I recently came across the Australian Women Writers Challenge at the Literary Studies Convention held earlier this month at the University of Wollongong. I thought it was was a great initiative encouraging people to engage with more female Australian authors and given my recent relocation to Australia I thought signing up might give me a chance to get to grips with my new home and its literature. As my own research focuses on the early twentieth century I’m keen to ensure at least half of the novels I read for this challenge were written before 1950, and specifically to make sure I read a number of popular genre novels alongside more canonical, well-remembered novels. I’m hoping to keep myself accountable by posting reviews of the books I read for the challenge here and will try and post updates on my progress as I attempt to read 10 novels (and review at least six) written by Australian women before the end of the year alongside teaching my first course at my new institution. More on this soon (I hope!)
This week’s “make” (well last week’s) for Connected Courses asks us to consider our answer to the following question: So what is the real “why” of your course? Why should students take it? How will they be changed by it? What is your discipline’s real “why”? Why does it matter that students take __________ courses or become _________ists? How can digital and networked technologies effectively support the real why of your course? I’ve come across so many great ‘Why I Teach’ posts throughout the week but two that have stuck with me are Jeff McClurken’s post (‘I believe in students being “uncomfortable, but not paralyzed” in their learning’), and Gardner Campbell’s reflective piece on “joint attention” (‘It meant, I think, that I was able to focus and make visible the purposeful attention any of us might bring to the learning moment, and with that focus and visibility strengthen and amplify its power and efficacy for all of us’). Both are well worth a read if you get a spare moment. For me (and I’m sure for many others) this week’s task seems such a daunting question, and there’s no way I’m going to be able to unpack such a complex question in just one week and a blog post. This said, I think this question is really important and will remain central to me thinking as I work through this course and try to better understand my own teaching motivations and goals. But, never one to give up without a…
I’ve really enjoyed the discussions during this “first” week of the Connected Courses programme. I wasn’t able to watch the first webinar live due to time zone issues so I had to watch it the next day, but I was very relieved to realise early into the discussion that it would not be a rather grim discussion about the crises and perils HE is currently facing, but rather a more positive discussion focused on what the “end” of education entails in terms of its aims/intentions/ultimate goals or results, etc. There were lots of great discussions in the video, which you can find here. I particularly found the discussions on digital badges really intriguing as it’s a concept not really widely under discussion/being considered for implementation over here (as far as I’m aware at least). I found Cathy Davidson’s passion about the need for a new system of grading really inspiring, and her arguments in favour of badging, especially her focus on how badges are not punative, but instead designed to reward achievements rather than assign failure. Thus students who don’t complete a course still feel like they’ve learned without feeling they’ve failed, and those that fulfil the requirements are rewarded/given a badge to serve as “proof” of acquired skills/knowledge. However, I also found this blog post that discusses the intentions of badges and some of their limitations/potential pitfalls compelling as well. In this, Julie concludes by arguing that maybe the way forward is in fact not badging, but a more…
So I spent this morning playing catch-up: both with my WCC CCS course and with the most recent Connected Courses Pre-Course google hangout. What I really loved about his week’s session was how it really got down to the nitty gritty of how to customise your site and your pages and posts to utilise plugins on WordPress, how to not be afraid of your C-Panel (confession: I used mine to set up an SQL database to install WordPress and then shuffled away quickly and haven’t been back since), and even introduced how you might create a syndicated/aggregated feed of student and course materials for a course website or online learning resource. As someone who’s hoping to teach a connected course further down the line it was great to realise you can get up a syndication feed via WordPress relatively easily – though you obviously require more complex customisation and categorisation of your materials to get something as advanced as the stream at the bottom of Connected Courses’ own webpage. As they mention in the screencast, it’s so much easier to get students to engage with each others’ work when they automatically appear on the course website (as opposed to them having to make extra clicks and follow links to get to others’ websites and then the relevant materials). I also found the idea of multiple tagging across these posts to enable both faculty and students to divide posts not only by class but also by their study groups or their…
I’ve decided to use the forthcoming Connected Courses programme as an excuse to finally get this blog up and running. I was first introduced to this course via the wonderful people over at HASTAC. Connected Courses aims to become a collaborative network of faculty in higher education developing online, open courses that embody the principles of connected learning and the values of the open web. This semester’s course focuses on different ways to developing and teaching connected courses. Although I am not teaching at present, this is a topic I have increasingly become interested in and I’m hoping that by working through the materials presented on this course I will be able to begin thinking about the kinds of pedagogical and methodological issues I need to consider when it does (hopefully!) come time to starting teaching my own courses again. I listened-in on pre-course GoogleHangout and found the discussions around blogging as a valuable tool in learning how to narrate your thinking particularly useful. One of the pre-course facilitators linked to this great piece on narrating your work, and discussed the need for an ongoing commitment to sharing what you’re thinking and learning throughout the course (and in your research and blogging more broadly). This has really motivated me to start thinking about how I can better narrate my own research processes and ensure that I explain the thinking behind my future work, eg., how was this particular tool/visualisation/representation created? What thinking went into the processes behind its development/construction? How…
