Classroom
Accommodating Difference
17 Mar 2013 @17:00 — Filed in: Teaching
This has me thinking about ways I can improve my own presentations—things I generally pride myself on doing well. I now realize my idea of a good presentation might be a complete failure for some members of an audience.
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Managing Expectations
08 Feb 2013 @09:51 — Filed in: Teaching | Distance Learning
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Umbrella or Bridge
19 Jan 2013 @23:20 — Filed in: Teaching
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Built Beyond the Walls
17 Jan 2013 @16:03 — Filed in: Teaching | Distance Learning
In this talk, I take what I discovered in MOOC MOOC (and MOOC MOOC²) and apply it to classrooms, showing that the characteristics which make cMOOCs awesome can actually work with traditional, in-person instruction. Early on, I introduce MOOCs and provide a very brief history, in case the term is new.
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Intellectual Capital in FYC
13 Jan 2013 @22:40 — Filed in: Commentary
That said, I know my ideas as they stand don’t address policy as clearly as they should; I even confess as much mid-paragraph at one point. But I’m trying to show how research-driven FYC courses can help students develop their sense of and store of intellectual capital. (The conference’s theme is “Challenges and Opportunities for Improving Intellectual Capital and Research Productivity.” Again, not my usual conference.)
In this post, I present my sketch of “From Knowledge-Seeking to Knowledge-Making: Improving Intellectual Capital in First-Year Composition Courses.” I welcome any comments, dissension, argument, or rejection at this point. I’ll be adding lit review in my next revision.
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Striking up a Conversation
11 Jan 2013 @16:09 — Filed in: Teaching
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Guiding Principles
05 Jan 2013 @09:18 — Filed in: Teaching
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Breaking FYC: Ripping the Insides
02 Jan 2013 @08:56 — Filed in: Teaching
For this post, I want to focus my attention inward, rather than outward. What would happen if we questioned the core of a first year composition course while the boundaries are in flux? Could our courses still operate, how would they be structured, and what with their content be? After doing a little damage by breaking the outside of FYC, let's take some time to break apart the guts, too.
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Grading, Assessment, or Feedback?
01 Jan 2013 @13:57 — Filed in: Teaching
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Outsourcing Grading
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Defining a Discipline: Threshold Concepts as Lines of Demarcation
07 Nov 2012 @09:25 — Filed in: Teaching
In 2006, Jan Meyer and Ray Land published a book that addresses these issues and highlights some of the implications those questions have on how we teach students, especially in higher education. If we want to help students become members of a professional working group, shouldn’t we be able to tell when they’ve made it in?
A recent conversation in my department addressed our questions from this text, and we found ourselves questioning the essence of our discipline and asking what it is that makes rhetoricians/compositionists a distinct group of thinkers. These issues are not as simple to work through as you might think.
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Orchestrating a Course
13 Aug 2012 @19:13 — Filed in: Teaching | Distance Learning
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Showing the Work of Technology
16 Jun 2012 @09:28 — Filed in: Technology
Is the design of technology more like a mathematics problem or a humanities essay? Should we show our work or present only a final draft?
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The Acceptability of Ignorance
07 May 2012 @21:16 — Filed in: Teaching | Technology
Is it ever possible that ignorance, beyond allegedly being bliss, could be a good thing? What about for teachers?
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On Rubrics. Or, Do We Know What We Want?
An assignment I’m working with—the final project for Comp II—is causing me grief when it comes to assessment. One of my peers refers to me as “The Rubric Guy” because I am, in a word, obsessed with the use of rubrics for major writing assignments. For years, I have relied on a detailed, multi-column rubric to help make my assessment more consistent and my expectations more clear.
What I’ve found is that a rubric can help make my expectations more clear to me before I ever give the assignment to my students. As I’ve developed my Comp I and Comp II classes this year, I’ve never been comfortable with an assignment until I’ve finished its rubric; that’s how I know I understand what I’m expecting my students to do.
I’d like to discuss that process and the rationale behind rubrics in the face of some hearty opposition.
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What I’ve found is that a rubric can help make my expectations more clear to me before I ever give the assignment to my students. As I’ve developed my Comp I and Comp II classes this year, I’ve never been comfortable with an assignment until I’ve finished its rubric; that’s how I know I understand what I’m expecting my students to do.
I’d like to discuss that process and the rationale behind rubrics in the face of some hearty opposition.
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Between Print and Web: Digital Portfolios
Many English composition classes currently use portfolios as a means of assessment. These involve countless sheets of paper and some very large staples to collect student work into a single representative document. Some teachers are transitioning to ePortfolios, in which students build a website to host their portfolios, often as a series of individual PDFs.
Based on a poster presentation from last week, I propose a middle ground: digital portfolios that retain the single-document approach of a familiar traditional portfolio, but using documents that employ more advanced design elements to take advantage of the electronic medium.
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Based on a poster presentation from last week, I propose a middle ground: digital portfolios that retain the single-document approach of a familiar traditional portfolio, but using documents that employ more advanced design elements to take advantage of the electronic medium.
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Let's Go Back…to the Future
05 Mar 2012 @09:24 — Filed in: Technology | Commentary
Wrapping up a collection of recent comments on the promising or problematic nature of technological developments in education, I argue that what was thought back in the 1940s should be brought back to our attention, and that the technological developments of the past 40 years have served to distract that attention from the real business of learning: the work and the content.
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On Engagement. Or, What Makes Learning Real?
26 Feb 2012 @15:02 — Filed in: Teaching
Teachers often crave students who are “engaged” with their learning, and new technologies often flaunt how “engaged” they get students to be. But are we really setting the right expectations for our education system, and are those really the goals we should have for our tech (or our students)?
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The Sound of Productivity
03 May 2011 @18:40 — Filed in: Working
After reading an article about the merits of working from coffee shops, I find myself wondering whether the working environment of classrooms are as authentic as we think.
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Putting Schoolwork on Refrigerator Doors
16 Mar 2011 @19:54 — Filed in: Teaching
If we work to make classrooms more like the “real world” outside schools, where will grades come from? How can we be sure everyone participates? How can we be sure everyone learns?
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Testing, Testing: 1…2…3?
16 Mar 2011 @16:18 — Filed in: Teaching
Our nation’s schools are obsessed with grades and tests. But where in the world (no…literally) is the concept of formal testing used outside the education institution? Why do we accept “good enough” as sufficient to graduate?
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Making Students Bloom: What Can They Create?
03 Mar 2011 @18:34 — Filed in: Teaching
New advances in technology are making me reconsider which steps of Bloom’s taxonomy we need to pay attention to. As computers are able to do more for us, the nature of our education goals need to change accordingly.
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Counting Words
Throughout our educational careers, we are taught to count words as a measure of completeness for our writing. But why? And what qualities of writing end up taking priority?
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When Does the Criticism Start?
23 Jan 2011 @14:36 — Filed in: Teaching
A recent class conversation got me pondering the scarcity of critical thinking in our culture.
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Thinking Allowed/Aloud
02 Jan 2011 @10:30 — Filed in: Writing
Here, I explain the title of the blog.
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