UBC Arts ISIT Blog

Tomorrow is UBC's annual E-Strategy Open House. It is happening at UBC's Life Sciences Centre. They event is completely sold out with 400 people attending the morning and afternoon sessions.

Arts IS will be presenting Arts Metaverse and Open Croquet at one of the afternoon break out sessions and we will have a poster presentation on Word Press Multi-User (an open blogging software that we are currently using in our faculty) and how it can be used with our Arts Learning Tools.

Hope to see some of you there!

I came across a pretty good visualization of a 3D brain.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/brain/3d/

It shows the human brain and all its compartments which is very useful for undergraduate bio-psychology courses.

I am now going to try to find something similar for monkey, rat, and cat brains.

I wrote on this topic a short while ago but it has come up again and I thought it would be worth while to discuss it some more.

Technology is the medium we often choose to use to accomplish a task that we used to do with a pen and paper more efficiently. However, sometimes technology is not advanced enough or simply can not accomplish a simple task we did with a pen.

Before students were able to submit their assignments electronically (either via e-mail or on an LMS like WebCT or Sakai), instructors would take their nice red pen and write comments all over their assignments. I have to say I never liked seeing my papers covered with red marks when it was returned to me but it was an efficient way to mark papers and it was easy for students to understand their errors. The drawback to paper assignments is that students had to hand them in class (or mail them in for distance education), it was easier to fudge the word count because nobody would actually count the words exactly, and instructors had to carry bags of paper around with them (often in the rain).

Now we have LMS (WeBCT, Sakai, Moodle, etc) where students can submit assignments electronically as attachments or can type them in (or copy/paste from MS Word) in an HTML editor.

With LMS technology, students submit assignments anytime and anywhere making it more efficient for them. Instructors can print out the assignment if they wish or they can mark them online. Their lives are easier too because they don't have to carry papers around with them or worry about getting them stained or wet. Instructors can give students their grade privately and efficiently within the LMS website.

BUT....with some LMS technology, instructors can only place comments at the end of the assignment. They can't type in comments wherever they choose. They have to explain which passages were incorrect or too wordy for example instead placing such comments where they should be.

So far, I have only found one LMS that supports comments written in the assignment. This is Sakai. The only drawback is that the instructor has to place two curly brackets around the comments in order to have them appear in red like so {{comment}}. I think instructors should be able to choose the colour of their comments and have their comments automatically be that colour (without remembering to type the curly brackets each time). WebCT does not allow comments placed in the assignment at all unless at the end. I do not know about Moodle.

Instructors have been writing Writing comments within an assignment for decades. Why does technology need to make this simple task so much more complicated?

UBC's annual E-learning Open House event will be held today from 3:30pm to 5pm at Sage Bistro (near the Graduate centre at the far north of campus). It's an opportunity for various IT or IS (instructional support) units across to showcase their projects, tools, and services.

This year, our unit will be showing how virtual environments can be used in to enhance teaching and learning. Metaverses such as Second Life, for example, can be used for students to collaborate online, see things in 3D such as sculptures for Art History classes for example. We will also be showcasing Sakai and our experience with it. We will be showing the new tools in Sakai and how can it be used to benefit the face-2-face learning and teaching experience.

There are about 140 people confirmed to attend today. There will be room for drop - in. We encourage everyone to try to attend the Open House to become more familiar with what is going on amongst IT circles on campus.

I was testing out CogLab today to see how the program worked and how stimulating it is. I quickly learned that the CogLab experiments have very limited graphics (non existent actually) and are basically a black screen with some white letters or numbers. CogLab is an application that provides cognitive pychology students an opportunity to take experiments that are very similar to those taken in clinical settings. It's a great way to give students a hands-on feel of cognitive psychology. However, the tasks in the experiments are very repetitive and not very stimulating although they do provide results at the end that can be informative. I wonder if there are other applications available (free or not) that provide experiments on concepts such as attention, perception, sensory memory, neurocognition, etc that may be more visually stimulating to students. Maybe with some graphics, some colour, some animations?