Spring 2006 Events

Google Tips and Tricks
Thursday, January 12, 2006, 12:15 – 1:00 p.m., Knox Conference Room

Who doesn’t use Google? If you don’t, you are unusual. Every month, more than 380 million unique users do Google searches. Google gets about 300 million hits per day, more than half from outside the U.S. Yet, few people really know how to take advantage of Google’s unique features. This session will help you narrow your search parameters to locate what you want, find images, use Google Scholar as a great resource for identifying publications, identify books about a topic, locate blogs on the topic of your choice, and scan more than 4,500 news sources worldwide. Plus an eye-opening demo of a new Google tool currently in Beta testing!!

Using the Online Testing and Evaluation Tools in TigerNet
Thursday, January 19, 2006, 12:15 – 1:00 p.m., Knox Conference Room

About a third of the DWU faculty use the Coursework and Gradebook portlets in TigerNet, most of whom administer quizzes or exams online. This session will demonstrate some of the features in TigerNet that can assist you in your student assessment. The session will cover topics such as minimizing student opportunities for cheating, asking and grading essay questions, inserting images and hyperlinks into your questions and manipulating fonts, and setting up a drop box for students to submit assignments, as an alternative to Outlook.

Introducing Turnitin
DWU’s New Product for Plagiarism Prevention and Detection
Thursday, January 26, 2006, 12:15 – 1:00 p.m., Knox Conference Room

With funds provided from the Bush Grant, Dakota Wesleyan has licensed an anti-plagiarism tool, Turnitin (http://www.turnitin.com) that is now available to all faculty and students. While Turnitin allows us to detect plagiarism in student assignments, our primary goal is to make Turnitin available to students so they can scan their assignments to ensure plagiarism is not present. This session will provide an overview of how Turnitin works and the benefits it can provide. The Turnitin database contains over a billion documents, including web sites, journals and other publications (including the ProQuest database, for example), reports, and all student papers previously submitted.

Safe Computing
Thursday, February 2, 2006, 12:15 – 1:00 p.m., Knox Conference Room

What do you need to know about the evils of the Internet, to prevent them from contaminating your computer or accessing private information? Matt Moore of DWU’s Information Systems will lead this session on how to practice safe computing. Topics will include phishing (those messages asking you to verify your account information at a bank where you have no account, or eBay, PayPal, etc., etc.), spams, viruses, spyware, those pleas from the former king of Nigeria who needs help moving $20 million into (or as much as he can vacuum out of) your bank account, and other varmints sent to you electronically by the lowlifes of the world.

BiblioExpress
A Great (and Free) Tool for Organizing the References in Your Files
Thursday, February 9, 2006, 12:15 – 1:00 p.m., Knox Conference Room

How many times have you torn your hair out looking for that article you KNOW you have in your files? Somewhere. Maybe. Well, here’s a great solution. BiblioExpress (http://www.biblioscape.com/biblioexpress.htm), a product of CG Information, is a free tool that will allow you (and your students) to catalog and annotate your (their) files. You’ll know exactly which folder, which drawer, etc., and you can identify all your references on that topic of interest. BiblioExpress has no size limits and provides helpful tools for searching and sorting. This session will demonstrate BiblioExpress and how it can help you and your students.

Helping Students Avoid Plagiarism
Thursday, February 16, 2006, 12:15 – 1:00 p.m., Knox Conference Room

OK, we now have Turnitin. (See the January 26 TLTR.) We can detect plagiarism, but what can faculty do to prevent plagiarism from happening in the first place? This session, led by Gretchen Rich of the DWU English Department, will give faculty helpful guidance that can be passed on to students to help them avoid plagiarism. Participants will also learn about the warning signs that indicate possible plagiarism.

Using Wikis and Wikipedia as Learning Tools
Thursday, February 23, 2006, 12:15 – 1:00 p.m., Graham Room (Sherman Center upper lobby east side)

NOTE CHANGE IN MEETING LOCATION FOR THIS MEETING ONLY
A “wiki” is an online writing space that can be an excellent tool for collaborative online writing assignments and group activities compiling information in a single resource. This session will discuss wikis and demonstrate how wikis are being used by college faculty around the country for course assignments. The Mother of All Wikis is Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page), a free online encyclopedia being written by almost 600,000 people all over the world. Wikipedia contains over 825,000 articles in English and gets 60 million hits per day, some of which are likely to come from your students. Wikipedia will be demonstrated.

Using Online Discussions in TigerNet
Thursday, March 2, 2006, 12:15 – 1:00 p.m., Knox Conference Room

Online discussions can be extremely helpful in promoting higher order learning in your courses. Online discussions allow everyone to participate, whenever and wherever they wish, encourage student reflection on the topic before posting, permit re-reading of the text and or literature before posting, and allow students to edit or delete their own postings if they wish. Yet, few DWU faculty use the Forums portlet in TigerNet. This session will feature a panel of three faculty (TBA) who will talk about what works, what doesn’t, and what are the benefits of online discussions.

Everything Every Faculty Member Needs to Know About Copyright
Thursday, March 16, 2006, 12:15 – 1:00 p.m., Knox Conference Room

You’d probably rather watch paint dry or an Ishtar sequel than attend this session, but you really need to. Compliance with the copyright law is an obligation of all of us, and let’s face it. You probably don’t know as much about copyright as you should. This session will be an informative, and hopefully painless and entertaining, review of copyright applications in a college teaching and learning environment. Just exactly what is fair use, and how do we know if a use is fair? What can (and can’t) you distribute to your students or put on TigerNet? What can you print or save from other people’s web sites? Sorry, but you really need to do this.

Title III Mini-Grant Recipient Reports
Thursday, March 23, 2006, 12:15 – 1:00 p.m., Knox Conference Room

An important component of the Title III Embedding Technology mini-grants is a commitment on the part of recipients to share information about their projects and results with faculty peers. The TLT Roundtables are an excellent forum for this purpose. Recipients and their projects that will be reported on this day will be posted here when schedules have been confirmed.

Title III Mini-Grant Recipient Reports, Part II
Thursday, April 6, 2006, 12:15 – 1:00 p.m., Knox Conference Room

An important component of the Title III Embedding Technology mini-grants is a commitment on the part of recipients to share information about their projects and results with faculty peers. The TLT Roundtables are an excellent forum for this purpose. Recipients and their projects that will be reported on this day will be posted here when schedules have been confirmed.

For more information about any event listed here, contact Mike Albright at x2638 or mialbrig@dwu.edu.