Leading Lines

Jenae Cohn is the director of academic technology at California State University at Sacramento and the author of a new book on digital reading from West Virginia University Press. The book is called Skim, Dive, Surface: Teaching Digital Reading. It’s a fantastic book that takes a look at reading from historical, emotional, and cognitive science perspectives, and presents a digital reading framework that instructors can use to promote deep reading practices in their students. It’s full of very practical advice on teaching digital reading, with examples of classroom activities and digital assignments designed to foster digital literacies.

We talk about the emotional connections people have print books, the ways that reading on a screen is different from reading on a page, ways to help students develop better reading practices, and the joy of writing books in coffee shops.

Links

• Jenae Cohn’s website, https://www.jenaecohn.net/

• @jenae_cohn on Twitter, https://twitter.com/jenae_cohn

• Skim, Dive, Surface: Teaching Digital Reading, West Virginia University Press, https://wvupressonline.com/node/865

Cliff Anderson is Vanderbilt’s associate university librarian for research and digital strategy, and he’s back on the podcast interviewing another author of a fascinating book Cliff read recently. This time, he speaks with Cathrine Hasse, professor of Learning at Aarhus University in Denmark, author of the 2020 book Posthumanist Learning: What Robots and Cyborgs Teach Us about Being Ultra-Social from Routledge Press.

Cliff and Cathrine have a wide-ranging conversation, covering such topics as posthumanism, Lev Vygotsky’s learning theories, why teaching humans is harder than teaching gorillas, and cyborgs.

Links

• Cathrine Hasse’s faculty page, https://pure.au.dk/portal/en/persons/cathrine-hasse(5ba5eb68-a94f-4626-b074-1958780ab33a).html

• Posthumanist Learning: What Robots and Cyborgs Teach Us about Being Ultra-Social, https://www.routledge.com/Posthumanist-Learning-What-Robots-and-Cyborgs-Teach-us-About-Being-Ultra-social/Hasse/p/book/9781138125186

• “In 2016, Microsoft’s Racist Chatbot Revealed the Dangers of Online Conversation,” https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/artificial-intelligence/machine-learning/in-2016-microsofts-racist-chatbot-revealed-the-dangers-of-online-conversation

In October 2020, Stephen Kosslyn published a new book called Active Learning Online: Five Principles that Make Online Courses Come Alive. The book draws on Kosslyn’s experiences at Minerva, but also his very long and impressive career in higher education. He is the founder, president emeritus, and chief academic officer of Foundry College, which provides high-quality, research-informed online education for working adults. He’s also the founder and president of Active Learning Sciences, a consulting group that help institutions adopt active learning principles in online education. Prior to that, he was founding dean and chief academic officer at the Minerva Schools at the Keck Graduate Institute. And that all came after an amazing career as a professor of psychology at Harvard University and Stanford University.

We have a great interview with Stephen Kosslyn to share with you. He recently facilitated a virtual workshop here at Vanderbilt on his new book, and we took the opportunity to talk with him for the podcast. You’ll hear a new voice in this interview: Julaine Fowlin, the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching’s new assistant director for instructional design. Julaine helped organized Stephen’s workshop, and she had a lot of great questions to ask him about his book. Kosslyn goes through his five principles for active learning, offers practical strategies for implementing these principles in the virtual classroom, and speaks to the important role motivation plays in learning.

Links

• Active Learning Online: Five Principles that Make Online Courses Come Alive, https://www.alinealearning.org/kosslyn-active-learning-online

• Active Learning Sciences, https://www.activelearningsciences.com/

• Foundry College, https://foundrycollege.org/

• Minerva Schools at KGI, https://www.minerva.kgi.edu/

• Derek’s sketchnotes on Stephen Kosslyn’s 2014 talk about Minerva Schools, https://www.flickr.com/photos/derekbruff/15360156349/

• Jigsaw infographic, https://www.flickr.com/photos/vandycft/32869991478/

• “From Teaching to Learning: A New Paradigm for Undergraduate Education,” Robert Barr and John Tagg, Change Magazine, 1995, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00091383.1995.10544672

• Julaine Fowlin on Twitter, https://twitter.com/julaine_fowlin

Back in 2019, the Center for Teaching, along with a few other units on campus, hosted a Learning at Play symposium about teaching with games and simulations. Listeners may recall that Mark Sample from Davidson College was our keynote speaker, and I talked with him here on Episode 72 of the podcast.

Given the pandemic, we didn’t host another Learning at Play symposium in 2020, In lieu of another symposium this fall, we organized a panel on Zoom with some instructors teaching with games and simulations in a pandemic, and I’m happy to share the audio from that panel here on the podcast today.

Our panelists were Holly Tucker, Mellon Foundation chair in the humanities and director of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities; Shaul Kelner, associate professor of sociology and Jewish studies; and Cait Kirby, PhD candidate in biological sciences.

In this episode, you’ll hear all three panelists talk about the games or simulations they taught with or created in 2020, and you’ll hear them respond to a couple of questions from the audience.

Links

• Reacting to the Past, https://reacting.barnard.edu/

• Twine stories and other resources from Cait Kirby, https://caitkirby.com/resources.html

• Twine, https://twinery.org/

• @caitskirby on Twitter, https://twitter.com/caitskirby

• Learning at Play 2019, https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/play/

• Leading Lines Episode 72: Mark Sample, http://leadinglinespod.com/uncategorized/episode-72mark-sample/

Forrest Charnock is a senior lecturer in physics here at Vanderbilt University and the director of the undergraduate physics labs. Like other lab directors in 2020, Forrest had to get creative to adapt his labs to remote teaching and learning. In this episode, we’ll hear about his creativity in the interview, which was conducted by Thayer Walmsley, a doctoral student in physics here at Vanderbilt and a Teaching Affiliate at the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching.

Links

• Physics labs at Vanderbilt, https://my.vanderbilt.edu/physicslabs/

• iOLab Wireless Lab System, http://www.iolab.science/

Jesse Stommel is an author, speaker, and teacher with a focus on education, critical digital pedagogy, and documentary film. He’s the co-founder of the Digital Pedagogy Lab, a fantastic professional development workshop for those interested in critical digital pedagogy. He’s the co-founder of Hybrid Pedagogy, the journal of critical digital pedagogy. And he’s the co-author of An Urgency of Teachers: The Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy.

Jesse is an incredible thoughtful and powerful voice in higher education. His work and writings have influenced so many educators, and we are thrilled to have him on the podcast.

Links

• Jesse Stommel’s website, https://www.jessestommel.com/

• @jessifer on Twitter, https://twitter.com/jessifer

• Critical Digital Pedagogy: A Collection, Jesse Stommel, Chris Friend, and Sean Michael Morris, https://hybridpedagogy.org/critical-digital-pedagogy/

• “How to Ungrade,” Jesse Stommel (2018), https://www.jessestommel.com/how-to-ungrade/

• “If bell hooks Made an LMS,” Jesse Stommel (2017), https://www.jessestommel.com/if-bell-hooks-made-an-lms-grades-radical-openness-and-domain-of-ones-own/

• Derek Price’s website, https://derektprice.github.io/

• Scholars at Play, https://soundcloud.com/scholarsatplay/tracks

• Leading Lines Ep. 34: Derek Price, Terrell Taylor, and Kyle Romero, http://leadinglinespod.com/episodes/episode-34derek-price-terrell-taylor-and-kyle-romero/

Today on the podcast, we’re sharing a conversation with two people who have some very useful thoughts to share about why students report an increase workload during the pandemic, while faculty report making intentional choices to scale back the work required in their fall courses.

Betsy Barre is the executive director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching at Wake Forest University, where she also teaches in the department of the study of religion. Karen Costa is a faculty developer specializing in online pedagogy and trauma-aware teaching and author of the 2020 book, 99 Tips for Creating Simple and Sustainable Educational Videos.

We talk with them about this workload paradox during pandemic teaching, how it presents itself, where it comes from, and, perhaps most importantly, what instructors can do to mitigate it in the coming semester.

Links

• Betsy Barre, https://www.elizabethbarre.com/

• Karen Costa, http://www.100faculty.com/

• @betsy_barre on Twitter, https://twitter.com/betsy_barre

• @karenraycosta on Twitter, https://twitter.com/karenraycosta

• Enhanced Course Workload Estimator, https://cat.wfu.edu/resources/tools/estimator2/

• Jody Greene’s November 2020 Twitter thread, https://twitter.com/Jodyji/status/1329835339452538885

• “The Strange Case of the Exploding Student Workload,” Jody Green, December 13, 2020, https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/guest-post-strange-case-exploding-student-workload

• “Investigation of Community of Inquiry Framework in Regard to Self-Regulation, Metacognition, and Motivation,” Selcan Kilis and Zahide Yildirim, Computers & Education, November 2018, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360131518301751

In this episode, we talk with Heeryoon Shin, Mellon assistant professor of Asian art at Vanderbilt University. Heeryoon participated in the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching's summer 2020 Online Course Design Institute, or OCDI for short, and we wanted to check in with her late in the semester to see how her online courses turned out.

Heeryoon teaches courses on the art and architecture of Asia, with a special emphasis on South Asia. Her research interests include sacred and urban space, cross-cultural encounters, and architectural historiography in early modern and colonial South Asia.

In our conversation, Heeryoon reflects on her first full semester of teaching online, what worked and what didn’t, and what changes she’s making for her spring courses. She talks about her decision to make portions of her courses asynchronous, her changing use of recorded video lectures, some successes in leading discussions on Zoom, and an Instagram activity her students found really fun.

Links • Heeryoon Shin’s faculty page, https://as.vanderbilt.edu/historyart/people/heeryoon-shin.php • “The ‘Change-up’ in Lectures” by Joan Middendorf and Alan Kalish (1996), https://citl.indiana.edu/files/pdf/middendorf_kalish_1996.pdf

Dan Levy has been a faculty member at Harvard University for 15 years, and currently serves as the faculty director of the Public Leadership Credential, the Harvard Kennedy School’s flagship online learning initiative. He co-founded Teachly, a website aimed at helping instructors teach more effectively and more inclusively. He is passionate about effective teaching and learning, and enjoys sharing his experience and enthusiasm with others.

In our conversation, Dan talks about the challenges of teaching with Zoom, he shares ways that instructors are thinking about new forms of class participation thanks to Zoom, and he describes strategies for engaging and assessing students on Zoom.

We are sure you'll learn several new approaches to engaging participants and students during our conversation.

Links

• Teaching Effectively with Zoom, 2nd ed., https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1735340871

• Dan Levy’s faculty page, https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty/dan-levy

• @danmlevy on Twitter, https://twitter.com/danmlevy

• Teachly, https://teachly.me/

Leading Lines producer, Cliff Anderson, talks with Michael Dezuanni, associate professor of communication at Queensland University of Technology in Australia, and associate director of the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland. His research focuses on digital media, literacies, and learning in a variety of contexts, and he’s the author and editor of numerous articles and books, including Serious Play: Literacy, Learning, and Digital Games, a book he co-edited with Catherine Beavis and Joanne O’Mara, published in 2017 by Routledge Press.

Dezuanni talks about his newest book, Peer Pedagogies on Digital Platforms: Learning with Minecraft Let’s Play Videos, published in 2020 by MIT Press. He shares some of the findings from his studies of Let’s Play videos, including ways that children learn from peers and near-peers in this very particular learning context. He and Cliff also talk about implications for teaching digital media literacy in other contexts, and about the troubles with YouTube comment policies.

Links

• Michael Dezuanni’s faculty page, https://research.qut.edu.au/dmrc/people/michael-dezuanni/

• Peer Pedagogies on Digital Platforms: Learning with Minecraft Let’s Play Videos, https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/peer-pedagogies-digital-platforms

• @dezuanni on Twitter, https://twitter.com/dezuanni

• Cliff Anderson’s YouTube channel, Computational Thinking at the Margins, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-nUTl7F0PLgpXOMFsQDstA