Group items tagged

Have you considered running a blog, and how that blog might be part of your professional presence? This set of articles (blog posts, really) look at the choices professors make when they choose to write an academic blog.

Blog post by Tracy Mitrano, NITLE Fellow.

This case study shows how blogs can be used to diversify writing assignments and scaffold student learning.

Asking students to do work in public can lead to powerful learning, but we should talk to students about how it impacts their work and public identity. In this blog post, Jade Davis gives a description of the readings and release forms she uses in her classes with digital media projects.

Interesting post from the Rice University Center for Teaching Excellence blog. The criticism that we conflate "art" and "talent" seems spot on, though I think there's room to debate whether simply being observant and iterative is the same as as "scientific."

We're having a series of book club meetings (and a book club blog) on Ken Bain's book this summer. This interview is particularly interesting for the way Bain expands on his thinking since the book was published.

This 2008 blog post from a mathematician at Dickinson College is the best summary of my thoughts on curving grades that I have ever come across. Other than the fact that there is more math in here, this is what I think of whenever my students ask me "Do you curve your exams?" Moreover, his discussion on assigning grades includes formulas that can be pasted into either Google Docs or Excel that will generate letter grades based on splits that you can set to your liking. (Note: I have my own blog post about this where I explain these formulas in a bit more detail. Just copy and paste the following link into your browser: https://cip.kenyon.edu/hells-bells-not-question-again-and-formulas-assigning-grades.)

What do you do to mark the beginnings and endings of classes? I took a class in grad school which started with 5 minutes of reviewing the news relevant to libraries, books, or reading... or Elvis, because the prof was a big Elvis fan and wanted to lighten the tone a bit. It worked as an engaging ritual, marking the transition into the class.

An interesting design suggestion for multiple-choice tests - after the student gives an answer, ask them to identify the core principle which makes it right.

Like many people, I prefer to take notes on my computer rather than writing with a pen or pencil because I can type much faster than I can write longhand. The authors report on a study which indicates conceptual understanding is deepened when one takes notes by hand. The study points to benefits resulting from a greater level of "encoding" of the information because of "selective strategies" employed when a person can't simply type everything verbatim.

Essay by a professor at Vanderbilt who adapted his face-to-face classes to take advantage of MOOCs on the same subject. He calls this making his course a "wrapper", I've called it "using the MOOC as a textbook." See in particular the last paragraph, regarding the "scholarly-like community with my fellow educators."

One thing I learned as Helpline manager is that the stereotype that today's students are "good with computers" is a gross generalization. Students (and most people) are good at _doing some things_ with computers. If we're asking them to use an unfamiliar system, especially for a complex task, it would be time well spent both to introduce them to the tool and check in on how they used it.

This is a question we need to start asking up-front. When a textbook vendor calls, ask about accessible materials. When you see a documentary, ask if it's closed-captioned. When we think about new technologies, ask about screen readers and other accessibility tools. Better still, ask vendors (and colleagues) what accommodations they'd make to get all students an equivalent educational experience.

A worthwhile interview about the University of Mary Washington program to offer every student and professor their own domain name and a significant amount of control over which web publishing platforms they use. I find the discussions about privacy vs. publicy in a networked society to be the intellectual meat of the piece - the technology issues, while complex, are also just logistics to be solved or worked around.

A good discussion of how on professor uses multiple choice quizzing to measure comprehension of the major concepts in the course, instead of just testing for the ability to recall facts.

The MOOC conversation is dominated by examples of digitizing the large lecture hall. This is a deviation from the historical roots of the MOOC, and in this Chronicle article a very different kind of open educational activity is proposed.

As we think increasingly about the use of screencasting software for laptops and desktops, we should also consider those small computers in everyone's pocket.

An interesting idea about the flipped classroom model. The professors in the article are not only challenging the idea of class time and homework time, but the idea that the whole class needs to move through the same syllabus at the same pace. From the article: "We would rather our kids actually know 80 percent of the content, instead of being exposed to 100 percent of the content," said Bergmann.

Thoughts of a professor who is taking a MOOC. (Sorry this is a bit dated, but the Chronicle message was caught in my Spam filter.)

Many students don't know who the real audience is for their course evaluations. Brian Croxall has an interesting solution for that - tell them that the audience is the students in the next class.