October 5th, 2009 by Alex Chapin
All the Language departments and Language Schools at Middlebury require students to take a placement exam before enrolling in language courses or programs in order to ensure students take courses at a level appropriate to their knowledge of the language they want to study. Amongst language departments, the Spanish department was the first to create an online version of their placement exam in a web application referred to as Measure. Prof. Nancy O’Connor used the Spanish department exam as a guide for developing an exam for students of French.
The exam contains about 45 questions, most of which are either multiple-choice or cloze type questions. Some questions refer to images of product labels, tickets or forms that students might encounter in a French-speaking country. There are also listening comprehension questions and a short essay question. The exam is configured to allow students to only access the questions once and has a time limit of 1 hour 30 minutes. Student answers are saved to a database and can be exported into a spreadsheet. Results from this exam determine what level courses students are allowed to take at Middlebury.
October 5th, 2009 by Alex Chapin
Prof. Kyoko Davis has never been fully satisfied with the audio resources included with any of the textbooks used by the Japanese dept. The Japanese dept currently uses Genki, An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese. To supplement the audio resources that accompany this textbook, Prof. Davis has recorded additional audio material for students, some of this audio contains material from the textbook that is not in the accompanying resources, some contain alternative versions that are presented at a faster and/or slower pace and some contain supplementary material.
One area of study that Prof. Kyoko has focused on is vocabulary instruction. She has worked with Media Services to record hundreds of vocabulary items and used a spreadsheet to document all the metadata for each item including Hiragana, Katagana and Kanji representations of a given word, its English translation, grammatical categorization and information about lessons it appears in. All of this information was then imported into a database that was accessed by a web application she helped design for vocabulary study that allows students to specify items they know and don’t know, tracks their study habits and generates quizzes customized to their particular knowledge of the items studied.
June 19th, 2009 by Brenda Ellis
 Technology Used: Podcasting
Course: PS0304 International Political Economy (Spring 2009)
Number of Students: 31
Objectives: To better serve the students and democratize education.
Anticipated Learning Outcomes: Better retention and understanding
Actual Learning Outcomes: Some on both fronts
Summary of Poster Session: James Morrison explained how he uses podcasts to record his lectures so that after class, students can review the lectures. “Students can double check difficult, complicated concepts; Overcome language barriers; Get Missed Material. ** Note: My podcasting had no noticeable influence on lecture attendance! **“. Read the rest of this entry »
June 19th, 2009 by Brenda Ellis
Technologies Used: Second Life; Blogs, Wikis.
Course:
Political Science 103: Intro to Comparative Politics
Number of Students: 50
Objectives: “Provide a political simulation experience for my students, and conduct an experiment to determine if it was possible to create a virtual state in which people would actively participate.”
Summary of Poster Session: Quinn Mecham and Alex Russo (a student from his course) demonstrated how they used Second Life as one of their tools to simulate how political parties and governments form. Students had avatars (simulated characters) in Second Life that could interact with each other and campaign, form parties, propose legislation, and experience how politics play out. A blog and wiki connected to their virtual space was also used to allow proposals to be vetted. Read the rest of this entry »
June 19th, 2009 by Brenda Ellis
Technologies Used: website: www.SouthChinaSea.org, Google Earth, Google Map, Google News Search, CD
Course: PSCI 214 – International Environmental Politics
Number of Students: 45
Objectives: “To integrate research and teaching, to promote student-faculty collaboration.”
Summary of Poster Session: David Rosenberg and several of his students showed the website that is a resource for students in David’s class as well as the world. Students helped identify content to link to and contributed content themselves, such as maps. Read the rest of this entry »
June 18th, 2009 by Brenda Ellis
Technologies Used: ArcGIS; Stata (Statistical Analysis Software)
Course: Economics 1008 Deconstructing Discrimination (Winter Term 2009)
Number of Students: 20
Assistance: Jack Cuneo, a tutor in the media lab (ArcGIS help)
Anticipated Learning Outcomes: Experience with collecting data and performing empirical analysis, familiarity with the capabilities of ArcGIS software, ability to use Stata software.
Summary: “My winter term class “Deconstructing Discrimination” carried out an empirical research project to examine whether retail gasoline prices are correlated with the racial and income characteristics of neighborhoods. The project required obtaining, manipulating, and combining data from a variety of sources. We purchased gasoline price data from Oil Price International (OPIS), used ArcGIS to identify the census tract for each station, and then obtained neighborhood characteristics from the 2000 Decennial Census using Geolytics software. Read the rest of this entry »
June 10th, 2009 by Carrie Macfarlane
 Technology Used: Google Earth Pro, GPS, digital video camera, Adobe Premiere Pro
Course: Environmental Studies 1011 – Reading Nature’s Winter Landscape
Number of students: 15
Photo by Carrie Macfarlane
Text by Chris Fastie and Carrie Macfarlane
For ten years, Chris Fastie, Visiting Research Scholar in the Department of Biology, had been laboring to map the geomorphology of a four-mile stretch of Upper Plains Road in Salisbury, Vermont. As time allowed, he would venture out to survey the landscape, and sketch his findings on aerial photos. Last summer, he used a GPS (Global Positioning System) receiver to map some newly discovered kame terraces, installed Google Earth Pro on his computer and learned that there was finally an effective way to share his findings with others. When he received a request to lecture for a Winter Term course at Middlebury, technology and opportunity had merged to give new impetus to the mapping project. Read the rest of this entry »
June 9th, 2009 by Bryan Carson
 Technology used: Segue for student electronic portfolios
Reason for using the technology: Several years ago, the state of Vermont decided to approve the use of electronic portfolios to meet the state’s licensure requirements. Since that time, students in Education Studies courses related to teaching have created embryonic electronic portfolios using Segue. Each portfolio needs to follow a prescribed structure and include categories relating to Teaching Episodes, Teaching over Time, Colleagueship and Advocacy, Self-reflection and Vision.
Read the rest of this entry »
June 9th, 2009 by Carrie Macfarlane
 Technology Used: Facebook
Courses: Organic Chemistry 2 (implemented twice), and Advanced General Chemistry (implemented once)
Number of students: Approximately 70 in Organic Chemistry 2, and approximately 25 in Advanced General Chemistry
Photo by Carrie Macfarlane
When Professor Jeff Byers, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, was looking for an online discussion tool for Organic Chemistry 2 (Chem 242) and Advanced General Chemistry (Chem 107), he wanted to find a tool that was student-centric. “I did not want this to be ‘top down’ — the students get enough of me,” he says. His students were already on Facebook, so he opened a forum there (see Middlebury Orgo Spring 2009). Read the rest of this entry »
June 5th, 2009 by Hans Raum
Anne Knowles’ poster session featured two atlases that had been created by students in her GEOG0219 course on the Historical Geography of North America. The titles of the atlases are Historical Atlas of New England and Atlas of Industrial America and each student in her class was responsible for creating a map, essay and bibliography for the atlas on a theme approved by her. Students found and used historical maps and created overlays that added new layers of information to the original maps. Using technology was not the goal of the course, but it presented an opportunity for students to use GIS, create an original map and to develop skills in thinking geographically to show changes over time. The feedback that Anne received from students was that their projects were the best and most satisfying assignment they ever had.
Copies of the atlases may be found in Special Collections, Armstrong Oversize and Stacks Oversize and may be loaned to other libraries through InterLibrary Loan.
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