Book: The Craving Mind: From Cigarettes to Smartphones to Love - Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits

I read Judson Brewer's The Craving Mind: From Cigarettes to Smartphones to Love - Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits to see what it can bring to the improvement of teaching and learning - although this is not its focal point.
Brewer clearly connects addiction and its perceived rewards to the human condition and our way of (non)thinking, charts his life's course as an example of how meditation can move a person away from addictive behavior to mindfulness and joyful immersion into meaningful activities such as learning and working. He shows addiction with its cycle of trigger, behavior, reward in situations that we would easily recognize - smoking, drinking, eating, drug use, but then maps the same cycle onto the use of social media, emotions, and other human behaviors. His solution is meditation, reflection, mindfulness to move towards a different kind of good feeling, based in Buddhist teachings. 

How can we use this in teaching and learning?  One of the key points he made is that full immersion into a topic comes from curiosity.  We need to find ways in our teaching to enable students to recognize the trigger of curiosity, use the appropriate behavior or immersion into the content to get the reward of feeling good about the learning.  We also need to make them more fully aware that the other triggers of social media lead to a lesser reward and addiction.
Using our mobile devices in class to feed our curiosity is one way of dealing with it; however, it may be useful to suggest to students to turn off notifications for that time period.  Changing that function may be enough to allow students to focus on course content without the distraction of getting sounds and buzzes from their various communication tools.
Giving students data about the downside of distraction, the myth of effective multitasking may make it also easier for students to put the mobile device distractions aside.
Some faculty decide that no devices are permissible in class, but that puts some students at a learning disadvantage. It may be more effective to have device-free thinking and discussion periods where no one needs to have a device for note taking.
What we have seen in our workshops is that marking clearly a time for break when it is ok to check email, social media and other communication channels helps faculty to stay focused during the remainder of the workshop - I am wondering if a similar strategy would work for students as well.

Book: Teaching and Learning STEM

I just finished reading Teaching and Learning STEM: A Practical Guide, by Richard Felder and Rebecca Brent and I highly recommend it for anyone who is interested in learning how to teach, learning more about how to learn, especially if this is going to happen in a traditional STEM field -- but the tips will also be applicable to other sciences in higher education even if the examples and illustrations may not be that easy to transfer.
The clear organization of the text makes it easy to envision starting with small changes in one's class and leading up, over time, to more complex changes that include project or problem based learning.  Some of the things I learned are

• in learning objectives do not use the verbs know, learn, understand, or appreciate as you cannot truly measure what your students are accomplishing
• if you need your students to know material that is primarily memory-based (vocabulary, terminology, definitions, facts, periodic table), give them handouts and set the expectation
• when addressing cheating in class, remind students that this may say something about their future life, their future work ethics
• distinction between active and reflective learner - though the example given does not convince me (active learner = just tries without thinking, reflective learner = will work carefully through exercises)
• the strategy of TAPPS - thinking aloud pair problem solving with the two roles of explainer and questioner
• the strategy of Pair Programming with the two roles of navigator and pilot
• flipped flipping
• learning approaches of deep, surface, and strategic
• designing an exam with 10-20% of high level objectives - no more, no less
• giving students strategies to become experts through problem classification, metacognition, automacity of certain tasks, self-efficacy
• the McMaster problem solving structure of define, explore, plan, implement, reflect
• the Perry model of intellectual development: dualism, multiplicity, relativism
• in-class clinics for group work

The reminders throughout the book were just as useful.

UBTech 2018

Back in Las Vegas! I was here two years ago and swore I would not come back -- and here I am again.
First day of UBTech 2018 brought a very good Women in IT Leadership Summit with some outstanding speakers and the opportunity to meet other women in IT. Highlights from the Summit:
1. Jenny Evans from PowerHouse Performance talked to us about crushing the confidence gap through an animated and personal discussion of how we need to take care of ourselves through reflection, sleep, and exercise, with exercise allowing us a (relatively) easy way to push ourselves into and through our zones of discomfort for increased challenges that allow us to see other challenges, like phone calls, as doable if not trivial. She also reminded us to go on an intellectual diet, purging our RSS feeds, catalogue subscriptions and other consumer-focused media inputs to limit what we see, read, and thus get tempted to deal with.
2. Marcia Dorita Baker from U of Nebraska provided strategies for inclusion that focused on different skill sets and practicing them so that everyone in a team gets the opportunity to grow in different skill sets.
3. Nicole Aboltin from Lone Star College discussed 3 models of mentoring which gave me some ideas on how to structure the Women in IT mentoring program I have been thinking about for Auburn.
4. Finally, Rebecca Gill from U of Nevada gave us crushing statistics on why women choose not to stay in IT -- with the top reasons the lack of female role models, female mentors, and female networking in an otherwise (white) male dominated profession.  Time to get to work.