You can find our blog, Engage: Technologies for Teaching and Research, over at http://engage.digital.conncoll.edu
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Yesterday we held a workshop to introduce Digital Connecticut College. Thanks to everyone who attended!
Digital Connecticut College provides students, faculty, and staff with the opportunity to register a domain name and create a digital presence through various mediums such as blogs, portfolios, and wikis. You can easily install open source applications such as WordPress, MediaWiki, Drupal, Scalar, and Omeka to your own domain.
Although are are the beginning stages of rolling this out to the community, we can share some ways faculty, staff, and students are already using Digital Connecticut College.
Contact Diane Creede, Lyndsay Bratton, or Jessica McCullough to create your domain and get started! If you have an idea, feel free to contact one of us. We can work with anyone regardless of your experience with technology.
Want to try that new quizzing app in class, but the fee stops you? Did you learn of an exciting new tool you can use in class, but just need some funding to get you started? Instructional Technology still has DELI mini-grants available!
The mini-grant program provides funding for faculty members to explore and experiment with digital technologies to enhance teaching and learning. Faculty members may request up to $300 to support the purchase of software or hardware that will be used in one or more courses.
Proposals are accepted on a rolling basis year-round, and decisions on awards are made once a month by the Instructional Technology team. Find a full description of the program, requirements, and eligibility guidelines in the Mini-Grant Call for Proposals.
Image credit: No Known Restrictions: WPA Poster: Health Care Even Without Money, 1939 (LOC)
Were you thinking about attending Tempel Summer Institute this summer? If so, don’t forget that proposals are due on Friday!
What is Tempel Summer Institute? It is an annual, one-week immersion program for faculty started in 2000 by a generous gift from Jean C. Tempel ’65. The Institute provides a pedagogical approach to the integration of new technologies into the curriculum, and is led by Information Services staff and two faculty leaders.
During the Institute, you will participate in group discussions on pedagogical challenges and teaching and learning goals, and learn about instructional technologies that can be used to address those challenges and goals. Many sessions are hands-on, allowing you to get a better understanding of the technology. Time for course development is built into the Institute, enabling you to make significant progress on redesigning courses and creating course materials with the assistance of faculty and staff.
Sound interesting? More information and the full Call for Proposals can be found on this page.
Our Instructional Technology Student Assistant, Kristen Szuman, did some research into new accessibility features available in iOS10 (if you missed her first post on iOS accessibility, find it here). She turned up some interesting features, including a camera magnifier, color display adjustments, voicemail transcripts, and more. Read on!
Apple has long been an innovator in the field of accessible technology. As one of the world’s foremost and most popular brands, Apple has been continuously raising the bar for technological accessibility; their release of iOS 10 was no different. Advertised as their “biggest release yet,” Apple’s iOS 10 featured many new and innovative accessibility features that work directly with the operating system, eliminating the need for additional app or tech support. Here are some of the new accessibility features available in iOS 10.
With iOS 10 you can now use your built-in iSight camera as a Magnifier with a customizable user interface. The Magnifier allows you to access the camera flash, gives you the ability to lock focus and take a screencap, and adjust color filters to increase contrast or color settings for easier viewing. This new feature not only has practical everyday applications for everyone, but also is especially helpful for anyone who may be visually impaired in some way.
With Apple’s fall launches, they have expanded their iOS, macOS, and tvOS, to include color adjustments to assist with color blindness by adding the ability to tint the entire display a certain color. Apple has included new color options such as Grayscale, Red/Green Filter (for people with protanopia), Green/Red Filter (for people with Deuteranopia), Blue/Yellow Filter (for people with tritanopia), and a more general Color Tint.
iOS 10 now supports Voicemail Transcriptions as do many of the major US cell phone carriers. Voicemail Transcriptions transcribe the words that are spoken on voicemail messages and display the text right in the voicemail section of the built-in Phone app on your iPhone. Voicemail transcripts are useful for everyone but offer new communication opportunities for those who are deaf or hard of hearing.
With the launch of watchOS 3, the Apple Watch has become capable of tracking the activity and fitness of wheelchair users. The device will track pushes, rather than steps, and encourages users to meet daily goals, burn more calories and provide notifications to keep moving throughout the day. While this feature is only available built into the new Apple Watch series, this is a new and innovative way to track fitness that will assist many wheelchair users.
iOS 10 has opened up a whole new world for app developers as Apple has now begun to allow third-party apps access to Siri. Using apps such as Square Cash, Venmo, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and The Roll, an iOS 10 user can now access Siri to perform simple tasks, such as sending money to a friend via Venmo or searching for pet photos in The Roll. You are also now able to send messages in third-party messaging apps, such as Skype, WhatsApp, and WeChat, using Siri. Additionally, ride-sharing apps are now partnered with Siri, so calling an Uber is now as simple as asking Siri to do so. As an easily accessible app, the addition of Siri in third-party apps have made those apps increasingly user-friendly and accessibility-friendly. While the motor control needed to swipe through pages of apps and repeatedly click and type may have been difficult for some individuals, the new addition of Siri in third-party apps now removes some potentially difficult physical barriers.
Today marks the beginning of International Open Access Week. This year’s theme is “Open in Action.” To celebrate, we are posting with the hashtag #ConnCollegeOA on Twitter throughout the week, multiple times a day. Follow us to learn about Open Access, why Open Access matters, how to participate and make your work more widely available.
If you can’t wait to read our tweets (or dislike Twitter!), you can read the series of blog posts I wrote two years ago during Open Access week:
Day 1: Happy Open Access Week!
Day 2: What is Open Access
Day 3: Local to Global Open Access
Day 4: Is Your Work Still Yours?
Day 5: Teaching Open Access
To learn about Open Access workshops, events, seminars happening all over the world, click on the map below!
We are very excited for our next Teaching with Technology workshops and hope you can join us! We promise you will leave these workshops inspired and excited to try new tools in the classroom and in your own research. Also, don’t forget we are hosting the Data Fair this week in Shain Library!
Wikipedia Assignments for Developing Literacies
Wednesday, September 28, 1:00 – 2:00 PM
Haines Room, Shain Library lower level
In addition to adding much needed diversity and authority to Wikipedia, Wikipedia editing assignments teach students many important skills and requires them to think critically about information. Join us to discuss the value of Wikipedia editing and how to incorporate these assignments into your classes. Please bring your own computer for the hands-on portion.
Register
Digital Publishing and Visualization Platforms: Scalar and Tableau
Thursday, October 20, 3:00-4:00 PM
PC Classroom, Shain Library lower level
WordPress is not the only free publishing platform on the block for digital projects. Come learn about Scalar, a free online platform built by the University of Southern California. Great for incorporating multimedia formats into your text, Scalar is easy to use and looks beautiful. Tableau is a free platform for building interactive visualizations with your data. You can then embed your creations into WordPress and Scalar sites, or anywhere else you publish to the web.
Register
Connecticut College is a member of ICPSR (Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research), a data archive of more than 500,000 files of research in the social sciences. It hosts 16 specialized collections of data in education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, terrorism, and other fields. We have written about this amazing resource on the blog, in Andrew Lopez’s post The JSTOR of Data Archives.
We invite you and your students to join us for the ICPSR Data Fair being held next week, which “aims to introduce, engage, and help the data community manage through the ongoing Data (R)Evolution.” We will be broadcasting Data Fair events in the Davis Lab all this week. You will find the schedule below, and on the ICPSR website.
Last Friday and Saturday Southern Connecticut State University held its 22nd Women’s Studies Conference, and a delegation from Connecticut College was there to represent! The conference theme – #FeministIn(ter)ventions: Women, Community, Technology – provided a perfect opportunity to share some of the technology-rich courses and projects that have been undertaken at the College, and to hear from colleagues about the successes and challenges of such ventures. At our roundtable workshop/discussion, we described the practices we collectively endorse and the activities we’ve been a part of, highlighting the collaborative spirit that developed among this mixed group of faculty, librarians, and instructional technologists as we prepared for the conference itself. Some of the projects we talked about have been the subject of Engage blog posts, including Hisae Kobayashi’s Twitter project, Ariella Rotramel’s Wikipedia project, and the various tele- and web conferencing activities we support, including Joyce Benett’s organization of a personalized Yucatec Maya course for a student. Caroline Park spoke about feminist music technology, bringing up gendered and racialized technical jargon in the context of creative art and sound projects, and the ongoing process of critically navigating that dynamic in the classroom and outside of it. Guided by Ashley Hanson, participants and presenters alike had a chance to role up their sleeves to do some mind mapping, which provided rich material for our discussion, and exciting ideas for the future. Feel free to check out our slides if you have time.
Endorsing as we do collaborative projects and approaches, we were somewhat disheartened to learn from one of our workshop participants that they are not so easily implemented in the K-12 environment as they are in higher education. Library Media Specialist Jill Woychowski enlightened us about filtering practices in federally funded schools that limit not just access to potentially harmful web sites, but also to ones that enable collaborative projects or contain content related to many common Gender and Women’s Studies topics. This conversation led us to wonder, as a group, about the impact on students as they transition to college and their development of critical metaliteracy skills. What do you think? Should students be sheltered from the “real world” of the Internet? How does a lack of access to collaborative platforms and to the contested territories of the public sphere affect our students’ ability to do research and to co-construct knowledge at the college level?
Over the January break we installed a new, state-of-the-art videoconferencing system in the Dilley Room, located on the third floor of Shain Library. The room’s Cisco SX80 videoconferencing system enables connection to other locations with similar or compatible systems. Faculty can share high quality video, audio and course content with students at the other sites, including, but certainly not limited to, Trinity College and Wesleyan University.
For example, an advanced Russian course with a small enrollment taught at Connecticut College can include students at Trinity College, with the Trinity students using their own videoconferencing site to participate in the class from their own campus. To use the system, the faculty member simply connects her laptop and calls up the Trinity classroom using the controls on the wall panel. At Connecticut College, students will see the laptop content on one screen and the Trinity students on the other. At Trinity, students will see the course content on one display and the professor on the other. Built-in high quality microphones and speakers at each site allow for live lectures and discussions between the two rooms. Two sophisticated cameras allow users to see the room from multiple angles, in addition to being able to zoom in on individuals, small groups, or the chalkboard.
The room also supports projection from laptops, a built-in DVD player, or VCR (by request). Contact Media Services for assistance at x2693. The room is also well-suited for web conferencing using software such as Zoom or Skype. We recently announced the availability of web conferencing kits that enhance the video and audio quality of your sessions. Kits are available at the Digital Scholarship and Curriculum Center. Finally, the room also offers built-in phone conferencing. If you are looking to utilize the videoconferencing system or would like to borrow a web conferencing kit, Mike Dreimiller, x 2093, can help.
The technology in this room was funded by a generous grant from the Alden Trust Foundation, and is one of the many technologies available in the library funded through this grant.
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