Resources

A useful 2016 teaching piece for students of faith adjusting to academic religious studies. In this blog post, Tabor addresses the objection, often raised by students or religious laypeople, that (biblical) historians "exclude the miraculous" in their investigations. Not "suppressing" claims of the supernatural (e.g., miracles), historians welcome all such claims as contributing to our understanding of times and events, but refrain from adjudicating such claims beyond what is accessible to historical means.

In this excerpt from Kugel's controversial "How to Read the Bible," the author argues—with rich citation and documentation—that academic biblical studies is rife with an "unmistakably apologetic tone" of which even its most self-avowedly "critical" practitioners are largely unaware. The implication is that academic biblical studies, practiced as it is overwhelmingly by people of faith, does not achieve the honesty about the texts' "strangeness" characteristic of other corpus-oriented disciplines. (2014)

In an attempt to build a better "intensive course," Torma "does the math" on credit hours, student-directed learning, and instructor-directed learning. This piece provides a helpful framework for anyone working through "seat hour" issues regarding fully online courses, blended/hybrid courses, face-to-face "intensives," or other game-changing learning contexts.

This piece describes the peculiar origins of the "credit hour" and argues against its relevance as a measure of learning. In an outcome-based approach to curriculum design, "where and how" learners spend their time is less important than what they can learn and do.

Based on "preliminary findings of an ongoing study at Boise State University," the author reports that faculty work 61 hours/week, increasingly at administrative tasks, and "largely alone." Only a vanishingly small percentage of time is spent on research and writing. The article is especially relevant in contrast with periodic pieces purporting to show that instructors in higher ed are protected from economic realities and underworked.

Nel examines the factors contributing to overwork on the part of faculty members in higher education: habit, economics, a culture of busy-ness, the blurred line between work and "fun," technological connectedness, etc.

In this Chronicle of Higher Education (ProfHacker) piece, the author describes the discoveries arising from "Center for Teaching Excellence" workshop: specifically, regarding active learning (even with lectures), possibilities for in-class use of social media, Twitter as a means of extending collaborative learning beyond session hours, and issues of vocational training and assessment.

Downes links to, and comments on, two articles, each offering tips on choosing among educational technologies. One list is focused on desirable outcomes (e.g., that the technology is scalable, or promotes lifelong learning, etc). The other list (his own) focuses on the properties that lead to such outcomes (e.g., good technology is always on, or doesn't require parts, etc).

Frost and Stommel capture a 14-minute YouTubevideo of a collaborative writing session on Google Docs (now Google Drive). In the accompanying blog post, they offer suggestions for assigning collaborative writing to students, along with persuasive arguments about the pedagogical goods of collaborative writing.

This graphic, with relevant links to Wikipedia, attempts to briefly describe all the established learning theories. It also maps the theories graphically 1) to one another, 2) to their key concepts and "world views," 3) to the learning theorists that developed them, and 4) to the scientific disciplines from which they arise.