1. Grading Participation Here is my evil|brilliant (depending on your perspective) plan: I’m going to make participation worth 12% of the final grade. Students will get graded on participation 4 times this semester, so each grade is worth a maximum of 3 points. In order to get a grade, a student must solicit 2 brief letters (emails, really) of recommendation from fellow students. And those emails need to contain specific details about how that student has contributed something valuable to the class. What do you think?
2. Sticky Notes & Flickr In my first class this morning (Senior Seminar) I repeated the sticky-note+flickr process from last semester. This time, I asked students three questions:
   1. Orange sticky: Why did you major in English?
   2. Blue sticky: What do you plan to do after you graduate?
   3. Yellow sticky: If you needed to explain what’s valuable about your undergraduate education (to a potential employer, to a graduate or professional program), what would you say?

   We then stuck all the notes on the wall and discussed the answers while I took pictures. Before they left, students took back their sticky notes, and they’ll develop those initial thoughts as the semester goes on.

3. Office Hours I came up with 3 possible permutations of offering office hours that work with my schedule, and I’m using a poll on Doodle to have students vote on which permutation works for them. The one with the most votes wins. And, of course, students are always welcome to make an appointment with me outside of office hours.
4. Live Calendar My homepage has been completely revamped and is now super simple. It does need some style (cascading style, if you will) and I’ll soon add unobtrusive but accessible links to research and service activities, but I have succeeded at stripping it down to the basics: my semester schedule (with links to pages for my classes), a public version of my Google Calendar, and basic contact information. We’ll see how this goes…

Definitions

Teaching Carnival: “[A] periodic collection of blogposts to do with higher education” (Miriam Jones).

Blog carnival: “[A] type of blog event. It is similar to a magazine, in that it is dedicated to a particular topic, and is published on a regular schedule, often weekly or monthly. Each edition of a blog carnival is in the form of a blog article that contains permalinks to other blog articles on the particular topic” (Wikipedia).

Instructions

You can easily have one of your blog posts about teaching in higher education included in an issue of the teaching carnival by doing any or all of the following:

1. Email the next host directly (see list below) with the address to the permalink of your blog post, and/or
2. Tag your post in Delicious with teaching-carnival, and/or
3. Tag your post with Technorati tags.

Publishing schedule

• Feb 9: Jason B. Jones
• Feb 23: Kathleen Fitzpatrick
• Mar 9: Alan Benson
• Mar 23: Chuck Tryon
• Apr 13: Dave Parry
• Apr 27: Miriam Jones
• May 11: Jeremy Boggs
• May 25: Alex Reid
• ???: George H. Williams

I’m putting together a planning team for Teaching Carnival 3.0. Let’s collaborate.

Once upon a time, I had a “blogging about teaching” idea.

That idea took on an active life and then went dormant (for a variety of reasons).

Now I’d like to bring the idea to life again, with a few possible tweaks:

1. Social Bookmarking: We should use Delicious or a similar web service to catalog and annotate the links while still posting a selection of those links as a regular “carnival.”
2. Discipline-specific carnivals: We could make each carnival specific to that particular host’s academic discipline. (I’m not wedded to this idea, so if participants don’t like it, we don’t have to do it.) Edited to add: I agree with those who have suggested that this is not a very good idea. Scratch that one.
3. Interviews: Let’s interview teachers (both well-known and unknown) about their pedagogy. Heck, let’s interview well-known scholars about their pedagogy. I don’t have any specific plan about how this would work. Recorded Skype calls? Video chats? IM transcripts? Email transcripts? I’m open to anything.

Leave a comment or gmail me at george.workbook if you’re interested in hosting, or if you’re interested in being part of the planning team.

Please use the form below to indicate your available dates to host.