Symposium focuses on learning beyond the classroom
Lecture halls and blue books are staples of a college education, but there’s a push at UW–Madison to expand the definition of where learning can take place and go beyond the walls of the classroom.
It’s a journey that could take students halfway around the world to Tanzania, working to improve water quality at a hospital, or give them a role in an historical event just by playing a game on a handheld computer equipped with GPS.
The concept is the heart of this month’s Teaching and Learning Symposium, an annual gathering for professors, instructors and teaching assistants to share ideas and methods for engaging students and enriching their college experience.
Robert Howell, director of International Academic Programs (IAP), sends 1,000 students overseas every year and says more and more students are going abroad, not to study art or languages, but to work for corporations, governments and relief organizations. Driving that trend is the demand from employers that college graduates have a deeper understanding of the world.
UW-Madison study abroad programs have expanded their scope to provide opportunities for students in a range of majors to immerse themselves in real life applications of what they’ve learned in the classroom while also making progress toward getting their degree. Seventy-four students, sponsored by various schools and colleges, went abroad during the last academic year and summer to participate in internships or service-learning programs, Howell says.
IAP has 15 students participating in overseas internships this summer; eight of them will work as research assistants to British members of Parliament in the House of Commons and the House of Lords.
“We’ve found in study abroad that the learning that happens for the students happens not only in their academic classes, but also essentially every waking minute they’re in the host culture … developing language skills, intercultural skills and global competence just by virtue of their living in the country,” Howell says.
Howell says students who travel overseas for internships through IAP aren’t there to make copies. “In fact, the tendency is for students to be given really quite challenging assignments,” he says.
Anchoring their time abroad with an internship or service-learning experience, “equips the students a lot better to deal with the real world and to see what the relationship is between life out in this global world that we live in now and what they did at the university,” Howell says.
That’s the foundation of the International Academic Internship Initiative (IAII), which recruits students and matches them with employers for summer programs. The program is a collaboration led by the Division of International Studies and the School of Business and includes the College of Engineering, the Institute for Cross-College Biology Education, the Center for East Asian Studies, the Center for European Studies and Global Studies.
Last year, the initiative sent six students to Japan to work for Toshiba or the Central Japan Railway Co. Another student went to the Netherlands for an internship with Promega Corp. The students earned academic credit for taking part in the eight-week program.
“This year our goal has been to double the size of program and diversify types of internships offered,” says IAII faculty director Loren Kuzuhara.
This summer, student internship opportunities include working with a plastics molding company in China, with the Golakr political party in Indonesia or designing and constructing a well for Abbott Laboratories in Mexico.
But students don’t have to go that far to get actively engaged in learning; researchers with the university’s Local Games Lab are developing augmented reality games students play on a handheld computer.
Depending on the game, students can take on the role of environmental scientists, urban planners or historians in scenarios that take place in the real world or in the context of historical events. They can interact with virtual people, data and other information through photos, text and video clips.
The work grew out of a research project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where UW–Madison researchers teamed with the school’s engineering faculty to create a game for teaching students how to investigate a chemical spill.
At this month’s Teaching and Learning Symposium, participants will play “Dow Day-1967,” an augmented reality simulation game in which players take on the role of journalists investigating why a series of anti-Vietnam war protests turned violent. While seeing where events took place in person, players use the handheld computer to gather data, develop arguments about what happened and defend their conclusions.
“It’s a model for getting students and kids of all ages back out into the community,” says Kurt Squire, an assistant professor of education who heads up augmented reality gaming projects.
Most of the lab’s games have been designed for middle-school students, but the model has potential to expand to the university level, Squire says, especially because most students arrive on campus “with technology in their pockets.”
“Not only are you just kind of viewing this information within the game, it’s a problem-solving activity,” Squire says. “So you’re having to actively synthesize and think about it and engage much more deeply than if you were just learning for rote memory.”
Imagine a game that would help new introductory science classes learn about processes such as lake eutrophication. Students could not only go and observe Lake Mendota or Lake Monona but also get access to data on a handheld PDA “that lets you see deeper what’s going on,” Squire says.
Professors won’t need a programming background to integrate the games into their courses, says Jim Matthews, a graduate student and games researcher in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction.
Matthews said the ultimate goal is for students, teachers and community groups to design their own games with help from an easy-to-use interface that lets them upload and place items on a map and decide what roles they want to include.
“What we’re really trying to do is provide people with both the process for developing games and then also the tools to make that happen,” he said.
