Inside-Out

After dodging a major snowstorm and traveling for 18 hours I finally made it to San Diego late Sunday night. What a beautiful place the Estancia Hotel is - I mean gorgeous.

After an exciting plenary session on the future of technology - sorry that's all I can say, due to a confidentiality agreement (lets just say the future will be exciting!) I heard a series of exceptional talks discussing how Tablets have been integrated into a number of courses and curricula. Lunch with "birds of a feather" connected me with a community of educators in the physical scientists. I found a few folks who have very similar applications and goals. We discussed details of our projects at length at the poster session. One tip was to go with Vernier probes - the company seems more geared towards college than Pasco.

Gloria Rogers from ABET gave a very informative talk on assessment. This was followed by small groups that reviewed the assessment matrix we prepared in January. The first thing I noticed was that we are probably being too ambitions in our assessment strategy. It might be best to scale things back and spend more time on a few things rather than try to do so many things. The second major thing I learned is that assessment takes upfront planning, but that it is also iterative. I'm glad we are offering the live version of the course next year so that we will have some baseline data.

Day 2 of the conference was even better. In addition to a few plenary talks there were several smaller workshops dedicated to new and innovative software written to take advantage of the versatility of the tablets. It looks like Classroom Presenter from U. Wash is a product that will allow us to give field lectures via ad-hoc networks and will also serve as a good classroom collaboration software. (See http://classroompresenter.cs.washington.edu/). This type of application is essential if we are to move beyond simply replacing pencil and paper to developing new ways of delivering field-based courses.

After another session of working on our assessment plans I presented my poster at the poster session. Alas I didn't win any prizes, but I'm happy to say that two of the winners were from the environmental sciences.

In the birds of a feather lunch we talk about field use of the computers. Some folks have used the "pouch" to house the machines other just use an over-sized zip lock. All expressed interest in outdoor viewable screens.