Faculty Focus: What’s Happening at USA?

Everywhere you turn, people are talking about blogs, podcasts and wikis, about social networking, about how today’s college students are different due to these new technologies, and about how faculty need to learn and make use of these technologies to reach their students and avoid becoming irrelevant.

While we’re not quite ready to make that leap, there are several faculty at USA who are taking advantage of these new tools.

One of these is Peter Wood, Assistant Professor of Music and 2007 Teaching Excellence Award winner. Dr. Wood uses podcasting to supplement his classroom and has found it to be a “very powerful teaching tool.” He also believes that students enjoy learning this way and appreciate the flexibility that podcasting affords. As he points out, “being able to view podcasts at a time or place of the student's choosing gives them increased flexibility, especially welcome with today's increased emphasis on balancing work and school schedules.”

Dr. Wood is currently using podcasts to introduce new chapters and topics, to clarify “muddiest points” from the last in‐class lecture, to answer frequently asked questions, and to provide help on homework assignments.

He is also using them as a recruiting tool to help high school students prepare of All‐State auditions. He provides excerpts of him performing the audition materials. He also discusses “the technical and musical challenges inherent in each excerpt” and offers “specific suggestions on ways to conquer those difficulties.”

Finally, he is in the planning stages of creating a series of video podcasts designed to introduce fundamental concepts of music theory for incoming freshman. He anticipates that this will “help bring underprepared students up to a more standard level” and therefore “raise the overall level of understanding and achievement in our fall Music Theory classes.”

Next month, Dr. Wood will be facilitating a PETAL Faculty Roundtable Discussion on the instructional use of podcasts. It will be on Monday, February 18th, at 2pm in Library Room 181. We hope you will look forward to this with as much anticipation as we are.

Also next month, this space will be devoted to ways that USA faculty are using blogs.

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