Blogs

Check out the latest schedule updates, read presentations and more via our new online conference guide at https://guidebook.com/g/BlendLAC2015/

If you haven't registered, it's not too late! Click here for details.

See you at the event!

In a recent article in the Bryn Mawr Campus Bulletin, Professor Shiamin Kwa talks, among other things, about the role that digital technologies play in her East Asian Languages and Cultures course, Everything But the Table: Food and Culture in East Asian Literature and Film. Kwa received funding and staff support for this course through Bryn Mawr's Mellon-funded "Developin a Liberal Arts Curriculum for the Digital Age" and the Tri-Co Mellon Creative Residencies Program. The digital assignments and collaboration embedded into this course, are by no means the only aspects of this course that students find exciting and engaging, but Kwa discusses the role they play in helping students to reflect on their objects of study in different ways. A quote from Kwa in the article sums this up: "'Making is a way of thinking,' she explains, 'and a generative one.' Read the article ...

On Wednesday, April 1st, artist Shing Yin Khor along with Professor Shiamin Kwa  hosted a Zine Workshop in the new Carpenter Media Lab in conjunction with the East Asian Language and Culture course: Everything But the Table (EALC 345). The Carpenter Media Lab was a great new space for digital collaboration as the students quickly got to work making their own zines within one hour with art supplies scattering the tables. 

Though much of Khor's work is printed or sculpted, the internet has become a gamechanger for artists like Khor. Through fundraising platforms like Patreon, artists of all kinds can create sponsorships where their fans can give monetary support in order to receive exclusive blog posts and updates as well as gifts and subscriptions. Furthermore, publishing platforms such as Issuu have made it easier to share zines and publications digitally.

Registration is now open for the fourth annual Blended Learning in the Liberal Arts Conference, May 20-21, 2015 at Bryn Mawr College!

This year's conference has grown to include 13 sessions of 2-4 presentations each, and two workshops. Sessions with a pedagogical focus include blending foreign language and STEM courses, designing blended approaches to teaching critical thinking, reading, writing, or computational skills across disciplines, and ideas for digital project-based learning in the humanities and social sciences. If you're just getting started, the Blended Learning: It's All About the Face Time workshop offers hands-on experience with developing a blended course. For those grappling with developing institutional support for blended learning, there are sessions on research and assessment, internal support models, and cross-institutional collaborations, including a hands-on workshop, Working Together: Community and Cross-Campus Collaborations through Blended Learning.

See our conference website for a schedule and registration, travel and accomodation information.

The harbor shifted solid in darkness cracking, it
Came ashore with no life in it, serrated white forms lacking time.

Evenings heaving colder, our illusions tested, stuck
Inside woodframe cages with no air.

Five men, the paper said, decided not to live, all
Just as old as I knew, then two more.

The woman who pulled through before could not survive
The space between metal and pavement twice.

And the channel was not clear but the helicopter flew and
Hurling snow to clear my mind kept the ice at bay.

She had a stroke and I followed it on Facebook.
She fell in the Métro on New Years Eve and I felt bad when
she was in a coma in France but then she got better
almost completely in just weeks. I never commented. 

I had a dream in the middle of it all that I saw her and 
I was happy she was better and we hugged and it
was warm in my dream. 

But in February at the soup party she
didn’t recognize me. 

I couldn’t ask her if it was
because of my hat or her stroke.

CFP: 2015 Blended Learning in the Liberal Arts Conference

The fourth annual Blended Learning in the Liberal Arts conference is scheduled for Wednesday, May 20-Thursday May 21, 2015, and will be held at Bryn Mawr College. These conferences are intended as a forum for faculty and staff to share resources, techniques, findings, and experiences related to blended learning. Our definition of blended learning is quite broad, encompassing any combination of online and face-to-face instruction with a focus on supporting the close faculty-student interaction and emphasis on lifelong learning that is a hallmark of American liberal arts education.

We are currently seeking proposals for individual presentations, sessions, and workshops. We welcome proposals from any academic discipline, but faculty in the humanities and those who have used blended learning for open-ended and/or authentic assessment are particularly encouraged to apply.

For more information about the conference, the CFP, and to view materials from past conferences, please see our website at http://blendedlearning.blogs.brynmawr.edu/conferences/.

The deadline for proposals is February 15, 2015. Conference registration will open on March 1.

As an added incentive, we are pleased to announce that support from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation will allow us to waive conference registration fees and provide some travel support for invited speakers.

Lisa Cook explains why "you should watch this project" as part of Higher Ed Impact's "Spotlight on Innovation series. Read more ...

Blending a course can be daunting. Jennifer Spohrer has collected advice about how to get started that faculty have shared at the annual Blended Learning in the Liberal Arts conferences that Bryn Mawr hosts in this guest post on the Next Generation Learning Challenges blog. 

This question was a hot topic at last year's Blended Learning Conference, which featured several faculty presentations about their experiments and experiences with blended learning. In particular, faculty debated the importance of using videos that they created themselves and/or in which they were visible speaking.

In a recent article in the Educause Review, Melanie Hibbert, a media producer at Columbia University's School for Continuing Education and a doctoral candidate at Columbia's Teachers College shares findings from a internal study that the former conducted in order to answer this question. This study combined media analytics -- analysis of the viewing data collected by the school's video-hosting platform -- and follow-up interviews with 10 students. Although the courses analyzed were online, and the students were master's level students, their findings correlate with some of the feedback we've received from undergraduate students in blended liberal arts college courses and from our own internal analysis of viewing data at Bryn Mawr College.