The original Mentor was an aged advisor in The Odyssey. The guidance that Mentor provided to his young ward, Telemachus, was apparently so superb that in the seventeenth century his name became synonymous with sage counsel. Examples of famous mentoring relationships abound: Haydn mentored Beethoven, Freud mentored Jung, Ezra Pound mentored T.S. Eliot, and Lawren Harris mentored Emily Carr. Continue reading Mentoring Faculty – Mark Morton
The Birth of the Learning Studio – Lynn Long
Last term, Marlene Griffith Wrubel , Jane Holbrook and I offered a new type of workshop to instructors in the Faculty of Arts. We called it the Learning Studio in order to distinguish it from our previous workshops which had typically involved a presentation supplemented with questions and answers. The “Customizing Your Course in ACE” Learning Studio took place in the FLEX Lab where three CTE staff simultaneously facilitated three small discussion groups each focusing on a specific online learning topic. Participants were able to choose which discussion group to join and were able to move to a different group at any time. Marlene and I were excited by the dynamic learning environment that we saw evolve during the first studio. Continue reading The Birth of the Learning Studio – Lynn Long
Live from Austin, Texas — Mark Morton
I’m in Austin, Texas this week at the annual conference of the Educause Learning Initiative (ELI). Today was a long and full day (and two more days of conference are to come) so I’ll probabaly need some time to reflect and sift the various things that I’ve learned or heard about so far. Two things, though, stand out from today. Continue reading Live from Austin, Texas — Mark Morton
CTE’s Teaching Tip Sheets
Over many years, CTE has developed almost a hundred evidence-based “tip sheets.” Most of these tip sheets explore different ways of enhancing one’s teaching (such as “Activities for Large Classes”); a handful of others aim to provide guidance on career-related issues (such as, “The Academic Job Interview”); and a few others offer advice to students about strategies for effective learning (such as “Building Your Note-Taking and Study Skills”). I’ve pasted an alphabetical list of our tip sheets at the end of this blog entry, but you might find it more useful to look at the list on our website, where we present them in thematic categories. Our ongoing challenge Continue reading CTE’s Teaching Tip Sheets
A commercial webinar on teaching – do we want this? – Trevor Holmes
Normally, I’d be loathe to flog a business solution to a pedagogical problem that can be solved easily in-house. However, I noticed in my email inbox (I belong to too many listservs!) a freebie from a company that specializes in higher ed “webinars” — ugly word, I know — this one has some time-saving tips about uses of regular everyday technology and higher-octane stuff. Continue reading A commercial webinar on teaching – do we want this? – Trevor Holmes
Educational Fads and Jargon 1 – Trevor the Curmudgeon
It’s Holiday Season. I really should be feeling generous. Everything is going well. However, I’ve been so involved lately in running meetings or workshops that my immersion in educational theories may just have reached the point where I’m gasping for air. Here’s why: “incentivize” — yup, one word. I can’t really see that it is a word, an allowable word, but if it is, it may indeed be one of the ugliest in the English language. Other than “impactful” I guess. I’m not even going to grace the offending word with a citation, as I wouldn’t want to endorse the company that offers it. The context in which I saw it: browsing around for energizers to use with smart grown-ups (rather than off-putting ones that are meant really for elementary kids), I saw a link to a site for a rewards and sanctions system that uses plastic credit cards to “incentivize” students between the ages of 11 and 18. I think it’s a sign of the end of the world. But seriously, the deeper point for me is that humans do not need a newfangled business-speak word to be curious, to be civil, or to be engaged (even if the latest wisdom seems to suggest that millennials need something vastly different than X’ers and boomers did). We just need the right conditions for the people and the topic, and learning itself will be incentive enough to jump in head first.
A new version of the CTE home page
To my mind, the design of a website is as much an act of pedagogy as the design of a course: the goal, in both cases, is to present information, encourage interaction, and foster an experience in a way that facilitates learning. Because of this, I tend to keep an eye open for web apps that can enhance the CTE website, and for layout ideas (from other university websites) that might further improve the navigation or presentation of our own site. I’ve cobbled together some of these potential enhancements in a version of our home page that can be previewed here, and which can be compared with our current home page here. As you’ll see, the “new” version makes use of a triple column “newspaper” layout, in an effort to succinctly display important information, and to maximize the real estate of the screen; as well, the RSS widget that appears below the three vertical columns now spans the entire width of the main content area. That RSS widget also now makes use of “tabs,” in order to pull in dynamic data from three (rather than one) sources: namely, the RSS of this very blog; the RSS of the CTE Diigo Group; and the RSS of a Twitter feed (which will pull in any “tweet” that contains “#uwcte” as a hash tag. If you have a moment, please compare the current home page with the potentially new one, and let me know what you think. You can do so via the comment feature of this blog posting, or by emailing me at mmorton@uwaterloo.ca.