Favorites?
While everyone agreed that there were excellent sessions held each day of the conference, we all had our personal favorites. Some chose a favorite based on the interesting content presented, and others chose a favorite based on its pedagogical implications. To view a schedule for the conference, we invite you to visit the ECCTYC website.
posted by Emalsam | 9:05 AM
2 Comments:
I was inspired by the panel called "Research: Collaborative, Engaging, and Significant." Georgia Pierce Williams from CSU Fresno has developed a really interesting group research project. She has her students pick a research topic related to auto-ethnographies that they write early in the semester, and then she puts them into research groups according to their area of research. As a group they develop their own research plan and assessment criteria so that all group members feel assured that the work they do will be recognized; she shared these with us and they were very interesting.
Listening to her and the others talk, I wrote down a bunch of ideas for my own research project. The ideas I had were different from but inspired by what they had to say. That is what I like about going to conferences…I like getting into the zone where teaching and academic ideas are circulating. While in my routine, I am so focused on maintaining organization and deadlines, that creativity can be elusive. Attending a conference like this one stirs up the regiment in my mind.
I particularly enjoyed the session in which I was, unfortunately, one of the only attendees. The first presentation was interesting because the presented scholarship included information on how the presenter had applied for and received an NEH grant, something that I would be interested in applying for at a later date. The second presentation was where it really started to get interesting...the gentleman presenting used a program called NICENET, which I was previously unaware of, that helped to connect two classrooms, one in southern California and the other in Cairo, Egypt. The prospect of connecting two cultures, two perspectives, and two classrooms (across an ocean, nonetheless) is really exciting. For my purposes, it would be interesting to host a NICENET website and invite participation from outside sources: classrooms in outside disciplines, community members from various career paths, or I could target a specific group of people, for instance, while reading Haroun, I could search out scholars on MidEast politics, religions, philosophy, etc. Technology is an area that I often find myself gravitating; therefore, it was no surprise that this presentation ended up being my favorite.
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