Readers might be interested in an online session I’ll be hosting on October 13th (3 pm ET) entitled Conflict Resolution Educational Gaming: Behind the Scenes with Harmony Island and Cool School. As part of the national Conflict Resolution Day festivities (or week in this case), I’ll be joined by gaming industry veteran FJ Lennon and developmental psychologist Melanie Killen (University of Maryland School of Education), both part of the team that developed Cool School: Where Peace Rules, and Richard Goldsworthy, Director of R&D for Academic Edge, Inc., developers of Harmony Island: A Tropical Adventure in Conflict Resolution. These games feature high quality animation and research-based learning scenarios designed to teach young people conflict resolution skills and knowledge. We’ll talk with the developers about some of the challenges and opportunities in the CR gaming field. As a special bonus, attendees to the webinar will be entered into a drawing to win free copies of the games. You can reserve a spot at http://snipurl.com/gamechatreg Link to flyer for event.

I just noticed this interesting blog post and thread of comments exploring the idea that Microsoft should buy Blackboard and integrate itself in new ways into Higher Education. It was written by Joshua Kim, a learning Technologist at Dartmouth College. He makes an interesting case but many in the comments disagree with him.

There is a risk of reduced attendance because of H1N1.The Office for Teaching and Learning (OTL) is ready to help you respond, ideally by preparing in advance but alternatively on an “as needed” basis.

The more that your course is or could be on-line, the easier it will be for absent students. (In an early class, you should learn how many of your students would have access to a computer with internet access while ill.) We can easily show you how to use the internet to post and revise assignments and syllabi; create and share PowerPoint presentations with students; open discussion boards for “cyber discussions” among you and your students; and upload examinations.

Existing resources are set out below and can be located at www.otl.wayne.edu. Please check back periodically, since this resource list will expand as additional resources are created and made available to you.

• A resource titled, “The ABC’s of Online Teaching” can be found on the OTL website. This will be followed by a digital version of one of our most popular workshops titled “Moving Your Course on Line” which will be uploaded to our website within the first week, or so, of this semester.
• For those faculty and GTA’s not familiar with using Blackboard for instruction, tutorials on Blackboard Basics, Blackboard 9 and Advanced Blackboard1: Using the Communication Tools are available. They can be located under the Online Tutorials tab of our website. The tutorials will provide you with ways to do such things as uploading exams and arranging for “cyber discussions” with your students. Please check by soon for online tutorials of Advanced Blackboard 2: Assignments and e-Grading and Advanced Blackboard 3: Creating Online Assessments (Using Respondus).

Please take notice that nearly different Blackboard related workshops are being offered during the month of September, you are encouraged to register for one, or two, online today! Simply do so through the OTL website or by clicking the burgundy Trainings, Seminars and Workshops tab under the faculty tab on Pipeline.

• For the more technologically advanced instructors, an online tutorial for Wimba Live Classroom, which is a live virtual classroom that supports multi-way audio, video, application sharing, polling and content display is available.
• Last, in addition to our student-staffed drop in developmental lab located in room 147 of the P/K Library and the many workshops offered at the OTL, we also offer individual consultations on technology-related inquires and projects and on pedagogy, as well.
  Please feel free to sign up for one of these individual consultations today.
  (And, yes, you can also ask for help if you suddenly find that many of your students are sick, or if you are!)

For more information, please don’t hesitate to contact Kristi Verbeke, Assistant Director at 7-6448 or email af5315@wayne.edu or Shari Robinson-Lynk, Program Coordinator at 7-5605 or email bb4104@wayne.edu.

Comics in the Classroom is a learning module from North Carolina’s LearnNC collection that illustrates the growing interest in using comics and graphic novels as teaching tools. There is also now a National Association of Comics Art Educators devoted to the teaching of comics and visual storytelling that has begun to collect lesson plans. Seems like an area we should look into more often , don’t you think?  gt9iwrkdbe

A new search tool is available to help scholars search the growing collection of open access journals. Jurn.org enables searching on almost 2,400 journals in the arts and humanities. Take it for a spin, you might like what you find!

We all know that classroom conflict is part of the teaching and learning process, but it is not often that we can find a window into the classrooms of others and get a sense of their experience. An article entitled “How Do Faculty Experience and Respond to Classroom Conflict?” in the open access International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (2006, Volume 18, Number 3, 180-187) provides some insight.

The article (available as a pdf) was written by Steven A. Meyers, James Bender and Shantha Y. Thomas from Roosevelt University and their colleague Erin K. Hill from the Harvard Medical School. The authors present descriptive data about the nature and correlates of classroom conflict using a national sample of 226 psychology faculty members. They differentiated two different types of conflict, inattentive versus hostile, in the survey. Levels of conflict were not associated with instructors’ demographic traits or characteristics of their courses, but were related to professors’ choice of teaching methods, their demeanor, and how they responded to challenging situations. They also found that those conflict management techniques that address the relationship between faculty and students were most effective in reducing conflict.

Co-author Steven Meyers, Illinois Professor of the Year for 2007-2008, has also discussed some of his own approaches to managing classroom conflict in an earlier article in College Teaching. See: Meyers, S. A. (2003). Strategies to prevent and reduce conflict in college classrooms. College Teaching, 51, 94-98. 

Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge is a freely available book of essays by leaders in open education describe successes, challenges, and opportunities they have found in a range of open education initiatives. Published by MIT Press in Sept. of 2008. Get it here.

Faculty developing a new course or modifying an old one might want to have a look at the Phoebe project. The aim of the project  is to guide practitioners working in higher education in designing effective and pedagogically sound learning activities. The project, based at Oxford University, has developed a prototype online planning tool known as the Phoebe Pedagogic Planner that offers users both flexible and guided paths through the planning process and encourages them to explore new approaches and tools in their pedagogy. The design guidance is provided via a wiki-like tool that offers content and explanations that help structure the course development experience. 

The folks at Michigan State University’s Virtual University Design and Technology group (vuDAT) have developed a nice guided walk-through for online course developers. The collection of tools and tips is built around  the course design process, laid out like a subway map, with important stops highlighted along the way.

The Association of Research Libraries has been researching new kinds of scholarly works that challenge traditional publication models. The ARL initiated a study in 2008 to describe these new-model publications. The study had two segments: the first phase, a field study, engaged librarian volunteers in arranging structured conversations with faculty members at their institutions to learn about new model publications that are currently in use by scholars and researchers, while the second phase consisted of interviews with selected managers of new model works and the preparation of a study report. 

Over 300 librarians participated in the field study phase and interviewed hundreds of faculty members from across the disciplinary spectrum. They contributed records of more than 300 new kinds of scholarly works that are currently in use in a broad range of disciplines. 

Both the study report and a searchable collection of new model resources gathered during the study are now freely available. The report provides a detailed picture of the patterns and trends that have emerged to date. Emergent genres, disciplinary patterns, and peer review practices are all described. The accompanying searchable collection offers 206 examples of new model works along with descriptive information gathered for the study.