During today’s Science Fiction class, we began discussing volume 1 of Mary Shelley’s 1831 edition of Frankenstein. After a brief lecture on Mary Shelley, her family, and the fateful June 1816 trip to Switzerland, I wanted to talk about how historical and cultural forces made it possible for a work like Frankenstein to come into existence. However, instead of lecturing about the Age of Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, Industrial Revolution, and Romanticism (and the Gothic), I decided to roll out an active learning exercise to facilitate peer learning. I divided my students into teams of three based on where they were sitting in the class. I reminded them to swap contact information with each other for sharing notes, studying, etc. Then, I explained the exercise to the class as a whole: I would assign each team a topic to research for 20 minutes using Wikipedia and EDU TLD sources on their laptops, tablets, and smart phones. Of course, I said that they could also rely on any knowledge that they already have, but they will have to share that knowledge with their team mates. While researching and talking about their assigned topic, they should compile a list of the most important ideas and/or figures and teach the class those topics. I walked around the class and told each group their assigned topic from the list above. After about 15 minutes I saw that the teams had completed the task, so I asked them to wrap it up and I called for a team to volunteer to present. Each team gave a superlative summary that I could add to, build on, and reference during our discussion of Frankenstein. I asked the students if they liked the exercise. There was no response, and my question was probably not a fair one to ask. Next, I asked if they learned something from the exercise, and they unanimously said, yes! Now that I’ve seen active learning work in my classroom, I will definitely think of other active, peer learning exercises to keep my classes dynamic and engaging for my students.
Today, I began teaching my first Science Fiction class at Georgia Tech (LMC 3214 SS2). It is a short-session class, so my students and I will explore the history of SF in only five weeks on a grueling 4 days per week, 2 hours per day schedule.
Following a short break after reading the syllabus, I conducted an interactive exercise where I wrote “Science Fiction (SF)” on the left side of the chalkboard and “Sci-Fi” on the right side. I sketched out the differences between the two terms and how we might use them to identify different types of SF. Then, I handed the chalk to a student who I asked to go to the board and write a type of SF that she liked in the spot that she felt best represented it in the SF/Sci-Fi continuum. As a class, we would discuss these examples. The other students and I would help point out how we might view these examples in different ways along the SF/Sci-Fi axis. Each student would hand off the chalk to the next student. We completed two rounds of this before running out of time in class.
I think that I have an excellent group of students. Most are SF fans invested in the genre in one media form or another. Some students are there for pragmatic reasons. I believe that as the class unfolds all of my students will find interesting and significant connections to their thinking, life, and work.
Tomorrow, we begin discussing Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Today, the Georgia Tech Alumni Student Ambassadors and the Georgia Tech Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning hosted the Dean Griffin Day Luncheon to recognize recipients of “Thank a Teacher” notes. I was honored by a Thank a Teacher note from one of my students.
Associate Vice Provost for Learning Excellence Donna Llewellyn told us about the origins of the Thank a Teacher program and recited some of the notes that recipients had received.
Marilyn Somers, Director of Georgia Tech’s Living History Program, guided us through enjoyable multimedia-driven stories about Dean George C. Griffin. Her enthusiasm for Georgia Tech is only matched by her passion as a storyteller.
Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education Colin Potts delivered a meditation on what exactly it is that makes a great teacher and how that relates to the modern development of online education in MOOCs (massive open online course). The two most provocative things that I took away from his talk include the question, “What makes a good teacher?,” and the observation, MOOCs are part of the evolution of education but not the end.
On my walk back to the Hall Building, I thought about Dr. Potts’ question: What makes a good teacher. Of course, I have given this idea a lot of thought before and after entering the profession, but it is a question that we as educators should continually return to in our work as reflective practitioners. The best quality that I have found in my teachers (and I mean those people who are educators in the broadest sense of the word) is passion. This includes a passion for the material being taught, a passion for student learning and success, a passion for engaging others, a passion for life-long learning, a passion for energetic discourse, a passion for understanding, a passion for a passion for giving back to a community, a passion for being a part of larger conversations beyond the classroom, and a passion for kindness. What’s intriguing about my experiences with some fantastic teachers during my life is that I do not believe that any of them perform, demonstrate, or conduct these same passions in the same way. There many different paths to these things, and its amazing to me how many different people tread very different paths yet have achieved for me the same positive and enriching outcomes.
This reminds me of something else that Dr. Potts warned about MOOCs–the impulse of some to promote a singular, superstar educator as the one way for a course to be delivered and taught. In a smaller way, I think back to my Calculus education at Georgia Tech. There were simply some professors who I could learn from–that is, their teaching style and methodology synced, jived, and meshed with my thinking and learning ability. The professors who I did learn Calculus best from might not have been the exemplars of the profession at Tech at that time, but they were, to me anyways, the best educators of Calculus (I should know, because I had some false starts early on in my educational career). We have to be very careful about the choices that we make as an institution and as a profession as we move further into offering MOOCs. These choices should extend beyond the calculus of student completion rates. We have to consider the effects MOOCs will have on pedagogy and educators. How will MOOCs, over time, influence education? How will MOOCs influence student success in areas not explicitly concerned with a course that teachers often provide and encourage (finding out how students are doing, having informal chats, making sure students are doing okay, etc.)? Will MOOCs push out some educators and educational styles in favor of others? Can the passions of educators be provided/conveyed and can the passions of students for learning, solving puzzles, and engaging discourses be fostered in a MOOC?
A final note: I am listening to Dr. Eric Rabkin’s lectures on tape for his Science Fiction: The Technological Imagination course from the University of Michigan. Certainly, he is passionate about science fiction, and it is, I believe, unavoidable for his passion to infect his audience. He knows the material, and he is obviously excited to convey this knowledge to his students (in the classroom and in the world–those of us listening to the lectures on tape). However, Dr. Rabkin cannot provide the same kinds of things as a teacher (educator, mentor, counselor, etc.) in a MOOC or lectures on tape that he can provide in a class of reasonable size (another issue). Don’t get me wrong–Dr. Rabkin is a fantastic person and I count him among my professional friends. However, there are limitations to what an educator can and cannot do in a MOOC or lectures on tape. For example, in his own highly popular MOOC, I imagine that he cannot read all of the comments or questions of every student (when I see Dr. Rabkin next, I will certainly ask him about how he compares his classroom and MOOC teaching). This is something possible when you have reasonable class enrollments and course loads (this leads into another area of concern about having too large of a class for a qualitative and composition oriented course–there is a point at which the teacher cannot provide the necessary and needed passion for all students. In which case, a too big of a class, too many classes, or a MOOC can become indistinguishable from the perspective of the educator). Of course, I can see that the objectives of the classroom learning environment compared to the MOOC/lectures on tape should be different. I am left wondering though if everyone who promotes MOOCs truly recognizes the different affordances of each without trying to make one into the other at the cost of each.
My Pedagogy Poster on “Writing the Brain” at Assessing Multimodality Symposium.
Today, the Georgia Tech Writing and Communication Program and Bedford St. Martins hosted a symposium on Assessing Multimodality: Navigating the Digital Turn. I co-presented a workshop with Mirja Lobnik on Multimodality and Perception and I presented a poster during one of the day’s sessions. Many of us were tweeting our experiences at the symposium today, too. Click through the Storify embed below to virtually experience the symposium 140 characters at a time.
This morning, Mirja Lobnik and I will be co-hosting a workshop on “Multimodality and Perception: A Multi-Sensory Approach to Teaching Rhetorical Skills” at the Assessing Multimodality: Navigating the Digital Turn Symposium co-hosted by Georgia Tech’s Writing and Communication Program and Bedford St. Martin’s. Our workshop is about multisensory perception, multimodal composition, and cognition:
Associated with the use of various media to create cohesive rhetorical artifacts and the neurology of the ways humans process information through different sensory channels, multimodality has gained considerable ground in the composition classroom. Insofar as multimodal pedagogies emphasize the role of students as active, resourceful, and creative meaning-makers, it tends to enhance student engagement and, by extension, the teaching of composition and rhetorical skills. Focusing on sensory details of embodied, lived experience, this workshop centers on teaching that engages students both in mind and body. This approach not only promotes the students’ creation of multimodal artifacts but also encourages students to explore and critically reflect on personal experiences. Specifically, Lobnik focuses on aural composing modalities, including speech, music, and sound, and assignments that highlight sound as a rhetorical and creative resource: a transcription, audio essay, and a video. Ellis discusses cognition, metacognition, and curation and an assignment that integrates Twitter, Storify, ComicLife, and the written essay.
If you get to attend our workshop or the symposium’s other great sessions, please tweet using the hashtag: #AMsymposium.
