Blog - cyberpop!

Summer School: Digital Media Trends

May 12, 2012 By sem 1 Comment

My online summer course on digital media culture theory and trends at Queen’s University is off to a great start. The students are creating some excellent work on the site.

One of their first assignments is to create some photoquotes based on the weekly readings. Here are a couple of examples I think turned out really well:

Image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/mdgovpics/6756420231/

Image sourced from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/born2bmild/5158015580/

The description for how to do photoquotes is on the site, and part of the course outline (on scribd). Here is the first week’s lecture video. The topic is digital literacies.

In terms of walking the talk, we’re using several social media platforms including Twitter and Google+. And we’re constructing a collaborative pinterest board and a Facebook page.

Obviously this course has a tonne of online open educational resources. We are using the campus learning management system (Moodle) for secure delivery of the gradebook and for online testing. Otherwise, I’m dedicated to teaching in public to increase accessibility and engagement. The students are putting lots of comments on each others’ work, and that activity is being tracked using Disqus (the leaderboard for commenters is on the sidebar here).

300 students, many learning WordPress and Photoshop for the first time and at the same time, and 12 weeks of content covered in 6 weeks, I love summer school!

Filed Under: teaching Tagged With: teaching

Flip the Class, No Tech Required

April 19, 2012 By sidneyeve 3 Comments

Doing some research into the flipped classroom at scale, and discovered this inspiring perspective from Steve Wheeler’s blog, describing another innovative approach to flipping the classroom: “We don’t need to use hi-tech solutions to help us flip the classroom. If we want higher quality learning experiences, we simply flip traditional roles. Flipping learning for me means teachers becoming learners and students becoming teachers [...So for example,] teachers assume the role of a learner, and accept that they are not the fonts of all knowledge, but are there to facilitate learning instead of instructing [...And correspondingly, supporting] students to become teachers, and we encourage them to independently create their own content, share and present their work – either in the classroom, or on the web – we place them in a position where they must take responsibility to learn and develop their understanding of their subject. This is active, participatory learning.” ~ Steve Wheeler [@timbuckteeth]
Click here to read the original piece for an intelligent critique of the flipped classroom model/rhetoric.

Image: Some rights reserved by sunshinecity

Filed Under: teaching