If you look at the front page of the website, one of the areas I say that I’ll cover is political communication. Yet, I really haven’t done that until this post. This post will answer the question, “Did the Harris/Walz campaign miss an opportunity to highlight one of their potential strengths?” To answer this question,…
Read More Did the Harris/Walz campaign miss an opportunity?As I’m teaching four classes this semester, something I haven’t done for a while, I figured it was time to up my organizational game just a little… and give website readers a sense of how I organize my classes along with the tools I use. Tools: What Goes With Me Into the Classroom As my…
Read More Setting up classes for a new semester: My processIn other words: Did I waste a lot of time? I don’t think the project I described in a previous post was a waste of time at all — there are two ways in which I think of the project: The mere act of going through the abstracts pointed out to me the articles that…
Read More Followup: Why bother to have abstracts for all my journal articles?One of the complaints that my students hear from their STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) friends is that communication is such an “easy” discipline. In the first week or two of my Communication Theory and Theory and Research classes, we pretty quickly work on refuting that notion. We talk about how even the “simplest”…
Read More Polymaths and the Communication DisciplineI’m not going to rehash here the myriad debates about what Artificial Intelligence (AI) will do to education and colleges. There’s been enough electrons and ink spilled about that, with more to come. I want to focus on one aspect that ties in well with the typical academic’s tendency toward imposter syndrome — the fear…
Read More FONK, not FOMOLet’s be honest: Most students don’t want to read assignments, let alone for a course such as research methods. Typically, only 20-30% of students will read their assignments [1] See Kerr, M. M., & Frese, K. M. (2017). Reading to learn or learning to read? Engaging college students in course readings. College Teaching, 65(1), 28-31.…
Read More Rethinking reading assignmentsI have to admit this is so brilliant and I wish I had thought of it. But I didn’t. Here’s the idea: hand out your syllabus and have students annotate it. Let them mark up the lessons, ideas, thoughts, assignments that went well and that didn’t go well. Or, an alternate way of doing it:…
Read More A different way of evaluation at the end of the semesterI probably subscribe to way too much stuff, but that’s a matter for another post. 🙂 One of my subscriptions is to The Teaching Professor, a publication for college professors designed to get people to reflect upon their teaching. They have a parallel site called “Faculty Focus” which is free, and does have good material…
Read More How do we make students “teachable?”Some of my former teaching assistants would laugh because my desk is relatively clean right now. In addition to the things you would expect (file drawers, tissues), there are a couple of other things I keep on my desk to remind me about various things: Yes, I’ve been known to like the Peanuts cartoon strip…
Read More What’s sitting on my desk now…I think that those of us who are in academia know that we’ve chosen this career because we simultaneously possess and/or don’t possess certain qualities. I’m blessed that I am able to process lots of information and find ways to organize that information. I’m also blessed that I find thinking about abstract matters to be…
Read More A more serious reflection: the cost of academia