As the editor of TECHstyle this year, I’ve exhorted my colleagues on a regular basis to “bang out a post – it only takes 15 minutes”! Yet here I sit, mulling on this “end-of-the-year” reflection post and I find I have nowhere to start and no idea how to write… Continue reading
It’s that time of year again, and the Brittain Fellows are reflecting on the year in the rear-view mirror. The value of reflecting on the work we have done is something we emphasize to our students, and yet it is something we often fail to do ourselves. Yet we can all benefit from sitting down to ask ourselves questions like: What went well this semester? What didn’t? What will I do differently next time? What have I learned? As Karen Head, the director of Georgia Tech’s Communication Center, mentioned in her recent interview for TECHStyle, reflecting on the same questions as our students and then comparing our answers can be extremely insightful – do the students see our successes and failures the same way? Does their understanding of the goals and outcomes of the course align with our own? Reflection, however, should not just cover our teaching, but our achievements in scholarship, our progress on large projects, our work-life balance, and whether we are staying focused on our larger priorities and goals. Continue reading
This week, in our weekly Brittain Fellow Research Methodology seminar on Hybrid Pedagogy, we discussed using Twitter as a tool for creating a “back-channel” of conversation at conferences, lectures, and in the classroom. Our conversation constituted the “face-to-face” component of our own hybrid classroom; our session technically began last week when we all attended the Emory DISC lecture “Seeing Time” by Edward L. Ayers during which we used a twitter back-channel (#discayers) to have a synchronous discussion about the talk. We then continued our conversation asynchronously on TECHStyle by commenting on Robin Wharton’s write up of the event “What Should a Hybrid Classroom Look like?” during the week leading up to our Wednesday evening Research Methodology seminar.
In our “face-to-face” discussion, we shared our experience using the Twitter back-channel during the talk, and many of us expressed feeling distracted by the effort to listen to the speaker … Continue reading
In early January, I made the trek to Seattle for the 2012 MLA convention. I was excited to be there, not only because Seattle is a very cool town, but because I was participating in an “electronic roundtable” devoted to digital pedagogy along with some very cool people. The roundtable,… Continue reading
As a way to bring the year to a close, I asked the Brittain Fellows to answer the following question: “Looking back over the fall semester, what are you most proud of?” Here’s a round-up of their answers:
Leeann Hunter: This semester, I actively transformed the classroom into a space where innovation could thrive. I found that students largely benefited from the experimental nature of the course and what I called “Invention Mobs” and “Professional Interventions.” It’s the first class that I’ve taught that I would teach again and again. For more information about the course, visit my website at www.leeannhunter.com/invention.
Julia Munro: I’m proud of, and impressed by, the creative work that the first-year Gatech students (in my 1101 classes, and other 1101-1102 classes) come up with to meet the challenge of our multimodal assignments.
Aaron Kashtan: I’m proud of having gotten my students to notice typography. Continue reading
A World Englishes Tertulia will be held on Wednesday, November 30, 2011 between 4 and 5 pm in Clough Commons Suite 447. The workshop will address various methods of providing effective feedback to students in our contemporary multilingual and multicultural classrooms. In particular, we will focus on the multiple perspectives reflected in student… Continue reading
I had an “a-ha” moment in first-year composition class last week. I was preparing for a conference, writing job letters, preparing my classes, and trying to keep up with grading. In short, something had to give. But what? And then it hit me – Blog Post of the Week! Every… Continue reading
Last Monday, I attended one of the Workshops on Digital Scholarship being offered through the Emory Digital Scholarship Commons this semester. This series offers workshops on a variety of topics ranging from “Creating an Online Presence I: Take Control of Your Online Personality” to “Hack Your Theme: Customize WordPress Themes… Continue reading
I’m putting together a book proposal and would love advice/feedback/comments from those of you who have been through this before. What is the most helpful thing someone told you when you started working on one? What did you learn from the process? What do you think is the most important… Continue reading
This semester I have the privilege to be a participant in the Class of 1969 Teaching Scholars program here at Georgia Tech. We (a small group of faculty members, instructors, and staff from a variety of disciplines) meet once a week to discuss issues related to our seminar topic, “student engagement.” I am learning so much from our sessions, not only from the readings and discussions, but from the techniques our seminar leaders use to engage us with the topic at hand.
his week I took part in an exercise that I’m now excited to try in my class: the gallery walk.
The exercise required us to read an article on how students learn, looking at the way the brain changes when new information is stored and recalled. Continue reading
I’ve been using blogs for a long time in my classes as a place for informal writing and reflection. I originally used the blogs as simply an online repository to store weekly response readings but the more I’ve used them, the more I find that the actual medium creates a particularly dynamic… Continue reading
It’s that time of year and we’re all thinking “syllabus.” At least we were about a week or two ago – now with classes underway most of us have finalized our syllabi and distributed them to our new classes. Or did you? I didn’t. Well, distribute them that is. I’ve… Continue reading
At the end of the semester I like to take some time to look back at the classes I just taught and evaluate how they actually turned out. It always feels like a leap of faith to me, trusting that the syllabus I created in the quiet summer months and… Continue reading
My class this semester revolved around the idea of people, material artifacts, and information that are “born digital.” As my class blurb explains, “for people, this means that they are born into, and have only ever known, a world that prioritizes all forms of digitization; for materials and information, it… Continue reading
