I agree with your thoughts – I think we need to emphasize collaboration between community members and utilities/regulators/other decision makers. As someone who interned with a water utility a few summers ago, I can attest that there were monthly public hearings. There were never more than one or two community members at the hearings and I got the sense that the public didn’t have an interest in the day-to-day operations of the water utility. Rather, they seem to only get involved when something goes wrong. I think that a more interactive relationship between utilities/regulators and the community needs to be implemented going forward so that community input can be factored into decision making. This will foster a more transparent environment in which utilities and regulators can be held more accountable for their actions.

I agree with your thoughts – I think we need to emphasize collaboration between community members and utilities/regulators/other decision makers. As someone who interned with a water utility a few summers ago, I can attest that there were monthly public hearings. There were never more than one or two community members at the hearings and I got the sense that the public didn’t have an interest in the day-to-day operations of the water utility. Rather, they seem to only get involved when something goes wrong. I think that a more interactive relationship between utilities/regulators needs to be implemented going forward so that community input can be factored into decision making. This will foster a more transparent environment in which utilities and regulators can be held more accountable for their actions.

Thanks. I think passion is the energy for all works, especially in the study.

Messiness is better than OK, its downright necessary. Invite it into your instruction.

Learning is messy. Research is messy. Authorship is messy. Heck, life is messy. And in my experience this is one facet of the academic experience that traditional students (especially at the Freshman / Sophomore level) have a low aptitude for dealing with — navigating messiness.

Help them with this. Show them your messiness! But then show them *how* you navigate it. This is one thing students still cannot get from the internet or a book: how an experienced person deals with the unexpected.

Here’s another way too look at the issue… barriers to learning. Some part of every instructor yearns to have a polished, well-thought-out course where every word of your lecture is finely crafted and the answer to every question recited with ease. But this, from the student’s perspective, can be be a barrier to learning. You’ll come off as: 1) an authority figure, 2) setting a seemingly unobtainable standard of knowledge, and 3) unrelatable / distant

How much better is it then to show your students (through “messiness”) that: 1) self-improvement is the only real authority, 2) knowledge is a process not a destination, and 3) that you have flaws and self-doubts just like your students.

One thing I make clear to any class I teach is that every time we walk though the classroom’s door, we all become students. Nobody knows everything (least of all me), and the only way anyone ever learned anything was to admit (in some way) that firstly…. they didn’t know. So, rather than shying away from mistakes, I jump on them! I say, “Ohh! Ohh! Look how I messed this up. Does everyone see how I did that? Let’s go back and think (e.g. “reflect”!) how I fowled this up so badly.” So now, without a lot of over arching structure, we’ve closed the loop on learning — we’re practicing meta-learning. Which is really where the students should be headed anyway.

PS: It also doesn’t hurt to throw a few bonus points to students who do catch your mistakes — keeps everyone on their toes. ?

Thanks for the shoutout! The image of orations in ancient Greece came to my mind as well. Though that also emphasizes the point of origin of this method of speaking. The fact that the word “lecture” conjures up this type of imagery also instills a sense of how far we have evolved from those times. I couldn’t agree more that lecturing is a necessary part of current pedagogy, but I don’t think it is effective enough to rely entirely on them as a medium of educating today.

Being clear on the difference between different types of writing, even online writing, is so important! English and communication classes need to emphasize this to a greater extent. Blogging is very different from using most Web 2.0 social media platform. If you are an English instructor, you wouldn’t be well-advised to encourage students to tweet before they fully grasp that colloquial language, emoji, etc, are variations on a standard that needs to be upheld in other contexts.

I explicitly ban the use of technology in my classroom for the reasons you listed — the major reason being distraction. I make it clear that if students have differences in ability that required them to use an electronic device, they can, but aside from that: no. I wonder if other GTAs here do the same thing?