Let’s take a break from thinking about Facebook, shall we? Recently I shared some of my favorite teaching blogs and technology blogs. Today, some blogs about visual thinking: FlowingData - Nathan Yau’s blog is an impressive collection of data visualizations from around the Web. Yau is a PhD student in statistics at UCLA with a [...]
Earlier tonight on Twitter… I replied: I didn’t really think I would get a reply from Garr (Presentation Zen) Reynolds, but… Wow! He replied! The phrase “much better” stood out to me in that first reply. When it comes to engaging students, I don’t see a clear winner in the digital vs. analog fight. I’ll [...]
Earlier today I led a workshop for doctoral students in the Teaching & Learning department here on the use of effective visuals in presentations. The 20 or so doc students who participated made for a very engaged audience. Many of them will be giving presentations at the AERA conference this weekend, so they were particularly [...]
A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about the “imagine” step in the four step model David Sibbet describes in his new book, Visual Meetings. I noted that Sibbet’s first step, which involves having meeting participants make visible their expectations and goals for a meeting, reminded me of the idea of a “private universe,” the [...]
Our brains are wired to rapidly make sense of and remember visual input. How might we tap into our students’ ability to think visually when teaching? What roles can photographs, concept maps, flow charts, and infographics play in learning? These are some of the questions we explored at my workshop on the use of visual [...]
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.) [...]
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 [...]
One of my goals over winter break is to read Visual Meetings: How Graphics, Sticky Notes & Idea Mapping Can Transform Group Productivity by David Sibbet. Sibbet is an expert graphic facilitator and president of the Grove Consultants International. I’ve seen a few graphic facilitators at work, including Peter Durand of Alphachimp Studio, who demonstrated [...]
Regular readers of this blog know that I’m a fan of Prezi, a highly nonlinear alternative to PowerPoint and other slide-based presentation tools. Back in September, Prezi rolled out a feature called Prezi Meeting that I’ve been eager to try out in a classroom environment. Today’s lesson lent itself very well to Prezi Meeting, so [...]
On Friday, I was invited to give a presentation to DigitalVU, a group of web developers and other technology folks at my university. They asked me to talk about technologies useful for engaging students in a classroom or audience members at a presentation. I talked about some tools for enhancing the visual component of one’s [...]
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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