we strongly encourage instructors to consider the guidelines for pedagogical humor mentioned in the previous section. First, does the humor promote an educational objective? Second, will the students understand and appreciate the humor? Third, is the target of the humor appropriate for the course?
The Internet is the best resource for pedagogical humor, and although any search using a discipline and “humor” as descriptors will yield numerous web sites, we recommend more narrowly focused searches (i.e., “humor” and a specific discipline topic). Additional resources for pedagogical humor include supplemental instructional materials provided by book publishers and journals devoted to humorous research (e.g., Journal of Polymorphous Perversity, Annals of Improbable Research). When using humor from other sources, instructors need to adhere to copyright considerations.
Visual humor is especially effective in online courses, and cartoons, illustrations, and photographs, can easily be integrated throughout the course. Although visual humor is usually self-contained (i.e., a caption or the illustration delivers the punch line), there are several ways that instructors can enhance visual humor for the online environment. Visuals, such as photographs or illustrations, can be used as a punch line for a joke. For example, when discussing the difficulty of course examinations, the setup would be “And this is how students often feel after an exam…” with a photograph or cartoon of frighten individuals delivering the punch line. For this type of humor to be effective,
rhondamatrix on 11 Jun 14This link will take you to the opening chapter of Tom Romano's latest book about multi-genre papers. Romano has been working on this concept for close to two decades. It branches off Gardner's work on multiple intelligences, which Samantha wrote about on the Module 1 discussion board. I believe that we need to rethink what an academic paper "should" look like. Are we teaching an outdated model?
dkiesel on 11 Jun 14Rhonda, I started reading Fearless Writing with this link you provided and if I had nothing else to do today I would curl up and just read it. This is a topic that I have been thinking about whie taking these ETAP classes that there needs to be a paradigm shift in letting people just write. As a writer, of sorts at least I have published a book, I write best with editing a thousand times as the writing becomes better targeted. However, one can notice in our online discussions how some students do not write much, or do not write from the soul of self, the creativity with the science and theories to figure out how to remember and apply what we learn. During the years I was writing my book, I discovered that when I played the piano or figured out some 1700 Spanish classical guitar piece..I could write easily. It was like food for the writing. Now days I have that music in my head whenever write like right now there's a tune being built with the pace of tapping the keys. This process is what we need to let flourish when student have their dance of art, music, and other types of deigns in the Mind that form pathways to help us learn.
