doctoral candidate in rhetoric and scientific and technical communication
education
viral
0I hate to perpetuate viral videos except that some of them are worth promoting. The Digital Ethnography Group at Kansas State University regularly put out videos that make us think, ponder this social networking we do, and look at what we’re doing in a new way. It’s no surprise that this newest video makes us think about what we’re doing.
I saw it the first day it came out (a few weeks ago) and put it in my YouTubes favorites to think about and hold until I was ready to talk about it.
Having been a student for the past (*cough*) few years and an instructor this semester, I can say that many of these things are true — but not all of them and not for all students. What I think is important about this video is that it may make us look at education a little differently.
Lecturing from the front of a room doesn’t work. It hasn’t ever worked for all students. They aren’t engaged, their brains aren’t being challenged. Hearing a voice droning on and on about topics that most students won’t find interesting is a waste of the students’ and instructor’s time.
Instead, instructor’s should be out talking to the students, working with them, understanding how the topic will work within their interests and how they can build on the things they know to incorporate what can be learned in this course. If students are bringing laptops, iPods, ultra-mobile PCs, and cell phones to class, how can those tools be used to incorporate learning? What can we share with our students about sites like Facebook and MySpace to encourage them to use those sites responsibly (and this is a topic I’ll come back to later since it is my call to arms statement in my thesis)?
Where can we facillitate learning and not just give directed instructions? I think that we, as instructors, learn just as much when we open a classroom up and promote conversation than when we stand in front of a classroom and lecture. That type of instruction isn’t any fun for anyone.
close and closer
0 
The big news is the bridge collapse in Minneapolis. I am sure you’ve all heard the news by now and we’re still getting updates on how many have lost their lives and how many are injured. It is heartbreaking.
It is feeling a little closer to home simply because yesterday morning I was speaking to the head of the University of Minnesota’s Rhetoric and Scientific and Technical Communication department on the phone. She and I spent about an hour discussing her program, other programs, and opportunities for my success as a PhD candidate at any school.
I had joked about all of my school choices being back east and she retorted that Minnesota is NOT east. Ummm…but it’s east of here. Almost everything is east of here (and if that big earthquake came along and the planets aligned just right and the oceans surged and a black hole swallowed the universe as we know it, this could be the far west).
She gave me some wonderful advice. She said they’d like to see me visit their campus this fall. She gave me a LOT of information and my head is still swimming from it. There is so much to think about.
Today I’m hoping that she is ok. I’m sending my deepest condolences and thoughts out to everyone out there.
And I’m looking forward to seeing their beautiful twin cities in the near future.
xtimeline
04 years ago
I happened across this web site yesterday in my feed travels. It’s a relatively new site that is geared toward making timelines. xtimeline allows you to make timelines for anything.
This started me thinking about the uses in education. History is a given, right? I mean, I have a few history classes that I’m working on and I can imagine a faculty member either using this or having her students use it to make a relative timeline to a paper or to what they think is the important information in the class. What amazing feedback that could offer.
But imagine that you’re a literature teacher (ahem, miss ashley, are you paying attention???). Say you’re teaching Pride and Prejudice. Well, we have two obvious things here (probably many more now that I really start to think about it). We have the timeline of the book itself. Can we track the characters and what they are doing, with whom and when? Also, we can look at Austen’s life and track where she was when she wrote it and where she lived, traveled, etc. while this book was being written, published, promoted, etc. But we could also track world happenings at the time that might have influenced Austen – what other books were published, what societal happenings occurred, what the weather was like, etc. We could track the literary criticisms of P&P over time and how those changed according to time periods, social influences, and political environments. This could get students thinking outside the box, which is really good when critical thinking is a new concept to them.
Physics, chemistry, geology, business admin, psychology — I can see this being a useful tool in any of those area. Getting outside of “traditional” education (those darned liberal arts), I could see this being used in forestry, recreational education, or even dental hygiene classes (track the progress of patients over time).
We use timelines in a lot of our classes. Typically an instructor will request a timeline to be developed and we do so according to their request. But what if the power was put back into the students’ hands and they created timelines to show what they are learning in the classroom? This is the kind of assessment tool that could be fun and interesting — and educational.
This is not a paid advertisement. I just found the site and thought it was cool and wanted to share it with my readers.