After my seminar met today, two of the participants came up and told me, “Four of us from class got together for dinner the other night and we talked about this course.” Referring to both a discussion we’d had the first week and also to Gardner’s APGAR, they joked “We spent the time engaging with the course material!” They said it flippantly, but were serious at the same time, and I realized that I got the last laugh.
Monthly Archive for January, 2009
The WSJ has apparently decided to allow only paid subscribers to receive their rss feeds. This is a change in their policy.
I spent much of last week in Orlando at the 2009 Educause Learning Initiative Annual Meetings, about which I have much to blog, and I promise to do so when I get a chance. I was invited to participate in a faculty innovation showcase at the ELI, which was an opportunity to meet and talk with many people about a particular project in pedagogy that I did last year. At the showcase, I met Kelvin Thompson from the University of Central Florida who asked if he could interview me for one of his courses. In the first part of the interview I retold what I presented at the showcase, but then he lead me in a number of other interesting directions. The recording is here and lasts about 45 minutes.
P.S. Apologies to Paul Romer at Stanford. In the interview I gave him the wrong affiliation.
In the last few years, I’ve thought a lot about appropriate approaches to grading in my different courses, and I’ve even pushed the boundaries of what academics think appropriate in some. On Monday in my seminar on international finance, we had a discussion of what grades mean and how they should be determined in the context of our course. (This discussion was modeled after Barbara Ganley‘s approach.)
Parts of the discussion, for example the part about how one demonstrates ‘insights’, were tough going for the students. This is a brighter than average group, but I got the feeling that they didn’t know what to say, that this isn’t something they’d been asked before.
I took notes and today posted a revised version of them as the “class rules” for grading.
Want your students to see their undergraduate program as a coherent curriculum rather than an almost random set of courses? If so, you must read Gerald Graff’s article from Inside Higher Ed. The article is adapted from his presidential address at this past year’s MLA Meetings.
Here’s an opportunity you won’t want to miss.
I am writing to ask for your help in changing the way mainstream higher education thinks about teaching and learning. Okay, that may be a bit hyperbolic, but only a bit. At least if you read this blog, I know you are sympathetic to the goal.
The University of Mary Washington is in the process of hiring a director for our new teaching center. We are looking for someone with a special skill set to build a program from the ground up. We are looking for someone who thinks originally and creatively about higher education. We are looking for someone who believes in the transformative power of higher education, someone who, while conversant with the concept of the CMS, is not limited by that concept, someone who understands that teaching is a creative, individual process, not a one-size-fits-all transaction.
I would like to solicit your help in reaching individuals who you think might fit what we’re looking for as described more fully here. UMW provides a rather unique situation for someone interested in creating a forward looking program to promote teaching and learning for the 21st Century. To this end, I wonder if you could to forward information about this opportunity to anyone you think would be qualified for our position, or anyone you think might know someone so qualified. The closing date for the position is January 20, 2009, which I realize is fast approaching. Any help you can provide would be much appreciated.
For the last year or so, I’ve wondered if I could find a productive use for Twitter in my teaching. In case you don’t know, twitter is a micro-blogging tool which allows users to broadcast “tweets,” messages limited to 140 characters, to a network of colleagues or friends defined by the user. I got an idea over the summer which I tried out last Fall. I thought this experiment failed, but it didn’t, rather I did! I was so involved with other, bigger projects that I didn’t put enough effort into the Twitter project.
What I wanted to do was use twitter to implement the idea of the “minute paper.” I asked students to send a weekly tweet to the course twitter address, econ201, identifying any concepts we had covered which they didn’t fully understand. I planned to then review those concepts first thing the following week. I told students that I wouldn’t call on them to explain any concept they identified as not understanding. But any other concepts were fair game for questions. I hoped that the micro-blogging format would enable me to follow along with a minimum of time and effort.
The project started slowly since the students seemed to have trouble understanding twitter and only a couple people tweeted for the first few weeks. Students didn’t seem to get that saying ‘no questions’ was okay too.
One problem I ran into was that I had to make a conscious effort to check the course twitter account, unlike my personal account which comes to me automatically. I wonder if it would be possible to use two separate tweet catchers (like twirl), one for each of my two accounts? I set up the separate account for the course because I thought it would be better for all the course tweets to be together in one spot.
Another issue was that some students thought they had to send direct messages, so I didn’t discover those until a bit latter in the term.
After the first exam, I stopped checking the course account, apparently just about the time the Twitter experiment took off. Since I had committed to giving students credit for tweeting, near the end of the term I finally went back to the econ201 account where I discovered some really useful communications. The tweets fell into three categories: actual questions which were what I asked for, administrative questions either about twitter or the course in general (e.g. I missed the deadline on last week’s aplia assignment. Is there any way I can do it now?), and what I call “just tweets.” This latter tended to be “hello world” type messages and they were largely at the beginning of the course. What was particularly valuable was the ability, in at least some cases, to “hear” students think. It was as if the students were honestly dialoging with themselves. There was apparently something about the medium that prompted those kinds of reflections, which I haven’t seen in any other format. It was also very easy to differentiate between genuine questions and fake ones, where students were apparently simply trying to get credit for the assignment.
In any case, I saw enough of value for me as a teacher that I’m going to try the experiment again this semester and hopefully any breakdown won’t be with me.
For more on academic uses of twitter, you might check this article.
Leslie Madsen-Brooks just posted another excellent example of the kind of post I would flag and redirect to the UMW Teaching Center website if we had that ability.
Anyone who reads this blog knows that I view my primary responsibility as teaching students how to think (from an economic perspective), not covering the breadth of content which is in most textbooks. If they’ve learned how to think, they can teach themselves any of the content we didn’t cover.
My favorite line in the post is where Leslie quotes Linda Hodges:
Our illusion is that we tell students the information that we want them to know, students who are motivated will absorb it, and our obligation to the discipline has been met.
The not-so-hidden assumption here is that we’re teaching to the gifted students, the ones who are worthy of induction into the society of the educated. They will learn the breadth of content, even if students of lesser ability will not.
I have two problems with this, first, I think we should be teaching to all of our students and I think all of our students are capable of learning. Second, there’s at least some evidence that gifted students learn only superficially, enough to ace the test, but not enough to learn the content deeply. If that’s true, then we’re really fooling ourselves.
Designing a course is a creative endeavor. I don’t mean just creating a new course, but rethinking, re-presenting a course you have taught before, even many times before. This design creativity seems so personal to me, but I imagine every serious teacher does something similar.
Before each semester I find myself thinking about what changes I will make to each of my courses. I find myself asking “What will be the theme of the course this time, that is, what theme makes the course relevant for this time and this place and this cohort of students?” The obvious theme for several of my courses this coming term is the 2008 financial and economic crisis.
The purpose of the theme for each course is to hook students, to make the course “sticky” by hopefully showing its relevance. (No theme has ever grabbed students’ attention more than the current economic situation.)
Sometimes the theme requires major changes in the way I structure the course; sometimes it’s only a slight change in focus. I rarely start out to complete a “major revision” as it’s called at my school, though sometimes it works out that way.
Let me discuss how this will work in a couple of my courses. The first is Macroeconomics, one of two intermediate theory courses we offer. The goal of the course is to teach students to manipulate economic models to derive insights about macro issues and problems. The theme (or outer wrapper) of the course will be to explore three questions: What is the mechanism by which the financial crisis led to a recession? How is the recession likely to play out? What are the optimal policy responses given where we find ourselves? The first major change to the course will involve reordering the topics we explore–in recent years it’s been common in the discipline to teach the long term issues of economic growth and productivity change before the short run issues of business cycles. This time, it makes sense to switch those so that we learn the tools necessary to understand the recession earlier rather than later. The other major change will be to explore the role of financial markets in a bit more depth than we usually do. For this, I hope to draw on the text we used in the big wiki experiment, several years ago.
The second class is a senior seminar in International Finance. This is always an interesting class to teach; the way I teach it, it’s not a technical course, but rather very much an interdisciplinary one. I recruit students to try to obtain a group which is one third economics majors, one third business, and one third international affairs. That way, we can draw on the expertise and perspectives of all three disciplines. We spend the first half of the course learning the nuts and bolts of international finance, and then in the second half we explore broader issues in international finance, usually focusing on some foreign financial event or concern. This year, the joke is on us–the theme will be to explore the global implications of the U.S. Financial/economic crisis.
In both of these cases, I will frame the theme as a research question, for which there is no generally accepted answer yet, and which we will publish when completed.
Feel free to follow along: econ304.umwblogs.org and econ482.umwblogs.org.
The college president as a public intellectual.
A couple of weeks ago, I read this op-ed piece in Inside Higher Ed. I forwarded the link to Gardner, since his son is a first year student at Hampshire College, where Dr. Hexter is president. The other day, he tweeted about Hexter’s fascinating blog.
I commend it to you.
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