Exemplary Video-Based Argument

Last week, I posted about some of the multimedia assessment guidelines we’re developing in the Graduate Multimedia Fellows Seminar. This week, I’d like to try to apply those guidelines to a professional video clearly intended to communicate an academic-style argument. Mike Rugnetta of PBS’s Idea Channel posts new videos once a week investigating “connections between pop…

Evaluating Multimedia Assignments

We’re asking a number of important questions in the Graduate Multimedia Fellows Seminar: What is multimedia? Why assign multimedia rather than a traditional paper? What kinds of assignments are worth giving in which disciplinary contexts to develop what kinds of knowledge and skills? But more important than any of these questions is the one that…

Teaching with Research Guides

You’ve probably encountered a library research guide before—perhaps you’ve taken a course that had its own LibGuide, or consulted your department’s guide for graduate study—but have you thought about using a research guide as teaching material? Library guides are not just lists of amazing resources, though they are that, too. They’re also glimpses into particular…

Learning by Doing: Podcasts

In the Graduate Multimedia Fellows seminar, co-sponsored by the Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching and the Bok Center, we’re generating best practices for designing, implementing, and evaluating multimedia assignments. Every week, we read scholarship, examine exemplary student and professional multimedia work, and discuss what kinds of assignments (multimedia and traditional) work best in various…

Transformative Teachnological Teaching Tools!

In The Evolution of the Lecture I posed the question, “could we live without lectures?” and while far from the first to do so, I suggested that lectures need to evolve in our modern world. Clearly technology can enhance education, but how should it be incorporated? And, what tools are out there? Technological teaching tools…

Paper Structure Exercise

The following exercise is a sample from ABLConnect, an online active learning resource database recently established by Assistant Professor Dustin Tingley and Ph.D. student Leslie Finger. ABLConnect seeks to create an accessible, searchable repository of active learning activities that Harvard instructors can contribute to and draw from.  *** Paper Structure Exercise In the revision stage of paper writing, Jerusha Achterberg…