At the November Faculty Friday Forum sponsored by NMC’s Center for Instructional Excellence, four questions about competency-based learning were posted. As I struggled to organize responses to this hot topic into a meaningful context, Mark DeLonge suggested Jimmy...
4 x 4 x 16 Challenge Articles
The Joy of Public Speaking
There's been a commercial on TV recently about glossophobia, or the fear of public speaking. It's an advertisement for a new Google tablet, which does seem pretty cool, but the message about overcoming speech anxiety is even cooler. Watch it now: Google Nexus 7...
Give Me the Beat…To Organize My Learning?
Ever look at your workload and think, where to start? Then, as you pull out materials related to the task at hand, you discover stuff that you forgot you had, or you forgot to do, or... and the list goes on, and the project still isn't done to your satisfaction....
How Much is Too Much?
I find myself struggling with the technology question, how much is too much. Or, more realistically, how much is the right amount. I am a stickler for working out a problem yourself, but there are some problems I like to assign that are too time consuming, or the...
Learning debt
Lately I've been studying Agile Programming. One idea new to me is the concept of "technology debt." The gist is this: if developers choose to release a version of software with fewer features or more bugs than planned and desired, they accumulate a debt that must be...
“Messy” Questions Often Elicit Critical Thinking
One strategy to elicit critical thinking is to omit important facts when presenting scenarios to students for classroom discussion. Often instructors take considerable care in class to articulate each important fact within a particular scenario that students will...
Searching for the Somatic (week 2)
My writings involve movement descriptions taken from my classroom. I am trying to bring the reader into a dance classroom to catch a glimpse of movement education. "Today we will start facing away from the mirror. Although the mirror serves as an important tool in...
Thinking Inside The Box
Thinking Inside The Box By Brian Sweeney I spent two years in Germany with the U.S. Army, providing bomb disposal support to highly classified missions. I would get a call telling me to get to an airfield within usually 6 hours, without being told where I was going...
Lifetime Writing Prompt & Order of Magnitude
Instead of telling the students what the concept of order of magnitude is, I let them discover its meaning through a writing prompt. Following is the prompt statement (derived from a Just-In-Time physics question), the students' results, & the lead up to the...