Leading Lines

In this episode, we hear from Julia Feerrar, head of digital initiatives at the Virginia Tech Libraries. She speaks with producer Melissa Mallon about a framework for digital literacy that she helped develop, a framework that includes a variety of competencies, from discovery and evaluation, to communication and creation, to identity and wellbeing. Julia and Melissa discuss the development of the framework, the cross-campus connections enabled by the digital literacy work, and what’s next for digital literacy at Virginia Tech.

Links

• Julia Feerar on Twitter, https://twitter.com/JuliaFeerrar

• Virginia Tech’s digital literacy framework, https://lib.vt.edu/research-learning/digital-literacy.html

• The Jisc framework, https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/developing-students-digital-literacy

• Digital Pedagogy Lab, https://www.digitalpedagogylab.com/about/

• NewsWise module on fake news, featuring Mike Caulfield, http://newswise.ca/module/fakenews/

This fall, two members of the Leading Lines team, working completely independently, brought interviews with university educators about shared language programs. In each case, a group of colleges and universities got together to offer online language courses. These are courses that wouldn’t have enough enrollment to run at a single institution, but across three or four institutions, there’s a healthy demand.

With declining enrollments in higher education and with colleges and universities looking for creative ways to collaborate, we may see more shared course programs like these, and not just in the languages.

In our last episode, Vanderbilt’s Stacey Johnson spoke with Denison University’s Gabrielle Dillmann about teaching German and Arabic across multiple institutions. In this episode, we consider a shared languages program in which Vanderbilt participates, the Duke-UVA-Vanderbilt Partnership for Less Commonly Taught Languages.

These are indeed less commonly taught languages: Haitian Creole, Tibetan, and K’iche’ Maya. My Vanderbilt colleague John Sloop talks with Ingeborg Walther of Duke University, who coordinates the program, about the origins of the partnership, how language learning works in hybrid and virtual spaces, and where the partnership is going.

Links

• Ingeborg Walther’s faculty page, https://german.duke.edu/people/ingeborg-c-walther

• Homepage for the Duke-UVA-Vanderbilt Partnership, https://trinity.duke.edu/initiatives/duke-uva-vanderbilt-less-commonly-taught-languages

• “From the Tristar State to the Land of Eternal Spring: Vanderbilt and Guatemala,” https://essay.vanderbilthustler.com/from-the-tristar-state-to-the-land-of-eternal-spring-vanderbilt-and-guatemala

This fall, two members of the Leading Lines team, working completely independently, brought interviews with university educators about shared language programs. In each case, a group of colleges and universities got together to offer online language courses. These are courses that wouldn’t have enough enrollment to run at a single institution, but across three or four institutions, there’s a healthy demand.

With declining enrollments in higher education and with colleges and universities looking for creative ways to collaborate, we may see more shared course programs like these, and not just in the languages.

In our last episode, Vanderbilt’s Stacey Johnson spoke with Denison University’s Gabrielle Dillmann about teaching German and Arabic across multiple institutions. In this episode, we consider a shared languages program in which Vanderbilt participates, the Duke-UVA-Vanderbilt Partnership for Less Commonly Taught Languages.

These are indeed less commonly taught languages: Haitian Creole, Tibetan, and K’iche’ Maya. My Vanderbilt colleague John Sloop talks with Ingeborg Walther of Duke University, who coordinates the program, about the origins of the partnership, how language learning works in hybrid and virtual spaces, and where the partnership is going.

Links

• Ingeborg Walther’s faculty page, https://german.duke.edu/people/ingeborg-c-walther

• Homepage for the Duke-UVA-Vanderbilt Partnership, https://trinity.duke.edu/initiatives/duke-uva-vanderbilt-less-commonly-taught-languages

• “From the Tristar State to the Land of Eternal Spring: Vanderbilt and Guatemala,” https://essay.vanderbilthustler.com/from-the-tristar-state-to-the-land-of-eternal-spring-vanderbilt-and-guatemala

In this episode, we feature an interview Stacey Johnson conducted for her podcast, We Teach Languages, with Gabriele Dillmann, associate professor of German at Denison University, a small liberal arts college in Ohio. Gabriele is the director of the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s Shared Languages Program. The program features language courses taught at one school in the consortium that are offered to students at other schools through virtual classrooms. This makes it possible for a school like Denison to offer upper-level language courses that are often under-enrolled, as well as less commonly taught languages that wouldn’t ordinarily be available on every college campus. Gabriele shares the origin of the program, the challenges it has faced, the technology that makes it work, and the value it brings to language students.

Links

• Gabriele Dillman’s website, https://gabrieledillmann.com/

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

• Globally Connected Courses, https://gabrieledillmann.com/globally-connected-courses-collection/

• Shared Languages Courses, https://gabrieledillmann.com/description-of-shared-languages-initiative/

• We Teach Languages podcast by Stacey M. Johnson, https://weteachlang.com/

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

For this episode, Derek Bruff talks with Bahiyyah Muhammad, assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at Howard University. She teaches courses as part of the national Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, courses in which half of her students are Howard students, and the other half are incarcerated individuals. Most Inside-Out courses take place at prisons, but for logistical reasons that was challenging for Bahiyyah. She turned to a set of technologies to facilitate distance learning, and to turn the course into a learning community.

Links

• Bahiyyah Muhammad’s faculty page, http://sociologycriminology.coas.howard.edu/faculty-and-staff_bmuhammad.html

• @DrBMuhammad1 on Twitter, https://twitter.com/drbmuhammad1

• @drmuhammad_experience on Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/drmuhammad_experience/

• “Does the Apple Fall Far from Prison?,” Bahiyyah Muhammad at TEDxHowardU, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUR2kdevY9s

• The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, http://www.insideoutcenter.org/

In this episode we feature an interview with Ben Rydal Shapiro, a postdoc at the School for Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. Ben was trained as an architect, and he brought that perspective to his PhD research in Vanderbilt’s Space, Learning, and Mobility Lab, aka the SLaMLab, where he combined it with the learning sciences and data visualization to do some really amazing projects visualizing how learning and engagement happens in relation to the physical environment. For instance, if you visit his website, benrydal.com, you’ll see some visualizations of families moving through exhibits at Nashville’s County Music Hall of Fame, showing how the family members interact with the exhibits and each other across time and space. It’s a fascinating window into place-based learning.

Links

• Ben Rydal Shapiro’s website, https://www.benrydal.com/

• @Ben_Rydal, https://twitter.com/Ben_Rydal

• Vanderbilt’s Space, Learning, & Mobility Lab (SLaMLab), https://peabody.vanderbilt.edu/departments/tl/teaching_and_learning_research/space_learning_mobility/about-home.php

• Processing.org, https://processing.org/

• Learning on the Move, https://www.lom-meshworking.org/

• Leading Lines Ep. 14: Katy Börner, http://leadinglinespod.com/episodes/episode-014-katy-borner/

In this episode, Derek Bruff talks with Bryan Dewsbury, assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of Rhode Island. He’s incredibly passionate about student success, and he uses technology in ways that are fully supportive of his pedagogical goals. His approach to teaching introductory biology isn’t the typical one, and we are glad to have him share his story here on the podcast.

Links

• Bryan Dewsbury’s faculty page, https://web.uri.edu/bio/bryan-dewsbury/

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

• “The Whole Classroom: Inclusive Teaching in the Classroom,” Bryan Dewsbury at the STEM Summit 5.0, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfn8pX0we2I

• Bryan Dewsbury’s profile in the Chronicle of Higher Education, https://www.chronicle.com/article/Freshmen-Are-Souls-That/243559

• Bryan Dewsbury on Teaching in Higher Ed Episode 215, https://teachinginhighered.com/podcast/teaching-as-an-act-of-social-justice-and-equity/

In this episode, we hear from Margaret Rubega about her #birdclass assignment. Rubega is an associate professor in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut. She’s also Connecticut’s state ornithology, and she teaches a large enrollment ornithology class at UConn. In this class, she asks her students to take to Twitter and share their observations of the birds they see on their way to class, as they go to their jobs, wherever they might happen to be, tagging their tweets with the hashtag #birdclass. This gets right at the goal of transfer, having students take what they’re learning about birds in the classroom and apply it to new contexts and environments out of the classroom. That’s a hard goal to reach with students, so they need lots of practice, and the #birdclass assignment provides that. And since the student tweets are public, students can easily see each other’s contributions to learn from them and to be inspired by them.

This interview with Margaret was recorded for a free online course called “An Introduction to Evidence-Based Undergraduate STEM Teaching.” All the videos produced for the course, including this video interview with Margaret Rubega, are available on this YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUXmF5kZkUm_X3Dj_qMVlqw). Visit stemteachingcourse.org for links and more information.

Links

• Margaret Rubega’s lab website, https://rubegalab.uconn.edu/

• @profrubega on Twitter, https://twitter.com/ProfRubega

• The latest #birdclass tweets, https://twitter.com/search?q=%23birdclass&src=typd

• Our free online STEM teaching course, http://stemteachingcourse.org/

In this episode, the newest member of the Leading Lines team, Melissa Mallon, brings us an interview about teaching critical media literacy. The interview features Natasha Casey, a communications professor at Blackburn College in Illinois, and Spencer Brayton, library manager at Waubonsee Community College, also in Illinois. While Brayton was at Blackburn College, he and Casey collaborated to bring their respective fields—information literacy and media literacy—together, developing and team teaching a course on media and information literacy. The course took at a critical look at the topics, meaning that there was a particular focus to issues of power and control in digital media.

Links:

•Natasha Casey’s blog, No Silos, http://www.natashacasey.com/mil-blog

•Spencer Brayton’s blog, Converging Spaces, https://spencerbrayton.wordpress.com/

•@NatashaCaseyIRL, http://twitter.com/NatashaCaseyIRL

•@brayton_spencer, http://twitter.com/brayton_spencer

•RiP!: A Remix Manifesto, the 2008 open-source documentary directed by Brett Gaylor and featuring the DJ Gregg Gillis, better known as Girl Talk, https://vimeo.com/8040182

•Melissa Mallon’s new book, The Pivotal Role of Academic Librarians in Digital Learning, https://www.abc-clio.com/LibrariesUnlimited/product.aspx?pc=A5258P

In this episode, we’re going in a slightly different direction. Since we’re here to explore the future of educational technology in higher education, we thought it would be interesting to talk with someone who is currently teaching our future students. Stacey Roshan teaches at the Bullis School, an independent K12 school outside of Washington, DC, where she is also the Upper School Technology Coordinator. She’s well known for flipping her math classroom, introducing students to new material before class through online explanatory videos she creates, and spending class time helping students learn math by working problems on their own and in small groups. She uses a variety of technologies in her teaching, all in very intentional ways to help students learn math and learn how to learn.

The students we see in our college classrooms don’t come in as blank slates. They have a variety of prior learning experiences. This conversation with Stacey Roshan will provide the Leading Lines audience with a little insight into the kinds of experiences and expectations our future students will have, particularly about the use of technology in learning.

Related Links:

• Stacey Roshan on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1xm6l56jzL95JNLv4UfAQQ

• Camtasia screen recording and video editing software, https://www.techsmith.com/video-editor.html

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

• Pear Deck, https://www.peardeck.com/

• EquatIO, https://www.texthelp.com/en-us/products/equatio/