In last week’s Chronicle Teaching Newsletter, reporter Beth McMurtrie offers a thoughtful reflection on the valuing, and devaluing, of teaching within higher education. Sparked by a conference put on by a high-profile national organization, her points echo ones I’ve heard,…
Category: Trends and Change
Revisiting the cognition-motivation connection: What the latest research says about engaging students in the work of learning
Posted in About Minds Online, Academic Life, Ideas and Resources, Student Success, and Trends and Change
I sometimes tell a story about my first solo book, Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology, involving a crisis that hit about 2/3 of the way through writing it. I forget what topic I’d originally planned to cover in chapter…
Academic Twitter in a post-Elon era: Why I left, and what is next
Posted in Academic Life, Technology, and Trends and Change
It was in May 2022 that I first deactivated my Twitter account. Not usually one to follow my gut when it comes to big decisions, this time I couldn’t help noticing how drained I felt after engaging on that platform.…
Tending, befriending, and coping with upending: Takeaways from the first month of mass emergency remote education
Posted in Academic Life, Cognitive Psychology and Learning, Higher Education, Ideas and Resources, Technology, and Trends and Change
About a year ago, I experienced what we all do sooner or later in the course of our face-to-face teaching careers: something terrible and unexpected happened in class. In my case, a student collapsed and became unresponsive*.*The student was okay,…
On (re)living the real and almost-real, and what it means for learning
Posted in Technology, and Trends and Change
VR can be a lot of things – disorienting, dizzying (literally), fun, strange, and emotional.