Update: And here is a short outline of tips I handed around:
phases.

You want me to teach what?

In the first of these, Joan van Hise and Dawn Massey addressed the question of what to do when you are faced with teaching a course with content or delivery that is unfamiliar. They brought Smarties and Dum-dums to throw at participants.

When pressed into a course you are unfamiliar with, you look for others as models. If there are no models, try professional organizations, other disciplines, and working profession as a source of information.

Past these sources, two approaches:

Plan A: Amass adequate technical training. Read the literature. Go to conferences and pre-conferences and training. Make contacts. Adopt a research agenda related to the area.

Plan B: Bring in an expert. Have them do guest lectures, provide case studies, have them help with course materials, team teaching, or have the expert observe your teaching.

While this is stressful, it provides a great opportunity for learning and developing as a professional.

Getting students to learn from their mistakes

Vera Cherepinsky presented some ideas on getting students in their introductory math courses to use graded exams to study. She provides students a chance to correct problems that had some error in the solution. They are required to find the errors, decide whether it is major or minor (and explain why), and then explain how to fix it. Seems like a substantial time investment, though it’s clear it helps students to learn.

Capturing Shakespeare classes with Apple Podcast Producer

Richard Regan presented his experience with capturing audio for a course on Shakespeare. The Apple Podcast Producer provides a way of streamlining the production of podcasts, providing for a pretty much immediate upload of lectures recorded using an iPod. He records directly into Producer (using a Blue Snowflake, and the system immediately uploads to iTunes University. It’s pretty much one-click, making it easy for non-techies.

They are looking to move to having audio servers in four classrooms, with microphones in the room, that would record the conversation in the room on built-in Mac Minis and upload it automatically to iTunes U. They are also looking at doing video in much the same way.

When college writing gets personal

Peter Witkowsky, from Mount Saint Mary College, talked about ways of using new media to encourage writing, and negotiating “academic” and “personal” writing styles. Says that freshmen tend to fall into two models: Elinor or Marianne: “Neither of us have anything to tell. I because I conceal nothing and you because you communicate nothing.” He says that he finds the polarization between these extremes is increasing.

Suggests that we encourage, rather than discourage, the use of web-based resources. He provides the example of using blogrunner to track on the decision about the making US currency accessible to the blind. By looking through this stuff, you provide an example of assessing information online.

The day began with a keynote from Alison Morrison-Shetlar, the Dean of Undergraduate Studies at the University of Central Florida. I’ll admit to being a bit cynical about overarching advice on teaching, but I think she did a good job of cutting through a sea of ideas and presenting some nice ideas for improving teaching at the course level and at the university-wide level.

She split this into three perspectives: those of the student, the teacher, and the classroom. She talked about a project to reinvent the general education requirements at UCF. They went out to try to figure out what students were excited about and found that across the board, undergrads shared an interest in the environment and global climate change. They encouraged faculty to include these issues, in whatever way was appropriate, in their general education courses, and provided resources for faculty to make use of (learning artifacts provided by faculty). As a result, students were not only more excited about the general education classes, they became more involved in other campus initiatives.

From the teachers perspective, she pushed hard on formative assessment. Although these were not particularly new ideas, it was great to hear them again, and just because you’ve run into them before, doesn’t mean you remember to try them. She touched on low-stakes writing (one-minute papers), encouraging students to draw pictures of the ideas they are exploring, use pictures as puzzles to encourage discussion, make use of choral response (even at the grad level), and pass the chalk to get people to present materials.

She had less time to discuss things from the perspective of the classroom, but encouraged the clustering of courses, team-teaching, and inviting colleagues into the classroom.

Next, there was a session on using Moodle with Web 2.0. The presenters ran into technical difficulties, so they ended up a bit rushed. They broadly introduced the ideas of surrounding Web 2.0 tools. They had some particular favorites (gliffy, mindmeister, buzzword, google docs, elluminate, WizIQ). WizIQ is particularly interesting: a free plugin for Moodle, it allows for live collaboration over video. It was a nice show-and-tell, though I think it’s time to throw out the whole “web 2.0” thing, especially when it comes to education. I still think the best definition of “web 2.0” is “stuff we weren’t doing on the web five years ago.” I’m dubious of efforts to define it conceptually beyond this.

In the second part of their talk, they looked at strategies for employing Learning Management Systems. They decided they wanted to have the live components (through elluminate), but they are doing their static work through NineHub, a free Moodle host. They set up a course over there to collect resources relating to teaching with social media.