Teaching in Higher Ed

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Plugging in to Teaching in Higher Ed

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A few episodes ago, I recommended the podcast called Serial.

It is the first podcast that I have heard described as one you're going to want to binge-watch. The good news is that there haven't been that many episodes released yet, so you have plenty of time to catch up with the rest of us obsessed fans.

Lest you think that there's no practical value to listening as a professor, there are plenty of lessons in there about effective storytelling.

TOP-5

If you are just checking out the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast and blog, you won't likely experience quite as much suspense as you will if you listen to Serial. However, we have had some great guests agree to come on the show and share their wisdom.

Top five podcast episodes

  1. Role immersion games in the higher ed classroom with Dr. Marc Carnes (author of Minds on Fire)
  2. How to move a course online and other community questions with cohosts Bonni & Dave Stachowiak
  3. How to get students to participate in discussion with Dr. Stephen Brookfield
  4. Back to school episode with Dr. Sandie Morgan
  5. How technology is changing education with Audrey Watters

Five essential blog posts

While the following blog posts aren't necessarily ranked via objective criteria, such as hits, they stand out as essential reads to those looking to better their teaching:

  1. Creating measurable learning objectives
  2. Cultivating character
  3. Stop yourself from becoming a digital hoarder
  4. Shaping first impressions in the college classroom
  5. The dangers of making assumptions as educators

If you have just joined the community, the resources listed above are a great place to start. I hope you'll join the conversation happening in the comments section of each episode and blog post.

Help students answer the dreaded career question

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Dreaded career questionAdvising season just ended at our institution.

We are fortunate in that we have a dedicated advisor for our major, so I don't wind up investing too much time in the process of helping students map out their classes.

Conversations during these two weeks tend to focus on careers and the selection of a major.

Students often have stress around this process because they don't know what they want to do. This lack of vocational clarity is a source of concern, despite the number of times we stress that most people don't wind up doing what they majored in during college.

One question I've started asking students is:

What are times that you have felt the most alive in the last few weeks?

My intention is to help them identify times that they have been in a state of what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls flow. He coined the term and describes it as:

…being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost.

Csikszentmihalyi's book Flow was recommended by Dr. James Lang on episode 19 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

LifeHacker has some other good advice for students on how to discover their career path. There are even some who are trying to make finding a career more like playing a video game.

The other area I strive to get students thinking about is developing competencies versus identifying specific desired jobs.

One resource is the labor department's o*net website. They map specific jobs to the skills that are needed to perform well in that type of a role. They also identify what kinds of experience and education people typically have in a given position.

There's also something to be said for learning how to cultivate one's own happiness. For this quest, we can turn to quite a young source. Logan LaPlante is 13 years old and says he wants to be happy when he grows. up.

All of these questions can be tough and I don't pretend to have any easy answers. Even this New York Times best selling author was unable to get a job at The Container Store, despite her love for organization and excitement at the prospect of greeting others with a similar passion (and her desperate need for health benefits, as she fights breast cancer).

Instead of having the answers, maybe our job is to ask more questions?

[reminder]How do you help your students answer the question of what they're going to do after college?[/reminder]

Not a good week for gender equality

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I had the honor of interviewing Audrey Watters last week, for episode 18 of Teaching in Higher Ed. She cautions readers on her blog that she's the sometimes EdTech's Kassandra. She neglected to mention that conversations with her can get stuck in a person's mind and rattle around in there a lot.

genderequality

A few minutes prior to recording with Audrey, I had more than a few chuckles listening to Aziz Ansari define and discuss feminism on The Late Show with David Letterman. I wound up sharing about the clip during the recommendations portion of the show. It was one of those hopeful minutes when it seems like we might be moving to a better place when it comes to equality.

Let's just say that the week did not turn out to be a very good week for gender equality.

Audrey writes about the week in the last paragraph of her weekly update.

#gamergate rages on, as more female gamers have had credible threats of violence made against them, because of their speaking out on sexism. Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella decided that women should rely on karma for achieving equitable compensation.

I'm grateful for the way in which Audrey challenges us to do better on a number of fronts in her writing. It is arguably part of her personal brand to make us uncomfortable as we identify ways in which we are contributors to the problem.

Lest you think that this issue is only being discussed by a small minority of self-declared rabble-rousers, you should know that David Sparks, the host of The Mac Power Users podcast crafted a post on the subject, hoping to start a dialog with his community.

Anyone who thinks that this isn't an issue beyond the tech world might find the State of the Women in America report revealing.

About a month ago, I was speaking to a different Teaching in Higher Ed podcast guest about his recommendations for future topics or guests. He suggested a professor/researcher to speak on the subject of race in higher ed. I'm leaving the specific name of the person who was suggested out of this post, since I haven't reached out to the individual yet. 

It was particularly timely, since the topic kept popping up on my list of potential podcast episodes. However, the whole subject of racial and gender equality can leave me feeling completely inadequate.

The number of times I've not handled it well when students have used gender or racial stereotypes overwhelms me. It is hard to know where to begin. Such a fundamental shift of perspective has to take place in order for students to recognize the flaws in their heuristics and it isn't a mental change that can be forced upon them.

Despite feeling completely inadequate, we all must persist toward doing the hard work it takes to bring us to a new day. We must not be silent (as emphasized so well in this TED talk with Jackson Katz).

I haven't ever written a post on this topic before. I know that it raises far more questions than it provides answers. However, just like David Sparks, I can continue the dialog and invite us all to challenge each other to do more to squelch the voices that would suggest anything other than equality.

[reminder]What do we need to be doing more of as educators in higher education to move toward greater gender equality? How do we work to transform the minds of students who come from an entirely different perspective when it comes to women being equal to men?[/reminder]

A book, a mention and an update

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It has been quite a week.

now_you_see_itA Book

I finished reading Cathy Davidson's Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science will Transform Schools and Businesses in the 21st Century.

I'm not sure whether I benefitted more from the discoveries she offered that will inform my teaching, or the knowledge I gained about the brain as it relates to my own life.

She writes:

What better gift could we give our children than to learn to enjoy as they grapple, to aspire higher when they stumble, to find satisfaction as the challenges become ever greater? As the adage goes, the person who loves to work never has to.

I hope that there will continue to be more emphasis placed in our educational systems on cultivating grit in our students and on helping them develop more self control.

Dr. Davidson also emphasized how much it matters what we pay attention to and how much we are capable of missing. She shared about this experiment in which viewers are asked to count how many times a basketball is passed between players wearing white shirts.

The instructions given by the researchers do not mention that there will also be a gorilla coming through the scene, a fact which the majority of people miss when participating in the research.

The gorilla example keeps coming back throughout the book, as Davidson weaves through how technology is impacting the attention of students in schools and the attention of individuals in the professional realm.

Now You See It is absolutely worth a read.

top 10 edtech toolsA Mention

My second item of note this past week was that I was mentioned by a couple of my favorite podcasters: The Mac Power Users (David Sparks and Katie Floyd). They aired an entire episode on Tech in Education and asked educators to weigh in with our favorites on Twitter.

I couldn't do the subject justice in 140 characters, so I wrote a page on my top ten tech tools for education that they mentioned on the show. It was exciting to get to be a small part of a show that has taught me so much over the past couple of years, since I started listening.

An Update

In the most recent episode of Teaching in Higher Ed, I told a story about the student who didn't ever want me to use his name in class again and was so full of anger. I wound up seeing him a couple of days ago and it was like encountering an entirely different person.

The anger was no longer apparent, being replaced by a nice smile and a warm greeting. I need to make sure that I remember times like this, so that I never forget how transformative the college years can be for our students.

 A Request

I'm excited about the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast episode that will be airing Thursday. Dr. Stephen Brookfield offers such great insight into how we can all get our students more engaged in discussions.

Would you consider recommending Teaching in Higher Ed to one of your colleagues or friends in higher ed, or writing a review on iTunes/Stitcher, so more people have a chance to discover the show? As the community continues to grow, it makes it more possible to bring on guests like the ones we have had on lately.

Thanks for being a part of Teaching in Higher Ed.

 

Free program that reminds you to take stretch breaks from your lengthy computer work

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I’ve met a number of faculty who suffer from some type of health issues related to the too many years they have spent working long days at computers. The role of a faculty member at a teaching-oriented institution can mean a little less time in front of a monitor than in our corporate days, but there still remains the necessary work on a computer to be done.

I found a little program called Workrave that reminds you to take little breaks and even suggests some stretches you might do during your mini breaks.

http://www.workrave.org/

From their website: “Workrave is a program that assists in the recovery and prevention of Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI). The program frequently alerts you to take micro-pauses, rest breaks and restricts you to your daily limit.”

You can customize how often you’re prompted to take what they call micro-pauses and longer rest breaks. You determine how long these breaks should be and can always skip them if they wind up arriving on your screen at an inopportune time.

Image001

Workrave has worked well for me, though I did find two issues with the program:

1.       When running iTunes, it would sometimes cause the music to distort when Workrave was running in the background.

2.       I did find that I got in the habit of dismissing the break reminders, somewhat negating the benefits of the program. This was my own lack of discipline, however, and nothing to do with any limitations in the application.

Overall, I highly recommend Workrave as a great way to keep healthy while working in a position that requires computer work.