Today I venture outside of my comfort zone in talking about teaching and learning with technology in the Liberal Arts to address a group of faculty from the Smeal College of Business. In so doing, I am been thinking about how to translate the teaching and learning philosophy that has guided my teaching of Philosophy courses into the context of the Business classroom.
This led me to the embedded video below, in which Professor Debbie Ettington says:
“I think of learning as an active process, as a social process … we try to use lots of different ways to engage different learning styles, to engage students in working with each other …” (see: 0:45-1:03 in the video).
Professor Ettington’s words resonate with my own attempts to put a genuinely cooperative approach to education into practice in my teaching. They also give me the courage to share the story of how I use blogs in my Philosophy courses in order to open a discussion about how this model might be adapted to the particular contours of the environment in a Business classroom.
Below is a link to the presentation that lays out the model, but how precisely this might be taken up by professors in Business will, I hope, be part of our discussion we have in the session and perhaps here on the blog.
Here are some resources that might be relevant to the discussion:
- Blogging Rubric in pdf format
- The Pedagogy of Blogging Video
- Socratic Politics in Digital Dialogue video about how I use blogging in the classroom.
- New Media Literacies Presentation video
- http://www.youtube.com/user/cpl11
- @cplong and @LAUSDeanLong
looking forward to hearing how it goes, I would imagine that the business school models of working through case studies and actually creating campaigns/proposals would be a good fit for pragmatist style cooperative learning. On a side note I’m still not sure what technology, like blogging, adds to the learning experience except for the possibility of extra-classtime exchanges, and without more moderating/guidance this may add more dissonance than consonance.
It is fascinating how teaching has evolved. Blogging is almost as ubiquitous as opinions these days and reading all the different opinions is fascinating. Thanks for the post. Happy Holidays.