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Category Archives: All
First Take on Ronco
I just discovered Patrick’s post on the ronco project, which follows two posts from Martha and Jeff on the topic. I’m not sure why I missed Patrick’s when it came out, but I have a couple comments. One thing that … Continue reading
Posted in ronco, Teaching and Learning
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What does it mean to make a course “sticky”?
This is the second post inspired by my reading of Malcolm Gladstone’s The Tipping Point. According to Gladstone, The stickiness factor says there are specific ways of making a contagious message sticky; there are relatively simple changes in the presentation … Continue reading
Posted in Teaching and Learning
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Honesty in Academia
I have been working on an idea with Gardner and Jeff regarding the First Year Seminars we will each be teaching next fall. The topics of the seminars range from ‘Banned and Dangerous Art†to “When Americans Came Marching Home: … Continue reading
Posted in Teaching and Learning
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Postmortem on my experiments with teaching this year.
At the end of the school year, about a month ago, I was pretty unhappy with my teaching experiments this year. In my intro course, the metacognition experiment didn’t seem to go very well this year. Part of it was … Continue reading
Posted in BigWiki, Teaching and Learning, The Experiment
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End of Term: Artificial School?
The end of an academic term makes students and faculty alike crazy with stress. While a little stress tends to motivate us, too much makes us shut down. Does learning actually take place this time of the year? I’d say … Continue reading
Posted in Teaching and Learning
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The Power of Context
Last week, I finally got around to reading Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, a fascinating argument for how institutional change comes about (or not). Gladwell identifies three rules for effective change: The Law of the Few, The Stickiness Factor, and … Continue reading
A little irony
The lecture, as a teaching methodology, has gotten a lot of bad press in recent years. I should know–I’ve been one of the critics. The problem with lectures, it is said, is that they are passive, allowing recipients to simply … Continue reading
Posted in Teaching and Learning, University 2.0
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Reflections on the BigWiki Experiment
[This is the first of several reflections I wrote during the semester, but waited until it was over to post, since I didn’t want my blog reflections to influence student behavior.] After 2/3 of the semester, I’ve concluded that the … Continue reading
Posted in BigWiki, Teaching and Learning
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Studies in Pedagogy
I received an interesting heads-up from my teaching economics newsgroup about a list of pedagogical papers by the Physics Education Research at Colorado group. This group includes Carl Wieman, Nobel Laureate who I’ve blogged about before. The archive includes a … Continue reading
Posted in Teaching and Learning
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Can you become a competent athlete by only hearing someone tell you about the sport?
Learning only occurs at the intersection between a text and a reader, or between a lecture and an audience. In a comment on an earlier post, Shannon notes, [T]ext is sometimes seen as a time waster if it requires a … Continue reading
Posted in Teaching and Learning, What is Education?
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