Teaching Carnival 4.4

December’s Teaching Carnival is from David Morgen, Assistant Director of the Writing Center at Emory University. You can email him at dmorgen [at] gmail [dot] com.

ProfHacker has become the permanent home of the Teaching Carnival, so each month you can return for a snapshot of the most recent thoughts on teaching in college and university classrooms. You can find previous carnivals on Teaching Carnival’s home site.

Teaching Carnival 4.4 continues with a new list of interesting links and reads about pedagogy in higher education.

Technology, digital humanities, and social media.

• Martin Foys and Asa Simon Mittman write about being digital medievalists, if not digital medievalist rock stars, after being covered in the New York Times for their work in digital humanities.

• Bardiac asks how to bridge the gap between the teaching with technology folks and the instructional folks.

• Phillip Barron Four principles of using digital tools to assist humanities research.

• Audrey Watters questions some “research” on social networking and learning.

Assignments, teaching strategies, and pedagogical queries

• Jeff Rice on why he’s through with the essay: it’s “become more of a ritual that a pedagogy.” Alex Reid proposes rapid prototyping as a way out of the dilemma. Alex Halavais, also examining rapid prototyping, proposes that academics need to learn how to Just Do It.

• Flavia describes the writing assignments she gives to her MA students and asks “what kinds of skills do you think are most important for grad students to work on--and what kinds of assignments have you found that do the trick?”

• Deanna Mascle proposes focusing on the writer, not the writing.

• Dr. Crazy develops a new course to introduce students to the English major.

• Lee Skallerup tells her students, “I’ve got carrots and I’ve got sticks. Pick the one that works best for your motivation.”

• Delaney Kirk asks how for ideas on how to teach students to take risks in the classroom.

• It’s that time of the semester and jo(e) reminds us: grading, grading, grading.

• Sisyphus on surviving the death march of a long semester of grading and teaching.

• Bardiac willfully breaks the law by grading student essays.

• Dean Dad responds to a reader’s question: “What constitutes ‘falling behind’ on grading in a college classroom and what are the consequences?”

• Notorious Ph.D. has two of a planned three-part series on being a better teacher.

• Maria H. Andersen posts her Prezi presentation on measuring teaching and learning in mathematics.

• Lee Skallerup explains why she’s nervous about her first use of a blogging assignment in her classes.

• Another Damned Medievalist describes a day full of work duties, but that leaves her feeling like she hasn’t gotten anything done.

• Tenured Radical A Letter To My Students: Stop Rape Now By Doing These Ten Things.

• Flavia makes plans to start her own rare books library.

Plagiarism, cheating, shadow scholarship

• Alex Reid takes the following lesson from the Shadow Scholar article’ in the Chronicle: “If higher education is becoming de facto compulsory education for many students, then we might need to change the way we think about it.”

• Traci Gardner uses the recent Cooks Source magazine controversy as a means of discussing plagiarism in the classroom.

• Historiann on the wicked cheat of the business classes at the University of Central Florida.

Educational policy, budgeting, hiring, and admissions

• Historiann argues that “Administrators are the authors of [the] shift from tenured to casual labor.” Dean Dad responds that administrators are really simply the bearers of the bad news.

• Dean Dad identifies another problem with the adjuncting trend in higher education: the loss of an “administrative farm team.”

• Tenured Radical points out that ”when we pay university presidents like the CEO’s we seem to want them to be, all of a sudden cries of outrage rend the land.”

• Tenured Radical also asks where are the demobilized soldiers on your campus?

• Dr. Crazy on academic freedom in the classroom.

• Tenured Radical on how Skype interviews can change the academic hiring process.

• Dr. Virago posts a “kindler, gentler” xtranormal video about getting a Ph.D. in the humanities.

How about you? Do you have any last minute links you’d like to add to this month’s carnival? Did we miss your work? If we don’t know about you, we can’t link to you. So, let us know what you are up to in the classroom. You can easily have one of your blog posts about teaching in higher education included in an issue of the teaching carnival by doing any or all of the following:

1. Email the next host directly with the address to the permalink of your blog post, and/or
2. Tag your post in Delicious with teaching-carnival

Sara Webb-Sunderhaus, Assistant Professor of English at Indiana Purdue Fort Wayne, will host the next Teaching Carnival (4.5) in January 2011. Please send her your links or information you’d like to have included. You can reach Sara through email at webbsusa@gmail.com or in the comments section below. Lastly, if you are interested in hosting a future Teaching Carnival, please contact Billie Hara for information.

[Image by Flickr user Dawnzy58 and used under the Creative Commons license.]