2012 Teaching with Technology Awards Announced

Three faculty members were named recipients of the Teaching with Technology Awards – Betty Rose Facer, Jennifer Kidd and Kevin Moberly – at the Faculty Awards and Retirement Dinner on May 1. A one-time award of $1,500 will be provided to each recipient’s department to support technology in teaching.

Facer is senior lecturer of French and director of the Language Learning Center in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures. She received master’s degree from Syracuse University in French language and literatures and has completed work toward a Ph.D. in French at the Catholic University of America. She has 18 years of experience in managing language resource centers which incorporate technology into the foreign language classroom, as well as teaching. She is the past president of the Mid-Atlantic Association for Language Learning Technology, and in 2005 was elected to serve as the Official Delegate to the Joint National Committee for Languages in Washington, D.C., to identify national needs and to plan national language policies. For the past 16 years, she has collaborated with ODU faculty and students to develop a variety of pedagogical innovations for language teaching and learning.

Kidd has served as lecturer in the Department of Teaching and Learning since 2007. Prior to that, she had had many roles at ODU, including graduate student, graduate assistant, adjunct faculty and project manager for a $1.4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education. She taught fifth grade in public schools in Newport News and Chicago, and kindergarten in an international private school in Budapest, Hungary. She also served as the education director at the school in Budapest and was responsible for the staff, curriculum, assessment and all day-to-day operations.

Moberly is a third-year assistant professor of rhetoric, new media and game studies. His research focuses on understanding how computer-enabled manifestations of popular culture reflect, contribute to and transform contemporary cultural and political discourses. In particular, he is interested in the way that contemporary computer games encode labor, often blurring already uneasy distinctions between work and play. He is currently working on a number of academic projects, including a book-length study (co-authored with his brother, Brent Moberly) that examines how contemporary medieval-themed computer games function within and against the larger material context of late capitalism.

This article originally appeared in InsideODU, May 2012.