“Do I Do It on My Phoooone?” The Twitter Post! Posted on March 13, 2014 by A+ Brooke Lester, CuratorLook, I get it. You’re a serious educator. And you have serious questions about Twitter. (No, yeah. Click through that link. I’ll be here when you get back.) If you’re already rolling your eyes about the idea of using Twitter, then STOP! Yes, the name sounds silly, but I’m willing to bet that hasn’t been a deal-breaker for you concerning “Google.” This post is your chance to do your homework (I’m talking especially to you, reader with a research degree!), so that if you choose not to start using Twitter, then you can reject it like an adult. But I don’t think you will…
Sipping the Firehose: The RSS Post! Posted on February 24, 2014 by A+ Brooke Lester, CuratorThe Web is huge, and everything is all over the place. You want to collect just the stuff you want, and put it in one place. What you want is “RSS.” “Really Simple Syndication” is both old and new: old, because it’s been around for 15 years or more; new, because every day somebody discovers RSS for the first time and wonders where it has been all her life…
Integrating by Parts Posted on February 11, 2014 by A+ Brooke Lester, CuratorSomething there is that doesn’t love a silo. A curriculum is divided into fields are divided into courses are divided into units are divided into assignments. Ever review a student’s final paper for a course and find that, somehow, she didn’t succeed in using the knowledge and skills that she _actually did develop_ throughout the course? That final paper was constructed in a silo. There are a lot of factors from which the silo problem has been constructed and maintained. But, it’s pretty disheartening to imagine our learners going into their vocations and building silos around the challenges they find there…silos with high walls that keep out all the knowledge, intuition, skills, and habits that they’ve poured themselves into developing. My institution’s response-in-progress to the silo problem is a capstone project to the M.Div program, the “Final Integrative Paper…”
Culture Check: Course Work Extensions Posted on January 30, 2014 by A+ Brooke Lester, CuratorIt is the end of January, and I am beginning to hear around me the muffled groans of faculty colleagues as the Fall 2013 “extensions” roll in. I don’t know whether they are called “extensions” everywhere, but we all know what we’re talking about, right? This is when a student is granted permission to complete some of their course requirements during the weeks or months after the course is over. At my institution, the student contracts with the instructor and the registrar, agreeing on what work remains, and what grade will result if the work is not done. But even if we all know what “extensions” are, that does not mean that everyone agrees on how to administer them, or that every school has the same perspective on them. How is the practice of granting extensions assessed in the “ecosystem” of your institution? What is your own thinking on extensions…?
Why Don’t You Just Tell Me What Grade You Want? Posted on January 13, 2014 by A+ Brooke Lester, CuratorWant an “A”? Okay. Shake on it. In “contract grading,” the student and instructor agree at the outset what grade the student is going for, and what is needed to earn that grade. Of course, this could describe the point of many syllabi. What distinguishes “contract grading” (at least the examples I have seen) is that the student decides which assignments she will do and which assignments she won’t do. Also, in most examples I have seen, the work is assessed on a “satisfactory/unsatisfactory” basis. I have been looking closely at “contract grading,” and am planning to implement some version of it for my 2014–15 courses…