m2h blogs by Marcia Hansen

I’m a winner! I was just notified via email today that I won the Mizzou IT Teaching with Technology Award in the GTA category. I am so happy! Plus we had another winner from the English Department in the undergraduate teaching category! Now, the question: on what educational-related technology do I spend the $500? your [...]

Remember my dilemna about the teaching with technology award? I heard from them yesterday. After I sent them a polite email mentioning my concerns, the committee has revised the information they previously sent. Turns out it wasn’t a rule change, but a “clarification.” And, instead of all finalists being denied the opportunity to receive award [...]

On May 7th, I was notified in a congratulatory email from Margaret Gunderson (gundersonm@missouri.edu) of Educational Technologies at Missouri ( ET@MO ) that I am a finalist for the University of Missouri Teaching with Technology Award. The winner will receive $500! Yeah me! I was going to ask you to keep your fingers crossed for [...]

Daniel Anderson posted a quote from Daniel J. Levitin’s text, This is Your Brain On Music : The Science of a Human Obsession, which I’m clipping part of below: The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class [...]

In response to a question about what I’d change about first-year writing, I said, “I’d love it if the class had more of a rhetorical focus.” Next respondent as he looked at me: “Well, I don’t know about having the same handbook, but we should be able to develop a shared mission statement…” So from [...]

I wanted students in my Professional Writing class to practice writing headlines and 1-2 sentence summaries. I thought the headline writing would help them write titles for their own documents, as well as help make their future blog post titles more creative and informative. I thought the 1-2 sentence summaries would help them practice their [...]

I’m happy to report that students in my Professional Writing class loved John August’s post, “Professional Writing and the Rise of the Amateur.” Some students thought it should be required reading much earlier in their academic careers because it would hold them to a higher standard of professionalism during their college careers because they are [...]

Happy! Happy! F2F class sessions are done. Joy! Joy! One student stopped to tell me that he’s taking my introduction to digital composing class next semester. It’s remarkable how pleasing the comment, “I’ll see you next semester” really makes me feel.

Jenny asked about resources for her business writing course. Like Jenny, I think that someone who writes in business today needs to know more than how to write a memo or a report. I started to comment over there, but then my list got long. Some of these may be more or less useful depending [...]

My students are submitting their formal writing assignments as PDFs. I wanted them to have the experience of transfering a document in a form that is more stable (from a production standpoint) and think about the idea that not everyone has all of the same software, fonts, etc. on their computers. I need to work [...]