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Writing as an exercise in learning

The Stanford University professor who taught an online artificial intelligence course to more than 160,000 students has abandoned his tenured position to aim for an even bigger audience.

Academics have held the online, user-written reference work in some disdain, said Mahzarin R. Banaji, a psychology professor at Harvard University, "but now I'm hearing nothing but enthusiasm, and I really think this is going to work." Ms. Banaji, the association's president, has put the prestige of a leading scholarly group-and her own name-behind the project, which involves a new interface custom-designed to make encyclopedia entries easier to write and edit, a nascent social network that links scholars who share interests, and tutorials for professors on ways to make writing for Wikipedia part of course assignments.

This Princeton English professor has written more than 3,200 short essays on Facebook and shared them with his students.

Colleges and professors have rushed to try a new form of online teaching known as MOOCs-short for "massive open online courses." The courses raise questions about the future of teaching, the value of a degree, and the effect technology will have on how colleges operate. Struggling to make sense of it all? On this page you'll find highlights from The Chronicle's coverage of MOOCs.

I thought some of you might be interested in following this blog.

There is a tendency in universities today to think of teachers as, like sales people and politicians, interested in outcomes. And so there is a tendency for teachers to treat their students in the way sales people treat their clients and politicians treat the voters: without respect. Professors these days, as well as our graduate student assistants, are encouraged to approach the classroom as a social engineer might. We are prodded to think about how most effectively to seat the students, to organize them into working groups; journals, wikis, presentations, and such like, are devices we are told to use to restructure the classroom experience. And we are encouraged to get ourselves videotaped and so, in general, to come to think of ourselves as teaching professionals whose main concern is student outcomes. Now there is nothing wrong with working hard to make the classroom the most exciting place it can be. But we are not social engineers and students are not products we are manufacturing. To think of students that way is to insult them and it is to make genuine teaching and learning impossible. Students, like citizens, are free and equal, and they have the power of reason; they can make up their own minds and can discover and enforce their own conceptions of value and truth and meaning. To view them as any less is to view them the way politicians so often view the public, without respect.

This course, with 36 undergraduates, was one of twenty-five new interdisciplinary courses approved by my institution to address "new problems" facing society and to experiment with new teaching and learning strategies. The goals of the class are to use and evaluate various social media in the contexts of information production, sharing, consumption, teaching, and learning. Since the course is open to all majors, one of my goals as a journalism professor is to tap a diverse group of students to gain a better understanding of how digital information and social media are utilized in different disciplines. This "hybrid" course combines class meetings with the use of more than ten different social media tools during the 12-week semester. Some tools take the place of more traditional teaching methods such as papers and written exams.

according to Dr. Gary Small, a neuroscientist & professor at UCLA, who spoke at the Learning & the Brain Conference, "The technology train has left. You have to deal with it, understand it, and get some perspective."

Through collaboration between the Thompson Writing Program and the university's office of alumni affairs, the Duke Reader Project offers our faculty members a way to supplement their own responses to their students' writing. When professors include their courses in the project, their students can get comments on drafts of papers from an alumnus or employee who has relevant experience in the field, like the Coast Guard commander or the wildlife expert.

As its name suggests, flipping describes the inversion of expectations in the traditional college lecture. It takes many forms, including interactive engagement, just-in-time teaching (in which students respond to Web-based questions before class, and the professor uses this feedback to inform his or her teaching), and peer instruction. But the techniques all share the same underlying imperative: Students cannot passively receive material in class, which is one reason some students dislike flipping. Instead they gather the information largely outside of class, by reading, watching recorded lectures, or listening to podcasts.

How one professor uses a MOOC and its resources to flip his own classes.

Reacting to the Past (RTTP) is a series of elaborate games, set in the past, where students take on the roles of historical characters, and through arguments and gameplay, have the potential to reshape history. In order for students to "win" the game, they have to thoroughly master literary and historical texts for their games' time period, and to be able to fight against their in-game opponents through a series of oral presentations and written work. In other words, students in Reacting to the Past have to basically do everything their professors want them to do in a college class-read and analyze texts, learn about historical contexts, learn how to construct forceful and convincing arguments-but in the guise of a game.

Our question is whether IT staff in academic environments might not aspire to a vital mission: to being something more than consumers and cheerleaders for commercial products.

This looks like something the Economic & Business professors may want to follow. How will this new social networking affect businesses?

Some excellent questions for building an assignment. Look beyond the writing assignment pedagogy to the general aspects of any assignment.