Last week I listened in on the online seminar by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, the writers of Academically Adrift and Aspiring Adults Adrift. After reading Excellent sheep by William Deresiewicz, these books are a breath of sensibility. While Excellent Sheep is entertaining, it lacks the data driven conclusions Arum and Roksa are able to […]
Monthly Archives: September 2014
Mentorship and Connection
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This semester as I am a part of the Connected Courses series at the international level as well as our group at Virginia Tech, best practices and transformative education has been on my mind even more. Additionally, I frequently read Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle. Today on Inside Higher Ed this was posted, which […]
Thinking Animals – The “Why” for a New Connected Course
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My “why” for previous connected courses has centered on developing empathy (closeness) and analytical perspective (distance) for things that really matter. For me, those things include: people, animals, and an appreciation of the unique cultural contexts in which we relate to each other. In an honors colloquium on domestication we worked to unpack the assumptions […]
The questions we need to ask especially “why”
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This semester many of us are engaged with a national initiative entitled Connected Courses. At Virginia Tech, we developed our own active co-learning group of faculty and graduate students to interface with each other and ConnectedCourses. And the dialogue ensued. … Continue reading →
The Why
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So, the big question that we are discussing in the Connected Course, that I am participating in, is the Why of teaching and the Why of your course. This is a bit of a complicated question on many fronts. First, why do I teach? I am not 100% sure why I teach. It is something […]
Introduction for Active Co-Learning.
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It is time to (re)introduce myself this semester as a participant in Connected Courses: Active Co-Learning in Higher Ed. I was given the opportunity to take part in this course as one component of the Future Professoriate Graduate Certificate at … Continue reading →
Old Meets New in the New Media Seminar
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Despite the best efforts of a recalcitrant widget, a freshly pressed motherblog is just about ready for a new cohort of seminarians. The New Media Seminar kicks off tomorrow, and while the syllabus addresses the “Awakening of the Digital Imagination” (i.e. the intellectual and cultural history of new media up to Web 2.0), the workings […]
“What I Did For Love”
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A Chorus Line had a huge impact on me the first time I saw it. It resonated so deeply with me, because it told the hidden stories we all have inside. Our desires, our hopes, our fears. The song What … Continue reading →
Thinking about a personal methodology
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We can sometimes be at a loss for words. But being dumbstruck by life is not good enough. If we consider the potential situations have, we all can use the physical world of drawing and sketching to help move past … Continue reading →
Why do I want to teach?
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When I thought about the reasons for teaching, learning, and working; I came to a surprising self discovery. All of my “whys” grows from my love for science. The attention to detail, diamond-like shapes of protein crystals (see above), the beauty of single molecules, and rhythm of biological processes. But the esthetics is not why […]