Teaching Tables, 2009-2011

Teaching Tables are all-campus workshops that focus on shared readings and discuss specific topics that are of relevance to the entire Emory community. They are usually held during lunchtime in the Jones Room of the Woodruff Library. In the past, they have included such topics as “Civil Discourse and Diversity in the Classroom” and “Who Are Our Students? Millennial Learners, Net Geners, and New Learning Styles in the Classroom.”

Teaching Tables usually involve a follow-up or series of follow up workshops. They are smaller “lunch and learns” that focus on continuing discussion from an earlier Teaching Table. CFDE staff gathers the concerns that faculty have expressed in the initial workshop through survey data and informal feedback, and creates sessions specifically geared to those concerns. For example, the “Millennial Learners” workshop resulted in a five part year long “Teaching Table” series that focuses on various philosophical and practical elements of teaching with technology in the twenty first century classroom.

Topics for Teaching Tables in AY 2010-11

Millennial Learner Series

This is a  series on the theory and practice of teaching with technology:

Podcasting and Pedagogy
September 22, 2010. 11:30-1:00pm; 215 ECIT, Woodruff Library
Facilitated by: Shannon O’Daniel
Co-sponsored with Emory’s Center for Interactive Teaching (ECIT)
RSVP at: ecit.emory.edu/schedule

Come learn how you can get started delivering educational content, class lectures, interviews, videos, and other materials that your students can access in the familiar iTunes environment. Join us for an overview of iTunes U at Emory and podcasting, including faculty examples, content creation, production and support and a discussion on how this technology can be applied to pedagogy.

Technology 101: Using New Technologies in Your Classroom
September 29, 2010. 11:30-1:00pm; 215 ECIT, Woodruff Library
Facilitated by: Wayne Morse & Chris Fearrington
Co-sponsored with Emory’s Center for Interactive Teaching (ECIT)
RSVP at: ecit.emory.edu/schedule

In this workshop we will discuss how to best use three new technologies in your classroom: Luna’s Insight, Google Docs, and the iPad. Luna’s Insight allows you to organize, categorize, edit and present images (a la PowerPoint) pulled from on the web. Google Docs and Google Groups can be used in tandem to create an online “place” for class content to be collaboratively developed, edited and shared with whomever you choose. And the iPad not only allows for a new type of portability, it may also begin to change the dynamics of learning through its endless applications. Each of these technologies open up opportunities for collaboration and learning in new and exciting ways.

Plagiarism and Safe Assign
Teaching Tables: Millennial Learner Series
November 30, 2010. 11:30-1:00pm. 215 ECIT, Woodruff Library
Facilitated by: Alan Cattier
Co-sponsored by the Emory Center for Interactive Teaching (ECIT)
RSVP at: ecit.emory.edu/schedule
Read a Summary of This Discussion Here

This hands-on workshop will focus on pedagogical issues concerning plagiarism in the classroom, including a hands on session with a Blackboard tool, Safe Assign. We will begin with a discussion of some of the major issues facing teachers today and move to strategies for creating assignments that both teach and prevent plagiarism.

Using Personal Response Systems (PRS) or “Clickers” in Your Classroom
Teaching Tables: Millennial Learners Series
February 16, 2011; 11:30-1:00pm; 217 ECIT, Woodruff Library
Facilitated by Tracy Morkin & Carolyn Clevenger
RSVP to: jdweems@emory.edu

As part of our Millennial Learner Series, the CFDE welcomes Professor Tracy Morkin, Senior Lecturer in Chemistry and Professor Carolyn Clevenger, Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing to discuss the possibilities when using various Personal Response Systems (“Clickers”) in your classroom. Professor Morkin will discuss different styles of clicker questions and ways teachers can connect clicker strategies to their own teaching philosophies. Professor Clevenger will discuss the benefits of personal response systems for both small and large classes with a focus on Turning Point software. This workshop is open to all faculty and graduate students.

Faculty Blog Presence: The Do’s and Don’ts of Academic Blogs
Millennial Learner Series
March 25, 2011. 11:30-1:00pm. 215 ECIT, Woodruff Library
Facilitated by: Wayne Morse, Stewart Varner, and Chris Fearrington
Read a Summary of This Discussion Here.

Blogs, or “web logs,” are online journals and can be personal, professional or somewhere in between.  Current web applications make creating a blog extremely simple; the difficult part is deciding what to write.  Are blogs appropriate for academic discourse?  Using a blog for academic purposes will be discussed in this session.  Topics will include:

•  Writing for an academic blog.
•  How to get your academic posts online.
•  Pathways to publishing your blog.
•  How to get others to visit your blog.
•  Protecting your intellectual property rights.
•  Successful practices of academic blogging.

Examples of academic blogs hosted by Emory and also residing outside of the University will be highlighted.

Thinking and Teaching in a Digital World: A Panel Discussion
Teaching Tables: Millennial Learner Series
April 7, 2011. 11:30-1:00pm. Few Hall Multipurpose Room G27
Rsvp to: jdweems@emory.edu

How do we encourage our students to think critically about media and the technologies they utilize every day?As we use technology more in the classroom is it our responsibility to also teach digital citizenship to our students? How does technology impact our research and scholarship?

The CFDE welcomes Miriam Posner and Stewart Varner (DiSC- Digital Humanities), Debra Vidali (Critical Media Literacy Group), Alan Cattier (digital citizenship/digital ethics) and Wayne Morse (millennial and next gen learners) to discuss how their groups and/or centers approach these questions. Along with their theoretical stances on thinking and teaching in a digital world, panelists will provide concrete examples of projects at Emory.

Lunch will be provided.

Civil Discourse at the University

In this series of Teaching Tables, we are following up on a workshop we sponsored two years ago, based on case studies developed here at Emory. We learned from our first workshop that civil discourse challenges are different in different arenas of intellectual inquiry. Based on this insight, we  designed our Teaching Tables accordingly. For the 2009-2010 academic year, our Civil Discourse workshops were based on three general fields of inquiry: health sciences, humanities, and law. For the 2010-2011 academic year we will focus on three remaining fields of inquiry: social science, basic science, and business.

In each of these arenas we  invite two or three professors to have a conversation about civil discourse in their fields, and a respondent from outside their field but familiar with its basic commitments and intellectual contours.

In other arenas, “civil discourse” might be called “courageous conversations” or “difficult dialogues” and these discussions may connect in some ways to conflict resolution and questions of hate speech, free speech, and academic freedom.

What we hope to accomplish with these workshops is to stimulate new ways of thinking about talking across difference. How do we “agree to disagree” about “hot-button” issues in our respective fields? Can we learn to co-exist in classrooms, labs, and offices with different opinions and avoid destructive coping mechanisms that undermine intellectual community?

Civil Discourse in the Social Sciences
Details TBA

Civil Discourse in the Basic Sciences
Details TBA

Civil Discourse in the Business School
Details TBA