The Acagamic

If you ended up in higher edu­ca­tion, have you ever asked your­self where rev­o­lu­tions in the class­room come from? After I started at UOIT as a pro­fes­sor, full of enthu­si­asm and burst­ing with ideas, I have cer­tainly pon­dered on this ques­tion for quite a bit, espe­cially last year dur­ing my first semes­ter teach­ing two uni­ver­sity under­grad­u­ate classes. Of course, I have no defin­i­tive answer, but I wanted to share some of my expe­ri­ences with tech­nol­ogy in the class­room with you, start­ing with how I use Twitter in my courses.

Social Media and Twitter

One incen­tive to look into class­room tech­nol­ogy is that UOIT is a laptop-based uni­ver­sity. To quote Wikipedia: “All under­grad­u­ate pro­grams require stu­dents to lease a Lenovo Thinkpad lap­top PC from the uni­ver­sity as a con­di­tion of enroll­ment, mak­ing it Ontario’s only laptop-based uni­ver­sity” [1]. This can be equally scary and excit­ing for a new pro­fes­sor. When I started teach­ing, I was mainly scared of the sto­ries that I heard about stu­dents just doz­ing off on Facebook dur­ing class and not car­ing about any­thing I would say (I would later find out that imgur is actu­ally more dan­ger­ous for stu­dent pro­duc­tiv­ity). I thought, all this means is to inte­grate social media in my class­room and make it all really excit­ing, so that the stu­dents are engaged in class. Challenge accepted. However, I would soon find out that it is dif­fi­cult to get social media right when not all peo­ple in the audi­ence have the same inter­est in this form of par­tic­i­pa­tion. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently orga­nized a CHI work­shop on Brain and Body Interfaces together with Kiel and Steve from PhysiologicalComputing.net. We have been talk­ing about com­mon inter­ests for a while now and it was great to orga­nize this work­shop together as it is the sec­ond one on this topic at CHI that I was involved in. Since we were dis­cussing about other pos­si­ble venues to dis­sem­i­nate research or at least keep the dis­cus­sion going in our research area, we have been try­ing out things like a BBI wiki, an attempt at a blog about affec­tive gam­ing and also using the Physiological Computing web­site to enhance the work­shop and allow more peo­ple to see our research dis­cus­sions. Kiel did an excel­lent job at prepar­ing all the videos from the work­shop online. For an exam­ple, see the fol­low­ing video of my work­shop talk. Read the rest of this entry »