Derek Bruff

Here are some more thoughts inspired by Clay Shirky’s new book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. And, yes, I am a slow reader. In Chapter 5 (“Culture”) Shirky explores the role of community norms on the productive use of people’s “cognitive surplus.” He starts by describing research by Gneezy and Rustichini [...]

Recently, blog reader Elizabeth Lawley, who teaches game design and development at Rochester Institute of Technology, emailed me to ask if I knew of any game-like uses of clickers. A few uses came to mind, some more interesting than others, … Continue reading →

I meant to blog about this sooner, but I’ll console myself with the tweets I sent out about it earlier. Stephanie Chasteen (@sciencegeekgirl on Twitter) is facilitating a webinar on teaching with clickers Tuesday, September 28th. I’ve linked to Stephanie’s work here on the blog several times in the past on such topics as using [...]

During a recent email conversation with Jeff Nugent at Virginia Commonwealth University, Jeff pointed to a recent blog post of his about blogging. Jeff’s post pretty much sums up my feelings on the value of blogging as a reflective practice, and he includes a great two-minute video clip of Seth Godin and Tom Peters talking [...]

I’ll be heading to St. Louis in November for the POD Network 2010 conference. I’m contributing to two concurrent sessions there. Details below. If you’re in POD or interested in educational development, I hope to see you there! Revolution or Evolution? Social Technologies and Pedagogical Change Derek Bruff, Vanderbilt University Dwayne Harapnuik, Abilene Christian University [...]

In my last post, I described the discussions that resulted in my first-year writing seminar from a few clicker questions on academic integrity. I attempted to help my students start to reconcile their opinions on what’s ethical and what’s not with the norms of the community they’ve now joined. In today’s class, we continued exploring [...]

I recently described some of the components of my fall course over on my main blog. It’s a first-year writing seminar the history and mathematics of cryptography. Since it’s a first-year writing seminar, I have the responsibility to teach my students something about plagiarism, and I started that process in today’s class. Instead of jumping [...]

I was recently asked (by Stephanie Chasteen) to describe my approach to helping faculty innovate in their teaching. While I’ve been asked this question in various ways in the past, rarely have I been asked to respond in writing, as I was this time. I took a little time to compose my answer, and the [...]

I don’t cover the K12 beat here very often since my experience and interest lies primarily with the use of classroom response systems in higher ed contexts, but I wanted to share a recent article in the Harvard Education Letter, a publication of the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, that presents a down-to-earth picture [...]

Eric Darr is the provost at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, and he’s banning Facebook and Twitter from his campus. Well, only for a week, and only sort of. Darr is interested to see what happens when access to certain social media websites (as well as certain collaboration tools in the campus’ course management [...]