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Online Icebreaker: Songs My Mother Taught Me
[Note: This post began as a draft in June 2014 after I heard this tune on a plane. Video description: Antonin Dvorak’s musical composition, Songs My Mother Taught Me, performed by Itzhak Perlman]Different metaphors have been used to describe the learning process; learning is like a game, a conversation, combustion system, an ecosystem … What if learning is like music-making or an inspiration of song? This idea came about when I heard Joshua Bell and Yo-Yo Ma play Dvorak’s “Songs My Mother Taught Me.” How about using this as an online icebreaker…
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Assessing Student Learning in Online Education Part 1
Assessment types. Besides learning engagement, assessing student learning is one of the top concerns (top 3?) of teachers. This burden is no less lighter for online teachers. Much as teachers might like to banish this bane of teaching from their jobs, assessment (evaluation, retention, accreditation, and all related concerns) won’t go away because “measuring” learning and giving a score/grade to course completion is a deeply embedded element of the institutional culture of formal education. How to give a grade meaningfully is a priority of mine. Recently, the role of rubrics…
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Online Teaching and “Body Language”
Image description: A quotation by Jenifer Ringer, “Terry taught ballet as if it were very important and precious.” Vignette 1: “Terry taught ballet as if it were very important and precious.” – Jenifer Ringer, Dancing Through It: My Journey in the Ballet. Image Description: Feet clad in ballet shoes standing on pointe position A line in a book given to me during the early days of losing my parents; supposedly the heroine’s victory over her struggles would inspire me. A short sentence fraught with meaning and implications. I especially love…
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Help! I am teaching online
I thought about adding these 5 words (my blogpost title) to the trending hashtag in Twitter, #ScaryStoriesIn5Words. Those tweets made Halloween Day somewhat more Halloween for me, lots of drama and jokes. Scary? Not so much at the ALT Lab where I was stationed for livestreamed sessions from the Online Learning Consortium’s International Conference (OLC). Which is a good thing. The turnout wasn’t ideal but a real and urgent need of some faculty or future faculty members emerged from conversations with some attendees. Some major questions were: “I think I’m going to…
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Thinking Like the Web
Anant Agarwal, CEO of EdX, describes MOOCs as the next-generation textbooks. As I was savoring Unit 3 of #CCourses, I tried to think about how students would respond to such a textbook. There’s a lot of information offered by the course, but we don’t have to cover all of them during these two weeks. When I first landed on the course, I was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of content and readings available. This week, I’ve learned to take it slowly, thanks to fellow #CCourses colleague, Tania Sheko, who blogged about…
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Enduring Passion: Letters to a Young Scientist
I became aware of this book by Edward O. Wilson in early August 2013. I had participated in the Arts and Passion-Driven-Learning Summer Institute. During the Opening Concert, Yo-Yo Ma (yes, the world-renowned cellist) read a few lines from the book on stage: [P]ut passion ahead of training… Decision and hard work based on enduring passion will never fail you. [Wilson, 2013, p. 25] Intrigued, I returned home from Cambridge, MA, determined to read the book. Fast forward two months. I’ve finished reading the book out of a pile of…
