News Items

From today's InsideHigherEd.com's newsletter:

• Dalhousie University, in Nova Scotia, arranged to with Facebook to eliminate a group on the site devoted to opposing the university’s alleged use of animals in research, Canada.com reported. The group, called “Stop Dogs and Puppies From Being Murdered at Dalhousie University,” attracted thousands of members. University officials said that they did not have the site removed for being critical, but because it would not post responses from the university or correct inaccurate information. For instance, university officials said that the site featured pictures of dogs that appeared scared — as if they were part of university experiments when they were not.
• Many college students have been slow to embrace e-books, so Café Scribe, which offers online textbooks, commissioned a poll on what they most like about books in traditional form — and 43 percent cited issues related to smell (either liking “old book” smell or “new book” smell. So the publisher announced that it would send scratch-and-sniff stickers to those students who buy e-books.

Wiki instead of textbook?

Hi all,

I've been watching your posts here with great interest. Sounds like you all are planning some interesting projects for the upcoming semester.

Let me join in by pointing you to a Computerworld article about a professor at Boston College (my alma mater.) This fellow has been using a wiki as the "primary teaching tool" in his classroom since October.

Do you think abandoning a text book in favor of a wiki is too radical an approach, or perhaps worth a try?

(BTW - I found this article from the rss feed of the Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus blog.)

Use of a blog

Here is my attempt at using some of the information presented at our workshop this spring. Students in the Twenty First Century Techniques for Music Education class this fall will be asked to participate in a class blog. I will assign one student each week to discuss the technology (Finale, Band-in-a-Box, Publisher, PowerPoint, creating web pages, etc) or the jazz pedagogy we are covering that particular week, and then request class members respond to that blog entry. The class will also be introduced to WIKI and RSS by Rick Lindquist from IT. This year we will not have specific assignments using these options, but will consider using them in future classes.

Request for Bloggers!

Hi everyone,

As the end of summer rapidly approaches, the Summer Reading Project is gearing up. The library has a webpage with a number of resources about Mountains Beyond Mountains - articles, sites, video/audio interviews with Kidder and Dr. Paul Farmer, etc..

If you're reading the book or if you've read the book, or if you have any knowledge/opinion of the book or of Dr. Farmer's work, I would love it if you'd post to the IWU Reads blog at http://iwureads.blogspot.com/. Right now, it's just me, so it would be great to get other faculty voices in the mix! Students know about the blog thanks to mailings and a link from the "Class of 2011" Facebook group, so hopefully some of them will also chime in.

Please email me so I can invite you to participate in the blog through Blogger!

Thanks in advance!
Stephanie

blogging vs writing?

Here is an article by author and blogger Sophie Cunningham called "Caught in the Blogjam". She talks about a lot of writers you might have heard of (Michael Chabon, William Gibson, Poppy Z Brite, Barbara Ehrenreich and on and on) who manage to teeter on the edge between blogging and writing. Does engaging in blogging help or hurt our main efforts?

http://www.theage.com.au/news/books/caught-in-the-blogjam/2007/07/19/1184559950812.html

I expect many of the arguments and commentary in the article apply much the same to Illinois Wesleyan faculty as they do to full time writers of fiction and non-fiction.

Good stuff

When I was at the University of Wisconsin - Baraboo, the dean always said "Good stuff" when he liked an idea. So I say, "Good stuff." I'm really looking forward to hearing about the results of each of your projects.

I've been working with Joel Haefner on a collaborative library - writing center project. We are experimenting with training a select few writing tutors to provide a combination of writing and research assistance to students in specific classes. Communication among all parties -- tutors, students, teacher, Joel, and me -- will be important, so I'm going to either set up a group in Luminus or create a blog for one of the fall semester classes that utilizes a designated writing tutor/research assistant. Details later...

Marcia

Economics Senior Seminar

The Economics Senior Seminar is the capstone course in economics and is taught every fall. Students are given various assignments throughout the semester (topic proposal, outline, annotated bibliography, presentations) as steps toward their final assignment, an original research paper.

As liaison to the Economics Department, I work closely with the class (taught by Mike Seeborg). At the beginning of the semester I meet with the class and talk about what resources they are likely to find the most helpful and some of the challenges and issues they may face in conducting their research. The final paper requires a significant literature search and the use of datasets, which can be difficult to locate, access, and download. I encourage students to meet with me individually to talk about their projects and I work with them to locate needed resources and to troubleshoot problems in locating and accessing data. Often there is overlap among different students regarding resources they might find useful and/or problems they encounter and ways to solve these problems (especially with accessing datasets).

This fall there are two sessions of the senior seminar class. I’ve decided that using a blog might prove helpful as a way to communicate resources and to share problem-solving strategies. My hope is that students will not only post questions and concerns, but also share what they learn – such as good search techniques, resources, or ways to solve the challenges inherent in finding usable and relevant datasets. Thus, they will learn from each other in addition to any insight I can provide. This blog will also serve as an archive and this information will be beneficial to have for other economics classes (such as econometrics) and for future senior seminars.