Making student Wikipedians: Encouraging disruptive scholarly communication

John T. Oliver is Information Literacy Librarian at The College of New Jersey. As the professor of a mandatory library skills and academic research course for all of the College’s 1,800+ first year students, he works to understand, support, and develop students’ use of information.

John is interested in facilitating authentic contexts for teaching students to identify, evaluate, access, and use information for specific purposes (especially–but not exclusively–in writing). In an effort to support self-directed information seeking and research-skills learning, he researches high-impact design features and teaching approaches within digital learning objects and multimedia interactions. He is also interested in finding (and using) robust but simple assessments for measuring learners’ information skills. Using data from his mandatory library skills course, he explores which research skills and concepts students readily understand and which ones they struggle to grasp.

He received his Master of Library and Information Science degree from Rutgers (2006) and, more recently, a Master of Arts in Cognitive Studies in Education from Teachers College, Columbia University (2011).

Big Data Thinking and Learning 3.0 as Guides for Online Textbook Development

Eileen Medinger, Ph.D. is the Instructional Art Coordinator for the Online Education unit of the UNLV Division of Educational Outreach. She comes to Educational Outreach from Empire State College in NYC, a unique college in the SUNY system because of its distributed learning structure. She has a B.F.A from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, an M.F.A. from Concordia University, Montreal, and a Ph.D. in Instructional Design from Capella University. Her research interests include faculty perceptions of online education and the design of rich media for learning objects. She has had a professional career as a graphic designer and illustrator and has taught graphic and digital media design in traditional and online settings.

Eileen is most proud of her son, Christopher, who teaches in south central L.A. and her daughter, Jill, a free-lance writer and video editor in N.Y.C.

Big Data Thinking and Learning 3.0 as Guides for Online Textbook Development

Ed Nagelhout is an associate professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in rhetoric, professional writing, and language studies. He has edited two collections, published seventeen articles, and presented more than eighty papers on a variety of topics, including writing program administration, teaching in digital environments, writing in the disciplines, and contrastive rhetoric. His current research projects examine academic program design, comprehensive assessment and learning analytics, and online, open-source textbook delivery.

Where does 3D printing fit into your pedagogical thinking?

Mike retired from Atlantic Cape Community College in 2003 as Dean of Academic Computing and Distance Education. He has continued to teach an online Human Body lecture and lab course for Atlantic Cape and also teaches an online Histology course and an Anatomy and Physiology lecture and lab online course for The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) from his home in Ocean City, NJ. While at UTEP, he was the Associate Vice President for Instructional Technology and a tenured professor in the Department of Biological Sciences. Mike has enjoyed approaching online course development and teaching from the scholarly perspective and has made conference presentations over the past few years on utilizing retrieval practice and 3D anatomy images in his online course offerings. Mike was asked last year by UTEP to teach several online courses for their faculty on online course design and instruction and has been asked to teach another faculty online training course during summer 2013 for The University of Texas at San Antonio. Mike was also interested in learning how to make ePub files and self-published three iChapbooks of poetry last year and they are now available on the iTunes bookstore. His interest in 3D printing has focused on how virtual learning objects can be made into real things and how 3D printing has the potential to change what we can do in the online as well as traditional classroom and laboratory setting.

The Scratch Disruption: Video Game Design with Scratch

Sophie Idromenos promotes computer science as a core skill & helps educators integrate technology into their curriculum, through individual training as well as numerous workshops given across NY/NJ. Sophie has a Bachelor’s in Art & a Master’s in Computer Science, both with a specialization in computer graphics. Originally an art teacher, she became the lead technology teacher for dyslexic & autistic students, grades 1st -12th at a private school, all the while building a “state-of-the-art” technology curriculum rivaling that of public schools. Prior to this, she worked as a teaching/research assistant, and instructional technologist in a university. However, her knowledge extends beyond academia to the IT field, where she worked as a graphic/web designer/developer with an emphasis on user-interface design & user-experience. Please feel free to contact her at sophia.idro@gmail.com

Virtual Instructor-Student Interaction in an Asynchronous Learning Network

Christopher Donoghue earned his Ph.D. in Sociology at Fordham University. His early research focused on labor instability and inequalities in nursing home care. This work appeared in journals on health policy and aging such as The Gerontologist, Research on Aging, The Journal of Applied Gerontology, Health Care Management Review and The Journal of Health and Social Policy. His current work focuses on a range of social psychological topics in elementary and middle school education such as peer aggression, coping, deviant behavior, academic motivation and the acquisition of ethnic prejudice. This research is intended for scholarship in his own discipline and to inform best practices in education, school counseling, and school psychology. As a program evaluator and an educational consultant, he has also worked on grant funded projects to assess school climate and implement curricula to reduce teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. In this capacity, he has conducted public forums for parents, workshops for teachers, and presentations for school administrators. Dr. Donoghue teaches many courses in Sociology such as quantitative and qualitative methods, the sociology of aging, and poverty and social welfare policy. In 2012, Dr. Donoghue was elected Representative of the Northeast Region of Alpha Kappa Delta, the International Sociology Honors Society. In 2011, he was inducted into Phi Kappa Phi. He is a member of the American Sociological Association and the Eastern Sociological Society and an Associate Member of the National Association of School Psychologists. He also frequently serves as a peer-reviewer for several academic journals.