Terry Greene (Learning Nuggets)I want to hear it from them. The Open Faculty Patchbook is an ongoing collection of stories by post-secondary educators about their teaching. It was meant to serve as a community collaboration of how-to-teach tips and tricks that can be patched together to form a sort of manual on how to teach. What...
This space is here to house the stories of how learners learn in higher ed. Below is a list to choose from for learners to write about how they develop or use that skill. It has been cultivated from the open textbook from the University of Saskatchewan entitled University Success. A wonderful open resource that we hope can help springboard learners themselves into sharing their take on these skills and strategies. It is a list of suggested topics. You are free to choose your own if you’d like to contribute.
An interactive virtual lounge and presentation space
As a part of our continuing series of AnnotatED events, Hypothesis is participating in OLC Live, the free online virtual conference running parallel with the OLC Accelerate 2019 conference in Orlando, Florida, USA. Join us and other educators online for 4 days of sessions focused on themes of openness and online education.
We need to critically examine all of our assumptions about conferences. How they are run. Who leads them. What kind of learning should happen there?
Jesse Stommel (Twitter)When you worry students won’t understand an assignment, the answer is often not to add more instructions, but to take instructions away.
Students get bogged down by all the words and minutiae we clutter assignments with. I think the best assignments are spare and evocative, not weighed down by expectations.
But this also means making sure we don’t have “hidden” expectations — making sure we are genuinely prepared for students to do something novel and unexpected. And prepared to work (or collaborate) with students at any point in the process.
I’ve seen assignment sheets for 1-page papers that were themselves more than a page. I wouldn’t demean anyone using those. As teachers, we care deeply about our work. But I’d ask whether all those words are actually helping get us or students closer to the germ of the work.
The final project for my digital studies course goes to the other end of the extreme. In the syllabus, I call the prompt “deceptively simple.” It’s just 8 words: “do something on the Web about the Web.”
When students ask for clarification, we talk about what’s possible, about all the ideas they have, even maybe imaginatively about the kinds of stuff I might do in their place. I tell them my final project is the course syllabus I’ve been building (with their help) all semester.
I don’t add more instructions. I don’t answer “do you mean,” “can I,” or “are you looking for” kinds of questions. I don’t show examples (unless students get really stuck).
The point of an assignment, for me, is not to create gotcha moments or to point students toward paint by numbers outcomes. An assignment, in my mind, should be like a canvas for students to experiment upon.
Not all assignments can be expressed in just 8 words. Some are more intricate, layering different skills atop one another. I teach with that kind of assignment as well.
As a side-note, I’ve actually stopped using the word “assignment” altogether. I say the “work of the course,” “do some stuff,” or “project” to remove transactional language like “assignment” or “submit.”
I also don’t have students “turning in” their work to just me. By whatever means I (or we) devise in a given semester, students share their work with each other (and also me) or with the world.
Me also, my instructions (across the board) have become more and more spare over the last 20 years. I have 50 students this semester, and I've gotten only about 3 questions all term about instructions or logistics.
Jessie Stommel distills assignments down to a roughly similar 8 words, but then smartly relies on students to fill in the complexity of the idea with their own work. In the West Wing framing, he’s asking students to give the next 10 words and then again and again. Filling out the complexity of ones’ ideas is really where learning takes place.
His idea is closely related to the one I had been making about Trump’s communication style. Though even in the completely made up versions of things like the Turbo Encabulator, teachers will need to be careful about what’s coming back in the assignments.
Jesse Stommel (Twitter)When you worry students won’t understand an assignment, the answer is often not to add more instructions, but to take instructions away.
— Jesse Stommel (@Jessifer) November 14, 2019
English, communications, biological sciences and law were among the most regretted college majors, according to a recent survey. On the upside, students who focused on computer science, business, engineering and health administration felt very good about their choices.
Tom Woodward (@twoodwar) is Associate Director of Innovation in the @VCUALTLab. We chat about the awesome things that can happen when great educational technologists like Tom get to work with great educators. A few of those things are anth101.com, photographyismagic.com, and oh the 34,200 blogs at rampages.us!
Jennifer Oulette (Ars Technica)Ars chats with math teacher Ben Orlin about his book Change Is the Only Constant.
Finally, I decided to build it around all my favorite stories that touched on calculus, stories that get passed around in the faculty lounge, or the things that the professor mentions off-hand during a lecture. I realized that all those little bits of folklore tapped into something that really excited me about calculus. They have a time-tested quality to them where they’ve been told and retold, like an old folk song that has been sharpened over time.
And this is roughly how memory and teaching has always worked. Stories and repetition.
–November 11, 2019 at 09:56AM
A couple of weeks ago, we quietly released a new feature here at hypothes.is: the ability to annotate websites and PDFs in groups. Previously, all annotations created using hypothes.is were either public or private (“only me”). Now you can create a hypothes.is group and invite others to join you in annotating a text or set of texts amongst yourselves–here’s a tutorial to get you started.
Tom Woodward (Twitter)This social media data translator opens up a world of nice possibilities. github.com/snarfed/granary //cc @cogdog @J_Everhart383 @heyohbunkbunk
— Tom Woodward (@twoodwar) November 8, 2019h/t @ChrisAldrich in the @wpcampusorg slack
— Tom Woodward (@twoodwar) November 8, 2019
I think Michael Feldstein is directionally correct in his analysis of what has been happening to “open education” for the past several years. Without wading into the labeling fray (are we a movemen…
Gettin’ Air with @hypervisible Professor of English at Macomb Community College. Self described as the “The Beavis of Twitter”, we chat about how he works to raise awareness of the absurd and abusive tech practices of various platforms and companies and how he helps his students navigate this increasingly dystopian world. “There’s always material to talk about how something sucks if you’re in the ed-tech space”.
Somehow @hypervisible blocked me on Twitter, which is a painful shame–at least for me. He’s one of the few researchers to have done so and one of the few people it’s worth having a separate account just for reading his content. I’m glad that others like Terry help to get his message out in other ways!
Chris also mentions a great list of recommended reads at 11:30 into the episode including: