Word 2007

 

Looking ahead to the future…

Word 2007 will allows users to post directly to a number of blog engines such as WordPress.  Click HERE for a tutorial. 

This is good news!  I can’t wait to try it.

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Incentives for good teaching?

Jon Siegel writes in a blog post entitled Changing Law School: “… incentives are all wrong. … it would be a lot of work related to teaching. And work related to teaching is not rewarded…. It certainly does nothing for one’s reputation in the legal academy generally. People at other schools can’t even observe your teaching; they can only read your scholarship. Indeed, some people seem to think that if you’re a really good teacher, that’s a negative, because it means you must not be spending enough time on scholarship…Even if an individual school chooses to reward good teaching, it can’t affect the external incentives that academia as a whole creates. “

Have I hit a dead end?  If there are no rewards for “good teaching” in law schools, what INCENTIVE is there for learning and using technology to enhance student learning??

 

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Teaching to the Polychron

 

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I learned a new word recently- polychron.

“Polychrons love to work on more than one thing at a time. To a polychron, switching from one activity to another is both stimulating and productive and, hence, the most desirable way to work. “

As I observe students in our classrooms here taking notes on their laptops, while reading their email, IMing some friends, checking the weather on weather.com, and a number of other things at the same time, I realize that they are indeed “polychrons.”

We need to take advantage of their ability to multitask and switch from one topic to the next.  We need to offer them opportunities for asynchronous learning through online environments such as TWEN discussions and blogs.  We need to realign our curriculum.

We will lose them them if we continue to present information in a monochronic way. I may be biased, but I think technology can help engage the students of today.

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**taken from http://elearning2006.dicole.net/060705-Teemu_Arina-EUEL06/