Teaching
While at Cornell, I served as a teaching assistant for several classes. I was fortunate to serve as a TA for Professor Jeffrey Hancock (Fall 2009) and Professor Jeremy Birnholtz's (Fall 2010) course on Communication and Technology for two consecutive years. During my senior year, I was given the opportunity to develop and co-teach a class on Mobile Social Networks with my advisor Professor Geri Gay and Eric Baumer. These experiences crystallized my interest in teaching and using innovative technologies in the classroom. Below are descriptions of the classes and summaries of my contributions.
Description
Description: Introduces students to the Communication and Information Technologies focus area of the communication department and the Human Systems track for information science. It examines several approaches to understanding technology and its role in human behavior and society. Topics include psychological aspects of computer-mediated communication; how design plays a role in the way we interface with technology and collaborate with each other; and the ways in which communication technology is situated inside social and institutional structures and cultural formations.
Contributions
For the course, I redesigned the entire communication and collaboration system to create a more interactive and real-time class. We designed a Ning social network for students to interact with each other, post their weekly blog assignments, reach out to the teaching assistant's for help and prepare for exams. In addition, we have integrated the use of Twitter by requiring students to tweet about the readings and/or course material before each class. We create a wordle (examples below) from all of the tweets for each class and the best tweets are also shared on the lecture slides for that day. Although the Ning social network is private, feel free to check out the Fall 2010 and Fall 2009 class Twitter accounts.
Video Descriptions
Jeff and I each recorded a video about teaching with technology. They are both currently on the
Cornell Information Technologies website. You can view Jeff's video
here and my video
here. Feel free
to contact me if you have questions about what we did.
Images and Related Media
Below is a screenshot of the Ning profile created by all students in the class and examples of the worldes from the students' tweets and shown in class:
Description
Description: This seminar will explore social influence and social support through mobile applications designed to improve health attitudes and health behaviors. Feature-rich mobile phones (such as the Google Android driven G1) are becoming far more common and readily accessible. These small, portable computing platforms provide numerous users with a host of different functions, including email, scheduling, storing contact information, way-finding, movement sensing (through accelerometers), photography, social networking, and many others. Not only can such features enhance the user experience of mobile technologies and grant developers new opportunities for interaction design, but they can also provide novel information and insights into users' behavior with these devices.
Throughout the semester we will discuss research that examines these novel opportunities, focusing on two specific areas. First, we will be concerned with practical, concrete design recommendations for mobile applications that use social network effects to support healthy choices. For example, happiness and other affective states are dynamically spread through social networks, and positive affect can be leveraged to motivate improvements in health, such as increased physical activity. What technology and social design features are most effective at facilitating the activity and spread of such affective and behavioral changes? How can mobile devices best employ context awareness to support healthy decisions and attitudes? Second, we will examine conceptual issues in the role that physical location and temporal rhythms play in the use of such technologies. Choices about health take place not only in the context of our social networks, but also at distinct places in physical space and at specific moments in time. How do time and location mediate our health-related social interactions? What general, broader insights can be derived from the novel data mobile devices provide about these interactions? How do users and developers of these technologies negotiate privacy in the context of these novel data? This seminar will discuss both conceptual, theoretical issues raised by these technologies, as well as practical issues involved in their design, implementation, and evaluation.
