Hardie Fellowship 2017

Blogging, I have found, is a liberating medium for someone who naturally struggles with verbosity.  Tweeting has been great for on-the-run snapshots ( https://twitter.com/joshdeanLC ), but 140 characters doesn’t allow deeper digression.  And for those that know me, I am a deeper digression sort of person. This is my first blog post in a while and there is a reason(s) for that, not the least of which is because blogging takes some internal processing time before blurting it all out, editing and pressing 'publish'.  But also because ever since I departed for the USA I have been both formally and informally, consciously and subconsciously, engaged in processes of inquiry and experiences that, in totality, will form my Hardie Fellowship.  As human beings, we are constantly learning in response to the experiences that we have and this Hardie Fellowship experience is quite literally one of global proportions, providing access to world-class facilities, world-class research, wo

( This post was created for the course: Project Based Learning in the Flipped Classroom, University of Wisconsin-Stout ) What is flipping the classroom? A fairly traditional 'classical' classroom setting involves students first receiving a certain amount of direct instruction in the classroom, often in a lecture format with some time for questions and answers, followed by some in-class time for practice and application with further practice and application set for homework. Lecture - Image by George Serdechny (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_lecture_at_the_ITM.jpg) Flipping the classroom is the reversing of these processes. In the flipped classroom direct instruction is moved (flipped) from inside the classroom to outside the classroom (for homework before class) which then frees up time in the classroom for other kinds of more personalised and activity-based learning. Flipped Classroom - Image from University of Texas at Austin (https://facultyinnovate.u

Twenty years ago when I was an undergraduate at university the way in which we accessed course materials was pretty straightforward and simple. We were given a reading list (on paper of course - we had email - it just wasn't very well utilised at that time) which you took to the bookshop - and you bought your books. Which were sometimes very big. And often very expensive. Image by CollegeDegrees360 (https://www.flickr.com/photos/83633410@N07/7658051014) We then wrote all over them, dog-eared them, made notes in the margins etc. - which we have been doing since at least the mid-1600s (Pierre de Fermat was a notorious margin scribbler - whose 'last theorem' was famously too large to fit in the margin of the copy of Diophantus he was reading and it took Andrew Wiles another 300 years to finally 'discover' it. By the way - I highly recommend the book 'Fermat's Last Theorem by Simon Singh - a great read for maths and non-maths people alike on the glorious