Speakers for the 2010 Symposium
Keynote Speaker
Keynote address cosponsored by University Information Technology Services (UITS).
Eric Mazur is the Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Harvard University. An internationally recognized scientist and researcher, he leads a vigorous research program in optical physics and supervises one of the largest research groups in the Physics Department at Harvard University.
After obtaining a Ph.D. degree in experimental physics at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands in 1981, Dr. Mazur came to Harvard University in 1982. In 1984 he joined the faculty and obtained tenure six years later. Dr. Mazur has made important contributions to spectroscopy, light scattering, the interaction of ultrashort laser pulses with materials, and nanophotonics.
In 1988 he was awarded a Presidential Young Investigator Award. He is Fellow of the Optical Society of America and Fellow of the American Physical Society, and has been named APS Centennial Lecturer during the Society's centennial year. In 2007 Mazur was appointed Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar. In 2008 Mazur received the Esther Hoffman Beller award from the Optical Society of America and the Millikan Medal from the American Association of Physics Teachers. Dr. Mazur has held appointments as Visiting Professor or Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University, Vanderbilt University, the University of Leuven in Belgium, National Taiwan University in Taiwan, Carnegie Mellon University, and Hong Kong University.
Lectures and Learning: Pedagogies, Technologies, and Peer Learning for the 21st Century.
Discussions of teaching and learning and even some publications abound with anecdotal evidence concerning our profession. And our intuition often supplants a systematic, scientific approach to finding out what works and what doesn't work in the classroom. Yet, research is increasingly demonstrating that our gut feelings about teaching and learning are often wrong.
It has also been suggested that the lack of interaction in large lecture courses is to blame for the many problems facing these courses: declining enrollments, low attendance, poor evaluations, and disappointing retention. This presentation offers a way of redesigning the classroom so interaction and student engagement is introduced in many aspects of the course. Then Professor Mazur shares research conducted by the Mazur Group concerning large science courses, and the effectiveness of classroom demonstrations.
In addition to his work in optical physics, Dr. Mazur is interested in education, science policy, outreach, and the public perception of science. He believes that better science education for all -- not just science majors -- is vital for continued scientific progress. To this end, Dr. Mazur devotes part of his research group's effort to education research and finding verifiable ways to improve science education. In 1990 he began developing Peer Instruction a method for teaching large lecture classes interactively. Dr. Mazur's teaching method has developed a large following, both nationally and internationally, and has been adopted across many science disciplines.
Dr. Mazur has served on numerous committees and councils, including advisory and visiting committees for the National Science Foundation, has chaired and organized national and international scientific conferences, and presented for the Presidential Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology. He serves as consultant to industry in the electronics and telecommunications industry. In 2006 he founded SiOnyx, a company that is commercializing black silicon, a new form of silicon developed in Mazur's laboratory. Mazur is currently Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board for SiOnyx. Mazur is Chairman of the Instructional Strategy Advisory Group for Turning Technologies, a company developing interactive response systems for the education market. He also serves on the Scientific Advisory Panel for Allied Minds, a pre-seed investment company creating partnerships with key universities to fund corporate spin-outs in early stage technology companies, and on the Scientific Advisory Board for the Lifeboat Foundation, a nonprofit nongovernmental organization dedicated to encouraging scientific advancements.
Dr. Mazur is author or co-author of 224 scientific publications and 12 patents. He has also written on education and is the author of Peer Instruction: A User's Manual (Prentice Hall, 1997), a book that explains how to teach large lecture classes interactively. In 2006 he helped produce the award-winning DVD Interactive Teaching.
Plenary Speaker
Carol Hostetter, MSW, PhD is Associate Professor in the School of Social Work at Indiana University, having joined the faculty in 2001 and director of the Indiana University Mack Center for Inquiry on Teaching and Learning. She has won several teaching awards, including the Lieber Memorial Award for Distinguished Teaching (all eight campuses), the Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching (IUPUI campus), the Trustees' Teaching Award (five times, for the School of Social Work), and membership in FACET (Faculty Colloquium on Excellence in Teaching, the Indiana University teaching academy).
Dr. Hostetter is the director of the Mack Center for Inquiry on Teaching and Learning. The Mack Center is the home for a collaborative group of scholars on all eight campuses of Indiana University. She is the Bloomington Social Work Program Teaching Mentor, Bloomington FACET Liaison, a member of the FACET Steering Committee, and is a Preparing Future Faculty Mentor. She teaches the graduate pedagogy class for her school. Her grants and publications focus primarily on child welfare training and the scholarship of teaching and learning. Dr. Hostetter presents regularly at national and international conferences on teaching and learning, and recently served on the program committee of the International Society of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning conference.
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