pedagogy

The Global Middle Ages Project (GMAP) is a collaborative, interdisciplinary initiative to show what a broader view of the Middle Ages through deep time looks like. It grew out of a course designed by Geraldine Heng at the University of Texas at Austin, which you can read about here. Some of the goals of the course read:

Instead of seeing "teaching" as the polar opposite of "research," we should be thinking of our classrooms as the place to test out all of the skills necessary to translate research into scholarship. Isaac de Waal says teaching is what makes us distinctively human. Why not consider that complex, interactive act as the theoretical grounding for all communication?

So I'm hanging in the Seattle airport thinking about my Educause experience this year and wondering about the future of Academic Technology, that strange hybrid entity emerging out of web design, data management, librarianship, CS, education and the work of various academic misfits--including myself. Instructional Computing has turned into a thing in it own right, with the more advanced course management systems attempting to model collaborative pedagogical principles and to incorporate the most widely adopted tools under the umbrella of university authentication and authorization schemes.