Spring is in full swing in Asheville, but Soomo is in full conference mode. We’ve packed up our gear (again) and are in Chicago for the 68th Annual MPSA National Conference April 22-25!

Soomo has set up shop in the exhibit hall, booth #504. Come by, say hello, check out our original videos and online assignments, and grab a few pieces of chocolate for the road.

We are hosting a workshop, “Build Your Online Course in 15 Minutes,” on Thursday, April 22, from 10:30 am – 12:00 pm in the Wrigley Room. Our Editorial and Political Science Desk teams will be on hand ready to help arrange your course to meet your needs for upcoming semesters.

Also on Thursday at 4:35 pm on the Teaching and Learning in an International Context panel, our own Zara Ricks and David Lindrum and Professor Kevin Cooney of Northwest University are presenting a paper titled, “What Do We Teach When We Teach IR? -
a search for our de facto canon of ideas and content to be included in the intro course, pursued through comparative analysis of leading IR textbooks.”

Soomo will be conducting another workshop, “How I Use the Web,” on Saturday, April 24, at 12:45 pm in the Empire Ballroom (on the Lobby floor) with Professors Tressa Tabares of American River College, Lilly Goren of Carroll University, and Chapman Rackaway of Fort Hays State University. They will discuss how they are integrating online resources into their courses, and share what they’ve learned about getting the most out of web resources without a lot of hassle.

We conclude our jam-packed schedule with David Lindrum chairing the Approaches to Undergraduate Research panel on Saturday, April 24, at 4:35pm.

As always, safe travels and see you in the Windy City!

If you think that your students’ work sometimes looks familiar, or you find that students turn their work in very early (or alternatively, very late), there are many reasons that could explain this. Perhaps new generations of students are smarter, or work more diligently and efficiently. But online “sharing” sites now available to students may also be the answer.

You may already submit your students’ papers to turnitin or similar services to check whether it is original work or has been “recycled” and to provide a disincentive to students tempted to plagiarize. But you might not be aware of other online services that provide students with the opportunity to upload and “share” assignments with other students and, in return, download assignments that other students have previously submitted. In fact, “swapping” assignments is mandatory for some of these websites: you can download other students’ submissions only if you upload something else in return. Thus, while in the past many professors objected to their notes, handouts, and assignments being circulated by students in fraternity or sorority houses or being circulated in paper form commercially, existing online services allow students to exchange teaching materials and assignments in a virtual environment.

Participants in the technology track of APSA’s 2010 Teaching and Learning Conference pointed to two such online services available to students. Course Hero is a “social learning network” that promises “less work, better grades” by offering over 6 million study materials including syllabi, essays, lectures, and exams, and 500,000 textbook solutions, among other resources.

Another such student “resource” is koofers.com, which allows students to share notes and makes previous exams and study guides available. Koofers’ website states that it is “a social learning company transforming higher education through student-driven, intercollegiate collaboration.” In the koofers universe, collaboration is thus taken out of the classroom and the supervision of the instructor, and assignments that professors might expect students to complete on their own are now easily converted into “collaborative” experiences.

On these websites, students have discussions about whether lecture notes and exams have changed from one semester to the next, what the assignments are likely to be like, and provide examples of previous papers for a course. The problems with these online services are obvious and numerous. From a professor’s perspective, copyright infringement is just one of them. Note that when class material is copyrighted and professors complain, most of these services will remove the copyrighted material. Apparently it is time to copyright any handouts, exams, and lecture notes that you will be posting online in order to protect intellectual property and maintain the integrity of our classes. But this is just a first step since it is apparently now the responsibility of the instructor to check where course materials have been posted and to be vigilant in ensuring that they be removed.

When I came to my current position, I was excited because every classroom was a smart classroom and as we have all discovered… smart classrooms change the way we teach. We can use brief video clips, show a copy of the front page of the newspaper, integrate a great website, respond to student questions with real-time data… all on the fly.

The spring of my first year at Jackson State University (Mississippi), all of the projectors were stolen out of the classrooms in my building during spring break and we could not replace them. The overhead projectors were long gone and we were left with blackboards and document projectors/VCRs/CD players that were all dressed up and had no place to go. Eventually each department was provided with a portable projector they could wheel to classes, but in my department there are three or four of us who compete for the technology. So now I must plan ahead. I don’t know about you, but although I plan ahead it often is to no avail.

In the fall semester I tried several times to integrate some wonderful on-line videos, some streaming Court arguments, and a couple powerpoint presentations (not out of habit, but towards a very specific pedagogical end!) None of these attempts worked out the way I expected. My colleague’s laptop did not have a large enough buffer to allow the oral argument to stream; so, first they fell out of sync—to great hilarity for the students—and then, after a total of 10 minutes, ceased to play. (The class groaned: isn’t that a measurable sign of student engagement?)

Another classroom has spotty wireless coverage and the network was absent the day the video was to air. The “portable” speakers, in another class, hummed so loudly that the students couldn’t hear the video.  And finally, and most embarrassingly, when I went to show a powerpoint on my computer, I did not reset the “sleep” mode to a length suitable for a discussion with visuals. So my laptop kept shutting down, forcing me to sprint to the machine to awaken it—not so funny the tenth time (it took me about that long to recognize the problem—I was in the groove of the topic). I am convinced these setbacks (or at least I tell myself this) are making me “logistically flexible” and capable of making anything a “teaching moment”—that rationale is better than feeling like a klutz in the classroom.

This semester I have learned from these failings and am better prepared: I have bought an adapter for my Mac so that I can use it and its endless buffer; found a speaker that simply plugs into the USB ports and still projects to the back of the classroom; and I now test everything out at home before I present. My teaching may be a little less spontaneous, but the classroom is even more of an adventure than before!

Am I the only one or is anyone else gaining logistical flexibility through their experiences with technology?

An iPad has been making the rounds at Soomo’s headquarters in Asheville this morning and all is go on the compatibility front. As a matter of fact, all of Soomo’s titles are iDevice compatible. (We are an online publisher of educational materials, after all.)

So, if you are at your local coffeehouse, iPad in hand, reading this post, or are standing in line at the Apple Store waiting for what David Pogue has dubbed a giant iPod Touch to be handed to you, take a minute to log into Americans Governing and check out our sparkly videos (on health care, for example) and the rest of our content. Happy post-release Monday!

A great website that helps students understand the functioning of the Supreme Court is Oyez (http://www.oyez.org). This site not only provides full information on many of the cases (brief summary of facts, constitutional question, ruling, and votes of the justices), but also provides links to many of the petitioner and respondent briefs, the decisions, and the oral arguments.

Oyez is searchable by justice, by term, as well as by topic and case. Students are able to conduct their own original research looking at such issues as voting blocs and appointments. Biographies of all the justices as well as information on each appointment are available on the site, which also provides a tour of the Supreme Court. Finally, a recently released app called PocketJustice is available that allows students to access much of this material on their iPhones. (Ha! Who’s kidding? I think this app is great and use it on my phone as well.)

The way I most commonly use this site in class is to play the recordings of oral arguments. (A little background: I have been teaching and researching long enough to have gone to the national archives to order cassette copies of the oral arguments I wished to use in class, after I had photocopied the relevant transcripts. I have also taught using the cassettes and edited transcripts sold by Peter Irons in his May it Please the Court series. I even have copies of the earliest CDs available for PCs to play the “greatest hits” of oral arguments.) The Oyez website makes teaching with oral arguments and integrating them into other courses a breeze by comparison. The oral arguments stream, along with an on-screen picture of the justice who is speaking and a transcript of the argument in sync with the speaking voice.

I integrate the oral arguments in the discussion of the Supreme Court, the teaching of specific cases, or in the discussion of a particular doctrine that may be well-emphasized by a segment of an argument. Students find this engaging and it also leads to good discussions about the relationship between the media and Court—why doesn’t the Court allow video recordings of proceedings? Is this a good thing or a bad thing? These questions, in turn, can lead to a great discussion of the relationship between a representative democracy and the judiciary.