How present are you in your classes? If you teach face-to-face or hybrid sections, you may have an easier time responding to this question than if you teach fully online. When physically present in the classroom, it’s easy to take it for granted that students are able to see you, hear you, and respond to you. But in a fully online environment, especially one that doesn’t hold real-time sessions, it can be a challenge to establish your presence as the professor.
Enter the weekly video update. The authors of a widely cited article published in The Internet and Higher Education report that asynchronous video “made their instructors seem more real, present, and familiar… similar to face-to-face instruction.” This finding should resonate with instructors, who despite teaching online in increasing numbers still report feeling that online learning is less effective than face-to-face teaching.
I have students who 
I’ve recently gotten into a “maker” mindset, becoming more and more interested in the concept of makerspaces, hackerspaces, and generally improving my ability to make, repair, or upcycle the things I use on a daily basis. Besides using my wife’s broken laptop charge port as a big impetus to learn to solder, or installing various Linux distributions on various old computers or single board computers I have, I’ve been spending time watching YouTube channels of various makers or Linux podcasts. One thing I’ve noticed is that the video production of these channels is often very good, even when they seem like shoestring productions.
When I was an undergrad, my “intellectual conversation crutch” was bringing up something from Jon Stewart’s Daily Show. After moving to Chicago, that crutch morphed into inserting something I read in The New York Times or New Yorker.
Digital story telling is an instructional practice that is used to tell stories by using computer-based tools. For example, individuals or groups may tell a story by using a variety of multimedia such as audio, graphics, voice, text, and video. For centuries, many people have learned messages from stories that were either passed down orally or written in a book. We now live in such a technological advanced society that learners can now comprehend an intended message by using technological products of the 21st century.
I’ve always loved Rube Goldberg’s drawings. They lent a certain sense of the absurd to everyday tasks, creating a ridiculously complicated machine to handle something most of us could do without even thinking about it. Like many young people, I also delighted in building machines similar to Goldberg’s, using every toy at my disposal to produce something that, let’s be honest, may have been more satisfying to design and build than to actually deploy most of the time. A few hours’ work for ten seconds of payoff? Not a big deal, when you’re a kid.
