The way we diagnose our students’ condition will determine the kind of remedy we offer…The common diagnosis, to put it bluntly, is that our “patients” are brain-dead…That caricature highlights a truth: our assumption that students are brain-dead leads to pedagogies that deaden their brains. When we teach by dripping information into their passive forms,
Tag: teaching
Discussing Politics In the Classroom
We are in the final weeks leading up to a presidential election. One of Illinois State’s core values is civic engagement. It would seem, on the surface, at least, a no brainer to find ways to discuss and critically evaluate the issues and the candidates in our courses in an effort to encourage our students
Get connected!
Last summer, I was approached by two junior faculty members who wanted CTLT to provide more minority faculty support. We discussed a variety of options such as peer mentoring and workshops, and we decided to start with a Teaching-Learning Community (TLC). TLCs typically get together to read and discuss a book throughout a semester. We
Is 8% too high or too low?
Yesterday was my turn to write a blog post, but I totally blanked out and did not have any ideas what to write about. So, my first action in a situation like this is to randomly browse the Internet. I have various news sources on my portal page (I use myYahoo to aggregate various RSS
Chasing Shadows: Let’s Put Predatory Professional Essay Writers Out of Work
An article entitled “The Shadow Scholar” from The Chronicle of Higher Education is making email rounds this week. It’s turned up in my in-box three times now, recommended by two colleagues and, interestingly enough, by my twenty-six-year-old son. The article is written by “Ed Dante,” a pseudonym for “a writer who lives on the East
Potentially useless, but…
As an instructional technology specialist, I review a lot of different Web 2.0 tools to see if they are useful for instruction and collaboration. GoogleDocs, Wiki, Delicious, collaborative mind-mapping tools (like Mindmeister etc.), Voicethread and Diigo are definitely my favorite tools of trade, depending on what I’d like to use them for. Students’ favorite, Facebook,
