February 15: OpenTeachingOU News Update

So, for the #OpenTeachingOU round-up this week, there is some FABULOUS stuff to report. What a great week! And for more, check out the #OpenTeachingOU Omnifeed (thank you, Inoreader!), and also previous news round-ups.

OU Folks

Rob Reynolds, NextThought CPO. Given OU's ginormous investment in NextThought, I thought this should count as "OU Folks," especially since I am so happy about it: Rob Reynolds is now Chief Product Officer at NextThought, and we can see his work already taking effect. They have a real website now, and a real blog!

Faculty Learning Community: Online Presence and Digital Identity. I was THRILLED to see that the upcoming FLC from Adam Croom already has a web presence of its own! I hope to join in even if I cannot participate in the face-to-face.

Domains Do Disney. Adam was also at ELI this week and shared this fantastic blog post with an update on create.ou.edu. There are some faculty blogs here I have to explore, so expect more goodness here in the OU section next week!

Faculty Learning Community: Teaching in a Digital Space. Another great FLC, and one that I hope will leave a digital trail also. Kevin Buck says he will blog it! Yes!!!!!! We need some good Kevin energy for D2L... the John Baker webinar was not exactly a toe-tapper this week (maybe others got something out of it; I listened attentively but had nothing to take away).

President Boren on Twitter. Yes, President Boren has a Twitter account now... so, thanks to the power of the Twitter widget in D2L, President Boren was there to greet my students when they logged in!

Beyond OU

Striving for a Pedagogy of Empowerment: Taking a Leap of Faith. Beautiful piece from Mia Zamora: "A truly wise person learns from every person he or she connects with in the most unforeseen moments. This is of course the soul of co-learning. And, perhaps it is also the seed of equity and justice."

Educators as Lead Learners. More on colearning and making learning visible, this time about our learning as instructors, from Jackie Gerstein, with a great graphic as always!

U.S. Postsecondary Faculty in 2015. This Gates Foundation report has some very discouraging numbers re: faculty and technology but the report itself had some glimmers of hope compared to the short write-up I read in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. (Thanks to Phil Hill for alerting me to check out the actual report.)

NMC Horizon Report. Great comments from Stephen Downes: "So what does it tell us about the methodology? Mostly, that it sways in the breeze. It's strongly influenced by the popular press and marketing campaigns. It's not based on a deep knowledge significant technology developments, but rather focuses on surface-level chatter and opinion. And that is why I think NMC should be obligated to re-examine its methodology."

Before You Assign That Homework — What Students Wish You Knew. Great post from Pernille Ripp with much for higher ed here too. I am esp. a fan of the strategy that we should be doing our own homework.

Critical Digital Pedagogy. Beautiful and very thought-provoking slides from Jesse Stommel.

Critical Digital Pedagogy from Jesse Stommel

My Stuff

Ugh: That Grading Article in Chronicle Vitae. Terrible and depressing article, but at least it led to a good conversation re: very important topic of grading.

Data Schmata: Midterm Grade Reports. Yep, no comments. Again. It's big data deja vu all over again!

Making Learning Visible: Power of Past Student Work. Preliminary report on the way availability of Portfolios from last semester is changing things BIG TIME in my classes this semester; I'll have more on this next week.

Pinterest Project Boards. Excited to have Pinterest Project Boards running now, and I embedded them in the Project Directories for both classes!

Student Project Comments. Exciting week coming up: students begin commenting on each other's projects. I've revamped that assignment and am hoping for even better things than in past!

Student Schedule Update. I'm continuing my "small data" project for the semester, seeing what more I can do to get students to develop their own schedules instead of doing work based on my (arbitrary) deadlines.

Inoreader Dashboard. I am so happy with my new strategy for using Inoreader's Dashboard options!

Comment Walls. Some students come up with fun graphics for their Comment Walls (they are setting up those Comment Walls this week, getting ready for comments to come). Here's one that is very fun indeed: