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Engaging Teaching
Once in a while, the world is kind enough to give us worthy sequels like The Dark Knight, The Empire Strikes Back, and Hamlet 2. Today is another one of those days. We are proud to debut a second edition to Speakers Corner! You may have seen the original, by George Fogarasi, released back in 2016. Well, the sequel is coming to you from Amanda Mushynski of the PharmTech program and she is going to take you on an adventure into the world of Open Learning Communities through blogging. We’ve already read and enjoyed the article immensely ourselves, so we’re going to go watch Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, but go ahead and check it out to see if the exciting things PharmTech are doing could work for you (and even see some of the great work the students are doing). Check out Here Comes the BLOG!
Learning Technology
Course Title: The Twitter-Blog Learning Community Combo Package
Course Hours: 0.02 Pre-requisite: The ‘Here Comes The BLOG‘ article on Open Learning Communities Amanda Mushynski wrote that we just told you about in the previous section.
Learning Outcomes: Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:
- Consider using some of the ideas that Amanda has used to build learning community.
Learning Resources: To be honest, this fake course outline is the learning resource itself.
Assessment Summary: Learning Community Development Plan (100%). Please email it to alana.callan@flemingcollege.ca for feedback within the hour (no less than 50 pages)
Learning Plan: So just like, read the article and think about it and let it take you down any road you wish. You can contact Amanda or us if you’d like to try something and need some help!
Course Fee: $5 cash money discreetly slipped under the door of C1203.8
College Departments
In this week’s department of the week contest, we actually figured out how to send people into The Grid to have one of those Light-Cycle battles like in Tron. To date, Academic Operations is the only department to have made it back out. We’re sure the others are okay…
While we wait and hope for the others to return from their digital nightmares, Academic Operations wanted us to give you a Pop Quiz! Here we go!
What do these 3 important events have in common?
- 1901 – Walt Disney was born
- 1933 – United States ends Prohibition with the ratification of the 21st Amendment
- 2016 – Winter course outlines are due at Fleming College
Ding ding ding! These things all happen on December 5th! That’s right folks, your course outlines for the winter semester are due on December 5th. If you have questions about your course outlines, check out the How-to Guides and the FAQ from Academic Operations. Also, please if you know how to do a Human Grid Extraction, let us know.
Policies & Procedures
Despite putting the clocks back an hour a couple of weeks ago, we still seem to be slowly marching towards the end of the semester. Students may start looking for information on the Academic Appeal process. Of course, not your students, because you’ve promoted open dialogue throughout the semester, and you’ve stuck to your course outline!
But for those students who are still looking for the information, you can easily provide it by directing them to the Academic Appeals Policy & Procedure website. There, they will find the grounds required to launch an appeal, the forms they will need to do so, FAQs, a timeline, and as you can see in the picture over there to the right, a handy visual about how it all goes down. If you somehow can’t read the picture of the handy visual to your right, click here to see it embiggened.
Services for Students
Fleming Aboriginal Student Services
Fleming College provides a unique and supportive environment for Aboriginal learners. Through many years of collaboration with Aboriginal communities and our team of experts in Aboriginal education, Fleming College provides strong support for Aboriginal students, right from orientation through to graduation.
Please visit their website for more information.
Professional Development
Who doesn’t like a good map, resource or visual guide for learning?? Anyone… Anyone??
@FlemingLDS Just so you know, I do NOT like maps, resources or visual guides for learning.
— Lonnie Lonnerson (@Pancakes_Lonnie) November 18, 2016
Oh, of course. Lonnie doesn’t. Well, if you DO like these things, read on!
In the spirit of DIY and Personalized Professional Learning, we wanted to showcase a couple of highly visually designed options for learning about AND developing your digital literacy skills. First, you may be wondering what digital literacy skills are. If so, here is a nice definition to set you up for success in your exploration:
Digital literacy is the ability to find, evaluate, utilize, share, and create content using information technologies and the Internet.
https://digitalliteracy.cornell.edu/
AllAboard.org is a resource that is currently being developed for Higher Education in Ireland, check it out (The resource is setup like a subway system map, the headings are subway stations and the options are subway lines). It also has an interesting resource outlining digital skills for faculty, staff and students that you may want to have a look at.
The other resource we’d like to share is Mozilla’s Web Literacy (from the US), another interactive visual tool that helps you dive into and learn more about digital literacy.
Their site also includes activities, tools and even more options:
If you are curious to see what is happening on this topic in Canada, you might want to check out: This Digital Literacy Framework.
Chatter
Last week, we spilled the beans on our Open Faculty Development Textbook Project. Thank you for your responses to our survey so far! Here’s an initial response to some of the comments: we do want to pursue faculty workloading for this. We do NOT want the work to be daunting. We’re planning to do as much of the set up work as we can so that all we need from you (if you take on a ‘chapter’) is your take and your example about a specific pedagogical skill. We’re kind of envisioning 3-4 page chapters and the book itself being quite short. A novella-text! Also we want to have it ready for the beginning of next academic year so it is not a rush job. If you have a couple minutes to share your thoughts, please do! https://goo.gl/forms/ldMp502ze51JxJlr1
More Information
Looking for more information? Visit the LDS Team website, give us a call at extension 1216, follow us on Twitter @FlemingLDS or send us an email: LDSTeam@flemingcollege.ca!