Great stuff

I realize my last post came off a bit snarky, so I wanted to post about the pedagogy meeting with DEGW. We had four groups that each proposed a "class of the future" to talk about space and resource needs. I thought all of the ideas presented were compelling. Each was focused on experiential or situated learning and were driven by interesting, real-world problems. One involved having students design and build an energy-efficient house. That would be really cool! Another proposed having students try to balance the US budget in order to teach economics, to see how changes in one part would affect changes in the other -- that sounded really cool too. Another was about project management and would have students actually conduct the project management for a real project. The course my group proposed was my "think globally, act locally" course, where student groups would be matched up with groups around the world to study some complex-real world issue by investigating it locally and combining it with learning Esperanto in order to exchange results with the other groups around the world. I would love to see all of these classes being taught on campus! Great stuff!