UP TechTalk Podcast – Exploring the use of technology in the classroom, one conversation at a time

Connecting Students to Authentic Voices in the Arab World

Posted December 16, 2016 by Maria Erb Filed Under: TechTalk Podcast

Hala Jadid al Kash is a faculty member with IES Abroad in Granada, Spain, who teaches courses on Arabic language, social media, and Islamic culture to American study abroad students. In this podcast, she explains how she uses social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, as a tool to develop intercultural awareness by connecting students to authentic voices in the Islamic world. Students learn how to piece together media accounts, interactions with special guests such as Al Jazeera’s news director, and exchanges with bloggers and other first hand accounts a bigger picture of what is happening in some of the larger events such as the current Syrian refugee crisis.

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Complete episode transcript in PDF format

Continue the conversation at the Teaching & Learning Community Blog: https://sites.up.edu/tl

UP TechTalk is a bi-monthly podcast with cohosts Ben Kahn and Maria Erb of Academic Technology Services that explores the use of technology in the classroom one conversation at a time. Check out all of the pervious episodes in our special series The Future of Learning here. New episodes drop on the first Friday of every month during the fall semester.

The Future of Learning – Ethics Matter Now and Later

Posted November 30, 2016 by Maria Erb Filed Under: TechTalk Podcast, The Future of Learning

What does it mean to be a human being? Answering the big questions starts with paying attention to the little things like how we use technology, says theologian and scholar Dr. David Turnbloom. It’s the little things that create a foundation for ethical behavior.

Are we magnifying the good in creation or perpetuating the not so good? Who are you and how are you going to behave in the world? These are some of the questions Dr. Turnbloom and his students grapple with in his courses. In this podcast, we take a look at why a grounding in ethical behavior will have a big impact on a very complex future.

“Things will continue to get more and more complicated, ” Dr. Turnbloom says in this podcast. “You can’t turn on the news or look at Facebook without being inundated with impossible questions… It’s the little things you do on a day to day basis, not these great grand scale actions that make one an ethical person.”

This is episode is the fourth in the special UP Tech Talk series “The Future of Learning.” If you’ve missed any of the episodes, please visit the archives at https://sites.up.edu/techtalk/futureoflearning. UP Tech Talk is a bi-monthly podcast co-hosted by ATS’s Ben Kahn and Maria Erb.

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Full episode transcript available in PDF format

Continue the conversation at the Teaching & Learning Community Blog: https://sites.up.edu/tl

Bringing Ancient Texts to Modern Life

Posted November 18, 2016 by Benjamin Kahn Filed Under: TechTalk Podcast

gaudino Reading ancient writings takes practice. A lot of practice. Theology Lecturer Rebecca Gaudino wanted to give her students a chance get some serious practice but to do that, she needed to free up time in class traditionally spent on lecture. Culling an archive of lectures, she made visual recordings of the ones she wanted to keep and decided to move quizzes online. This allowed her to treat class sessions as a container of space for group activities, whole class collaborations, presentations, and discussions. Students had more pathways to engagement with the course content and each other. Dr. Gaudino’s journey has taken her from a place where she hardly used a computer at all to one where it’s now a central tool in her class.

And her students love it. “Fun” isn’t always an adjective that pops up along with descriptions of theology classes but Dr. Gaudino has heard from her students that her new class design is indeed “fun.” And she’s also gotten a lot of thank you’s for making course content relevant to the lives of students.

To get her course ready for this new format, Dr. Gaudino spent a summer school session going back to her office after class to record her lectures when they were fresh in her mind. It was a very “straight forward process” she said. For someone who views herself as “computer illiterate,” she learned to navigate a variety of programs that added a lot of variety to ways she could interact with her students.

“I had to be willing to be uncomfortable,” Dr. Gaudino said. “I had to put myself in a space where I was not the expert. Once I did that, I found I could learn enough to use these things in a meaningful way.”

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Full episode transcript available in PDF format

Continue the conversation at the Teaching & Learning Community Blog: https://sites.up.edu/tl

The Future of Learning – Learning How to Learn is Key

Posted November 4, 2016 by Maria Erb Filed Under: Special Series, TechTalk Podcast, The Future of Learning

Professional futurist Lee Shupp spends a lot of time thinking about what people will be doing ten or twenty years from now. While humans aren’t usually very good at long-term and abstract planning, Shupp’s background in systems thinking and his boundless curiosity provide a good platform to stand on while peeling back the curtain for a sneak peak at what may lie ahead.

Shupp says that current tensions in higher education such as student debt load, rising costs, lower graduation rates, and declining public support make change inevitable. Some of the major change agents likely to reshape higher ed include:

More and better learning analytics
Personalized adaptive learning via Artificial Intelligence systems
Competency-based education
Shorter timelines for degrees
Corporate influences

Shupp advises his students at the California College of Art to learn how to learn, to hone the ability to act as the curator for your own learning experience, and to develop the ability to filter and evaluate information.

Students who bring human skills like intuition, pattern recognition, and human thinking to augment artificial intelligence will be in a good position in the job market, Shupp says. Follow him on Twitter @leeshupp.

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lee-shupp-techtalk transcript

Continue the conversation at https://sites.up.edu/tl

Tech Conferences and Attitudes Towards Higher Education

Posted October 28, 2016 by Maria Erb Filed Under: TechTalk Podcast

This week, UPTechTalk co-hosts Ben Kahn and Maria Erb rehash the takeaways from the Northwest eLearn Conference in Eugene, OR. Lots of good ideas here about engaging more faculty around the use of technology and keys to successful Digital Fluency initiatives.

We also spotlight a new report from Public Agenda on attitudes towards higher education in this country which has definite implications for our universities. Key points: while people feel funding cuts to public universities are a big problem, they also feel that public universities spend money wastefully. Participants in the study also feel that high schools are not doing an adequate job of preparing students for college. Just 42% of participants say that a college education is necessary for success in the workforce. Sobering statistics for sure.

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Full Episode Transcript PDF

App Picks of the Week

Ben’s pick is Motion Stills to create gifs out of iOS Live photos.

Maria plugs the Oregon Public Broadcasting news app.

Show Notes:

Public Agenda report on attitudes towards higher education.

The UnWorkshop discussing active learning in professional development.

UP TechTalk is a bi-monthly podcast with cohosts Ben Kahn and Maria Erb of Academic Technology Services that explores the use of technology in the classroom one conversation at a time. Check out our special series The Future of Learning the first Friday of every month during the fall semester.