Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Jan 15, 2010, 12:35 PM

I was asked what skills I would want to assess if I were to reform "standards-based" education.   David Gibson, who will be one of our participants in a MacArthur Peer-to-Peer Pedgagogy HASTAC Scholars Workshop next fall, posed this question.  Here are the skills I think are important and that I'd love to be able to assess in a meaningful way.

Submitted by gerrycanavan on Jan 14, 2010, 04:46 PM

This semester I'll be teaching a Writing 20 here at Duke organized around Utopian science fiction from the latter half of the twentieth century: Star Trek, The Dispossessed, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and Dollhouse. (A longer description can be found here.) In keeping with the themes of the course that consider the digital as a possible space for Utopia, I've decided to move from the Blackboard discussion forum to a public blog housed with Duke's new WordPress project.

Submitted by chutry on Jan 08, 2010, 01:00 PM

On January 6, I was invited to give a short talk at Fayetteville State University on using social media in the classroom as part of our annual mid-year conference.  My talk focused on the use of blogs, Twitter, and wikis.  To illustrate some of the core strengths of these tools, I outlined my talk in a blog post, which I am re-posting here.

Submitted by John Jones on Aug 04, 2009, 05:41 PM

Cathy Davidson's post on her use of crowdsourcing techniques to facilitate grading in her courses has sparked a lot of interesting commentary, both on the HASTAC site and on this post at the Chronicle of Higher Education's "Wired Campus" blog.

In her first paragraph, Cathy provides a concise summary of what many of us find to be the major flaws of traditional grading:

I can't think of a more meaningless, superficial, cynical way to evaluate learning than by assigning a grade. It turns learning (which should be a deep pleasure, setting up for a lifetime of curiosity) into a crass competition: how do I snag the highest grade for the least amount of work? how do I give the prof what she wants so I can get the A that I need for med school? That's the opposite of learning and curiosity, the opposite of everything I believe as a teacher, and is, quite frankly, a waste of my time and the students' time.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Jul 26, 2009, 10:19 AM

I loved returning to teaching last year after several years in administration . . . except for the grading. I can't think of a more meaningless, superficial, cynical way to evaluate learning in a class on digital, collaborative, process-oriented online thinking than by assigning a grade. It turns learning (which should be a deep pleasure, setting up for a lifetime of curiosity) into a crass competition: how do I snag the highest grade for the least amount of work? There has to be a better way . . .

Submitted by Michael Widner on May 14, 2009, 09:58 PM
I came across two items of interest recently, both treating the ways in which we communicate with students. It looks like online office hours are catching on. Stanford now has professors holding office hours on F

Submitted by Alexa Garvoille on Apr 06, 2009, 11:04 AM
After editing Wikipedia pages with grad colleagues at Duke and simultaneously student teaching in Durham Public Schools, I've combined the two in this paper for the AACE-EDMEDIA conference. Abstract: In response to current anxieties over students? ability to critically evaluate internet-based sources, we propose a secondary curriculum that uses Wikipedia as a platform to pose questions about information verifiability, ethical use of technology, and the democratic role of internet-users.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Mar 23, 2009, 08:36 AM
If I have been blogging less frequently on the Cat in the Stack HASTAC site, it is because "This Is Your Brain on the Internet" has a blogging requirement and the comments there are so interesting and the conversations so rich that I've been spending much of my blogging time reading and posting to the class. I let them vote on whether they wanted their blogs private for the class or public to the world and they asked for private and, for some, even that has been hard. At least one very smart student in the class really doesn't like public internet documentation of his ideas at all. And I empathize with that, even though, as a lifelong writer, I've long ago given up on that issue. In any case, I've been blogging every few weeks, giving readers on the HASTAC network a taste of how this amazing class is going.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Mar 17, 2009, 08:04 AM

How did English become such a grumpy profession? And what is the epistemological framework that accounts for "critique" having a higher value on the intellectual hierarchy than "formulation"? There are so many things in the world worth critiquing. No one questions that. But there is also much to contribute, and especially now, where so many forms of public knowledge are truly open, accessible, and available to anyone who can sign-in to the public terminal at the local library. Making knowledge public is easy now. Why isn't sharing the knowledge of our profession--including its standards of credibility and citation--something we teach in every course and require of everyone entering the profession?

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Mar 05, 2009, 03:59 PM
This Is Your Brain on the Internet: Episode 4

. . . In which we identify galaxies, Ananth loses sleep thinking about Jeff Hawkins? On INTELLIGENCE . . . Michael brings Jeff Hawkins to TYBI . . . and blogger Jennifer is invited to lecture the faculty on blogging . . .