English Lecturer Barbara Stuart stands in front of her students' Election 2008 Blog.

As students filed into Barbara Stuart’s English 114 class, “Reading and Writing Argument,” little did they know that they would leave as seasoned political bloggers. “I had never used blogging as a tool for teaching, but with the 2008 election coming up, it seemed an ideal way to get students to write on topics of real importance,” notes Stuart, who is a Lecturer in Yale’s English Department.

While Stuart’s class is not the only Yale course to encourage students to blog in order to engage with their subject, it is one of the few to make it central to the class’s pedagogical goals.  Ken Panko, Manager of Yale’s Instructional Technology Group (ITG), recalls the invitation he received with instructional design specialist Robin Ladouceur not only to walk students through the mechanics of blogging but to explore the discursive precursors of the format. “I tried to motivate the students by situating their efforts in the long tradition of Anglo-American citizen journalism from eighteenth-century pamphleteers like Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke all the way through to contemporaries like Matt Drudge and Arianna Huffington.”

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One of the tablet PCs being used in the Collaborative Learning Center.

Faculty members looking to spice up their seminars or small lecture sections with interactive and collaborative learning activities have a new resource to consider in one of the new classrooms in the Bass Library. A cart stocked with 17 tablet PCs sits ready for the adventurous teacher in Room L01, located downstairs in the Collaborative Learning Center area of the Bass Library.

With the tablets, users can write directly on their computer screens with a stylus. This allows faculty members to annotate their lecture notes and scribble on their presentations. Students can draw graphs and concept maps or circle and caption images during class discussion. The tablet PCs also feature two special applications, DyKnow and SynchronEyes, which promote collaborative learning opportunities yet still give final control to professors over what students can do on their tablets.

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Students click their response pads to answer questions and the class then automatically sees a graph of the responses. Faculty interested in using clickers in their spring courses should contact itg@yale.edu.

Faculty interested in using “clickers” (audience response systems) in their spring courses should contact the Instructional Technology Group (ITG) as soon as possible to make arrangements. Coordination with ITG is essential to ensure that there will be enough clickers available at the Bass Library Circulation Desk to accommodate your class size and that faculty have the most recent version of the clicker software.

We’re happy to announce a new version of the clicker software, called TurningPoint Anywhere. Released a couple of months ago for the Mac and PC, the new version does not require Microsoft PowerPoint. This means that there is now a stable, tested option for Apple Keynote and Open Office users.

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