The Self-Determined Learner
This blog was inspired by two young boys. The first, an 8 year old, really wanted a cheeseburger, so he went to YouTube and taught himself to drive. He drove past four intersections and some train tracks with complete control of the vehicle–perhaps even more rule-abiding than the average driver. He was caught at the
6 Tips for Student Blogging
WordPress offers many possibilities for faculty who wish for their students to be completing writing or multimedia assignments in an open online platform. However, there are many varieties of WordPress available to faculty, and some decisions need to be made to help faculty select the best-possible variant of WordPress for their learning objectives, and to
Choosing the right teaching method
Prior to the Information Age, teachers were expected to stand at a podium and expound upon topics that were otherwise out of reach to the students. Since the last part of the 20th century, instructors have felt a shift from being the information hub to being the architects who must gather the various informational materials
Building a Better Blog Rubric
One of the greatest challenges of giving online writing assignments to students is insuring that it’s clear how they will be evaluated for these types of assignments. My colleague Mark Marino from USC recently shared his blog assignment rubric and I am going to use this as a springboard for my own blog assignments in
How do you pack your TPACK?
TPACK, meaning Technology, Pedagogy, and Content Knowledge, is an acronym brought to us by Mishra and Koehler’s (2006; 2009) studies on instructors’ abilities to combine their content knowledge with adequate knowledge of best pedagogies for teaching and best technologies to support learning. Most instructors in higher education have not had the benefit of formal pedagogy and technology
What is the future of Digital Scholarship?
This post builds on my previous writing, What is Digital Scholarship? In today’s installment about Digital Scholarship, I feature a 2013 EDUCAUSE article written by Ed Ayers, “Does Digital Scholarship Have a Future?” In this piece Ayers, President of the University of Richmond and National Humanities Medalist, explores concerns about how the primary activities of
What is Digital Scholarship?
When I travel to conferences I often get questions about my title (Associate Director of Digital Scholarship) and what I do at Chapman, but I also get questions about what I do from within the university. So I thought I would explain a bit more about that in my blogpost today… First, let’s start with
teaching Buck v Bell
Last week I taught my students about the Buck v Bell Supreme Court case during a history lesson about the eugenics movement. I was surprised to learn that not one student in the room had heard of eugenicist Harry Laughlin or of Carrie Buck or of the involuntary sterilization of tens of thousands
Talking about Disability
We watched this TED talk by Stella Young to start off today’s HIST 233 class (Disability in American Life): This video is a powerful one, that speaks to the ways that people with disabilities are treated in today’s society. Stella’s no-nonsense speaking about “disability porn” and the objectification of disabled people works well to disrupt
On Wheels...
Two things happened to me this week that might not seem related, but in some ways I believe they are. On Thursday night I teach until 10pm. It’s really the latest that I’ve ever hung out on campus, as I exit the classroom building at that hour and make my way across the