Connect Your Research with Teaching
American Council of Learned Societies (2007). Student Learning and Faculty Research: Connecting Teaching and Scholarship
Huber, Walter R. and Hockaday, James (2002). Connecting the Dots of the Academic Triangle: Combining Teaching, Research, and Service in Meaningful Ways
King, Shelley (2005).A Fine Balance: Connecting Undergraduate Teaching and Research
Despite teaching loads, student mentoring, participating in committees and other activities, faculty spend a great deal of time and energy conducting research. Often, what happens in the classroom doesn't necessarily connect with a faculty member's research, and so many students (undergraduates, in particular) complete courses unaware of the important work their professor may be doing. While completely reworking a basic course may not be desirable or plausible, new technology can create possibilities for connecting faculty research into the classroom in several, useful ways.
Strategies
Use the Blog and/or Wiki tools in Blackboard
- Post reflections on your research to your Blackboard course blog; receive student comments
- Have students build on an aspect of your research collaboratively using a Blackboard wiki
- Have students conduct mini research projects of their own using blogs to post their individual content, or wikis to collaboratively construct their projects
Use your own public blog, wiki and/or website as course content
- Have students regularly visit your blog, and post comments
- Ask students to work with you and your colleagues on a research problem on wiki
Share content with social bookmarking/annotation tools
- Use tools like del.icio.us or Connotea to share annotated links to journals, articles and websites
- Ask students to compile their own sets of links involving areas of your research and/or study the validity and usefulness of links that others have already created
- Use a tool like Google Notebook to keep track of notes, links and annotations
Share information and resources by connecting students with RSS feeds
- Use RSS feeds in Blackboard to bring up-to-date, research based content into your course
- Share RSS feeds to key journals and blogs with your students for use in their own aggregators
Create projects that require the scholarly use of the library's resources
- Meet with your discipline librarian
- Take advantage of the large number of images the library has available in different databases
Make your research (methods) transparent
- Work on your next paper (or maybe, a small subsection of your next publication) using a tool like Google Docs (or a wiki) and allow your students to view your changes and edits as they happen
- Show your students how you keep research organized in your file structures on your computer or using different web tools
- Create assignments and projects that make use of the same research technologies and methods that you currently use
Tools
Blackboard
Additional information available on the CIT website for the following:
- Aggregators
- Connotea
- del.icio.us
- Google tools for teaching (including Notebook, etc)
- Official Duke Wiki
- Duke Wiki -DUIKI
