Academic Technology Podcast - Episode 7

Kimberly: Hello and welcome to the seventh 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 Tristan Carter. Tristan is a lecturer for the Archaeology program based in the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology, or CASA. Thanks for coming in today, Tristan. You've been a long-time patron of the Academic Technology Lab and you have an Academic Technology Specialist, Claudia Engel in your department. Can you tell us how you got started with teaching with technology?

Tristan: I think it was about three—four years ago, I was teaching a graduate level class and a couple of the grad students had been TAs for various professors who had CourseWork-based classes. My response was, "Hmm, what's CourseWork? What's that all about?" The input has come through students and more recently through people like departmental ATS.

Kimberly: So, what kind of projects do you use the Academic Technology Lab for, as opposed to going to your Academic Technology Specialist, or ATS?

Tristan: That's a good question because I found over the last few years that the relationship between two sets of people—two opportunities—hasn't always been terribly clear, and I think one of the ways I've used ATL has been just on a very pragmatic, organizational element for myself, i.e., with ATL, I book a time, schedule my work, and I use that to just, sort of, retain organization. This way, I can guarantee myself a slot, it helps me organize my workload…yeah, it's elements like that, but I guess the difference between the two is that my ATS specialist is much more aware of where I may to go. That person is dedicated to the Department of Anthropology, or both departments of Anthropology, CASA, and AnthSci (Anthropological Sciences). So what you have with the ATS specialist is that person represents an interface between all the really cool things going on at Stanford and beyond with an acknowledgment of what you guys do. And so Claudia, our ATS person, she can host something albeit something as lo-tech as getting to know PowerPoint, all the way up to high-end digital editing or whatever, knowing full well what Anthropologists and Archaeologists tend to do. And so, she can get really to the point of, "You may already be doing this, well here's a faster, better, more tech-savvy way of doing it." So it's that kind of in-house knowledge interface filter within the technology. And I have used that and have gone to a whole bunch of these pro-active seminars, which then have sort of, in part, brought me back to ATL, and learnt more about what's going on with CourseWork, et cetera.

Kimberly: One of the primary differences between the Academic Technology Lab and the Academic Technology Specialist program is that, unfortunately, the ATL staff can't have discipline-specific knowledge for every area on campus. But we are certainly happy to work with faculty who are interested in getting more information about how to incorporate technology into the teaching and learning process, and also specifically, what types of multimedia are available. And the ATL offers that level of support for people—whether they have an Academic Technology Specialist or are just interested in using the equipment that's available in the facility, such as scanners and digitizing equipment. We can support digital video and digital audio projects, as well as larger range services offered by the Consulting, and Multimedia Services group, such as wide-format printing. So there's a wide variety of services available on the 2nd floor of Meyer.

As far as your teaching with technology, what have the advantages been?

Tristan: Numerous advantages, hopefully for both students and myself, through contact with ATL, and also from talking to our ATS specialist or through her seminars, I realized all the other kind of things I could do with CourseWork, and also, again, student feedback of, "Hey, we did this in this class," whereby, you know, I started a—hopefully, pushed the boundaries more.

Kimberly: What about the wiki that you've recently started using?

Tristan: Now, where I changed over to wiki-based interfaces for my teaching—and I hesitate to say whether I've gone over there for good now, but there was a pragmatic reason within that. One of the other things I do at Stanford is I teach for Continuing Studies, the adult education program. It was again encouragement from people I was working with, not least a number of my colleagues who work in the Metamedia laboratory (directed by Michael Shanks, through Stanford Humanities Lab, Classics, Archaeology program. There was a bunch of courses, blogs, student projects which were being run through this wiki-based technology.

For me, it's remarkably user-friendly, having been presented with, essentially, quite a classy template. Even I can sort of upload, create sub-pages, or what have you—it's very easy for me to then develop. So what I initially did was create a new course, which was devised specifically for Continuing Studies, based upon this. They appreciate the speed in which they can access the material. Also, as I'm beginning to learn, there is a very easy way of interacting...if I interact with it so can they.
And I've just had first week's experience of a classroom project and the students uploading five words associated with Archaeology—it was something as basic as that. And I gave them the option of, "This is how you upload the information. Follow these instructions, it's relatively simple. However, if everything is going pear-shaped, just email me them and I'll do it for you." And I was pleasantly surprised that pretty instantly about a third of the class uploaded in the appropriate manner what I required of them—one person got it spectacularly wrong and I rescued the situation, no harm there—, a couple of people sent me email versions because they were too busy or indeed, the were freaked out by this technology, and then the rest of them I poked with sticks in class, and they gave it to me on paper. But, you know, it's small steps—it's beginning. And again, I —whether I go to the wiki just because I find it also more pleasurable as a professor. Not only am I disseminating information more easily, but because I'm creating content, sometimes it actually pushes my own research. What I'm writing on this web page is forcing me to learn more and hopefully improving my teaching and my knowledge.

Kimberly: You covered a few of the challenges you've run into, but what have been the primary challenges you faced?

Tristan: Primary challenge...all fairly low-level because, again, I'm sure I'm not really pushing the boundaries of these technologies. I've yet to, for example, put any audio clips or any visual clips up onto these websites. There's the occasional problem of the server crashing, but everything—both with CourseWork and the wiki-based technology—has been wonderfully easy in terms of developing the class and disseminating the information. There has been the occasional issue about size of files, uploading and what have you, although that's had an interesting knock-on effect because some of my students asked me if I was going to be posting my PowerPoint presentations from class on CourseWork. Now, I actually tried to do that the first time, and it was far too big to actually be uploaded. But then after that it got me thinking about what I'm providing, and to what extent at times I might be getting into spoon-feeding, and also to what extent issues of intellectual property rights of teaching, and the other day in my Continuing Studies class somebody came up and said, would I be putting up my PowerPoint up online for them to access. I'm a bit uncomfortable with that. I spend enormously large amounts of time putting these things together, and they in themselves represent an intellectual effort, as much as a time effort. This is something I want to talk about with colleagues, in terms of dissemination of our information. I was actually thinking maybe translating them into a PDF and hosting a PDF, so people couldn't just grab all—I mean, I'm more than happy to share the images, all that sort of thing, but—So that's brought me into one new question in teaching, and rights, and what have you, so...which I wouldn't have had beforehand, I don't think. Certainly not in the day of slides, but having moved to PowerPoint and the digital thing, that's opened up a couple of new, interesting questions. But technologically, you know, eveything's been fine and dandy. But again, maybe I'll go to the next seminar, it'll be on the new version of CourseWork, and I'll—my mind span will expand as much as there'll be new excitement, there'll be new stresses and problems and what have you, so we'll see.

Kimberly: Thanks, Tristan. Also, just a note about Creative Commons: essentially, it's a way to provide certain amounts of rights, so that's something that we're definitely looking into incorporating more with the works that faculty and people are putting out there.
So, what advice do you have for people who are interested in just getting started with technology?

Tristan: Centainly, I would start with people who you understand, particularly for people who are not tech-savvy. It's very easy to get lost very quickly, I found. So go and talk to people you know—respect—about how they've been using it, and look at those potentials. And then at certain stages in developing it further, you may want to go off and take seminars that are hosted above and beyond your immediate, sort of ATS domain. So I think that's how I'd get on to it, but you know, go to your departmental go-to person, the ATS, because they will, essentially, know where you're coming from. They are going to know how you're going to want to use certain technologies, and also they're going to be able to provide you with examples of applications by some of your colleagues, by people from previous years, et cetera et cetera.

Because I came into this through the ATL, I wondered to what extent—if you go to the ATS—what point would they encourage you to go to ATL but that'll probably depend on how you want to use these technologies, and I think a lot of this comes down to how tech-savvy and how much this excites you, as much as anything, you know. It's beginning to excite me because it's now starting to push my research—having a kind of intellectual impact—whereas beforehand, the way I was using CourseWork, it was all about pragmatism, it was, you know, disseminating data. Quite possibly, you're going to have your peers, your students , or your professors suggesting some of these things to you. But go and demystify it as quickly as possible, because otherwise, the students are going to be so much further ahead than you.

Kimberly: Thanks for talking with me today, Tristan. Well, that's it for Academic Technology Podcast, Episode 7. Thanks for listening. Episode 8 will include the How Can We Innovate in Learning presentation that Claudia Engle and I gave at the Educause Western Regional Conference on April 25, 2006 in San Francisco. Links to information discussed in this podcast and other show notes are available online at acomp.stanford.edu/cams. Just click the Academic Technology Podcast link. You'll also find a link to our blog if you'd like to provide feedback or suggest topics for podcasts.

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 our blog if you'd like to provide feedback or suggest topics for future podcasts.