Final Efforts

three of Jumpstart at Stockton’s Tech Academy. More work at ironing out the kinks in using Picasa to create albums of medical recipe books – or at least understanding the kinks well enough to work around them. Google didn’t really design Picasa for collaborative work: though I can invite other Google account holders to add comments, they can’t add tags. Nor can they do much in the way of manipulating images. The only way they can have full access to Picasa features when working with the images is to log in under my account, but then I don’t have any easy way to keep track of the work contributed by each individual student. Picasa should really be set up to have blog-like capabilities, where one person (me) can have access to administrative features, while my students can all have access to “contributor” features, including the ability to tag images. Google Picasa developers, are you listening?

Wimba Interlude

In the afternoon we had a 2-hour introduction to Wimba technology, which creates a live classroom environment. It really is amazing: entire courses and conferences can be set up online, with full interactivity among participants. I am particularly intrigued by the possibility of setting up virtual break-out rooms, so that specific sets of participants can have access to specific materials, analyze them, discuss them, then rejoin the main group. I don’t expect to be using it any time soon – I want to see my history students face to fact, thank you, and we prefer the library, the real library, for break-out discussion – but it is intriguing to think how the technology might be useful. How about setting up a Live Classroom for a review the night before a test? Or a question-and-answer session just before a paper is due?

Final Wrap-Up

And finally, fortified with coffee, we met to present the results of the three-day intensive digital experience. I’ll skate over my own presentation — if you’ve made it this far through the blog, you already know all about it — and concentrate on my Jumpstart colleagues. Nora Palugod learned how to harness the power of Wimba to create live classrooms so her students could discuss global management issues with their counterparts in the Philippines. Lyn Mathis used the screen recording software Camtasia to put herself and her computer applications lesson into a wonderfully sleek package. We were awestruck as, with the click of a button or two, her voice and her lesson appeared before us on the presentation screen. And students can stop, replay, and fast forward to any part of her demonstration, unlike in real life. Fang Liu migrated a substantial portion of her course online to Blackboard, organizing lectures, problem sets, and assessments neatly according to date, and incorporating appealing graphics. And Jo Ann McEnerney won the award for Completion-of-Project-in-Shortest-Possible-Time, using Blackboard and Wimba, to carry out the complex task of turning her Financial Accounting course from classroom-based to distance education. She had the whole thing up and running by the end of the three day workshop, just in time for the start of her class three days later.

Reflections on Digital Projects @ a Liberal Arts College

The Summer Tech Academy at Stockton College is a solution to one of the ongoing issues in how to bring the promise of digital humanities to the liberal arts college environment. Faculty may be reluctant to buy in to digital technologies — especially if they believe, as we faculty often do, that neither their discipline nor their institutions may reward them for the extra work involved. By bringing together faculty who already have identified a way to improve a specific course with facilitators who can help them use technology to make that improvement, and also by providing one-on-one tech support, unlimited access to targeted software and hardware, and a stipend to boot, the Summer Tech Academy overcomes some of the most serious barriers to entry to the digital world. And making it easier to become tech savvy is the surest way to make work in the digital humanities relevant to the wider academic community.

Back to Basics: The Library

We reassemble on Thursday morning, and Jed Morfit and I betake ourselves and our equipment to the library to work through the process of putting a hypothetical medical recipe book, created by a hypothetical student, online so we can work with it in Picasa. At this point I should pause and explain the purpose of the assignment. Medical recipe books are fascinating historical documents, essentially scrapbooks of medical recipes taken from books or newspapers, or suggested by family members, friends, and medical professionals. They are like family cookbooks except that they deal with diseases and injuries, and in fact many scrapbooks combine notes and recipes for medical matters, household hints, and cooking. Like cookbooks, they were often passed down within a family, so that they include several generations’ worth of recipes. The College of Physicians of Philadelphia has a fine collection of them, which I’ve used for research and presentations. The important things about them for my history of medicine course are: 1) they perfectly encapsulate the patients’-eye view of disease, because they show what their patient-owners think is important, rather than what a medical professional might or might not think, and 2) they illustrate the different ways that people from different cultures make sense of disease.

Over the past few years I’ve had great success in having students create their own medical recipe books. I give them strict guidelines about length and content, and encourage them to collect recipes from their own family, friends, and medical professionals. Often they’ll take great pains with content and presentation, and the recipe books become a record of a kind of oral tradition in medicine. Since southern New Jersey has a fairly diverse population, students’ recipe books usually encompass a wide range of cultural traditions. But unfortunately we don’t usually get to discuss them as a class, because the assignments are handed into me, graded, and then returned. I could build a class discussion into the course, but it would be most productive if students had previously interacted in some way with each other’s recipe books. I would also like to expand the project to include medical artifacts, like aspirin bottles, which could be compared to medical artifacts held in the Mutter Museum at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

Taking Pictures

This is what has brought us to the library to develop a workable process. We stake out a couple of carrels away from summer school students and set up shop. Our digital equipment consists of 1) a laptop with Picasa installed 2) a digital camera 3) a card reader. Our game plan is to assume that students have brought in their medical recipe books on the assigned day, together with other artifacts, like aspirin bottles. They will be handed a digital camera, told to take a picture of themselves (for record-keeping purposes), then to take pictures of each page of their recipe books and each artifact.

So we locate a copy of Gray’s Anatomy to serve as a trial recipe book. We quickly determine that reflecting light is a factor: we may need to set up a specific place within my classroom where we can control the light source. We also determine that it’s hard for me to hold the camera steady: we may have to set up a tripod for the camera, and arrange the recipe books accordingly. Once the images are in the camera, though, moving them to my laptop is easy enough. I attach the card reader, insert the memory card from the camera, and copy the images into a newly-created folder (to protect the originals). start Picasa on my laptop, and create an album called Gray’s Anatomy Trial. We discuss whether any part of this process should be done by students, and decide that they could certainly take the pictures. But it will minimize opportunities for disaster if I then take the camera from them and take care of the rest of the upload process myself. Students can re-connect with the images when they are safely stored online.

Multiplying Googles

We are ready to begin the next phase, syncing to the online version of Picasa so students can have access to the files. But Jed points out to me that I don’t really want to use my own Google account, the one I use for my Google calendar and so on, for my classes. It would give students — and potentially the rest of the world — too much information about me. Much better to create a new Google account, with its own gmail, specifically for class purposes. The next little while is taken up with multiplying Google accounts needlessly, as it takes me several tries to hit on a set of usernames and passwords that would be useful for other products as well as Picasa, and other courses as well as history of medicine. The formalities attended to, I sync the albums. Jed and I take turns tagging images and sending each other posts. We realize this can be a perfect solution to the student-interactivity issue: Once the images of their medical recipe books and artifacts are online, students can be assigned to adding tags, using Picasa’s search tools to analyze images, and writing thoughtful and perceptive comments.

But that means they will each need a Google account, and they will have to be taught how to use Picasa which, though intuitive to us, may not be for them. And so we put away all our equipment — for the moment — and discuss how my medical recipe assignment, once just one among several course projects, will have to be moved front and center. I will have to schedule time in the computer lab at the beginning of the course, so that students can sign up for Google accounts; I will have to build in follow-ups and drafts during the semester; and I will have to make sure we have enough time for the digital process we’ve modeled as the end of term approaches. It will be — to be frank — a lot more work than I expected. But it will also be a lot more exciting, a chance to for us as a class to create something innovative and significant.

It’s been a day both productive and exhausting.

To be continued…

Introducing Tech Academy at Stockton College

I’m two days behind in my promise to blog the Summer Tech Academy at Stockton College, but my excuse is that we’ve been so busy and productive that I haven’t had time to put pen to paper — er, fingers to the keyboard. The Tech Academy is an excellent program developed, in the words of the Tech Academy blog, “to teach each other to lead with technology.” It is also a lot of fun, allowing faculty members at varying stages of tech-savvy to work with enthusiastic and knowledgeable computer geeks. The goal is for each participant to have a chance to experience hands-on a set of innovative pedagogical tools recommended specifically for his/her own classes. It is scheduled in the early part of the summer, so that the course-related issues for which we really, really want some technological fixes are still fresh in our minds. We then have the next two semesters to consider what we’ve learned and process how to implement these new ideas in our classes. Participation in the two-week Tech Academy counts towards two of the areas that form part of faculty evaluation at Stockton, pedagogical innovation and college service. In many cases it contributes to research as well.There’s free food. Finally, and non-trivially, we are paid for our participation. Who could ask, as the song goes, for anything more?

The Adventure Begins

I am involved in Jumpstart, a kind of mini-Tech Academy, for those of us whose pedagogical inquiries lend themselves to specific technological solutions. We met for the first time in the newly-redecorated G-wing bridge, for the traditional start of any Stockton workshop: breakfast. With me as participants are Lyn Mathis, JoAnn McEnerney, Nora Palagud, Fang Liu, and our mentors, Doug Harvey, Jed Morfit, Linda Feeney and Roberto Castillo. After addressing the traditional pre-workshop topics — the state budget, the new cafeteria decor, and the likelihood that any of our offices will ever get a comparable makeover — we launch into a discussion of pedagogy, that is, what courses we are working on and what we want to do with them. Nora wants to get her students more engaged in Global Management by setting up a live classroom which will allow real-time conversation with students in the Philippines. JoAnn is migrating her Financial Management course towards distance learning, and wants a way to retain her classroom-based problem solving sessions. Lyn also wants to learn about ways of putting part of her classroom practices online: she teaches a course in computer literacy to students from a wide range of majors, and she wants students who need extra help to be able to work through it at their own pace without holding back the others. Fang is thinking of making her Medical Technology a hybrid course, part classroom and part online, and wants to learn the technological possibilities for keeping students engaged and doing their homework. And I want to figure out how to create a kind of virtual medical museum for my History of Medicine course, so that students can bring in artifacts and home-made medical recipe books, place their images online and analyze their significance together.

We discuss all these courses, we drink coffee or tea or juice, we offer suggestions, technological and otherwise. I’m paired with Jed Morfit, a sculptor who began as a participant in the Tech Academy and is now an instructor. He has used Picasa to upload his students’ work and conduct online discussions, so we start by working out how we might try something similar for my virtual medical museum. Easy, I think. How am I going to stretch this out for three days? Google, Picasa, no problem.

A Temporary Setback

And it wouldn’t be, really, if it was just me working on my own project. But this is for a class, so we have to explore the students’-eye-view of the assignment. And so, down in the computer lab, we have our first reality check. Yes, Stockton has state-of-the-art computer labs, yes, the computers have Picasa installed, and yes, we certainly can connect to Picasa online, no problem. The complications emerge as we try to walk through each step students would take to get their images of medical artifacts and recipe books online. They would have to first obtain those images, but how? with a cell phone camera? and would they then email the images to themselves? No, the resolution wouldn’t be good enough. So they’d need a digital camera. Then they’d have to somehow get those images onto a computer in one of the labs. On my personal computer, I’d use a card reader, but how many students will have them? And even if they had them, they might not be able to use them, because some of the Stockton computers won’t allow outside USB devices for security reasons. Also for security reasons, outside files, such as documents and images, can’t be saved to the C: drive of any of the lab computers, but only to a special “scratch” drive. We discover this the hard way, by downloading trial images and saving them somewhere (where? no idea) that seemed to work but then doesn’t let Picasa access the files. Of course, as faculty members, we don’t usually use the computer labs, so maybe students would know this already — but maybe they wouldn’t, and would become as frustrated as, frankly, we felt. To make matters worse, while we’re doing all this, Picasa freezes on us. We email ourselves the trial images (so as not to download them again), move to another computer (we have the whole lab, after all), try downloading them again, to the right directory this time, and then realize that we are almost out of time for the day.

We take stock. Main lesson learned: Picasa is swell, Picasa is pretty, Picasa is grand, but we need a way of getting images into it that won’t frustrate students or the professor. How about via my personal computer, the one I know and love best? We agree to meet next morning, 8:30 am, with laptop, digital camera, card reader, and continue to work through the process.

To be continued…