Another busy week taking names and flipping classrooms

It has been another busy week and I am giving up on reading through all the SONA, Oscar and meteorite tweets. I have a few things to post here to the blog.

If you are interested in the flipped ECON classroom videos, I have three of those on Chapter 2 of Mohr & Fourie:

• WHAT to produce.
• HOW to produce.
• FOR WHOM to produce.

And I have two posts on the State of the Nation Address at the School's blog:

• The business perspective.
• and #SONA2013, looking back at last year's address and the policy year ahead.

On Monday I am speaking at the Tuks seminar series and hope that everyone will be as excited as I am about the topic: Chalk dust to star dust - How social media can benefit your research. I'll post the slides tomorrow or on Sunday.

Flipping the ECON classroom

I started class with my ECON111 group this morning and I am excited. There are some big plans going in - I am going to try and "flip" the classroom.

This is a familiar term to those of you who are out there reading #edchat #flipped blog posts. The idea is to turn the whole thing on its head:

• I am making short little videos explaining the stuff that I would typically have lectured about. Students can watch these as preparation for the contact session.
• Then they answer a few multiple choice questions before hand, hopefully on their mobile phones, and I have an idea who has prepared and how prepared they are.
• Finally they come to class, but not for a lecture, but for work: working through problem sets, drawing the graphs, discussing the issues.

I have the video for chapter 1 done in Afrikaans and it is on eFundi (our LMS). I want to make English versions as well and will have those up on YouTube. I'll share here.