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Beyond Bullet Points, or maybe not
I’ve been thinking about PowerPoint lately, and about how I might use it productively. It seems pretty clear that the blizzard-of-bullet-points method is not useful. Who can make sense of such tiny print so quickly? What’s the point of slapping bullet points on a screen? One popular alternative method is the one Cliff Atkinson advocates…
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Can Blackboard patent online learning?
A lot of schools use a “learning management system” called Blackboard to make course materials and registration functions available online. If you’ve ever used Blackboard, though, you know that it’s like a magic portal back to 1999. Blackboard’s design is truly hideous (frames everywhere!), the options for customizing course sites are dismal, and the interface…
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Getting meta in the classroom
I’ve been going through some old teaching evaluations and in between cringing (“I hate Miriam!”) and patting myself on the back (“I love Miriam!”) I was struck by one student’s comment. This was for a film theory section. I think generally the class was successful, but it a) was a theory class and b) took…
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Clips, class, and copyrights
A film class needs film. Duh. Close-analysis of film clips is an important part of teaching sections, and nobody wants to mess with scanning DVD chapters to find the right clip. So most TAs I know make clip reels — DVDs of clips — to show in class. I was interested to see that the…