Penguins have very particular opinions about learning and teaching. Maybe this has something to do with how devoted their elders are to raising their young. During the first MOOCMOOC, I made a video about the environments in which I have…
Category: Teaching
Prompts, Pedagogy, and Composition
Tanya Sasser has written a fascinating and important piece on the question of what truly constitutes student autonomy in first-year composition courses. While her piece is primarily about theory rather than practice, I want to discuss to one particular element…
Teaching Disadvantaged Students to Advocate for their Needs
It is difficult to ask for something you do not know is possible. The recent New York Times article on the struggles of poorer students to thrive at university brings up a lot of important issues, but what I want…
What I Learned from #DigiWriMo’s Novel Experiment
Yesterday, I participated in the creation of a massively co-authored novel. The goal had been to reach 50,000 words; we reached 41,184. With this kind of event, however, it is the process and not the product that counts, and so I…
A MOOC, A Meta-MOOC, A MOOCMOOC Monster
This week, I became part of the incessant march. I participated in a MOOC (a Massive Open Online Course), but not just any MOOC: a MOOC about MOOCs. I started out knowing very little about MOOCs other than that they…
Punctuating Penelope for Pedagogical Purposes
This week, I finally had the chance to use an adapted version of an activity I first read about in Geri Lipschultz’s “Fishing in the Holy Waters” (College English 48.1 (Jan. 1986)), an article I mention briefly in my…