Pedagogy

Daily Gleanings about managing stress and living with students as a faculty member.

I’ve recently had the opportunity of working through Andrew Babyak’s article, “A Teaching Strategy for a Christian Virtual Environment” ( Journal of Research in Christian Education 24, no. 1 [2015]: 63–77). A number of Babyak’s reflections are quite insightful and helpful. According to the abstract, The current landscape in education is changing rapidly as online learning programs are experiencing great growth. As online learning grows, many professors and students are entering into new learning environments for the first time. While online learning has proven to be successful in many cases, it is not a journey upon which Christian professors or students should begin without some preparation. This article articulates a basic Christian teaching strategy by providing recommendations for those who are entering the online environment for the first time or desire to improve their online teaching effectiveness. These principles and recommendations are presented so that Christian professors can create Christian virtual environments in which they can have a significant impact on their students’ spiritual development in an online environment. It is critical that professors design their courses with the needs of online students in mind, ensuring that students of all learning styles are able to excel. Furthermore, professors should understand that online teaching often takes more time than traditional methods of teaching, increasing the importance of clear instructions and communication with students. ...

Charles Jones notes that the May issue of the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research is available for free online through July 31 and that ClassicsTeaching.com contains some valuable resources for teachers of classics, compiled by Steven Hunt (Cambridge) and Aisha Khan-Evans (University of London).

On the web: Joseph Kelly discusses biblical theology and history of religion research. Cary Nelson considers ownership issues for faculty-developed intellectual property. Rod Decker comments on ζῶ. Allison Friederichs discusses grade inflation.

Image representing New York Times as depicted … Sunday’s New York Times had a disquieting article about a potentially dramatic increase in substance abuse among teens for the sake of improved academic performance: The boy exhaled. Before opening the car door, he recalled recently, he twisted open a capsule of orange powder and arranged it in a neat line on the armrest. He leaned over, closed one nostril and snorted it. ...

It seems like I’ve seen the site before, but Gideon Burton at Brigham Young University has digested a good deal of information about classical and Renaissance rhetoric at Silva Rhetoricae: The Forest of Rhetoric. The site “is intended to help beginners, as well as experts, make sense of rhetoric, both on the small scale (definitions and examples of specific terms) and on the large scale (the purposes of rhetoric, the patterns into which it has fallen historically as it has been taught and practiced for 2000+ years).” ...

[caption id="" align=“alignright” width=“125” caption=“Piazza (Image via Wikipedia)”] [/caption] In his article Sunday in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jeffrey Young comments: [Pooja] Sankar, a recent graduate of Stanford University’s M.B.A. program, leads a start-up focused on finding a better way for college students to ask questions about course materials and assignments online. Her company, Piazza, has built an online study hall where professors and teaching assistants can easily monitor questions and encourage students who understand the material to help their peers. ...

[caption id="" align=“alignright” width=“102” caption=“Nicolo di Pietro, “The Saint Teaching Rhetoric” (Image via Wikipedia)”] [/caption] In an article this past Sunday in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Dan Berrett digests the results of a recent conference at Harvard University about learning and teaching. The article contains several insightful observations, but in one key paragraph of his article, Berrett summarizes: ...

Yesterday’s review of the Chronicle of Higher Education collects several interesting articles about distance learning. Among the open-access articles listed are: Robert Mendenhall, “How Technology Can Improve Online Learning—and Learning in General” Shai Reshef, “No Tuition? No Problem.” Burck Smith, “Let’s Deregulate Online Learning” Derek Bruff, “A Social Network Can Be a Learning Network” Ari Kohen, “From Homeric Writings to Cellphone Forensics, Some Favorite Online Resources” Although potential gains need to be weighed especially carefully in relation to potential losses in some of the applications Bruff describes (e.g., “Back channels”), from this list, Bruff’s thoughts about employing collaborative technologies seemed especially intriguing. ...

Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jeffrey Selingo discusses what might change in higher education if engineers were assigned to reinvent it from the ground up. Some points that emerged at a recent kick-off event for Georgia Tech’s Center for 21st Century Universities were: ...

James Garland has an insightful article, “The Value of Humility in Academe (No Kidding)” at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

C. S. Lewis’s introduction to Athanasius’s On the Incarnation has since been reprinted under the title “On the Reading of Old Books” as, for instance, in Walter Hooper’s edited collection of Lewis miscellanies, God in the Dock. This introduction’s text is, however, also available at Silouan in HTML format (HT: Michael Hyatt). ...

Recently, at the first, annual meeting of the Canadian Federation of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Louis Menand, Professor of American Studies at Harvard University, addressed attendees regarding “[w]hy the case for liberal education is so hard to make”: Nowadays, everyone believes that “it’s good for people to be introduced to the humanities,” said Dr. Menand, but he highlighted a paradox: one of the difficulties in trying to make the case for the humanities is that the work of academics isn’t literature, art and music—rather, it is research about these works. Hermeneutics is hard to study and, because every interpretation is provisional, it is hard to defend. ...

In the past few weeks, I had thought of what might be a pedagogically helpful application for Google Wave. I had all but decided to experiment with it in a course assignment, but on Wednesday, Google announced that it would not “continue developing Wave as a standalone product” but would, over time, “extend the technology for use in other Google projects.” So, apparently, it is time to “wave” goodbye and wait to see what the next iteration of the technology holds. ...

I have been asked to produce a resource for distance education students who may have more difficulty than on-campus students with accessing traditional research venues like the brick-and-mortar library. To that end, this blog now has an Online Research page, part of which subsumes and expands the old, Other Websites page. I have tried to highlight and link to many of the wonderful resources already available for distance education students who are doing biblical studies work, but if anyone has suggestions about other free-access resources that these students might find particularly useful, please do post them in the comments section here. The students who will use this page and I would be very grateful for these additions. ...

Take this survey about a new website that the Society of Biblical Literature is developing with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. According to today’s email announcement from the Society, the site is generally intended to function as a medium for making biblical scholarship more widely available and encouraging interaction with the biblical literature. So, if you might be interested in using such a site, head over to Survey Monkey, and give the Society your input. ...

Mark Goodacre has updated the hermeneutics page at New Testament Gateway to include Holger Szesnat’s substantial list of online resources for biblical hermeneutics.

Michael Bird comments that the papers for next week’s Louven conference, “New Perspectives on Paul and the Jews,” are available for download. Of the presenters listed in the program, only Anne-Marie Reijnen’s paper on " Kosmos and Creation in Paul’s Thought" is not currently available. Additionally, in the developing list of audio and video resources over at Evangelical Textual Criticism: ...

Sometimes, a bit of humor or oddity can be pedagogically advantageous. In this connection, I have tried to fit the chief, Maccabean figures into the chorus from “Little Bunny Fufu” (who may apparently appear, at least occasionally, as “Little Rabbit Fufu” in the UK) ( midi audio, lyrics). ...