Leading Lines

In our last episode, we talked with Vanderbilt librarian and Leading Lines co-producer Melissa Mallon about her new book on digital literacy. As a follow up to that, this episode is an audio segment from a panel on teaching with podcasts that the Vanderbilt CFT hosted last fall. The focus of the panel was student-produced podcasts, that is, podcast episodes made by students as part of course assignments. One of the panelists was John Sloop, professor of communication studies at Vanderbilt, vice provost for digital learning, and also a co-producer of Leading Lines. In this episode, we get to hear from John about his own teaching in communication studies, and his experiments with teaching with podcasts.

For more on teaching with podcasts, have a listen to Episode 27 of this podcast, which features an interview with Gilbert Gonzales, health policy professor here at Vanderbilt. Gilbert shares his experiences with student-produced podcasts.

• John Sloop’s faculty page, https://as.vanderbilt.edu/communication/people/john-m-sloop/

• John Sloop’s digital learning blog, https://my.vanderbilt.edu/johnsloop/blog/

• @SloopJohnMartin on Twitter, https://twitter.com/sloopjohnmartin

• Vanderbilt EdTech Resource Finder, https://www.vanderbilt.edu/edtechfinder/

• Derek’s Fall 2017 podcast assignment, http://derekbruff.org/?p=3309

In this episode, we feature an interview with one of our own. Melissa Mallon, director of the Peabody Library and director of liaison and instruction services here at Vanderbilt, has a new book out, and my Center for Teaching colleague Stacey Johnson had a lively conversation with Melissa about the book. Part of Melissa’s work at Vanderbilt focuses on faculty-librarian partnerships to support student learning, particularly research and digital literacy skills. That’s what her book is about, the role librarians can play in helping students develop these skills. She and Stacey talk about that role, and the increasing importance of critical media literacy.

Links

• Melissa Mallon’s website, http://www.melissamallon.com/

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

• #vandylibraryfellows sharing propaganda on Twitter, https://twitter.com/search?q=%23vandylibraryfellows&src=typd

• The Pivotal Role of Academic Librarians in Digital Learning, published by Libraries Unlimited, https://www.abc-clio.com/LibrariesUnlimited/product.aspx?pc=A5258P

In this episode, we talk with Jay Clayton, professor of English and director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University. Jay teaches courses on digital media and online gaming, and he talks with Gayathri Narasimham, Associate Director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Digital Learning, about how he helps students engage in both critical analysis and creative production of video games and other new media.

Links

• Jay Clayton’s academic web page - https://as.vanderbilt.edu/english/bio/jay-clayton

• Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt - https://www.vanderbilt.edu/curbcenter/

In this episode, we interview the graduate students behind Scholars at Play, a podcast focused on the critical discussion of video games: Derek Price (German), Terrell Taylor (English), and Kyle Romero (History). Stacey Johnson, Assistant Director for Educational Technology at the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching, talks to the Scholars at Play team about the origin of their podcast, how it intersects with their teaching, and how it is shaping their academic careers. Through Scholars at Play, these graduate students are creating their own path for the kinds of interdisciplinary and digital scholarship they want to practice.

Links

· Scholars at Play, https://soundcloud.com/scholarsatplay

· Derek Price on Twitter, https://twitter.com/Digital_Derek

· Terrell Taylor on Twitter, https://twitter.com/BlackSocrates

· Kyle Romero on Twitter, https://twitter.com/E_Kyle_Romero

· Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy, https://www.vanderbilt.edu/curbcenter/

· HASTAC, https://www.hastac.org/

In our last episode, we talked with astronomy professor Cornelia Lang about how she uses an active learning classroom in her “Big Ideas” course at the University of Iowa. In this episode, we continue talking about active learning classrooms and the roles that technologies play in supporting student learning in these spaces. At the 2017 POD Network conference in Montreal, Derek Bruff interviewed D. Christopher Brooks, director of research at EDUCAUSE, the higher education technology association.

For more on Christopher Brooks and his work, visit the links below.

• D. Christopher Brooks’ EDUCAUSE page, https://members.educause.edu/d-christopher-brooks

• @DCBPhDV2 on Twitter, https://twitter.com/DCBPhDV2

• “A Guide to Teaching in the Active Learning Classroom,” co-authored by D. Christopher Brooks, https://sty.presswarehouse.com/books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=441414

• Active learning classrooms at the University of Minnesota, https://cei.umn.edu/support-services/tutorials/active-learning-classrooms

• SCALE-UP active learning classrooms at North Carolina State, http://scaleup.ncsu.edu/

• TEAL active learning classrooms at MIT, http://web.mit.edu/edtech/casestudies/teal.html

• Derek Bruff’s photos of learning spaces, https://www.flickr.com/photos/derekbruff/sets/72157630533336504/

This month, Leading Lines has a pair of episodes that look at the use of laptops in the classroom. Both episodes blow up the assumption that laptops are for notetaking, and they push back on that transmission model of college teaching. Both episodes explore the use of active learning classrooms, classrooms that are outfitted with a range of educational technologies, from movable furniture to whiteboards to good wifi to AV systems, designed to support active and collaborative learning

In this episode, we talk with Cornelia Lang, associate professor of astronomy at the University of Iowa. Cornelia teaches one of Iowa’s “Big Ideas” courses, which are large-enrollment, interdisciplinary, team-taught courses that satisfy general education requirements. And she teaches this course in one of Iowa’s active learning classrooms. In the interview, she talks about the kinds of hands-on, laptop-enabled activities she engages her students in when she’s got access to the affordances of an active learning classroom.

Links

• Cornelia Lang’s faculty website, http://astro.physics.uiowa.edu/~clang/

• TILE at the University of Iowa, https://its.uiowa.edu/tile

• Big Ideas Courses at the University of Iowa, https://teach.its.uiowa.edu/initiatives/big-ideas-courses

In this episode, John Sloop, Vanderbilt’s associate provost for digital learning. talks with Casey Doyle, assistant professor of rhetoric and writing and director of the Digital Writing and Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin.

John talks with Casey about the work of the Digital Writing and Research Lab and how it is helping students and faculty both produce and think critically about digital and multimodal texts. Casey also talks about his own teaching, particularly his work teaching students to, as he says, “write sound.”

For more on teaching with podcasts, see Episode 27 for our interview with Vanderbilt’s Gilbert Gonzales.

RELATED LINKS

• Casey Boyle’s homepage, http://caseyboyle.net/

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

• Digital Writing & Research Lab at UT-Austin, http://www.dwrl.utexas.edu/

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

• Writing with Sound course page, http://caseyboyle.net/project/writing-with-sound-rhe-330c/

•

In this episode, we have another interview from Open Access Week 2017. Cliff Anderson, associate university librarian for research and learning, talks with Kelly Doyle, Wikipedian in residence for gender equity at the West Virginia University Libraries. Kelly was at Vanderbilt to talk about her work at West Virginia and to assist with a Wikipedia edit-a-thon here on campus. Cliff talks with Kelly Doyle about her rather unique position at West Virginia University, and ways she’s found to help students at West Virginia contribute to Wikipedia and make better use of it in their research.

Links

· Kelly Doyle’s Wikipedia profile, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:KellyDoyle

· Kelly Doyle on Twitter, @WiR_at_WVU, https://twitter.com/WiR_at_WVU

· WVU press release about Kelly Doyle’s position, http://wvutoday-archive.wvu.edu/n/2015/11/03/wvu-libraries-hires-wikipedian-in-residence-for-gender-equity.html

· 2007 interview with Vanderbilt’s Michael Bess, https://wp0.vanderbilt.edu/cft/2007/12/episode-1-an-interview-with-michael-bess/

Open Access Week was October 23-29 of this year. It’s a week promoting open access as the default in

scholarship and research. The Vanderbilt Libraries hosted a number of events for Open Access Week, and one of the speakers they brought in was Nicole Allen, director of open education at SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. Melissa Mallon, director of liaison and instruction services at the Vanderbilt Library and a member of the Leading Lines team, sat down with Nicole while she was on campus to talk about Nicole’s work promoting the use of open educational resources in higher education.

Nicole Allen’s SPARC profile, https://sparcopen.org/people/nicole-allen/

@txtbks, Nicole Allen’s Twitter account, https://twitter.com/txtbks

SPARC, https://sparcopen.org/

OpenStax, https://openstax.org/

OpenCon, http://www.opencon2017.org/

In this episode, we talk with Akos Ledeczi, professor of computer engineering and senior research scientist at the Institute for Software Integrated Systems here at Vanderbilt University. Akos is the lead developer for NetsBlox, a graphical programming language designed to introduce novice programmers from middle school to college to networked programming. Students can use NetsBlox to create simple multiplayer games and to build apps that interface with public data sets.

Akos is interviewed by Cliff Anderson, Associate University Librarian for Research and Learning and a member of our Leadings Lines team. Cliff and Akos discuss the past, present, and future of NetsBlox, and explore how graphical programming languages like NetsBlox, Snap!, and Scratch, are changing computer science education.

One terminology note: Akos uses the term blocks-based coding to refer to programming languages like NetsBlox and Scratch in which graphical interfaces allow programmers to drag “blocks” of instructions together to create relatively complex programs.

LINKS

• Akos Ledeczi's faculty profile page - https://engineering.vanderbilt.edu/bio/akos-ledeczi

• Vanderbilt's Institute for Software Integrated Systems - www.isis.vanderbilt.edu/

• Graphical programming languages

https://netsblox.org/

https://scratch.mit.edu/

http://snap.berkeley.edu/