Category Archives: teaching and learning

Search Empathy

By Iris | Published: Thursday, July 22nd, 2010
I was just talking with an English professor about his upcoming Argument & Inquiry seminar on the Gothic story. I’ve really be so heartened by these early-stages planning meetings we’ve had so far. The combination of having really engaged faculty, really new syllabi, and a requirement that the courses should “clarify how scholars ask questions, [...]
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Teaching Print Journals

By Iris | Published: Monday, July 19th, 2010
I’m pretty excited that our current periodicals are moving to join their bound brethren.  The current print periodicals (which no longer actually reflect our current periodical holdings, now that by far the majority of our current issues are online) were housed in a huge, beautiful room on long white shelves, and they were shelved alphabetically [...]
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Information Literacy is about Choices

By Iris | Published: Friday, July 16th, 2010
I just had a really fun meeting with a professor who is developing a new freshman seminar for Fall, and we were trying to work out what exactly first year students could reasonably and usefully get out of her course in terms of information literacy, particularly since she’s interested in ditching the Big Final Research [...]
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Unexpectedly Reactive – Unexpectedly Good?

By Iris | Published: Tuesday, June 29th, 2010
This past year the Curricular and Research Support group on campus piloted a program that we hoped would fit into our over-all goals of both improving the ways we support coursework and also making all of our jobs a little less reactive, a little more proactive, and therefore a little more sustainable given lots to [...]
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Credo

By Iris | Published: Wednesday, February 24th, 2010
This I believe: The classroom is about learning, not teaching. Learning happens best when it is directly and explicitly tied to and relevant to a project at hand. Learning happens best when it builds on existing knowledge. This is why getting some sense of where the students are (such as talking to them before launching [...]
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