The Community College Business....

I attended a conference at Scottsdale Community College last Friday (see the liveblogs below)-- Tech Tools '10. Wow! The keynote speaker really got my mind buzzing! She is Maria H. Andersen, math faculty at Muskegon Community College in Michigan. Check her out if you have time -- she is FASCINATING: http://teachingcollegemath.com/. She talked about community colleges and "what we do" for a living. She questioned the sustainability of training for re-careering and how the two year model may not be effective anymore. She used the example of the Newspaper industry and how it has been cut in half....or even more than half because the jobs just don't exist anymore. Soooo.....at the community colleges, are we training them for careers that will eventually go away? Yikes! She made a great point that we need to futuristically look at our higher education model. We need to create 'thinkers' -- not people to do jobs. Creating thinkers is more sustainable --right? She talked about restructuring curriculum so that we don't teach in silos. Instead of teaching Math, Reading, English & History, we teach things like Effective Presentations of Graphical material -- a hybrid of Math & Graphic Design OR Trend Analysis -- a hybrid of history, economics & math. See where I'm going here? The idea is to produce creative and innovative critical thinkers -- and they will never become obsolete! Your thoughts?

LiveScribe in Developmental Math

Can You Digg It? Research in the 21st Century -- live blog

A Writer's Evolution in the 21st Century

I'm not sure why, but I have had several conversations lately about teaching grammar and how students no longer know how to write. I find it interesting that most people I speak with talk about how we don't teach grammar in schools anymore -- that young people weren't taught the rules that govern the written word. I reflect back on my youth and think that I really learned most of my "grammar" in my college grammar course (which, by the way, was the hardest class I took in college). I also know that I was taught grammar throughout my K-12 experience. I recall each teacher having a different "flavor" in which they presented the content. It took me until graduate school and beyond to really blossom as a writer. I wonder why it took me so long. Was it because I wasn't taught grammar properly? I doubt that. I truly think that writing development is a maturation process facilitated by life experiences. With that said....our young writers today are very different than our older experienced writers. With text messaging, internet, and Twitter, our writers are learning new contexts for which to write. I think this is exciting because our means for communication in the written form has expanded! Unfortunately we still have people who think that technology and text messaging are the end of the world. See this article: Students Failing because of Twitter, Texting. Our students will no longer be able to write or communicate properly because they write so often in a cryptic text message code. I just think it gives us more to draw from when we teach writing. If we know they text message and Tweet all the time, let's use it to get them writing more. Teach them about writing for different contexts -- isnt' that the essence of rhetoric? Knowing your audience? I would say these young students are going to be even smarter than us because they will learn to communicate in so many different ways!

Making the Switch LiveBlog

Happy Holidays from my family!

Using a tool that I promote for educational purposes, I decided to create my family holiday greeting. Glogster.com is a really neat website that allows you to create an online, media-rich collage. Check it out...at the bottom-right corner, there is a video embeded!

It's that time of year....

The semester is over, I have one more day and a few hours to work before 2010. I am sitting in my quiet office reflecting on what I have done for the semester/year and pondering how I take my performance from good---to GREAT. I love my job, I love teaching, and I love the people I work with. Sometimes that's the perfect storm which motivates you to do MORE and BETTER. So, as I sit in my office, winding back up for the next semester, I wonder what my next "thing" will be. With faculty professional development, we have to stay current and relevant because we already know that faculty have very little time to devote to us and it's our job to make our learning opportunities hard to resist. In fact, we need to make them a necessity...without mandating them! What I really want is for faculty to have "conversations"...conversations get our blood pumping, give us fresh ideas, build camaraderie, and inspire us. As an example, I think of the conversations I have with my fellow techy faculty and instructional designers/technologists. We meet several times a semester to plan workshops and share ideas. I always leave those meetings feeling inspired and motivated. I would like to replicate those emotions with all my professional development opportunities. With that said, a few bland and boring ideas bubble up -- create a college technology users' group, schedule open conversations in the CTL....*yawn* HELP! Ideas please! Maybe I need a weeks vacation and the ideas will begin to flow....happy holidays