OID: Scholarship in a New Media Environment

Moderator

Steve Rossen, Faculty New Media Center

Panel

Dario Nardi, Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Program in Computing, UCLA
Nicholas Gessler, Co-Director, Human Complex Systems
Timothy Ford, Programmer, Treyarch

The use of games and simulations is an exciting and engaging way to provide students with rich interactive learning activities. Nevertheless, most educators tend to think of these tools as something computer scientists can use but the rest of us find intimidating and opaque.

This forum is designed to show the non-specialist that it is possible for "the rest of us" to get involved in the design and implementation of these active learning tools. To help convince us, three educators with a fresh slant on the use of games and simulations will discuss and demonstrate the utility and value of games and simulations in education. They are:

Dario Nardi, Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Program in Computing. Dr. Nardi's focus is artificial intelligence, undergraduate education and curriculum design, andhuman factors in general. He is particularly interested in how people experience the every-day world in different ways and how machines can be made to interact socially to mirror and complement these differences. Dr. Nardi runs live in-class simulations with students. He has designed computer-based simulation software for use by liberal arts and science students. And he has developed a speaking conversational agent for use in the classroom. Dr. Nardi also believes that fiction writing, music, art, and other "intelligences" can complement otherwise theoretical approaches and he advocates that learning should be interactive and fun.

Nicholas Gessler: Lecturer and Co-Director Human Complex Systems Center. Mr. Gessler has developed three courses: Spatial Simulation & Games, Computational Cartography, Artificial Life, Culture and Evolutionary Design. Students in his classes create simulations using Borland's Rapid Application Development environment and C++, a language Mr. Gessler introduces to them in less than two hours, then go on to construct their own graphical multiagent worlds as laboratory experiments using elements of the C++ language for Windows PCs. In addition, his students use Lego's Mindstorms microcomputers to program the robot's behavior, collect data and mediate human interaction. Mr. Gessler will wear two hats for this forum, discussing both the utility and ease of learning programming languages as well as their embodiment in interactive robots.

Timothy Ford is a programmer for Treyarch, a subsidiary of Activision, and an undergraduate in UCLA's Computer Science Department. He is currently working on SegaNHL2k3 for the xbox, playstation2 and gamecube. Mr. Ford is the president and founder of the UCLA Community of Gamers and Developers, a campus organization which examines the practice and history of game design, technology and production. Mr. Ford will offer a broad overview of the role games can play in in teaching in learning.

Please join us Friday, April 26th, for what promises to be an intriguing discussion and demonstration. Refreshments provided, and questions and comments are decidedly welcome.

This forum will be archived for on-demand viewing over the Internet. Visit our WebCast page for information on setting up your browser to view this video presentation and to see the other material currently available for viewing.

Moderator

Steve Rossen, Faculty New Media Center

Panel

Dr. John Gerdes, Assistant Professor of Information Systems, UC Riverside

A number of courses call for the use of various software packages in order for students to successfully complete them. It may be a database, spreadsheet, or statistical program with which to analyze data, a sound editing program with which to capture, analyze and repurpose musical files, or a graphics program with which to construct a simulation. No matter which software program is used, the same problem obtains: how, within a quarter system, can one train students to use this software to perform the the requisite tasks?

One could schedule a lab, of course, but when class sizes are large, and support staff is minimal, labs often fail to fulfill both student and instructor expectations. Those students who miss the labs remain perpetually behind, and those who need to work at home often find themselves hopelessly frustrated. Even when the instructor is ready and willing, teaching software in a classroom situation can drain him or her of both energy and time.

This month's guest presenter, Dr. John Gerdes, an Assistant Professor of Information Systems at UC Riverside, has, in our opinion, found a unique solution. Using off-the-shelf software that captures everything that is happening on his computer monitor at the same time as he is explaining both what he is doing and why he is doing it, he created seven hours of computerized, narration instruction. Distributed via CD, these computer-based videos became, for the 100 undergraduate and 38 graduate students in his classes, their lab exercise in the use of Microsoft Access' database program. This CD is self-contained; it includes both homework and test questions. With it his students, working at home, are able to play and replay each lesson, then use the sample databases provided on the disk to perform the exercises.

What makes the CD particularly valuable is that it is so personalized. Students hear their instructor's voice and watch as he demonstrates how to properly use the software. It is almost as though he were teaching them in the lab. On Friday, March 8th, in the Hacienda Room, Dr. Gerdes will talk about and show his "CD Lab", discuss his experiences, and demonstrate how to use the software he employed (Camtasia).

As a special added attraction (and shameless inducement), we will be giving away by raffle three copies of Camtasia and three copies of SoundFoundry's SoundForge.

This forum will be archived for on-demand viewing over the Internet. Visit our WebCast page for information on setting up your browser to view this video presentation and to see the other material currently available for viewing.

Moderator

Steve Rossen, Faculty New Media Center

Panel

Eric Savitsky, MD, Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine
Paul Hill, Vice President, Product Development, L3I Interface Technologies
Jody Priselac, Executive Director, UCLA Mathematics Project at Center X
Mitch Gordon, Vice President, Lessonlab

Faculty here at UCLA have been working on several innovative projects (using several equally innovative software tools) that combine the use of digital video and the web.

Following the September 11th attack, UCLA's School of Medicine, in conjunction with Microsoft Corporation and L3I Interface Technologies, created an interactive website entitled "What You Need to Know: Bioterrorism and Chemical Warfare." What makes it "interactive" is that the user is permitted to branch off during the playing of the primary video to access additional information on the subject at hand, much as a reader would using footnoted text. Thus, while a video plays a segment dealing with Anthrax, for example, a secondary window will appear with specific information about how the cells reproduce. The reader can click on the small, secondary reader, read or listen to the information presented, then return to the main video and resume viewing the streamed lecture or video. The software behind this application, created by L3I, can be used by faculty to create customized courseware of their own (it can be either be streamed or housed on a CD). More importantly, it can be created by a novice instructor with a minimum of training and support.

Dr. Eric Savitsky, one of several School of Medicine faculty who worked on the project, will discuss how the videos were created and the website was made. Demo'ing the L3I software itself will by Paul Hill, Vice President of Product Development for L3I Interface Technologies.

Another intriguing project is underway at GSEIS's Center X. There Dr. Jody Priselac is heading up a team of educators working with California's K12 Math teachers to help improve teaching techniques and methods. Part of their training involves viewing streaming videos of authentic classroom behavior. Then, using a software environment created by LessonLab (a product developed in part, by UCLA faculty), instructors are logging on the web, viewing video, then commenting online on a message board especially designed to reference precise moments in the video flow. This ability to reference specific moments in video streams could have applications in a range of subject disciplines from anthropology to zoology.

In our forum, the Mathematics Project will be discussed by Dr. Jody Priselac, Executive Director of the UCLA Mathematics Project at Center X, and the software will be demo'ed by Mitch Gordon, Vice President of LessonLab.

There will be plenty of opportunity to raise questions from the floor. Refreshments will be provided, and questions and comments are decidedly welcome.

This forum will be archived for on-demand viewing over the Internet. Visit our WebCast page for information on setting up your browser to view this video presentation and to see the other material currently available for viewing.

Moderator

Steve Rossen, Faculty New Media Center

Panel

Noel Enyedy, Assistant Professor of the School of Education and Information Science
Ralph Robinson, Lecturer, Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics
Nancy Woolf, Associate Professor of the Department of Psychology
Bill Wolfe, Manager, Instructional Media Production, Office of Instructional Development

A number of faculty at various universities (including here at UCLA) have decided to put their lectures online. Those who have claim that it frees up time for them to do more research, more one-on-one advising with their students, and to be more innovative in terms of what they do in class. Others use online lectures as a way for students to review material or for those unable to attend class. Many claim that presenting their lecture material in this way significantly changes how and what they teach in class.

Those who oppose putting lectures online often point out that it robs the student of the incentive to attend class, threatens the livelihood of the instructor, puts too much emphasis on presenting information rather than on the instructional interactions between students and instructor, and deprives faculty of their rightful intellectual property

In this forum, we will show some of the various forms of streaming lectures available online, discuss their applicability and utility here at UCLA, review the results of a survey that was sent out to faculty examining this subject, and hash out some of issues surrounding the delivery of lecture material in this way.

There will be plenty of opportunity to raise questions from the floor. Refreshments will be provided, and questions and comments are decidedly welcome.

Moderator

Steve Rossen, Faculty New Media Center

The first SIANME forum of the 2001/2002 is a show-and-tell demonstration and discussion of some intriguing new instructional applications developed over the summer (or still in the works) here at UCLA.

The Module Maker. Susan Schaffer, Spanish, Eric Thau, Spanish. The Module Maker permits faculty to create online exercises using a mix of video and/or audio arranged in a structured format and enriched with assessment tools. This tool facilitates what is often a laborious process of converting video and audio into presentable and usable online forms. Currently in use in several sections of Spanish 4.

The Bidding Game. John Riley, Economics. For his economics class Dr. Riley devised an online game as an instructional exercise, creating a bidding game to teach his business economics students the risks and strategies of bidding.

The SMIL Maker: Andrew Thomas, Faculty New Media Center. SMIL stands for Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language, a fancy word for streaming video and text over the internet. This tool, a companion to the Module Maker, permits an instructor with a digital video file to convert the video into a streaming video file with scrolling text accompaniment to accommodate the seeing-impaired.

My Homework and the Annotator: Jill Stein, Sociology, Mike Franks, Social Science Computing. This tool, in use now at Social Science computing, is a one-click way for an instructor to display, or not display, a piece of homework submitted to an online bulletin board. Simple, but extremely useful and effective.