WSU Teaching & Learning Blog

A great collection of writing about wikis in the higher education context is available online as a wiki (no surprise there, eh?). It is entitled The Wild Wild Wiki/Wiki Writing: Collaborative Learning in the College Classroom. Perhaps more interesting is the news that the University of Michigan press will be turning the collection into a book. Here’s the contents you can read online.

Volume Introduction “WhatWas a Wiki, and Why Do I Care? A Short and Usable History of Wikis”
Wikis and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
- “Wikis in the Classroom: A Taxonomy”
- “Wiki Justice, Social Ergonomics, and Ethical Collaborations”
- “Building Learning Communities with Wikis”
- “Content and Commentary: Parallel Structures of Organization and Interaction on Wikis”
Wikis in Composition and Communication
- “Disrupting Intellectual Property: Collaboration and Resistance in Wikis”
- “Wiki Lore and Politics in the Classroom”
- “An (Old) First-Timer’s Learning Curve: Curiosity, Trial, Resistance, and Accommodation”
- “Above and Below the Double Line: Refactoring and that Old-Time Revision”
- “Success Through Simplicity: On Developmental Writing and Community of Inquiry.”
- “Wiki as Textshop: Constructing Knowledge in the Electronic Classroom”
Wikis and the Higher Education Classroom
- “Is there a Wiki in this Class? Wikibooks and the Future of Higher Education”
- “Agency and Accountability: The Paradoxes of Wiki Discourse”
- “One Wiki, Two Classrooms”
- “Glossa Technologia: Anatomy of a Wiki-Based Annotated Bibliography”

Writing and publishing is a major area of concern for most academics. Many of us struggle with finding the time to write within our daily routines. The OTL recently sponsored a workshop conducted by Dr. Tara Gray, called Publish and Flourish. Dr. Gray provided many wonderful, concrete strategies for increasing writing productivity, and faculty who attended have let me know that they found the experience to be extremely beneficial.

We would love to invite Dr. Gray back next year, so for those of you unable to attend this year, be on the lookout for the workshop in the upcoming 2008-2009 academic year. In the meantime, some of Dr. Gray’s suggestions include:

• Post your thesis statement and write to it
• Write EVERY day for at least 15 minutes, preferably the same time every day
• Make time by scheduling writing on your calendar and write without interruptions (shut your door, turn off the phone, and close your email)
• Document your progress by keeping a daily log of the minutes you wrote and report it to someone else

I noted a theme in Tara’s presentation, which often comes up in other discussions around writing, and that is the notion of consistency and accountability–writing every day and reporting your writing results to someone else.

To jump start your writing, you might consider joining an online Academic Writing Club. There’s a small fee involved, but many who participate claim the expense is offset by their increase in productivity. Check it out and let me know what you think!

Each summer the Department of Communication here hosts a seminar for doctoral students from communication departments around the country and abroad, focusing on the work of a guest scholar. This year we are pleased to be joined by Dr. Larry Frey from the University of Colorado at Boulder. The focus of the week-long seminar is on Communication Activism. We have selected an impressive group of about a dozen doctoral students for participation and they bring a wide-ranging set of interests in combining activism and scholarly research.

Part of our seminar includes a public event (this year May 29, 1:00 PM, Bernath Auditorium, WSU Undergraduate Library) where we open up and involve a wider audience, sharing some of the expertise of our guest with the community and hopefully exposing the students to some of the interesting things happening in our region relevant to the seminar. This year the topic is Engaged Scholarship: Taking Activism and Social Justice Seriously in Our Work. We will use a “samoan circle” model for the discussion so that audience members and the visiting doctoral students can join in the conversation. After some initial framing remarks by Larry Frey, we will turn to the circle for commentary and dialogue.

Please join us if you can!

Engaged Scholarship Event Flyer

Clearly the trend within higher education is a move toward larger class sizes. A recent article in the Association for Psychological Science magazine Observer presents some tips for managing larger classes. They report that faculty often first have to deal with their own feelings about the change:

Faculty responses to increased class sizes often resemble Kubler-Ross’s (1969) stages of grief and loss: denial (”There is no way to increase the size of this class and maintain academic integrity!”); anger (”I can’t believe they did this, administrators don’t care about students or faculty!”); bargaining (”If I teach 20 percent more students without additional compensation, what do I get in return?”); depression (”How am I ever going to teach this class in a meaningful way again?”); and finally acceptance (”OK, my class is larger. How do I deal with the hordes?”).

If this sounds familiar to you, you’ll appreciate Todd Zakrajsek’s presentation of some very pragmatic tips for staying connected as your class size grows. Check it out here.

If you have been doing any service learning work with your students, or are thinking about it and need some motivation, you’ll appreciate this listing of 93 potential research publishing opportunities. The Guide (available here as a pdf) was developed by Gary Homana, a participant in the 2007 Service-Learning Emerging Scholars Works-in-Progress Seminar hosted by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement (CIRCLE).

Spreadsheets in Education is an open-access journal hosted by Bond University in Australia that explores the role that spreadsheets can play in education. Three years of content are now available. Of particular interest to many faculty will be the regular features focusing on using spreadsheets in the classroom. A recent example is an article entitled Quick Correct: A Method to Automatically Evaluate Student Work in MS Excel Spreadsheets by Laura R. Wetzel and Peter J. Whicker. Worth a look…

The January 2008 Issue of the International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) is now available online. This is a great place to see what people are thinking and discovering as they strive for quality teaching based on reflection and assessment.