Setting Students' Minds On Fire

FIG Colleagues -- Barb and I are looking forward to our collective conversation tomorrow afternoon. We'd like to make sure that questions/comments about "The Balance of Power," as well as chapters 3 and 4 in Weimer are all up for discussion tomorrow.

Also, here's a link to a short POV article in The Chronicle on active learning you might find interesting. Carnes suggests that "pedagogies that feature teamwork and problem solving" can create learning environments that set students' minds on fire, (which is a goal to which many of us aspire, and a rather fabulous image/metaphor to contemplate). He focuses in particular on the recent use of games to foster student engagement, and argues that academic games may help the "ideas, texts, and historical moments on which academic discourse depends become a part of [students'] lives" in ways that stand and deliver traditional lecturing mode may not.

Thanks, as well, to Eric for clarifying that you do not need not to have a gmail address to have a Google account. If you don't have (and don't want) a gmail address, you can still garner access to the Google suite of tools, including the blogger tool we're using here in Scholar, by just creating a Google account.

So, if you'd like to be able to post and comment on the blog, you can use the new and improved instructions posted in the Resource folder, and I can invite you via your VT email address.

Welcome to our FDI FIG for Spring 2011!!

Greetings! Barb and I are happy to welcome all of you here for our Faculty Inquiry Group (FIG) on "Teaching Contemporary Students to be Actively Engaged Learners." This is a (too rare) opportunity for us to take time out of our Thursday afternoons for the next four weeks to engage with each other on an important topic.

We want this FDI short course and this Scholar site to be an interactive, continuous dialogue. With that in mind, we have embedded this blogger tool, and once you accept your gmail invitation, you will be able to both "author" and "comment" in our eConversation. Please feel free to post resources and links, suggest strategies, pose questions/dilemmas/possible answers, etc., with your colleagues.

Posting links is pretty easy: just state what it is you're posting, the fabulous fun and seriously important early TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson and voila! you are good to go. (btw, if you don't have 18 minutes to spare, check out the RSA Animate version of Robinson's Changing Educational Paradigms

We look forward to your comments and collective contributions!

--Shelli & Barb