Leading Lines

Edward Maloney is the executive director of the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship and a professor of the practice in the Department of English at Georgetown University. He is also the founding director of the master’s degree program in Learning, Design, and Technology at Georgetown and the director of Georgetown's teaching center, CNDLS.

Joshua Kim is the director of online programs and strategy at the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning and a CNDLS senior fellow at Georgetown University. Josh is also the author of the Learning Innovations blog at Inside Higher Ed.

Together, they wrote The Low-Density University: 15 Scenarios for Higher Education. It was published as an open-access e-book by Johns Hopkins Press in August. Given how influential their 15 scenarios have been to higher education planning in 2020, we wanted to talk with Eddie and Josh now, late in the year, to hear how they thought about their scenarios after seeing what higher education did this fall in response to the pandemic.

Links

• The Low-Density University, https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/low-density-university

• Edward Maloney at CNDLS, https://cndls.georgetown.edu/people/ejm/

• Joshua Kim’s “Learning Innovation” blog at Inside Higher Ed, https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/learning-innovation

• Learning Innovation and the Future of Higher Education, https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/learning-innovation-and-future-higher-education

In this episode, we’re circling back to a favorite topic here on the podcast: media literacy. Leading Lines producer Melissa Mallon recently talked with Renee Hobbs, professor of communication studies at the University of Rhode Island, about her new book, Mind Over Media: Propaganda Education for a Digital Age. Professor Hobbs is a longtime leader in the field of media literacy education, with a CV a mile long, and her new book distills her research and practice on propaganda education, a topic that is as timely as ever these days.

In the interview, she talks about her entry into media literacy, how the field has changed over the decades, and how faculty and teachers in all disciplines can practice connecting their classrooms to the culture around them.

Links

• Renee Hobbs’ faculty page, https://harrington.uri.edu/meet/renee-hobbs/

• Renee Hobbs on Twitter, https://twitter.com/reneehobbs

• Mind Over Media: Propaganda Education in a Digital Age, https://www.mindovermedia.us/

• Media Education Lab, https://www.mediaeducationlab.com/

• NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education, https://namle.net/

In this episode, we talk with James M. Lang about distraction and attention, the subject of his new book. He is a professor of English and the director of the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption University in Massachusetts. He’s the author of five books, including Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning, Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty, and his most recent book, Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It. Jim writes a monthly column on teaching and learning for the Chronicle of Higher Education, and he edits the “Teaching and Learning in Higher Education” series of books for West Virginia University Press.

Jim puts a ton of research into his books, and he’s an amazing communicator, as you’ll hear in this interview. We talk about laptop bans and classroom norms, the ethics of attention and cognitive diversity, and much more.

Links

• James Lang’s website, https://www.jamesmlang.com/

• James Lang on Twitter, https://twitter.com/LangOnCourse

• Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It, https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/james-m-lang/distracted/9781541699816/

• James Lang’s essays in The Chronicle of Higher Education, https://www.chronicle.com/author/james-m-lang

• From 2008, Lang’s appearance on the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching podcast, discussing teaching first-year students, https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/2008/05/episode-5-james-lang-on-teaching-first-year-students/

In this episode, we’re exploring that future by looking to the past. Leading Lines producer Cliff Anderson shares a fascinating interview with tech entrepreneur Brian Dear about his book The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the Rise of Cyberculture. The book tells the story of PLATO, an experiment in the 1960s and 1970s to see if a computer could teach people. In the interview, Brian Dear talks about the development of PLATO and its impact on the history of computing. He mentions a few names you likely know, like Douglas Engelbart, Seymour Papert, and Isaac Asimov, as well as a few you likely don’t. And he discusses the origin and importance of things we often take for granted today, like a display that responds as you type and the role of social connections in learning.

This episode is a little longer than our usual, but if you have any interest in the history of computing, I think you’ll find it really interesting.

Links

• Brian Dear’s website, http://brianstorms.com/

• The Friendly Orange Glow (Penguin Random House, 2017), https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/545610/the-friendly-orange-glow-by-brian-dear/

• Brian (@brianstorms) Dear on Twitter, https://twitter.com/brianstorms

• “The Story of John Hunter’s World Peace Game, Roger Ebert, and the PLATO System” by Brian Dear, https://medium.com/@brianstorms/the-story-of-john-hunters-world-peace-game-roger-ebert-and-the-plato-system-4b3bb571fa2

This episode features two librarians who have developed digital privacy toolkit they call Digital Shred. Sarah Hartman-Caverly is a reference and instruction librarian and Alexandria Chisholm is an assistant librarian, both at Penn State Berks. They both have a healthy interest in digital privacy, and they developed a series of workshops for students on managing one’s digital identity. Those workshops have spawned a website with a bounty of digital privacy resources for students and librarians and other educators. One of our favorite librarians, Melissa Mallon, talks with Sarah and Alex about their entry into the world of digital privacy, how they help students understand the value of digital privacy, and the kinds of resources they’ve collected for Digital Shred.

Links

•Digital Shred, a privacy literacy toolkit, https://sites.psu.edu/digitalshred/

•Privacy Workshop Series, https://sites.psu.edu/digitalshred/tag/privacy-workshop-series/

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

•Hartman, S., & Chisholm, A. (2020). Privacy literacy instruction practices in academic libraries: Past, present, and possibilities. IFLA Journal. https://doi.org/10.1177/0340035220956804 [open access]

•“Version Control,” Sarah Hartman-Caverly’s 2017 speculative fiction, https://pennstate.pure.elsevier.com/en/publications/version-control [open access]

•Six Private I's Privacy Conceptual Framework: https://sites.psu.edu/digitalshred/2020/10/01/six-private-is-privacy-conceptual-framework-hartman-caverly-chisholm/

•Privacy literacy collection (professional presentations and publications), https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/collections/5mk61rg687

•Alexandria Chisholm, https://libraries.psu.edu/directory/aec67

•Sarah Hartman-Caverly, https://libraries.psu.edu/directory/smh767

•Leading Lines episode 62 with Chris Gilliard, http://leadinglinespod.com/episodes/episode-62-chris-gilliard/

In this episode, we’re talking with one of the participants in the Vanderbilt Online Course Design Institute, Susan Kevra, a principal senior lecturer in French who also teaches in our American studies program. Prior to this spring’s remote teaching, Susan had never taught online. She knew she would be teaching online this summer, with an American studies writing intensive course on food, so she signed up for our institute. She actually participated the two weeks immediately prior to her summer course, so she was designing in a hurry! In our conversation, we talk about experiential learning activities, building community and fostering social presence, balancing asynchronous and synchronous modes of instruction, and the role of visual design in the online learning experience.

Links

• Susan Kevra’s faculty page, https://as.vanderbilt.edu/french-italian/faculty/susan-kevra-2/

• Online Course Development Resources from the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching, https://www.vanderbilt.edu/cdr/

• Vanderbilt Center for Teaching blog, https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/blog/

In this episode, guest producer Alex Oxner shares a conversation with three faculty teaching at institutions that serve a wide range of students. Adam Miller, director of the writing center and English instructor at Bluegrass Community and Technical College; Ayesha Keller, assistant professor of social work at Nashville State Community College; and Roxane Pajoul, assistant professor of French at Tennessee State University, a historically Black university, discuss the challenges they and their students faced during this spring’s period of remote teaching, their plans for teaching during this uncertain fall semester, and technologies they have found useful in engaging their students.

At the time of this recording, Alex was an instructor of English at Nashville State Community College. She is now the assistant director of inclusive pedagogy at the Kaneb Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Notre Dame. She is also an alumna of the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching’s Graduate Teaching Fellows program.

Links:

• Alex Oxner on LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandraoxner/

• Ayesha Keller on LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/ayesha-keller-msw-98126987/

• Roxane Pajoul’s faculty page, http://www.tnstate.edu/llp/faculty/pajoul.aspx

Rodolfo Rego is a senior instructor in the department of earth and environment at Florida International University. You may remember Rodolfo from Episode 59 of Leading Lines, about a year ago, when he shared some of his approaches for teaching earth and environmental science courses online. His courses are ones that one might think are entirely bound by place— his courses often feature field trips or mineral labs. But he makes them work, and work well, as fully online courses, leveraging the fact that his students aren’t all in the same place at the same time to help them learn about the Earth and the environment.

Rodolfo spoke with Derek Bruff in early June and was asked about the so-called pivot to online teaching this spring and how it affected him. He also talks about his plans for the fall, with all its uncertainties, and he shared his advice for faculty new to online teaching. For all those faculty who are new to teaching online and worried about making their fall courses work well, you’ll find Rodolfo’s advice both practical and reassuring.

Links

• Multimedia resources from Rodolfo’s courses, https://case.fiu.edu/earth-environment/resources/multimedia-resources/index.html

• Leading Lines Ep. 59 f. Rodolfo Rego, http://leadinglinespod.com/episodes/episode-59rodolfo-rego/

• Active Learning in Hybrid and Physically Distanced Classrooms, Derek Bruff, https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/2020/06/active-learning-in-hybrid-and-socially-distanced-classrooms/

• Structures for Flex Classrooms: Pros, Cons, and Pedagogical Choices, Cynthia Brame, https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/2020/06/structures-for-flex-classrooms-pros-cons-and-pedagogical-choices/

We’re back with another episode exploring the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on higher education. This time we are speaking with one of Derek’s colleagues at the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching, Cynthia Brame, about the Online Course Design Institute that was launched in May to help Vanderbilt faculty get ready to teach online this summer and possibly this fall.

Cynthia Brame was one of the designers of institute, and she’s been one of the institute facilitators since launching on May 4th. She’s an associate director at center and a principal senior lecturer in biological sciences, where she teaches a large-enrollment biochemistry course. At the center, she acts as liaison to the STEM departments on campus and leads the Junior Faculty Teaching Fellows program, among other duties. She’s also the author of the book Science Teaching Essentials: Short Guides to Good Practice, and prior to working at the center, she was associate professor and chair of biology at Centenary College in Louisiana.

Links

• Cynthia Brame’s website and blog, https://cynthiabrame.org/

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

• Science Teaching Essentials: Short Guides to Good Practice, https://www.elsevier.com/books/science-teaching-essentials/brame/978-0-12-814702-3

• Online Course Design Institute, https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/ocdi/

During this season of Leading Lines, we’re exploring the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on higher education. A big part of that impact lands on our students. Robin DeRosa is the director of the Open Learning & Teaching Collaborative, or Open CoLab, at Plymouth State University, a public liberal arts institution that’s part of the University. She brought along her colleague Martha Burtis, now a learning and teaching developer at the Open CoLab, and formerly at the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies at the University of Mary Washington.

Robin and Martha talk about the challenges our students are facing during this crisis and the ways they and their colleagues are helping to respond to those challenges. They also offered some useful advice for faculty and institutions planning ahead for an uncertain summer and fall.

Links

• Robin DeRosa’s website, http://robinderosa.net/

• @actualham, Robin DeRosa on Twitter, https://twitter.com/actualham

• Martha Burtis’ website, https://marthaburtis.net/

• @mburtis, Martha Burtis on Twitter, https://twitter.com/mburtis

• Open CoLab, the Open Learning & Teaching Collaborative, https://colab.plymouthcreate.net/

• “Preparing to Teach During COVID-19,” from the CoLab, https://colab.plymouthcreate.net/covid19/

• Ungrading webinar, https://colab.plymouthcreate.net/resource/ungrading-webinar/

• Ungrading, a Chapbook produced by Martha Burtis and Ashley Hichborn, https://colab.plymouthcreate.net/uncategorized/introducing-ungrading-a-chapbook/

• Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies course website, https://colab.plymouthcreate.net/ids-intro/ids-intro-home/