Michael J. Faris online portfolio
Welcome!
Welcome to my electronic portfolio! Use the navigation bars at the top of the page, or if you’re on the home page, select a post to visit. This post’s feature image source: Mike Gustie of Wired Wren Photography and Design.
Course Web Spaces
While teaching at Penn State, I have used four different types of online course web spaces: Course blogging software, including Blogs at Penn State and a WordPress blog on my own domain. Penn State iTunes U Cloud storage services like Dropbox and SugarSync Penn State’s iteration of Angel Blogging Software for Course Website I have [...]
Technological Innovations: Blogs, Electronic Portfolios, and Multimedia Arguments
Throughout my experiences teaching at Penn State, I have incorporated a number of technological innovations into my courses. These innovations have been attempts to use new technologies in order to: enhance the possibilities for student engagement; encourage students to think about rhetoric and communication outside of the delivery of a paper to a teacher; and [...]
Incorporating the iPad into Technical Writing
In the fall of 2010, my English 202C: Technical Writing students participated in a pilot project incorporating the iPad into the course. In conjunction with Educational Technology Services, the Composition program at Penn State developed a research study to explore how the iPad could be incorporated into a technical writing course. my iPad workspace as [...]
Screencasting an Assignment Explanation
In Summer 2011 I taught an online section of English 202C: Technical Writing for World Campus and did a 1/4 revision of the course. This was my first time teaching online, and I found I had to shift my expectations of how I interacted as a teacher. At the end of the term, student comments [...]
Using Prezi for Class Presentations
In my spring 2011 English 245: Intro to LGBTQ studies course, I often used Prezi for class presentations and to help facilitate class discussion. For example, early in the term students read Alexander Doty’s Making Things Perfectly Queer, an intervention into reception studies that argues that reading queerly is not a misinterpretation or reading into [...]
Using Clickers to Facilitate Classroom Discussion
Penn State’s Teaching and Learning with Technology program recently adopted clickers for use in classrooms. Some teachers are requiring students to purchase them for their course, but Education Technology Services also offers the opportunity to test them in a class or two so that teachers and students can experiment with them. At first I was [...]
FYC into the Archives
In the spring of 2010, an archival librarian gave a presentation to instructors in the composition program here about using the university’s Special Collections in composition courses. My friend Sarah closed out her first year rhetoric and composition course with an archival research essay in the spring, and when I talked to her, I absolutely [...]