What are the Technology Fellows up to? Part 2

Last Tuesday we spent another productive day with the Technology Fellows in the Advanced Technology Lab (ATL) on the lower level of Shain Library. The first part of the day was devoted to workshopping assignments from Ginny Anderson and Emily Morash. Our theme was creation – both Ginny and Emily had us try out their assignments as student “guinea pigs.” The hands-on activities kept us engaged and allowed the group to provide focused feedback.

• Creating compelling and educational narratives using InDesign. Ginny’s dramaturgy assignment asks students to play the role of the dramaturg for an upcoming theater performance. Students select a play; conduct research including the biographical, historical and cultural context; organize the information; and use it to create a compelling and interesting guide for audience members. This year, Ginny will require that students use InDesign for the design of the guide. She chose InDesign because previous assignments created in InDesign (instead of Word, for example) were higher quality and students will gain skills in a highly desirable software program. As her “students,” we spent class time analyzing real world examples then learning InDesign together using lynda.com to begin our own guides. We had a great discussion of the potential challenges and benefits of this project. Ginny will write more about this in an forthcoming blog post – stay tuned!
• Understanding building structural systems using Legos. Emily is integrating a series of Lego Workshops into her Building Culture course (AHI/ARC 103) next semester and asked us to complete one of the workshops. Questions that she needed answered were: how long will the activity take? what should the group sizes be? are there enough legos? will the corresponding Moodle forum work as anticipated? See the image above showing us using Lego Architecture Studio to create three different structural systems. Aside from having a great time and learning about building systems, Emily now has a better sense of the assignment from the students’ perspective.

Our final Technology Fellows event is in December. In the meantime, all Technology Fellows will be blogging about their experiences!