Here at ProfHacker, we devote about one-third of our posts (and our time) to teaching-related issues and activities. Our posts have covered, among other things, pedagogy, students, colleagues, tips, tricks, books, and lectures. We understand the importance of teaching in higher education. Nevertheless, we are not the only ones who understand it. At ProfHacker, we believe in collaboration in and the sharing of knowledge.
Back in April, George Williams (re)introduced ProfHacker readers to the Teaching Carnival, a round-up containing teaching related posts from around the blogosphere, or, what George has termed, “a traveling collection of constantly updated links to blog entries about teaching in higher education.” From 2005 to 2009, academics from all ranks and disciplines hosted the Teaching Carnival on their personal blogs. To peruse previous carnivals, head on over the Teaching Carnival’s home site.
In that spirit of collaboration, the Teaching Carnival is back. It will no longer travel from blog to blog (the way carnivals once traveled), but it will stay here and ProfHacker will be the constant host of the TC. It will, however, contain the same types of wonderful information the traveling carnival held. Each month, a new writer will collect and sort teaching-related links and will post them here. (If you are interested in writing one of these posts or contributing links to the roundup, see the info at the bottom of this page.)
OK, there have been many busy bloggers at the beginning of this semester. Let’s see what they’ve been doing the past few weeks:
Several bloggers considered the beginning of the semester in their posts:
Other bloggers wrote about the classroom and the students who will populate those spaces.
A number of bloggers wrote about pedagogy in a “how to” approaches to subjects in the classroom:
Assignments and Syllabi are another category of blog posts that are helpful to share.
- Educators are beginning to use Twitter, and Silver in San Francisco gives us his Twitter assignment.
- Kelli Marshall explains how “Teaching Seinfeld” (and other television and film examples) is relevant to the teaching she does with popular culture.
- Jeremy Boggs at Clioweb provides a working copy of his syllabus on Web Design and Usability.
- Cameron Dodd offers some tongue-in-cheek “College Writing Class Assignments with Real World Applications” at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. For example, assignment #7 instructs the writer to “Write a post-it note to your landlord with some feasible yet not cliché explanation for being late on this month’s rent.”
When professors assign work, there is always the concern about academic dishonesty.
When searching for teaching links for this Teaching Carnival, it was easy to see long-time bloggers who have also been teaching for quite some time. These bloggers cease writing about teaching (or at least not as frequently) because they are now writing about evaluation and assessment:
Teaching is something we do in higher education, but sometimes we need tools to teach effectively. The web is ripe with tools that are useful in the classroom:
Blogging, Tenure, and Promotion are other topics teaching bloggers explored over the past few months:
Lastly, an interesting video that riffs on the classic film, “12 Angry Men":
- In “12 Angry Teachers,” teachers argue whether or not to grant tenure to a colleague who uses inquiry-based methods in his teaching.
Whew! That’s a lot of reading, but we hope you find many things useful and interesting in this round up. Surely, we missed links, but we can change that in the next Carnival. Let us know about your work! You can easily have one of your blog posts about teaching in higher education included in an issue of the teaching carnival by doing any or all of the following:
- Email the next host directly with the address to the permalink of your blog post, and/or
- Tag your post in Delicious with teaching-carnival
Traci Gardner will host the next Teaching Carnival (4.2) on October 1. Please send her your links or information you’d like to have included, @newsfromtengrrl on Twitter or through email: tengrrl@gmail.com.
If you have comments, feedback, suggestions or additional links, please leave them in comments below.
[Image by Billie Hara and used under the Creative Commons license.]