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Table of Contents of Teaching/Learning
Activities and Spaces
Physical/Virtual: The faculty member and some number of students
walk through the door into the traditional classroom and close
it behind them. It's private but, in the past, the resources of
the classroom have been limited to
the people and things inside those walls. Today one can use videotapes,
telephone, or live videoconferencing to include others in the
course.
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The TLT Group is unusual
but not unique in using telephones or Internet audio to bring
outsiders into a room. A 'guest expert' might give a talk
by audio, with the local leader helping guide discussion between
the local students and the expert. Or the expert's presentation
might have been recorded previously (audio, video, or simply an
article). The local leader guides discussion of the expert's
materials. Then, after an initial set of questions or comments
have been assembled, the local group calls the expert at a
prearranged time, and has a brief discussion via audio link.
It's important for the local participants to be able to hear the
distant expert clearly. We've sometimes used additional
technical arrangements, including application sharing or shared
whiteboard so that the distant expert can show a picture, draw,
type or point in ways that the local participants can see.
Occasionally we've had fully two-way communications so that the
distant expert can also see something on display from the local
group. We've used technologies as simple as a speaker phone and
as sophisticated as groupware (e.g.,
Elluminate).
Virtual classrooms usually have an easier time
accommodating distant guest lecturers or students from different
backgrounds (useful for kindling debates), if the course
management system doesn't make it too difficult to include them
in the class.
- It was a revelation for me many years ago
when Prof. Nick Eastmond of Utah State University invited me to
give a guest talk to his course. The course was being
conducted by audio conferencing: the students, Nick and I were
in a conference call together. The revelation was that, once I'd
picked up the phone, I was with them, more so than if
they'd been face-to-face in a room and I'd been a voice coming
from a loudspeaker. I realized that intimacy in a course
is largely a function of ease of conversation and symmetry of
access-- everyone having the same abilities to see, speak and
hear.
-Steve Ehrmann, The TLT Group; updated Oct. 31,
2004
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