Center for Innovative Pedagogy

Students tend to hate group work, and I've come to believe it's because we have an unrealistically high expectation of students' skills at working in a group. Walking the students through the skills which the group task requires, and accurate assessment of their abilities and team composition, seems like a good step in teaching students what group work will be like in the working world (as well as positioning the students for success at the course work).

An interesting approach to the way an institution's design affects the kind of education it delivers. Considering Kenyon's ongoing consideration of general education requirements, I'll exerpt here the last paragraph as a prompt for discussion: "General education is often thought of as a means to expose students to a broad range of "essential" knowledge and to provide a historical context for the culture in which they live. These are valid, but insufficient, goals. The purpose of general education should be to produce graduates who are skilled in communication, imbued with quantitative reasoning skills, instinctively collaborative, inherently transdisciplinary in their approach to problems, and engaged in their local and global communities-broadly educated individuals with an informed perspective on the problems of the 21st century and the integrative abilities to solve them."

"The authors of the article suggest one fairly simple but meaningful strategy. Stop talking about "finding sources." Frame the work as learning about something."

A news story on a web site which uses Google Maps to plot scenes from books. 

A collection of Google Earth map files, designed to help students think about the geographic locations in various literary works (and the travels of their characters). The site also includes links to some good Google Earth tutorials.

Some interesting thoughts here on the differences between debates in course discussion boards and the "toxic" level of discussion in other social media.

A study of images used by articles in selected history journals from 2000 to 2009 shows no increase in the use of images, despite the boom in online images generally and digitized historical images in particular. How should this impact digitization strategies and visual literacy efforts?

I've heard from multiple people who are not satisfied with the quality of online discussion in their classes. Their concerns sound like the ones in this article - they get more student-to-professor writing than real "class discussion", and what they get is often dominated by the better students. This article poses 2 responses: ask for private journaling instead of public discussion, and then use the writing intentionally during class time.

From the article: "Exam wrappers are short activities that direct students to review their performance (and the instructor's feedback) on an exam with an eye toward adapting their future learning... Exam wrappers ask students three kinds of questions: How did they prepare for the exam? What kind of errors did they make on the exam? What could they do differently next time?"

This article deserves attention for opening up a professor's iterative process in figuring out the best structure for her class's online presence. I'm intrigued by the idea of using Facebook instead of or in addition to a professor-run website or Moodle page.

This chapter explores the challenges of assessing multicultural learning in a service-learning course and offers a variety of strategies for measuring student development.

A bibliography on service learning in STEM fields from the National Service-Learning Clearinghouse.

A bibliography on service learning in the mathematics curriculum from the National Service-Learning Clearinghouse. One of the resources from this summer's institute on service learning.

Links to 12 talks from a January 2011 MAA contributed paper session on service learning in college mathematics. A resource from this summer's faculty institute on community-based research and service learning.

A collection of resources on visual thinking in teaching and learning.

A quick overview of the "emerging, interdisciplinary movement which looks to enhance and to redefine traditional humanities scholarship through digital means" from the Association of College and Research Libraries. A reasonably good quick overview; check out the excellent bibliography.

Show me the data! Frankly, I think any survey that includes 722 physics faculty members has to be worthwhile -- that is quite the sample size! Moreover, this is likely to be pretty representative. While it is impressive that a very large majority (88%) were aware of certain "research-based instructional strategies," what is even more impressive is that 82% of the respondents had tried some of these strategies. True, 1/3 of these have given up and gone back to traditional lectures, but I agree with Eric Mazur's comment that this means that 2/3 are still plugging away. The follow-up studies should be interesting, especially if they shed light on what drove the 1/3 who gave up to do so.

An interesting concept map of different theories of how we learn (or learn best), and how they relate. It's admittedly oversimplified, but an interesting start. (Also an example of what you can make with mind-mapping software.)

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.

Here are some rather simple guidelines for developing online videos for your courses, pushing these to your students, and maximizing their pedagogical impact.