A More Perfect Quarter

I am always a very optimistic person. I'm convinced that each quarter is going to be better than the last and, in many cases, my optimism is justified.  But, inevitably, there are always lots of things that don't go quite as well as I might have wished.

This quarter, for example, my desire to gamify my class just didn't happen. It ended up being too hard to do in the time I had to do it. The tools are not yet ready for easy implementation. I could have done it, but it would have taken a lot of time, not just at the beginning, but all quarter long. I knew if I was spending time on that, I wouldn't be spending time doing other stuff that needed to be done, like updating my readings (which also didn't happen, and I can't even blame the games!)

Yesterday, I read an excellent article on ProfHacker, one of my favorite blogs, about planning for the upcoming quarter using a thought experiment of thinking through what the perfect quarter would look like and the steps you need to take now for it to look that way.

I love this idea because, as you might guess, I like to plan. But, I'm also perfectly capable of planning away the time that I should actually be doing something useful.  Now is the perfect time to have some fall quarter thought experiments and plan for a more perfect fall.

Do you have any tips for fall quarter planning?  Share them in the comments.

Reference:
Time Travel to Plan Your Semester by Natalie Houston, Aug 13, 2013 on ProfHacker

Technology Takeover

A couple of weeks ago, I was listening to a series of stories on Marketplace called Robots Ate My Job, in which David Broncaccio drove from coast to coast trying not to have personal contact with anyone, dealing only with automated hotel check ins and self checkouts, etc. It was very interesting.


Over the last few weeks, I've been at several meetings and conferences where I encountered a very real fear among faculty that technology would take over their jobs. This, for example, was a frequent unspoken message when folks talked about why they didn't use Tegrity (what if my students stop coming to class?).  


This fear is, frankly, baffling to me.  In my mind, if technology can do the same thing that I do, that means it probably does not require my two terminal degrees to get that job done.  So, hooray for technology - I'll let it do that job while I do something more worthwhile that does require at least one of my fancy degrees. Technology isn't stealing our jobs, it's liberating us from the mundane to really engage with students in a more authentic way. It's a tool that makes it easier for us to do our jobs.


Of course, if you are reading this, I'm preaching to the choir, so I'll get down off my soapbox. I'll wrap up this commentary with a brief postscript. On my way home from the ATL conference, I stopped for lunch at Jack in the Box.  In the lobby of the restaurant was a big machine urging me to use it to place my order instead of the friendly looking woman at the counter. Thinking of the Broncaccio story, I decided to try the machine.  I should say that I am one who generally opts for self check out at the grocery store and ATMs instead of going in the bank. The Jack in the box machine was quick and easy to use. However, it somehow felt rather unsatisfying. I would have preferred to chat for a moment with the friendly woman at the counter.

The Dangers of sitting

For a lot of us, especially those of us who teach online, sitting is an occupational hazard. How much of a hazard has been in the news a lot lately (see, for example, last month's story on NPR, Sitting All Day is Worse For You thank You Might Think).  So, making little notes about staying healthy is something I've tried to incorporate into my training for online faculty.  A story yesterday in Mashable (The More You Sit the Sooner You'll Die) reminded me that I should  share with this group.  I thought this Infographic from Mashable pretty much says everything you need to know.

I bike as my primary way of getting to work, but, as the NPR and Mashable stories makes clear, that's not enough. I have a ball chair and a standing desk and a bike desk (though I admit I don't use either half as much as I should). Sitting continues to be a huge challenge for me. What, if anything, are you doing to limit the dangers of sitting?

(I had a cool infographic here, but was asked by the creator of the infographic to remove it and the reference to their website)
Resources:
Just how Dangerous is Sitting All Day (contains the above Infographic) from Mashable
The More You Sit the Sooner You'll Die by Sonia Paul on Mashable
One Year at my Standing Desk from Lifehacker
Sitting All Day is Worse For You thank You Might Think from National Public Radio

New twist on the flipped classroom

The flipped classroom has been in the news a lot lately. This is when you have students prepare for an interactive classroom experience by getting the lecture online before class. This idea stems from the understanding that lecturing isn't a great way to teach nor is it a very good use of classroom time.  With the rise of tools like Tegrity for lecture capture and the ease of course management systems, putting the lecture online is becoming more and more popular for hybrid and traditional instruction.


In a great article titled Rethinking the Way College Students are Taught by Emily Hanford, on instructor goes a step beyond simply flipping the classroom. He engages the students in teaching each other by tying the preparatory reading (or lecture) with student generated areas of confusion. He then uses those points of confusion as the basis for peer instruction, where the students help each other understand the confusing topics.


I spoke last week at the Tegrity Conference on the future of lecture capture. One of the questions that came up in my presentation was, if we don't spend our time in the classroom lecturing, students will feel cheated, like the teacher isn't doing their job. Well, my response was that the teacher needed to be engaged, not just sitting sipping a latte and reading a magazine while the students were in conversation. This is a great model for that engagement.


It is also a great model for hybrid instruction and the overarching challenging of tying together the online with the  face to face instruction. 


I'm struggling, though, to think of applications of this idea for the fully online classroom, which is generally asynchronous and thus slower moving. While this can and does happen in a discussion forum, it doesn't seem like it would be quite as dynamic as what is described in the article.


What do you guys think?  How might you implement dynamic peer instruction in the fully online classroom?  Have you tried this in your hybrid or face to face classes? How has it worked?


Reference:
 Rethinking the Way College Students are Taught by Emily Hanford

Some recent reading. . .

I thought I would share a couple of articles with you all.  As I do, I should note that I use Instapaper for saving all the stuff that I don't have time to read. Once I read it, I forward the stuff I want to save to my Evernote account.  Like all my favorite tools, Instapaper is everywhere - I use the app in my browser to save articles, I can forward articles that I get via email, I can read the articles on my phone or iPad - it even syncs with my eInk Kindle. It's very cool.  I think I saw someone mention this in the Cool Tools post, so I know I'm not the only Instapaper fan here.


Anyway, on to the articles:

• You're breaking the law every day (and what you can do about it) - a good article on copyright from a consumer prospective (think - your students as they are working on assignments). This is from Lifehacker (http://lifehacker.com), probably my #1 favorite website.
• How to Scan Books for your Personal Library (and why you'd want to) from my favorite blog, the Chronicle of Higher Education's Profhacker, about using Goodreads for keeping track of all your books. This is a genius idea - I can't believe it never occurred to me.
• Web 2.0 at Your Own Pace - from Inside Higer Ed - looks at faculty using technology from the student perspective.
• Tool Roundoup: Productivity Helpers for the New Year - from Insde Higher Ed's GradHacker.  It recommends "iffit", a sort of automation tool, which is on my "try this" list for this year.