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Digital Bridges

Building Bridges Between Teaching and Technology

a publication of the Teaching and Technology Center

Volume 2, Issue 2

November 2006

In this issue . . .
A New Generation of Whiteboards
Create Captivating Lessons for your Students
Pedagogical Freebies in Cyberspace: The OpenCourseWare Movement
End of Semester Blackboard Course Cleanup Activities
Strategies to Deter Plagiarism in Student Papers
Remember to Be Security Conscious in the New Year

A New Generation of Whiteboards

by Dr. Robert Amey

For some time now, we’ve been using the “analog” version of the whiteboard – an updated version of the old chalk and blackboard slate, except with smelly markers that can give you a headache. Several years ago, a number of manufacturers like SmartBoard came out with an electronic version of the whiteboard that held the promise of being able to integrate editing and marking on the whiteboard with a computer-generated presentation. The biggest obstacle with the early electronic whiteboards was cost and screen damage … and the screen damage issue made the cost problem worse. Most of the older electronic whiteboards functioned with “active screen” where the screen itself was embedded with sensors. The screens were pliable (in order to sense where pressure was being applied so that it could record what you were doing), and that pliability had two significant problems: 1) leaning against the screen or brushing against it, even lightly, with anything sharper than a rubber ball could tear the screen, and 2) the soft surface would, over time, absorb the marker ink. Because the screen was the major active component of the system, damage to the screen often meant repair costs close to the full replacement cost of the entire system.

Several new systems have come out that reduce these problems significantly – well, at least one of the problems - the screen issue. Both of the systems reviewed here use sensing technology that is placed at the edge of the screen rather than in the screen. Thus, the whiteboard surface itself is about the same as the standard whiteboard, and in both models can be replaced for less than $250, depending on the screen size. The accuracy is slightly less than for boards with the sensors in the screen, but for most uses, the difference is difficult to notice. The only way I’ve been able to deliberately create any degree of inaccuracy is when trying to draw in a boundary line on a map at very low zoom levels and then zoom in. Even then it does a pretty credible job.

Both systems use “electronic markers.” Both manufacturers note that you can use the regular old smelly dry erase markers on the board, but they do caution against doing so all the time. These boards have a special low-glare finish on them that are harder to thoroughly clean than a regular whiteboard with a highly polished surface. Fortunately, since the writing surface itself is easy and not terribly costly to replace, that isn’t as big as problem as it once was. There have been few if any problems so far with either of these working with almost any Windows-based software application. I haven’t tried these with a Mac yet, so I can’t say how well they’ll work there, but I would not suspect problems there either.

I review these two specific systems because we have them available on campus: 1) the 3M Digital Wall Display Plus and 2) the Hitachi Starboard.

First, I’ll touch upon the 3M model. This is a possible solution for rooms that do not already have a projector in them, especially if space is tight (even more so if the ceiling is low). The biggest drawback here is cost – the 3M model includes an XGA-capable projector built-in, and list price approaches $8000. This is a good projector/board combo for a small room. The board size is on the small side, and probably not sufficient in a larger classroom. Any room more than about ten seats wide will have folks at the edges in the blurry zone, and the image will be too small for anyone more than about five rows back. This is NOT the system you want in a room that holds 45-50 students; currently, one of these boards is installed in one of the smaller library conference rooms (Maxwell 113).

The second system is the Hitachi StarBoard. This board can now be had in sizes from 63 to 82 inches (diagonal measure – by comparison, the 3M board is a 60 incher). The 75 inch model has been installed in the GeoAnalysis Lab in the Conant Science Building to see how well it would work in the classroom environment, and so far, no one I’ve talked to who has used it has been unhappy with the change. A lot depends on how you use it, whether or not you consider it just a fancier version of what was already there (the, um, “non-electronic” whiteboard).

The new software in the Hitachi board allows you to bring up almost any program and create an overlay with the board drawing tablet software that you can draw or write on without changing the original image. You can also use any editing tools within the program itself to make permanent changes. There is a virtual keyboard you can bring up on-screen to do text editing – great for doing examples of short texts, such as how to write an abstract. The menu in the upper right-hand corner of the image to the right is used with the electronic pen/marker to choose from a number of tasks, drawing tools, line styles, and colors. This software effectively turns the front end computer into a giant Tablet PC. The menu along the left-hand side of the board (in the gray area to the left) allows you add new pages and to “flip” between pages (with whiteboard drawing/editing you don’t have to erase every page as you go), to save pages as image files to the computer, and to send pages to the printer (if one is connected).

There is, besides cost and size, one other very attractive factor about the Hitachi model – the BT-1 Freedom Tablet. The Freedom tablet is a wireless slate/pen combo that you can use basically like a free-range mouse – it allows you to do anything on the whiteboard via the slate that you can do up at the board itself. It takes a little getting used to blindly coordinating your hand action on the slate to what you see on the screen, but once you realize it’s not that much different from using a regular mouse, you’ll find it pretty intuitive. What I really like about this is, 1) I’m not stuck up at the board, usually in someone’s way (the “make a better door than window” syndrome), and 2) I can ask students to do something on the board by simply handing them the slate.

In the last issue of Digital Bridges, I noted that I’d be happy to give anyone a demo of the board that wanted one. I’m booked up for the rest of this semester, and interest has been such that we will probably offer a workshop in the GeoAnalysis Lab during the spring semester. Stay tuned …

Hitachi Starboard—http://www.hitachi-soft.com/icg/

3M Digital Wall Display Plus—http://www.3M.com

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Create "Captivating" Lessons for your Students

by Eric LePage

Forty hours of class time per course just doesn’t seem like enough sometimes. You try to fit in as much content as you can, but you can only cover so much material. What if, however, you had the ability to create supplemental interactive video lessons that students could view on their own time, thereby freeing you up to spend more time on core topics?

If you teach in a distance learning format, you have even less in-class time (if any, for those teaching in a 100% distance learning format) for lecture. What if you could cover an entire lesson online, taking your students through a PowerPoint lecture, a web site tour, or an introduction to Excel?

If either scenario describes time limitations you’ve run up against, Adobe Captivate may be the teaching tool for you. Captivate allows you to create “screencasts” – movie captures of whatever actions you’re performing on your computer desktop. You can create simulations, software tutorials and demos, interactive assessments, and scenario-based training videos – all with just the click of your mouse button. No programming knowledge is necessary.
Captivate is a breeze to use. Simply start a new project, plug in your microphone, open the application or web site you wish to demonstrate, and away you go. Or, if you’d prefer not to speak into a microphone, let Captivate create “text balloons” which verbally demonstrate what you’re doing with your mouse.

So what teaching ideas spring to mind? Well, you could create video PowerPoint lectures with accompanying audio for starters. Take your students on a virtual field trip of a particular web site, or show them how to use Excel or SPSS for data analysis, or perhaps create a homework video in which you’re covering math and accounting problems. If you’re using specialized applications like Finale, ChemOffice, or Maple, create short tutorial videos to get your students up and going. You could certainly free up in-class time for other activities by turning these training activities into supplemental lessons.

Dr. Shannon Donovan from the Accounting and Finance Department users Captivate in her Accounting courses. She is able to demonstrate calculations using Windows Journal and a BA II Plus financial calculator program while she narrates via her computer microphone. Dr. Donovan finds that her students like her Captivate videos because “they can watch over and over again a topic that they missed in class. Also, if they do not understand how to do a calculation on the calculator or how to do something on Excel, they don't have to wait until the next class. They can ask questions on our Blackboard site and I can post the answer through a Captivate video that evening. It only takes a few minutes to publish a short Captivate video that can save the students hours of frustration.”

Another great feature of Captivate is the ability to create scenario-based training videos. You could create a training module that ties in various video clips, animations, PowerPoint slides, and more, and provide your students with questions and answers that lead that, based on their responses, leads them down various learning paths (what Captivate terms “branching”).

If you have some professional development money to spend, or your department has funds available for software, Captivate will run you about $131 (which includes 1 license, installation CD, and maintenance – a 2 year upgrade-at-no-cost plan). You could also purchase just the license with no installation CD or maintenance for $96, and IT can install the software for you since we already have it on hand. Keep in mind that Captivate is a Windows-only application, although the videos that you create can be viewed on Mac and Linux platforms.

If you are interested in learning more about Captivate, please contact Eric LePage at the Teaching and Technology Center – 508.531.2634. We can supply you with a 30-day demo of Captivate if you’re interested in trying it on your office desktop computer or laptop.

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Pedagogical Freebies in Cyberspace: The OpenCourseWare Movement

by Dr. Martin Grossman

Say you’ve been tasked with the development of a new course or you are looking for novel approaches for improving your current classes. Or perhaps there is a subject that you never quite mastered and you just want to come up to speed. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were some type of pedagogical repository, a place with relevant and downloadable materials (e.g. syllabi, bibliographies, assignments) for you to consult?

The idea is really not far-fetched at all. Indeed, the notion of sharing course materials over the Internet has picked up steam and is becoming increasingly popular across the U.S. and the world. In 2001, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced that it would make all of its course materials available on the Web. In the context of today’s highly competitive environment, MIT’s announcement of their OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative may have seemed a little counter-intuitive. The movement was not motivated by profit, however, but rather by the goals of advancing knowledge and making learning materials available to those with limited access. OCW is similar in concept to the ‘open source’ movement in the world of software, which has as its basic premise the idea that making intellectual property freely available encourages others to improve upon the work, thus advancing the field. An extremely successful example of ‘open source’ software is the popular Linux operating system (OS), which was developed with the participation of a worldwide community of individuals and which has become a mainstream player in the OS market.
At present, MIT hosts over 1200 courses, with new ones constantly being added. A typical course might include the following: syllabus, course calendar, lecture notes, assignments, exams, problem/solution sets, labs and projects, hyper-textbooks, simulations, tools and tutorials.

mit In recent years, the OpenCourseWare movement has expanded beyond MIT. Sites are popping up everywhere and more and more courses are being posted for general use. The OpenCourseWare Consortium (www.ocwconsortium.org/index.html) is a collaboration of more than 100 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world. It’s mission is to advance education and empower people through the adoption and adaptation of open educational materials. Institutions participating in the Consortium commit to publish at least 10 courses under the institution’s name in an OCW format. A OCW site (1) provides free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses, (2) is available for use and adaptation under an open license, (3) does not typically provide certification or access to instructors. The OCW Consortium web site allows the user to find course materials by searching across all courses from member sites.

Access to course materials is also available through the OCW Finder (http://opencontent.org/ocwfinder/), which searches through the course offerings of some of the top U.S. OCW sites, as well as the original MIT OpenCourseWare site. They are:

Utah State University OCW (http://ocw.usu.edu/ ). Lots of courses in a variety of subjects including Anthropology, Biology, Civil Engineering, Economics, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Instructional Technology, Agriculture
Johns Hopkins School of Public Health OCW (http://ocw.jhsph.edu/). Courses in health related subjects including Adolescent Health, Biostatistics, Environment, General Public Health, Global Health, Mental Health, Maternal and Child Health.
Tufts University OCW (http://ocw.tufts.edu/) - Courses are primarily in the life sciences (Dentistry, Medicine, Nutrition, Veterinary Medicine).
Sofia (Sharing of Free Intellectual Assets) (http://sofia.fhda.edu/index.htm ) - Focuses on community college-level materials.
Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative (http://www.cmu.edu/oli/) - Courses include a number of innovative online instructional components such as cognitive tutors, virtual laboratories, group experiments simulations. Cognitive theory and faculty expertise guide the initial development of each course. As the courses are delivered, OLI researchers conduct a variety of studies to examine the effectiveness and usability of various educational innovations.

Some other cool OCW sites are:

Rice University - Connexions - (http://cnx.org/) - A collection of materials in which content authors publish and collaborate, instructors build and share courses, and learners explore links between concepts, courses and disciplines. The content in Connexions comes in two formats: modules, which are like small "knowledge chunks," and courses, which are collections of modules. A Creative Commons open license allows anyone to take materials, adapt them to meet their needs, and contribute them back to the Commons.
Open-Of-Course – (http://www.open-of-course.org/home/index.php) - Started by two Dutch companies, this multilingual portal offers free online courses and tutorials. The goal of this site is to create a multilingual platform for free quality information, focusing on practical courses for work, business, hobbies, personal finance, etc.
Fulbright Economics Teaching Program OpenCourseWare -(http://ocw.fetp.edu.vn/home.cfm) The Fulbright Economics Teaching Program, founded in 1994, is a partnership of the University of Economics, Ho Chi Minh City and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. It is a resource for people working or studying in policy-related fields to increase their knowledge and explore new approaches to learning and curriculum development (see left image).

Other OCW related sources;

Wired article: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/mit.html

Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCourseWare

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End of Semester Blackboard Course Cleanup Activities

At the end of each semester, it is a good idea to save a backup copy of your Blackboard gradebook for your own records. To export your gradebook to a .csv file, which can be opened in Microsoft Excel, do the following:

Log into your course site
Click the Control Panel button
Under the Assessment heading, click the Gradebook link
Click the Download Grades button
Select the delimiter type as Comma and click the Submit button
Right-click your mouse on the Download button and select Save As (or Save Link As if you are using Firefox) to save a a copy of your gradebook in .csv format to a location on your hard drive or network drive

Blackboard also provides you with a tool for removing students and their course work from your course sites at the end of the semester. You can remove students, Gradebook entries, DropBox submissions, Discussion Board postings, and so on - all at once using the Recycle Course tool.

To remove students and their course work from your course site, do the following:
Make sure you have electronic and/or hardcopies of any student material you might wish to retain
Proceed into your Control Panel and click the Recycle Course link
Under the Select Other Content Materials to Remove heading, place a check in the box next to Users
Type the word Remove in the text box in the lower right-hand corner of your screen
Click the Submit button

You have now successfully recycled (or removed) the students and their course work from your course site.

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Strategies to Deter Plagiarism in Student Papers

by Dr. Anne Hird and Eric LePage

While plagiarism is not new, computer technology has made it easier than ever for students to turn in work, either intentionally or inadvertently, that is not entirely their own. Plagiarism is like a fire—it is important to know what to do if it happens, but it is even better to prevent it altogether.

Consider Your Assignments: Do They Lend Themselves to Plagiarism?
The more that a student has to link the content you are teaching to his/her own experience, the more difficult it becomes for a student to plagiarize. For example, it is easy enough to find on the Web papers on John Dewey’s philosophy. In contrast, it would be far more difficult for a student to plagiarize if the assignment requires the student to relate John Dewey’s philosophy to the student’s own learning experience. Requiring students to compare, contrast, or assimilate in some other way the course content with their own experiential frame of reference makes it very difficult for students to find ready-made papers or portions of papers to fit the assignment.

Require Draft Submission
Required but ungraded draft submission allows the instructor to get a sense of the student’s writing style at various points in the semester. In addition, students cannot procrastinate until the last minute, which may then lead to the temptation to plagiarize when time has run short. If the instructor provides feedback on the drafts and adequate time for revisions, students may also gain confidence in their own ability to complete a quality product. One caution: draft submission shifts the heaviest workload for both students and instructor from the end of the semester to the third quarter of the semester. The workload during the draft review period can be heavy; however, at the end of the semester, students are only doing the final revisions and the instructor is doing final grading on end products that he/she has already seen at least once. The best part is that the students actually apply the feedback in a way that they do not if it comes only at final grading time, and the instructor has the satisfaction of reviewing quality final products.

Provide Students with Ample Information on When and How to Cite Sources
Plagiarism may be an intentional shortcut, but it may also be the result of not knowing when or how to cite sources. For more information on citing sources in APA, MLA, and Turabian style formats, visit BSU's Bibliographic Style Guide site.

Seeking Permission
Provide students with directions on how to seek permission to use an item from the owner of that particular intellectual property. This is a common need in creating websites and other multimedia documents. Often, websites contain a way to contact the owner. If not, it is usually fairly easy to locate contact information on the Web. For example, a search on the name of a paper’s author may reveal that the author is a faculty member at a particular university, which may have a faculty directory with contact information. The student should send a formal e-mail/business letter indicating:

Student’s name, college affiliation, degree program, and course for which the assignment is being completed.
Purpose for which the item will be used, e.g. inclusion of photo in website, use of survey for a research project.
Exactly what section(s) of the item will be used.
The extent to which the item will be available—how large is your audience, how long will the item be available, how will it be conveyed? Example: chart will be included in my final presentation which will be presented once to class of 40 students and instructor.
Any alterations that will be made (caution—any substantial changes to the original may lead to denial of permission to use).
Thank you for the author/owner’s time and consideration.

If a student has asked for and received permission to use an item, require that the student include a copy of the letter or e-mail granting permission as an appendix to the final product.

Google It
If you suspect plagiarism, use full-text search engines such as Google (http://www.google.com) to search key phrases or sentences in the work. This may help to identify the original source.

The Turnitin Anti-Plagiarism Solution
Institutions such as Bridgewater State University employ anti-plagiarism software solutions for providing a powerful deterrent for academic dishonesty. The Turnitin (http://www.turnitin.com) plagiarism prevention system instantly identifies papers containing unoriginal material. Turnitin's extensive database contains millions of published works, electronic books, and archived student papers, as well as indexes of billions of web pages for a thorough comparison and review of your students' submitted assignments.

Buying Term Papers Online
Familiarize yourself with sources of ready-made papers. Let students know that you know about these sites and also know how to search for sources of content in their papers. You can use key search phrases such as "free term papers" for locating these sites via a search engine.

Protecting Your Students' Work
When students produce exemplary work that may be publicly available (e.g. on a website or in a portfolio), advise them to protect it. A simple way to do this is to include a copyright statement followed by e-mail address. The e-mail address provides contact information for anyone who might want to request permission to use the item. In cases of more substantial work, the student should consider registering the copyright. This is a simple and inexpensive procedure, with directions available at http://www.copyright.gov/.

Provide a Model for Students
It is very hard for a student to understand the importance of honoring others’ intellectual property rights if the instructor fails to do so. Instructors should review all course handouts, lecture notes, presentations and websites to be sure that these are in compliance with fair use. Instructors should also assume responsibility for remaining current on copyright and fair use, or knowing where on campus help is available when a question arises.

Reprinted from the Dec. 2004 article at http://it.bridgew.edu/FacStaff/plagiarism/

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Remember to Be Security Conscious in the New Year

by Stacey Osborn

IT’s Computer Security Checklist:

Protect computers from viruses and worms by using Anti-virus software regularly and using caution when opening email attachments and sharing files. If you do not have anti-virus software installed, download Sophos anti-virus software free now at http://download.bridgew.edu.
Download operating system (OS) patches and updates regularly.
Don’t get hooked by e-mail “phishing scams”. Do not reply to or click links in e-mail messages asking you to update credit card, bank, Social Security, account names, passwords, financial or personal information
Use a Spam filter on your BSU and personal email account(s).
BSU email has a Spam filter built in. Learn how to manage your own Spam filtering.
Remove spyware and adware from your computer with anti-spyware and anti-adware.
If you don’t already have anti-spyware installed, download and install Webroot Spysweeper free from http://download.bridgew.edu.
Consider installing a firewall.
If you have Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2, enable the firewall.
Use caution when shopping online, instant messaging or using wireless services to reduce your risk of Identity Theft. Make sure the site has “https://” in the address bar or look for the lock icon on the toolbar (see image below).
Protect yourself and others by reporting security-related incidents to the appropriate authority and check the Be Security Conscious page regularly for updated security news and alerts.
Protect important personal data by running routine data backups.
Share this important list with friends, family, co-workers, and classmates.