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, [...]
A couple of weeks ago I traveled to Ireland for the NAIRTL 5th Annual Conference & Galway Symposium on Higher Education, hosted at the National University of Ireland at Galway. This was a joint conference between the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at NUIG and NAIRTL, the National Academy for the Integration of [...]
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 [...]
Okay, so I didn’t finish David Sibbet’s new book Visual Meetings over winter break. But I did read a couple of chapters! I thought I’d share a few thoughts on what I read, particularly an interesting group cognition model Sibbet describes in Chapter 1. (See my earlier post for a few observations from Sibbet’s introduction.) [...]
More from the the 30th annual Lilly Conference on College Teaching at Miami University in Ohio back in November… A Fractal Thinker Ponders Bringing Faculty Development to Students: What If? – Ed Nuhfer, California State University-Channel Islands I was really looking forward to this session with Ed Nuhfer, and I wasn’t disappointed. I know Ed, [...]
More from the the 30th annual Lilly Conference on College Teaching at Miami University in Ohio… Cranky Students: Causes and Approaches for Instructors of First-Year Courses (Robin Lightner, University of Cincinnati) A recent meta-analysis of the literature on empathy in college-aged students by Konrath, O’Brien, and Tsing indicates that students are less empathetic today than [...]
Here’s another post in my series on Clay Shirky’s new book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. I’ve finally finished the book (thanks, flight to Boston!) so look for maybe one more post on it coming soon. In Chapter 6, Shirky looks back over many of the examples he shares earlier in [...]
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 [...]
Back in early August here on the blog, I described a few “experiments” in more public class participation I planned to implement in my fall cryptography course. Now that we’re a few weeks into the semester, I thought I’d share an update on how things are going. First, a little context. The course is titled [...]
More thoughts inspired by Clay Shirky’s new book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age… In Chapter 4 (“Opportunity”) Shirky describes some of the research on the Ultimatum Game. This simple game involves two players, a “proposer” and a “responder.” The proposer is given some amount of money, say, 10 dollars. She decided [...]
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.
Derek Bruff - StudioPress Theme