Multilitteratus Incognitus

I feel like this took forever to do, but it's finally done! Last November we had a guest lecturer, Dr. Bessie Dendrinos , from the National and Kapodistrian Univerity of Athens, come speak to us on the subject of "Global Economy and the Urgent Need for Languages: American and European responses to foreign language learning exigency".  I recorded the video on a FlipCam (remember those?) and edited really quickly on Camtasia to add in some clearer slides.  The FlipCam isn't that bad.  I think a lavalier microphone and a tripod would do wonders for any future things I record.  The transcription (big thank you to Kathleen, Liz, and Laura) and the captioning on YouTube took a while since we're all new at this.  Let's see how the next one goes in terms of production

Up until yesterday I was in the course "Think Again: How to Reason and Argue" on coursera. I decided to drop the course (more on this in a subsequent post), but my decision to drop the course was partly based on my free time to devote to this course, and the assessment factors currently available for math and science (and logic is a Math course for me ;-)  ). I was conversing with one of my colleagues the other day, about this very topic, after a workshop, and it dawned on me that I probably haven't written about it yet :-) One of the things that one hears, often, from the xMOOC crowd (especially from those xMOOCs in elite universities) is about the opportunity to learn from "the best." What they mean is "the best physicist, chemist, programmer..." and so on.  For them, the best would be someone like Albert Einstein for example (at least that's what I get from what they are saying in their presentations".  Don't get me wrong, Albert may ...

Here is this week's video (lecture!) on lecturing, from the FSLT12. I have currently paused the video to post it here (see, blogger is not competing for my attention :-)  ).  Thoughts on lecturing to follow!

I was reading this article on insidehighered.com the other day. All I have to say is BRILLIANT! (OK, maybe I am getting a bit carried away here) While the article doesn't point out much new information (for me anyways - sorry, I don't mean to sound like a snob), it manages to point out that a lecture is not an inherent ability that you are either born with or you are not. It's is a skill, an art dare I say, that you cultivate, and the longer you practice this art, the better you become at it (especially if you are inclined to take constructive critique). This isn't all that different from when I was learning to prepare presentations as a young(er) graduate student. Did my first presentations stink? Of course they did! But as time went by, and I spent more time thinking about content, layout, information outside of my powerpoint deck, and I practiced, I got better at it! Lectures are the same way too :-) I liked this particular quote from the article: Bad lecturers vio...