December 22, 2024

EagleEye

A Newsletter for UMW Faculty and Staff

Stommel Comments on Cellphones in Classrooms, Teacher-Student Communication

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Jesse Stommel, Senior Lecturer of Digital Studies

Jesse Stommel, Senior Lecturer of Digital Studies

Jesse Stommel, Senior Lecturer in Digital Studies, commented in several national media outlets on students’ use of cellphones in classrooms. “It’s better to help students figure out how to manage distractions instead of trying to eliminate it,” said Stommel to NBC News. He believes that schools shouldn’t ban the devices from classrooms. “It’s better to harness it and help make it productive.”

Read more. 

“What I’m particularly opposed to are blanket device bans that fail to recognize that different humans learn in different ways at different times,” Stommel said in another interview with Yahoo news.

Read more. 

Stommel also spoke to Inside Higher Ed about email communication between students and teachers:

Stommel “warned against advocating broadly ‘for one specific way students should address teachers.’ The relationships between teachers and students are ‘idiosyncratic and influenced by the pedagogical approach of individual teachers, the institutions where they work and the specific courses they teach,’ he said. “And teachers from marginalized communities have different challenges than those with more privilege. There is no one and no easy solution.’ ”

Read more. 

Stommel and Burtis Featured on Connected Teaching and Learning Blog

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Executive Director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies Jesse Stommel and Digital Knowledge Center Director Martha Burtis’ recent EdSurge.com interview on Critical Digital Pedagogy was discussed on the Connected Teaching and Learning Blog. The author shared highlights from the interview, specifically focusing on their views on grading in the classroom. Read more. 

Stommel Discusses Grading and Assessment on Inside Higher Ed

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Jesse Stommel, executive director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies

Jesse Stommel, executive director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies

Jesse Stommel, executive director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies, was quoted in an article entitled “When Grading Less is More” on Inside Higher Ed. “There are a surprising number of faculty questioning grades in productive ways, and experimenting with alternative modes of assessment,” said Stommel, an early proponent of ungrading. “If, as teachers, we just ask students why, when and how they learn, what we can get back is way more valuable than any standardized assessment mechanism can reveal.” Ungrading “creates space for that kind of honest reflection and dialogue,” he said. Read more.

 

Stommel Comments on Using Discussion Boards in Inside Higher Ed

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Jesse Stommel, executive director of Teaching and Learning TechnologiesJesse Stommel

Jesse Stommel, executive director of Teaching and Learning Technologies

Jesse Stommel, executive director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies, was quoted in an Inside Higher Ed article that focused on whether discussions boards are valuable or overused in university courses. Stommel offers the following tips for using discussion boards: Build a community of care; Ask genuine, open-ended questions; Wait for answers; Let conversation wander; Model what it looks like to be wrong and to acknowledge when you’re wrong; Recognize that the right to speak isn’t distributed equally; Make listening visible.

Read more.

 

Stommel Talks About Student Performance

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Jesse Stommel, executive director of Teaching and Learning Technology, was quoted in Elon News about student performance: “My anecdotal experience over 17 years of teaching is that my students are getting better and better and smarter and smarter,” Stommel said. “They are working harder and harder and I honestly believe that my students are performing better.” To read the article, visit http://www.elonnewsnetwork.com/article/2018/01/6tq9eytfgtzuuk1

Stommel Quoted in Inside Higher Ed

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Jesse Stommel, executive director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies at UMW,  and founding director of the Hybrid Pedagogy journal, was quoted recently in Inside Higstommelher Ed. In the article, “Do Professors Need Automated Help Grading Online Comments?,” Stommel said that he found Blackboard’s proposal to evaluate student writing in this way to be alarming. “There is certainly space for technology to help us create dialogue in an online class, but using a technology to assess the success of a discussion, ultimately it reduces student engagement to a rote series of behaviors. ‘Write a comment of 60 words, citing two sources, responding to at least one of your classmates’ — those kinds of behaviors do not make a discussion successful. They’re arbitrary markers.”

 

 

Groom Keynotes Conference at University of Oklahoma

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Jim Groom, executive director of teaching and learning technologies, presented the keynote at the University of Oklahoma’s 2015 Academic Technology Expo discussing the vision undergirding the Domain of One’s Own initiative that originated at UMW. The presentation, “Domain of One’s Own: Digital Agency in the 21st Century,” explored the importance of providing students, faculty, and staff with an innovative, web-based platform for owning, managing and migrating the digital work they create over the course of their academic careers.

Wired Article Highlights DTLT’s Known Pilot

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WiredLogoAn article in yesterday’s Wired about the open source blogging application Known mentioned the pilot work being done in UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies. Known provides a space where students can manage and publish their posts for various social media sites through their own application, controlling the archival copy of their work. It rethinks the users relationship to ownership of their data across sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, SoundCloud, etc. Right now, Jim Groom’s Digital Storytelling course and Zach Whalen’s Introduction to Digital Studies are exploring this application.

One of the points made in the Wired article, that reinforces some of the possibilities of the Domain of One’s Own project, is that the campus can quickly and easily pilot new, cutting edge applications that are defining what many refer to as the Indie Web Movement.

Jim Groom Co-Authors Article in EDUCAUSE Review

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Jim Groom and Brian Lamb published the article  “Reclaiming Innovation” in the May/June edition of EDUCAUSE Review. The article examines the state of innovation in higher education in regards to information and education technologies. Additionally, the article featured a series of supplemental videos about various sites of innovation, including one focusing on UMW’s intiaitive Domain of One’s Own. You can read the article online here and watch the video below.