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Two
Project Reports
During the summer and early Fall97 semester, I served as a faculty
mentor for two faculty: Gordy Weil and John Gildea. The projects
involved multiple tools/programs -- my charge as a mentor was
to learn the tools being used, provide one-on-one tutorial assistance,
and most importantly to develop "generic" handouts which
explain HOW to use the tool (for example, how to prepare output
from one tool so that the data is ready to be imported into the
next tool). I left "open" places in the handouts for
individual faculty to add their own assignment specific directions.
For
Gordy's FYS:
From lab to meeting: Modeling -- Graphing -- Presenting (Simulation/Web
-- Excel -- PowerPoint)
Tools:
(1) Internation Futures Simulation (IFS)
(2) Excel
(3) PowerPoint
In short, Gordie needed help in the transition between tools.
My handouts provided a starting point of our learning together,
as well as a starting source file for him to begin his handouts.
Here is a snippet from an email conversation (from Gordie to me
as we worked on the handouts):
"Below is a document that shows you what i have so far to give the students. actually i have 5 of these (one for each team, latin america, africa, asia, russia, europe & japan) but since the computer aspects of each are the same if we can iron one of them out i'll duplicate it with the others.
As you will see i've incorporated your work, and added some of my own. I've also annotated it with questions for you. have a read through it, and see if my questions make sense, see if you think i can improve it - anywere and let me know what you think. i think we're on the right track. we WILL get out on the golf course ..." :)
A sample of a working draft is included in the hardcopy packet
of materials, submitted to Dr. Tim Barker, chair of LTLC.
For
John Gildea:
John's needs served as a test of my handouts that I developed
for Gordie, that is, one of the "generic" handouts was
slightly modified and then passed on to John. This is the one
part of my work which may involve an assessment component, that
is, John was the first "client" to start his own handout
based on the generic template. I will allow John (and Gordie)
to comment on the usefulness of the process as well as to comment
on the utility of this use of "generic handouts" in
their project Reports.
A sample of the handout that John used, entitled:
"Moving Your Graph or Image to a POWERPOINT presentation" (Example: an Excel graph or image off the web is moved to and saved in your PowerPoint presentation)
is included in the hardcopy packet of materials submitted to LTLC.
Concluding
Thoughts:
Faculty mentoring is a right model for us to follow at this time.
There is no question that my assistance to John and Gordie saved
them valuable time, specifically, I saved them the time of reading
manuals and interpreting unexpected "glitches" in the
tools ... so that they might focus on the conceptual part of the
project rather than get lost in the technical. I strongly advocate
that the next set of LTLC calls include faculty mentoring.
Generic handouts are a good idea, even if somewhat premature.
It is clear that a growing subset of our faculty will be doing
projects relating to the presentation of data (e.g., teaching
students to give a professional PowerPoint presentation). While
I confess that I have not produced "totally" generic
handouts, a serious first cut has been made. Since we *must* continually
categorize the types of faculty projects, we may soon (now?) be
able to discover common tasks which use presentation and/or graphing
tools. If we do this right, I envision a set of web pages which
provide "generic handouts" for faculty to download and
then edit to suit their specific needs.
Last updated
on 1/26/99; 2:28:50 PM
Send questions about this page to: Mark
LeBlanc
or contact Wheaton
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