DCAL Headlines
Here are just a few notes about upcoming events and projects at DCAL
and other items of interest to teachers. Navigate the site's resources at the
right. For more news, see DCAL News. PDF
versions of the current DCAL newsletter
and DCALendar
now available.
Active Learning Institute (ALI) 2008
The third annual Active Learning Institute (ALI) will be held on August 28
and 29. ALI helps faculty develop and refine skills for student-centered
teaching in their courses. Once again this year Professor Chris Jernstedt (PBS)
will open the institute with a presentation on how people learn. Additional
topics include setting course goals, designing effective assessments, promoting
collaborative learning and using technology to enable learning.
Participants in the 2008 ALI will receive a $500 stipend for full
participation in the two-day institute and $100 for a follow-up meeting in
winter or spring 2009. Anyone holding a faculty teaching appointment at
Dartmouth at any rank (Arts and Sciences, Engineering, Tuck and DMS) is
eligible to apply. To apply for the institute, please submit the following to
DCAL at DCAL@Dartmouth.Edu by June 16, 2008:
- A brief statement (800 words or less) of the specific teaching challenges
you wish to address over the two-day institute. Please identify the Dartmouth
course you regularly teach or plan to teach in which these challenges arise and
for which you plan to adopt new tools and techniques.
- Your current CV, including name, address, phone number and e-mail
address.
- Please submit all application materials as e-mail file attachments
Feedback from 2007 Participants
“You did a very good job of allowing participant process/dialogue yet still
getting a lot of content covered. Effective teaching! I learned from each
and every faculty member.”
“Great workshop. I was dreading coming because I am so swamped right now
with grant and paper deadlines, but it was very useful. I was so inspired
yesterday that I went to the Dartmouth Bookstore for a couple of hours after
class and reworked my syllabus—adding unit goals, active learning activities to
the schedule, and rewriting the main assessment projects to be more
active.”
“I was pleasantly surprised with just how incredibly useful it was.”
ALI 2007 Participants
Colleen Boggs (English)
Leslie Butler (History)
Nancy Canepa (Italian)
Parama Chaudhury (Economics)
Mark Detzer (PBS)
James Dorsey (Japanese)
Don Likosky (Epidemiology)
Jonna Mackin (Writing)
Sharon McDonnell (Public Health)
Ana Merino (Spanish)
Stephanie Treneer (Math)
Thalia Wheatley (PBS).
(ALI is sponsored and directed by DCAL, Academic Computing, The Library and
the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric)
Computer-Based Support for Improving Patient Medication Management
Informatics Grand Rounds
Friday, May 16, Noon-1:00 PM
DHMC Auditorium G
James J. Cimino, MD
Chief, Laboratory for Informatics Development
NIH Clinical Center, National Institutes of Health
Obstacles to optimum drug therapy are major causes of adverse events in
patient care. Lack of information is a common underlying cause in these
events: inadequate access to evidence-based knowledge can lead to inappropriate
choices of medications, while incomplete information about a patient's
medication history can lead to confusion, poor communication, under-treatment,
or over-treatment. Computer-based support for medical management
decisions is available but can only help when it is applied
appropriately.
Dr. Cimino will describe studies at Columbia University and the New York
Presbyterian Hospital that sought to understand the kinds of information needs
that arise in the course of medical management. He will then describe how
the findings of those studies informed work on developing tools for
understanding and communicating patients' medical history and orders
("medication reconcilliation") and for anticipating and resolving needs for
evidence-based knowledge ("infobuttons").
To view this Grand Rounds, at the time of the presentation: go to http://www.dhvideo.org >>>
"Conferences on the Web." The Informatics Program web site is http://www.dhmc.org/goto/informatics.
See http://www.cc.nih.gov/about/SeniorStaff/james_cimino.html
for Dr. Cimino's full biosketch.
After graduating from Brown University and earning the MD degree at the New
York Medical College, Cimino interned and completed residency training in
medicine at Saint Vincent's Hospital in New York. He went on to complete a
research fellowship in medical informatics at Massachusetts General Hospital
and Harvard.
What the Best College Teachers Do
12th Annual International Summer Institute: New York City Area
June 18-20, 2008
A Three-day institute based on Ken Bain's award-winning and best selling
book What the Best College Teachers Do (Harvard University Press,
2004), and featuring author Ken Bain and some of the subjects of the 15-year
study of excellence in college education. Institute combines resources of
Montclair State University, Northwestern University, New York University, Rhode
Island School of Design, and Princeton University.
What do the best teachers do to captivate and motivate students, to help
them reach unusually high levels of accomplishment? Participants in this highly
interactive workshop will explore and use findings from a fifteen-year inquiry
into the practices and insights of highly successful teachers, those people
with phenomenal success in helping their students achieve remarkable learning
results. The program will emphasize both improving one's teaching and
developing ways to share insights with colleagues back home.
This year the following faculty members submitted successful proposals and
will be attending the Institute:
Adina Roskies (Philosophy), Kimberly Gifford (Pediatrics), Marlene Heck (Art
History) and Jennifer Sargent (Writing and Rhetoric).
Grants to Attend Conferences on Teaching and Learning
DCAL will make grants of up to $1000 to support attendance at conferences
and programs devoted to teaching and learning. These may be special
panels organized by your professional organizations at their annual
meeting, or by the Educause Learning Initiative or Tomorrow's Professor,
or similar events. If you want to attend such a meeting or present on such a
panel, DCAL will help you pay for it; we may be able to cover the entire
expense! These funds are for travel, lodging, registration and other costs of
participation. Direct your inquiries to Diane Chamberlain at
diane.chamberlain@dartmouth.edu.
Visit Your Colleagues' Classes!
About sixteen instructors joined in pairs and three-somes last winter term
to visit each other's classes and the teaching network continued last spring
and this fall. So far, everyone reports that it has been stimulating and
useful. We have a diversely talented teaching faculty at Dartmouth and we can
learn a great deal from each other. DCAL started this informal network by
setting up a system for visiting colleagues' classes, not for evaluation of
course, but for sharing and learning from each other. Comments and suggestions
are shared only with each other, not with the larger group and certainly not
with any chairs, supervisors or deans. This is often referred to as formative,
rather than summative, evaluation. DCAL helps the process by hosting the
initial meeting of those interested in joining the network, supplying
guidelines and helpful forms, and finally by hosting a de-briefing at the end
of term. The date for the initial winter term meeting is Thursday March 27 at 4
PM in the DCAL Teaching Center. For more details see the Class
Visits page of this website. Please sign up on our workshops
and events sign-up page or with Diane Chamberlain.
Dartmouth Centers Forum Theme for 2008-2009: Conflict and
Reconciliation
The
Dartmouth Centers Forum is pleased to announce that the theme for 2008-2009
will be Conflict and Reconciliation. Conflict is seemingly endemic to society
and rightly deserves our attention. Yet often efforts to resolve conflict focus
on causes, the mitigation of conflict impact upon its victims and place great
emphasis on the prevention of future conflicts through structural or policy
change. The focus of the Dartmouth Center's Forum theme is to emphasize
the role of reconciliation as a method to resolve conflicts no matter what
their causes. Conflicts permeate our personal and social relations, and may be
internal, local, national or international. Reconciliation, viewed as a process
of coming to terms with what is, accepting, forgiving and compromising, and
encompasses all the fields of human endeavor. As such it is fertile ground for
discussions such as, what makes reconciliation a successful conclusion to
conflict? Are there universal processes of reconciliation? Is there a
distinction between disputes and conflicts? Are there conflicts within which
parties cannot be reconciled? What methods might be employed in the promotion
of reconciliation for conflicts, be they personal, societal and global?
The Next DCAL Teaching & Learning Fair
Many may be surprised to learn that more than 20 offices at Dartmouth exist
to support teaching and learning. The library and study skills center are
obvious to almost everyone, but did you know about RWIT, the Tutoring
Clearinghouse, Service Learning programs at the Tucker Foundation, Rauner
Special Collections and Jones Media Center, to name just a few? DCAL is proud
to host the first annual Learning Fair on October 7 in the main Baker
corridor of the Baker-Berry Library. From 11AM until 2 PM representatives of
offices on campus that support teaching and learning will show off what they do
and provide detailed information on how to access their services. We hope
faculty and students will drop by and chat. Faculty are invited to stop by for
lunch in DCAL (102 Baker-Berry).
Syllabus Template
A
syllabus template is now available on the DCAL website. We hope that this
template will give you some ideas and make developing a syllabus for your
course a bit easier. Please modify the template as needed to make your own
personal syllabus and let us know if you have comments/additions.
DCAL Blog
DCAL launched the DCALblog this fall with a focus on learning. The purpose
of this blog, entitled Conversations about Teaching and Learning, is to share
ideas and information about teaching and learning. We hope it will be a
collaborative effort with lots of blog authors and commenters. If you attend a
conference, try something in your classroom, read an article or book, or have
something to share related to teaching or learning please chime in! Access the
blog through the DCAL website –
there is a link in the right side bar of the webpage to the blog.
Teaching Language and Culture Seminar
This new DCAL seminar formed on October 25th 2007 as an ongoing forum for
informed discussion of teaching and learning languages and cultural
competencies. Anyone at Dartmouth interested in these topics is welcome to join
us; simply e-mail Tom Luxon, Doug Moody or Nancy Canepa. Our inaugural
discussion focused on the May 2007 MLA report entitled "Foreign Languages and
Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World." Future plans include
invited speakers, discussion of literature on the subject of language learning
and cultural competency and discussion of possible innovations at Dartmouth.
Our second discussion, held in January focused on telecollaborative techniques
for language learning. We hope you will attend a special lecture by
visiting guest speaker Michael Geisler on April 10 (Thursday) at 12:15 pm in
DCAL. Please register for this luncheon on our workshop
page.
Please e-mail Doug Moody and Nancy Canepa with suggestions for future
meetings!
ReducingStereotypeThreat.org
Reducingstereotypethreat.org
was created by two social psychologists and professors who sought to offer a
resource for faculty, staff, and students regarding stereotype threat. This
website offers summaries of research on this topic and discusses unresolved
issues and controversies in the research literature on the phenomenon. Included
are some research-based suggestions for ameliorating negative consequences of
stereotyping, particularly in academic settings.
Physics Professor Eric Mazur Switched from Lecturing to Active
Learning
An excerpt from "Using the
'Beauties of Physics' to Conquer Science Illiteracy": A Conversation with
Professor Eric Mazur of Harvard University (New York Times July 17).
Q. When you teach Physics 1b,
do you give "fantastic performances?"
A. You know I've come to
think of professional charisma as dangerous. I used to get fantastic
evaluations because of charisma, not understanding. I'd have students give me
high marks, but then say, "physics sucks." Today, by having the students work
out the physics problems with each other, the learning gets done. I've moved
from being "the sage on the stage" to "the guide on the side."
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