I just got an alert about a webinar on Thursday that describes best practices for using digital textbooks. If you have time, you may want to check it out.
Best Practices for Integrating Digital Textbooks
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Slowing Down
Two Canadian academics, Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber, have written a book, The Slow Professor, explaining how we can reduce the frantic pace and multi-layered commitments of today’s universities and still maintain standards. Though the authors write from the perspective of those with tenure, they advocate for changing our academic culture so that everyone in it can have time to reflect.
Here are two reviews of the book, if your busy schedule doesn’t allow you time to read the whole thing!
Moral Consequences of Adjunctification
If you haven’t already done so, you’ll want to read the powerful speech given by Kevin Birmingham on the occasion of his Truman Capote Award. His essay, “The Great Shame of Our Profession,” was reprinted in The Chronicle of Higher Education last February, and now in Arts and Letters Daily. In fact, our union provided a link earlier this year. Needless to say, there was some pushback by tenured faculty who didn’t take kindly to the implication that they needed to be part of the solution.
Job: Tenure-Track Position, Teaching Stream
U of T’s New College has a new opening for the director of the Writing Centre. The deadline appears to be March 1.
Jobs: Tenure-Stream/Sessional
The Department of Drama and Speech Communication at the University of Waterloo is advertising a number of positions, two of which seem to be tenure-track. The salary is competitive and the work, on the surface at least, seems to be very interesting. Deadline for applications is February 1, 2018.
Have fun over the break!
Job Position: Lecturer
Here’s an opportunity at UBC for an Arts Studies in Research and Writing teaching position in the Faculty of Arts. They’re advertising one-year and potentially three-year contracts. Apparently the minimum annual salary for a full-time position is $62,353. The deadline is January 15, 2018.
More Advice on Efficient Grading
We’re more than 365 days away from truly putting this year’s final assignments behind us, and sometimes it can be disheartening to provide detailed feedback while suspecting most students look at just the mark. If we ask for hard-copy final reports in Week 11, that can mean a pile of stored assignments with hand-written comments which only the dust mites see. The eventually shredded documents can trigger pangs of regret for having spent precious time on unappreciated labour.
One approach some instructors have taken is to provide just general comments in the D2L dropbox, or a grade accompanied by an invitation to students to ask for more detailed feedback, if they need it. If you worry about having evidence for a later appeal of files graded online, you could create general categories (such as “expression,” “structure,” “layout”) in GradeMark to drag and drop.
If you have the time or the inclination to provide comments, then you might want to consider tips from seasoned professors. Last year I posted a link to a helpful article for streamlining grading. This year, The Chronicle of Higher Education offers tips from history professor, Kevin Gannon, Director of the Center For Excellence in Teaching and Learning. Some of us already use some of his techniques, such as giving oral feedback, using rubrics, and copy/pasting common errors. For those who don’t, his explanations provide a rationale for using the strategies he recommends.
Call for Papers
Here’s a call for papers for a symposium at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana entitled, Writing Research Without Walls: A Symposium for Interdisciplinary Writing and Collaboration. The event won’t be until October, 2018, and the deadline for submission is February 1, 2018. This could be a great opportunity, if you have the time to create a proposal. The CUPE professional development fund could cover some of the cost.
The Science of Learning
An old friend of mine, a professor of electrical engineering at U of T who was awarded The University of Toronto President’s Teaching Award in 2016, recommended a book, Make it Stick, as a must-read for those of us who teach at a post-secondary institution. Drawing on research in cognitive science, and writing engagingly about the data, the authors build a persuasive case for how we learn. One of their more controversial arguments challenges the long-held assumption that durable learning is possible through repetitive exposure to what you need to remember. Here is a Chronicle of Higher Education review of the book. You can find an eBook copy at our library.