Teaching with the election

Many are finding teachable moments by incorporating the election into their courses. Dr. Janice McIntyre has her reading students read a selection of articles on how the campaigns target young voters (and what young voters think) from USA Today October 6, 2008. The link has video of supposedly representative young voters from the 4 categories they fall into.

Her students do a "My view" project. They

• read the article(s),
• annotate it,
• write their reactions and
• engage in a discussion about what it all means - to them personally and to the larger community.
  

For full details of the assignment click here where it's stored on their class wiki.

We invite them to continue their discussion in the comment section of this post.

NCSPOD "GIFT" Sessions

GIFT is an acronym and a play on words. You share a Great Idea for ....Teaching? Faculty Topics? I forget what it stands for - Anyway it's clever. They set up 7 or 8 tables and somewhere between 60 and 100 people came in and distributed themselves at tables, organizers rang a bell and presenters had 10 minutes to share their project, experience or item of expertise. Then the bell rang again, groups shifted to different tables, and the presenters went through it again - repeating the excercise 5 times (+/-). Something like speed dating meets the Old-School lecture.

It turned out to be amazingly fun, and the cruising learners/ customers/ datees(?) seemed to have a blast. Intense in a good way, without enough time to get boring, the topics and format seemed to pique everyone's interest and motivate self-directed learning. Several presenters noted how they really honed there presentation through the process. I aimed for that and admire their success. Our table however seemed to get more interactive and the center of gravity moved toward the group. Not planned but not unwelcome. I recorded audio of our last 3 sessions and I'm thinking about posting them as a sort of reflection/ meta-analysis of the evolution of the experience. It may be interesting to dissect it, look at how it evolved, and consider implications for professional development. . .

I ran out of handouts and promised to post them on a wiki. They're up. Also posted are pages with more info. I'd like to see other people post material there as well. Presenters had intriguing stuff - and no one can be everywhere at once. Don't worry about making mistakes - anything lost can be found again. Password to edit is KCPDC08 -the last two characters are numbers. Many hands make light work, and an archive could help a lot of people - me in particular. If you haven't posted to the web by yourself yet - ya gotta do it.

AND/ OR post links in comments to this blog. I saw people shooting video of the Poster sessions with Flip cameras, and rumor has it they will be posted to the web - if you know where tell me. I'll post a link when I find it.

2008 NCSPOD Conference

The NorthAmerican Council for Staff, Program and Organizational Development (NCSPOD) Conference has just ended in Reno, NV. In addition to providing an invigorating forum for collaboration among community colleges and universities, the international organization presents awards to honor exemplary performance.

The biggest award (to my biased and imperfect understanding) is the Glenn Schmitz Award. It "recognizes an individual or a group that has provided outstanding service to the NCSPOD board. " This award perhaps creates the most excitement and suspense because it is the only award kept secret. No one outside of the active board, not even the esteemed Helen Burnstad (who has an annual award named after her) knew of the selection before the NCSPOD President, Louanne Whitton, announced the winner.

Of course it went to KCKCC's Ben Hayes. All agreed that the recognition was well deserved and there was no luck about it, but you should ask him about how he did at the tables. The fates smiled on him this week.

More teaching resources from the web.

With the election there's a load of great content that might connect to students' lives.

• The last presidential debate in 10 easy minutes (video)
• Standford's course on presidential elections (lot o' links + video)
• The geography of the US presidential election - part 1 (Spoiler alert: the whole Red/ Blue state dichotomy is misleading and trite). Stanford lecture (almost 2 hour video)
  

In the world of literature:

• Academy award winning animated video of Hemingway's The Old Man and The Sea
• This year's Nobel prize for literature goes to...
• Free Yale course on the american novel since 1945

Business and Economics

• Nobel Prize (in Econ) Paul Krugman on the current "readjustment/ crash" (word choice depends on your portfolio).
• Free Yale course on Financial Markets

See Also:

• Art:a horse paints -is it art?
• Geography and culture: gaming software used to create virtual tour of BeiJing's Forbidden City
• History: PBS documentaries on the 1929 crash
• Debate: Batman vs. the Penguin

Free courses by Yale including:

• Milton, Greek history, The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877, Fundamentals of Physics , France Since 1871, game theory

and seasonal botany photo

700 lbs - so it says.

Web resources for teachers

Going to try a new format. Too much fun (and potentially relevant) stuff; if it isn't shared quick it could be lost, so minimal descriptions

Video of scholarly and education merit to provoke discussion (or digression):

1. Anthropology: KSU's web celeb anthropologist Michael Wesch
   
2. Biology - crab rides a jellyfish; Learning about memory and aging on YouTube
3. Business: Yale professor explains financial crisis in 10 minutes
   
4. Chemistry;
5. Physics (including a boomarang in zero gravity);
6. Art: THe 50 greatest art videos on YouTube;
7. Collections: NYTimes top 5 online video lectures - and Open Cultures top 75 online educational videos - part of their "signs of intelligent life on youtube collection". Free Engineering and SCience courses from Stanford online; source to watch complete documentary films for free;
8. Pedagogy: Father Guido Sarducci breaks it down (learning and retention- Remember Saturday Night Live in the late 70's? funny because it's true)

See Also

• Education and technology: research shows people are more likely to lie in email;
  
• Brain Science: how the mind works - Brain Rules reviewed; What Magic teaches us about neural processing (2 articles), what it feels like to have a stroke (neuroanatomy part of TEDS talks - best stuff on YouTube); 2008 election and neuroscience
  
• Language: argument that English is a user-defined and user-modified technology; Chinglish recognized as full-fleged dialect (anyone have info on Spanglish?); Stanford's online writing classes; podcasts can teach you almost any language
  
• FREE AUDIOBOOKS: The Gutenberg project - a huge mass of audio books on line - I only bookmark human read titles, see also the growing collection by Literal Systems; 1984 by Orwell:
• How to (DIY's): how to make garden lights out of LED lights and mason jars; How to make online video's without getting sued (copyright info).
• Pedagogy and books to consider: review of book How Children Fail by John Holt;
• History: animated video of Howard Zinn's History of the US Empire
  
• Election related: a non-partisan project helps community organizers to find neighbors who think they are registered but actually aren't; 2008 election and neuroscience
  
• Of arcane scholarly interest: info and links to photos by famed Harvard Ethnobotanist (combined ethnography and botany);

Podcasting Research

The Pew Research Center reports that podcasting is continuing to proliferate.

Unsurprisingly, few people report downloading podcasts every day, but increasing numbers are accessing and downloading content.

Furthermore, access to the necessary hardware is increasing even faster, and socio-economic status doesn't hinder youth from having that hardware: "Like podcast downloading, ownership of iPods and MP3 players has also increased since 2006. According to a December 2007 Pew Internet Project survey, 34% of American adults and 43% of internet users report owning an iPod or MP3 player, up from 20% of the total population and 26% of internet users in April 2006.

Young adults between 18 and 29 years old are the age group most likely to own MP3 players, 61% of whom own these gadgets."