Category Archives: Active Learning

For my final project I decided to add digital components to a proposed undergraduate course.  The seminar, proposed for seniors, includes a “Science Salon” component, for which students would meet to discuss an issue of scientific and feminist importance. I’ve added three digital components to the course, which would allow students to move conversation beyond the classroom:

I. Science Salon Facilitation (20%)

Twice per month the class will convene for a Science Salon led by two students. Each pair of students will be assigned a primary scientific research article drawn from a neuroscience, genetics, evolution, or psychology journal and present the research to the class. You will provide your classmates with a handout of key concepts from the article including a summary of the: introduction, methods, results, discussion, and conclusion/future directions/applications of the findings. Feel free to make an appointment with me if you have any trouble understanding the article.

You should make use of the White Board and/or Power Point for the presentation. Come prepared with 8-10 questions in order to guide class discussion. Your questions should draw on your own ideas but also encourage your classmates to consider how the week’s feminist science studies reading(s) relate to the article.

II. Salon Live-Tweeting (5%)

Each student will be responsible for live-Tweeting one Science Salon event, posting comments and summarizing the salon as it unfolds on our private classroom Twitter account. After each salon, you will use‘ Storify,’ a digital platform, to collect your tweets and transform them into a curated narrative of your Tweets, which will be posted on our class blog. The live-Tweeting will serve a form of note-taking for the class and ‘Storifying’ as a form public scholarship that gives blog readers a sense of key arguments, questions, and ideas that come out of our meeting.

III. Digital Salon (25%)

Once salon facilitations are assigned, you will sign up to serve as an online respondent to the Salons in the form of four public blog posts. Blog posts should give a very brief summary of the salon and the main ideas generated and discussed. Your response may extend part of the conversation held in the salon or respond to a particular thought or idea in the salon or week’s readings. Blog posts should be roughly 500 words (not to exceed 750) and will be submitted to me before you post to our blog. Once you have received feedback you are invited and encouraged to revise your response before posting publicly. 

Hi all,

I’ve made a website/digital teaching portfolio here.  It’s shamelessly modeled on Brian Croxall’s site, and I’m trying to get started with blogging on the main page.

Blogging on an academic site makes me feel more academically “naked” than I’d like to feel.  The culture of peer review in academic publishing, frustrating as it is, brings some comfort of professional approval if you can get through it, and I’ve always been more reluctant to throw my undercooked thoughts onto a public forum.  But I’m now inspired to try, and to gradually make them more “cooked.”

Yet blogging has also made me realize that I often have interesting thoughts that I keep to myself.

For the final project I’ve been working to create a course website: https://foodsystems2foodsovereignty.wordpress.com

Right now the content is still missing, and I’m not satisfied yet with the layout.  My main concern was to create an online space to support a variety of assignments.  Some of this functionality you will not be able to see, but the site is linked to wikispaces.  Through this, I can divide students into groups and provide them with pages to work on a debate assignment.  This way each team can work together, but the other teams can’t see their work.  So far it seems to work, but does require students to register to both sites in order to gain full functionality.  I’m wondering if this can be simplified.  I am also using the wikispaces links to set up a course dictionary for the students (like a wiki page).  The word press site will be used to contain the syllabus, announcements, a course blog, and a course photo blog.  I’m still trying to figure out a way to simplify these different functions and perhaps will have one site by the time I teach this course.

Here are a few initial resources on Digital Storytelling assignments, rubrics, and examples.

http://lindsaybyron.wordpress.com/teaching-2/digital-storytelling-personal-narrative-assignment/

http://learndst.richmond.edu/for-teachers/sample-assignment/

https://learn.canvas.net/courses/21/pages/digital-storytelling-assignment

http://drummondlibrary.weebly.com/assignment-blog/storytelling-assignment-ii-digital-storytelling

http://www2.bgsu.edu/departments/english/cconline/winter2013/digital_s/rubric.html

http://www.ucdenver.edu/faculty_staff/faculty/center-for-faculty-development/Documents/Tutorials/Rubrics/documents/ex_digital_storytelling.pdf

Rubric Example

First of all, apologies on the post. I had written it but forgot to post it (and then I lost what I had written).

Technology is part of our lives. People may resist it by not having a Facebook account, avoiding smartphones, or barely using e-mails. Yet, technology does regulate the most basic chores of our lives: traffic lights, shopping, buying a plane ticket to go the middle of nowhere… Students today accept technology as part of their lives but, in my experience, they do not know how to use it for boosting their learning.

In past projects with highschoolers, I have learned that students enjoy exploring their own technological skills and applying them for school. For example, when studying the difference between Romanesque and Gothic art in the Middle Ages, a group of boys used Minecraft to “build” two cathedrals. For showing it to the class, the character would walk around the buildings as a student recorded everything with his phone (they did not have the program for screen recording).

I think the use of technology should be across the the curriculum, in the same reading and writing is. In the past I have used Prezi for presentations, Mimio for working on grade 2 fine motor skills, Edmodo for managing classes (schools did not have platforms), and TodaysMeet, to name a few. Ironically (or not), the only professors that used technology the most when I was in college were soon-to-retire ones: one introduced us to the world of libraries, information, and databases; the second one was an art historian who used Powerpoint and the internet for everything; and the third one made us blog for every class.

The purpose for my registering for this program is precisely to give my amateurish, self-taught tech tools a more professional framework. More importantly, I want to know the resources available at Emory. It is very easy to come up with ideas, but it is harder to know who to ask for help. I am currently designing two syllabi: a survey and a thematic one. Therefore, I think the time for doing this course is excellent: right at the beginning of my college teaching career.

Hi all! Please fill out this short form to let us know what you are working on and how you use data in your projects.

As an instructor in Emory’s English Department, I enjoy having students perform, rather than merely present, in my courses. I signify on presentations as performances because these exhibitions have the unerring quality of either enhancing or detracting from rich dialogue in the classroom. Aspiring towards the former, I’ve assigned students to work together in groups to perform skits. In another course, students gave speeches as capstone projects to exhibit their cogent and succinct writing while demonstrating their budding mastery of rhetoric. However, despite my small steps to encourage creativity, I’d like to use technology to enrich my students’ capacity to–in the words of Edwidge Danticat–“create dangerously.” Specifically, in my upcoming “Autobiography in the African Diaspora” course I’d like students to create short films in which they digitally animate their personal essays. In another course which I’ll co-teach next semester–Emory’s “Men Stopping Violence” class–I’d like students to use digital storytelling to interrogate some pertinent issue relating to male intimate partner violence through their investigation of materials from Emory’s archives. I look forward to learning innovative technological tools, in our upcoming sessions, so my students can fashion projects on the cutting edge.