Book Review: Blended Learning in Higher Education

As an instructor, how can I make the most out of limited contact hours with students? A semester seems like a long time... between 28 and 30 hour-and-twenty-minute meetings. But in reality, that time goes quickly, and when the end of the semester rolls around, I often ask myself, "did my students actually learn anything meaningful?"

To make learning experiences meaningful, I struggle with a basic question that most collegiate educators struggle with daily. Do I go broad, and attempt to "cover" lots of material? Or do I choose core concepts, and go into depth, giving students the time and scaffolding to ask deeper questions about the knowledge itself. This deep thinking is the gold-mine that all instructors are trying to find, but sometimes students need some "surface knowledge" before they can start digging deeper.

But I don't want to spend eighty minutes per class delivering surface knowledge through a stale power point. And by the looks on my students' faces when I lecture for only thirty minutes, they can only take so much surface knowledge, which is great for me, because I would rather have more interaction. Still, we need to cover some important topics. This is where Blended Learning in Higher Education (Jossey-Bass) offers direction. By mixing online instruction with face-to-face instruction in so-called "blended learning" environments (or hybrid courses as they are sometimes called), instructors can leave broad knowledge education to the computer, and make use of face-to-face instruction time to explain complicated topics like only an expert can. Authors Randy Garrison and Norman Vaughan present theoretical backing with practical strategies for designing blended learning classes. They also present six case studies of course redesigns for existing face-to-face courses.

My Information Diet

I've been prompted to examine my "information diet," which includes all of my sources of information throughout the day.

I typically wake up around 6:30 or 7:00 in the morning, to the sound of the Michigan State University college radio station, Impact 89 FM. I love the awkward first-time DJs, and the station seems to have an early 1990s nostalgia -- lots of grunge.

Ever since I got an iPhone, I now read most of my e-mail in the morning while I am lying in bed. There are about 20 minutes where I don't want to be physically awake and out of bed, but I need to do something to wake my mind up. I get e-mail alerts from ScienceDaily website, which keeps me up to date on a range of topics from Social Psychology to Sensory Perception. Occasionally, I will tweet the findings of the study -- I use twitter to catalog and bookmark things that are of interest to me.

The debt ceiling debate that we don't hear about

I am really torn about this debt ceiling debate. On one hand, I see a noisy Republican majority in the House who doesn't care if the government shuts down, a reckless attitude that ignores the impact that this will have of millions of people's lives. On the other hand, the Fed's desire to continue raising the debt ceiling has been somewhat callous and ignorant. The sub-text here is that there are two separate debates: one political, one economic. The political debate has been a theater of incompetence; the Daily Show on Monday, July 25th, characterized it with a YouTube video of a skunk with its head stuck in a peanut butter jar. The economic debate has not been very visible at all -- carried on in the pages of the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times.

This fits into a long historical narrative in the United States. Economic decisions are not up for discussion in the public sphere, they are to be made by the men who understand business and commerce. Political decisions -- or more accurately, political theater -- is for the masses. Let the masses be swept up by the political posturing... Republican vs. Democrat... Tea Party vs. the Liberal Scurge of Washington. Which side are you on, brother? Which side are you on?

CNN is pathetic

Daily Show commentary on CNN, the news channel that has abandoned the news.

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"Public Works" on display

On a recent trip to Chicago, I caught the final day of the Public Works exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Photography. This was right up my alley, I love looking at the landscape and what humans do to it. In most cases, “progress” on the landscape involves a typical set of development behaviors; cut down the trees, grade the land, put in drainage, etc. These behaviors are so deeply ingrained into the default construction code that trying to do something different requires too much thought. When we see the cranes and bulldozers, we typically think “progress,” and so we don’t tend to ask too many questions.

Frank Breuer, Untitled, 2004 (1523 Plum Island, MA)

Anyway, the exhibit… among my favorite pictures were two photographs by Daniel Shea that illustrated mountaintop removal mining. Mountaintop removal is exactly what it sounds like: take huge machines and cut the top right off of a mountain to get at coal seams. This has been going on in Southern West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky for decades, and it is controversial for the large amount of landscape destruction that it causes, as well as the water pollution and toxic run-off. In some cases, dams that hold back sludge ponds have broken and sent millions of gallons of sludge cascading down through narrow mountain valleys. The process is enormously controversial and the EPA has tried to avoid the issue, seeing it as a political third rail it does not want to touch. The first two photographs appeared in the exhibit (the third was not part of the exhibit). These appear on Daniel Shea’s website.