

• Health Policy Radio with Gilbert Gonzales, https://soundcloud.com/user-175461561

• Gilbert Gonzales’ faculty page, https://www.vumc.org/health-policy/person/gilbert-gonzales-phd

• @gilbgonzales on Twitter, https://twitter.com/GilbGonzales

• Vanderbilt News story on Gilbert’s University Course, https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2017/03/06/university-course-students-meet-with-legislators-during-visit-to-general-assembly/

• Course Design Institute at the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching, https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/cdi/

In this episode, the newest member of the Leading Lines team, Melissa Mallon, interviews Maha Bali, associate professor of the practice at the Center for Learning and Teaching at the American University in Cairo. Maha is a full-time faculty developer and also teaches educational game design to undergraduates. She’s also very active in educational technology and digital pedagogy discussions online. She and Melissa have a wide-ranging conversation, from faculty development, to critical pedagogy, to digital literacy, to surveillance capitalism, to social media, and more.

Links

• Maha Bali’s faculty page, http://www.aucegypt.edu/fac/mahabali

• @Bali_Maha on Twitter, https://twitter.com/Bali_Maha

• Reflecting Allowed, Maha Bali’s blog, https://blog.mahabali.me/

• Maha Bali’s ProfHacker posts, http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/author/mbali

• Hybrid Pedagogy, http://www.digitalpedagogylab.com/hybridped/

• Virtually Connecting, http://virtuallyconnecting.org/

In this episode we talk with Elizabeth Self, a teacher educator at Vanderbilt University in the Peabody College of Education and Human Development. Stacey Johnson, Assistant Director for Educational Technology at the Center for Teaching, talked with Liz about her clinical simulation project, in which preservice teachers role-play with actors the kinds of interactions they might have one day as teachers with students, parents, and colleagues. Liz shares why these simulations are such powerful learning experiences for her students, and the specific ways that technology, particularly video technology, enhances those learning experiences.

Links

• Elizabeth Self’s faculty page, https://my.vanderbilt.edu/elizabethself/

• @elizabethself on Twitter, https://twitter.com/elizabethaself

• “For Preservice Teachers, Lessons on Cultural Sensitivity,” an Education Week story profiling Elizabeth Self’s project, http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2016/02/17/for-preservice-teachers-lessons-on-cultural-sensitivity.html

In this episode, we continue exploring one of the themes of this season of Leading Lines: non-traditional assignments. We talk with Haerin (Helen) Shin, assistant professor of English at Vanderbilt University, who gives her students a choice for final projects: a traditional research paper or a creative, usually digital, project. Helen describes a few examples of digital projects, talks about how she structures and scaffolds these assignments, and explains why these nontraditional assignments help her students achieve her learning objectives.

Links

• Haerin Shin’s faculty page, https://as.vanderbilt.edu/english/bio/haerin-shin

• The Velveteen Rabbit: Exploring the Boundary Between the Real and the Unreal, by Jung Min Shin, http://jasmine138.wixsite.com/velveteenrabbit

• Seven Yellow Faces: Strangers in a Home Land, by Ellen Q. Wang, http://lnwang95.wixsite.com/seven-yellow-faces

• The Future of Identity Theft, by Miguel Moravec, https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-cu1pKZJSEedzJLeTBhMXZDVlE/view

• Flipping the Flipped Classroom: The Beauty of Spontaneous and Instantaneous Close Reading, by Haerin Shin, https://tomprof.stanford.edu/posting/1435

• Students as Producers resources from the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching, https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/tag/students-as-producers/

• Students as Producers presentation by Derek Bruff, https://prezi.com/1cnevevepyjo/jitt-2017-students-as-producers/

In this episode, we interview Eric Schmalz, Citizen History Community Manager at the U.S. Holocaust Museum. Eric works with the museum’s History Unfolded project. That project aims to investigate what Americans knew about the Holocaust as it was happening during World War II, and how Americans reacted to news of the Holocaust. The museum calls History Unfolded a “citizen history” project, in the style of crowd-sourced citizen science projects like Galaxy Zoo or FoldIt. Regular people are invited to find newspaper articles from the 30s and 40s, either online or at our local libraries, ones that reference the Holocaust, and contribute them to an online database. So far, the project has collected over 8,000 articles!

Eric Schmalz was on Vanderbilt’s campus for the Cultural Heritage at Scale symposium, organized by Vanderbilt and the Council on Library and Information Sciences. He was interviewed by Gayathri Narasimham, associate director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Digital Learning. There’s a really interesting education angle here, since History Unfolded works with high school teachers and college professors to involve students in the project. Gayathri talks explores that educational angle with Eric in the interview.

Links

• History Unfolded, https://newspapers.ushmm.org/

• Above the Fold, the History Unfolded blog, https://newspapers.ushmm.org/blog/

• @Eric_USHMM on Twitter, http://twitter.com/eric_ushmm

• Cultural Heritage at Scale symposium, http://heritage-at-scale.info/

• Derek Bruff’s 2013 blog post on citizen history and MOOCs, http://derekbruff.org/?p=2579

In this episode, we interview Humberto Garcia, associate professor of English at the University of California at Merced. Several years ago while teaching at Vanderbilt, Garcia started experimenting with blogs in his teaching, having students write short blog posts on a common course blog in lieu of the usual reading response papers. Humberto kept experimenting with blogs every semester, trying out creative new ways to use them both outside of class and during class.

In this interview, Humberto talks about his reasons for teaching with blogs, as well as specific strategies he has used over time to integrate out-of-class and in-class learning through blogs. And he describes his experiments with classroom response systems as a way to incorporate student blogging in larger classes.

Links:

• Humberto Garcia's faculty page at UC-Merced, http://ssha.ucmerced.edu/content/humberto-garcia

• English Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century course blog, https://english102literaturesurvey.wordpress.com/

• Transnational Encounters with Islam in 18th and 19th Century British Literature course blog, https://transnationalencounterswithislam.wordpress.com/

• William Blake and Enlightenment Media course blog, https://williamblakeandenlightenmentmedia.wordpress.com/

• British Romanticism and India course blog, https://britishromanticismandindia.wordpress.com/

In this bonus episode, the Leading Lines team sits down for a roundtable discussion about the Leading Lines podcast and what we’ve learned putting the podcast together. We talk about the origin of the podcast, what we mean by “educational technology,” how we’ve used podcasts in our teaching, and a couple of other podcasts we’ve launched since starting Leading Lines. And we have a lot of fun with our standard interview question about analog educational technology.

The conversation was facilitated by the newest member of the Leading Lines team, Melissa Mallon, Director of Peabody Library and Director of Liaison and Instruction Services at the Vanderbilt University Library. Around the table were the rest of the Leading Lines team: Derek Bruff, Stacey Johnson, and Rhett McDaniel from the Center for Teaching; Cliff Anderson from the University Library; Gayathri Narasimham and Ole Molvig from the Vanderbilt Institute for Digital Learning; and John Sloop, Associate Provost for Digital Learning.

Season 3 of Leading Lines will launch this August. In the meantime, check out Stacey Johnson’s new podcast, We Teach Languages, https://weteachlang.com/, and the new podcast from Gayathri Narasimham and John Sloop, Tenx9 Nashville, https://tenx9nashville.com/podcast/.

In this episode of Leading Lines, Vanderbilt’s Associate Provost for Digital Learning John Sloop interviews three colleagues from Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of Education and Human Development. This fall, Peabody is launching two online graduate programs, a Masters of Education in Human Development Counseling, and a Doctor of Education in Leadership and Learning in Organizations. John talks with three Peabody faculty members involved in the new programs about moving into online education in 2017.

Our guests are Andrew Van Schaack, Principal Senior Lecture in Human & Organizational Development and Associate Dean for Online Programs; Catherine Loss, Assistant Professor of the Practice and Associate Department Chair in Leadership, Policy, and Organization; and Paul Speer, Professor and Chair of Human and Organizational Development. You can read more about Peabody’s new online degree programs by visiting https://peabodyonline.vanderbilt.edu/.

Note that this is our last episode of Season 2. We’ll be back in the fall with more interviews exploring the future of educational technology.

In this episode, we feature an interview with Enoch Hale, Director of Teaching and Learning Excellence at Virginia Commonwealth University. He has been involved in a variety of innovative teaching and learning projects at VCU, and he has a way of making clear the connection between a piece of technology and the kinds of student learning we might want to foster with that technology. In the interview, Enoch talks about three technologies he’s been experimenting with, in his own teaching and in his faculty development work, and he points to some general principles of teaching with technology.

• @EnochHale10 on Twitter, https://twitter.com/enochhale10

• Enoch Hale’s blog, http://enochhale.blogspot.com/

• Telescopic Text, http://www.telescopictext.org/

• UNIV 200 Course Description, http://www.telescopictext.org/text/C3vhiMMnA6xtL

• Flipgrid, https://info.flipgrid.com/

• PFF Grid, a FlipGrid site Enoch used with a graduate course on pedagogy, https://flipgrid.com/b75bb61b

• Rethink Your Space, the motherblog for a VCU learning community on learning spaces, https://rampages.us/spaces/

• Digital Timelines, a teaching guide from the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching, https://cft.vanderbilt.edu//cft/guides-sub-pages/digital-timelines/

In this episode, we speak with Carwil Bjork-James, assistant professor of anthropology at Vanderbilt University. Bjork-James is a cultural anthropologist whose work focuses on strategies of grassroots autonomy and disruptive protest in Latin America. He serves on the board of the Wiki Education Foundation, a grant-supported non-profit institution, which supports the use of Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects in higher education contexts across the United States and Canada.

In the interview, Bjork-James discusses the problem of representation on Wikipedia, ways he has worked with his students to write for Wikipedia, and how he sees his role as a Wikipedian. This episode’s interview is conducted by Gayathri Narasimham, Associate Director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Digital Learning.

Links:

• Carwil Bjork-James’ faculty page, https://as.vanderbilt.edu/anthropology/bio/carwil-bjork-james

• @CarwilBJ on Twitter, https://twitter.com/CarwilBJ

• Wiki Education Foundation, https://wikiedu.org/

• Tim Foster’s interview in Leading Lines Episode 13, http://leadinglinespod.com/episode-013/