{"id":45606,"date":"2022-12-01T09:59:06","date_gmt":"2022-12-01T14:59:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/?p=45606"},"modified":"2022-12-01T12:20:50","modified_gmt":"2022-12-01T17:20:50","slug":"blog-early-innovation-a-tls-story-from-the-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/2022\/blog-early-innovation-a-tls-story-from-the-past\/","title":{"rendered":"Blog: Early Innovation \u2013 A TLS Story from the Past"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Patrick Lyons, Director, Teaching and Learning, TLS<\/em><\/p>\n

Teaching and Learning Services (TLS) is celebrating its 30th anniversary<\/a>. To help recognize this milestone, we\u2019re sharing stories of teaching and learning from our past. This is the first story in our series.<\/em><\/p>\n

One of the earliest collaborators with Carleton\u2019s first teaching and learning centre, the Teaching and Learning Resource Centre (TLRC), was Prof. Tim Patterson, a paleontologist in the Department of Earth Sciences. Tim was an early adopter of using technology in the classroom \u2013 using a primitive data projector (which consisted of an LCD screen that sat on top of an overhead projector) and authoring learning aids in hypercard in the early 1990s. In the TLRC\u2019s early days, he helped advise and guide the department on the use of technology in teaching.<\/p>\n

By 1996, Tim had integrated a website assignment into his teaching. Rather than produce a paper, students in the third-year evolutionary paleoecology class were given the option to produce a website on a theme related to paleoecology \u2013 fossilization, mass extinctions, specific extinct organisms, such as a dinosaurs, or even local Ottawa area paleontology sites.<\/p>\n

It may be helpful to recall that in 1996, the world wide web was still a very new concept. Images had just begun to be viewable on a website. In 1996, the fastest home dial up connection was 33.6 kbit\/s (for a sense of perspective a modern smart phone sends and receives data 1,500 <\/strong>times faster).<\/p>\n

For students to undertake this assignment \u2013 it was \u2026 a commitment. Not only did they have to conduct research into their topic area to produce academic quality work, but they then had to format and create webpages by writing HTML in a text editor, source images (by scanning them or finding digital images), and then navigate copyright and permissions of these images. Finally, the individual webpages needed to be put together into a cohesive, navigable public <\/strong>website \u2013 where each student\u2019s website was available to be seen and critiqued. Tim then took the initiative one step further and assembled each student website into one larger website which became the Hooper Virtual Paleontological Museum (the museum is still online<\/a>).<\/p>\n

In subsequent years, Tim chose to eliminate the term paper \u2013 students needed to complete the website assignment. I vividly recall hearing student opinions on the assignment and it was not positive (they used much more expressive and colourful language). Students dreaded this assignment, and I entered Tim\u2019s course wishing along with my classmates that he would be on sabbatical\u2026<\/p>\n

I could not understand the point of it, nor conceive of how much time that I would need to put to it. Except, as I started the project \u2013 and learned how to author HTML, thought about website navigation, dove into the literature around the topic, found images (and optimized them), visited the Museum of Nature\u2019s research facility and library\u00a0 \u2013 I discovered a passion for my topic area (Pterosaurs), and became fascinated with building the website and learning all these skills, which I initially thought that I\u2019d loath.<\/p>\n

I came into Tim\u2019s class thinking that it would be one of the worst experiences that I would ever have and instead it turned into one of my most important formative learning experiences.<\/p>\n

This story isn\u2019t about me \u2013 but rather about Prof. Tim Patterson and his approach to teaching. He challenged his students and pushed them outside of their comfort zone. In many ways Tim was a pioneer for many teaching and learning approaches that we know are important to student engagement and success:<\/p>\n