Unpacking ISSOTL09

I’m back from ISSTOL09 and unpacking my luggage, physical and mental. I had a great time in Bloomington, visited several great restaurants in good company, did my paper, talked a lot with the other historians in HistSoTL which led to a long list of future SoTL projects. That work will keep me and many others busy for several years to come, so you’ll be able to read about it as it emerges, but before I start feeding laundry into the machine, I wanted to note some of the other things I brought home with me about teaching and learning

The Indiana Memorial Union

The IMU makes a strong first impression – it is a solid, cut limestone building with walls several  feet thick; its website really does not do it justice.  But it was only after I walked  around it for three days that Michael Murphy from Western Washington put his finger on what is great about it – it is a building where students can be comfotable. We have places in UCC where students can just sit and work, but they are smaller, with less flow space, and most are also catering areas which are impossibly busy at peak times and locked off at other times.  There appears to be more square footage per seat in the IMU, and that goes for the rest of the campus as well.
The guy in the game store
I learned that I should have talked to the guy in the Game Preserve the first time I went in, even though I was jetlagged, because it turns out he is not only a gamer but also going off to teach in Alaska and is interested in using games in teaching. I guess some of my friends will rightly feel entitled to say “Doh!!” at me for missing that, but for next year in Liverpool, I’m going to look for a good games shop to help me present gaming material.
Student Voices
There was so much in the programme that I almost missed the Special Interest Group meeting on involving students in SoTL work, even though it is something I am tettering on the brink of doing. If I had missed that session, I would have missed the revolutionary work done at Western Washington by a team of extraordinary students and staff. At the SIG meeting, I first met Megan Otis, an anthropology grad student who co-edited the Student Voices book but it wasn’t until I got to their roundtable later in the conference that I looked around and realised that they had 5 students there, all of whom are active SoTL researchers, and, as one of them said they “…brought three professors along with them.”
Large lectures
I do  quite a few team based assessments in my smaller classes, but I never quite worked out how to make them work in larger classes. Given the work that goes into organising and supporting teams in small classes, I didn’t see how it could work in large classes.  In the session on teamwork in large classes, Kelly Ottman showed us a video of one of her large classes doing teamwork, and it looked chaotic, but clearly it worked, and her students gave positive feedback about it. I was also pleased to see that I am not the only person who tries to create teams of students with diverse backgrounds, because Donna J. Charlevoix and her team do too – and from their paper I found what looks like exactly the survey tool I want for next terms SoTL research.
Unusual History Game
Not only are there lots of people out there using games in teaching, but there are also plenty of people who want to design games for their own teaching area. After my paper I was talking to someone who is working in a field I never thought about before but now I know someone who is designing a game to help teach in that area.   I can’t really say more until she is ready to let it out in the wild but I am really looking forward to seeing how that turns out – and I can guarantee you will never guess what field of history she is working in.

International Teaching
It looks like at least part of my Hi2001 class next term will use online tools to share teaching with students in England and the US. Exactly what part of the course is something I need to work out with my collaborators when we see how we can line up our course content, but we are pretty set on doing it.