JE SUIS CHARLIE
The world is definitely flat, as Dr. Thomas Friedman so famously declared in his book of the same name a decade ago (can it be that 10 years have passed). The events in Paris that occurred last week demonstrated that in a tragic and vivid way. I hope that you join me in using this terrible occurrence as a teachable lesson with your students. Inserting the lesson into your class may be easier for some of us (history, political science, CSSK, art) than others (chemistry, math, welding, nursing) but there are ways to make it happen. If you decide to incorporate it into your class, maybe as part of the larger human rights project being led by Dr. Val Holliday in Philosophy, please share your experience with me so that I can post it here.

LOOK AT ME
Are you having problems capturing and keeping your students attention in class? Mary Loyd, with the journal Prism, has written an interesting column about this issue. She writes, "Ask instructors to name their biggest challenge, and classroom distractions very likely would top most lists. Even experienced engineering educators must compete for students' attention against social media and texting. Classroom management has become so vexing that ASEE's 2014 annual conference devoted several sessions to the topic, including Shepard's panel presentation, I Did Not Anticipate This: Experiences From the Early Years. Research has documented an increase in disruptive behavior and cheating by students over the past 20 years. And it's not just among weaker students." Take a look at the rest of the post here.

USING STARTERS AND WRAPPERS EFFECTIVELY
Faculty Focus provides a great article at the right time addressing effective ways to structure discussions in the online environment. The good news is that you can use Dr. Maryellen Weimer's suggestions for your face-to-face classes as well. She writes, "The use of online discussion in both blended and fully online courses has made clear that those exchanges are more productive if they are structured, if there’s a protocol that guides the interaction. This kind of structure is more important in the online environment because those discussions are usually asynchronous and minus all the nonverbal cues that facilitate face-to-face exchanges. But I’m wondering if more structure might benefit our in-class discussions as well. Students struggle with academic discourse. They have conversations (or is it chats?) with each other, but not discussions like those we aspire to have in our courses. And although students understand there’s a difference between the two, they don’t always know exactly how they’re supposed to talk about academic content when discussing it with teachers and classmates. Would providing more structure provide that clarity and make the value of discussions more obvious to students?" Read more here.