Seminar looks behind learning technologies

College-age students are digital natives: they grew up with laptops, cell phones, and iPods. Education Professor Joan Swanson helped freshmen reflect on that in a Scribner Seminar called “The Intersection of Technology and Education.” Freddie Amara ’19 found it “fascinating, as we often do not take time to stop and think about how technology affects not only our everyday lives, but also our academic studies.”

Swanson devised her seminar with help from Alex Chaucer, of Skidmore’s academic technologies staff. He noted, “As the hardware gets smaller and more mobile, the trend in educational technology is BYOD—bring your own device.” For Swanson’s course, he suggested Fulcrum, “an app that offers satellite mapping and data collection on a smartphone, making it accessible to almost anyone almost anywhere.” He also helped incorporate Fulcrum into Scribner Seminars on local politics and on surveillance, and he’s starting a community geography program.

Swanson’s course used the app in a project on Saratoga’s mineral springs. In teams of four, students tasted water at all 18 springs, measured their mineral content, photographed them, collected information from plaques and websites about their histories and lore, and then prepared presentations. Amara says the project was “like a virtual scavenger hunt,” although Rowen Halpin ’19 says Fulcrum’s GPS “wasn’t always very accurate.” But she added, “We got to learn more about the place we’re living for the next four years and bond with the people in our class. My group still has a group chat that we use all the time.”

Watching the student groups at work, Swanson was “struck by how easily and well they used digital technologies in organizing their schedules, and in sharing photos and editing documents.” The teams used Prezi and other visual-information software to create online presentations or posters, focusing on everything from geology to public health.

In several class sessions, Swanson brought in faculty from other departments as guest instructors, after assigning readings or TED-talk videos or news reports, to provide background. For the springs project, she brought in a geoscientist to explain the formation of the springs and a chemist to show how to conduct a water-hardness test.

Another faculty guest was a conductor and composer who explained computers and music, showed studios in the Arthur Zankel Music Center, and demonstrated an instrument played live, recorded, and synthesized. Further insights were shared by an archaeologist, a choreographer, and even a classicist (who especially connected with a seminar student from Greece after discussing how digital scanning and viewing can help clarify Ancient Greek writing).

Until a business professor addressed online marketing, Amara hadn’t considered the disadvantage for small shops competing with major firms that have a stronger Internet presence. Halpin was intrigued by a psychologist’s showing “some of the machines she uses to record data about people's eye movements while reading.” For music fan Kevin Sayour ’19, “It was especially cool to see how new programs that can write original melodies and songs are crossing that barrier of creativity between humans and machines.”

As for Swanson, she was pleased that the course “exposed the students to how different disciplines approach problems and use technology.”  She acknowledged that they may be “more widely tech-savvy than I am, but my goal was to empower them to be able to delve more deeply into technologies they’re familiar with and those they’ll encounter in the future.” ~ By Sue Rosenberg