Recently, I was told that I was a recipient of this year’s Class of 1940 Course Survey Teaching Effectiveness Award from the Georgia Institute of Technology!
The selection criteria for the Class of 1940 Course Survey Teaching Effectiveness Award are: “During the Fall 2012 and/or Spring 2013 semesters, a CIOS [Course-Instructor Opinion Survey] response rate of at least 85%, and either a class size of at least 40 students with a CIOS score for the question which reads, “Overall, this instructor is an effective teacher” of at least 4.8; or a class size of at least 15 students and a CIOS score for the same question of at least 4.9; or a 5 (or greater) credit course with a size of at least 10 and a CIOS score for the same question of at least 4.9.”
I qualified in the middle category, because my classes are typically 25 students/each and 3 credit hours/each.
I am deeply honored to be recognized by my students and institution with this award, and its monetary award is certainly helpful and appreciated.
Georgia Tech’s teaching awards will be given publicly at the upcoming Celebrating Teaching Day on March 6, 2014. I’m looking forward to it!
My LMC3403, Technical Communication students are well into their second unit project on reader-centered and process-driven fundamentals. In a fun assignment, I wanted the students to try out many different types of technical communication deliverables for different readers/audiences. Also, I wanted them to think differently about nonverbal communication with the heavy emphasis on haptics, physicality, and making.
In this project, their primary task is to build a set of instructions for a Lego model of their own design.
Their Lego model should represent something about their studies, their professional field, or their entrepreneurial spirit.
Their project began with the creation of a proposal memo that laid out their entire project: designing instructions, testing instructions, reporting on tests in a memo, revising instructions, and reflecting on the project in a memo.
Throughout the process, they have to be mindful of different audiences (executives, managers, and customers).
In these photos, the students are busy at work creating the first version of their Lego models.
I was happy to overhear someone say, “It’s nice to actually do something fun in a class for once!”
In today’s lecture, I charted a brief history of China and Taiwan (revolution, Kuomintang/Republic of China, Civil War, and diaspora to Taiwan), the history of Taiwan SF with an emphasis on Zhang Zioafeng’s “Panduna” as the first Taiwanese SF and her role–like Mary Shelley’s–as the “mother of Taiwanese SF” and Zhang Xiguo’s as the “father of Taiwanese SF” who also coined the term for “Science Fantasy Fiction” (科學幻想小說: Science/科學, Fantasy/幻想, Fiction/小說). I also identified five general characteristics of Taiwanese SF: 1) Synthesis of Western and Eastern culture, 2) Wuxia (武俠) or the Chinese martial arts chivalry story, 3) Adopt Chinese mythology and history to make the reader more familiar with the fantastic elements of the story (c.f., Star Trek), 4) Themes of nostalgia and loss, and 5) Conservative affirmation of society and the existing social order.
During class, I led the students through two exercises. After explaining to them the general characteristics of reading and writing in traditional Chinese, I handed out worksheets for them to practice writing the four characters of the truncated term for “Science Fantasy Fiction” (科幻小說). I gave them about 5 minutes to try out their Chinese penmanship while I walked around watching their progress. This also led to a discussion about how written traditional Chinese is different than Japanese (kanji, hiragana, and katakana).
In the second exercise, I divided the class into four teams of three students each. I handed each team two pages from the John Balcom translation of the Prologue to Chang Shi-Kuo’s City Trilogy (which corresponds to the “City of the Bronze Statue.”) The students were tasked with identifying differences between the two translations. They discovered small variations in measurements, descriptions, and phrasing. In particular, they noticed that the two translations differed in tone–the translation on his website is more vernacular and the book translation has a more formal tone. However, they reported that the Bronze Statue seemed more life-like and personified in the Balcom translation. I was surprised though that they did not pick up on the understated comedic tone in either translation. Nevertheless, I was glad that they got to experience first hand how much of a role the translator has in the creation of a translation–translation being a creative act itself.
Exam 3 review notes.
At the end of class, we reviewed for their short third exam tomorrow and I talked with them about the fun Lego project that I have planned after the exam.
Their final essays in the class will be due next Tuesday.
Many thanks to Y for helping me with my research, writing, and pronunciation for this lecture!
For today’s class, I had planned on us spending about half the class on definitions of SF before continuing our discussion of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Happily, nearly all of my students showed up for class today, but this turned the class into one completely devoted to SF definitions.
On the first day of class, we discussed the differences between science fiction (SF) and sci-fi. The students took turns writing examples that they knew on the board along a spectrum from SF (subjectively: the good stuff, significant, more than entertainment) and sci-fi (subjectively: the not-so-good-stuff, less significant, entertainment is primary vector). I wrote about this exercise on Monday here.
Yesterday, some students asked questions that pointed toward better clarification of what science fiction is. I had planned to save that for next week when I introduce the major paper assignment in the class, which involves their working with and formulating definitions of SF. However, it seemed that it might be more useful to give my students something to test SF–including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein–against.
I wanted to do another active learning exercise, but I wanted to have everyone in class contribute to the discussion instead of primarily interacting within their teams (as we did on Tuesday and I wrote about previously). To help them think about a variety of definitions of SF, I pulled 14 definitions from the list on Wikipedia here and created this handout: ellis-jason-science-fiction-definitions. When they came into class, I asked them to sign in on the attendance sheet, but unlike normally, I had numbered where they sign their names. I asked them to remember the number next to where they sign in for attendance. Then, I passed out a handout with the list of definitions numbered from 1 to 13. Each of these entries included the writer’s name, the year of publication, and the definition. These ranged from Hugo Gernsback to Kim Stanley Robinson. Next, I instructed them to read and think about their assigned definition, research the writer and prepare notes on the person to share with the class, and argue why a work of SF that they know is an example (and if possible, a counter example) of that definition. I gave them 15 minutes to conduct their research and formulate their response. Then, we went around the room from 1 to 13 with each student identifying the writer/editor/critic, reading the definition aloud, teaching the class about the person, and explaining their supporting/detracting examples.
While I am glad that everyone in the class had a chance to contribute and draw on their knowledge of SF, I think that the exercise as a whole took longer than I had planned. In the future, I will break the assignment into a few definitions split between teams as I had done with the exercise on Tuesday (researching the Age of Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and Romanticism).
In the last few minutes of class, I briefly recapped some of the important points about Frankenstein that would lead us into a full discussion of Volumes 2 and 3 on Thursday: epistolary novel, narrative frames, and Walton/Frankenstein/Creature as scientists and scientific practitioners.
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.
