Artigo Acesso aberto

Editor's Note

2015; Wiley; Volume: 24; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/ntlf.30041

ISSN

2166-3327

Autores

James Rhem,

Tópico(s)

Legal Education and Practice Innovations

Resumo

Usually, I place TECHPED on the inner pages of the FORUM. This time I've made Mike Rodgers's column the lead feature. The challenges and advantages of constructing online courses with graduate students in mind hadn't occurred to me, and Mike explores the topic in his usual thoughtful and thought-provoking way. In reading his essays I often have the feeling of someone carefully, firmly pulling a length of twine into a useful coil. There's just that steady pull leading me confidently forward, that tension needed to untangle the subject and make something useful come of the effort. Thanks Mike; you've done it again. This issue contains other clear and useful writing on teaching and learning. Howard Aldrich and Joseph Lowman of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill offer something similar in this issue's PRAXIS column in the way of steady, sensible exploration of a topic that comes up repeatedly in teaching. Should faculty accept late papers? What kind of question is that question anyway? Aldrich and Lowman consider it from a variety of useful angles. Whose benefit do hard and fast deadlines serve? And if most learning turns out to be contextual, don't most deadlines also exist in temporal contexts? Absolutes have their place, but that place may also be movable—depending on the context. One context many faculty have not experienced comes in moving from the world of professional work into the world of academic teaching. Often teaching itself is the only professional world faculty know with a subject matter applicable ‘out there’ in the ‘real world’ their area of expertise. For Joanne Sohn and a number of other faculty I met at Cal Poly Pomona it's a different story. They'd come to teaching after years of experience working outside of academe. After spending four hours with Sohn in a lab with rabbits training students to become vet techs and seeing how much she enjoyed the work, how well she taught, and how short a time she'd been at it, I asked her to write about the experience of moving from one world to the other. Her LEARNER'S DIARY tells a joyful story. All faculty new and old benefit from pauses in their routines where they have the opportunity to reflect on improving teaching. Staging a Great Teachers Seminar offers faculty that opportunity, but as with anything else, success hides in the details. Page Wolf and Martha Lally of the College of Lake County offer a seasoned primer on what works well and what to watch out for. This issue also includes the first of my FIELD REPORT columns on individual campuses visited for a month each in Phase One of the NTLF Residency Initiative. The trips began with a visit to the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. I'd never been to Las Vegas before and found it a genuinely engaging surprise. Yes, you can see the MGM Grand from the backside of the campus and the campus does benefit from the wealth generated by “the Strip.” Still, what happens on the UNLV campus bears little comparison to what goes on in the casinos. Over all one comes away from UNLV impressed by a very palpable sense of the commitment of the campus to the success of its students. By that I don't just mean readying them for jobs. My sense was they prepare students to apply an adaptable understanding to complex situations; in other words not job training but actual education. Finally Marilla Svinicki's AD REM … takes up probably the biggest challenge in teaching: Transfer. If they can't use the knowledge in new contexts, they really haven't learning anything.

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