Hybrid Pedagogy – My “Go To” Blog for Thinking through On-Ground & On-Line Courses

So which blogs do you read regularly for your own thinking about teaching and learning?

I suspect my colleague expected my follow up email would include a quick listing pointing her to several blogs.  Her expectation makes sense as scanning several blogs and reading a good number of posts each week related to teaching and learning in higher education across the world is certainly an integral part of an ordinary work week for me.  In response to that September query, I sent an email with two links:

The first to a UK university resources page (Oxford Brookes University Centre for Staff & Learning Development, more on that in November). And the second to Hybrid Pedagogy: A Digital Journal of Learning, Teaching and Technology, the focus of this short post via an “About Them” overview and a brief glimpse of the site’s focus via re-caps of recent posts in a “Three Good Reasons for Reading” section.

With today’s blog post, we will also launch the CTL blogroll, which you’ll begin to see this week at the bottom of our blog page.

Hybrid Pedagogy – About Them

Hybrid Pedagogy: A Digital Journal of Learning, Teaching and Technology is on one hand an open-access scholarly journal inviting writers to enter into collaborative peer review with the editorial collective as the practice for developing articles, and inviting all participating readers to enter into post-publication peer review to extend conversations across countries, disciplines, and professional boundaries.  On another hand, this is a resource that invites deep reading and reflection by regularly offering praxis-oriented writing and thinking in several areas:

• connecting discussions of critical, digital  & online pedagogies
• linking higher education & K-12 teachers, as well as e-learning & open education communities;
• querying personal and professional hybridity;
• upending student, teacher, and learner distinctions; and
• exploring pedagogy and scholarship – each in relation to the other.

Readers can easily follow Hybrid Pedagogy via the Home page RSS feed and/or via Twitter.

3 Good Reasons for Reading Hybrid Pedagogy

In the posts I highlight here, I was invited to think in brand new ways about student writing assignments, online discussion forums, and multicultural learning and teaching – considerations I engage daily as teacher and learner.  Being invited to think about teaching is a good thing.  Walking away from that reading with insights that help me navigate class tomorrow, plan for classes to come, and feel renewed in my work – these really are the three reasons I “go to” Hybrid Pedagogy each week.

Here’s a glimpse of three posts that I’ve recently recommended to colleagues – the words drawn directly from the online posts:

Seeing Composition Three Dimensionally, by Lori Beth DeHertogh, rouses us to think significantly about dimensions of students’ writing: the purpose, task, audience dimensions along with those related to where and how and in what ways student writing can be published, but also about crafting three-dimensional compositions – think children’s museum exhibition spaces:

While I agree with…assertions about the role of visual rhetoric in writing classrooms, I would take this one step further by arguing that our classrooms must also become spaces where we ask students to tap into the multidimensional aspects of visual communication. What I mean by this is that while encouraging students to use two-dimensional images, videos, graphic art, etc. is useful, we must also invite them to think about how they can use the three-dimensional aspects of physical objects and persons to craft rhetorically sound arguments.  […]

The Discussion Forum is Dead; Long Live the Discussion Forum, by Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel, reminds us that forums within learning management systems such as Moodle are – like bricks and mortar classroom spaces – physically and pedagogically shaped ahead of our arrival.  Like the classroom spaces, LMS spaces can – and need be – reshaped by our pedagogical practices, course designs, and student learning goals.  This post helps me reconsider ways of working with my students to hack – or mashup or walk away from, if you prefer – the school offered discussion forums:

Discussion forums are the sort of ed tech you hope creative teachers will hack mercilessly, creating in their place a means through which students and teachers can interact in substantive, relevant ways. The forum itself does not automatically promote meaningful  conversation — or conversation at all, unless conversation can be reduced to monotone interjections by its participants — but that does not mean good things can’t happen there. In truth, discussion forums have the same potential all digital pedagogy tools have. In the right hands, wonders occur.

A Pedagogy for Cross-cultural Digital Learning Environments, by Bernardo Trejos, addresses many questions I’ve been mulling about ways to support – provoke, guide, learn from – students in engaging cross-cultural domestic and international conversations related to the complex and sometimes wicked problems they address in courses we offer and learning they undertake.  Trejos had me thinking deeply from the first paragraph with his invocation of global-level pedagogies.  And my thinking only deepened across the specifics this article calls into consideration:

Whether you make Hybrid Pedagogy a weekly regular read or simply check in on its home page listing of Recent Articles, you’ll be a happy reader and thinker.

Upcoming TILT Posts

Guest authors for October and November will continue the teaching and learning with technology focus.  

Joe Moses, from Writing Studies, will post on October 28th about personal learning networks, their integration into course curricula, and ways of taking an intentional approach to evaluating and growing one’s own PLN.

Alison Link, from CCE/Extension, will be writing on November 4th about descriptive language and self-naming strategies that support constructive, respectful conversation among higher ed instructors, technology support personnel, students and staff.  

And we’ll round out our initial blogroll listing on 11 and 18 November to note the four other sites that join Hybrid Pedagogy as our top five sites.

Tags: course design, teaching resources