We began Friday’s session by noting that D-WRD has had regular attendance at every single session since we began four years ago, in AQ 2009. I think that not every professional development unit and initiative on campus can claim that. I think it’s great and am always so grateful for the opportunity to participate in such a teaching community and for the collegiality and collaborative problem solving.
We spent some time on Friday reflecting on the notion of “professional development” and how our version of it — which looks to mutual support and collective expertise rather than only to institutional imperatives — values the personal, pedagogical, and professional aspirations of our participants.
We briefly reviewed a couple of our initial 2009 readings that continue to inform the D-WRD ethos — sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly:
- Feenberg’s Transforming/Critical Theory of Technology
- Selber’s Post-critical Framework
- Normal Research Collective (from the journal Social Epistemology): “Postmodern Pedagogies and the Death of Civic Humanism”
We then reviewed some job listings via the Chronicle of Higher Education — http://tinyurl.com/mhkpjk5 — looking for references to “multimodal” and “portfolios.” This resulted in interesting reading — and generated a great conversation — but it turns out that you receive many more results if you try that during the fall hiring season.
Finally, we brainstormed some productive sessions for 2013-14:
- Kristen Rozzell suggested a session on teaching online courses, for which we have some great materials and methods available, both locally and disciplinarily
- Nancy LaFever suggested a session on using tags in Digication and the metadata structure behind them
- Eileen Seifert suggested a session dedicated to another Student Writing Portfolio Roundtable
- Pete Vandenberg suggested a session on the relationship between multimodality and our x-sections, so that we can explore the relationships between multimodality and multilingual contexts
- Blair Banwart and I have been talking for a while about sessions on iMovie — both for low-tech slideshows and for editing video.
There is plenty of room for more suggestions and requests for next year. If you have any, please send them to me!
Finally, if you encounter any trouble with your FYW Digital Portfolios next week or during finals — assigning, collecting, reading, assessing — please let Michael Moore know right away.