April 3, 2007
Upcoming Events: Workshops and presentations
Service or program spotlight: CIT to offer faculty workshops in early May
Teaching resource of the month: Connexions Sharable Content Website
Interesting read: Classroom transparency
Upcoming Events
Using Audio to Improve Student Writing
http://cit.duke.edu/events/event.do?eventid=417&occurid=931
Thursday, April 5
11:30 am - 1 pm
Are you teaching a writing intensive course and seeking ways to improve student writing and facilitate more active student engagement in the revision process? In this round table discussion, faculty from the University Writing Program discuss how they use audio recordings to improve peer review and give audio feedback to students on writing assignments. Lunch will be provided to pre-registrants. More information and registration at the link above.
Distance Education Brown Bag
http://cit.duke.edu/events/event.do?eventid=427&occurid=942
Friday, April 20
12 - 1:30 pm
Copyright issues for distance education, presented by the Library System's Scholarly Communications Officer Kevin Smith. Bring your lunch - desserts and drinks will be provided. More information will be at the link above soon, but registration is now open.
CIT 7th Annual Instructional Technology Showcase
http://cit.duke.edu/showcase/2007/
Thursday, April 26
8 am - 2:30 pm
Registration is now open for CIT's Showcase, a one-day conference at the Bryan Center, highlighting faculty instructional technology projects at Duke. The day will feature morning concurrent presentations, keynote speaker Malcolm Brown on "Teaching in Flexible Learning Spaces: Opportunities and Challenge," lunch for pre-registrants, and an afternoon poster session packed with interesting posters. Register now at the link above.
Service or program spotlight
CIT May Faculty Workshops
CIT will be offering two week-long series of workshops for faculty the week of May 7-11, one focused on pedagogical and technology needs of language departments, and one for any faculty member. The half-day workshops will cover a range of topics and will be targeted at faculty who are interested in trying new technologies in their teaching but who may not have had the time to learn about the technologies during the school year. Information about the workshops will be posted on the CIT events page http://cit.duke.edu/events/eventsreg.do by mid-April, but hold the dates now.
Teaching resource of the month
Connexions Sharable Course Content Websitehttp://cnx.org/
Connexions is an "environment for collaboratively developing, freely sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the Web." Connexions was founded in 1999 by Richard Baraniuk, electrical and computer engineering professor at Rice University. The website's "Content Commons" contains materials that range in levels from K-12 to college to professional. Topics are organized in small modules that can be connected into larger courses. The majority of modules are in the areas of science and technology, mathematics and statistics, and the arts. All content is free to use and reuse under the Creative Commons "attribution" license.
Note that Connexions is just one of several sharable content collections available on the Web. For links to others, such as MIT's OpenCourseWare and MERLOT, go to http://cnx.org/aboutus/relatedsites/.
Interesting read
Chronicle Careers, 4/2/2007: Classroom Transparencyhttp://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2007/04/2007040201c/careers.html
A college professor visits the high-school classrooms of two student teachers, and makes several observations, including: "The most effective teaching is transparent teaching: Both student and teacher know the reasons for the major decisions about a course, from the choice of texts and classroom activities to the weighting of the grades and the design of the exams."
