Beloit College’s annual listing of the mindset of incoming freshmen is yet another reminder we can’t work from those crusty yellow lecture notes (not that any of you do of course!). Personally, I always find the class assumptions behind these types of lists fascinating. These students have never had to roll down the car window? Somehow I think many of our students still have access to cars that require rolling down the window. However, I love the recognition of media as historian while discussing that these freshman only know JFK and Malcolm X from the films. Be sure to realign your thinking and check out the list!
We’ve tabulate the results from the ticket out from Fall 2007 Convocation on Monday. The following list groups the various "Reaching Out to Students" ideas into trends that Naomi Story & Shelley Rodrigo identified. Please read through and consider responding to this post. Things to consider:
- Which of these suggestions will you do? when? where? how?
- Which of these suggestions have you done in the past? How did they play out?
- What other categories do you see emerging in this list of suggestions?
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I liked Jim Mancuso’s metaphor that MCC is not just turning a new page this academic year, but an entire new chapter. I think the CTL is also starting a new chapter with the recent return and/or turnover of new staff in the CTL. As a part of our new chapter, the CTL is kicking off a new program called “Focus On“. The purpose of this program is to give the CTL a pedagogical topic to focus on for each semester. Our kick off topic is Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs). We hope this semester that everyone will participate by talking about, and possibly trying, CATs sometime during the Fall semester. Hopefully you all filled out your “ticket out” at the end of the Convocation. Those of us in the CTL will look at those results and report back to you all later this week.
I thought I would “cheat” and make my blog posting this week an easy one. For those of you who do not know, Donna Guadet, Mesa CC’s fabulous instructional technologist, decided she missed the classroom and moved over to Scottsdale CC as a full-time math instructor. To allow MCC to run a full search to replace our instructional technologist position, I will be the acting instructional technologist for the 2007-8 academic year.
I just finished five years, full-time, in the English, Humanities, and Journalism department teaching writing and media studies classes. My scholarly interests generally include the interface between technology and humanity. My various scholarly projects are usually about teaching and learning with technology, technologically mediated professional development, and cross-media narrative studies. I have been blogging about my various scholarly interests for the past year and a half and just upgraded to my own domain.
Besides helping with workshops, course design, and various programs in the CTL, I will also be working on my own interests of scholarship at the two-year college (specifically how do we seek funding and do it). I will also be working on revising the ETL (excellence in teaching and learning) courses.
So swing by if you:
need help with some funky teaching and learning technology,
want to chat about redesigning your course,
like to share what projects you are working on, and/or
just need a place to hide for a while!
Recently there were articles in both the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed about working students in higher education. Probably not a surprise to most of you, there were many statistics that emphasize, and reemphasize, the hurdles that many of the working students at MCC must go through to attend college. The report discussed in the article from Inside Higher Ed claimed that “the working poor who take college courses think of themselves as students first and employees second.” The report also listed recommendations to help working poor students; all of those listed in the article have to be implemented by either the federal government (or other student aid decision makers) and individual institutions. None of the recommendations focused on what individual instructors can do in their specific classes.
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