Tag Archives for students

STUDENT SUCCESS & Hints + Videos That Help Students Do Better at Wesley Seminary

by Bob Whitesel, Professor of Missional Leadership.

The following are “helpful hints” I have compiled for students starting my courses. They are based on some of the most common questions I receive.  And, they are designed to help you have a smooth(er) start of your academic journey:

1)  Courses officially begin at 12:01 AM ET on Fridays, and the weekly workshops run through the following Thursday night, at midnight.

2)  Under the “Getting Started” menu on the left of your Learning Studio screen, you will find information on how to post, use Dropbox, etc.

3) We have a Wesley Seminary Bookstore (via Amazon.com) that will allow you to find and order the books you need for each church.  Here is the web address and steps to finding the books needed for this course:

  • CLICK ON  http://astore.amazon.com/wesleyseminaryiwu-20  Under the “Browse by Category” list on the right,
  • CLICK on “MA Leadership Core” or “MDIV Leadership Core”
  • Then CLICK on the title of your course.
  • This should take you to a page that has a list of books needed for this course and guide you through the steps to purchase them 🙂

4) Whenever you access the Learning Studio page (for any of my courses) always check the “Professor’s Forum.”  We will put helpful information there, including hints for doing well (like this one 🙂

5) And finally, here are some helpful links on writing formats, time management and library resources.  Peruse these sometime before Week 2 begins.

SOCIAL MEDIA & Why a leading professor of new media just banned technology use in class #The ashingtonPost

by Clay Shirky9/25/14, The Washington Post

I teach theory and practice of social media at New York University, and am an advocate and activist for the free culture movement, so I’m a pretty unlikely candidate for Internet censor. But I have just asked the students in my fall seminar to refrain from using laptops, tablets, and phones in class.

I came late and reluctantly to this decision. I have been teaching classes about the Internet since 1998, and I’ve generally had a laissez-faire attitude towards technology use in the classroom. This was partly because the subject of my classes made technology use feel organic, and when device use went well, it was great. Then there was the competitive aspect. It’s my job to be more interesting than the possible distractions, so a ban felt like cheating. And finally, there’s not wanting to infantilize my students, who are adults, even if young ones. Time management is their job, not mine.

Despite these rationales, the practical effects of my decision to allow technology use in class grew worse over time. The level of distraction in my classes seemed to grow, even though it was the same professor and largely the same set of topics, taught to a group of students selected using roughly the same criteria every year. The change seemed to correlate more with the rising ubiquity and utility of the devices themselves, rather than any change in me, the students, or the rest of the classroom encounter.

Read more at … http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/25/why-a-leading-professor-of-new-media-just-banned-technology-use-in-class/