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‘Social Pedagogies’

The Flipped Classroom, a Conversation on Digital Pedagogy, April 7th

Apr. 1, 2015—by Derek Bruff, CFT Director On March 19th, the CFT and the Vanderbilt Institute for Digital Learning (VIDL) hosted the first in a series of Conversations on Digital Pedagogy. These conversations are meant to provide members of the Vanderbilt teaching community opportunities to learn from each other as they explore creative and effective uses of...

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Medicine and Magic: Students as Producers in the Humanities

Apr. 16, 2014—by Derek Bruff, CFT Director The post below is about a fantastic “Students as Producers” course taught by Vanderbilt’s Holly Tucker. For more ideas on engaging students as producers of knowledge, come to the CFT’s Celebration of Learning next Monday. The event will feature a highly engaging keynote by Georgetown University’s Randy Bass, as well...

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Social Pedagogies: Language Teaching with Google Earth and Wikis

May. 16, 2013—by Andrew Greer, 2013 Teaching Certificate Recipient and 2012-13 SoTL Scholar Many of us have memories of foreign language classes with seemingly never-ending repetitions of semi-useful phrases. I remember learning German for years, only to be surprised by my lack of fluency when I traveled to Austria. The repetition of banal phrases in my German...

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SoTL Spotlight: Public Performances of Learning

Mar. 29, 2013—by Nancy Chick, CFT Assistant Director Nancy is the author of a variety of scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) articles and book chapters, as well as co-editor of two books on signature pedagogies and co-editor of Teaching & Learning Inquiry, the official journal of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL). “SoTL Spotlight”...

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Professors tweak their pedagogical style with blogs

Dec. 6, 2012—Vanderbilt faculty are increasing incorporating online wiring in their teaching. A recent article by Joan Brasher highlights the work of Assistant Professor of English Humberto Garcia and his course blog The Romantic Period: Romanticism and Apocalypse and Allison Schachter, Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and English and her course blog Literature, Photography and Memory.  ...

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Leveraging Student Interests through Social Bookmarking

Aug. 29, 2012—by Derek Bruff, CFT Director I have a new guest post over on the CIRTL Network website describing my use of social bookmarking tools like Delicious and Diigo in my math courses. The post is titled “Leveraging Student Interests through Social Bookmarking.” Here’s an excerpt: As with the cryptography course, social bookmarking contributed to the...

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Are poster sessions or blogs part of your course? If so, we’d like to hear from you!

Apr. 2, 2012—The Center for Teaching is interested in hearing from Vanderbilt faculty and staff who are: – Using end-of-course poster sessions in which students share the results of their individual or team projects. For instance, senior lecturer Steve Baskauf uses a poster session as an opportunity for his introductory biology laboratory students to share the results of experiments they...

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Social Pedagogies: An opportunity for authentic learning?

Feb. 18, 2012—This is a post written by Graduate Teaching Fellow, Megan McMurtry. One way to motivate student engagement with course material is to make use of social pedagogies.  Social Pedagogies are “design approaches for teaching and learning that engage students with what we might call and ‘authentic audience’ (other than the teacher), where the representation of...

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VMAT an example of Classroom-learned skills solving real-world problems

Dec. 8, 2011—This week the Vanderbilt Mobile Application Team (VMAT) was profiled in Campus Technology. VMAT develops iPhone- and Android-compatible apps for the Vanderbilt campus, teaches dozens of students how to program mobile apps – which has become a lucrative business for many, including current and former members who have landed jobs across the country. Of note, is Chris...

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Motivating Students through Authentic Audiences

Nov. 7, 2011—CFT Acting Director Derek Bruff authored an essay titled “A Social Network Can be a Learning Network” that appears in this week’s special issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education on online learning. In the essay, Derek uses the notion of social pedagogies to frame three educational technologies (social bookmarking, backchannels, and collaborative documents) that...

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