Team 5: Information Technology Initiatives

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Team 5: Information Technology Initiative

Science-Math Overall
A growing number of schools are teaching their students how to write code on one language or another. Interdisciplinary training is growing and writing code is part of this training. The language does not really matter as much as the ability to think logically and write scripts to accomplish tasks. Currently, such courses are offered in Math and Physics. Laurie Heyer offers one course that is cross-listed in biology. All of these courses are populated by upper level students majoring in one of these few disciplines.
See this workshop as an example.

Biology

• clickers for in-class use
• iPod for bird call ID
• podcasts for news and protocols
• Tablets for field work
• It is worth noting that medical schools use PalmPilots (or equivalents) for all medical students when they go on rounds to track medications, test results, etc. The goal is to remove the burden and possible mistakes made when human memory is required to make diagnosis and prescriptions.

Chemistry

• clickers for in-class use

Math

• MatLab and Mathmatica are popular software tools.
• Programing in Java, R, STELLA, Phython, Perl, etc.
  

The Math Dept. would like a computer lab with 28 stations for a variety of classes. Having two computer labs with only 16 stations and students limits their ability to teach math and CS courses.

Physics

• clickers for in-class use

Physics education research is the most advanced in the sciences and math. They have led the way in many areas of education and assessment. Wolfgang and Mario are two world leaders in this area.
In two papers, Dancy and Henderson (2009) measured the extent of physics higher ed faculty's knowledge and use of research-based instructional materials. About 80% knew of these methods but only half used at least one, and very few used more than one. The most common reason given for not using these methods demonstrated to improve student learning was time it takes the faculty to learn and adapt the method to his or her classroom.
I think these two papers make an important point with regards to IT and learning. Just because we make something available does not mean faculty will use it. Furthermore, faculty time is the rate-limiting step, not technology or money. No matter what we do in this area, we need to make sure time is alloted for implementation.

Humanities

Foreign Languages