Essays

Apple’s AcademiX 2009--the Closing and Opening Of University Minds

0 Comments | 739 Page Views
Luke Fernandez reports out from Apple's AcademiX 2009. In current economic climes, it's an inexpensive conference option--thanks to Apple--and as Fernandez discovers, it offers an engaging exploration of digitial technologies and their impact on teaching and learning. For upcoming AcademiX 2009 conferences, see http://www.apple.com/education/academix/  . Normal 0

Building a Network, Expanding the Commons, Shaping the Field: Two Perspectives on Developing a SOTL Repository

0 Comments | 892 Page Views
How can faculty from diverse disciplines cultivate and share knowledge about teaching practice?   In these essays, Tom Carey and Jennifer Meta Robinson explore the challenges of creating a digital repository for teaching resources, envision what a SOTL repository might look like, and discuss how such a repository would influence the emerging field of SOTL and its growing community of practitioners. The pieces are introduced by John Rakestraw, who reflects on the distinctive nature of SOTL as a field and points out further questions to consider in the process of developing a SOTL repository.

How Do Open Education Resources Acquire Their Value for Teaching and Learning?

0 Comments | 957 Page Views
How can faculty from diverse disciplines cultivate and share knowledge about teaching practice? In these essays, Tom Carey and Jennifer Meta Robinson explore the challenges of creating a digital repository for teaching resources, envision what a SOTL repository might look like, and discuss how such a repository would influence the emerging field of SOTL and its growing community of practitioners. The pieces are introduced by John Rakestraw, who reflects on the distinctive nature of SOTL as a field and points out further questions to consider in the process of developing a SOTL repository.

Can a Repository Make the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Usable?

0 Comments | 596 Page Views
How can faculty from diverse disciplines cultivate and share knowledge about teaching practice? In these essays, Tom Carey and Jennifer Meta Robinson explore the challenges of creating a digital repository for teaching resources, envision what a SOTL repository might look like, and discuss how such a repository would influence the emerging field of SOTL and its growing community of practitioners. The pieces are introduced by John Rakestraw, who reflects on the distinctive nature of SOTL as a field and points out further questions to consider in the process of developing a SOTL repository.

Opening Up Education--The Remix

0 Comments | 2211 Page Views
In their new book Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge (MIT Press, 2008), editors Toru Iiyoshi and M.S. Vijay Kumar bring together a diverse group of scholars of teaching and learning to address this question:  “How can open educational tools, resources and knowledge of practice improve the quality of education?” That is, how can educators take advantage of new knowledge-sharing tools in order to make their own learning visible, enhancing the collective understanding of how best to use these same tools in the classroom? By bringing together excerpts from the book’s diverse group of contributors, this article presents a snapshot of open education that sits at the intersection of innovation and the imperative for an expanding knowledge base on teaching and learning.

Can We Promote Experimentation and Innovation in Learning as well as Accountability? Interview with Terrel Rhodes

0 Comments | 1263 Page Views
Faculty often fear that “assessment” will have a reductive effect, either by reducing the rich complexity of teaching and learning to simplistic metrics, or by limiting what’s being measured. Student learning in new media environments seems particularly difficult to reconcile with traditional assessment tools.

In this interview, Terrel Rhodes, director of the VALUE project, describes the process of creating metarubrics that provide flexible criteria for making valid judgments about student work, resulting in frameworks tailored to local contexts but calibrated to “Essential Learning Outcomes.”

From Narrative to Database: Multimedia Inquiry in a Cross-Classroom Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Study

0 Comments | 1047 Page Views
Michael Coventry and Matthias Oppermann draw on their work with student-produced digital stories to explore how the protocols surrounding particular new media technologies shape the ways we think about, practice, and represent work in the scholarship of teaching and learning. The authors describe the Digital Storytelling Multimedia Archive, an innovative grid they designed to represent their findings, after considering how the technology of delivery could impact practice and interpretation. This project represents an intriguing synthesis of digital humanities and the scholarship of teaching and learning, raising important questions about the possibilities for analyzing and representing student learning in Web 2.0 environments.

Multimedia as Composition: Research, Writing, and Creativity

0 Comments | 1322 Page Views
Viet Thanh Nguyen reflects on a three-year experiment in assigning multimedia projects in courses designed around the question “How do we tell stories about America?” Determined to integrate multimedia conceptually into his courses, rather than tacking it onto existing syllabi, Nguyen views multimedia as primarily a pedagogical strategy and secondarily a set of tools. Exploring challenges and opportunities for both students and teachers in using multimedia, he outlines principles for teaching with multimedia, and concludes that, while not for everyone, multimedia can potentially create a transformative learning experience. 

Turbo-Charged Wikis: Technology Embraces Cooperative Learning

0 Comments | 1363 Page Views
Jon Orech offers suggestions and resources for use of wikis in the classroom.

Multimedia in the Classroom at USC: A Ten Year Perspective

0 Comments | 1330 Page Views
Does multimedia scholarship add academic value to a liberal arts education? How do we know? Looking back at the history of the Honors Program in Multimedia Scholarship at USC, Mark Kann draws on his own teaching experience, discussions with other faculty members, and the university’s curriculum review process to explore these questions. He describes the process of developing the program’s academic objectives and assessment criteria, and the challenges of gathering evidence for his intuitions about the effects of multimedia scholarship. Finally, Kann reports on the program’s first student cohort and looks ahead to the future of multimedia at USC.
Syndicate content