Controversial topics provide an opportunity for students to learn how to listen, understand, disagree, and discuss in a civil manner.

The following suggestions come from Harvard's Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning and were written by Lee Warren.

This guide is meant to provide Dickinson faculty, both seasoned classroom veterans and new colleagues, with a single place to find policy statements, recommendations, and suggestions from colleagues. This guide is also just that, a guide to teaching at Dickinson College. We are proudly pluralistic in our approaches to teaching, so new faculty should feel comfortable finding what works best for them (and their students) in the classroom.

The following link from Claremont McKenna provides interested faculty with a compendium of resources related to teaching. Each is based on cognitive science research.
http://www.claremontmckenna.edu/berger/asl/ar.php

I commend Dean Shareski's blogpost here, where he muses on the changing roles of teachers and, in particular, of good teachers.  Content delivery is less central when 'content is everywhere.'  But engaging, encouraging, and empowering students is still very necessary, as is the role of connecting them to others who can guide and help them.  I don't necessarily buy in to his metaphor of teacher as network administrator, but I do see that connective role as very important to how we can help many students learn

I have been invited to take part in a NITLE video conference at the end of this month about using blogs in teaching.  Feel free to sign up (by Feb 13), join in, and give me a hard time.

Among other things, I will be discussing my experiment this semester in my course about media and identity in the Middle East and North Africa.  Read all about it here, and be sure to check out what the students are blogging about.  Comments most welcome.

I described an experiment in using a chatroom to allow discussion during a film showing on my blog here.

Academhack offers a link to Mark Marino's USC Writing Program web-based tools to help students sharpen their essays. Follow the link and discover The Topoi!

http://www.pageflakes.com/markcmarino/23536077

Dan Cohen has an interesting article on his blog, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, on how scholarly databases can transform how humanities courses can be taught.  Here is a snippet:

An interesting article in Campus Technology this week --"Publishers Sue Georgia State over Digital Distribution."  Maybe the days of viewing Blackboard, or any course management system, as a safe haven for flagrant copyright violation are over?

Michael Wesch, creator of the incredibly viral YouTube video "The Machine is Us/Using Us" and  professor of anthropology at KState has just published an essay on "anti-teaching."  It is essentially a write-up of a talk he has been giving at conferences lately.  Here it is:

http://www.cea-ace.ca/media/en/AntiTeaching_Spring08.pdf

For those who have not seen his videos, here are three: