Last week we held our last “Emerging Technology and Pie” event of the Fall 2007 semester. Again we had strong turnout and it was great to see so many instructors interested in new tools for learning and teaching. As we plan our schedule of events for the Spring 2008 semester, we need your input on what topics to offer.
To review, we had four Emerging Technology gatherings this semester. Our first event looked at UMass’s new blogging tools with guest speakers: Michael Cotton (Theatre), Paige Warren (Natural Resources Conservation), and Steve Fox (Journalism). For our second event Academic Computing’s Tony Sindelar and Fred Zinn discussed several tools for online collaboration: wikis, Google docs, and del.icio.us. Our third event was an overview of working with digital audio and podcasting with guest speakers Katharine Dambach (Anthropology) and David Perkins (Journalism). Our fourth event was an introduction to creating Screencasts using Camtasia with Karsten Theis and Scott Garman, both from Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. It was great to have so many excellent guest speakers this semester, and we would like to continue this model for future Emerging Technology events.
As we plan for Spring semester events we would love to get your input on topics. Possible topics we are considering include uses of virtual worlds (popularized by Second Life), “Serious Games,” and mapping tools (such as Google Earth.) Please leave a comment below to let us know your thoughts on these events. Are there new technologies you’ve heard of that you want to know more about? Are there topics that should be repeated? Have you found a neat new tool or a new way to use an existing tool in your teaching?
Thanks for attending. We look forward to your feedback for how we can shape these events in the future.