Blog
Data Analytics Learning Community
I was excited to send this email to my colleagues today. I am looking forward to participating in this learning community: It is my pleasure to announce that Plymouth State University is the recipient of a grant from the Northeast Big Data Hub to develop a Data Analytics Learning Community (DALC). The DALC will begin…
The Dispossessed
I’m reading Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed and am fascinated by the portrait of the three societies in the novel. An interesting side note is that my copy of the book doesn’t have the subtitle (An Ambiguous Utopia) on the cover. In fact, I only realized it had a subtitle when I looked for a…
Online Asynchronous Collaboration: Mid-Semester Reflection
As is typical in the Fall semesters, I am teaching a section of our first year, project-based course Tackling a Wicked Problem. Back before we knew the extent of the COVID-19 crisis, we knew that there were going to be at least some students who wanted to take all of their courses online. Some of…
Developing Habits of Mind
The latest assignment for the Tackling a Wicked Problem/Integrated Capstone track of Plymouth State University’s Cluster Pedagogy Learning Community asks us to: Write (and share if you feel comfortable doing so) a self-assessment on your own development of the Habits of Mind. Pay particular attention to the signposts on the benchmarks for the level of…
Indie Web Camp West 2020 Project Update
I attended the virtual IndieWebCamp West meeting this weekend. Yesterday, I listened to people talk about their web sites and how they did what they did on them. It was inspiring. Today, I worked on my own project to implement something I wanted on my web site. My project (not finished) is related to…
Values and Cluster Learning
For the second summer in a row, I’m participating in a faculty learning community at Plymouth State University focused on our cluster learning model. One of the exercises we engaged in during our June meeting asked participants to begin to develop some values for our group. For our homework in preparation for our July meeting,…
10 Books That Have Influenced Me
I was challenged on Facebook to post 10 books in 10 days that have had an influence on me. Not surprisingly, it was really challenging to narrow this down to just 10. But it was also kind of fun to think about all the books that I have loved. In the IndieWeb spirit of PESOS…
Resources for Learning to Teach Online
The following resources (courses, OER, videos, etc.) are all freely available. I haven’t vetted most of them other than reading their descriptions. Delivering High-Quality Instruction Online in Response to COVID-19: Faculty Playbook “Delivering High-Quality Instruction Online in Response to COVID-19 is a faculty-focused playbook intended to improve course design, teaching, and learning in online environments.…
Moving From File Repository to Narrative Journey
On May 18, 2020, The Journal of Applied Learning and Teaching published a timely article that I am finding helpful as I begin my thinking about teaching Tackling a WIcked Problem (TWP) online this Fall: “Introducing the Tri-layered Student Online Experience Framework: Moving from file repository to narrative journey,” by Eager, Lehman, and Scollard. I’m…
Tackling a Wicked Problem Online
Because of the uncertainty about the Fall 2020 semester, my university has decided that if a first year student wants to take all of their classes online, we would have a set of General Education classes for them. To accommodate this, we have created a couple of online sections of Composition and at least one…
Project-Based Learning in the Age of COVID-19
Last week, Plymouth State University faculty participated in an event called Slipper Camp (“like boot camp but softer and on Zoom”) in which we discussed various issues related to designing our Fall 2020 classes so that they can be offered online if we need them to be. The Open Learning and Teaching Collaborative organized the…
Cluster Learning at Plymouth State: A Community-Based Approach to Pedagogy
I am proud to be part of the learning community that created this newly available, openly-licensed book: Cluster Learning at Plymouth State: A Community-Based Approach to Pedagogy.
