Group items tagged

As we welcome new colleagues and new students (and continuing mentoring folks who have been here longer), it's worth asking what the institutional and interpersonal factors are which contribute to "imposter syndrome," and what we can do instead. The word "teacher" (or "chair" or "director") could be substituted for "manager" all over this episode.

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 discussion with Kenneth Crews of Columbia University about copyright. It opens with a nice primer on the concepts of copyright and fair use, and takes an interesting turn at the end as the discussants consider the ownership of faculty and staff copyrights, and Creative Commons licensing.

This episode of NPR's Planet Money presents a good case study in applying the 4-factor fair use test. The topic is web sites which present song lyrics. In specific, they look at a site called RapGenius, which makes a "transformative use" case by providing a site where users can annotate and explicate lyrics. (Despite the name, the site includes any genre of music as well as poetry, prose, and news.) RapGenius also has an education program for faculty who want to use it as a classroom tool for close reading exercises.

We talk a lot about the way sleep functions as a necessary part of learning, but the way sleep helps us handle stress also seems important when dealing with our overcommitted, underslept students and colleagues.

How could research on the psychology of cheating impact our discussions about academic honesty?

Good conversation about the ways in which we can use the study of memory and motivation to help us and our students follow through on our intentions to work and study well.

Xavier University of Louisiana uses the "deliberative discussion" framework in a public speaking class to facilitate community conversations about current political issues.

"If you think about the way our educational system is set up, it's this constant cycle of goodbyes." Ed Burger and Jennifer Stayton discuss endings and beginnings, as we pass the end of the academic year and approach graduation.

If groupwork is worth doing, it's worth teaching students how to do it well. I wish some of my teachers had read this book.

Martin Weller's 25 Years of Ed Tech is a valuable reminder that there is a history to the use of computers in the classroom (and it goes beyond March 2020). It's an open access book, available in print and electronically, but I'm enjoying this audio version, released one chapter at a time, read by a terrific selection of experts in the field.

As we think about the role of sustainability for the College and our curriculum, this panel discussion on addressing environmental justice in the curriculum makes for good listening.

As we think about a J-term at Kenyon, it might be interesting to look at The Great VCU Bike Race Book as a model for demonstrating the connections between a set of shorter, more experimental courses.

A powerful discussion about overcoming student and institutional biases on the first day of class.

An important episode that puts pandemic learning losses in context. (Short summary: learning losses are real, but part of a trend that started well before the pandemic. So there's no reason to believe "coming out of the pandemic" alone will return student performance to earlier levels, and our curricular responses may need to be deeper and longer lasting than we might prefer.)