We’ve all been there: you’ve handed out the research assignment. Your students have begun working on it. But there’s a snag—the material isn’t as easy to find or as abundant as you thought; your students are missing crucial context; the instructions are ambiguous on a key point; you hadn’t anticipated what would happen when students …
Pardon our dust while we update the look of the Bok Blog. Continue reading »
Today’s author is Sarah Rous, DTF for the Classics Department. On March 5–6 the Department of the Classics was pleased to welcome Jeff Beneker, Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as our visiting “distinguished teacher” and facilitator of a series of workshops and colloquia collectively dubbed the Distinguished Teaching Series. Our department … Continue reading »
Last week, I posted about some of the multimedia assessment guidelines we’re developing in the Graduate Multimedia Fellows Seminar. This week, I’d like to try to apply those guidelines to a professional video clearly intended to communicate an academic-style argument. Mike Rugnetta of PBS’s Idea Channel posts new videos once a week investigating “connections between pop … Continue reading »
We’re asking a number of important questions in the Graduate Multimedia Fellows Seminar: What is multimedia? Why assign multimedia rather than a traditional paper? What kinds of assignments are worth giving in which disciplinary contexts to develop what kinds of knowledge and skills? But more important than any of these questions is the one that … Continue reading »
You’ve probably encountered a library research guide before—perhaps you’ve taken a course that had its own LibGuide, or consulted your department’s guide for graduate study—but have you thought about using a research guide as teaching material? Library guides are not just lists of amazing resources, though they are that, too. They’re also glimpses into particular … Continue reading »
In the Graduate Multimedia Fellows seminar, co-sponsored by the Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching and the Bok Center, we’re generating best practices for designing, implementing, and evaluating multimedia assignments. Every week, we read scholarship, examine exemplary student and professional multimedia work, and discuss what kinds of assignments (multimedia and traditional) work best in various … Continue reading »
In The Evolution of the Lecture I posed the question, “could we live without lectures?” and while far from the first to do so, I suggested that lectures need to evolve in our modern world. Clearly technology can enhance education, but how should it be incorporated? And, what tools are out there? Technological teaching tools … Continue reading »
