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CELT Conference Promotes Effective Teaching

From ecology to kimonos, academic honesty to mind mapping, the Eighth Annual Conference on Excellence in Learning and Teaching, sponsored by the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT), offered 31 sessions focused on creating high-quality learning environments, both inside and outside the classroom. The following is a sampling:

Plagiarism Prevention: Writing-to-Learn in the Age of the Internet

Cautioning faculty to beware of becoming the "plagiarism police," English professors Chris Fosen and Mark Hall offered teaching strategies for preventing plagiarism before it starts, including

• Give "nongeneric" assignments that narrow the focus, so that students must come up with new approaches.
• Ask to see student writing at various stages and have short discussion conferences, in groups of three or four if class is large.
• Require oral reports or multimedia presentations, with a question-and-answer session, to be sure that students know their subject.
• Require students to keep a journal or research log of their project, describing their writing and research processes and reflecting on what they learned.

Writing assignments, Fosen said, should be used as a way for students to learn, not just a way to demonstrate what they have already learned.

Plagiarism is often the result of misunderstanding the concept, Hall said, and in those cases students need to be taught exactly what constitutes plagiarism. However, too often it is a case of outright fraud, he said. Students may "borrow" papers from friends, copy from published materials, or purchase papers from Internet "paper mills," which he called a "hot button" of academia today.

To combat plagiarism fraud, the university has subscribed to Turnitin.com, an online plagiarism detection service where student papers can be compared to a database of materials for a "similarity index." Kris Johnson of the Library Instruction Program encouraged faculty members to contact her about using the system in their classes.

Mary Oling Ottoo, director of Special Projects and Judicial Affairs, advised faculty to turn over suspected plagiarism problems to Judicial Affairs, along with the student paper and the alleged source.

Ecoliteracy: What Is It, What Are We Doing, and What Should We Be Doing?

"In the face of growing environmental problems, the world needs wise, empowered citizens to keep the planet functioning," declared professors Dave Brown, Geosciences, and Mark Stemen, Geography and Planning.

To achieve that, they said, "we must change the way we educate students. We must teach that we are all involved with the earth." Empowered citizens will need a strong working knowledge of how natural systems function and how human activities affect natural systems, they said, plus the skills to evaluate problems and take effective action.

Stemen and Roger Lederer, Biological Sciences, have designed a new environmental literacy course, tentatively numbered UNIV 005, "because we didn't want it to be the property of one discipline," Stemen said. It is to be called Ecological Living and Learning, but a participant asserted that "we should call it Life Literacy," acknowledging the importance of the course content to the students' future.

Accelerated Research and Learning Techniques on the Internet

"Technology stocks may be going down, but there are still people out there developing great technology," asserted Rick Sheridan, Health and Community Services, as he initiated participants into advanced Web research possibilities.

Using the Accelerated Learning Web site he compiled with support from a CELT grant (www.accel-learning.com), Sheridan demonstrated the power of multiple search engines, such as ProFusion, which allows users to access almost 1,000 search engines and databases at once.

For gathering and delivering large amounts of information, Sheridan recommended bots—software robots that perform a variety of difficult and time-consuming tasks, based on advanced artificial intelligence programming. These bots perform automated functions that go beyond the ability of a typical Web search engine, he said.

Sheridan also gave an overview of some established techniques for rapidly learning new materials, including neuro-linguistic programming, mind mapping, brainstorming, metaphorical thinking, mnemonics, and mental gymnastics. Links to these techniques appear on the Accelerated Learning Web site.

Diversity in Art: Possibilities of Integrating Art Exhibitions with Academic Subjects

Four artists and administrators demonstrated how collaboration can turn a simple idea into a unique multidisciplinary exhibition program that is also a teaching and learning tool.

Masami Toku, Art and Art History, started with the idea of encouraging the Chico community to understand Japanese culture by displaying traditional silk kimonos from her hometown in the Amami Islands.

She approached Jason Tannen, curator of the University Art Gallery, who saw it as an opportunity to show the connection between objects, art, and culture, and provide a learning experience for the campus and the community.

The project expanded to the Humanities Center at Trinity Hall, which featured a photography exhibition depicting the people and region of Amami-Ohshima by noted photographer Makoto Koshima.

The Janet Turner Print Museum joined the project with Fabric of Life: Kimonos in Japanese and Contemporary Prints. "I offered to loan Masami a few prints as accents for her show," curator Catherine Sullivan said, "and it transformed into my own print show." She enlisted Susan Yonts, a University of California, Davis graduate student in art history, to serve as guest curator, a first for the museum.

Music, dance, and lecture rounded out the interdisciplinary program, with a performance by an Amami Islands music and dance troupe, a kimono dressing workshop, a tea ceremony, and a talk by anthropologist Liza Dalby on her life as a Western-born geisha.

Francine Gair