Dustin Kidd

1. Use the 3-column backwards-design system for creating your course. Identify your forward-looking measurable course objectives . "By the end of the semester, students should be able to...." " Forward-looking " means focusing on how students will use this learning after the semester ends. That may mean in their future careers, in their lives as citizens, or simply in the next course of a sequence. But it should not be internal to the class. "Successfully write a term paper" is not a forward-looking goal. A forward-looking revision would be "communicate arguments with evidence to different types of audience." Identify the assignments and other mechanisms that help you to assess whether and how the course objectives have been achieved for each student. Too often, course goals name outcomes that simply cannot be measured. Similarly, a lot of assignments exist for generating a grade without any alignment to the objectives. Alignment means tha...

1. 10 Simple Steps for Universal Design of Online Courses . 2. How to Design an Excellent Online Course: How to Design an Excellent Online Course from Debbie Morrison More about these slides here .   3. Designing Your Online Course .   4.  

This post really just applies to folks at Temple University. As a Temple student, your initial email address may be set up as a random series of letters and numbers, such as TUR93847@temple.edu. That makes it hard for recipients to know who they are receiving emails from. Here are three easy steps to make your emails easy to identify! 1. In your email, click on the settings option. Then choose the option "Accounts." Then, under "Send Email as," click on "edit info." If your account is linked to multiple addresses, be sure to choose the correct address. Finally, enter your name and click on "save changes." 2. Still in the settings, click on "General." Scroll down to "Signature." Fill in a signature that includes your first and last name. You can also add other contact information such as an email address, business phone, or social media handles. Click on the box at the bottom that reads "Insert ...

I love this post on LinkedIn about creating an Interview Bucket List of places you'd like to pursue for your next job. The criteria are: "The company's product or service is something you believe in. You can explain in detail, what experiences you've had in life that have taught you the company's product or service is worthy of your admiration or respect." Read more on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/my-best-job-search-tip-how-create-interview-bucket-list-o-donnell .

Internship Skills: Technical Skills for the Modern Workplace In this post, I use a series of videos to step students through the basic technical skills they need for the average workplace. The most important set of skills a modern worker needs are all related to the Microsoft Office Suite: Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, and Outlook. For each of these, there are also non-Office alternatives that are worth considering, but everyone needs to know how to operate successfully in the Office Suite first and foremost. The Microsoft Suite is available online as a software download and it is even available by subscription, which means you would always have access to the most updated version. Word Word is, of course, a text editing program. The best alternatives to consider are Google Documents (in Google Drive) and Apple Pages.A full course of Word training is available here: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzj7TwUeMQ3jkkDD_N-nRHQTp9oX7Smam . Excel Excel is a sp...

Fall 2014 – Semester in Review – Dustin Kidd Research I began work on a new book project entitled Social Media Freaks , under preparation for Westview Press. I completed two chapters of the book—a history of social media and an analysis of the relationship between sexuality and social media. I published a review of the book Comic Book Crime: Truth, Justice, and the American Way by Nickie Phillips and Staci Strobl in the journal Men & Masculinities . I was invited to undertake two encyclopedia entries related to my field. The Cambridge Handbook of Sociology invited me to write the entry for “Popular Culture.” At my request, two of my graduate students were added as co-authors: Jennifer Kim and Amanda Turner. The entry is due March 1, 2015. The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies invited me to complete the entry for “Women as Producers of Culture.” This is due on March 23, 2015.   I spent much of the semester promoting my...