eCOTS 2016 Registration, and Other News
04 Mar 2016ECOTS Registration is Live!
Registration for eECOTS 2016 went live earlier today. Go to the eCOTS site to register. As part of the process you will be asked to check which regional mini-conference you wish to attend, so don’t forget to check the Georgetown College box!
Then email me to let me (see the Contact link in the sidebar) know of your intent to come. Registration at eCOTS plus an email of intent to me complete your registration for the Georgetown Regional Conference. Thanks to support from eCOTS registration is free, and breakfast and lunch will be provided at no charge to you.
Also don’t forget to sign up for a free account on GitHub and then visit the repository for this site. Click the Watch button on the repository in order to receive email notifications of all discussions about scheduling, contributed talks, car-pooling and other conference details.
Details on the Keynote Address
Our keynote speaker is William S. Rayens of the Department of Statistics at the University of Kentucky. Bill has kindly provided some details of his talk:
Student-Centered Learning: Room Design Matters
William S. Rayens, Ph.D; Associate Chair and Director of Educational Initiatives, Department of Statistics, University of Kentucky
Abstract
There are fundamental reasons to inherently value a student-centered, activity-based classroom in which students are active participants in their own learning. This can be especially important in a statistical reasoning course where students need to appreciate the role of the mathematics that underwrite the familiar formulae, but are students not well served by having a purely mathematical encounter. At the University of Kentucky we have become profoundly aware of the challenges that the physical classroom space poses for student-centered learning and in this talk we will describe a space we have constructed that we believe is a true game-changer. This pilot room was designed by the speaker and was used as a model for twelve TEAL (Technology Enabled Active Learning) classrooms in the new $112 million Academic Sciences Building, set to open in the fall of 2016. We will describe these spaces and discuss the critical role of technology in the design and how we are using that technology to facilitate a student-centered pedagogy.
I’m sure we all look forward to Bill’s address!
Call for Abstracts
But we want to hear from you, too! If in addition to attending you would like to present at our conference, please send me a title and abstract. For now, let’s plan on limiting contributed talks to twenty minutes each.