Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Empowering the peanut gallery

Alan Jacobs at Text Patterns makes the brazen claim that concentration and distraction are incompatible entities. Actually that thought had occurred to me also, but I wrote it off to old age. Jacobs provides some good references on this topic, and his post is followed by a string of interesting comments. The Chronicle of Higher Education discussed this phenomenon recently in  Teaching with Twitter: Not for the Faint of Heart - which is actually more about occupational health than higher education. In the video below, an enthusiastic faculty member notes that he now hears from students who were once to shy to speak up in class; once again, technology levels the playing field, this time taking away that unfair advantage formerly enjoyed by  ventriloquists. See also my earlier post  about backchanneling.

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