Online Learning

Office Chat: Research

The University of Mary Washington (UMW) may not be an “R-1″ university (a designation once used by the Carnegie Foundation for large research universities). But research is very important at UMW nonetheless. Mary Wash promotes the concept of research in it’s undergraduate programs as well as the graduate professional programs and is an institutional member in the Council of Undergraduate Research. UMW hosts a Student Research and Creativity Day each year which highlights the amazing research and creative talents of our undergraduate students.

In this interview with Dr. Jo Tyler, Associate Professor of Linguistics and Education, the focus is on the importance of research in the UMW graduate programs. Not mentioned in the interview is a very interesting application of research that Tyler used to investigate a childhood family accident. Detailed in an article by Chris Neuberger, Tyler compares linguistic clues from interviews with family members to resolve a long-standing internal conflict. But back to the present interview…

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Online Course Evaluations

One of the interesting and innovative uses of technology that I saw at our recent UMW Faculty Academy wasa combination of RSS feeds and Google Custom Search. I can’t remember who demonstrated this and I would surely love to give them credit - so please let me know, if you know.

So, I have experimented with this and offer this service to the community. I have created two pages here as follows:

The first is a page containing a Delicious feed for sites containing course evaluation instruments, rubrics, or comprehensive information about course evaluations. The second is a search page which is constrained to just those sites listed. The site list is fairly shoprt right now and I would appreciate any forwarded links to evaluations or information about evaluations. Because the search is done on a page formed by dynamically generated list (via rss), the search becomes more exhaustive as more sites are tagged.

Office Chat: Classroom Management

In this office chat, Dr. Suzanne Houff discusses some very practical advice on classroom management taken from her recent book, The Classroom Manager: Procedures and Practices to Improve Instruction. Both in the text and in this interview, Houff tells us how we can apply Glasser’s five basic needs of:

Survival
Belonging
Fun
Freedom
Power

In the interview, Houff relates Glasser’s needs to Maslow’s hierarchy. As she states in her book:

Glasser, although similar to Maslow, does not suggest a hierarchy but instead believes that each individual simultaneously experiences needs and fulfills those needs at an individual level. Both believe that actions are reflective of how well the needs are being met. (p. 22)

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