Weekly Reader

On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're the 'Wrong' Professor
"I—November 29, 2011: At 7:30 on a Tuesday, right after supper, Karen McArthur had just started to wind down for the night. Her three kids were in their pajamas, reading in front of the fireplace, and her husband Jim was cleaning up the kitchen.McArthur, an adjunct professor of art history at Austin Peay State University, flipped open her laptop to see if any students had questions about their class assignments. Instead, she was shocked by an email from Alexandra Blau, a colleague she’d never met." -- Stacey Patton, Chronicle Vitae, 10/2/14

The Relationship Between Participation and Discussion
"My interest in participation and discussion continues. How do we use them so that they more effectively promote engagement and learning? A couple of colleagues and I have been working on a paper that deals with how we define participation and discussion. (Side note: If you want to challenge your thinking about an aspect of teaching and learning, consider focused conversations with colleagues and the purposefulness of a writing project. I have said it before and will likely say it again: We have so much to learn from and with each other.) One of the new insights that has come to me out of this collaboration involves the relationship between participation and discussion. I used to think of them as being related, but I didn’t see them as interrelated." -- MaryEllen Weimer, Teaching Professor Blog, 10/22/14

Incorporating Active Learning into the Online Classroom
"Gary Ackerman, director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Mount Wachusett Community College, works with faculty to incorporate active learning into their online and face-to-face courses, and while there are differences in these learning environments, active learning can be implemented just as well online as face-to-face. Ackerman encourages faculty members to use the following active learning approaches in their online (as well as face-to-face) courses." -- Rob Kelly, Faculty Focus | Online Education, 10/21/14

Library Advocacy Done Wrong
"Despite their good intentions, there are some people who maybe shouldn’t advocate for change in libraries. For example, the generally awful Huffington Post is hosting a blog post that grated on my nerves the entire time I was reading it. It’s advocating making a change to the Woodstock Library. I’m assuming that’s Woodstock, NY, although the state is never specified and since the Huffington Post isn’t a local news site a guess based on context clues is all we have. We can’t say for certain that she’s not writing about the Woodstock in Alabama, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Ohio, or Vermont." -- The Annoyed Librarian, Library Journal, 10/27/14