May Events, 2006
Paul Kates, Mathematics Faculty LT3 Liaison
Event Summary
Course Development Grants
=========================
* Office of Learning Resources and Innovation grants from $5K - $20K
for UW undergraduate courses. Proposal deadline May 25, 2006.
* TRACE Instructional Development Grants of up to $1000 per year.
* Mathematics Endowment Fund (MEF) term grants from a pool of $40K
for undergraduate education in the mathematics faculty.
Open Classroom
==============
* Professors "Open their Classrooms" to colleagues Tuesday, May 9th
and Monday, June 5th, 2006.
Talks
=====
* An Instructional Designer Looks at Digital Game-Based Learning,
Monday, May 8th.
* The extent to which student comments from ratemyprofessors.com map
against the best practices proposed by experts in higher education,
Wednesday, May 17th.
Courses
=======
* Getting Started Using UW-ACE, Wednesday, May 17th.
* Using the Action Editor, Wednesday, May 17th.
* On-Line Quiz Creation in UW-ACE, Thursday, May 25th.
* Introduction to UW-ACE Instructional Resources, Thursday, May 25th.
* Using the Action Editor in UW-ACE - Part 2, Monday, May 29th.
Conferences
===========
* Camp CLOE, May 1-5, 2006, University of Waterloo.
Workshop for the Co-operative Learning Object Exchange (CLOE).
* Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, May 2-4, Dalhousie University.
* Canadian mathematics education study group (CMESG), June 3-7,
University of Calgary (along with Canadian Mathematical Society Summer
2006 Meeting).
* Maple Conference 2006, July 23-26, Wilfred Laurier University.
* Working with and Learning From the World's Best, August 8-11, Ottawa.
6th Annual MERLOT International Conference.
* 7th Annual Imperial Oil Summer Institute for Computer Studies Educators,
August 15-18, 2006, University of Waterloo.
Course Development Grants
a) The Office of Learning Resources and Innovation
(http://avp-lri.uwaterloo.ca/index.html) is again sponsoring their
yearly Spring grants to faculty, departments and schools for the
enhancement of current learning outcomes in UW undergraduate courses
through changes in instructional methods, learning resources, and
curricula.
Proposals are requested to be submitted by Thursday, May 25, 2006.
Grants can be worth up to $15,000 under the Learning Initiatives Fund
and up to $20,000 under the Program Initiatives Fund (which is tied to
formal undergraduate academic program reviews). The funds can be used
over a two year period.
Details about the funds, contacts, and type of projects funded can be
found at www.learning.uwaterloo.ca/PIF/index.html. For assistance with
proposal and project development see your faculty LT3 Liaison (me) or
the TRACE office (Verna Keller, TRACE Office, MC4055).
b) Throughout the year, TRACE offers Instructional Development Grants of
up to $1000 per year for smaller projects. See
http://www.adm.uwaterloo.ca/infotrac/idhp.html.
c) Every term, the Mathematics Endowment Fund (MEF) disperses a pool
of up to $40,000 for student and faculty projects that promote the
education of undergraduates in the mathematics faculty. Past projects
are listed on their web site
http://www.student.math.uwaterloo.ca/~mefcom/home
Open Classroom
The TRACE Open Classroom Series returns for the Spring 2006 term
after successful Winter term visits to the classrooms of
* Professor Lyndon Jones, School of Optometry
* Professor Andrew Hunt, History Department
* Professor Jean Andrey, Geography Department
In each series, professors "Open their Classrooms" to colleagues to
demonstrate and discuss classroom challenges and teaching and learning
styles. This term, visits are arranged for
ME 459 - Energy Conversion
Professor Roydon Fraser
Tuesday, May 9, 2006
Lecture: 10:30 - 11:20 a.m., Location CPH 3374
Post-observation Discussion: 11:20 a.m. - noon
Location: TBA
ME 566 - Computational Fluid Dynamics for Engineering Design
Professor Gordon Stubley
Monday, June 5, 2006 OR Monday June 12, 2006
Lecture: 1:30 - 3:30 p.m., Location CPH 3374
Post-observation Discussion: 3:30 - 4:30 p.m.
Location: TBA
Registration www.trace.uwaterloo.ca/OpenClassRegistration.html
Talks
An Instructional Designer Looks at Digital Game-Based Learning.
Presented by Richard Van Eck, Associate Professor, Instructional Design
and Technology, University of North Dakota.
An ELI Web Seminar.
Monday, May 08, 2006, 1:00pm-2:00pm
FLEX Lab, Dana Porter Library, room 329
Registration: http://lt3.uwaterloo.ca/events/
The potential of digital game-based learning remains largely
unrealized, in part because designers of "edutainment" games have never
understood how and why games are effective and how to align curriculum
with the game world without "sucking the fun out" of the games
(according to Marc Prensky).
Games succeed precisely because they employ sound pedagogical
approaches such as situated cognition, cognitive disequilibrium, and
scaffolding to teach what is needed to succeed in the game.
By examining the underlying principles of games and aligning them with
educational theory and learning outcomes, it is in fact possible to
create effective blended game-based learning. Instructional design is
ideally positioned to guide this process. During this online seminar,
Richard Van Eck will highlight some of the theories that underlie both
games and effective learning and explain how to align these two
worlds.
"Even your pillow will need a pillow": the extent to which student
comments from ratemyprofessors.com map against the best practices
proposed by experts in higher education."
Presented by Dr. Mark Morton, Instructional Program Manager, LT3.
Wednesday, May 17, 2006, 12:00pm-1:00pm
FLEX Lab, Dana Porter Library, room 329
Registration: http://lt3.uwaterloo.ca/events/
A search of the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC)
database for articles featuring, or even mentioning, the online
database known as ratemyprofessors.com turns up no matches.
This scholarly disregard is striking, considering that
ratemyprofessors.com is a trove of over four million comments on the
teaching abilities of tens of thousands of instructors across North
America. It would seem that if we want to discern what students
consider to be desirable qualities in an instructor, we might do worse
than to examine a sampling of the comments on ratemyprofessors.com.
Moreover, it is enlightening to see where these comments do and don't
map against schemes that purport to identify "best practices" in
education, such as Chickering's "Seven Principles for Good Practice in
Undergraduate Education," Terenzini's "Six Characteristics of Learning
and Development," and the NSSE's "Benchmarks of Effective Educational
Practice."
At the end of this thirty-minute presentation, the audience will have a
better sense of what students and experts each consider to be best
practices in education, and the degree to which these two groups
succeed (or not) in communicating these expectations and assumptions to
one another. The presentation will be followed by questions and
discussion.
Pre-question: To what extent are students credible authorities on what
makes effective instruction? When it comes to rating instructors, are
students actually able to distinguish what is effective from what they
like or what they are used to?
UW-ACE Courses
* Getting Started Using UW-ACE Wednesday May 17 9:30-11:30 am
* Using the Action Editor in UW-ACE Wednesday May 17 1:30-3:30 pm
* On-Line Quiz Creation in UW-ACE Thursday May 25 9:30-11:30 am
* Introduction to UW-ACE Instructional Resources Thursday May 25 1:30-3:30 pm
* Using the Action Editor in UW-ACE - Part 2 Monday May 29 9:30-11:30 am
All courses are held in MC 1050. See descriptions below.
Registration: https://ist.uwaterloo.ca/course_registration/registration.php
If you would like to book a different time to learn more about
the quiz system, gradebook, teams building and collaboration
or other features please contact Paul Kates pkates@uwaterloo.ca.
Getting Started using UW-ACE:
This is a hands-on session where we will explore some of the more
commonly used UW-ACE functionality, including: creating/uploading a
course syllabus; creating and marking a drop box; creating and using
a discussion forum, using milestones to update calendar items, and
tailoring your course and work environment.
Using the Action Editor:
The ANGEL Action Editor is an advanced tool that allows you to define
actions to be taken when certain events and conditions occur. For
example, an action could be defined to allow a student to gain access
to previously locked material (action) after the submission of a quiz
(event), only if their quiz grade is above 80% (condition). This
session will explore a number of common examples which will be worked
through via hands-on activities.
On-Line Quiz Creation in UW-ACE:
A detailed look at quiz creation, multiple choice, true-false, short
answer, essay etc. This session will also cover uploading of
question banks and existing quizzes, as well as how to provide
feedback to students taking the quiz/exam. Adding quiz results to
the Course Gradebook will also be examined.
Introduction to UW-ACE Instructional Resources:
The hands-on session is designed to provide an introduction to
"UW-ACE Instructional Resources", a repository of online teaching and
learning resources available to all instructors using UW-ACE in their
courses. It will include an overview of the types of resources in the
repository, as well as a practical "how to" session, demonstrating
how instructors can import items from the repository into their
courses.
Using the Action Editor - Part 2
More examples of the Action Editor are demonstrated in this course.
Conferences
Camp CLOE - May 1-5, 2006, University of Waterloo.
CLOE, the Co-operative Learning Object Exchange is a collaboration
between Ontario universities and colleges for the development, sharing,
and reuse of multimedia-rich learning resources. This occurs through
the CLOE Learning Object repository.
For more information, see http://cloe.on.ca/.
CLOE workshops feature learning communities, instructional design,
accessibility, project management, evaluation and technology issues.
During the first two camp CLOE sessions, in 2003 and 2004, attendees
acquired knowledge on how to build highly interactive, learner-centred,
learning objects. The workshops attract participants from across Canada.
If you would like to drop in this week to see what happens at
Camp CLOE please get in touch with me to arrange a time.
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning - May 2-4, 2006 by Dalhousie University and McGraw-Hill Ryerson. Many good looking presentation topics.
From the web site:
University and college faculty continually enhance the impact of their
teaching on student learning by critically reflecting on student
learning experiences and assessing the extent to which new approaches
to teaching affect specific learning issues. When we share what we
learn about teaching and learning with colleagues, we go beyond the
development of learning in our own courses and contribute to the
scholarship of teaching and learning within and across disciplines.
To celebrate its tenth year of fostering the scholarship of teaching
and learning, the Dalhousie University Conference on Teaching and
Learning is partnering with McGraw-Hill Ryerson to create a national
forum for presenting and developing the scholarship of teaching and
learning in Canadian universities and colleges.
Faculty, academic administrators, and educational developers are
invited to propose sessions that address questions such as:
* How do you conduct the scholarship of teaching and learning in
your discipline?
* How can the scholarship of teaching and learning inform our
teaching practices?
* What are the institutional benefits of the scholarship of
teaching and learning?
* What have you learned about how to design inquiry into student
learning?
* How do you address the ethical considerations that emerge when we
engage in research on student learning in our own classes?
* How can we create scholarly communities in which the scholarship
of teaching and learning is recognized, debated, and valued as a
form of scholarship?
* How can the scholarship of teaching and learning be recognized in
the career advancement of university and college faculty?
Saturday June 3 to Wednesday June 7 2006 - Canadian mathematics education study group (CMESG)
Saturday June 3 to Wednesday June 7 2006 University of Calgary, in conjunction with Canadian Mathematical Society CMS Summer 2006 Meeting (June 3-5, 2006) http://www.cms.math.ca/ CMESG is a group of mathematicians and mathematics educators who meet annually to discuss mathematics education issues at all levels of learning.
3rd International Conference on the Teaching of Mathematics - Istanbul, Turkey, June 30-July 5, 2006.
Submission information:
Notification of acceptance of abstracts: By March 15, 2006
Abstracts are between 300 and 500 words, in plain text.
Deadline for full paper submission: April 1, 2006
Paper Review Decisions: May 15, 2006
Conference themes for presentations:
* Educational Research: Results of current (unpublished) research in
mathematics education, and assessment of student learning.
* Technology/ Technology based Educational Systems: Effective integration
of computer technology (Calculators, Computer Algebra Systems,
WWW resources) into the undergraduate curriculum.
* Innovative Teaching Formats: Innovative ways of teaching undergraduate
mathematics courses: cooperative and collaborative teaching and
learning styles.
* Distance Learning: Distance Learning Technologies for teaching and
learning mathematics. Current software/hardware delivery media.
Visions for the future.
* Specific Courses: Reform efforts in specific mathematics courses and
assessment results.
* Other Disciplines: The effects of changes in the teaching of mathematics
courses in other disciplines (needs of client disciplines;
interdisciplinary courses).
Maple Conference 2006 - July 23-26 at Wilfred Laurier University. The preliminary call for papers deadline is February 28th, with full paper due March 17th.
Keynote speakers include
Dr. Frangois Cellier, President, Society for Computer Simulation
Dr. Carl Cowan, President, Mathematical Association of America
Dr. Richard Bartels, UW CS professor (now retired),
Renowned authority on Computer Graphics
Working with and Learning From the World's Best - 6th Annual MERLOT International Conference, August 8-11, 2006, Ottawa Congress Centre, Ottawa. Co-sponsored by CLOE, The Co-operative Learning Object Exchange collaboration between Ontario universities and colleges (http://cloe.on.ca/).
MERLOT is an international cooperative of higher education
institutions and professionals working to amass superior online
resources to improve learning and teaching. At www.merlot.org MERLOT
maintains a digital library of online teaching-learning materials, as
well as myriad learning enhancements to help educators explore online
teaching and learning and bring it to their classrooms in productive
and vibrant ways.
Tuesday, August 15 - Friday, August 18, 2006 - 7th Annual Imperial Oil Summer Institute for Computer Studies Educators - Strategies for implementing the curriculum for computer science and computer engineering
Registration deadline: Friday, May 19th, 2006.
Registration and agenda: www.cemc.uwaterloo.ca/csteachers/reg06.shtml
Tuesday, August 15 - Friday, August 18, 2006
University of Waterloo
The Imperial Oil Summer Institute for Computer Studies Teachers
provides educators for grades 10-12 with activities useful
in the computer science and computer engineering classrooms. The
four-day conference will combine lectures, hands-on presentations and
computer labs and foster support and discussion on relevant curriculum
issues including curriculum content and teaching and learning
strategies.
Sessions will be presented by University of Waterloo faculty members
and graduate students, as well as high school teachers. Teachers will
also have an opportunity to network and relax in the evenings at
planned social events.
Maple
An Innovative Approach to Post-Calculus Classical Applied Math
Robert J. Lopez
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (retired), Maplesoft (Note: To
view the paper you may be asked to register at Maplesoft.com. If
you wish, I can send a copy of the paper instead. Please send your
request to pkates@uwaterloo.ca.)
From the introduction of the paper:
Post-calculus classical applied math is scattered through courses
in differential equations, boundary value problems, vector
calculus, matrix algebra, complex variables, and numerical methods.
Most of this material can be found in texts entitled Advanced
Engineering Mathematics. The mathematics in such texts is truly
classical, having been available in its present format for many
years, if not centuries. The apprenticeship for working in the
field of classical applied mathematics is long and arduous because
the apprentice must master material from so many different
disciplines.
Twenty-first century software allows this apprenticeship to be both
shorter and more effective. Modern computer algebra systems can be
the tool of first-recourse for teaching, learning, and doing such
applicable mathematics. Software tools such as Maple, Mathematica,
MuPAD, and Macsyma implement nearly all the manipulations of the
undergraduate program in applied and engineering mathematics. The
time has come to use these twenty-first century tools for teaching
eighteenth and nineteenth century mathematics.
A complete post-calculus applied math curriculum in which a
computer algebra system is the primary working tool appears in [1].
In this text the software is not just an add-on to a traditional
by-hands pedagogy. Instead, the software is used as an active
partner in the student.s participation in applied mathematics.
We give two examples taken from [1], examples that show how use of
a computer algebra system enhances pedagogy. The purpose is not to
tout a particular book, but instead, to call attention to the
concept that a computer algebra system can, and should, be the
working tool for teaching, learning, and doing classical applied
math. So, rather than talk about this approach, we give two
examples and let readers judge for themselves the viability of a
curriculum predicated on the ubiquitous use of modern software
tools.
Maplesoft.com has many online seminars available.
An Introduction to Maple 10 (42 min)
Introduction to the Maplet Builder (7 min)
Advanced Engineering Applications with Maple (50 min)
Clickable Calculus (54 min)
Click Here to Download the Associated Maple Worksheet for
this Seminar
Maple T.A. Demonstration for Instructors (24 min)
Maple T.A. Demonstration for Students (13 min)
Maple T.A. for Blackboard. Software Demo (8 min)
Syntax-Free Computations in Maple 10 (65 min)
Control System Development Using System Identification (43 min)
Technical Solution Deployment Using MapleNet 10 (34 min)
Introduction To Global Optimization Toolbox For Maple (61 min)
Maple in the High School Classroom (10 min)
Modeling Multi-body Mechanical Systems With DynaFlex Pro (65 min)
Implementing Technology in the Modern Math Curriculum (60 min)
Many mathematics lessons are also available using Maple.
Algebra (44) Calculus I (102)
Calculus II (59) Calculus III (23)
Case Studies (4) Complex Analysis (67)
DE's (89) Economics (20)
Elementary School (9) Engineering (68)
Geometry (32) Linear Algebra (22)
Maple TA (5) MapleNet (2)
Maplets (4) Numerical Analysis (15)
Operations Research (1) Physics (88)
Precalculus (42) Quantum Mechanics (19)
Real Analysis (20) Statistics (36)
Trigonometry (4) Vector Calculus (99)
MapleTA is an online assignment and quiz system backed by the Maple
mathematics engine that allows questions to be graded using Maple
to match and evaluate student answers.
Many different question types are available including questions
generated by formula for random assignment to students (students
don't see the same questions, but the form is the same). Questions
can make use of physical units and error bounds. Maple graphs can
be included in questions for display or for interaction with the
student e.g. selecting an area of the graph or plotting points on
a curve. See http://maplesoft.com/products/mapleta/types.aspx.
MapleTA is available at UW on a trial basis. Please contact me if
you wish more information about using MapleTA at UW.
Past Events
| April, 2006 | September, 2005 |
| March, 2006 | August, 2005 |
| February, 2006 | July, 2005 |
| January, 2006 | June, 2005 |
| December, 2005 | May, 2005 |
| November, 2005 | April, 2005 |
| October, 2005 |
Liaison Information
Please contact me if you would like further information. Paul Kates, Mathematics Faculty LT3 Liaison, pkates@uwaterloo.ca, x7047
This page is located at www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~pkates/LT3/events.
More information about the services of the Centre for Learning and Teaching through Technology - LT3 is available at lt3.uwaterloo.ca/.
(1) More information about learning and teaching Mathematics and Computer Science, plus a description of the services I provide as Mathematics Faculty LT3 Liaison is available here.