Text mark-up faculty consultation report

Faculty met over lunch on Thursday, April 7 to explore how technology might assist us with that time-honored task of grading student written work. We were looking for ways that faculty can comment on student writing, for students to annotate texts, and for all of us to make the work-flow of collecting, marking up, and returning work more efficient and ecologically responsible. The session was lively and lots of experiences were shared, including the following.

• Lee Forester (DMCL) demonstrated how he uses the free Revisions tool from MSU in his German class to comment on student writing assignments (http://clear.msu.edu/revisions/)
• Barry Bandstra (Religion) demonstrated how his students annotate biblical texts in class using their laptops. The pdf is distributed as a Moodle resource which the student downloads. After annotation, the student uploads the pdf using the "Upload a single file" within the Assignment activity. Mac annotation is done with the free Preview application, which comes loaded with the Mac OS. PC annotation is done with the free PDF-XChange Viewer program (http://www.docu-track.com)
• Other possible ways to annotate text: Track Changes in MS Word and Google docs.

Rumor has it that the iPad might be useful for text annotation, but nobody in attendance brought one to demo. Thanks to Tom Ludwig, here is a link to a short list of useful iPad apps -- http://chronicle.com/article/The-iPad-for-Professors-/126885/ including something called iAnnotate. Some other apps came up in the discussion, though not related to text mark-up:

• Prezi (http://prezi.com) for engaging presentations, free, going way beyond powerpoint
• Jing (http://www.techsmith.com/jing/) for short instructional videos
• iShowU (http://www.shinywhitebox.com/ishowuhd/main.html) for screen capture movies

This was the last of three ACAT sponsored faculty consultations on emerging technologies for the Spring 2011 semester. If you have a topic you would like to see discussed in a future faculty consultation, send a note to bandstra@hope.edu.

Report of the March 8 e-books faculty consultation

A group of about 15 faculty and staff met in the Granberg Room on Tuesday, March 8 to discuss e-books and e-textbooks. Kelly Jacobsma, director of the Van Wylen library, apprised us of the variety of electronic book resources the library already licenses (see below). We discussed the variety of existing options for readers and file formats, talked about reading textbooks on a screen, annotation issues, and student reception of e-textbooks. We also mused about the role (and responsibility?) of faculty in promoting the use of online as opposed to print resources for ecological and stewardship reasons.

In this same vein, The March 15, 2011 New York Times has a news item As Library E-Books Live Long, Publisher Sets Expiration Date about HarperCollins unilaterally changing its library licensing terms to restrict access to its e-book catalog, because they are becoming too popular. This does not bode well.

Kelly's handout --

Library E-books

There are currently 32,000 e-books in the library catalog
We purchase e-books from a variety of vendors all of which use a different platform for reading the e-book:
• Netlibrary (our earliest collection - currently investigating new platform and portability)
• ACLS Humanities E-book Project
• Ebrary (investigating purchase on demand)
• Springer (almost 19,000 are Springer titles - portable e-book format via pdf download)
• Credo - primarily reference books
• Oxford Reference Online
• Gale Reference Books

Portable E-book formats In the consumer market

• Kindle (Amazon)
• Nook (Barnes & Noble)
• Google Books
• iBooks (Apple)
• BlueFire Reader (supports Adobe DRM standard and allows you to purchase books from a variety of online book stores, including international bookstores for foreign language materials)

E-readers and E-books Collection Guide from University of Michigan - Dearborn
http://libguides.umd.umich.edu/content.php?pid-155250&sid-1315772
Top Ten Reviews, http://ebook-reader-review.toptenreviews.com

E-Textbooks

• Inkling (textbooks for the iPad)
• CourseSmart (A substantial list of textbooks from a variety of publishers including McGraw-Hill, Pearson, Routledge, Wiley, Elsevier, Sage, Taylor & Francis, FA Davis, Jones & Bartlett, Sinauer and Wolters Kluwer etc, Partners with bookstores, Has an iPad app, E-textbooks generally cost 50% of print version.
• Nookstudy (only available on Mac and PC - not portable devices)
• CafeScribe (Follet) (features note sharing among students)
• Cengage Brain (allows purchase of individual chapters or entire textbook)

2011 ACAT Instructional Technology Innovation Fund recipients and their projects

Mark Husbands (Religion) Digital Note Taking & Lecture Capture Project
with “Pear Note” -- a license for software to facilitate in-class student notetaking. Check out a description of the proposed project here.
Tom Ludwig (Psychology) Tools for Efficient Delivery of Online Instruction -- hardware to facilitate the development of instructional modules. Instructors planning blended courses or adding online content to standard classroom courses need efficient ways to develop online instructional materials and to deliver them to students in formats that can be viewed on laptop computers and on mobile devices such as smartphones. Although the technology is already available to deliver simple content tutorials through narrated PowerPoint/Keynote presentations or QuickTime movies, it's not easy to make this type of content interactive in the sense of assessing student learning within the tutorials themselves. This project will produce a set of software tools that Hope faculty could use to create interactive instructional tutorials with embedded quizzes. These tutorials could contain text paragraphs, photos, graphs, animations, and video clips. Once the faculty member had assembled the media elements for a tutorial, the tutorial could be created in a text editor, using simple "mark-up" tags to specify the content to be displayed on each tutorial page.The software tools would read the text file and generate an interactive tutorial that could be displayed within the Flash player on laptop computers and some smart phones, or be displayed using HTML5 technologies on iPhones and iPads.
Becky Schmidt (Kinesiology) Tablet Technology in Health Dynamics -- tablet devices to facilitate faculty-student contact in a blended version of Kinesiology 140. In this new model, the bulk of student personal contact will take place during physical activity periods. I and my two TAs will circulate around the cardio room, the weight room, and the track area of the Dow Center giving encouragement and advice, and we will initiate discussion around issues arising out of the online materials. As we maintain contact with students during their activities, we will need to be able to access their records in order to monitor and discuss their progress, and keep a record of personal contact, including notes and observations. In order to do this we will need fast, efficient, and ready access to their data. Handheld tablet devices connected to Moodle via the campus wi-fi network may accomplish this.
Leigh Sears (Kinesiology) Attendance System for Health Dynamics -- a card swipe system for health dynamics class attendance. With multiple sections of health dynamics each semester, each containing roughly 60 students - much time is wasted in the sign in and sign out process. There is limited time to work out and some of this time is wasted standing in line to sign into class and time has to be set aside at the end to check everyone out. Class time could be more effective if the students simply had to swipe a card on their way into the workout facility. Also - this would ensure that students are not signing in or out for each other.