Tag Archives: UCB

Argument at UC Berkeley

Posted on December 12, 2014 | 2 comments

I’m proud of my students this semester in Intermediate Composition: Argument in the Disciplines. This was the first semester the course has been offered, and the students stepped up and built a website about written argument for the student community at UCB. The website (Argument at UC Berkeley) contains papers that the students wrote during the course, as well as advice from professionals and academics whom they interviewed. Students in subsequent semesters will maintain and expand the site.

Here’s a link, if you want to check out the site: http://argument.berkeley.edu/

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Posted in Teaching, Writing

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Back at Work

Posted on August 28, 2014 | 4 comments

Here I am, back in my office in Wheeler Hall on the UCB campus, after finishing the first class on the first day of fall semester.

carolyn-firstclass

I’m not sure what my expression means.  “We’re gonna do this thing”, maybe?

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Posted in Teaching

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GSI Presentation Skills Workshop

Posted on August 22, 2014 | 1 comment

Today I teach the usual pre-semester Oral Presentation Skills workshop for graduate student instructors. Here’s the handy-dandy visual aid I give them so that they have something to point at during practice.

visual-aid

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Posted in Teaching

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bCourses = be curses

Posted on August 18, 2014 | 3 comments

UCB’s bCourses continues to whup my ass. I see the benefit of having a content management system, but it doesn’t seem to be able to do what I want it to do — simple things, like print the online syllabus in larger font rather than make me create two versions, one online and one offline for printing. Having two versions just increases the possibility of error. And what happens when bCourses is down or slow? Or when students can’t access the internet?

So far, prep that usually takes three hours has taken three days . . . and I haven’t even started on the argument course.

Grrrrrr.

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Posted in Teaching

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Drat bCourses

Posted on August 14, 2014 | 2 comments

Preparing for the upcoming semester is taking much more time than usual because I have to figure out how to use bCourses instead of bSpace to build the course websites. I have lots of material in html format, designed to display online, and none of it seems to work in bCourses. Changing all that is a monumental headache.

Teaching is a joy, but this slog prepwork is joyless.

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Posted in Teaching

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