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I’m currently listening to E. F. Schumacher’s book Small is Beautiful: A study of Economics as if People Mattered. It’s a collection of essays published in 1973. In it, he talks a lot about how investing in smaller, perhaps even less modern technologies and policies can be better in many communities because they require less … Continue reading
Failing forward has become a more common term in business settings. It is used to convey a situation where failure is seen as a learning opportunity that helps achieve success. As an educator, I’ve advocated for something similar for a number of years. I believe that failing or falling is part of learning. Unfortunately, at … Continue reading
Collaborative note taking is an activity where students share the load of creating notes from a class or resource. They work in groups to identify key material, examples, etc and record these in a shared document. I’ve mainly seen this activity in relation to accessibility and inclusion. For some reason, a student may not be … Continue reading
QR codes are a type of barcode that can be read using a smartphone to, typically, open up a website where they can access more information through websites, photos, videos, etc or activities on different sites such as interactive quizzes or collaborative documents. They’ve become more popular in the last few years for a couple … Continue reading
I’m a fan of open education resources (OER), which are “teaching, learning, and research resources that, through permissions granted by the copyright holder, allow others to use, distribute, keep, or make changes to them” (Aesoph, 2022). In fact, after becoming frustrated that I couldn’t find an appropriate OER for my introduction to sustainability course and … Continue reading
I remember playing a game about animal adaptations and survival rates in a bio lab in my first year of university. I remember the general gist of the game and what we learned from it. It’s the only lab I remember from four years of science courses. This was a form of active learning, but … Continue reading
I distinctly remember sitting in a lecture hall listening to the professor talk. I firmly believed that I was learning. I even got home, and something from that class came up on TV, and I said, “I learned what that is today.” But, when someone asked me to explain it, I couldn’t. This is one … Continue reading
I was reminded this week of having students set up “cheat sheets” to support them during exams. Instructors will call these tools many different things, but the gist is that it is a document of a set size that students can prep in advance and are allowed to bring into an exam scenario. My favourite … Continue reading
We know that exercise is good for us. It improves our cardiovascular health and strength. It can also help to prevent injuries. But the idea that exercise can improve our brain functions is a newer idea. Research is slowly showing potential links between exercise and cognitive functioning, but of course there are other factors at … Continue reading
I’m fascinated by the recent explosion in discussion about AI text generation in education. In November 2022, OpenAI launched a tool called ChatGPT. You can enter prompts into the tool and the tech returns a response written in, what is considered by academia, proper English grammar. There are now flurries of debate about banning the … Continue reading
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