Yale Bulletin and Calendar

October 5, 2007|Volume 36, Number 5

Faculty members win fellowships
for use of technology in curricula

Three Yale faculty members — Seth Fein, Julie Dorsey and Pericles Lewis — have been awarded John and Yvonne McCredie Fellowships in Instructional Technology to support innovative teaching initiatives in their 2007-2008 classes.

This program is supported by a donation from Jack McCredie ’62 B.E., ’64 M.E.

Fein, assistant professor of history, is redesigning his courses to build in activities that hone students’ scholarly acumen in interpreting and selecting audiovisual primary sources.

“I want to provide students with the means to research widely and think deeply about sounds and images not as mere illustrations of the past but as rich sites for its analysis,” says Fein. “At the same time, I want to provide them with the means to mobilize audiovisual sources purposefully and creatively to express that scholarship.”

Dorsey, professor of computer science, will also be asking her students to do hands-on work with multimedia this year. As a companion to her lectures, she is developing a series of interactive 3-D computer tutorials. By controlling input to the tutorials, students will be able to test hypotheses, visualize cause-and-effect scenarios, and develop a richer understanding of the relationship between the abstract concepts underlying computer graphics and what is observed.

“Interaction and visualization techniques are extremely powerful in helping students to engage technical material,” says Dorsey. “It is our hope that our new tools will serve as a model for other courses — at Yale and beyond.”

Inspired by the collaborative environment of laboratories in the physical sciences, Lewis — professor of comparative literature and of English — is developing a Modernism Lab, a virtual space designed to encourage similar collaborative learning opportunities in the humanities. Students studying modernist literature will make annotated records of the primary sources and criticism they consult in a shared database. This will create a collective pool of research they can use to inform their written assignments. The written assignments will be published to a wiki, enabling students to add links to the database and to inter-related passages in each other’s writing.

Noting that he is excited by the collaborative possibilities, Lewis says, “I hope that students will extend the conversations they are having in my seminar into shared research projects, and that all of us — students, teaching assistants and faculty — can draw on this shared conversation to develop our understanding of early 20th-century literature.”

Yale faculty members interested in applying for the McCredie Fellowship to support creative uses of technology in their curricula should contact Ed Kairiss, director of the Instructional Technology Group, by e-mail at edward.kairiss@yale.edu or by phone at (203) 432-6637. More information is available online at http://itg.yale.edu/opportunities.

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Campus Notes