A practical-minded and lucid instruction manual for teaching online.
Cohn and Greer offer a comprehensive guidebook for designing effective online learning experiences.
Constructing an effective online learning experience is notoriously difficult, and, as the authors observe, a live online course “can often feel uninspired and, frankly, boring.” However, they assert, an online learning experience is also filled with promise—one can customize it to serve the specific needs of the students in question in a manner that emphasizes their agency, putting “learners in the driver’s seat.” To create an “individualized learning experience,” one needs to adopt an “experience design model” that interprets learning as an active affair demanding the engaged participation of the learner. The teacher, therefore, must discover as much as possible about the needs of the learners, to the extent of conducting research through targeted surveys and focus groups. Being an effective learning designer requires the teacher to remain flexible and responsive to an ever-changing environment: “You have a unique set of skills as a learning designer. You have to create an experience that is structured and easy for users to understand, while also being responsive to different learners’ needs and interests as you encounter them.” Following this guide, a teacher proceeds in reverse, using “backward design” that organizes the course around well-defined goals. With great clarity and helpful specificity, Cohn and Greer cover a remarkable swath of territory, discussing learner engagement, the writing of a course text, and the production of videos and webinars. The thoroughness of the book is impressive—it is hard to imagine another single-volume work, especially one so concise, illuminating so many different topics. The authors practice what they preach, writing only in the plainest and most accessible language. The reader may tire of the gratuitous use of euphemisms—for example, the employment of the awkward “learning designer” in place of “teacher” is as silly as it is pointless. Regardless, this is a valuable resource for anyone who teaches online courses.
A practical-minded and lucid instruction manual for teaching online.Pub Date: July 25, 2023
ISBN: 9781959029168
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Rosenfeld Media
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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