Techno-Rhetoric Cafe

Course management software bothers me. It finalizes my teaching in a Bakhtinian way. Essentially, it tells me that I have to be able to categorize my material into specific areas. If I can’t fit my material into these specific areas, then I have to use a link. End of statement. Even worse, though, is the [...]

The first day of class is always fun for me. I get to meet a new group of students with the potential to do awesome work. I get to start over again with my syllabus, my pedagogy, or any aspect of my teaching that I want to start over with. Students don’t always feel the [...]

I teach my students the importance of collaboration to their further studies. I teach them this because I know how much collaboration has aided me in continuing my education, but I also know how much collaboration is involved when working in the “real world.” But I also stress to them the differences between cheating [...]

I’ve wrestled with whether to post this now and add an additional post once the class has finished with the unit, or to wait and do all of this together. I decided to go with the first option for two reasons. First, I can lay out the pedagogical idea I had that led to using [...]

The first year I taught, I initiated a concept that I called “Virtual Office Hours.” The concept was relatively simple. I provided my students with information for each of my online messengers, added each of them as friends, and set up regular hours. I kept about 3 hours a day for the first semester and [...]