UIS Professor Karen Swan honored with Columbia University Distinguished Alumni Award
Karen Swan, Ph.D. a professor in the Teacher Leadership program at the University of Illinois Springfield and the James J. Stukel Distinguished Professor in Educational Leadership is being honored.
Swan has been selected to receive the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Teachers College at Columbia University. The Columbia Department of Mathematics, Science, and Technology will be hosting a graduation luncheon on May 18, 2010, at the Teachers College where Dr. Swan will receive her award.
Swan is recognized as a leading researcher in the nation when it comes to the effectiveness of online teaching and learning. In 2006, Dr. Swan received the Sloan Consortium for Asynchronous Learning Networks Award for “Most Outstanding Achievement in Online Learning by an Individual.” This award recognized her for national innovation, research and service in online learning.
Swan holds a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Connecticut, a Master of Education in Curriculum & Instruction from Keene State College, and Master of Education and Doctor of Education degrees in Instructional Technology from Columbia University.
The University of Illinois Springfield is riding a new wave of online education.
UIS is one of the first universities in the nation to begin using Google Wave - an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration - for online learning and teaching, beginning in October 2009.
“We’re really excited to be working with Google Wave here at UIS,” said Ray Schroeder, director of the UIS Center for Online Learning, Research and Service. “One of the wonderful features of this new product is that it combines the Web 2.0 technologies that we have been accustomed to using on an individual basis. It molds all of these into a kind of an email or wiki format. And it enables students and others to use Web 2.0 technologies in a collaborative fashion.”
Wave was developed to answer the question: “what would email look like if we were to invent it today?”, Schroeder said. The product was released to developers in May and to the public as a beta in October.
“Email was invented nearly 40 years ago. As we developed technology over time, email was created to emulate snail mail and IM, or instant messaging, was more to emulate telephone conversations,” Schroeder said.
A wave, on the other hand, can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly-formatted text, photos, videos, maps and more. In developing Wave, Google looked at “the way in which we can use technologies as they exist today rather than as analogs for technologies developed years ago,” Schroeder said.
And the new technology allows for many opportunities within the online classroom. Wave enables students to connect not only with each other in the classroom, but with people all around the world, Schroeder said.
“The technology allows for all kinds of collaborations,” he said. “You can drag and drop documents right into a wave rather than as attachments. You can come up with final product that can be saved and shared with a broader group.”
Other features of Google Wave include the ability to embed web pages, bring up live weather forecasts, look at maps and instantly change those maps to satellite views, Schroeder said. There is also a feature that will translate between different languages.
One of UIS’ efforts in testing the online teaching capabilities includes a collaboration outside of the classroom between students at UIS in the “Internet in American Life” course taught by Schroeder and Burks Oakley and students in energy studies at the Institute of Technology in Sligo, Ireland. The students are discussing the impact of the Internet on the perception of energy sustainability in Europe and the United States.
“Wave provides an opportunity to collaborate with people in other countries, and in our case, we collaborated with people in Ireland,” Schroeder said. “It’s phenomenal - our students meeting in a wave.”
COLRS also has several upcoming projects regarding Wave, including multiple national presentations, online workshops through the Sloan Consortium and training sessions for UIS faculty on using Wave. Two training sessions have already been conducted on campus.
“UIS is really out in the forefront of this,” Schroeder said. “This is a tremendous opportunity to use this technology to reach beyond our campus and our online program. It breaks down institutional and geographical boundaries.”
MIS online graduate student competes for Essence Magazine wedding package
Jasmine Harris, a 25-year-old online graduate student in Management Information Systems at UIS, is competing for a complete wedding package in the pages of Essence Magazine.
Harris lives in Manasas Park, VA and works at Lockheed Martin, where she met her future husband during an employee happy hour. She decided to enroll in the MIS program online because of its reputation.
“The course selection of the MIS program, the flexibility of the online courses, accreditation, along with the affordability of the tuition attracted me to the online program at UIS,” said Harris.
Her future husband, Gabriel Sheffield, submitted a letter to Essence explaining why he would like to propose to her, which led to the couple being named one of four finalists. The actual proposal came on December 17, 2009, and was video taped by Essence and posted online. Sheffield’s proposal letter was published in the February edition of the magazine.
“We hope that the glimpse into our proposal can allow the world to, if only for a few moments, feel the power of love,” said Harris.
If the couple wins the “Will You Marry Me?” contest they’ll get the following:
• A wedding consultation with renowned wedding producer and designer Diann Valentine, who will provide the winning couple with key tips on how to make their day extra special and invitations from her new collection, Wedding Paper Divas • A wedding dress from the David Tutera by Faviana Collection -- a dress designed collaboratively by design house Faviana and celebrity wedding planner and host of WE tv's My Fair Wedding with David Tutera • An amazing cake courtesy of one of the bakers featured on the WE tv hit show, Amazing Wedding Cakes • $10,000 in cash for wedding day essentials
“The day a girl gets engaged is one of the most memorable occasions of her lifetime. Gabriel demonstrated his dedication and love for me by taking the time to ensure that the proposal was extraordinary and unique,” said Harris.
Karen Swan researches educational technology as Distinguished Professor
Dr. Karen Swan admits that she became an education teacher “by default.”
Swan was a single mother when she got a grant from the government to return to school.
“There were only certain things you could do, and one of them was education, so that’s what I did,” she said.
Swan, a professor in the Teacher Leadership program at UIS, now serves as the James J. Stukel Distinguished Professor in Educational Leadership. Her investiture ceremony took place in the fall. She has been at UIS for about a year, after coming from Kent State University in Ohio, where she was an endowed chair for research on educational technology.
Swan’s family moved to Chicago, but she was still commuting to Ohio when she heard about the opportunity to fill the professorship at UIS.
“It’s a perfect fit; I truly love it,” she said. “It’s specifically for online learning, which I couldn’t do very much of at Kent, and it’s kind of my hobby. I can teach again, which I love, and the people are fabulous. I just think it’s a wonderful opportunity.”
The Stukel Professorship was created by the University of Illinois Foundation to honor James Stukel, the 15th president of the University of Illinois system. The professorship includes support for research and grant work and was created for a candidate who possesses expertise in and scholarly accomplishments relating to online teaching and learning issues.
Swan became interested in the field of technology within education while completing her graduate assistantship.
“I had a graduate assistantship teaching gifted kids. The only thing they insisted on was that we use computers, and that was the beginning of computers,” she said.
“I'm an old hippie, and at the time, I thought they were the devil,” she laughed, “but I did it anyway because it kept me going in school. I took a computer class, and it changed my life. I suddenly started understanding math, which I never understood before, and it turned out I was a good programmer. And the rest is history.”
At UIS, Swan teaches a course on educational research tools and a capstone course for the Master’s in Teacher Leadership program, as well as a technology course occasionally. Being a part of UIS’ online teaching and learning has been exciting, she said.
“UIS is known throughout the online learning community as being one of the best schools in country,” she said. “Little UIS in the cornfields is really far ahead of almost any other place I've known. It's amazing.”
Online learning has been shown to be just as engaging as face-to-face learning, Swan said, and new trends continue to emerge in online learning, including using social media in online courses.
“Online learning is growing still by leaps and bounds; we thought it would flatten out, but it hasn't yet,” she said. “Blended learning – the combination of face-to-face and online learning - is growing even faster.”
“Ray Schroeder (director of the Center for Online Learning, Research and Service) just gave me a Google Wave account, and we’re thinking Wave might replace the learning management platforms we have now,” she added. “There are all sorts of trends outside of educational computing involving social networking which I think are going to become part of mainstream educational technology. People are now trying to figure out how to use it.”
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Karen Swan, Ph.D. a professor in the Teacher Leadership program at the University of Illinois Springfield and the James J. Stukel Distinguished Professor in Educational Leadership is being honored.
