WSU Teaching & Learning Blog

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

Yesterday I presented a campus workshop entitled “Empowering Educational Resources: Moving from a Culture of Control and Containment to One of Sharing and Reuse”  The description I cooked up is as follows:”This multi-media session will provide a review of an growing shift by academic and civic organizations toward promoting open-access, reusable learning materials. We’ll look at the activity of several large foundations committed to promoting open educational resources and take a tour of a collection of fascinating new tools designed to help users create, locate, annotate, collate, rate, repurpose and exhibit digital resources for learning. And the good news is that the bulk of these tools are free and open-source…”      The slides from the session (all 75+ of them!) have been posted online at slideshare.net

For those of you who haven’t heard, we’ve got many exciting speakers lined up at the OTL. Your own colleagues will be presenting their ideas and innovative approaches to teaching. This Friday, February 1, Dr. Tim Spannaus will discuss Simulations for Classroom Use and next Tuesday, February 5, Dr. Mame Jackson will talk about Opening Doors Between the Classroom and Community.

We’ve also got other speakers lined up for the rest of the semester. Topics include: Thoughts on How to be Both Rigorous and Flexible in the Classroom, Today’s Student: Deciphering What’s Real, and more. Click here for a complete list of Winter semester faculty speakers.