palimpsest

Art of (Class) Participation

Every wonder what class participation has to do with sprezzatura? Sage advice, via Kari Kraus.

The Great Debate

Here's an interesting resource: The Great Debate & Beyond: The History of Presidential Debates and Beyond. The archive includes select video clips froms televised presidential debates since 1960. Coincidentally, I was talking to a colleague about wanting to see (or show my students) the "You're no JFK" moment from the Bentsen-Quayle VP debate during the 1988 election, so this kind of resource could be really helpful. Also several good clips from Reagan's debates ("Are you better off four years ago?"). Thanks to Blog for Democracy for the good find. Cross posted at my personal blog, the chutry experiment.

teaching with new tools

Via Liz Lawley, educause on educational social software:

The September/October issue of Educause Review is devoted to “New Tools for Back-to-School: Blogs, Swarms, Wikis, and Games.” The articles are well worth taking a look at.

group work

Here's something I often wrestle with: I'll break a class into smaller groups which have some task or tasks to perform. After a while we'll reconvene and I'll ask each group to report results back to the class at large. The problem is that at ths point one person in the group will have been pre-selected or will emerge as the spokesperson, and the rest of the group will sit there like bumps on a log. If I work at it, I can usually get a couple of more from the group to engage--but then the rest of the class sits there like bumps on a log, observers of the spectacle. How to share group work with a large class in a more participatory fashion?

evaluating student blogging

Those teachers who require their students to blog for class might take a look at Dennis Jerz's brief entry titled "Framework for a Weblog Portfolio." For the first time in a long time, I'm teaching a writing class, and this semester I'm experimenting with student blogs, inspired largely by Chuck, who continues the practice in his Fall 2004 course titled "Rhetoric & Democracy.

class meetings on secondary readings

Back in February, KF posted this question to Palimpest: "How do you get your students to engage actively with a small piece of a long text before they've read the whole thing?"

I have the opposite question, I suppose: When you've assigned 2 or 3 articles of secondary reading for one class meeting, how do you provoke, manage, promote, (what-have-you) class discussion?

In my course on "Histories of Writing, Reading, and Publishing," we're reading a good many secondary articles here at the beginning of the course (like Darnton and Feather). Discussion is going pretty well, but I feel like we're perhaps moving a bit too quickly through the material and that we might not be doing it justice.

One way I try to frame discussion is through some basic questions:

• What are the main points of this essay?
• What are its strengths and weaknesses?
• How does it differ from / disagree with other material we've read?
• How does it apply to the issues we are considering?

So what do you do?

[Cross-posted on my blog.]

Fall Courses

Blogs and syllabi for both of my fall courses at the University of Maryland are now available: Computer and Text and Postmodern Literature.

improve students' thinking about your subject matter

From an instant-message conversation with a colleague about this post: "10 Ways to Use Writing in Class to Improve Students' Thinking about Your Subject Matter."