When I was assigned my first duty as a TA in one of the electrical engineering courses, one term after arriving to Canada, I was keen to know more about Canadian students. Thus, I started asking other experienced TAs about undergraduate students and how to teach them effectively. One comment that I still remember until today and after being a TA for more than 6 courses was about the students’ attendance in the tutorials. Continue reading Why do some students choose not attend tutorials?! – Walid Omran (International TA Developer)
Month: August 2009
Reading at 900 words per minute – Mark Morton
Here’s an interesting new piece of software: it’s called RapidReader, and it purports to allow you to double or triple your reading speed by flashing a document onto your computer screen one word at a time, at a rate of up to 950 words per minute. Being a skeptic by temperament, I was surprised to discover that the program actually works: I was able to read an online newspaper article at about double my normal reading speed. Continue reading Reading at 900 words per minute – Mark Morton
Cognitive Surplus and Web 2.0 – Mark Morton
I heard an interesting interview with Clay Shirky on CBC’s Spark last week. Shirky is the author of the book Here Comes Everybody, and one of the many ideas he puts forth is that of cognitive surplus. In a nutshell, he proposes that in the past half century, leisure time has increased to such an extent that people now have a surplus of cognitive resources on their hands – that is, they not only have brains, but they now have time and energy to use that brain on things other than making ends meet. Unfortunately, says Shirky, this increase in leisure time and cognitive surplus coincided with the invention of television – and so for the past fifty years the cognitive surplus of hundreds of millions of people has been devoted to the passive consumption of I Love Lucy, Happy Days, Law and Order, American Idol, and so on. Even watching ostensibly “high brow” television shows like Charlie Rose, Meet the Press, and the nightly news is, according to Shirky, merely a form of passive consumption. Continue reading Cognitive Surplus and Web 2.0 – Mark Morton
“Passenger” Problem and Internet Use in Undergraduate Group Projects — Danielle Terbenche
In their 2001 study of term-long undergraduate group projects Bourner et al. defined “passengers” as an impediment to team functioning, referring to students who made little contribution to group work, choosing to “ride along” on the efforts of fellow students (Bourner et al., 2001). Last winter I also observed this problem as a TA in a second-year history course where term-long group projects, involving some shared team grades, accounted for the majority of students’ evaluation. Poor research skills coupled with questionable perceptions of work expectations seemed to me to be the origin of student disengagement, rather a conscious evasion of responsibility. Continue reading “Passenger” Problem and Internet Use in Undergraduate Group Projects — Danielle Terbenche