The Unofficial Guide To Unofficial Conversations At #OLCInnovate

TLDR: Replace your course rubric with a letter of recommendation. It’s time that we take responsibility for knowing our students. If you can’t write a letter of recommendation for your best students, you should rethink your teaching. If we center the letter of recommendation at the core of our assessment strategy, we can create a […]
Keegan is wrapping up the first week of his Information Literacy Faculty Learning Community as I type. The FLC, especially for weeks 1 & 2, draws heavily on Mike Caulfield’s work on media and information literacy, especially his recent work around what he calls the ‘Four Moves’ of fact-checking. Mike has built out an challenge bank […]
2016 still sounds more like a made up year in the distant future than that time “a couple of years ago.” Nonetheless, a couple of years ago, Scott Wurdinger came out with a book called The Power of Project-Based Learning. There is a great deal of debate over how to define PBL. Wurdinger recounts how […]
In reading We Make the Road by Walking, I am struck by the magnitude of Myles Horton’s work. His educational and organizational efforts were targeted at (among other things) improving literacy in order to help people secure their right to vote. This is so obviously important and world-altering that I was having a hard time relating […]
I had a great meeting on Monday with Professor Karlos Hill from African and African American Studies about a new course he is designing on race in Oklahoma focusing on the Tulsa Race Riots of 1921. Part of his idea for the course is that the students would build a virtual museum about the Race Riots. Karlos’s concept reminded […]
Last night Adam Croom posted a text-analysis of the abstracts for Open Education Conference 16 noting the ongoing focus of the conference on open textbooks. This morning Gardner Campbell gave a poetic, metaphor-laden opening keynote that challenged the conference attendees to shift away from open textbooks and refocus on open pedagogy. Bob Dylan, burning fires, insight…etymology & learning. @GardnerCampbell‘s […]
This year, Instructure held their annual Canvas conference, #InstCon 16. The consciously kitschy summer camp theme drew from and heightened the stunning beauty of the host town, Keystone, Colorado. I attended with my colleague Keegan Long-Wheeler, and, over the course of the week, the two of us walked something like 35 miles along stream-side paths going from one conference […]