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Revisiting Twitter as an Educational Tool

A peek at TEP's Twitter feed

A peek at TEP’s Twitter feed

Twitter, the popular microblogging site that allows users to post 140-character “tweets,” both intrigues and irritates faculty, according to a Faculty Focus survey. Some embrace it as a clever way to teach concision and get students writing, thinking, and connecting with the course material and one another. Others consider it distracting and antithetical to sophisticated communication.

The Teaching Effectiveness Program Tweets daily, and has just added a Twitter feed to its Web page: we want to make visible a campus-wide and national network of people talking about teaching and learning issues. As we explore Twitter’s promise and limits, we’re investigating how the UO community experiments with and expands the possibilities of the medium. For example, Jessyca Lewis, who teaches marketing in the Lundquist College of Business, says that Twitter “has been the most fantastic teaching tool I have ever used. It makes the classroom and learning experience incredibly interactive.” Continue reading Revisiting Twitter as an Educational Tool

‘Yes, And…’: UO’s Freshman Interest Groups Break Boundaries, Forge Connections

One of UO’s undergraduate FIG assistants remembers the first day of his own College Connections course: “The professor began the class asking us ‘Why are you here?’” The student, now a mentor to this year’s freshmen, was surprised—indeed, why hadn’t he taken a year off? What did he want? Was he just taking the expected [...]

A Shape in the Stone, an Art to the Science

Through the long lenses of digital SLR cameras, Dr. Marli Miller’s students train their eyes on the lines and colors of the natural world. Her “Geophotography” seminar, first taught in conjunction with the Geology of National Parks in Fall 2012, allows students an imaginative and aesthetic entry to the scientific study of the earth. “It’s [...]

International Classroom Follow-up

In February, TEP, the American English Institute and the College of Arts and Sciences hosted a workshop on the teaching implications of the rise in UO’s international student numbers: this year the institution welcomed 2,524 students from around the world—the eighth year in a row record-setting numbers. At that event, participants voiced recommendations both for individual [...]