Preparing for 9x9x25
“The challenge is for Ontario Post-Secondary educators to write reflectively about their teaching.”
“We want to collect your reflections on the teaching and learning happenings in your classes and on your campuses here on Ontario Extend’s Domains Hub. We think we can give each other a leg up on how things are going. The challenge is to write about your teaching in 9 posts, over 9 weeks, with a minimum of 25 sentences per post. No fragments!”
(Now, I don’t know about you, but when someone uses a sentence fragment (“No fragments!”) to indicate that you can’t use sentence fragments, my eyebrows arch. But I suppose we could interpret it as an exhortation. It is punctuated by an exclamation mark, after all.)
Terry Greene’s poster for the 9x9x25 Challenge
I’ll be writing about a few things in my posts, such as issues regarding skills vs topical content in the humanities, why open education makes us better instructors, how I try to focus on educating, not teaching. I’m not very emotive about what I do in the classroom or in my courses. The reason for that is simple: I think there’s a lot of fluff in the writing that one sees about educational practices. But I like the idea of reflecting in written form for a public audience. That’s important because it requires me to explain my ideas as opposed to just stating them. I like that.
I also want to be supportive of the efforts of eCampusOntario. This is a wonderful consortium that is injecting some real vigour into the higher education scene in Ontario. It’s one of the few places where you see college and university people interacting with each other. And its approach to post-secondary education, while sometimes a bit scattershot, provides a much needed voice in the province. That voice is saying: Try new things! Share your activities and ideas with others! Enjoy what you’re doing! Keep the students and their learning top of mind! That’s all extremely worthwhile.
Is that a 25-sentence post? Ah, doesn’t matter, it’s not part of the actual challenge.
