Duveronymous Yawp

Everything is a Remix Part 3 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Part 3 of 4 videos by Kirby Ferguson on the idea of remixing, copying, creativity, innovation, etc. I will be using this video tomorrow in a discussion group with 20 new students at the College of Charleston. The plan is to link a liberal arts education to the positive outcomes of remix, which Ferguson defines fairly broadly. If copying, adapting, and remixing are the means by which culture and technology move forward, wouldn’t it make sense to have the broad basis for remixing that a liberal arts and sciences education could convey? That’s what I hope to show tomorrow — after showing this, that is.

You probably have questions or, if not questions, curiosities about the course: what are we reading?, what are the writing assignments?, things like that.  Maybe the syllabus (opens in new window) will answer some of the these.  Maybe perusing the OAKS course site will answer a few.  Maybe I can answer a few: send me email or set up a time to meet.

I’m looking forward to the semester.  I hope you are, too.  I’ve taught this course five or six times since coming to the college in the fall of ’05, but this semester marks a change in the approach I’m taking to the material. Continue reading →

Re: Bloom’s Taxonomy & DOK (Depth of Knowledge)

When I worked in a writing across the curriculum (WAC) program, just after finishing grad school in American Literature, I began learning about Bloom’s taxonomy (see this site for a rundown). I even wrote a webpage on learning outcomes for our site (I can’t believe it’s still up), which, like so much of what I was reading then, used Bloom’s hierarchy in a practical way to articulate learning outcomes, that list of behaviors you would like to observe in your students after the interventions of your teaching and assignments. I was completely enamored of Bloom’s scheme–many of us are: it just makes such sense; kinds of cognition seem to stack on top of each other so well; the lower-level thinking provides the solid base for increasingly more complex cognition. There’s a completeness and elegance to it, and I evangelized it.

But even while I was just learning about Bloom, I was beginning to hear that the taxonomy was being refined and modified and, on the other side, questioned by people that study that kind of thing.  Not being a person who studies that kind of thing, I sort of said to myself, “OK, that’s something I’ll want to look into, and soon, if I end up doing this WAC job longer than planned.” But I didn’t end up doing the WAC job for much longer.  It was a wonderful learning experience, Continue reading →

In my upper-division class, Late 19th Century American Literature, I thought I would change up the writing instruction a bit.  Typically, I have either individual meetings to discuss drafts or I have small group draft workshops of 3-4 students, and I do more of the latter lately.  That is, until this semester.  I thought I would do more “front-end” work this time, taking almost two weeks of class time to discuss research, have students read and discuss the merits and approaches of a couple sample papers, and workshop a couple proposals as a class.  This seemed to be a good idea at the time.

But I have begun to regret not doing the workshops in favor of doing more “front-end” work. There’s a zero-sum effect here, I should note: there’s only so much time that I can spend on writing instruction, per se.

In talking with my students about their projects for this semester, I am impressed with many of the ideas, which seem well worth the students’ efforts and truly support the goals of the class.  I mean great ideas.  However, having put my eggs in the front-end basket, I am left with no time to work with them individually on the back-end, where a careful reading of the draft and a conversation about it with me and their peers could really bring home an argument.  I can sense that many of them will need this close attention to their writing and ideas if they are really going to bring home the significance of their ideas.  I liked giving them instruction on writing on the proposal end, but I am definitely not going to give up the workshops in the future.

According to Ken Bain, in What the Best College Teachers Do:

In the learning literature and in the thinking of the best teachers, questions play an essential role in the process of learning and modifying mental models. Questions help us construct knowledge. They point to holes in our memory structures and are critical for indexing the information that we attain when we develop an answer for that inquiry. Some cognitive scientists think that questions are so important that we cannot learn until the right one has been asked: if memory does not ask the question, it will not know where to index the answer. The more questions we ask, the more ways we can index a thought in memory. Better indexing creates greater flexibility, easier recall, and richer understanding. Continue reading →