Academic Technology Podcast - Episode 6

Kimberly: Hello and welcome to the sixth episode of the Academic Technology Podcast. I'm Kimberly Hayworth, the manager of Academic Computing's Consulting and Multimedia Services group. Today I'll be interviewing Peter Chen, Academic Technology manager, about the Academic Technology Specialists Program. Thanks for being here today, Peter.

Peter: Thank you for having me today, Kim.

Kimberly: So, what is the Academic Technology Specialist program?

Peter: The Academic Technology Specialist program is a group managed through the Libraries, more specifically, through Academic Computing. And we place individuals with discipline-specific expertise within specific departments to work with faculty. And these individuals always have a higher degree of expertise in technology, a sense of they want to innovate and figure out interesting ways of applying technology to the current pedagogy to enhance the teaching and learning process.

Kimberly: Great! Can you describe the types of projects an ATS might work on?

Peter: Sure. It varies quite a bit depending on the department and program that ATSes are involved in. And in some cases, also, we have ATSes that are not involved in a specific academic department but involved in a program that may involve some consulting and an example is the Office of Accessible Education. And our specialist in there, Shelley Haven, she works on various projects that affect just about every discipline out there. And one of the projects that she's working on in particular is the Proteus Project which is built on the concept called Universal Design. The idea of Universal Design is applying different technologies and techniques to the teaching and learning process that can help all learners not just learners with different ability needs but also any student. What the Proteus Project does in particular is a lecturer may be recorded in video and audio and a text track will be developed basically based on a transcript and will be synchronized to the recorded audio video and in doing so it provides an enhanced presentation for a student to later review. Obviously it helps students who have hearing and visual disabilities but at the same time students may have other learning deficiencies that are not specifically identified and this can help that process. So that's one example of an ATS project.

Another type of project, we work very closely with the CourseWork team that is developing the next generation of course management system. And one of the areas of interest nowadays is looking at how course management systems might be applied in other areas not just in teaching but also in research or our work with groups. And so for instance our specialist in IRiSS which is the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences is basically a non-academic ATS position but is working with faculty in the Social Sciences to find ways of applying content management system as opposed to course management system as a way to manage resources for research groups and facilitate communication. So there are some of these technologies that will apply both in the research arena as well as pedagogically in the teaching arena.

Kimberly: And there are also some ATSes who actually teach in the department, aren't there?

Peter: That's correct, yes. We do have ATSes who are discipline-specific individuals and they actually teach some of the courses. For instance, Claudia Engel, our ATS for CASA and Anthropology teaches a course in Ethnographic Studies. We also have ATSes who lead workshops from time to time. Matthew Jockers, our ATS in English, will do a workshop on Endnote which is a popular citation management tool. Citation tools are used increasingly more and more by faculty as well as graduate students and is an important research tool that helps facilitate writing of papers and generating reference lists and bibliographies.

Kimberly: If faculty are interested in getting more information about the ATS program where would they go?

Peter: We have a website at academiccomputing.stanford.edu/atsp and there's a little bit more information there about what the ATS program does, its history, a few more examples of projects and who our current staff include.

Kimberly: That's wonderful. Thank you so much, Peter.

Peter: Thank you, Kim.

Well, that's it for Academic Technology podcast episode 6. Thanks for listening. Episode 7 will include an interview with Tristan Carter. Tristan is a lecturer for the archaeology program based in the Department of Cultural & Social Anthropology (or CASA), Tristan will discuss his experiences working with his ATS, Claudia Engel, the Academic Technology Lab, CourseWork and his course wiki.

Links to information discussed in this podcast and other show notes are available online at http://acomp.stanford.edu/cams Just click the Academic Technology Podcast link. You'll also find a link to the forum if you'd like to provide feedback or suggest topics for future podcasts.