Posts that focus primarily on teaching and pedagogy.
The first week of never-completely-successful classes always prompts some serious, not necessarily helpful reflection. No harm in reflecting electronically, I guess. I don’t know how many others of you do this, but when I’m introducing myself to new students as their teacher of writing and communication, I become increasingly aware… Continue reading
Hello! I’m joining y’all at Tech from Eugene, Oregon. I just finished a two year postdoc at the University of Oregon, which is also where I received my PhD in English in 2009. Prior to that, I earned an MA in Classical Languages, Literatures, and Cultures from the University of… Continue reading
I’m thrilled to be joining a group of teachers and scholars from whom I can already tell I will be pilfering many valuable ideas and resources. In fact, the pilfering has already begun. Fellow Emory alums and current Britts Katy Crowther and Michelle Miles have been very generous with their… Continue reading
The temperature is hovering around 95 and we are hurrying to put the finishing touches on our course syllabi. Yes, it’s that time again: a new school year at Georgia Tech. And with it comes a new cohort of Brittain Fellows. They may not yet realize it, but they are… Continue reading
As we prepare for the new semester, we asked two Brittain Fellows to reflect on their teaching experiences during the last semester. Regina Martin Teaching Modernism at Tech Modernism lends itself really well to teaching multimodal communication at Tech because much of modernist art is heavily influenced by technological advancements… Continue reading
We asked Brittain Fellows who will be moving on from the program to reflect upon their experiences. Four Britts rose to the challenge; as you’ll see, the perspectives of Jo Anne Harris, Crystal Lake, Melissa Meeks and Paulette Richards are varied but share an enthusiasm for the time they have… Continue reading
“We already have an UnPress and it is called the internet” – Trevor Owens THATCamp Prime, at George Mason University’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, taught me that a word does not make a new publishing model. The UnPress session was, surprisingly perhaps only to my naive… Continue reading
I spend a lot of time trying to simplify how I work on computers. I know I’m not alone in trying to make sense out of how best to utilize and integrate my three computers, iPhone, and iPad for teaching and research. I expect we all have our favorite life… Continue reading
March 17 was Celebrating Teaching Day at Georgia Tech. As part of the festivities, a number of Brittain Fellows presented posters of their successful approaches to improving student learning. Those whose work was displayed included Doris Bremm, Kathryn Crowther, Andrew Famiglietti, Jo Anne Harris, Robert LeBlanc, Jennifer Parrott, Paulette Richards,… Continue reading
As a master’s student in my introductory theory course, I became particularly enamored by Roland Barthes’s essay “Why I Love Benveniste.” At the end of the essay, Barthes says that Working with him, with his texts […],we always recognize the generosity of a man who seems to listen to the… Continue reading
Hours of browsing the web for information or entertainment have made us savvy clickers on the Internet highways. We intuitively know the most efficient way to navigate a page using colors, images, and hyperlinks as visual cues. Stop and think for a moment though. What if you cannot see or… Continue reading
The Parachut<e> addresses broader issues of digital pedagogy in the context of an advice column for piloters of the <emma> LMS at Georgia Tech. For those of you who are new to The Parachut<e> and <emma>, you can find a more detailed discussion of both here. This week’s post evolved from… Continue reading
Last fall in my English 1101 course on celebrity culture, I had my students analyze the real-time media discourse surrounding the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear”. Once again I find myself drawn to teaching current events as they unfold. This term I am teaching ENGL 2400:… Continue reading
What is the Parachut<e>? This semester, the Director and Assistant Director of the Writing and Communication Program here at Georgia Tech approved a pilot program for a learning technology that I have been helping to design and build for the last several years. <emma> is a learning management system that… Continue reading
On the eve of his return to Canaan, your biblical namesake, Jacob, wrestled with an angel until daybreak. What force is your greatest challenge on your journey to “The Promised Land?” You walk into the room and take a seat before a firing squad of six interviewers. For an arduous… Continue reading
‘Write a reflection piece on this last term.’ That sounded like a reasonable task and one I would be able to knock out quickly – in the midst of trying to finish marking and prepare to fly home for the holidays (if anyone has any suggestions what I can get… Continue reading
This semester I taught a course on collaborative consumption. According to Rachel Botsman, who coined the phrase in What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, collaborative consumption has emerged from “digital interactions” that have enabled consumers to “experience the concept that cooperation does not need to come at… 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
For the end of the Fall semester, I challenged six Brittain Fellows to give me a reflection on the difficulties and the triumphs experienced in their courses. What follows is a series of meditations on a wide variety of pedagogical subjects: from presentations of student projects to theories of student… Continue reading
Students who went to these labs encountered fields of knowledge that they did not know existed. 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
On November 18, the Georgia Tech Writing and Communication Program hosted the Fall Communication Colloquium in which two Brittain Fellows presented on work their students have been doing in class this semester. The presenters did such a wonderful job generating discussion during the sessions (a link to an archive of… Continue reading
Last month, while attending a Caribbean Island Cultures conference held at the University of Guyana in Georgetown, Guyana, I was jolted out of my usual polite conference attentiveness when a series of papers suddenly shifted away from the usual focus on such traditional island cultures as Storytelling, Carnival or post-colonial… Continue reading
On November 18, the Georgia Tech Writing and Communication Program hosted the Fall Communication Colloquium in which two Brittain Fellows presented on work their students have been doing in class this semester. The presenters did such a wonderful job generating discussion during the sessions (a link to an archive of… Continue reading
To mark Open Access week, on Thursday, October 21, Georgia Tech’s Library and Information Center sponsored a panel, “Expanding the Reach of Your Research: An Open Forum on Authorship and Your Intellectual Property.” Evans Harrell (School of Sciences, Mathematics) facilitated, and TyAnna Herrington Continue reading
