The Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning

IMPACT: The Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning is a peer-reviewed, biannual online journal that publishes scholarly and creative non-fiction essays about the theory, practice and assessment of interdisciplinary education. Impact is produced by the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning at the College of General Studies, Boston University (www.bu.edu/cgs/citl).In this issue, podcasts are looked at as a pedagogical game changer. Using the award-wining podcast Serial as their catalyst, this issue's essayists look at podcast's emerging role in higher education, how multimodal learning can help students find their voices, the podcast's place in the curriculum at a criminal justice college, and how podcasts can inspire students to reflectively assess their own writing. Our reviewers take a critical look at the podcasts Welcome to Night Vale and Revisionist History

Synergizing Wikis, Vodcasts, and Podcasts for Collaborative Class Texts

This tech-savvy generation of students, known as digital natives, desires to learn and to interact utilizing the collaborative technologies that have always been a part of their lives. The purpose of this paper and corresponding presentation is to demonstrate how a wiki can be used by students and the instructor to create a collaborative text and demonstrate how multimedia can be integrated into the texts using podcasting and vodcasting. A description of the procedures used to design, to produce, and to publish a wiki class text with integrated podcasts will be demonstrated. The challenges and benefits of using these technologies will also be discussed from both a student and faculty perspective

Expectations eclipsed in foreign language education: learners and educators on an ongoing journey / edited by Hülya Görür-Atabaş, Sharon Turner.

Between June 2-4, 2011 Sabancı University School of Languages welcomed colleagues from 21 different countries to a collaborative exploration of the challenging and inspiring journey of learners and educators in the field of language education.\ud \ud The conference provided an opportunity for all stakeholders to share their views on language education. Colleagues met with world-renowned experts and authors in the fields of education and psychology, faculty and administrators from various universities and institutions, teachers from secondary educational backgrounds and higher education, as well as learners whose voices are often not directly shared but usually reported.\ud \ud The conference name, Eclipsing Expectations, was inspired by two natural phenomena, a solar eclipse directly before the conference, and a lunar eclipse, immediately after. Learners and educators were hereby invited to join a journey to observe, learn and exchange ideas in orde

Podcasting in Higher Education: Students’ Usage Behaviour

At German universities, podcasting is still a relatively new method of teaching and learning, on which only few studies are available so far. The present report aims to describe students’ usage behaviour and their assess- ment of podcasting. The findings are based on a survey of students at the University of Flensburg, who took part in lectures recorded and made avail- able as podcasts during the 2007 summer term and 2007/08 winter term. A total of 148 students took part at the two survey sessions. The majority of the surveyed students are inexperienced in the use of podcasts, as the descriptive results show. For most of the respondents, lecture podcasts were their first contact with this medium. Mainly a notebook is used to listen – at home – to the podcast of the recorded lecture. The focus in this regard is on playing back or catching up on the lecture at a later point in time. The main purpose for the students is to systematically prepare ahead of written tests and examinations. Slightly more than half of the respondents consider the opportunity to use podcasts to be no substitute for attending lectures. A clear factor in the success of lecture podcasts is that they are available with no cost involved. Another important factor is that the students can reuse and replay the recorded lecture. Podcasts are considered a possibility to assimilate the contents of lectures better and more efficiently. Students who do not use lecture podcasts justify this by stating that they have difficulties in learning with a computer.podcasting, podcast, higher education, usage behavior

Web 2.0 technologies for learning: the current landscape – opportunities, challenges and tensions

This is the first report from research commissioned by Becta into Web 2.0 technologies for learning at Key Stages 3 and 4. This report describes findings from an additional literature review of the then current landscape concerning learner use of Web 2.0 technologies and the implications for teachers, schools, local authorities and policy makers

Breaking Glass: A Pedagogical Approach to Understanding Voice in Media

This dissertation aims to examine the remediation of voices in media, specifically focusing on the reproduction of voices across different genres and the pedagogical approaches used to teach writing and media literacy. Much of the extant media is created with practices that historically have excluded minority groups, such as people with disabilities and people who speak other languages in addition to English in the US. This project develops a theory of interstices, which are both physical and metaphorical spaces in genres that can become sites of intervention through the composition process. These interstices are burdened by their many complex relationships between other formal elements of the genre and medium as well as by the social contexts surrounding the text’s production. To account for and name these relations, this project applies Thing Theory to understand the formal functions of the genres and will highlight unconventional examples of generic conventions of reproducing the voice. This project demonstrates examples of media that promote access and inclusivity by how they reproduce the voice and provide examples for instructors to use in higher-education classrooms, with the intention of addressing issues of inaccessible space in media

How is the digital medium shaping research genres? Some cross-disciplinary trends

There is little dispute that technologies are impacting academic communication today, rendering new forms of accessing information and disseminating knowledge. To explore this impact, in the first part of the paper I review a selection of scholarly literature that addresses ways in which digital technologies are shifting the scholars’ information access behavior and introducing new forms of research dissemination. I also discuss how these new forms of communication are modeling new ecologies of genre systems and genre sets. In the second part of the paper I conduct genre analysis with a sample corpus of texts from different disciplines to illustrate how the emergence of new multimedia genres and the use of multimodality, hypertextuality and interdiscursivity features in genres within electronic environments appear to be pointing at generic evolution and innovation. In light of the findings, I propose some areas in which genre research can engage in interdisciplinary conversation (with ethnography, academic/digital literacies studies, situated genre analysis and reception studies). Regarding EAP instruction, I suggest a pedagogy that provides corpus-based linguistic and rhetorical input on the new genre formats, opportunities for noticing, hands-on practice and critical awareness of aspects of genre innovation and change

Take Me Out to the Ballgame: Adolescents\u27 Insights About Engagement with Sports Texts in a Voluntary Sports Reading Club

Adolescent disengagement in school and school-related activities continues to be a national problem (Christenson, Reschly, & Wylie, 2012; Center for Evaluation and Education Policy, 2009). Recent research has shown that allowing choice in what adolescents read in school and school-related activities strengthens student engagement (Kittle, 2013; Lee, 2011; Miller, 2009). Much of this literature, however, does not adequately explore the potential of sports texts to foster engaged reading by exploring the cognitive, behavioral, emotional, and agentic components of engagement (Finn, 2012; Yin & Moore, 2004). In addition, researchers have yet to emphasize adolescent voices via qualitative inquiry to add to the knowledge base of student engagement with sports texts (Fredricks, 2004; Ivey & Johnston, 2013). Therefore, educators, teacher educators, administrators, and policymakers need an understanding of the potential to generate interest in adolescents’ engagement with sports texts. Framed by Rosenblatt\u27s (1994) transactional theory of reading, this qualitative case study (Merriam, 2009; Stake, 2005) examined how adolescents engaged with sports texts as they participated in a voluntary sports reading club. The following questions guided the study: (1) What were the indicators of engagement when selected adolescents interacted with sports texts? (2) What contextual factors brought about the features of student engagement when adolescents explored sports texts? Participants in this study included three adolescent sports enthusiasts, and data collection occurred November-December 2014 during the 2014-2015 school year. Data sources included semi-structured interviews, participant observation during club meetings, session observation using audio and video recording, and participant journals. Using an evaluative approach to text analysis that involved assessing, categorizing, and evaluating content (Kuckartz, 2014), I found the participants’ engagement with sports texts was varied based on their thinking, emotions, behavior, and sense of agency communicated in the program. Findings suggest that adolescent sports enthusiasts may benefit from opportunities to use sports texts to show their engagement in semi-structured reading and discussion programs through the connections and responses to the texts they read. Findings also suggest that maintaining engagement over a six-week program is a difficult endeavor. Providing almost all-out choice, a casual space to talk and discuss texts, and acknowledging the social dynamics of the group may strengthen engagement in school, afterschool, and community small group reading programs. Finally, the study emphasized the important role that teachers and other adults can play in providing an environment for rich discussion and response by focusing on the features of student engagement