Category Archives: Pedagogy

TPC+R project: Zaption tour

For my project in this class (for now), I created a Zaption tour, which I hope to use when I teach Conflict Transformation Skills next January & February.  (I have ideas of other projects I hope to complete in preparation for this course, including a second Zaption tour–but this was all I could finish in time for our final meeting on Nov 25!)

My tour uses a video made by the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (Acas) from the UK.  The video is featured on the Acas website, © Acas, Euston Tower, 286 Euston Road, London NW1 3JJ (2001 – 2009), and was uploaded to YouTube Mar 11, 2011.

My  learning objectives in creating this Zaption video tour for my students are: 1) to let them see an example of well-performed conflict mediation; 2) to give them opportunity to apply concepts from their reading of John Paul Lederach’s Little Book of Conflict Transformation.

If you wish to preview my tour, here is the link: http://zapt.io/t2f9zm3k

 

Teaching and Research Goals

When teaching a course a few years back, I assigned a group project that asked students to use Google Earth to explore processes of development and change on Atlanta’s two most historic corridors, Auburn Avenue and Peachtree Street.  Notwithstanding minor difficulties, the assignment went well, but I did suspect that it might be worthwhile to consider using other tools when teaching the course in the future.  Since then, I’ve attended a handful of workshops offered by ECDS, but wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to consider digital pedagogy in a systematic way.  In particular, I’m interested in developing interactive syllabi, and becoming better acquainted with tools that allow students to tell stories using mixed media and tools that explore spatial relationships in urban environments.

Teaching and Research Goals

As an undergraduate student, I was most taken with professors who exuded poise and energy during lectures, and who kept student discussions interesting while maintaining control over them.  I wanted to teach college students because I liked being charismatic in front of a captive audience.  Of course, this has never been all pedagogy is, and the increasing popularity of online and blended courses suggests it will become less and less so.  Last fall, I got good marks from my students on the use of audio visual material, but this never went beyond the use of historic YouTube clips, which for a course on the 1960s was pretty much essential.  I’m hoping to learn some practical interactive uses of digital technology for the classroom, besides Blackboard, which I used even in my college years.

Around the same time I was teaching, I got access to hundreds of recorded speeches on reel-to-reel tapes.  Most of these speeches are by conservative activists connected with the John Birch Society, a major focus of my dissertation on anti-Communist conspiracy theory.   I digitized the tapes for MARBL and took notes on them.  I figured there was a great digital project to be done with them, too, but I didn’t have the background to propose one.  So I’m hoping to get some ideas for how I could make these tapes into a more useful, interactive archive for people who study the right wing of U.S. politics. Knowing how to create a scholarblog page seems like a good first step. I’ve also heard about audio recognition technology for use in transcription.