Esri Education Summit - Using Esri in the digital humanities and ArcGIS best practices
InfoComm: The Audiovisual and Integrated Experience Event - Gaining knowledge and sharing expertise at the premiere professional audiovisual conference in North America
International Forum on Active Learning Classrooms - Critical skills for teaching in a team-based learning classroom
Michigan Institutional Collaborations on Display at ACH Conference - Institutional collaboration and digital pedagogy
Virtual Exchange Classes Between U-M and St. Petersburg State University in Russia - Article co-authored by LSA Technology Services staff member about the motivations for and results from these Virtual Exchange classes
Esri Education Summit
Peter Knoop and Caitlin Dickinson (Research Computing and Infrastructure Services unit in LSA Technology Services) recently traveled to San Diego, CA for the Esri Education Summit, a gathering of K-12 and Higher Education users and administrators of Esri's software platform. Dickinson presented an innovative use of the Esri platform in the digital humanities project 'Mapping Modern Jewish Culture', led by Professor Shachar Pinsker (LSA Judaic Studies). Knoop conducted a half-day workshop on best practices for administering ArcGIS at an educational institution, focusing on geo-enabling the campus community, with the goal of making the Esri software platform accessible to all faculty, staff, and students. He also participated in a panel on Story Maps in Higher-Education, and coordinated a software enhancements prioritization meeting for higher-education institutions.
InfoComm: The Audiovisual and Integrated Experience Event
In June, Raine Baker, Chris Elly, Nicholas Hytinen, John Jahn, and Jan Stewart attended Infocomm 2019, the premiere professional audiovisual conference in North America. They attended training workshops and walked an extensive show floor where they met with many of the product suppliers used by LSA Technology Services and the rest of the university, viewed new products, discussed product changes for the LSA and U-M environment and collected product information for colleagues at U-M. Elly, Hytinen, and Stewart received their Certified Technology Specialist (CTS) credentials, which is the audiovisual industry-recognized standard. Jahn had previously achieved the CTS, along with the CTS-D and CTS-I masters-level certifications for advanced AV design and installation.
Jahn and Stewart also gave a 90-minute presentation ‘Case Study: Pedagogically-Driven In-House Learning Space Design and Build’. They discussed how pedagogical considerations inform the AV design process, such as in our Team-Based Learning classrooms, Iterative Design, as demonstrated by the evolution of our classroom podiums, and tools and methods developed by the LSA AV team to make their work safer and more efficient.
International Forum on Active Learning Classrooms
Teri Horton and Carla Stellrect, Teaching and Learning Consultants for LSA Technology Services’ Academic Technology Services unit, presented at the International Forum on Active Learning Classrooms (IFALC) held at the University of Minnesota in August. Their session was titled "Faculty development: Critical skills for teaching in a team-based learning classroom”. Horton and Stellrect led a roundtable discussion that explored the bare minimum skills instructors must have to be successful in these specialized spaces. Participants brainstormed around situations they have encountered and shared lessons learned. Horton and Stellrect were then able to share the basics of the LSA faculty development model for teaching in a team-based classroom. Horton commented about the conference, "It was insightful to hear about the experiences of our international colleagues and rewarding to share LSA practices with them. We hope what we learned at the IFALC can enrich the learning environment for students and faculty”.
Michigan Institutional Collaborations on Display at ACH 2019 Conference
Who do you collaborate with? What does institutional collaboration look like? How do you recognize and honor the work of those involved in your collaborations? These are some of the questions Joe Bauer (LSA Technology Services), Anne Cong-Huyen (U-M Library), and Simon Appleford (Creighton University, History) asked at the ACH 2019 Conference (Association for Computers and the Humanities) on July 23. Along with Appleford and six other collaborators, they facilitated a session on institutional collaboration as part of a full-day workshop on digital pedagogy.
Together, Bauer and Cong-Huyen shared their experiences of being part of a collaboration between the U-M Library and LSA Technology Services in support of digital scholarship. They talked about how early cross-campus grass-roots collaboration of the Connecting Digital Scholarship group paved the way for more formal institutional investment. At U-M Library, Cong-Huyen now leads the Digital Scholarship Team as the Digital Scholarship Strategist. At LSA Technology Services, Bauer leads a Digital Scholarship Working Group in coordinating, reimagining, and refactoring services to be more supportive of and more compatible with digital scholarship.
The session included about 50 participants including faculty, librarians, educational technologists, and graduate students from across the U.S. and Canada. During the session the three facilitators posed questions, like the ones above, and guided conversations with the attendees. From those conversations, some of the following themes emerged: reliance on precarious labor makes durable collaborations difficult; it is important to compensate collaborators fairly for their work; ask collaborators early on what kind of recognition and credit will be most valuable for them in their professional roles; keep track of who is doing labor throughout the whole research project lifecycle and start early.
Virtual Exchange Classes Between U-M and St. Petersburg State University in Russia
Todd Austin, Videoconferencing Lead from LSA Technology Services, was co-author on an article with lead author Professor Alexander Knysh from LSA Mideast Studies, along with Philomena Meechan from LSA Language Resource Center, and faculty members Anna Matochkina and Darya Ulanova from St. Petersburg State University (SPbGU) in Russia. In it, they presented the motivations for and results from an ongoing series of U-M Islamic Studies courses that have been shared as Virtual Exchange classes between U-M and SPbU.
The article, “When two worldviews meet: promoting mutual understanding between ‘secular’ and religious students of Islamic studies in Russia and the United States", appeared in the book Telecollaboration and Virtual Exchange Across Disciplines: In Service of Social Inclusion and Global Citizenship. In it, they discuss the ways in which these classes broaden the intercultural competence of U-M students and expand their perspective on the subject material of the classes through active connection with students in another country, both inside and outside the classroom.
Read the full article on pages 57-64 of the electronic version of the book.
The fourth course in this series will be taking place this fall: MIDEAST 411, "Islamic Movements in Comparative Perspective", and will include a third partner, Kazan Federal University, also in Russia.
