Technology supported a number of innovative teaching and learning activities in Fall 2010 courses. Most notably, professors increasingly asked students to produce scholarly work in a variety of media.

Screenshot of the Gender, Sexuality and Pop Culture course blog.

Inderpal Grewal and Laura Wexler’s “Gender, Sexuality and Popular Culture” seminar included a weekly media lab section. Yianni Yessios of Yale’s Instructional Technology Group (ITG) taught the lab in which students explored multimedia production techniques and technologies that they used to complete their final project - creating a street. Students picked a specific location in the world and a specific time in history and addressed an issue related to gender and sexuality in that place and time with how they designed their street.

In History, students in Alyssa Park’s “Mapping Korea in East Asia” junior seminar recorded podcasts and produced short, narrated videos.

A student in Prof. Pressman's "Digital Literature" course presents her avatar-based final project.

For their final projects, Jessica Pressman’s “Digital Literature” students produced web-based essays using technological methods similar to those used by the authors they studied.

In “Principles of Chemical Engineering and Process Modeling,” Andre Taylor’s students formed groups to write, record and edit informational videos that introduce viewers to the field of Chemical Engineering.

Professors also used technology this semester to facilitate their students’ engagement with Yale’s collections.

Screenshot of the YRIHS Research Resources website.

George Chauncey, Joanne Meyerowitz and Graeme Reid worked with ITG to produce a research resources guide on their Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities website.

Staff in the Library’s Map Collection digitized historic maps of Dublin on which students in Pericles Lewis’s “Ulysses” course placed digital markers pinpointing and describing the locations of events in the novel.

The use of course blogs and clickers were popular with instructors, as well. WordPress blogs were used in over 40 courses and approximately 700 clickers were loaned to students for use in seven different Yale College courses.

Visit the Yale Slavery and Abolition Portal at http://slavery.yale.edu.

As Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, David Blight was more than aware of the wealth of material available from Yale about this difficult period in world history. But how to get it into the hands of Yale students more effectively was the question that had been preoccupying him.  That’s when one of Blight’s Ph.D. students, Joseph Yannielli, who is also an I3 intern in the Instructional Technology Group, proposed creating a website guiding students and faculty to Yale’s resources in this field of study. “The secret to our success,” Yannielli notes, “laid in our decision to use Drupal, a content management system that makes it easy for content experts to set up a portal and even contribute new information to the project.” The Yale Slavery and Abolition Portal marries Yale’s enormous resources to an easy of way presenting them to the scholarly community solving a problem that the Gilder Lehrman Center had considered for years.

Take the case of the Amistad. In 1839, fifty-three Mendi Africans awaited trial for mutiny, murder, and piracy after taking over the Spanish slave ship. It was at that time that they received a visit from New Haven resident William Townsend, who sketched them in pen-and-ink. Also visiting them was their attorney Roger Sherman Baldwin, an 1811 graduate of Yale, who corresponded with the captives during their two-year legal struggle that culminated in Baldwin’s successful argument of their case before the United States Supreme Court.

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“There are three ways of getting data into students’ hands,” explain Professor of Psychology, Margaret Clark. “You can hand them already formed sets; they can gather it from subjects outside the classroom; or they can collect it from themselves.” For her class, “Research Methods in Psychology,” what she wanted was the last: “That way, students could experience data collection firsthand without the enormous effort of having to find their human subjects,” she adds.

But collecting data from human subjects can be onerous. For Professor Clark, it required getting approval from Yale’s institutional review board and ensuring the identities of her students subjects were protected. For Clark, the challenge was finding a way her 80 or so students could collect data from one another without revealing to her or the rest of the class which questions individual students had answered and how. That’s when she turned to ITS Academic Technologies including the StatLab, which supports social science departments with data collection and analysis, and the Instructional Technology Group.

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