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11 Comments
I’d love to see some posts on sabbaticals and productivity or support ideas, given that I’m two weeks into mine and already feeling my resolve start to slip!
After all the talk about social media (esp. Twitter) at the MLA and AHA conferences, I thought I would point people to the Twitterstream for the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Francisco running today through the weekend.
We don’t have any digital humanists driving Twitter discussion, but I think we’re doing okay! We’ll see how the Tweetup goes tomorrow night.
Well, since y’all asked… I’m thinking about how to alter my teaching for very small classes. I have two classes this term with less than 6 students. Both classes are upper level writing classes. I’ve never taught classes this small before, so I’m trying to anticipate how things will be different. If anyone has any thoughts or experience with small classes, I’d find it helpful.
I also am teaching a class with 4 students! Looking forward to some conversation about how to keep it interesting and fun for such a small group.
I’m in the same boat as Meagan. I have 4 students in an intense course that meets every day except Friday, and where the book is not in yet. Ack! We’re surviving, but it’s hard to keep things interesting when there are only 4 people that can contribute to the discussion. The course, btw, is an educational technology course for pre-service teachers. It’s in a lab and much of it is hands on, but I’d love to have more in my toolbox in terms of activities.
This semester I’m teaching some introductory courses that are required for students outside my discipline: composition for students outside the English department, and technical writing for Engineering students. I thought I had this feeling beat after last semester, but already I’m feeling the weight of “honestly, why do we have to be here?” glowing from some of those faces.
Ways to convince them that there’s a reason to take this course?
Does anyone have experience with students reading required texts on the Kindle? They are telling me that the Kindle versions of books don’t have page numbers, so they can’t cite where their quotations are from. True? Does it depend on the book? I’m not sure what to do since proper citation is pretty important to me.
There are no page numbers on a kindle, due I think, to the variable font size–instead the device provides “location numbers” as place markers in the text. I have my first kindle student in intercession, but the kind of assignments in this class don’t require page citation. If they did, I would be torn between making the student get page numbers from a friend in the class and devising my own makeshift citation style based on the MLA09 guidlines with location instead of page # and Kindle instead of “print” or “web.”
I don’t have any experience of students using Kindles, but I’d personally be inclined to go the route Erin suggests. As long as they can provide a citation that more or less adheres to standard style and that lets me easily find what they were looking at, I’m happy.
Thanks! I just wondering about some of my professional writing students who will be submitting things to academic journals that require page citation. Or are academic journals allowing Kindle texts to be cited like this? Hmmmm….
I’m guessing that the question is too new for journals to have dealt much with it yet, but certainly if the multitude of prototypes at the recent CES is any indication, e-readers aren’t going away so someone somewhere is going to need to figure out a way to deal with them!
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