• I apologize for being so late with this unit.  As an adjunct at 4 different schools, all my different spring breaks messed me up a bit, including my daughter’s, in which she pretty much preoccupied all my time.  

Socratic Method – This is the philosophy I center my pedagogy around the most.  I love the socratic dialogue/dialectal and constructivism approaches to learning as opposed to the fill your brain up and regurgitate or lecture based methods.  However, translating a socratic method to online courses is a tricky one.  What I really like about Tony Burman’s video is that diagram of using cms/online tools to facilitate collaborative learning.  I like the idea of individual exploration wikis/blogs, mini lectures of patterns in responses, collaboration through discussion boards and google docs, and how that diagram can be shifted around and work cyclically and not linearly.  In my class, I use individual assignments and then into discussion boards and sometimes google docs in bigger collaborative assignments, but I have yet to use wikis, blogs, or listservs as Warnock suggests. 

*** In my critical thinking class, I like to start with the socratic dialogue as a means of a critical thinking strategy.  I use the classic Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, A conversation between Waldo and Carmen San Diego on the concept of love, and a socratic dialogue on fait, which also play into a research paper on ontology and self-awareness.  They create their own socratic dialogues and also role play characters to generate different perspectives and “lenses” as a scaffolding exercise. 

Warnock Text: Some things I definitely want to incorporate and build in both my online and f2f courses is service learning and group projects with a service learning component. I’ve also always wanted to turn my entire course into a video game as I have already mentioned in other blog posts, but this is a lofty goal that may take a long time and resources I don’t have to accomplish. As far as syllabus design goes (Chapter 5), I’m actually pretty confident in my syllabus and reading this chapter gives me some validation and peace of mind that my syllabus addresses most of what Warnock recommends.  Some things that I definitely want to incorporate better is messaging rules. My organization, the way I name files and the rules I have my students name files is a bit messy still and can use better organization. One thing that I’m not present enough about is the section on technology, especially regarding how slow/fast they upload large files, or even accessibility to large files using old outdated technology.  I assume that students have the most updated technology or can use the school’s computers, so I don’t really take into account students who use old slow computers or do not have the current software like microsoft office or pdf readers.  Along this tangent of the time it takes like connection time/lag, I also want to incorporate time expectations for all my assignments to help them better manage their time.