A two day symposium titled “Shifting (the) Boundaries: Blended Learning, Digital Humanities and the Liberal Arts” was held on April 5th and 6th, sponsored by the Mellon-funded Blended Learning Initiative at the College. Evelina Guzauskyte from the Spanish Department and David O’Steen  from Library and Technology Services co-directed the initiative which is in its fourth year. They did a superb job putting together the program, which was well attended by not just the faculty, students and staff from Wellesley, but members from several other nearby institutions.

The faculty and students from Wellesley who spoke at the symposium were illustrating a range of ways in which they have blended technology into their courses. The most striking thing for me was that in all the presentations technology itself took the backseat and the discussions were about how it improved or enhanced pedagogy. And the passion that the faculty exhibited by devoting a lot of their time to experiment with blended methodologies to improve student learning was evident in all presentations. They could have easily turned away from it all and gone about advancing their scholarly activities!

The presentations were videotaped and soon they will be made available on the web for everyone to see. What you will notice is that the strong collaboration between students, faculty and LTS was evident in almost all projects that were presented. I am very proud of the LTS staff who helped accomplish all of this great work. Whether it is the virtual reality of the walk through the careful recreation of Anna Karenina’s Train Car or the Virtual Reality Evolutionary Anatomy Lab, the labor of love was evident!

Johanna Drucker from UCLA gave a very thought provoking keynote on “Drawing Knowledge, Seeing Interpretation: Visualizing Interpretation in Research and Pedagogy”. She stressed how she uses low tech in her class such as HTML and CSS. The important takeaway from her talk was that visualization is important and understanding the data and the purpose of visualization is far more important than simply throwing the data on the latest and greatest visualization tools. Point taken. I have been a big fan of Ed Tufte from the time I was a postdoc in the 80’s and this area is his bread and butter and I always tried to remember some of what he stressed in his talks when I was engaged in visualization of massive amounts of data from molecular simulations.

One intriguing thing that Johanna mentioned about the blended learning is that those who create them are far more engaged than those that are learning or benefitting from them. It may be true because we only get to hear from the creators for the most part, but at least one of the assessments presented by Adam Van Arsdale pointed to better learning outcome using the Virtual Reality Evolutionary Anatomy Lab. I would interpret this as better engagement on the students’ part.

Some of the other faculty presentations highlighted the fact that though the student reaction seem mixed, the blended learning experience provided them more opportunities to explore. And one faculty mentioned “Students learned to balance tech with “human” in Humanities” and “care about the process as much as product”.

I think this is an important lesson we can all benefit from – that the process should be as important as the product we produce. We need to constantly look to refine the process and produce better products!