Over the past three days I attended several sessions at the Cascadia OpenEd conference sponsored by several west coast associations and the wonderful and always inspiriting BCcampus team. I thought I’d share a couple of broad thoughts about the event and what I saw on the screen and felt as…
Over the years, I’ve refined rubrics with the intent that students can evaluate their own mastery of an assignment. In some courses, students generate their own rubrics. During class sessions, students practice applying the rubrics, which gives them insight into how to create assignments that meet the goals. I still…
‘How will you live your life, so that it does not make a mockery of your values?” ~Bill Ayers ‘Teaching and Learning on the Open Web’ learning community has been one of the best learning experiences in my professional career. Whenever we meet, there are conversations that inspire me, question…
We don’t recall how it got started, but the email thread was long with limericks. Even some haiku from Gavin. So many in fact, we share them here for your reading pleasure. There once was a learning community Who zoomed due to lack of immunity It wasn’t that grueling When…
Introduction During the last week of class this fall quarter, my First-Year students are giving presentations on topics related to viruses. We are using PowerPoint and sharing screens—sort of old school meets Zoom school. I am really impressed by how the talks are opening up larger discussions, especially on the…
Vision 2020 Image Credit 20/20 vision indicates good visual clarity, much like the year 2020 has done for me. 2020 made me look very closely at what the teaching-learning process was truly about. I wondered about the affordances and challenges of a brick and mortar school, the unique challenges…
I teach a lot of performance-based classes. Body and voice are especially important. And Zoom makes this especially hard. Students are often poorly-lit, often have issues with sound, and often feel stuck and physically-restrained in the small boxes of Zoom. So, my fellow performance colleague, Deborah Hathaway, and I recorded…
I am going to choose to represent what I am trying to convey in some text, a couple of images, and in a video. Why three things you might ask? Well, I just don’t want to have to type all the sentences it may take to express this thought. That…
I went back to school. This seems somewhat odd at first, given that I’ve been in school since I was 5, traveling an academic path that went from K12 to college to grad school to postdoc to faculty member. But I recently had occasion to present talk to the principal…
by Gavin Doyle With COVID, much of what I’ve relied on for my teaching—immediate interactions with students, a close community of supportive learners, and hands-on exercises—felt like they’d be lost. How was I supposed to teach ACTING over a webcam, for instance? I’ve been unsuccessfully arguing with UWB for years…
