Can I make Twitter a requirement for my students?

Harold Jarche is one of the most popular bloggers dealing with social networking, and for good reason – he is insightful. His blog post from yesterday gathers ideas which prompt me to wonder why I haven’t already made twitter a requirement in my courses, and how I can overcome the obstacles to using it in teaching. Continue reading Can I make Twitter a requirement for my students?

Expanding SOTL problem

Action research in any form has a funny – or not funny – way of running away on you. I’ve been doing a bit of SOTL work on the wargame design task in my Hi2007 class, and next term I thought I would have a research plan to  finish of my Masters in Teaching & Learning using that class. However, next term the Hi2001 tutors and I plan to roll out a new set of tutorials for Hi2001, a class which includes all the Hi2007 students, and which will change how they look on group work. I think I have a solution – read on while I think it aloud Continue reading Expanding SOTL problem

Subversion

I’m looking for some (moderately) radical students to help subvert the top-down model that dominates the Irish university sector. I do a quite a bit of research in the Scholarship of  Teaching and Learning, and I have a couple of things going on which I am keen to open up a bit and get some active inputs. I’m actually looking out for students who might be interested in collaborating on two projects, from offering comments all the way to co-authoring papers. One is on how history teaching in universities differs from culture to culture; the other is my ongoing work on group and team based learning using games in my military history option, HI2007.

Continue reading Subversion

Unpacking ISSOTL09

I’m back from ISSTOL09 and unpacking my luggage, physical and mental. I had a great time in Bloomington, visited several great restaurants in good company, did my paper, talked a lot with the other historians in HistSoTL which led to a long list of future SoTL projects. That work will keep me and many others busy for several years to come, so you’ll be able to read about it as it emerges, but before I start feeding laundry into the machine, I wanted to note some of the other things I brought home with me about teaching and learning Continue reading Unpacking ISSOTL09