TED Education Week

This week is the TED Education week so I am happy to share these links with you. Exploring teaching and teaching philosophy is so valuable to us all as we strive for excellence in teaching.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/ted-talks-education/
http://www.ted.com/

If anyone is interested I think it would be great to get together and discuss some of the issues presented in these talks. Anyone interested?

Publishing Your Work

FC_Publishing_Your_Work_The_Editor’s_Perspective_04_26_13_W

The workshop will consider how we respond to reviewer comments after submitting an article for publication. Understanding the editor’s point of view can help u successfully navigate this stage of the publication process.

Profs. Richard Hanley, editor of the Journal of Urban Technology, and Aaron Barlow, faculty editor for Academe http://www.aaup.org/reports-and-publications/academe, will lead a panel discussion on perspectives of the editor. They will describe strategies for submitting articles, responding to reviewer comments, and share some of their experiences and insights. Hope that you can attend.

If you can participate please RSVP to facultycommons@citytech.cuny.edu.

Followup: Open Pedagogy on the OpenLab

Just a heads up, in case you have haven’t seem them:  The results of your creative work in the April 5th “Open Pedagogy on the OpenLab” workshop are available in the Files area of the main Living Laboratory site, here:

https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/groups/a-living-laboratory/files/

Thanks again for your participation and inspiration!

Dr. McGuire’s Talk

Apologies for not being able to make this last week’s gathering, but I wanted to offer some thoughts concerning Dr. McGuire’s talk. I appreciated the emphasis that she put on reflective practices. It’s something that all students can use to get better control and personal investment in their own learning.

One thing that I have not done that she woke me up to was the idea of group reflective practices. Typically, when students work in groups and complete collaborative assignments, I have them evaluate themselves after the assignment, and, if the grade is tied to the effort of the group, I have them evaluate the effort of their group mates. I ask them, in their evaluation form, if they believe that their peers contributed an equal amount of effort to the overall task, and if they feel each member of the group deserves equal credit. Typically, students respond by saying that everyone should receive the same grade. Occasionally, they can be self critical and say that other members deserve more credit. This assessment practice typically works fine and it does have students assess and evaluate their own contributions. What they don’t do, however, is reflect on their work together as a group, and after listening to this gem from Professor McGuire, why shouldn’t they? I really like this idea and plan to use it with my collaborative assignments.