Teaching, Technology, and Learning

UAA is primarily an undergraduate institution, yet many faculty members have research as a component of their workload contract. I've been fortunate to enlist a number of wonderful undergraduate students as research assistants and the collaboration has been very positive. The students help me get some research done and in the process they learn how to conduct research.

I was at a lunch meeting the other day with another professor and a former student that we are hiring to do some software development for a research project. The conversation was going something like:

"What used to be one set of data is now split up into 7 sets, one for each size class. There's also a field for max percent and coefficients for a quadratic formula to describe..."

At this point I took out my OQO 02 and actually showed our prototype with these data fields to our programmer so he could actually see what we were talking about, instead of trying to explain it without visual references.