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TILT - About Techniques in Learning & Teaching Blog

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Overview:: Techniques in Learning and Teaching (TILT) is the blog space of the Center for Educational Innovation at the University of Minnesota. They post longer-form essays each Monday, sometime in the late afternoon in the US Central Time Zone. They add occasional short Words on Wednesdays (WOW posts) to highlight another blog, a recent teaching / learning article, a great learning / teaching moment they have observed, or an idea someone is openly testing.
Type of Material:: Collection
Recommended Uses:: Independent study by instructors and faculty developers
Technical Requirements:: None
Identify Major Learning Goals:: The aim of TILT "is to write about learning and teaching in higher education, to think with – and because of – colleagues from right here and from across the world of higher education. Our writers aim to offer insightful, research-based, locally tested, globally minded and timely learning/teaching essays."
Target Student Population:: Instructors, future faculty, adjuncts, and faculty developers.
Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:: No prior knowledge or skills are required.

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Strengths:: This blog site has two distinguishing features. First, the posts are authored by people in diverse roles, including faculty developer, faculty, adjunct, teaching assistant, and even a Pedagogical Innovations Journal club. This is reflected in the variety of post topics which, in turn, has the potential to engage people with diverse interests and needs. Second, there are two types of posts: original, longer, and more considered posts by the community of blog authors and shorter, WOW posts, to call attention to notable resources of others. This enables TILT to leverage both their own and others' resources.

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Strengths:: TILT is a useful resource for continuing education in the area of pedagogy. The posts are reliable, referenced, diverse, and brief. It is possible to receive them in your email.
Concerns:: This is not a deficiency. It's just that it's a human tendency to look for the last word on a subject and be done with it. TILT is not a resource for in-depth comprehensive faculty development. TILT is clear about this and hopefully readers are as well.

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Strengths:: Previous posts may be found under the Archive link at the top of the blog. The titles of the last 30 posts are available to browse. Posts are also categorized by year, by month and year, as well as keyword searched. Finally, there is a set of clickable tags and a categorization by author for those entries authored by one person. Posts are well-formatted with plenty of white space, headings, figures and graphics where appropriate, and bullet points.
Concerns:: It is necessary to scroll beyond advertisements to access links to navigation, tags, related posts, and comments. Comments require clicking to display. It’s likely that many viewers would not scroll down that far and therefore be unaware of these resources. It is not possible to get a list of posts from a keyword or a tag research. Just one post displays, then one must click Previous to get to other retrieved posts, which appear one more at a time on the page. Thus, it is not possible to retrieve and browse a set of related posts in one page. To use this site as a reference, browse by month. However, one still must open posts one-at-a-time by scrolling down and clicking Older Posts.

Other Issues and Comments:: I really like the concept of this site: building a community of authors and commenters about learning and teaching in higher education. Instructors are busy people so it is challenging to get them to engage in commenting; however, I think the blogging technology could also support this better.
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