Skip to content

Category: Uncategorized

Published on Leave a comment on NEWCITY: Data Projects

We are passing along this opportunity, which presents interesting possibilities for Xavier faculty who may be interested in working with these data sets for research and/or student learning projects.

data.path Ryoji.Ikeda - 3

Since 2008, NEWCITY has worked to collect extensive Community Impact Measurement (CIM) parcel and resident survey data in historic Treme/Lafitte, Tulane/Gravier and 7th Ward neighborhoods. Currently, NEWCITY is working to collect the 2015 data, and previously has collected 2008, 2011, and 2013 parcel survey data and 2013 resident survey data.

This data is available to NEWCITY members and working groups in raw or analyzed form. We would like to encourage members to submit data projects that will assist them in grant writing and informed decision making. Examples of how the data has previously been used to create maps can be found at newcitynola.org/data/.  Inputs that can be analyzed include occupancy, building use, property condition, residential satisfaction and opinions on the area, and more.  Additional analysis will also be offered for data points that address quality of life, public safety, transportation and public health.

If you have a data project that you would like to submit to NEWCITY please contact the NEWCITY Neighborhood Partnership Coordinator Ciara Stein at cstein@providencech.org or (504) 821 7236.

Image credit: data.path Ryoji.Ikeda - 3 by r2hox | CC BY-SA 2.0

Published on Leave a comment on Suggested Feedback for Underperforming Students

by Karen Nichols

As a followup to my previous post on discussion boards, I thought I would outline some best practices for responding to underperforming students.  All too soon, we'll begin a new academic year and it's so important to stay on top of our students' status and provide help to them, especially if they are struggling.  In a recent issue of Faculty Focus, Dr. Maryellen Weimer offers suggestions for feedback based on why a student is not doing well.

For the student who just isn't trying, she recommends offering alternate assignments and trying to find ways to engage that student.  When I'm teaching French online, I do tell my students to make suggested alternatives or I may give more than one choice for an assignment, but that is still not enough motivation sometimes.  When a subject is required and a student has no interest in it at all, what feedback do you give to help them?

For the student who lacks self-confidence, Dr. Weimer recommends focused feedback.  Be descriptive and specific--not evaluative.  Focus on each individual task that the student must complete and celebrate the progress with that student.  Learning a new language can be quite overwhelming for many students and getting them focused on completing the task at hand can be tricky.  When a student tries to read a paragraph in French and only understands 20% of it, s/he must be shown skills to apply to figuring out the other 80%.

There are other reasons for underperformance such as not possessing the requisite skills to be taking the class (you're trying to take French 1020 without 1010 because you had French in kindergarten?) or a student just can't grasp a certain concept (verb conjugation--what's that?).  In all of these cases, Dr. Weimer's article gives good tips on how to work with your students to help them improve their performance and hopefully succeed.

Published on Leave a comment on Civil Rights leader DeRay McKesson to keynote Rising Tide X conference

For Immediate Release August 4, 2015:

The organizers of Rising Tide, the premier annual new media conference in the GulfSouth, are proud to announce that civil rights activist DeRay McKesson (@deray) will deliver the keynote speech at Rising Tide X (#RTX), Aug. 29 at Xavier University.

Since the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, McKesson has used social media to amplify protest and advocacy against oppressive systems. In the past year he has become one of the most widely-recognized civil rights leaders of his generation. His keynote, scheduled for 2pm, will highlight a full day of multi-track content at Rising Tide X.

Rising Tide organizer Mark Moseley said, "Part of Rising Tide's mission is to use technology to transform advocacy into action. No one has done that better over the past year than DeRay McKesson. He is at the forefront of an innovative digital movement to expose and resist systems of racial oppression. We thank him for accepting our invitation and look forward to his speech and presence in New Orleans on August 29."

Fortune magazine rated McKesson #11 on its list of “World’s Greatest Leaders.” The Los Angeles Times hailed McKesson as one of the “new civil rights leaders,” and New York Magazine profiled him in May and said he helped build the "nation’s first 21st-century civil rights movement."

For more on @DeRay, see his bio page.

Rising Tide X will be free admission. Organizers aim to have free lunch for attendees, as well, but this will be contingent on the amount of donations received on the RTX Go Fund Me page.

The 10th annual Rising Tide New Media Conference will be held from 9am-5pm at the University Center at Xavier University of Louisiana, 1 Drexel Drive, New Orleans, Louisiana 70125 on August 29, 2015.

Contact:

Mark Moseley
RTX organizer
oystersliq@gmail.com
504-481-5407

###

1

Published on 1 Comment on The Ultimate Guide to Discussion Boards!

by Karen Nichols
I know that a few of us in CAT have already posted suggestions and hints for success in using discussion boards. But I just have to share this guide with you from the Teaching Effectiveness Program produced by the Center on Teaching and Learning at the University of Oregon. Licensed to share through Creative Commons Generating and Facilitating Engaging and Effective Online Discussions (choose the discussionboard.pdf) is an 11 page how-to document that is chock-full of information, resources, research and examples. It is the best attempt I've seen yet that successfully pulls together the myriad pieces of what makes discussion boards work. A bit overwhelmed when I saw "11 pages," I soon discovered that it's actually an easy read. I would love some feedback from you to see if you find this resource as wonderful as I do.

is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike3.0Unported License.

Published on Leave a comment on Two Ideas to Foster Student Collaboration and Engagement

by Karen Nichols

Sue Frantz just posted two items in her Technology for Academics blog that you may find useful in a variety of settings The first post offers up a great way to foster student collaboration no matter what modality you're using to deliver your course. Dropbox has a new feature that allows others to deposit files into your Dropbox account via a URL. Sue Franz does a great job explaining the how-to part in the blog, so let's think of ways we can use this feature called File Requests. If you give your students a group project and they are each responsible for a part of the project, they can then deposit their contribution into the Dropbox of their other group members. Once complete, the group can in turn deposit their final project into your designated Dropbox. I can also see applications for this feature when collaborating with colleagues at a distance.

 Collaboration
Collaboration

Sue Frantz' second post centers on engagement. In this instance, ParticiPoll works in a face-to-face setting when you want to use polls and embed the polls in your Power Point presentations. How cool is that? Again, the Technology for Academics blog post explains the how-to. In addition to using it in class, wouldn't this be a useful feature to add engagement in a conference presentation? I've just attended two conferences back to back plus a virtual one this week and the polling attempts were not 100% successful. I want to experiment with this polling app myself for an upcoming conference, but also to see if we can adapt it to be used virtually or at least via Blackboard Collaborate.

Polling
Polling

So if you find you have a little free time on your hands this summer, I recommend checking out Dropbox File Request and Participoll. Let us know if you do and what you think of these two tools.

Leave a comment on Record, Upload, and Share Video on YouTube

You may be required to submit a video file for an assignment. Most video files are too large to post directly into your Brightspace course. If your assignment requires you to submit a video file, the file should be uploaded to a video sharing site such as YouTube, and then the link to the video should be posted to your Brightspace assignment.

YouTube icon on film strip

Directions for recording, uploading, and sharing a video on YouTube are provided below. You may use other video upload/sharing sites you are familiar with instead of YouTube, as long as you are able to share your video. Your video upload/sharing site should allow you to share your video by providing your classmates and/or instructor with a link to your video.

Record Your Video

Devices such as a web camera, laptop camera, digital camera, video recorder, or cell phone may be used to record your video as long as the video file format is one of the Supported YouTube formats. Your professor may require your video to be a particular length. Verify your equipment's recording capabilities in order to meet the length of time requirement for your video. Refer to this YouTube support website for assistance with recording your video. Once your video has been recorded and saved, you are ready to upload to YouTube.

Access Your YouTube Account

You will need to create or use a Gmail/Google account in order to use YouTube for uploading and sharing videos. If you have a Xavier email account, you automatically have a Google account. You can use that account to login to YouTube, or you can create a new account, or use another YouTube or Google account you may already have.

  1. Sign into your Google (Gmail) account.
  2. Open a new tab or window in the same browser and go to YouTube.com.
  3. Click on Sign In at the top right corner of the YouTube screen.
  4. If this is the first time you've logged into YouTube, follow the onscreen instructions to set up your account.

Upload Your Video

Step-by-step instructions on how to post a video and how to record a video using your webcam are available at YouTube help.

YouTube allows you to upload videos of up to 15 minutes in length. Longer videos may require your account to be verified. This is a simple one-time process as explained in this YouTube help article.

Note: We recommend using the "Unlisted" privacy setting for uploaded videos. The "Unlisted" privacy setting will still allow you to easily share the video with your instructor and/or classmates. The "Unlisted" privacy setting will not allow your video to be included in search results when people search the web. The "Private" setting is very restrictive and therefore we do not recommend using the "Private" setting.

Share Your Video

Once you have recorded and uploaded your video to YouTube, you can share your video in a couple of different ways with your instructor and/or classmates. Refer to the following YouTube support websites for instructions on sharing your video:

Post the Video Link to Brightspace

Once your video is uploaded to YouTube or other video sharing site, you can link to it in Brightspace anywhere the Brightspace HTML Editor is available (i.e., discussion board, assignment submission folder, etc.)

Information about the new Brightspace Editor is available.

Adapted from How to Record, Upload, and Share a YouTube Video: Introduction by Learning at Colorado State University and Students: Post a Video to YouTube by Support at Southern Oregon University.

1

Published on 1 Comment on Watching the Smartwatch for Possible Educational Uses

by Karen Nichols
My iPhone is one of the old 3G versions and serves me just fine so I'm not a person who runs out to buy the latest gadgets. However, I'm intrigued by the possible educational uses of wearable technology and therefore am on the lookout for ways instructors and students may use the Smartwatch.

I've mentioned before that the POD (Professional and Organizational Development Network for Higher Education listserv has much useful information including technology discussions. From a recent posting, I discovered that Chris Clark from Notre Dame created a Youtube video to show what possible educational uses the Smartwatch may have:

I love the idea of using the Smartwatch to conduct polls! For more ideas and discussion, check out Chris' article:  https://ltlatnd.wordpress.com/2015/03/12/smartwatches-in-higher-ed/

Do you think the Smartwatch will complement or even replace cell phones? Join me in the watch for possible pedagogical uses of the Smarthwatch and other wearable technology.

Published on Leave a comment on Ngramming Nachhaltigkeit

by Bart Everson

CAT's XX anniversary newsletter contains an article by yours truly which traces the origin of the word "sustainability" to just around 1980. I came to that conclusion by using the Google Books Ngram Viewer, an online phrase-usage graphing tool.

Sustainability Ngram

I stand by that minor feat of scholarly inquiry. (It took me less than five minutes.) However, I was a little puzzled by these results. Surely the concept is much older than that?

My method had obvious limitations. I was looking at the history of a word, not the idea behind the word.

New research by Jeremy L. Caradonna suggests the roots of the idea go back to late 17th- and early 18th-century Europe, when people started cutting down too much forest and endangering their own way of life. Caradonna points to one Hans Carl von Carlowitz as the one who coined the word "sustainability" in 1713.

How did I miss that? The twist is that since von Carlowitz was German he called it Nachhaltigkeit.

Indeed, the Ngram Viewer yields quite different results when searching for this term in the corpus of German texts. There's still a major spike in usage over the last several decades, but it doesn't spring out of nowhere.

The spike is evidence of our contemporary sustainability movement. It's an expression of burgeoning concern, but it's also cause for concern in and of itself. As Caradonna notes in a recent interview for the Boston Globe, "If you have a sustainability movement, you know you have a problem." Hans Carl von Carlowitz started writing about Nachhaltigkeit because of a problem he saw with deforestation. The huge spike in writing about this topic in recent years, in English and German and other languages, is an indication of an even deeper problem.

Sustainability is about coming to terms with our limits — living within our means — and in the modern industrialized West, we have pretended for some time that there are no such limits. This illusion is becoming more difficult to maintain, which is why sustainability is becoming ever more prominent in our discourse, including the college curriculum. Thanks to Caradonna's research, the history of our current concerns is a little clearer.

Jeremy L. Caradonna's new book is Sustainability: A History.

Published on Leave a comment on New York Times Webinar

by Karen Nichols:  I'm posting this message for anyone who may be interested.

Hello,

Please join me, Emily Ryan, Education Manager with The New York Times, for a brief demonstration of the various academic resources from NYTimes.com on Thursday, November 20th at 10AM PST / 1PM EST.

Learn About:

Academic resources inside NYTimes.com that will support your courses
Examples of how others have incorporated NYTimes.com into their curriculum
Special programs for core curriculum instruction and the study of leadership

Please feel free to register in advance and add this event to your calendar.

Click or copy/paste this link into your web browser: http://clearslide.com/v/k9u38s

To join the webinar on November 20th at 10AM PST/ 1PM EST simply click on the link below and dial into the toll-free conference line noted below.

Presentation Link:

clearslide.com/emilyryan

Dial in:
United States: (888) 419-5364
Conference Access Code: 3977-6248

I look forward to seeing you online.

Regards,
Emily Ryan
Education Manager

The New York Times
Sold by PCF, Inc.
(201) 560-2564