Multilitteratus Incognitus

Well, this week has been particularly crazy, with a couple of days of snow making things pile up at  work, and with a presentation this past Friday on international education at NERCOMP, it means that I've been behind a bit (compared to where  I thought I would be) on blogging for #rhizo14.  I have been keeping track of the facebook discussions, so I think this week I'm consolidating both original post and blending them with things that others have written. The question of the week (or rather, the prompt of the week) was: Explore a model of enforced independence. How do we create a learning environment where people must be responsible? How do we assure ourselves that learners will self-assess and self-remediate? The first thing that came to mind actually comes, second hand, from former classmates taking a course on Group Dynamics (a course that I never took during my graduate studies with this particular faculty member).  The story goes like this:  First da...

Before the new year came in, one of my linguistics professors sent me (and other classmates) an email looking for some feedback.  The question was:  How would you react as a teacher if your students texted, surfed the internet, or did other stuff on their computers during your class? Given that my classmates all come from diverse backgrounds (some in Higher Education, some in K-12, others in Adult Education, and so on), the question is not that simple. I toyed with the idea of answering this before the new year, but seeing as I was on vacation I decided to make it a blog post for the new year :-) So here's my answer: It all depends on context and what I expect from the students.  First of all, I think that in a Higher Education context, it's really unreasonable to expect students to not bring any technology into the classroom and to have all devices off (not silent, but off).  There are a number of comments in this InsideHigherEd story about faculty being very...