Resources

This report of a Wabash Center grant project outlines the current status of efforts to incorporate clergy ethics in theological education settings, recommendations to seminaries and recommendations to the FaithTrust Institution in two areas: curriculum and teaching; and policy and procedure. 

Click Here for Book Review Abstract: Behind the lectern stands the professor, deploying course management systems, online quizzes, wireless clickers, PowerPoint slides, podcasts, and plagiarism-detection software. In the seats are the students, armed with smartphones, laptops, tablets, music players, and social networking. Although these two forces seem poised to do battle with each other, they are really both taking part in a war on learning itself. In this book, Elizabeth Losh examines current efforts to “reform" higher education by applying technological solutions to problems in teaching and learning. She finds that many of these initiatives fail because they treat education as a product rather than a process. Highly touted schemes—video games for the classroom, for example, or the distribution of iPads—let students down because they promote consumption rather than intellectual development. Losh analyzes recent trends in postsecondary education and the rhetoric around them, often drawing on first-person accounts. In an effort to identify educational technologies that might actually work, she looks at strategies including MOOCs (massive open online courses), the gamification of subject matter, remix pedagogy, video lectures (from Randy Pausch to “the Baked Professor"), and educational virtual worlds. Finally, Losh outlines six basic principles of digital learning and describes several successful university-based initiatives. Her book will be essential reading for campus decision makers—and for anyone who cares about education and technology. (From the Publisher)

In our current screen-saturated culture, we take in more information through visual means than at any point in history. The computers and smart phones that constantly flood us with images do more than simply convey information. They structure our relationship to information through graphical formats. Learning to interpret how visual forms not only present but produce knowledge, says Johanna Drucker, has become an essential contemporary skill. Graphesis provides a descriptive critical language for the analysis of graphical knowledge. In an interdisciplinary study fusing digital humanities with media studies and graphic design history, Drucker outlines the principles by which visual formats organize meaningful content. Among the most significant of these formats is the graphical user interface (GUI)—the dominant feature of the screens of nearly all consumer electronic devices. Because so much of our personal and professional lives is mediated through visual interfaces, it is important to start thinking critically about how they shape knowledge, our behavior, and even our identity. Information graphics bear tell-tale signs of the disciplines in which they originated: statistics, business, and the empirical sciences. Drucker makes the case for studying visuality from a humanistic perspective, exploring how graphic languages can serve fields where qualitative judgments take priority over quantitative statements of fact. Graphesis offers a new epistemology of the ways we process information, embracing the full potential of visual forms and formats of knowledge production. (From the Publisher)

This is an annotated bibliography looking at what recent research on the human brain and its development can tell us about how traditional college-age students learn.

Overview of a study where developmental psychologist William Perry suggests that your perspective on learning will change and mature as your college experience unfolds. Gives expected levels of development.

The Serve Program combines academic study of theology w/year-long community service project combating poverty. Analysis of the program during 2008–09 revealed that students demonstrated a significant increase in interest in theology; a greater desire to enroll in theology coursework; and a deeper interest in theology than non-participating classmates.

Article that walks you through your own understandings of diversity, how to creat an inclusive classroom including assignments.

Great for student group-work projects. Share docs, have virtual meetings, share calendar, send emails, and create websites all through this one site.

An instructor reports, from the benefit of hindsight, on the mistakes he made when assigning students a multimedia project (podcasting, in this case). Commenters offer their own insights on pedagogically sound multimedia assignments.