Tag Archives: Teaching

CommentPress and Diigo

I have two new courses online this semester: one that introduces HTML, CSS, Javascript, SQL and CGI. Yes, really. It’s a lot to cover, but I’m trying to do a very basic intro of each, cutting out anything at all extraneous. This will leave students with a lot more to learn to be effective, but […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 2 Comments

Against letter grades

Next semester, no quantitative grades until the end of the semester. No As, no Fs, no 83%. At least one study has shown that grades not only do not help students, they actually impede their performance (Butler, 1987). Students tend to take a horse-race approach to grading, and pay less attention to how they are […]
Posted in Teaching | Also tagged | 6 Comments

I love it when a course comes together

I’ve turned in the last of my grades, and the semester is over. I was pretty happy with all my courses this semester, and particularly with one of the two versions of the “Introduction to Interactive Communication” seminars I led. It made me think a bit about what makes a course go well or poorly. […]
Posted in General | Also tagged | 6 Comments

A farewell to academia

There is a scathing elegiac on modern higher ed written by a departing mid-career professor that appears in Inside HigherEd. After too many years at this job (I am in my mid-40s), I have grown to question higher education in ways that cannot be rectified by a new syllabus, or a sabbatical, or, heaven forbid, […]
Posted in Teaching | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments