Category Archives: digital pedagogy

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“Education, Technology, and Society”

  October 26, 2014 , , , , ,

This week I sat in on the two presentations given by Rich Halverson on : Education, Technology, and Society Speaker Series Center for Instructional Innovation.   Much of his presentation was analyzing how technology does and can influence the way we educate and the way we learn.  Although some of the discussion was giving an overview of various approaches to education currently being used, what I found most interesting was his comment on the way kids and young adults communicate and interact with each other and the world. You no longer call you friend to make plans to meet, go to the public library to do research, or have to meet up in person to play a game- everything can be done remotely. You what information on a research topic for school, google it. You want to know where your friend is to see if they want to have lunch? Just see what they last tweeted or put on facebook, see if they have checked in somewhere or send a quick text.  Want to get with your friends and play the newest video game? Just get online and talk via your game console or computer.  Basic human interaction is not the same , yet the way we approach the classroom and education is shockingly stagnant. I believe in much of the traditional concepts utilized ino our public systems, but that is also in part because I do and have succeeded in them.  I am one of the few people I know … Continue reading

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More about Timelines and their Uses

  October 23, 2014 , ,

Timelines can be useful in teaching in a variety of ways. The most obvious is having students create a timeline on a particular topic that can be represented chronologically or progressively.  The choices the student makes of what to include on the timeline and what to say about the events not only help the student learn the material, but also to analyze the available information for what is most salient about the topic. The teacher can also use timelines to present material to students in a way to better illustrate the kind of connections events have within a span of time.  A timeline might open class discussions about how and in what ways an event affected other events that followed; or visualizing events on a timeline could reveal that previous assumptions of associations weren’t really so. Further, a class can contribute to a timeline tied to a teacher’s web site (or D2L), and multiple classes can contribute entries from semester to semester, creating an on-going wiki of sorts.  In this way, the entries by previous students serve to teach subsequent students and provide models of a successful entry.  (Eventually, depending on the topic, the wiki timeline would need to be taken down and started blank again for a new round of classes.)  George Pullman in the English department (and the co-director of CII) uses this approach in his Greek Rhetoric class—his timeline is meant to gather a “chronology of events thought to be significant to the development of Rhetoric,” and … Continue reading

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Rhet/Comp, Durkheim, Hybrid Pedagogy, and Me

  October 20, 2014 , , , ,

In the last 7 or so weeks as a SIF, I have learned more than I ever imagined I would. A few weeks ago, I decided to write an article featuring the SIF program. In a stroke of benevolence, Brennan gave me permission to spend some of my hours developing the article. So I set to work – basing the article on a footnote I harvested from Emile Durkheim’s sociologically ground breaking book The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life written in 1912: “A tool is material accumulated capital.” When I read that note, I knew I was going to use it for something – but I wasn’t sure what – until I began to read Writing Teachers Writing Software by rhetoric and composition scholar Paul LeBlanc. The article I wrote went live this morning at 3am on Hybrid Pedagogy. Here is the link: Addressing the Elephant: The Importance of Infrastructure