Editor's Note

Abstract

It's heartening to see how the conversation about college teaching has grown. When I created the FORUM over 20 years ago, there weren't that many publications available on college teaching. There were occasional newsletters from the few campus teaching centers, and there were some discipline-specific journals with small readerships. Today, there is a growing number of SoTL journals as well as a proliferation of (sadly expensive) conferences. From the start, a vigorous and varied conversation has been the FORUM's aim. In a good conversation, topics range from the mundane of practical importance to the conceptual and visionary. The FORUM tries to accommodate both, since both figure into the realities of college teaching. And important topics recur. Our last issue touched on helping students learn to read textbooks effectively. In our next issue, we'll return to that topic. Remember the psychomotor domain? A past issue explored the importance of this, the most neglected of the Bloom taxonomies. We'll be revisiting that topic in a future issue as well. Engagement? That too. As this subscription year comes to an end and a new semester begins, we thought it worthwhile to look ahead a bit and offer a glimpse of where part of the conversation will be going. In this issue we begin with a story on helping students find their voice as learners. You've probably heard of student voices and wondered what that might mean aside from complaints about grades. What it means most usefully might have to do with helping students understand themselves as learners; an understanding they can't really develop merely from the grades they get on exams. We begin this issue with the first of a two-part series on an approach to helping students find their voices and those understandings. At the moment in this issue, collaboration emerges as a focus. Our TECHPED by Mike Rogers and Mary Harriet Talbut of Southeast Missouri State University offers the first part of a three-part series outlining for faculty the wealth of resources available to collaborate in reshaping courses for today's technology-saturated learning environments. There's a lot of expertise out there, and the TECHPED columns outline where to start and how to make use of it. This issue's CREATIVITY CAFÉ column by Charlie Sweet, Hal Blythe, and Rusty Carpenter of the University of Eastern Kentucky is all about collaboration. An article on how The Beatles did it kicks off their thinking, but it's their own years of experience that have taught them most about what works. Leadership and ideas play into it of course, but “collaborations are sustained by mutual respect,” they say, and who could argue with that? The thing is, it applies between teachers and students as much as anywhere else. In PRAXIS, Henry Etlinger of the Rochester Institute of Technology extends his inquiry into the multiple uses of homework. Etlinger offers insights into how homework and group work, evaluation and the development of the “soft skills” needed to operate effectively with other humans can all be combined in the careful and creative use and design of this old, standard teaching tool. Finally, two pieces in this issue consider whether some of the problems teachers currently experience might indicate things needing adjustment in our own practice: our teaching approaches. Siew Hoon Lim of North Dakota University is not a fan of students using cell phones in his classes. He discourages it, but wonders when it occurs if perhaps it's because he hasn't made his lectures engaging enough. And Marilla Svinicki's AD REM … column challenges some current notions about students and entitlement. Maybe they aren't the ones who feel entitled, or at least the only ones in the teacher-student dyad who feel that way.