The Last Five Years

The very interesting and timely article from Magna Pubs

By Barbara Mezeske, Hope College,MI -
mezeske@hope.edu
Much is written today about new faculty
and those in their midcareer
years. The literature for newcomers is
about how to teach, and for those who’ve
been teaching for a while it’s about new
strategies and keeping vital in the classroom.
Those of us well past that professional
midstage wonder why these groups
get all the attention. What about those
of us who are considerably older, who are
pushing hard against the upper limits of
midcareer, and who may have some of
the same concerns about not drifting
toward obsolescence or prematurely
slinking off into some imaginary sunset
where there are no students, exams,
papers, departmental reports, or annual
reviews to plague us. Isn’t staying intellectually
alive and effective in the classroom
just as much—or more—of an
issue for those who can count on their
fingers the number of semesters they
have left?
Two examples encourage me.
The first is the renowned
Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt
of Harvard University. I loved reading in
The Chronicle of Higher Education
(October 26, 2007) about his plunge
into the new world of digital humanities!
The Chronicle reports that his new
course “Travel and Transformation in
the Early 17th Century” takes full
advantage of Web and digital technologies
to link the standard stuff of lecture
with visual, auditory, and interactive elements
that deliver a far more robust and
rich look at the past than does the ordinary
humanities course of the 20th century.
Greenblatt is no midcareer scholar;
he was born in 1943.
The second example is from my own
college. I had a colleague whose
strengths were his intellectual keenness
and physical energy, but not his teaching.
It was rumored that he fell asleep in
his own classes. Yet in the final semester
of his career, by good luck as much as by
design, he was discovered by a group of
three students whose passion was studying
fantasy literature as their senior capstone
course. Would he take them on,
they asked. Certainly, he replied, not
missing a beat. And so a colleague in his
final semester of teaching embraced a
new challenge, stretched his own boundaries,
engaged for probably the first time
in collaborative course design, and finished
with some of the best classroom
experiences of his career.
From these two examples and from
my own reflections as I traverse my seventh
decade, I share three lessons about
the end stages of my classroom career.
First, embrace the new technologies.
This is not easy.While I am comfortable
acknowledging that there are some elements
of technology that I will never
master, I know that the new digitized
world is replete with good additions to
my work. In my case I have had to insist
on help—sometimes with departmental
or institutional funds, sometimes from
adept administrative assistants, sometimes
from students themselves. I am
immune to pitying looks and slight condescensions;
it does not bother me one
little bit that 19-year-olds are better
than I am at working techno magic.
Spreadsheets, Excel grading,Web-based
surveys, clickers, YouTube, Moodle,
Google Earth—just give me time and
patient assistance, and I’m happy to add
these to my repertoire.
Second, find the energy to go out at
the top of your game. Do not succumb
to the temptation to repeat old patterns.
Seek out new assignments. Propose a
course you have not done before.
Explore a minor interest that you have
been wondering about. Take a faculty
development workshop. Audit a colleague’s
course. If none of that is possible,
then at the very least lose your old
notes, syllabi, and files.Try something—
anything—from scratch, just as you did
when you were young and dewy-faced.
Finally, begin now to have a new life.
So accustomed are we to immersion in
the academic world we inhabit that we
sometimes forget that there is a bigger
pond outside. Moreover, once tenure is
earned, a reputation is built, and children
have left the nest, we are inclined to
live in a smaller and smaller world, one
circumscribed by the boundaries of our
campus and our professional selves. Not
me. I have vowed to have a life that
extends beyond my job, starting today,
before my career ends. This involves the
active pursuit of leisure; all those books
on my “must read someday” list are finding
their way into my home and onto my
nightstand. I have resolved to be intentional
about my physical well-being—
usually accomplished by daily walks with
my dog, rain or shine. And I am looking
quite seriously for my next position,
most likely as a volunteer in some place
where I will meet new people, where I
will be someone else’s gofer, and where I
can find myself a new place to do what,
after all, I am doing right now: living
with purpose and making a contribution
to the world around me.
March 2010 The Teaching Professor
8

When I Grow Up

I Want to Be Like Hazel when I Grow Up!

CTV News - Shaw Usage Based Billing clip

iPad in the Classroom

From the article: HIGHER ED IMPACT
Weekly Analysis from Academic Impressions

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 http://www.academicimpressions.com/news.php?i=155&q=7815x276950bX

Piloting the iPad

Pepperdine University's iPad Research Initiative is a three-term study (consisting of classroom observations, surveys, and focus groups), and Pepperdine has just completed the first third of the study, looking at how students are actually using the iPad in class when given the opportunity. Future terms will assess effectiveness on teaching and learning. The preliminary findings from the first term suggests that students have found value in using the iPad because of its:

• Ease of use (students noted its touch-screen and the fact that unlike a laptop, the iPad has no "boot up" time)
• Mobility (students noted how easily the iPad could be passed around a group of students, making for smoother collaboration and group study)
• The vast variety of apps available (students in Pepperdine's math course pilot praised the graphing calculator app and other programs that they perceived as having a positive impact on their learning)

One of the things Pepperdine University hoped to learn this term was how quickly students would adopt the iPad. Moving beyond the hype, would students actually adopt and use the device? Dana Hoover remarks, "Before assessing anything else, we needed to observe how students would use the iPad. At this early stage, it was like throwing a rock into the water and watching the ripple effect."

As it turned out, students had a lot of excitement about the iPad, and expressed that they hoped to use the apps they discovered for future math courses.

Making powerpoints more effective for online learning

Magnapubs latest issue features an article on how to make powerpoints more effective for online courses by adding voice. 

http://tinyurl.com/onlinepowerpoints

This article provides very practical tips on adding voice narration to powerpoints, making them into more useful "mini-lessons".  Using tools such as Sceenr, Jing or other free tools offer one method.   You can also use the narration tool provided in the more recent versions of Power Point. 

Tip:  Remember to keep your slide content to a minimum.  It's better to have 10 good slides that 5 cluttered, hard-to-read slides.

ELearning Courses -

According to the Rapid ELearning Blog, three aspects need to be considered when planning an e-learning course:

• Motivated to Learn: How do you get people interested in what you have to offer?
• The E-Learning Course: Design the right instruction, visuals, and interactivity.
• Support Ongoing Learning: What happens the morning after?

They state: "Learning is a complex process.  An elearning course is an important part or the process, but it isn’t the entire process.  The secret to elearning success is to know how to tap into the learner’s need for the course content, to build the right type of course, and then to ensure that you have ongoing performance support."
What do you see as some of the challenges in these three steps?  What do you think?

For more info, check out http://tinyurl.com/threeideas