Summer 2005 ACS Technology Workshops

The following workshops were offered by the ACS Technology Center in summer 2005. These workshops were open to faculty and staff at ACS member and NITLE Southern Region institutions. The ACS Tech Center paid for travel, room, and some meals for accepted ACS and Southern Region applicants. ACSTC had a limited number of openings for faculty and staff from institutions served by The Center for Educational Technology (CET) and The Midwest Instructional Technology Center (MITC). Those served by CET contacted Amy McGill to apply, and those served by MITC contacted Nancy Millichap.

All workshops were held at the ACS Technology Center at Southwestern University, Georgetown, Texas, unless specified otherwise.

Note on dates: the first and last dates listed for each event were travel days. All workshops began with a reception/meal on the arrival date.

Planning Learning Objects, June 2-5, 2005
Leader: Michael Roy, Wesleyan University
Intended Audience: Faculty, IT/Support Staff, esp. Instructional Technologists

This workshop provided an opportunity for teams of faculty and instructional technologists to plan a specific learning object project, and to also create plans for both discovering and integrating learning objects developed by others into their courses.

"Learning objects are a new way of thinking about learning content. Instead of providing all of the material for an entire course or lecture, a learning object provides material for a discrete lesson or sub-lesson within a larger course. Examples of learning objects include simulations, interactive data sets, quizzes, surveys, annotated texts, adaptive learning modules."
Wesleyan University Learning Objects Project

Participants in this workshop learned about the creation, standards, reuse, distribution and evaluation of learning objects as well as crash courses on project management and web usability. Training in the use of LOLA, a learning object exchange for facilitating the sharing of learning objects, were also provided. Participants came with a particular project in mind.

Participants were encouraged to enroll in the following workshop, Learning Object Technology, which focused on implementing their projects.

Agenda

*****

Learning Object Technology: Flash, HTML and Other Tools, June 4-9
Leader: Suzanne McGinnis, Academic Technology Services Liaison, University of Richmond
Intended Audience: Faculty, Librarians, IT/Support Staff

This workshop offered an introduction to the technology needed to implement learning objects (see previous workshop). It laid the foundation for the creation of interactive web-deliverable teaching and learning applications with Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Professional and Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004. We began by learning the basics of Flash's animation and interactivity capabilities. Participants were introduced to motion tweens, keyframes, and actionscript behaviors. In the second half of the workshop participants were introduced to Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 so that they could put their flash animations on the web as part of a larger website. Applicants had to be experienced with Web browsing.
HTML, Image Editing, and other tools were included as needed for specific projects.

This workshop was project-based, with ample time for participants to work on projects they planned in advance, and one-on-one help from Tech Center staff and student interns. Teams that included faculty, support staff and/or students who provided ongoing technical support were encouraged to apply. All workshops were designed for both Windows and Mac users.

Agenda

 *****

Sunoikisis Summer Seminars and Curriculum Planning, June 11-19
Intended Audience: Classics Faculty

This concurrent workshop was the sixth Summer Seminar and Curriculum Planning for the SUNOIKISIS Online Greek and Latin courses. In addition to planning curriculum, these seminars offered professional development opportunities for Classics faculty. A joint meeting was held June 15 to discuss other areas of collaboration in classics. Participants attended either one of the seminars or both. These seminars were intended for all interested ACS classics faculty, in particular those who planned to participate in the Fall 2005 on-line courses (ICC's).

Latin: June 11-16
Leader: Prof. Catherine Connors, University of Washington

The Latin session (June 12-14) planned the Fall 2005 course ICLAT 393: Literature of the Neronian Period, with the assistance of Prof. Catherine Connors, University of Washington.

Writing Nero’s Rome: memory, luxury, spectacle
The actor-emperor Nero treated power as a performance. Seneca, Lucan and Petronius each respond in different ways to Nero’s imperial theatrics. In this workshop we explored some common themes treated by each of these writers: history and memory, virtue and vice; spectacle and power.

Readings in Latin were expected to include: Lucan, Civil War 2 (Fantham); Petronius, Cena Trimalchionis (Smith) (esp. 26-34, 40-46, 71-78); Seneca, Selected Letters (Motto and Clark) (esp. 7, 12, 27, 41, 47, 53, 55, 65, 70, 77, 83, 86, 90, 104). Additional readings in English included ancient accounts of Nero and his court as well as modern scholarship.
Themes examined included the following: History and memory, Virture and vice, spectacle and power, Voyages, and Death.

Greek: June 14-19
Leader: Prof. Susan Lape, University of California at Irvine

The Greek session (June 16-18) planned the Fall 2005 course ICAGR 394: Literature from the Fourth Century, with the assistance of Prof. Susan Lape, University of California at Irvine. Texts included selections from the orators (Lysias, Demosthenes, Aeschines, Isocrates), philosophy (Plato and Aristotle), or historians (Xenophon).

Agenda

*****

Chinese Planning Meeting, June 17-20
Leader: Patricia Gray
Intended Audience: Chinese Faculty

This initial meeting was designed to bring together professors of Chinese from a variety of institutions who were interested in using technology to build collaborations to enrich their teaching.

OBJECTIVES

• To survey the current use of technology in Chinese language classes at the institutions represented at the workshop
• To explore effective ways of using interactive exercises, video, and other types of online presentation to enrich the experience of students in the classroom and beyond.
• To identify specific projects that can be begun immediately and introduced at some level in classes in the 2005-2006 academic year
• To look toward the possibility of creating an online ICC (Inter-Institutional Collaborative Course) at some time in the future

Agenda

*****

Digital Video, June 25-30
Leaders: Monique Head (Morehouse College) and Vidya Ananthanarayanan (Trinity University)
Intended Audience: Faculty, Librarians, IT/Support Staff

This course provided the working teacher or professional with basic theory, techniques and practice using digital video equipment. It also introduced the principles of non-linear editing and addressed the basics of graphics and composting for video. It provided the individual with practice in the design and implementation of field based instructional techniques related to video in the classroom.

Workshop Description:

This hands-on workshop presented the concepts, tools, and activities essential to producing a video short. Participants explored how to take an idea from conception to storyboard, and from storyboard to usable images in digital format. The participants also explored editing the piece for final presentation with a non-linear editing system, and publishing to QuickTime and DVD formats. Various pedagogical needs of faculty members and academic support staff were addressed, as well.

GOAL
This course provided participants with basic theory, techniques and practice using digital video equipment. It introduced the principles of non-linear editing using Adobe Premiere 6.5 and iMovie.

OBJECTIVES

• Refine & discover new instructional uses of digital video.
• Develop an understanding of concepts and practices for instructional use of the video camera and the production process.
• Gain practical experience using video equipment for instructional use.
• Utilize learning activities, which will provide methods of learning video production and editing.
  

Agenda

*****

XML (eXtensible Markup Language) for Teaching and Research, July 13-17, 2005
Leader: Scott Hamlin, Wheaton University
Intended Audience: Faculty, Librarians, IT/Support Staff

This workshop explored the uses of XML for teaching, learning and research at small liberal arts colleges. Participants received an introduction to XML markup and focused on specific applications of XML, including the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI, http://www.tei-c.org/), XHTML, RSS, TEI, EAD (Encoded Archival Description). Participants could choose separate tracks that focused on markup of literary and linguistic texts for online research and teaching (TEI) or providing technical support for XML at liberal art colleges.

Workshop Description:

Anyone who knows anything about web technologies has probably heard the three letters XML -- even if they aren't fully aware of what they mean. The eXtensible Markup Language was "originally designed to meet the challenges of large-scale electronic publishing," (W3C) and is now widely used to describe, facilitate the exchange of, and increase access to all sorts of data. In academia, XML encoding schemes have been developed to describe an institution's archives and special collections and to create digital editions of important historical, literary, and linguistic texts.

This workshop introduced faculty, instructional technologists, librarians, and information technologists from small liberal arts colleges to this flexible and powerful computer markup language. It focused on academic applications of XML and the skills participants needed to develop encoding projects on their own campuses. After an introduction to the basics, participants were divided into two groups. One track focused on potential pedagogical uses of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) -- an XML-based encoding scheme used to describe, annotate, and enhance "all kinds of literary and linguistic texts" (TEI). The other showed participants how to use tools to represent, manipulate, and query XML.

Track 1: The Text Encoding Initiative for Teaching and Research at small liberal arts colleges. Until recently, the encoding guidelines developed by the TEI-C (Text Encoding Initiative Consortium) have been the domain of large research universities and institutes, who have the resources for large-scale digitization efforts. Over the past year, though, several small colleges have begun to explore ways to adapt these methods to fit within the realities, constraints, and advantages of smaller institutions. This track introduced participants to the TEI encoding scheme and provided them with examples of how it can be used on a small scale for teaching, learning, research, and the preservation of special collections and archival materials.

Track 2: Technologies used to support XML-based projects at small colleges. As a data markup and exchange format, XML bridges two different worlds: the human-readable and the machine-readable. In this track, we focused on the latter, and cover the basic technologies used to manipulate XML. These technologies include XSLT and XPath, the building blocks for working with XML through code. Using these technologies allows us to transform and reconfigure our XML documents into other XML formats, so that, for example, we can turn TEI into XHTML for the web. Our hands-on work and examples explored tasks likely to come up in the small-college environment.

Who attended? Most encoding projects in academia require technical knowledge, research skills, and a deep understanding of the material to be encoded. Therefore, we recommended that teams of at least two of the following attend: faculty, instructional technologists, research librarians, archivists, systems librarians, and/or information technologists.

Prerequisites: Though anyone interested could attend, we recommended that participants come to the workshop with ideas for potential projects, which they developed over the three days. Projects included using encoding with students in a class to analyze a text, digitizing selected documents from a college's archives, publishing previously encoded texts on the web or in a print format, or creating an encoded version of texts that could be used as a resource. Examples from a similar set of workshops held recently at Wheaton College can be found here: http://www.wheatonma.edu/KACC/tei/jan05/projdesc.html.

Workshop materials
Agenda

*****

Music Technology Workshop and Fourth Annual New Music Festival, July 27– August 1, 2005, Birmingham-Southern College
Leader: Patricia Gray, ACS Technology Center
Intended Audience: music faculty, librarians, and students

This workshop focused on the building of online teaching materials and on supporting the work of faculty and student composers in the Orpheus Alliance.  

The areas of concentration were:

• Continued work on the building of online teaching modules for use in music theory and history classes.
• The production of the fourth annual ACS New Music Festival featuring works by ACS faculty, students, and guest composers. Winning compositions of the 2005 Student Composition Contest were performed as well as several new faculty compositions written for Luna Nova, the ACS New Music Ensemble.
• A continuation of the Classics of the 20th Century concert series. Works by George Crumb, Bela Bartok, Gyorgy Ligeti, and Charles Wuorinen will be included.
• Presentation of student research projects with supporting multimedia.
• Planning for possible Internet 2 projects
• Sessions on selected pieces of software used by composers of electro-acoustic music.
• Workshops designed for students to help in their preparation for the graduate school application process.

Agenda

Fall Events

• Fall IT Staff Retreat - October 6-9, 2005
• Digital Assets Management Symposium - December 1-3, 2005

[Past Workshops]