teaching: January 2006 Archives

Well, I received a serious question back about this three-month old blog and it's relation to/interaction with privacy laws that govern confidentiality between teachers and students. (How strong are these, anyway? When do they get used?)

I meant the post as a joke with/among my colleagues, yet there is an edge of challenge to my students as well. I haven't scoured the posts back in time, but it does seem some rather offensive things have been said. A recent post critiques the blatant sexism, objectification, and rudeness that's been exhibited by some. Meanwhile, a student has also sent thoughtful comments on how teachers receive good evaluations.

Perhaps the site will evolve from a competitive forum countering the equally problematic Rate my Professor.com into a useful public sphere for the discussion of pedagogy? Or it might just degrade again. Or flux between extremes...

Rate Your Students arrives to compete with Rate My Professor.

Tracked from Alex' amusing post on the subject. He got it from Dan's Revenge of the Profs.

The best undergraduate student paper in last fall's 4-credit course, Introduction to Mass Media, was written by Laurie Goodman on Intelligent Design.

Her paper, Analyzing the Communication Strategy of the Intelligent Design Movement, applies excellent strategies of critique and mass media theories, concepts, and analysis.

More on the ID debate can be found at Intelligent Design and Evolution.

Read Hanson & Maxcy's excerpt of Lazarsfeld & Merton (1948) this morning for CMN455, and noted this critique as relevant to COM375: "Large numbers of people have acquired what might be termed 'formal literacy,' that is to say, a capacity to read, to grasp crude and superficial meanings, and a correlative incapacity for full understanding of what they read. There has developed, in short, a marked gap between literacy and comprehension. People read more but understand less. More people read but proportionately fewer critically assimilate what they read."

I'm considering this in combination with the Preface to How to Think about Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age, (critiqued here by a member of the Parapsychological Association).

There is nothing harder than to critique your own thinking. My own thinking!

“My writing partner is a violent, chauvinistic, semi-literate adolescent.”

I'm preparing the syllabus for COM375 Writing as Communication. It's a required course that students love to hate. I can hardly wait! :-) Collaboration is well-underway in the Intro to Mass Media class I'm teaching at UNH: excellent initial round of online posts, and we've already solved a technology problem and have a student suggestion for curricular material. This is what I like to see!

A new phd program in Org Science is opening at UNC-Charlotte.

posted by Anita to air-l Digest, Vol 18, Issue 11