Speaker: Andreas Karatsolis, Assistant Professor of Information Design, Carnegie Mellon University – Qatar

Provide each student with a tablet pc – difficult to support
Wanted to move into a paperless campus
Used DyKnow

Andreas’ background – Rhetoric and Communication
-situated learning
-information design

Albany College of Pharmacy:

Principles of Communication course
All networked sections – but the use of tablets in classroom was determined by each instructor

Can tablet PCs force a process of crafting a series of information design decisions?
Assignments – Eval, Proposal, Paper

Tablets and reading – how tablets could be used to improve how students read; help students know what texts do

Writing an abstract
5 necessary components – outline field, justify a piece of research
showed example of abstract – you can annotate it in class to show where 5 elements are, how they function
Students work less with content than mechanics of what an abstract is supposed to do.

Use DyKnow panels that are submitted.
Learning how to read texts in a more interactive way in class

Tablets and writing – help students on invention and revising
Activities
Pre-writing
Peer Reviewing
Editing and Evaluation

Use tablets in class to break proposals down into component charts = structured thinking and strategizing.
Peer reviews aren’t very useful unless you give them very specific instructions of what one should look for and do
Use stylus to make connections between text they are reading and rubric they are using to guide them through the review process.

Tablets => messier, but more productive review process. Students are more engaged.

Tablets and visuals
Help students understand the relationship between text and visuals ad produce rhetorically meaningful visuals
Activities:
Analyzing images

Tablet PCs can allow for greater engagement with information design.

Curricular Design

Get buy-in from faculty
Start backwards at the outcome level
Map out content outcomes to specific sessions
Map out learning outcomes to specific assignments
Align outcomes to assignments and assessments

Yale University recreated a traditional pedagogical model in a way that used TabletPCs to maximize student participation. We realized that classroom management software along with the interactivity of the TabletPC could provide an opportunity, as the professor put it “to send all of the students to the blackboard at the same time.” We recently took some the lessons learned from our first attempt at a laptop classroom and used them during the creation of a newer Collaborative Learning classroom in the Library. This presentation will cover the considerations and decisions made as we transition from pilot to production including: dissemination and storage of laptops, why pen-based machines, furniture, imaging and deployment, learning curves for professor and students, and, most importantly, ongoing support.

Themba Flowers’ PowerPoint:

Tablet PCs

Speakers:
Meg Stewart, Academic Computing Services Consultant for GIS, Vassar College
Keri VanCamp, Ecological Preserve Field Station Manager, Vassar College

(Get PPP to post on the blog)

-Got a grant from Hewlitt Packard – got 21 tablets 2004
-Enhanced GIS program
-Teaching with GIS
-with money from the grant – they got GIS software
-Spring 2008 – they purchased new tablets.
-got grant from HP in 2008 to make a video to show students how to use the tablets.
-students worked in pairs – one has tablet, the other has GIS
-can digitize – using pen to mark land use. Pen integrated seamlessly with “ArcMap(?)”
-have aerial photo as base and can annotate – diagram sediment distribution.
-did mobile mapping workshop for faculty.

Geomorphology:

Objectives:
-understand a geomorphological concept – meandering stream.
-have students use an emerging tech.
-TC1100 – early tablet that they used with a GPS receiver.
-collecting wave points every few seconds.
-mapping change in course of stream.
-advantage of tablets – mobility and power; interactivity with GPS; stylus is vastly more efficient.

Ecology:

Objectives:
-have students participate in long-term ecological research during a series of lab assignments.
-study invasive plant species
-problems with traditional methodology – eyeballing inconsistencies among researchers
-inability to verify findings
-plant id is time consuming

Tablets could obviate these problems – photogrid!
-data collection more consistent among users
-a photographic record of plot is stored
-could use custom field guide for site using web browser.
-easier plant id
-point id is simpler
-participating in long-term research was useful

Drawbacks:
-speed problems
-using 10 tablets – collating data from all
-battery life – poor

Still it is a useful tool.

-enhanced scope of Ecology projects
-allows for increased complexity of projects
-could use excel in the field to record data.

Advantages:
-ease of use
-ability to combine data sets of various users.
-stored info for long-term project
-involvement in actual research = boon for students.

Field Archeology:

-actual experience of in-field research informing choice of major, investment in field of study.
-cataloguing everything from the site that they found in their field session.
-could do complete record of excavation – could take records from each tablet and collate.
-more like apprenticeship in real life sit., than theoretical/abstract.

Evaluating student outcomes.
-understand student confidence level with tech.
-learning outcomes
-increase or decrease in student skill level (with tablets)

Faculty wanted to see decrease in transcription errors

Used Likert scale

Students needed demo
Longer battery life
Good for dift. learning styles
Like using an emerging technology

Faculty liked two scales of visualization

Link to Vassar NERCOMP Presentation