Leading Lines Podcasts

Permanent URI for this collection

https://ir.vanderbilt.edu/handle/1803/17556

In Leading Lines, we explore creative, intentional, and effective uses of technology to enhance student learning, uses that point the way to the future of educational technology in college and university settings. Through interviews with educators, researchers, technologists, and others, we hope to amplify ideas and voices that are (or should be!) shaping how we think about digital learning and digital pedagogy. In art, leading lines are visual elements in a drawing, painting, or photograph that guide the viewer’s eyes into the scene. I hope that the interviews we share on the podcast lead our listeners through the educational technology landscape, helping them understand what’s happening now and pointing the way to what should happen in the future. https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/2021/11/celebrating-100-episodes-of-the-leading-lines-podcast/

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An Oral History of the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching
(https://intentionalteaching.buzzsprout.com, 2024-11-12) Bruff, Derek
In 1986, Vanderbilt University established a new Center for Teaching, a unit that would help thousands of faculty and other instructors at Vanderbilt and across higher education develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas in teaching and learning. I’m Derek Bruff, and I worked at the CFT, as we called it, from 2005 to 2022, serving as its director for over a decade. When I left Vanderbilt, I wanted to find some way to honor the good work of the Center for Teaching. It played an important role in my professional career and in the careers of the faculty and staff who passed through its doors. I decided to produce this oral history of the CFT as a way to document and celebrate the CFT’s story. I reached out to a number of former CFT staff, including all of its directors, to interview them about their time at the CFT. You’ll hear from Ken Bain, Darlene Panvini, Linda Nilson, Allison Pingree, Peter Felten, and others CFT alumni, and I hope these stories capture just a bit of the CFT magic.
Episode 115 Laura Guertin
(Vanderbilt.University, 2022-12-05) Bruff, Derek
Laura Guertin received her B.A. in Geology from Bucknell University and her Ph.D. in Marine Geology and Geophysics from the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science. Dr. Guertin’s primary research focus is the effective integration of innovative technologies to improve student learning in introductory-level geoscience courses, particularly to improve student scientific literacy, information literacy, and geospatial skills. Research projects have included student-generated audio narratives, ePortolios with Google Earth and ArcGIS Story Maps, and other technological tools for geoscience research and outreach. Her courses cover Earth science topics such as oceanography, climate change, energy, water, and sustainability. Penn State University has honored Guertin with university-wide awards, including the George W. Atherton Award for Excellence in Teaching (2006), Teaching and Learning with Technology Impact Award (2019), and The President’s Award for Excellence in Academic Integration (2020). In this interview with Sung Jun Han, Laura talks about how her use of technology has evolved over the last 20 years. Listeners will hear examples of how technology has enabled Laura to teach even while aboard a ship doing field work and has enabled her students to learn while commuting. Starting with the course objectives and using low-bandwidth, accessible technologies can unlock so many possibilities for learning.
Episode 114 Remi Kalir
(Vanderbilt University, 2022-10-24) Bruff, Derek
Remi Kalir is an Associate Professor of Learning Design and Technology at the University of Colorado Denver School of Education and Human Development. He is a scholar of annotation, and his 2021 book Annotation, published by MIT Press, introduces annotation as a genre that is significant to scholarship and everyday life. Remi’s research spans literacy education, the learning sciences, and teacher education and examines how annotation facilitates social, collaborative, and justice-directed learning. In this interview with Derek Bruff, Remi talks about how annotation works in partnership with reading as a knowledge construction activity. With physical books, digital reading, and even on social media, people add notes to texts to wrestle with what they read and reach new audiences. Let’s explore how instructors can harness the power of annotation in formal educational contexts.
Episode 001 - Georger Siemens
(Vanderbilt University, 2016-01-27) Bruff, Derek
George Siemens is executive director of the Learning Innovation and Networked Knowledge Research Lab at the University of Texas at Arlington. He is an internationally known expert in digital, networked, and open learning. Among his other accomplishments, he co-taught the very first massive open online courses (known as MOOCs) back in 2008. His “connectivist” MOOCs featured peer-to-peer learning through blogs, Twitter, and other platforms. These days, George continues to lead research efforts into MOOCs and other forms of digital learning. George was on campus at Vanderbilt in the spring to give a talk as part of the Schmidt Family Educational Technologies Lecture series, and he was kind enough to sit down to talk about the present and future of educational technology. We’re honored to have him as our first guest on Leading Lines.
Episode 002 - Cprbette Doyle
(Vanderbilt University, 2016-08-15) Bruff, Derek
When we started brainstorming ideas for a new educational technology podcast, we knew we wanted to include Vanderbilt instructors who use technology in innovative ways. We talk to colleagues regularly who impress us, and we wanted to share their ideas and perspectives beyond our own campus. In this episode, we feature our first Vanderbilt guest, Corbette Doyle. Corbette is a lecturer in organizational leadership in the Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations at Peabody College of Education and Human Development. She came to Vanderbilt in 2008 after a successful career in the healthcare industry, where she focused on strategic planning, diversity in the workplace, and risk financing. In her interview, she talks about the ways she uses technologies like Google Plus and Poll Everywhere in the service of very intentional teaching objectives, and she reflects on how she approaches adoption of new educational technologies.
Episode 003 - Mike sharples
(Vanderbilt Univesity, 2016-09-05) Bruff, Derek; Gayathri, Narasimham
In this episode, we feature an interview with Mike Sharples of the Open University in the United Kingdom. The Open University is a public research university committed to increasing access to college through open admissions and online learning. It’s been around for more than 40 years, and it currently has more than 250,000 enrolled students from the UK and beyond. The Open University also runs FutureLearn, a venture that offers free online courses to the world. Not only does Mike Sharples hold a chair in educational technology at the Open University, but he is also the Academic Lead at FutureLearn. In his interview, he draws on that experience to describe the kind of social, collaborative learning that can happen online when you have hundreds or even thousands of learners. Sharples is interviewed by Gayathri Narasimham, Associate Director at the Vanderbilt Institute for Digital Learning, also known as VIDL. VIDL is, among many other things, Vanderbilt’s production shop for massive open online courses (MOOCs), which is why Gayathri was interested in talking with Mike Sharples about his experience designing and assessing MOOCs.
Episode 004 - Jeff Rice
(Vanderbilt University, 2016-09-19) Bruff, Derek; Sloop, John
In this episode, we feature an interview with Jeff Rice, inaugural chair of the Department of Writing, Rhetoric & Digital Studies (WRD) at the University of Kentucky. Rice also holds the Martha B. Reynolds Chair in Writing, Rhetoric & Digital Studies, and he’s the author of multiple books and essays, including his most recent book, Craft Obsession: The Social Rhetorics of Beer. Rice recently sat down with John Sloop, Vanderbilt’s Associate Provost for Digital Learning, at the Rhetoric Society of America conference in Atlanta, where the two discussed the mission of “digital studies,” the role of open online education, and the relationship between craft beer and digital communication.
Episode 005 - Lee Forester & Bill Van Patten
(Vanderbilt University, 2016-10-03) Bruff, Derek; Johnson, Stacey
In this episode, we feature an interview with Lee Forester, Professor of German at Hope College, and Bill VanPatten, Professor of Spanish and Second Language Studies at Michigan State University. Stacey M. Johnson, Assistant Director for Educational Technology at the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching, sat down with Forester and VanPatten at a language teaching conference last summer. Both faculty members have developed online learning materials, including textbooks, for language instruction, and Stacey’s conversation with the two professors explored ways that instructors use digital textbooks and publisher-provided learning platforms. As a companion to this podcast episode, Stacey Johnson has created a new teaching guide on working with publisher-provided online platforms, shared as part of the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching’s collection of more than 70 teaching guides on various topics. The new guide features more audio from Lee Forester and Bill VanPatten, as well as other language instructors Stacey interviewed recently.
Episode 006 - Suellen Stringer-Hye & Michael Hunger
(Vanderbilt University, 2016-10-17) Bruff, Derek; Anderson, Cliff
In this episode, we feature two interviews conducted by Cliff Anderson, the Director for Scholarly Communications at the Vanderbilt library. Both interviews focus on Neo4j, an open source platform that can be used to visualize and analyze data and connections among data. Cliff interviews his Vanderbilt library colleague Suellen Stringer-Hye, Linked Data and Semantic Web Coordinator. Suellen has worked with a number of faculty members and students here at Vanderbilt, helping them use Neo4j in their research. In the interview, she talks about some of those projects and how a database tool like Neo4j can be easier to use than one might think. In the second interview, Cliff interviews Michael Hunger, who handles developer relations for Neo Technology, the company that has developed Neo4j. Michael shares a few more examples of how Neo4j has been used and how it supports collaborative data visualization and analysis.
Episode 007 - Lynn Ramey
(Vanderbilt University, 2016-11-07) Bruff, Derek; Molvig, Ole
In this episode, we feature an interview with Lynn Ramey, Associate Professor of French here at Vanderbilt. She is the author of multiple books and essays, including most recently Black Legacies: ‘Race’ and the European Middle Ages. Lynn is currently engaged in several ambitious digital projects exploring the use of video games and 3D environments as means to explore how societies and cultures have interacted in the past. She recently sat down for a conversation with Ole Molvig, an assistant professor of the History of Science and Technology, and a member of Vanderbilt’s Institute for Digital Learning. The two discuss the challenges of employing complex digital tools in the humanities, these tools’ promise for teaching, research, and outreach, as well as Lynn’s path and experiences in the digital humanities.
Episode 008 - Zoe LeBlanc
(Vanderbilt Univesity, 2016-11-21) Bruff, Derek
In this episode, we feature an interview with Zoe LeBlanc, a sixth-year doctoral student in history at Vanderbilt University. Zoe studies networks, ideas, and spaces in modern history, and her dissertation examines the role of Cairo, Egypt, as a hub for anti-colonial activism in Africa during the Cold War. Zoe has been a graduate fellow at the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching, the Vanderbilt Institute for Digital Learning, and at the Vanderbilt Center for Digital Humanities. She helped launch a “Conversations on Digital Pedagogy” series at Vanderbilt, and continues to build and enrich the digital humanities community at Vanderbilt and elsewhere. We talked with Zoe about her experiments in digital pedagogy, her approach to using educational technology, and her career path as an aspiring digital historian.
Episode 009 - Paul-Olivier Dehaye
(Vanderbilt University, 2016-12-05) Bruff, Derek; Sloop, John
In this episode, we feature an interview with mathematician Paul Dehaye. Dehaye is known as the instructor of a 2014 massive open online course (MOOC) about massive open online courses that was mysteriously cancelled one week in. Dehaye is interviewed by John Sloop, Vanderbilt’s Associate Provost for Digital Learning, who met Dehaye at an Open edX conference last summer. Dehaye shares his perspective on that 2014 incident, and he comments on the role of for-profit companies in higher education, the future of online education, and the still untapped potential of MOOCs.
Episode 010 - Steve Baskauf
(Vanderbilt University, 2016-12-19) Bruff, Derek; Anderson, Cliff
In this episode we feature an interview with Steve Baskauf, senior lecturer in biological sciences at Vanderbilt University. Steve coordinates the introductory biological sciences labs, trains and mentors the undergraduate and graduate student teaching assistants for those labs, and designing and assesses inquiry-based lab curricula. However, this interview focuses on another aspect of his work at Vanderbilt: biodiversity informatics. Steve has developed Bioimages, an online image database with over 10,000 annotated plant and ecosystem images, and he has created mobile-friendly tree tours of the Vanderbilt campus. We talked with Steve about the semantic web, linked data, and the challenges and opportunities of creating and using machine-readable datasets.
Episode 011 - Kathryn Tomasek
(Vanderbilt University, 2017-01-16) Bruff, Derek; Anderson, Cliff
In this episode, we feature an interview with Kathryn Tomasek, associate professor of history at Wheaton College. Kathryn is interviewed by Cliff Anderson, Associate University Librarian for Research and Learning at Vanderbilt. Last summer, Cliff met several of Kathryn’s undergraduate students at a private seminar that she held in the lead up to the 2016 Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations conference in Krakow, Poland. Kathryn’s work focuses on transcription and mark up of historical texts, and she and her students are active in TEI, the Text Encoding Initiative. In the interview, Kathryn discusses her experiences getting started with text encoding, the value of teaching all students how machines talk to each other, and the role that text encoding can play in helping students engage in the kind of close reading that’s critical for historical analysis.
Episode 012 - Cassandra Horii
(Vanderbilt University, 2017-02-06) Bruff, Derek
In this episode, we feature an interview with Cassandra Horii, Director of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Outreach at the California Institute for Technology. Leading Lines host Derek Bruff talked with Cassandra about a couple of the edtech projects her center is supporting at Caltech. Both projects involve making student learning visible in interesting ways. Cassandra also shared her “edtech manifesto,” a set of principles for helping instructors make thoughtful use of technology.
Episode 013 - Tim Foster
(Vanderbilt University, 2017-02-20) Bruff, Derek
This episode features an interview with Tim Foster, a graduate student in Vanderbilt’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Tim is an active member of the digital humanities community at Vanderbilt, and he has worked at the Center for Teaching, the Center for Second Language Studies, and the Vanderbilt Institute for Digital Learning. Last fall, Tim was on a panel at Vanderbilt that focused on teaching with Wikipedia, where he shared a class project in which he worked with his students to write for the Portuguese language version of Wikipedia. Derek Bruff spoke with Tim about this project, as well as a few of Tim’s other experiments in educational technology.
Episode 014 - Katy Börner
(Vanderbilt University, 2017-03-06) Bruff, Derek
In this episode, we speak with Katy Börner, professor of information science at Indiana University-Bloomington. Dr. Börner is the curator of a traveling exhibit called Places and Spaces: Mapping Science. The exhibit, now in its twelfth year, features print and interactive visualizations capturing science and how science is done. Vanderbilt is hosting the exhibit this spring. Leading Lines host Derek Bruff interviewed Dr. Börner while she was on campus.
Episode 015 - William Pnnapacker
(Vanderbilt University, 2017-03-20) Bruff, Derek; Johnson, Stacey M.
In this episode, Stacey M. Johnson interviews William Pannapacker, DuMez Professor of English and Senior Director of the Mellon Grand Challenges Presidential Initiative at Hope College in Michigan. Pannapacker is a Walt Whitman scholar, and a proponent and supporter of the digital liberal arts. In the interview, he talks about that work, and the program building he’s done at Hope to enable more faculty to teach with technology. He also talks about his own career and the surprisingly limited role technology plays in his own teaching.
Episode 016 - Jan Holmevik
(Vanderbilt University, 2017-04-03) Bruff, Derek; Sloop, John
In this episode, Vanderbilt’s Associate Provost for Digital Learning John Sloop interviews Jan Holmevik, Associate Professor of English and Co-director of the Center of Excellence in Next-Generation Computing and Creativity at Clemson University. Holmevik was central in working to give the nearly 30,000 students and faculty at Clemson access to all the software tools in the Adobe Creative Cloud, along with an impressive “collaboration space” filled with high-end hardware, collaboration tools, and expert guidance. Among a wide array of essays and books, Holmevik is the author of “Inside Innovation: The History of the SIMULA Programming Languages,” “MOOniversity: A Students Guide to Online Learning Environments,” and “Inter/vention: Free Play in the Age of Electracy.” In the interview, Holmevik talks about what it took to launch this project, both in terms of strategic leadership and faculty development and support, as well as the roles digital literacy has played in higher education in the past.
Episode 017 - LaTonya Trotter
(Vanderbilt University, 2017-04-17) Bruff, Derek
In this episode, we speak with LaTonya Trotter, assistant professor of sociology at Vanderbilt University. Trotter is a medical sociologist, using ethnographic approaches to study how changes in the medical workplace alter how we think about illness. She was also a Junior Faculty Teaching Fellow at the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching, and she thoughtfully selects technologies for use in her teaching that align with the goals she has for her students learning.

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