THATCamp Philadelphia: Getting Distance Education Students To Engage With Library Materials (Session Moderator/Proposer=William Patrick Wend)

I proposed a session on trying to get distance education students to work with library materials more. I have had a number of conversations with both faculty and administrators about this issue, so I thought it would be useful to speak to others at THATCamp about it.

  • University of Delaware does virtual tours of their library.

  • What if there were embedded videos of library tours?

  • Do we have romanticized ideas about libraries?

  • How do we get more distance students engaged with the community of the college?

  • Lee Skallerup-Bessette’s work may be helpful for this issue.

What I Am Up To This Semester

This is a period of great change at Rowan College At Burlington County (ICYMI). I am teaching my normal compliment of composition courses plus the American Cinema course I taught in the spring. I will be doing another film screening to promote Graphic Narratives, which should be returning in the spring. Shortly after this post goes up, I will be adding links to all of my syllabi for the semester. 

A few firsts: I am, for the first time, a program coordinator. This year I will be coordinating Entertainment Technology. I am quickly learning about the faculty and their needs and concerns. Hopefully we will be having a coffee session soon to meet up. I am also on a hiring committee for the first time. 

I will be attending THATCamp Philadelphia in October as usual. News about the 2016 edition of THATCamp Community College will be forthcoming shortly as well. I can confirm the unconference will be moving from the spring to the summer for 2016.

Worth Reading Recently

Podcast #13

Here is a new podcast with my reading of the review I did of the Hacking The Academy anthology from about this time last year. I have two more of these to do this summer and I will post them soon.

New Writing Policy

As I always do at the end of the year, I had a group of students look over and help me revise some of my syllabus policy. This year I decided my general writing policy was long overdue for a makeover. After some discussion, we decided to merge my previous section on makeup work into the new writing policy as well. I am proud of the work my students did on this and look forward to the new collaboration on my syllabus policy. 

Here is the new policy...

Writing Updated Spring 2015 by AB, CD, and MW

My expectation for this class is that all of your work will be free of errors. Papers, projects, etc should be proofread for spelling, mechanics, and grammar. I will mark down for these errors: Please do an exhaustive job of proofreading and revision. All papers should follow standard MLA 7 formatting: Typed; titled; double spaced; page numbers, with your last name, in the top right hand corner; and a page break before your works cited page. All papers will be digitally shared via Google Drive by 23:59 to my school email (wwend@bcc.edu) on the due date. I will not be accepting print copies of your papers. No matter the email students submit their work from, all work will be returned to their school email.

If you use Microsoft Works, please convert your file (.wps) to something more accessible (.odt or .doc is fine) before submitting your paper. Same goes for .pages files. Please do not submit a .pdf file.

Upon sharing your paper via Google Drive, do not consider your paper submitted until, if and only if, you receive a confirmation reply (usually within 24-48 hours). If you do not receive a confirmation email, it is the student’s responsibility to get in touch with me about their work. I am not responsible for making sure you hand in your assignments.

Please make sure you are backing up your work to an external hard drive, flash drive, cloud based source, or other backup method. I will not accept excuses involving crashed computer or broken files.

Please follow the “24 hour rule” for graded work. I do not discuss returned student work until 24 hours have elapsed since I returned them. There will be no discussion, in person or via email, until that time window has elapsed.

All submitted work should be completed by the due date. Please consult the extension policy for details about asking for, and receiving, an extension. With prior permission to submit late work, a full letter grade will be taken off for each day that it is late.

Academic Awards 2015

This year, instead of giving an award as I had in the past, I awarded a $250 scholarship to a student transferring to Stockton University from BCC/RCBC. I decided to do this because I now have a nice amount of students who have transferred from us to Stockton and as an alum I want to help the students of Stockton as much as I can.

I explain in more detail in the video. I had a hard time getting it to embed at the time stamp, so here is a direct link to it.