The LSS Learning Lab has reopened. The old ceiling has been removed and will be replaced with a new ceiling. We expect the Learning Lab to remain open during construction, though some areas may temporarily be blocked off.
The ceiling in the adjacent computer lab (259A) is currently being installed and will reopen on or before June 25.
Mold has been discovered in insulation above the ceiling in the LSS Learning Lab and adjacent computer lab (room 259A). Both labs will be closed while ceiling material is being removed and will reopen as soon as it is safe to reenter those areas.
A new ceiling will be installed in both the Learning Lab and 259A. We expect the Learning Lab to remain open during construction, though some areas may temporarily be blocked off.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Everyone is working as quickly as possible to reopen the affected labs.
One of the best things about teaching at UW-Madison is the wide array of support options available for instructional technology, media production, and technical support. That said, it isn’t always easy to navigate those services to figure out where to go for different kinds of support.
With that in mind, we’ve published the L&S Learning Support Services Guide for Summer Session Instructors (PDF), designed to make it easy for instructors to find the help they need, when they need it. The guide includes key information about our services and facilities, including the Learning Lab, Special Projects Lab, AV Pool, InfoLab, computer and movie rooms, and Media Services.
Take a look, let us know what you think, and please be sure to contact any of our consultants with your questions.
We’re looking forward to a great summer session!
Did you know that L&S Learning Support Services is open all summer long? Not only are LSS staff available to assist with summer and fall courses, but also items from the AV Pool and media collection are available for reservation and checkout (even when the AV Pool and Learning Lab are closed!)
Summer hours are listed below. To contact a specific LSS staff member, see http://lss.wisc.edu/staff/stafflist.php
Have a great summer!
Hours
LSS Main Office (279 Van Hise)
262-1408
Open all summer, Monday-Friday, 8 am-12 noon and 1-4 pm.
LSS AV Pool (275 Van Hise)
262-1678 / 262-4965
Open June 16-August 8, Monday-Friday, 8 am-12 noon.
LSS Learning Lab (259 Van Hise)
262-1678 / 262-7759
Open June 16-August 8, Monday-Friday, 10 am-4 pm.
LSS InfoLab (464 Van Hise)
262-4575 / 262-3004
Open June 16-August 8, Monday-Friday, 11 am-4 pm.
Photo by Michael Forster Rothbart, © UW-Madison University Communications.
L&S Learning Support Services recently completed a pilot course, the Global Spread of English, with University of Wisconsin-Madison English Professor Jane Zuengler. LSS provided the training and support that allowed students to create multimedia assignments and then share content online. In the Spring of 2009, the class will expand to allow UW students to collaborate with students from Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco via videoconference and a collaborative site built by LSS.
Students completed assignments using different modes of communication: text, hypertext, digital audio, digital video. A collaborative web site, built by LSS, allowed students to share, reflect, work together, and provide feedback on assignments. In the Spring of 2009, the course will explore how students from across the Atlantic can collaborate on multi-modal projects with students at UW-Madison.
Professor Zuengler and Mr. Macasaet traveled to Ifrane, Morocco in November to work with their counterparts at Morocco’s only English language university. Located in the Atlas Mountains in the small town of Ifrane, AUI has about one thousand students. Planning for the course began early in 2007. To learn more about the Global Spread of English and the technology and support behind the course, contact Doug Worsham or David Macasaet.
Several LSS staff will be participating in the 10th Annual Teaching & Learning Symposium May 21-23 at the Pyle Center.
The annual Teaching & Learning Symposium brings together all of us—faculty, staff, post-docs, and graduate students—to share best practices, celebrate accomplishments, discuss new teaching pedagogy, and explore themes of mutual interest.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the symposium, and its theme celebrates that milestone: “Shaping our Future: Teaching and Learning at UW–Madison.” Symposium participants will explore both what is enduring about teaching and learning at UW–Madison, and what has dramatically changed. Issues to be discussed are
LSS staff participate in Symposium activities to share ideas and interact with other faculty and staff who are passionate about teaching and learning. We often return to LSS energized with new ideas and connections made at the event.
We look forward to seeing many of our L&S colleagues at the Symposium. For more information and registration, please see http://www.learning.wisc.edu/tlsymposium/
With a new DoIT Engage award program and an innovative new LSS service, now is a great time to explore how instructional technology tools can support and expand the role of group collaboration in your courses.
DoIT’s Engage Adaptation Award is focused on working with UW-Madison instructors to assess and evaluate technology-enhanced collaborative group work to develop best practices for instructional use. The competitive awards provide $1200 and up to 12 hours of consultation for 2008-2009 timetable courses, and are focused on five overlapping themes:
At the same time, L&S Learning Support Services has developed a new platform for online interaction and communication called L&S Collaborative Sites. L&S instructors who apply for Engage awards may elect to use an L&S Collaborative Site in addition to the cash award and consultation time.
LSS has piloted the Collaborative Sites platform in several L&S courses and created several custom online learning environments that support multiple types of interaction, including group authorship and consensus building, class glossaries, knowledge repositories, course portfolios, student journals, and literary analysis sites.
Examples include:
A limited number of Collaborative Sites will be available to L&S instructors for Fall 2008 courses. Preference will be given to instructors that receive an Engage Adaptation Award.
For more information:
On Friday, May 2, 2008, the UW-Madison Libraries and the Office of the CIO and Vice Provost for Information Technology are co-sponsoring a symposium related to projects that utilize or study the impact of digital technology in the arts and humanities.
These technologies offer faculty and students new methods of conducting research, conceptualizing relationships, presenting their scholarship and increasing the public’s ability to search and access arts and humanities information. The goal of the symposium is to explore collaborative research initiatives, with a focus on the arts and humanities.
Wendy Pradt Lougee, University Librarian and McKnight Professor at the University of Minnesota will provide the keynote address, building on work she has done pertaining to building cyberinfrastructure support for the arts and humanities today.
Peter Losin from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) will describe the Digital Humanities Initiative, a program aimed at supporting projects that utilize or study the impact of digital technology.
A panel of UW-Madison arts and humanities faculty and graduate students will offer participants a chance to share ideas from the discussions.
See http://www.cio.wisc.edu/events/researchconf/may08/ for agenda, registration, and more.
As of the first of April (no foolin’!), LSS has a new Associate Director, one well-known to people around the College and around the campus: Lisa Jansen. Lisa’s ten years at LSS and her experience at Cooperative Extension before that have prepared her well for her new job, and I’m very much looking forward to working with her in it. I hope you’ll join me in congratulating Lisa: it was no small accomplishment to be the successful candidate among thirty-odd applicants from a couple of different continents, and I hope she’s as proud of that as we are to have her.
Sue Weier, Doug Worsham, and Sara Ziemendorf with L&S Learning Support Services had a great time presenting a poster session at UW Madison’s Showcase, an annual event focused on sharing best practices in both academic and administrative areas.
The poster, titled “Collaboration. Administration. Networking. What can’t you do with Drupal?” shares our recent innovations built on Drupal, a free, open source content management system. We’re currently using Drupal as a platform for:
For more information, please take a look at the case studies linked above, or contact us directly.
If you’re into making YouTube videos or sharing music with friends, then this event is for you! On Saturday, April 12, 2008, the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries are sponsoring Culture of Sharing, a forum for students covering a variety of issues related to the culture of sharing made possible by the technologies of the Internet.
The free event will feature a keynote speech by Nelson Pavlosky, co-founder of Students for Free Culture, and closing session with Gavin Baker who manages the Open Students blog and is the Assistant Editor for Peter Suber’s Open Access News.
Breakout sessions include:
For more information and schedule, see cultureofsharing.library.wisc.edu
Thanks to a series of grants from Friends of the UW–Madison Libraries, the LSS Learning Lab in 259 Van Hise offers a growing collection of world language DVDs for check-out by students. The DVD collection features more than 250 titles, most of which are recent releases, representing twenty languages from Arabic to Swedish.
The original grant in 2003 purchased foreign language DVDs to support classes studying French Cinema, Italian and Italian/American Culture, and Spanish Literature and Film. In 2005, a second grant allowed LSS to collect foreign language DVDs that were attractive as entertainment and useful in the classroom. In 2008, a third grant will focus on adding foreign cinema classics such as La Dolce Vita and Carmen.
Before the first Friends grant in 2003, the LSS video collection was limited to 24-hour use by instructional staff, and students could only view materials while in the LSS Learning Lab. The new collection offers students the opportunity to view cinema that will enhance their appreciation for languages and cultures of other countries and provide enrichment beyond the classroom.
The new collection has been surprisingly popular with both students and instructors. Various foreign film clubs, foreign language instructors, and graduate and undergraduate students have made suggestions for new titles to add.
DVDs in the new collection are listed at http://imp.lss.wisc.edu/lss/mediacat/3day.pdf and in MadCat and are available to the entire campus community.
Learning Support Services recently streamlined the video camera checkout process for faculty and instructional staff.
Beginning spring semester 2008, faculty and instructional staff in the College of Letters and Science will be able to check out a variety of digital video cameras directly from Learning Support Services’ AV Pool. For convenience, digital video tapes and tripods are available for check-out as well.
Camcorders are especially popular for teacher self-evaluation and lecture capture. Reservations can be made in advance at http://babel.lss.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/avres.cgi
Learning Support Services is pleased to announce the addition of Marcelo Fraga as LSS’s new Media Production Assistant. Marcelo hails from the mountain city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil and is a recent University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate with a master’s degree in library and information sciences.
Marcelo brings a wealth of knowledge and skills in areas ranging from motion picture and television production to web development.
Marcelo may be familiar to many of LSS’s regular customers as he began his time at LSS as a Media Production Project Assistant in the Summer of 2006.
Marcelo has worked on notable instructional technology projects such as the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Personalidades podcast created through the Department of Spanish and Portuguese with the assistance of L&S Learning Support Services.
“I would be happy to assist faculty and staff in creating instructional media,” said Mr. Fraga. “I’m especially interested in working on projects that take advantage of my audio and video editing skills.”
Contact Marcelo at 265-8069 or fraga@lss.wisc.edu.
The 3rd Annual LACIS Festival de Cine ran on campus from Feb.29-March 2. This year’s festival featured past and present films from Argentina. If you missed the screenings or are interested in seeing more cinema from Argentina, check out our collection of films from Argentina and other Spanish speaking countries: http://imp.lss.wisc.edu/lss/mediacat/span.pdf
We recently added three new MacBooks to our collection of audio, video, and computer equipment in the L&S LSS AV Pool.
These MacBooks run Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger), and include lots of useful software, including iLife ‘06, Microsoft Office X, Audacity, Skype, and NeoOffice.
Also exciting is the MacBook’s iSight Camera, which offers a quick and easy way to record simple instructional materials, either in class or in your office. You can use the iSight with Photo Booth to take portraits, or with iMovie to make simple movies. For even more fun, use the iSight with the program Comic Life to easily put together comic books featuring you and your students.
We’re looking forward to seeing how instructors put these new MacBooks to use!
The L&S LSS AV Pool provides a wide range of audio, video, and computer equipment to all faculty, staff, and graduate teaching assistants teaching in Van Hise Hall. Some portable equipment is also available to instructors and staff in the College of L&S for use in other buildings. For more information on the L&S AV Pool, please visit http://lss.wisc.edu/facilities/av/avpool.htm or contact Doug Worsham (doug@lss.wisc.edu).
L&S LessonShare, our online tool to help communities of instructors in L&S departments share, organize, and collaboratively improve their lessons, handouts, and other teaching materials, was recently featured in the January 28th edition of Wisconsin Week.
The article, TAs drive development of a teaching tool, describes the grassroots development of LessonShare by LSS staff in collaboration with German and Italian language instructors. Sharing and organizing teaching materials has been a long-standing challenge in many departments, and the article shows how LessonShare has evolved from previous attempts to meet this challenge - from the departmental “treasure box,” a plastic milk crate filled with folders, to early efforts at sharing materials online.
An improvement on the “treasure box” approach, LessonShare is more than just an online file cabinet. It provides flexible, department specific organization allowing instructors to find the materials they need quickly. It handles any digital file, from a PDF of a lesson plan, to an audio, video, or PowerPoint file. It also provides a platform for workflow management, collaboration, and discussion.
We’re happy to see LessonShare in the news and growing! In the coming months, we’ll be working on expanding the use of LessonShare within the College of Letters and Science, and helping others on campus get started with their own LessonShare platforms.
For more information on LessonShare, please contact Sue Weier (sue@lss.wisc.edu) or Doug Worsham (doug@lss.wisc.edu) with L&S Learning Support Services.
For Teaching Assistants in the College of Letters & Science, instructional technology training and support is just an email or phone call away. Below is a list of campus departments that provide free services to TAs.
L&S Learning Support Services
http://lss.wisc.edu
LSS provides a variety of services free to all L&S faculty and instructional staff. We offer one-on-one consulting for any project involving use of instructional technology, including:
Consulting takes many forms, including:
We also offer use of our hardware, software, and recording facilities for many instructional technology projects. Contact Lisa Jansen at 262-1126 or eajansen@wisc.edu for more information.
Software Training for Students (DoIT)
http://www.doit.wisc.edu/training/student/
STS offers a variety of services free to registered students, including:
Academic Technology (DoIT)
http://academictech.doit.wisc.edu/
DoIT-AT provides a variety of services free to all UW-Madison faculty and instructional staff.
Library Instruction Program
http://library.wisc.edu/workshops/
Campus libraries offer a variety of one-on-one workshops and individual consulting free to all UW-Madison students, faculty and staff. Some topics that fall under “instructional technology” include:
Writing Center
http://www.wisc.edu/writing/
The Writing Center offers free workshops on a variety of topics to all UW-Madison students, faculty and staff. Some topics that fall under “instructional technology” include:
The Language Institute
http://languageinstitute.wisc.edu/
The UW-Madison Language Institute offers free lectures, workshops and events, and links to other resources from its website.
Second semester is out of the gate, so it’s time for me to try to catch up. Some of the things I need to catch up on I should have done long since, like welcoming David Macasaet to the LSS staff. David joined us last summer as an instructional technology consultant specializing in all things video. He’s a UW grad returning to his alma mater via a longish detour through Montana, and he brings with him enormous technical acumen, an artist’s eye, and just the right anecdote for any occasion. He’s been instrumental in a number of our recent initiatives, especially regarding streaming video. and we’re very lucky to have him. Anyone who has yet to meet David is in for a treat.
One of the things David has been collaborating with other LSS staff on is a redesign of the LSS website, which we expect to be rolling out soon. I think the group that has worked on this project has done a tremendous job: the new design has more information in it, that information is easier to find, and it even looks great. I’m very much looking forward to seeing it go live. One of the things it will include will be more regular blog postings on current topics, such as the fancy new mediated classrooms in Van Hise (three more to come this summer!), our LessonShare initiative, and more. So you’ll want to stop by periodically to see what’s new - we’ll make sure it’s worth your while.
We also have a really great bunch of new student employees this semester. They, like the continuing staff, are looking forward to helping L&S folks with every which kind of instructional technology this semester, so stop on by - virtually or in person - and see us!
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Madison had growing pains just like any other city. The newest arrivals to our beautiful Capitol were shunted to an area in the center of town called Greenbush, and instead of becoming a slum, it became a haven of culture and harmonious peace. Italian families mingled with Polish families, African-American families lived alongside Jewish families, and it was a wonderful place, but a place with some notoriety and a bad reputation.
A lot of people don’t realize that this area, called the Greenbush, this triangle where Meriter Hospital now dominates, was forcibly depopulated in the 1950s and 60s. Madisonians didn’t want to have to have an urban concentration of poor families in the center of town, and the people pushed out in this mad rush towards “Newer is Better” still look back fondly upon their time there.
Recently, the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Culture (CSUMC) presented a conference with conjunction with Randall Elementary School on the Greenbush, its people, its traditions, and the loss of it in the push for urban renewal. This conference was videotaped and when the Engage Program offered grants to create “Podcasts Plus”, they saw their opportunity.
Working with LSS, and using the easy interface of iMovie, a student was able to take the video of the highlights of the conference, splice that with pictures of the “Bush”, and add titles so that any casual person interested in the history of Madison’s Greenbush might be able to get a sense of what it meant to be there in its infancy and in its defining moments.
The result was a series of 20 video podcasts, some only a few minutes long, some up to 24 minutes long, where stories are told, myths debunked and a sense of Madison’s history is revealed.
It is the hope of the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures that these video podcasts can be used for instruction, not only in Madison, but as an example of the costs of urban renewal in a cultural context and a plea for tolerance for future generations.
If you’d like to view these podcasts, check out The CSUMC Podcast Page at http://csumc.wisc.edu/MediaLib/podcast/index.htm You can also subscribe to them using iTunes or any other feed reader at http://csumc.wisc.edu/MediaLib/podcast/folklorefeed.xml
A companion website allows access to many more materials used in conjunction with this conference, most of which were developed by students at Randall Elementary School. See http://csumc.wisc.edu/cmct/greenbush/index.htm for more details.
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