Minnesota Daily mentions our work with Facebook
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Check out today's story from the UMN daily paper on Facebook at UMN
One of the most beneficial parts of the Faculty Fellowship Program for me (so far) is the collaboration and conversation. From one-on-ones with consultants in the DMC to our regular meetings as a group to the weekly planning meetings I am starting to have with my teaching assistant for the course (funded through the fellowship), each conversation starts with one idea that blossoms into a field of opportunity. I've written elsewhere on this blog about how my project began with revising curriculum for the active learning classroom and morphed into the scholarship of teaching and learning in a digital age. And I returned to that realization this week.
As I sat with my TA to answer questions she had about my class taught in the active learning classroom, and to brainstorm ways she could help me prepare for the summer when I will teach it again, our conversation went from team-based learning to the use of video clips to provide perspective to our students to re-focusing the final exam to fit more with a collaborative approach to recording lectures as Breeze presentations in order to save face-to-face time for higher level thinking and learning. I think each of these pieces adds to a new form of scholarship. How do we meet the needs of our students by meeting them in their tech-enabled worlds? How do we re-vision the face-to-face classroom time to teach skills of collaboration and connection that they will be expected to have by the businesses that hire them to be knowledge workers? And, since I teach prospective teachers, how can I prepare them to meet the needs of their own students, who are most likely connected to digital devices for the majority of their days?
This realization and others, the collaboration, and the connections we are making throughout the Faculty Fellowship Program are, for me, the core of the experience. Regardless of the foci of our individual projects, the results of the evaluations, or the success of our initiatives, the field of opportunity I see before me is what I value most.