Here’s a quick analysis of the Twitter backchannel at the CIRTL Network Forum. As of 10:10 am this morning, the #CIRTLForum Twitter stream included 679 tweets from 56 unique individuals, including at least six who weren’t physically at the Forum. Here’s a list of the most frequent contributors, by Twitter handle: Twitter User Number of [...]
Gardner Campbell delivered tonight’s keynote at the CIRTL Network Forum. All day, we’ve been discussing the competencies and critical skills that STEM grad students and postdocs need to develop for future teaching roles. It’s good work and important work, but difficult work. Gardner’s talk, “Symphony Academy: Awakening the Digital Imagination” provided, for me at least, [...]
In my last post, I tried to make sense of why the changes Facebook made to its news feed Tuesday night bothered me. The short version? I don’t want my relationships with my friends managed by Facebook’s algorithms, I want to manage those relationships directly. Someone named Michael commented on that post, saying the following: [...]
If you’ve been on any of the usual social networks today, you’ve heard that Facebook has made some changes to its news feed that have frustrated a lot of Facebook users. I’m one of those frustrated users, but I’ve heard enough people ask “What’s the big deal?” to start to wonder why these changes bother [...]
My latest guest ProfHacker guest post went live last week. After heading up the “Twitter Teams” at the POD Network and Lilly Conferences this fall, I thought others might be interested in some of the lessons I learned about organizing conference backchannels. My post, “Encouraging a Conference Backchannel on Twitter,” outlines some of the strategies [...]
While visiting Georgetown University last week, I participated in a discussion about social pedagogies with Randy Bass, director of the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS). Randy and his colleague Heidi Elmendorf use the term “social pedagogies” to describe a cluster of teaching practices that “engage students with… an ‘authentic audience’ (other [...]
One of the more unusual components of my fall cryptography course was the cryptography timeline I had my students create collaboratively. Inspired by the collaborative timelines put together by the students of Brian Croxall and Jason B. Jones, like this one on the Victorian Age, I asked my students to enter events from the history [...]
As I’ve mentioned here before, I see social bookmarking as a valuable tool for Involving students in surfacing relevant course content we might not address otherwise (and that students might leverage in their paper assignments), Creating a greater sense of community within the course, and Tapping into students’ Web surfing abilities and desire to share [...]
More from the the 30th annual Lilly Conference on College Teaching at Miami University in Ohio… Blogs as a Unique Environment for Critical Thinking and Language Development (Deborah Page & Ruth Benander, University of Cincinnati) Deborah and Ruth shared their use of student blogs in their study abroad and service learning courses. In each of [...]
I was honored to give the opening keynote at the 2010 Lilly Conference on College Teaching at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, last week. My other role at the conference was to encourage the use of Twitter for conference backchannel discussions. I helped the conference team settle on a hashtag (#lilly10), recruited a few Twitter [...]
Welcome to my home page. I’m Derek Bruff, author of Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments (Jossey-Bass, 2009). I’m also acting director at the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching and a senior lecturer in the Vanderbilt University Department of Mathematics. The views and opinions expressed here are my own and not necessarily those of Vanderbilt University.
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