[September’s Teaching Carnival is from Roger Whitson, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Digital Scholarship Commons (DiSC) at Emory University. Roger blogs on his website, on Emory Library’s blog, and on Teaching Romanticism - and can be contacted via email at rogerwhitson [at] gmail.com or via Twitter @rogerwhitson. 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 page. –Billie Hara]
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For September’s Carnival, we have a long list of syllabi and job market manifestos to help with the challenges of the start of the school year! We also chronicle Mozilla’s Open Badge Project controversy, the role of technology in pedagogical experiments and professional development, and the ongoing evolution of the relationship between libraries, Universities, and undergraduates.
Fall 2011 Syllabi and Course Websites
- Leeann Hunter discusses the challenges of teaching collaboration and creativity in her class “Invention Mobs”.
- Jeffrey McClurken talks about the process of creating a syllabus with his future students for the course “History of the Information Age.”
- Katherine Harris experiments with GIS mapping the Grand Tour of Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth and the Shelleys in her syllabus “Eat, Look, Go: Romanticism, Aestheticism and the Sensualism of Travel.”
- Kathryn Crowther investigates the possibility of a multimodal syllabus for “Literary London.”
- Mark Sample asks, how do you teach a networked novel like Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves in a new and exciting way? You create a multi-institutional teaching network! See Sample’s course “PostPrint Fiction,” along with Paul Benzon’s “Literature, Media, and the Archive,” Brian Croxall’s “Introduction to Digital Humanities,” Erin Templeton’s “Contemporary American Fiction,” and Zach Whalen’s “Code(s), Culture and the Postmodern” for very different but linked methods of teaching an unteachable text.
- Ian Bogost, “The Philosophy of Sport”
- Matt Gold, “Fire, Disease, Disaster: Catastrophe and the Shaping of the Urban Public Space”
- Anya Kamentz et al., “DIY U: Getting Started with Self-Learning”
- Ted Friedman, “American Film History II”
- Stephanie Boluk, “Virtual Worlds and Utopia”
- Jesse Stommel, “Monsterous Bodies”
- Andrew Famiglietti, “Introduction to Electronic and Digital Communications”
- Dan Cohen, “The Digital Past”
- Sidney I. Dobrin, “Advanced Argumentative Writing”
- Rebecca Onion, “Popular Culture and American Childhood”
Classroom Experiments
- Brian Croxall employs frozen yogurt, Bánh Mì, and 4 minute lightning talks to get graduate students talking across disciplines about their teaching.
- Robin Wharton engages students in an analysis of classroom discussion, and finds that it helps more people to participate.
- How well does a classroom work when students watch lectures at home and do their homework in class? Chris Faulkner weighs the pros and cons of “The Flipped Classroom.”
- Bridget Draxler uses Twitter to get her students to think critically about their thesis statements.
- GoogleVoice provides an ideal platform for teachers to communicate with students on the go, says Amy Collier.
- Mark Sample gives his students agency by requiring them to read (and reread) Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein aloud in class.
- Ryan Cordell regularly devotes class time to in-class writing and notes the advantages.
- Chris Clark’s students record podcasts and reflect upon the complexities of sound-recording.
- Ellen Bremen challenges students to ask her for help.
- Amanda Krauss asks what would happen if teachers had the ability to fire students.
- Nate Kogan questions the ethics of allowing students to collectively determine what counts in testing.
Libraries and Undergraduates
- Sarah Werner uses the Folger Shakespeare Library to encourage undergraduates to become experts in archival texts.
- Lee Skallerup is astonished to see how little her students know about how the library works.
The Mozilla Open Badge Project Controversy (Twitter: #dmlbadges and #openbadges)
- Mozilla launches the Open Badge Project, which allows users to share achievements online. They, along with HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) and the MacArthur Foundation, are sponsoring the Badges for Lifelong Learning competition and creating a white paper about the project.
- Cathy Davidson outlines many applications of the Open Badge Project to education.
- Alex Reid critiques the potential for badges to commodify every aspect of our lives, and offers three alternatives to the badge system.
- Ada Play notes parallels between the Open Badge Project and gamification, and wonders if there isn’t a better way to use games in education.
- Audrey Waters explains the importance of the “open” in the Open Badges Project, Storifies part of the Twitter conversation reacting to the announcement, and responds to Alex Reid and Ada Play’s criticisms.
- Sheryl Grant sketches several definitions of badges and shows how they can be used in contexts beyond gaming.
The Job Market (Twitter: #jobmarket)
- Karen Kelsky offers advice on fixing your job letter, lists eight pitfalls that frequently plague teaching statements, and considers what counts as evidence of teaching excellence and chastizes graduate advisers for not properly training their students for the job market.
- Masood Raja shows how to properly get ready for the job market.
- Billie Hara discusses a service that helps academics think creatively about their degrees and their careers.
- Marc Bousquet mourns the end of Academic Labor activist Wilma Liebman’s tenure at the National Labor Relations Board and talks about job market inequality.
- Carlos Delclos outlines the edges of a global student movement that is redefining the University and the job market.
- Kathleen Fitzpatrick urges graduate students to produce more digital humanities work and pleads with faculty members to back them.
- Natalia Cecire uses Fitzpatrick’s piece as a call to arms to reconceptualize the job market as a phenomenon that impacts all parts of academia – not just young scholars.
- Alex Galarza imagines graduate students as political activists, and being proactive about incorporating digital tools in their research and job talks.
- Cheryl Reed and Dawn M. Formo illustrate how the job ad can help in the job search.
- Tim Morton aggregates all of his job advice from last year.
Technology and Professional Development
- Diane Jakacki talks about how lists help her juggle multiple projects.
- Claire Potter tells us that it is time, given the dramatic change in technology, to reconsider how time is calculated in academic labor.
- Bill Caraher lists five tools that can help you digitize your workflow.
- Jason B. Jones outlines the benefits of learning coding from CodeAcademy.
- Andrea Lunsford searches for other models of instruction now that the lecture is dead.
- Joseph Ugoretz reflects on learning how to assess ePortfolios.
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How about you? Do you have any last minute links you’d like to add to this month’s carnival? Did we miss your work? If we don’t know about you, we can’t link to you. So, let us know what you are up to in the classroom. 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 (or Diigo or other bookmarking service) with
teaching-carnival.
Delaney Kirk, an educator and an edublogger, will compile teaching-related posts for November’s Teaching Carnival 5.3. You can reach her via email (Dkirk11@tampabay.rr.com) or on Twitter (@delaneykirk). Delaney blogs at Ask Dr. Kirk. Keep in mind, that if you don’t send us your posts, we might miss them. So send them on! We want to include you in our next Teaching Carnival. Lastly, we are looking for more contributors for the Teaching Carnival, so if you have interest in compiling links for one month, please contact Billie Hara for information.
[Image by Flickr used by Red.Dahlia and used under the Creative Commons license.]
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