During this year’s Decatur Book Festival, second-year Brittain Fellow John Harkey read from a book he recently edited: “Homemade Poems,” Lorine Niedecker’s handmade book of poems from 1964. Lorine Niedecker was an American “objectivist” poet who explored conjunctions between plain, vernacular language and experimental techniques such as disjunction, wordplay, and… Continue reading
Former Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow, Robert Blaskiewicz, now in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire, is featured in an article in the most recent issue of Georgia Tech’s Alumni Magazine, “The Article They Don’t Want You to Read.” As a Brittain Fellow, Bob Blaskiewicz taught courses about… Continue reading
In addition to finalizing the schedule for the rest of the semester, this Wednesday’s D-Ped seminar will be the first of two seminars that focus on multimodal theory. See the lists below for required and supplementary readings. Begin the conversation before Wednesday by using the Comments feature below. The next two… Continue reading
This week in Profhacker, Ryan Cordell itemizes some particularly valuable Mac apps to help with process and organization. I am a long-term Things user (synced on Mac, iPad and iPhone), love Scrivener, and am gradually pulling all of my various bibliographies into Zotero. What life hacks do you use? Back… Continue reading
Edward Burger teaches his students “how to fail effectively.” Interesting notes on incorporating failure into class discussion. And he goes into enough detail about assessing failure that you wish he’d provide more. Essay on the importance of teaching failure | Inside Higher Ed. Continue reading
Last week Matthew Kirschenbaum reflected on how his writing process as changed, from his dissertation to his first book to his current work. Interesting reflections! On Tradecraft and Track Changes (An Update). Continue reading
About a thousand years after everyone else, I came across Feminist Ryan Gosling, and despite having seen only one Ryan Gosling movie—Drive, in which he “Hey’s” nary a girl, but does assault someone with a hammer—I enjoyed reading through the entries. But I knew I was late to the party when… Continue reading
As a client-based course, my technical communication class at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta functions like a hybrid between a college class and a consulting firm, with the students working in teams to compose websites, marketing strategies, reports, manuals, and a variety of other artifacts for local nonprofits and small businesses. Continue reading
I came across this piece while planning an 1101 assignment that will require students to analyze web texts through Voyant. “Could we imagine a world in which ‘Here is an ordered list of the books you should read,’ gives way to, ‘Here is what I found. What did you find?’ via… Continue reading
Third-year Brittain Fellow Malavika Shetty’s new children’s book, The Sweetest Mango, has just been published by Tulika Books. The picture book, illustrated by Ajanta Guhathakurta, is written for children five years and older. and is available in English, Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, and Bengali. Continue reading
Karen Head emailed this photo of her with Doris Bremm and Regina Martin clearly enjoying Barcelona. Continue reading
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
On April 26, 1478, as part of a plot against the Medici, conspirators attempted to assassinate Lorenzo de’ Medici and his brother Giuliano in the Duomo at high mass. Giuliano died but Lorenzo escaped. The reverberations of this daring plot, known as the Pazzi conspiracy after the family who… Continue reading
Being a teacher can be incredibly rewarding. I feel fortunate to work in an environment where I can focus on becoming a better teacher and collaborate with other progressive pedagogues (couldn’t resist that). It is easy to get caught up in the prepping and marking and research and committee meetings… Continue reading
Two weeks ago, my students displayed their final projects in the third floor gallery space in Clough. For the final installment of my “Myth in the Classroom” column, I thought I’d reflect back on what I learned, what I enjoyed, and what I struggled with in putting the exhibit together… Continue reading
Assistant Professor Karen Head and Brittain Fellow Nirmal Trivedi were recognized this year with Course Instructor Opinion Survey (CIOS) Teaching Excellence Awards.
Katy Crowther, Diane Jakacki, and Christine Hoffmann sat down with Karen and Nirmal to ask them a few questions about course evaluations, teacher-student relationships, and their work in the Communications Center. A transcript of this enlightening interview follows.
KC: Thank you for agreeing to sit down with us. We have some questions, but obviously we can just have a conversation. First of all, congratulations on your awards.
KH: Thanks. Continue reading
In the last unit of my course on copia, we’ve been looking at early modern pamphlets alongside 20- and 21st-century political campaign commercials. Oddly enough, students seem to enjoy the pamphlets more than the videos. The latter they’ve been quick to dismiss as simple-minded, pathos-driven exaggerations. They’re less eager to judge the pamphlets that, in their own heyday, were dismissed as “small, insignificant, ephemeral, disposable, untrustworthy, unruly, noisy, deceitful, poorly printed, addictive, a waste of time” (from Joad Raymond’s Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain, 10). It’s been more difficult for students to see how materials so loaded with elaborate, expressive and dexterous prose could be considered as insignificant and disposable as, well, this. Continue reading
Diane Jakacki and Tom Lolis (2nd year Britts) presented on Digital Pedagogy and Early Modern Studies at the Renaissance Society of America conference in Washington DC on March 23. Three sessions, sponsored by the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies and organized by Jakacki, featured nine speakers and a roundtable… Continue reading
Rachel Dean-Ruzicka (1st Year Brittain Fellow) presented a paper titled “How the Specter of Death Complicates the Image of the Nazi Bogeyman in Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief” at the recent International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts conference in Orlando, Florida. The conference focused on the idea of… Continue reading
Here is some digital pedagogy news from former Brittain Fellow Sipai Klein Tweet! Clayton State New York Times Talk on Twitter, Civic Engagement and Knowledge, March 30 Morrow, Ga., Mar. 27, 2012 — Clayton State University’s partnership with the New York Times continued on Friday, Mar. 30, with a New York Times Talk that focused on one of the… Continue reading
One thing that stands out in our conversations these past weeks is just how amorphous the term “hybrid” actually is, both pedagogically and methodologically. In the past few weeks we’ve talked about tools and platforms, shared successes and failures in our own intentional and un-intentional forays into hybrid pedagogy (however… Continue reading
Julia Munro presents at the Northeast Modern Language Association 2012 conference in Rochester, New York (March 16-18). Her paper — “‘It Tells a Story to the Eye’: Photography and Visualizations of Racial Anxiety” — is part of the panel, “Sex, Blood, and Hybridity: The Discourse of Racial Anxiety in Antebellum Writing,”… Continue reading
