Teaching Carnival 4.2

[October's Teaching Carnival is from Traci Gardner, a blogger and social media educator. She blogs on Teaching in the 21st Century for Bedford/St. Martin's Bits and publishes educational resources on ReadWriteThink. You can email her at tengrrl@gmail.com or follow her updates on literacy and education in the news at @newsfromtengrrl.]

Did you notice the smell of deep-fried Twinkies in the air? That’s right. It’s time for another Teaching Carnival, the monthly round-up of blog posts on teaching and issues in higher ed.

Last month, Billie Hara hosted the carnival and showed us dozens of great links. As she explained then, ProfHacker has become the permanent home of the Teaching Carnival, so each month you can return for a snapshot of the most recent thoughts on teaching in college and university classrooms. You can find previous carnivals on Teaching Carnival’s home site.

Now without further delay, step right this way to see what’s going in in teaching and higher ed.

The Carnival Midway: Assignments, Teaching Strategies, and Pedagogical Queries

• Benedict Carey of the New York Times tells us how “Research Upends Traditional Thinking on Study Habits.” Dana S. Dunn from Psychology Today considers the issues more deeply in “Studying? Great–But Get a Plan!“
• Nate Kogan of The History Channel This Is Not asks students to focus on critical content analysis in The “Crap Detection” Assignment, or “If you can’t create a nice title, then don’t create one at all.”
• Greg Glau and Chitralekha Duttagupta’s Bedford Bibliography for Teachers of Basic Writing, 3rd Edition is now available online.
• Jo(e) of the blog Writing as Jo(e) describes an outdoor retreat and class discussion session for environmental science students in “Outdoor Classroom.”
• Rick Reis from Tomorrow’s Professor Blog explains the benefits of partnering with students in “Team Teaching With Students.”
• Barclay Barrios of Bedford Bits ask students to connect readings to current events with “Teaching a Meme: Antoine Dodson.”
• Kathryn Tomasek from Teaching History Digitally shares her IT success story in “Collaborative Pedagogy.”
• The Writing in Digital Environments (WIDE) Research Center from Michigan State explores how students think about writing and compose in the WIDE Study on FYC + Revisualizing Composition.
• Bradley Dilger of CDB reflects on the WIDE Study and laments that students do not see the value of “Taking Notes.”
• Shannon Mattern and a team of investigators from The New Everyday examine the literacy practices of those who write “Notes, Lists, and Everyday Inscriptions.”
• Erin Daniels from College & Research Libraries News offers librarians in “Ten tips for teaching college freshmen.”
• Traci Gardner of Bedford Bits invites students to analyze persuasive techniques in “Analyzing Cigarette Ads from the Past.”
• Erica Swenson Danowitz and Carol Videon from College & Research Libraries News offer a handy collection of “Native American resources: Sites for online research.” Be sure to save it for use in November, which is Native American Heritage Month!
• Smitesh Bakrania from Rowan University teaches students the basics of presentation in the YouTube video “Get Prepared to Present Well.”
• Alex Reid of Digital Digs talks about his strategies for “Teaching Invention.”
• Derek Bruff offers “Teaching Using Clickers and Games: Some Ideas and a Request for More.”
• Maria H. Andersen of Teaching College Math explains the answer to the question “What IS a Learning Futurist?“
• Christopher Peterson of Psychology Today’s The Good Life talks about the University of Michigan’s exploration of “Teaching Positive Psychology to an Entire University.”

Fasten Your Seatbelt: Technology and Social Media in the Classroom

• The Pew Internet and American Life Project has released a new report “The Rise of Apps Culture,” which explores the ways adults use smartphones.
• Alex Hartov and Lewis Glinert of Dartmouth College invite you to listen to over 20,000 tracks in the Dartmouth Jewish Sound Archive.
• Austin Carr of Fast Company reflects on the effects of a recent campus-wide unplugging in “Harrisburg University’s Social Media Ban Lifted, Addictions Soothed.” Lauren Melcher of The Huffington Post offers a related warning: “Colleges: Ignore Technology Literacy at Your Own Risk.”
• Kelli Marshall of Unmuzzled Thoughts discusses the process of “Teaching 200 Students How to Tweet: The Challenges” and “The Rewards.”
• Paige Chapman of Wired Campus explains that at St. John’s College there will be “No Homer on Your iPads, Please.”
• Faith Merino of Vator News provides a timeline that shows how “Technologies that have changed college life,” and the New York Times Interactive Feature showcases “The Evolution of Classroom Technology,” beginning with the Horn-Book.
• Ryan Hoover of The Power of Persuasion muses on “The Death of HTML in the Classroom.”
• Kashmir Hill on the Forbes blog The Not-So Private Parts describes “How Karen Owen and Tyler Clementi Lost Control.”

Bumper Cars in the Funhouse: Ethics and Other Sticky Professional Issues on Campus

• Dan Ariely from Irrationally Yours explores the issue of academic dishonesty: in “Plagiarism and essay mills.”
• Michael Roth of The Huffington Post discusses the “Virtuous Circle of Teaching and Research.”
• Thomas H. Benton from The Chronicle of Higher Education explores the public perception of the professoriate in “Why Do They Hate Us?” and Steve Krause counters in his response “I dunno, I don’t think they hate me…“
• Jef Akst of The Scientist asks “When is self-plagiarism ok?“
• Karen Hoelscher and Carmen Werder offer the first of a series of Faculty Writing Workshop pieces with “Writing for Academe: A Series on Dialogue, Mentoring, and Motivation” in Inside Higher Ed.
• Scott Jaschik invites teachers to complete a Coalition on the Academic Workforce survey in his “Documenting Adjunct Work.”
• The Association for Computing in the Humanties along with ProfHacker now offer a place to ask about anything related to to scholarly activity in the digital humanities with their Digital Humanities Questions & Answers board.
• Carmen Tejeda-Delgado of Inside Higher Ed’s Career Advice talks about the tenure process in “Things I Wish I Had Known.”
• David Leibow of The Huffington Post explains “The Number One Cause of College Unhappiness.”
• Valerie Strauss of The Answer Sheet asks about the people on campus who knew and did nothing in “Tyler Clementi and all of the bystanders.”

Certified Safe to Ride: Assessment in the College Classroom and on Campus

• Sara Webb-Sunderhaus from Writing on the Margins reflects on “What Is an F?“
• Derek Bruff explains why participation grades may not work the way teachers intend in “A Case Against Class Participation Grades: Negating and Remaking Social Contracts.”
• Mark Sample of ProfHacker describes how he grades student blog entries in “A Rubric for Evaluating Student Blogs.”
• University of Wollongong has developed a new tool that makes students’s participation on discussion board visual with their SNAPP: Social Networks Adapting Pedagogical Practice.
• Eric Hansen of ProfHacker encourages students to do a bit of self assessment with “Checklists: Giving Assignments a Facelift.”
• Sandra Schroeder of FACE Talk suggests the issues that must come up if The White House Summit on Community Colleges.is to be a success in “What We Must Discuss at to the Community College Summit.”
• Stan Katz of Brainstorm, The Chronicle Review‘s blog, urges reader to spend some time “Assessing Assessment.”

Beware The Clowns: A Little Educational Humor

• Sam at Copperbadge offers us a glimpse of what T. S. Eliot might have written if he were around today in “The .DOC File of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
• Lane Smith, children’s book illustrator, pokes fun at the differences between paper and pixels in the promo for his new picture book, “It’s a Book.” The Wall Street Journal interview of Smith explains more about the book.
• Jim Aune at the Blogora points us to a compilation of snippets from The Simpsons that satirizes Ph.Ds and graduate students with “Terrible Life Choices.”
• The comic xkcd offers a mashup of Emily Dickinson and the game Grand Theft Auto in “The Carriage.”
• Don Troop from The Chronicle of Higher Ed discusses student excuses in “New Semester Results in Huge Loss of Life Among Grandmothers.”
• Heather O’Neill of The Montreal Gazette confesses, “At 15, I fell for guys from literature.”

Right This Way to the Egress

Time to shut down the lights on the midway and turn off the deep fat fryers for another month, as another Teaching Carnival comes to an end. Hope you found a ride or two you enjoyed. Time for the carnival to pack up the game booths and rides to get ready for the November carnival.

And speaking of November, please 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:

1. Email the next host directly with the address to the permalink of your blog post, and/or
2. Tag your post in Delicious with teaching-carnival

How about you? Do you have any last minute links you’d like to add to this month’s carnival? Please leave them in comments below. Meagan Rodgers will host the next Teaching Carnival (4.3) on November 1. Please send her your links or information you’d like to have included, @MeaganRodgers on Twitter, through email: meagan.rodgers@gmail.com, or in the comments section below.

[Image by Flickr user TwoBlueDay and used under the Creative Commons license.]