Teaching with Technology @ Tufts

Following are more insights gleaned from the November 16 Chronicle of Higher Education chat with Henry Jenkins, director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The topic was focused on teaching with high-tech and participants writing into the chat had many questions about adopting and using technologies for teaching and learning.

One question focused on the the choice between being an early-faculty-adopter of new technologies in the classroom or waiting until the 'new' technology has become widely accepted and used among students.

Some of the points Jenkins made to this:

*Early adopters need to structure in more classtime to introduce students to the technology, its functions and uses.
*Look at new technologies that are being used in the professional field as students should be exposed to them and their use.
*"Weigh the value of the technology vs. the expenditure of time ramping up for its use"

I'm learning how to use a variety of new Web 2.0 tools such as wikis, blogs, rss feeds, social bookmarking...the list seems to be growing everyday. Here are some recent examples that of the influence these tools are having in higher education

Using a Wiki to Collaborate on a Book
Check out the We Are Smarter Than Me site, "the first community-driven, networked book on business." Its focus is to help the business world understand the emergence of blogs, online communities, and other interactive Web media and their uses to the business enterprise.

However the really interesting part of this is that you (and a million others) are invited to participate in writing the book (it is a wiki after all): "Collaborate with authors from MIT, Wharton, and thousands of professionals from around the world. See your name in print when the book is published next fall by Pearson Publishing. "

The December 2006 issue of Campus Technology http://www.campustechnology.com/article.asp?id=19671 features a yearly review of 101 Best Practices - including 32 “smart ideas” for “how colleges and universities are bringing new kinds of learning into the classroom.”

The overview article presents brief introductions to each best practice and then links to the full article that appeared previously in Campus Technology during 2006. These best practices include digital library iniatives, using cell phones to deliver information and content to students, creating portals to digital media available to students, and configuring "smart classrooms."

In Boon to Art Historians, Leading Museum Will Make Digital Images Available Free
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=1747
A recent announcement significantly broadened the access art historians and others will have to high quality images of Britain’s Victoria and Albert Museum vast repositories of "works in design and the decorative arts from cultures around the world." The museum will make digital images of objects in its collections freely available to scholars beginning in early 2007.

Visitors to the Collections Online Web site http://www.vam.ac.uk/ will soon be able to download high-resolution files free of charge.

UIT-AT partnered with the Tufts University Department of Art and Art History and the Tufts Digital Collections and Archives group to create a system that would support access to high-resolution digital images for presentation in Art History courses. Read more at Teaching and Learning Art History with Digital Images http://uit.tufts.edu/?pid=569&c=405

According to Department Chair and Associate Professor Cristelle Baskins, *The biggest change is that my first impulse now is to grab a JPEG rather than to run up to the slide room."