Final Thoughts before I BOLT.

I'll be honest: I wasn't excited about taking this course. Not because of the material, etc,. but because it was just one more thing to do during a summer that was quickly disappearing! 
But boy, am I glad I did. Here's a couple things I learned:
1. I can start--now--incorporating more online material into my existing F2F courses (in fact, I already have!)
2. If I teach an online course one day, I now have some really effective tools to help make it less onliney and more personal. Also, seeing Dave model some fun, goofy, but always effective behavior, was great. My only experience with online studies prior to this was pretty dull and boring. Thanks Dave!
3. Through our readings, other blog posts, etc., I was challenged to improve my F2F courses. That, indeed, was an unexpected bonus from taking BOLT. I'm eager for classes to begin in late August because I've got some new ideas I'm eager to try out.
4. The emphasis in creating a streamlined, organized course with easy-to-find materials online forced me to go through my F2F courses and do the same thing. I tossed some things out, added some new things, and reorganized some items. 
Oveall, I'm so glad I took this course. I'd highly recommend it to all our faculty--even if they have no intention of ever teaching a fully online course.

Is it Really Called "Chunking"?

I'll start by saying I can't believe it's called "Chunking." Coming from a background of feature story writing and journalism, I'm often frustrated with academic writing. The simplest things get obfuscated to sound more academic. "Understanding someones teaching style" becomes "pedagogical analysis". Doing a "decent bit of research" becomes "academic rigor" and the list goes on ad nauseam. So I was delighted--and very surprised--to read about "chunking" in an academic environment.  One would think it should be referred to as "grouping into sequential models based on similarities in pedagogical outcomes," or GISMBSIPO for short.

With that rant out of the way, this weeks discussions helped me understand that I'm already doing some serious chunking, but not as intentionally as I could or should be. I've already gone through my syllabi for my F2F classes and made some changes, and am definitely being very intentional about chunking in the blended outline I'm making for BOLT and for use in future. 

Question for you more serious chunkers out there: Do you start feeling chunky after a lot of chunking? Or let me put it another way: Does the grouping of topic matter and ideas into relevant patterns for increased pedagogical flow lead to courses that seem inflated or conflated with superfluous material leading to decreased learning and retention? 

An unexpected breakdown

I was intrigued by this week's discussion about letting your personality come through in class. That's usually not a problem for most of us, but to what extent?

A few years ago I was in an advanced film class and was telling students a story about an interview I did with a woman in Sierra Leone. It was one of the most difficult interviews I've ever conducted. I won't go into graphic detail here but I'll give you the gist of what made it hard:

• She was a sex slave for some years.
• She was buried alive.
• While tied to a tree, she was forced to hold her aunt's severed head on her lap.
• Emotional abuse.
• By the time of this interview, she was emerging from a deep, psychological "fog" and beginning to experience a degree of "normal" life again after many years. 

OK, that's enough. We were talking in class about the interview process and that's why this story was under way. I had absolutely no intention of getting emotional about the story ... but I did. I didn't get all weepy, but my voice cracked, I had to wipe my eyes.

I was really embarrassed, thinking I had made a real mistake, compromised my professionalism and lost the respect of my students.

To my great surprise, just the opposite happened. My relationship with that group of majors went to a place I hadn't seen before. I was still embarrased for some time after, but now that I've had time to reflect on that experience I've come to realize that letting our emotions out now and then isn't a sign of weakness, but a sign of trust. We trust those in the room to a point where we can be vulnerable with them. And in this case, that trust (though unintentional!) was rewarded greatly.

Most of us have had a teacher or two through the years who exercised this openness perhaps a bit too much, and that's not good either. But done with honesty, integrity and restraint, I think it can be a great thing for the classroom.

Conversion

No, not to a new religion or even denomination, but new way of teaching a class I'm already teaching.
Probably the hardest class I teach (from the students' perspective), is "Documentary Film Making." It's an upper level class and it demands a lot.
Because of transfer students, off-campus semesters and a few other notable reasons, I have students who just can't be on campus when I teach this class every other year, which means I have to give it as an independent study.

I've been using Dropbox to help this along, but I definitely want to move the class to a CMS and make it much more blended. Because they're on campus, we can meet. Because it's an independent study, they do the bulk of it on their own. This week's reading make me realize that I can easily take what I'm already doing and just move it online. I don't need weeks for much of it, but modules. I can take much of the mundane instruction and put it online, saving the really good stuff for our F2F meetings. I'm excited to give this a try.

Thanks to "Conquering the Content" and some other readings, I'll be sure to design the online environment in such a way that this course can be offered either semester, or even during the summer, without me having to go in and do massive surgery every time.

Ahhh, Pre-production at its best. 

Learning Styles

I thought I'd do my first blog on the VARK and FELDER learning style tests we were encouraged to take in chapter 1 of "Conquering the Content."

The two questionnaires did not take long to do and revealed some new info. The VARK came out about where I thought it would (see below) but the FELDER had a few surprises.

Learning a bit about my own learning styles definitely does make me more sensitive and aware of the varied styles of my own students so that alone was worth the cost (even though it was free!)

OK, here are my VARK scores:
Visual:             7
Auditory:         5
Read/Write:     6
Kinesthetic:     5

Conclusion: I'm a "multimodal" learner with a slight predilection for visual learning.

Felder Scores:
Sensing vs Intuitive:       Here I"m waaaaay on the right with an "11" on the "Intuitive" side of things.
Visual vs. Verbal:           Dead Center. Ahhh, balance.
Active vs. Reflective:     5 on the side of "Active."
Sequential vs. Global     5 on the side of "Global"

The 11 (strongly intuitive) kind of threw me and I'm not sure I'm happy about it. I definitely am that way, just not sure I"m happy about it.

My digital media students and I will sometimes joke about our learning styles compared to, say, engineers. In film film making we often talk about how a scene "feels," something an engineer would find utterly baffling. Imagine Kevin Timmer talking about circumference or biomass engineering and asking his students to see if the results "feel right." Yet we do it all the time because it works. It's a very intuitive way of working. But not all my students function this way (most do). I'm glad I took these tests simply because I'm not much more aware that not everyone learns the way I do ... and that means I need to teach in a variety of ways to help students, but also look for creative solutions for those who have completely different approaches to mastering material.