On June 11, 2013, CCNMTL hosted faculty from three Jewish higher education institutions for a workshop on tools and approaches for using technology to enhance student learning. The workshop was part the recently-launched eLearning Faculty Fellowship, a collaboration of the Jewish Theological Seminary’s Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education, Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion, and Yeshiva University.

17 faculty and a handful of administrators attended the two-and-a-half hour workshop, one of 12 events the program fellows will attend between February 2013 and March 2014. The group met in Columbia University’s Butler Library, and three participants attended virtually from Los Angeles and Cincinnati.

The workshop focused on student collaboration and looked at free and open tools for online collaborative reading and writing, such as nb and Piazza. Dan Beeby, CCNMTL’s associate director of services, and Tucker Harding, an educational technologist at the Center, gave short presentations on the tools. The workshop participants then tried out the tools and reported back to the group about their findings, including challenges like authentication and input methods for Hebrew text.

The event concluded with a presentation by Mark Phillipson, interim director of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Teaching Center and an instructor at Columbia, about how he has used wikis in his humanities classes. Participants were particularly interested in this case study and had numerous questions for him about student privacy, assessment, and writing in a semi-public sphere.