Category: Digital Literacies
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Leading Synchronous Discussions: Challenges and Recommendations
This post was co-authored with HASTAC Scholar Shari Wejsa. You may have been there this year…countless times…attempting to engage with your students during a Zoom session while getting cryptic silences and blank stares in return. The diagnosis? Zoom fatigue. As instructors, what can we do to connect with our students in an online environment while…
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The Single Most Essential Requirement in Designing a Fall Online Course
Let’s start the week [updated 7/20/2020] by repeating that a summer of planning for better online learning this Fall will be wasted if we do not begin from the premise that our students are learning from a place of dislocation, anxiety, uncertainty, awareness of social injustice, anger, and trauma. So are we. This is the…
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Language Panda: Finding and Sharing Digital Tools for Language Teaching
In 2016, a group of graduate students at Vanderbilt University identified a need on campus for a stronger language teaching community: While instructors were using technology in their classes to enhance language learning, they had few opportunities to share their digital pedagogy or learn how other teachers implemented such technology in their classes. To address this need,…
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“Learning Outcomes” in a Time of COVID: What Happens When Students Say What They Aspire To?
What happens if we give up the idea that our course should begin with a prescriptive list of “learning outcomes” and offer students the chance to express their own? Even if you are at an institution that requires you to submit your outcomes in advance (as many do), you can simply put those on the…
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From Cardi B to Stranger Things: Reading Sounds, Captioning Meaning
This is the third post in a series leading up to my HASTAC webinar “From Cardi B to Stranger Things: Using Popular Culture in the Writing Classroom.” Disability Studies and Disability Rhetoric ask us to rethink how we arrange our classrooms (physical and virtual) and the course content we provide. Rather than a reactive measure,…
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From Cardi B to Stranger Things: Circulating Consequences
This is the second post in a series leading up to my HASTAC webinar “From Cardi B to Stranger Things: Using Popular Culture in the Writing Classroom.” Circulation Studies is something I am relatively new to, but considering the speed at which popular culture is shared and re-shared, it makes sense to incorporate discussion of…
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Tips for Students: Distance Learning in the time of COVID-19
Students and people who work with students know that it is difficult to balance school and work, even in normal circumstances. And now, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, that challenge is more acute than ever. Together with my CUNY colleagues Lisa Brundage and Lisa Rhody, we have prepared some recommendations for students who…
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From Cardi B to Stranger Things: Finding the Sonic Narrative
Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay This post is the first in a series that relates to my HASTAC webinar “From Cardi B to Stranger Things: Using Popular Culture in the Writing Classroom.” In this post I explore intertextuality–how texts rely on other texts to make meaning–as an important way to help students work through the…
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Engagement Tools for Remote Teaching
In the past week, more and more universities have switched or considering switching in-person courses to online courses. Our academic community joined their efforts to offer primers and guidelines from how to conduct classes through online platforms, to discussions on accessibility and engagement. Teaching online for the first time can be challenging; however, we…
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Creating Digital Discovery Journals with Ms. Amber Benson
As the Executive-in-Residence at the Temerlin Advertising Institute at Southern Methodist University, Ms. Amber Benson teaches Digital Media Landscapes*, Digital Strategy III, Campaigns, Business Communication, New Business Development, Healthcare Advertising, and a Graduate course on Metrics of Success. In Ms. Benson’s course Digital Media Landscapes, students create a Digital Discovery Journal. In her words, Ms…