The Rest of the Semester...

The semester is almost over! Here is what you need to know for the next few weeks:

Next Tues: No class meeting; work on your final project

Next Thurs: Bring your work-in-progress to class to get feedback on it.

Our final exam is scheduled for Thurs Dec 13 (9am for my first class, 10:15 for my second class). We will not have an exam, but it is a required class period.

Blogging next week:

Mon: Discuss the brainstorming/idea generation portion of your final project. Where are you with it? Where are you going? How are you going to make it interesting/distinctive?

Wed: What are your greatest successes and failures from this semester? Reflect on this. What will you take away from these experiences?

Sat: LAST Campus Safari!!!!


And that will be the last regular blogging for this semester!

Reminder: The final project is due on your blog on Dec 19.

If you haven't seen the final assignment yet, scroll down!

Here are some comments from Wendy regarding questions some of you submitted on the evaluation form:

Q: I don't really understand why if the articles aren't published yet they still appear and how to stop them from appearing?
Q: Finding articles online that are available?
A: Databases try to be smart, but sometimes they don't quite manage it. Every database has a set of publications that it indexes, and so as soon as those publications tell the database about the articles they have, the database puts them in the search results. However, many publications know which articles they're publishing well into the future, and sometimes they tell the databases early, which means the database can tell you that the article *will* exist, but it can't provide access unless the publication does (and some of them do). To stop those results from appearing, if the thing that's most important to you is to find an article you can look at right way, then you should go to the Advanced Search screen and check off the "Full Text" box so that you'll only see things available in full text from the database you're searching.

Q: I would want to learn more about finding books locations?
Q: Learn more about finding book locations?
A: CONSULS will give you a book's title, call number, and location, but to find where it is in the library, you'll have to take a look at the floorplan: http://library.southernct.edu/maps.pdf. If you're unsure of how to read the floorplan, a librarian will be delighted to assist you.

Q: If your book is in "SCSU Stacks" but doesn't have a letter with it, how do you find it?
A: If you find a book in the catalog that has a location but no call number, then that's a brand new book that hasn't made it into the public area yet. You can still get it, though! Just let a librarian know and we'll rush it through to you as soon as possible.

Q: If there are any tricks to finding more specific articles?
Q: How to find good/relevant journal articles?
A: The key to finding more specific/good/relevant articles is asking for more specific/good/relevant information. If you just type in "autonomy" and click Search, you will find every article in that database that mentions autonomy in any way. If you're only interested in "autonomy and education" or "autonomy and nursing" or "autonomy and sports," then you have to tell the database that. If you're ever getting frustrated with an article search, definitely ask a librarian to help you focus it better.

Q: How to sign a book out in the library?
Q: How to sign out a book?
A: Take your book and your HootLoot card to the circulation desk.

Final Self-Assessment Assignment

Final Self-Assessment Assignment

“We do not learn from experience…we learn from reflecting on experience” -- John Dewey



Write a 600-word blog post (with at least 4 images) OR a 5-minute video that functions as a final self-assessment for your first semester of college.

Use the following questions as a starting point for organizing your ideas. Your answers should reflect an honest evaluation of yourself and should not be an evaluation of SCSU, me, the class, or the FYE program.

1. What have you learned about yourself as a college student so far? Where are
you in your learning process?

2. What have been your biggest challenges so far?

3. How did you react to and/or meet or mishandle those challenges?

4. What have been your biggest achievements so far?

5. What habits or processes made certain that you were able to earn success
in those areas? How have you used the resources available to you in order
to ensure your own success? How can you do more of this in the upcoming
semester?

6. How successful have you been with time management and workload in your
courses? What have you put the majority of your time and energy into this
semester? What is the result of that?

7. What have your grades been like this semester? More importantly perhaps,
what are you learning? Are there classes where you are learning a lot or only
a little? Why? What can you do to maximize your learning?

8. How are you doing in meeting the personal goals you set for yourself at the
beginning of the semester? Are you where you had hoped you would be by
this point in your college career?

9. Where do you want to go from here and what do you think you need to do in
order to get there? Is there anything you need to change? Is there anything
you can improve upon in the upcoming semesters?

10. What specific goals would you like to set for yourself next semester and how
do you plan to meet those goals?

Be sure that your post is clear, detailed, shows in-depth thinking, makes specific points, and supports those points with specific evidence. In addition to rich content,your post should have a clear beginning, middle, and end, and unifying transitions. Please do not simply answer the questions, but create a meaningful narrative.

This assignment is due (posted on your blog) on Wednesday, December 19th by midnight.

More Important Information!!

STOP! If you haven't seen the video assignment I posted on Tuesday, continue scrolling down past this post and read that one first!

For next week, we only meet on Tuesday and we will meet in the Library, on the first floor by the reference desk. Wendy, the INQ librarian will facilitate a program for us on how to use the library resources. Our research focus will be the concept of "autonomy," the last concept we are studying in this course. At the end of the program, Wendy will ask you to complete a piece of writing based on the research, and that writing will be the one and only blog post due next week. There will be no campus safari due and no second blog post. Then we are off on Thursday for Thanksgiving.

The following week, on Tuesday we will finish The Creative Habit and read "Why Inspiration Matters." Please bring your notes/definitions on the key terms and questions presented today in class. On Thursday of that week, your videos are due and I hope to watch some in class. For blogging that week, one post should be your video and reflection (technically can be posted sometime Thursday) and the other post should be a final post about Twyla Tharp's book: based on the book/discussions, what can we gain from Tharp's perspective? Specifically, how do we define creativity, why is it important, how can we incorporate it more into our lives or even teach it, and why should we attempt that (individually and societally)?

My next post (maybe this weekend) will contain the final video or blog post assignment, so you can get a jump on the work due at the end of the semester.

3rd Video Assignment

Creative Problem Solving

One measure of success for college students is how well they can adapt
to new situations, tackle challenges, and be creative problem solvers.
This 3rd video assignment adresses this exact topic and asks students
to create a problem-solution "argument."

First, choose a common problem faced by first-year students. It can
span any aspect of university life and experience, from living away
from home to roommate problems to underage drinking to study habits
and procrastination to failing classes or oversleeping to getting a
bad professor. Think about a topic that would be unique, interesting
to you, and one that you would have a lot of information on.

In order to illustrate the problem clearly and creatively, make a skit
using either actors on video or drawings or pictures with captions or
comic "bubbles." Use your imagination in this section, and make it
entertaining (and perhaps humorous).

Then explore some possible solutions and offer your suggestions for
what could be done to alleviate this situation, either after it
happens or how to prevent it in the future or both. This part should
demonstrate some deep thinking into the causes and effects and perhaps
can include some research (cited, of course) or interviews. Also, be
sure to include the resources that are available on campus to help
students deal with these types of problems.

Length = 5 minutes

Applying Creativity to Our Lives...via Twyla Tharp

For next week, be creative in your blog posts! Here are your assignments:

1) Face Your fears: Do Exercise #3 on page 31 relating to the fears that prevent us from starting something, finishing something, or realizing our potential. This exercise is also related to the text we looked at on pages 22-23, so you may also want to review that before starting.

2) Choose ANY other exercise in the book, do it, and blog about it. Have fun with it as well as trying to learn something about yourself!

If you didn't see my previous post about the Snow and the Snow-Plans for our class, scroll down and read it now.

Snow

Southern opens at noon today so both of my INQ classes will not meet. Continue reading Twyla Tharp for next week. I will post blogging assignments for next week later today.

If you were supposed to meet me today, we will reschedule for Tuesday.

Stay warm!

Hurricane Relief

In case you weren't in class to hear this announcement, I am repeating it here:

All due dates for blogs, the video project, and campus safaris are pushed back one week because of the hurricane. If you still do not have power by next week and need more time, just talk to me about it.

If you are already done with everythning for this week, you have a week off. If not, you have a week to catch up.

We will be discussing The Creative Habit in class next week, so please read and be ready for discussion.

Next Week's Assignments -- (assuming we have power)

Right now, next week looks a little iffy in terms of the impending hurricane/snowstorm. If Connecticut loses electricity, due dates are pushed back until we regain it. If the storm is not as serious, things will remain the same. Check email, the SCSU website, and/or the Inclement Weather hotline for updates and university closings...and be safe!

Personally, I'm hoping for a false alarm because I am not a fan of inclement weather, and so, with all optimism, here are next week's blogging assignments:

#1: Video and REFLECTION -- Post your video and do some reflection and self-assessment. How did it turn out? What are its strengths and weaknesses? How does it compare to your last video? What progress did you make? (due Tuesday instead of Monday)

#2: Reading response to Twyla Tharp -- Comment on the reading so far. What do you think of it? What interests you and/or applies to you? What do you bring to the reading to further our thinking and discussion of it?

One advising update: If you are a Psychology Major, you need to go to the PSY Dept. and sign up for a Group Advising Meeting (the sign-up is posted on their bulletin board).

"You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it.” – Osho

Next week, remember that we are not meeting as a class in our classroom. Individual advising appointments are in my office instead. Take the extra time to make your video awesome and maybe get a jump on reading the Twyla Tharp book. Also, don't forget to blog!

Blogging assignments are:

1) Find a sculpture or piece of artwork on campus. Post a photo and give the title, artist if available, and the location on campus. Describe it in detail and discuss what you like (or not) about it, then offer an interpretation of what it represents, means, or tries to accomplish.

2) Report on your midterm grades for all of your classes and discuss. If these were your final grades, what would your GPA be? How satisfied are you with your performance? Do your grades represent the amount of time and effort you feel you were putting in? This blog post is due on Friday instead of Wednesday in order to give everyone time to get their grades from Banner or email your professors if your grades are not yet posted.

One last note: here are two more sites with creativity inspiration in case you need any for your video project:

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifestyle/24-creativity-quotes-to-bring-out-your-inner-artist.html

http://twistedsifter.com/2012/03/15-famous-quotes-on-creativity/

Video Assignment #2

School Spirit: "What makes Southern a good place to go to school?"

Your second video assignment is similar to the first in format but more open-ended in topic. Like the first assignment, you will need to create a 5-minute video that is both informative and entertaining. Your task in creating this video is to find something distinctive about Southern, perhaps something that others have overlooked when thinking about "what Southern is" or the opportunities it offers.

Choosing a Topic

What comes to mind when people hear "Southern"? How is it seen by its own students and by people outside of the university community? In INQ, we talked a lot about how people often dismiss or disregard Southern as "not their first choice" or "not a good school." However, many students choose to come to SCSU and/or stay at SCSU for a variety of reasons including the academic community, the student body, the faculty, the athletics, arts, and other organizations, the city of New Haven, the partnerships and professional internships, etc.

Your video should focus on one major theme and should try to capture some aspect of Southern that people may not know about or may not realize. Also consider how to make your video topic original (I am hoping that I will not have to watch 40 videos on the outstanding Nursing Program, for example, especially since there are so many other things that SCSU has to offer.) Your topic can cover a "big thing" that Southern is known for (like the Nursing Program) or it can explore something "smaller" that not too many people know about (the community garden, hiking up West Rock, the types of people who come here, the attitude toward X here, the Latin Jazz band, the Oceanography professors, the ability to go to school here and also....., etc.). Do a lot of creative brainstorming before you choose a topic, and maybe take a survey to get other people's ideas.

One inspiration for this assignment was the "Call Me Maybe" Video made by the SCSU OAs this summer (if you haven't seen it, search for it on YouTube and watch it). This video stood out to me because 1) Southern hasn't always been known for its school spirit, and 2) the people in the video were having a lot of fun and that was fun to watch. I don't expect your videos to be the exact same as this video, but try to capture those two elements in your videos if you can.

You can use interviews for this video project if you want, but you aren't required to do so. You can use other forms of research as well or take quotes from SCSU's website or offices/staff on campus; just be sure to cite them at the end of the video. Think about what other elements you can include to illustrate your points and tell your story: photos, music, skits, narrative, comedy, a TV show backstory, etc. Creativity will be weighted highly in this project in terms of the topic you choose as well as the way you present/format the information.

Creating a Video

The video must be 5 minutes and include a title and credits, just like the first video. Similarly, the project should have a clear beginning, middle, and end that moves through the following elements:

1) framing the topic and providing some context for the project,

2) exploring the issues and ideas of your topic in a creative way,

3) providing some closure from your perspective, some “so what?” or “what have we learned?” to leave the viewer with at the end of the video.

This project requires you to create a short video, not a set of PowerPoint slides. It is not a presentation project; your video needs to stand alone and run on its own. It is possible to create such a digital project using PowerPoint, but it is much easier and more professional if done in iMovie, Windows Movie Maker, or other video creation software. In past experience, iMovie has provided the best results and is available in any Mac Lab on campus. The final video uploaded to your blog; it can be first uploaded to Youtube or Vimeo and linked to on your blog.

Due: Oct 30

"Be a first rate version of yourself, not a second rate version of someone else." - Judy Garland

To follow up on today's discussion of self-assessment, the first blog post for next week will ask you to do some midterm reflection. As you wait for professors to post midterm grades, look back on the first portion of the semester and assess how well you are meeting your personal goals set at the beginning of the year. What successes have you had? What setbacks? What goals do you set for the second half of the semester? What will you continue to do and what will you change in order to meet those goals?

Academic success is important in college (of course!) but not at the expense of your own personal health and sanity. For your second post, I'd like you to do something fun on campus in order to relieve the stress of the midterm season (as always, nothing illegal or illicit though). Blog about your experience and post a picture if possible.

Posts can be done in any order. Students can collaborate on a fun activity -- no need for everyone to invent their own wheel.

Video assignment coming soon!

If you haven't yet read MINDSET, you should! Then we can have some interesting conversations about it in class.

Next week we will be continuing to talk about MINDSET as well as the other readings on innovation and the role of failure in the process of success.

For blogging next week, here are your two assignments: (they can be completed in any order)

1. Write a post that synthesizes and responds to the readings on failure and the book MINDSET. Try to go beyond just the obvious points and say something meaningful and specific about the connection between these readings. Also, don't just summarize -- include YOUR ideas!

2. Do something that pushes you outside of your comfort zone (academic, social, or whatever, just not illegal!) and blog about the experience.

Two other things of note:

If you haven't yet "liked" the SCSU First Year Experience Program on Facebook, please do since they post event listings and reminders all the time.

Erica, a peer mentor for one of my classes, has a blog. Last week, she posted about motivation, and her post is a good example of how to not simply repeat class discussion but take a topic and run with it. Check it out here.

"Be miserable. Or motivate yourself. Whatever has to be done, it's always your choice."

Next week, we will continue the discussions of motivation and mindset that we started this week. We are reading a new book which will bring a fresh perspective to the conversation. Also, the first video projects will be behind you and we can talk about what motivated you to make the choices you made in your project.

For blogging next week, the first post should be your actual video either embedded or linked to in your post along with some reflection on how it turned out. How well did you manage your time and how did that correspond to the quality of the finished product? How well did you achieve the goals of making your video informative, entertaining, and (technologically) polished? How well did you balance the material you gained in interviews with your own voice introducing the topic and drawing conclusions from your research? (This post is not due until Oct 2 since that is the technical due date for the video itself.)

In the second post, I'd like you to respond to the Mindset book (what do you think of the main argument of the book so far?) and connect it to the recent things we have been reading about and discussing in regard to the topic of motivation.

If you want to learn more about the Marshmallow experiment, there are lots of articles that talk about it. This one, for example, talks about how the SAT scores of someone who could wait the full 15 minutes were "two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds."

This article, "The Secret of Self-Control" from The New Yorker has a much more extensive discussion of the experiment if you are interested.

And here is an interesting article critiquing the whole concept called "Just Let Them Eat The Marshmallow."

Enjoy!

Some sample midterm videos from last year's INQ classes

Here are a few videos that I thought you might benefit from looking over. Last year's classes had a slightly different assignment than you, so the topic is different from what you are working on. These videos are not at all perfect, but they all have some strengths and they all are different and therefore represent a range of what you might do with your own videos.

The first is done using iMovie which makes it flow nicely. She has too many words on some slides and some of her interviewees don't always know what to say, but it shows you some of the things you can do with iMovie:

"Critical Thinking in College"

The second uses Windows Movie Maker. This one does a great job with Movie Maker even though it doesn't have a pre-formatted template to plug into like in iMovie. Some parts are hard to hear, though:

"The Art of Critical Thinking"

This one is different because it doesn't use music. Notice the different feel to it (she wanted it to be less chaotic, more formal and informative) and think about the feel/tone you want your video to have:

"Midterm Project"

This last one makes a point of being funny, and the video maker also draws some of his own comics and includes them in the video, so it's very creative. In some places the audio is hard to hear, but he does a nice job of supplying text (like subtitles) to help us along):

"INQ 101 Critical Thinking Video"

Enjoy!!

"It’s not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about?" -- Henry David Thoreau

For the past week, everyone was working on their Self-Study for Time and Time management. Please bring that work to class on Tuesday so we can talk about the results.

For next week's blog posts, the first post should be about the study and what you found out. Reflect on what the study taught you about how you spend your time. Discuss how many hours you spent on doing school work versus how many hours doing other things. Also, what sucked up a lot more time than you expected? What did you procrastinate on and how (if you did)? How do you want to plan out your week in order to do a better job at time management? What can you take away from the study and apply to the rest of the semester to come?

The second post is related to your video projects and how you are structuring it. What topic are you choosing for your video and why? What questions are you going to find answers to? Why are those questions important to first-year students? How are you going to use those questions to make an interesting video?

As I mentioned in class, the video project will help teach you about 1) putting together information to present to others, 2) organizing ideas with a clear beginning, middle and end, 3) using video-making technology...but it will also help you practice the time management skills we have been talking about, specifically planning ahead, tackling a large project in small chunks, and giving yourself enough time for the various stages of brainstorming to researching to learning the technology to crafting the project to proofing and troubleshooting. Get started on it right away so you give yourself all the time you need!

"Frequently Asked Questions" -- Interview Video Assignment

Frequently Asked Questions

Your first video assignment is to create a 5-minute video that is both informative and interesting/entertaining. You will use interviewing as a form of research in order to gain material for your video.

Choosing a Topic

All first year students on a college campus have a lot of questions. Think about how we, as a class, can create a resource for students built around the concept of "FAQ." The first step is to brainstorm good questions. What questions do you hear asked over and over by your peers? What questions do you seek answers to? Narrow your topic down to a set of 3 or 4 related questions. (You may not end up using all of the questions in your final video, but it is better to have more material to work with at the start of this project.)

Interviewing Around Campus

Next, you will need to go out onto the campus and do some on-the-ground research. You will need to interview at least 2 faculty or staff members, at least 3 first-year students, and at least 2 older students and/or role models (a CC, a team captain, student leader of a club or organization, an OA or peer mentor, etc.). Ask all of the people you interview a short series of questions centering around your topic and take notes, audio and/or video footage for use in the final video project. Again, all of what you record may not make it into your final project. However, you must include something from each interview (even one quote) although it can be presented as video, audio, or written text in your project.

Creating a Video

The final step involves interpreting the findings and crafting them into an informative and interesting video project. Be creative! It can be crafted as a news report or talk show or any other format that makes it engaging. It can include music or pictures to break up the question and answer pattern. Don't forget to add an original title.

The project should have a clear beginning, middle, and end that moves through the following elements:

1) framing the question and providing some context for the project,

2) exploring answers to your question from multiple perspectives,

3) providing some closure from your perspective, some “so what?” or “what have we learned?” to leave the viewer with at the end of the video.

This project requires you to create a short video, not a set of PowerPoint slides. It is not a presentation project; your video needs to stand alone and run on its own. It is possible to create such a digital project using PowerPoint, but it is much easier and more professional if done in iMovie, Windows Movie Maker, or other video creation software. In past experience, iMovie has provided the best results and is available in any Mac Lab on campus. The final video should be about 5 minutes long and needs to be uploaded to your blog; it can be first uploaded to Youtube or Vimeo and linked to on your blog. Be sure to test out that it works. Also, include a works cited listing all of the people you interviewed and their titles, if appropriate.

Due: Oct 2

This I Believe

For Thursday, I have assigned a reading/re-reading/reviewing of our Common Read book, This I Believe. You should have read some or all of it over the summer already. For class on Thursday, bring a list of your top 5 entries in the book: your 5 favorite or 5 most interesting or 5 best written (you decide how you select the 5 and on what criteria). Write out a list of the 5 titles, their page numbers, and briefly why you chose each one or why it stands out to you.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” -- Aristotle

As we mentioned in class, the college semester is short. It is important to try to get into a good routine for all of your classes early on in the semester and get a little ahead rather than being in a position where you have to catch up after you get your midterm grades. The readings from this past week speak to the development of good academic habits and ways to become a solid student in the classroom. But don't be satisfied with "good student" -- always push yourself to set your own challenges: cover new ground, think a little differently, stretch your vision of who you can be.

Blogging Assignments for Next Week: 1) What tips and information has resonated with you the most in the past few weeks? What elements will you actually implement into your schedule/habits as a college student? What aspects are not as useful? How will you make sure you are fulfilling your potential as a student and meeting your personal goals? 2) Read through a number of student blogs (listed on the sidebar of this blog). Find one or two which you feel represent an "A" level grade and explain why. If you can't find any blogs that meet high enough standards to warrant an "A" overall, then find one that reaches excellence in critical thinking, one in creativity, etc. Be specific when discussing the strengths of these blogs and what makes them excellent.

10,000 Hours of Deliberate Practice

The article and graphic we were looking at in class is from National Geographic. You can link to it here if you'd like to get some more information.

10,000 hours

Fyi: If the link for the article on the 10,000 hours isn't working, just google Malcolm Gladwell and his theory of taking 10,000 hours to master something.

"Don't ask yourself what the world needs, ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go do that. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive."

Reflections: The first full week of INQ has passed, and students seem to be settling into the campus, classes, and their routines well. Now is the time to figure out how you're going to work on meeting your personal goals and how you're going to strech and challenge yourself as you move forward in the semester. Here is an image I wanted to pass along for you to think about in considering what to work on in the weeks ahead:

Blogging: In writing your blogs, just like any other writing that happens in a college classroom, be sure to work on cultivating the craft of writing. Here are a few tips: 1) Develop an interesting and distinctive writing voice (work on not just sounding like everyone else.) 2) Be sure your blog has a flow, progresses through paragraphs, tells a story -- in other words, make sure it has a clear beginning, middle, and end. 3) Use rich language that is a pleasure to read and makes your readers see from your unique perspective. 4) Include some inquiry questions that make your readers think differently. 5) An engaging photo, video, or link breaks up the text and adds creativity to the post. Next Week: For the next week's readings, continue to read and take notes and bring them to class. Also, think of discussion questions (inquiry questions) because I will ask students to lead discussion more next week, practicing agency, taking action, being leaders. Next Week's blogging assignments are the following: 1) Take notes on readings and synthesize those notes with class notes/discussion. Choose one theme from those and write about it. Start with recapping what you read, what was said...but move the discussion further: what more do you have to say about this topic? what else do you see when you look at these various ideas side-by-side? how can you push our thinking on these dieas beyond what we covered in class and what was in the readings. (Be sure to include some direct quotes from readings in this post.) 2) Write about something difficult you have faced in your life and how you overcame it. Reflect on that experience. What did you learn from that? How can you apply that to the difficulties that you will face in college? You can choose to do these posts in any order, one due Mon. and one due Wed. Between now and Tuesday, also consider the question raised briefly in my second class (but one which we will return to as the semester progresses): "Why are you here?"

“I believe the term “blog” means more than an online journal. I believe a blog is a conversation. People go to blogs to read AND write, not just consume.” -- Michael Arrington

Dear INQ students, Welcome to Blogging! I am collecting all of the student blogs in a list on the righthand sidebar of this page. Check out some of the ones listed there already to see how people are organizing them. What blog titles make you want to click on them and read more? (Remember, that you can edit your format and change your title, layout, colors, etc. at any time.) I look forward to having a full list of 44 blogs of diverse styles and voices. If you are having trouble, you can 1) look at the provided tutorials, 2) search google for help, 3) comment on this post with questions I can try to answer, 4) ask a classmate for help, 5) email me for help, 6) come to my office for help, 7) go to a computer lab on campus and see if one of the technicians there might have time to help you. Don't just "do nothing" though; take initiative to problem solve (AGENCY)! Also, I just sent out an email because the first book we're reading is not yet in the bookstore, so I've tweaked the reading schedule for Tuesday to account for this. If you don't get that email, please let me know.

"Schooling, instead of encouraging the asking of questions, too often discourages it." – Madeleine L'Engle

A common question coming into Inquiry 101 is "What is inquiry?" and this is a question that I hope you continue to ask all semester. I'm not going to give you the one, right, simple answer to that question, but instead give you many opportunities to explore your own answers and push you to ask ever more sophisticated questions that springboard from your original exploration of that question. Inquiry is not just about the answers that I bring to the course; it won't be a very good course unless everyone brings something to it, maybe a unique way of looking at something or a different question for us to think about.

In many ways, Inquiry 101 is a mini version of the university in general. A college education can be transformative if you take advantage of the potentials it offers. But change doesn't just happen; you need to make change happen for you. Before coming to college, many students have been expected to be "learners": those who follow directions and take in the knowledge given to them by teachers. Now, however, you are expected to become "thinkers": those who frame the questions, pursue knowledge, create new ideas and new meanings. This class will be a semester-long immersion into the process of becoming a college-level thinker and knowledge-creator. That type of transformation isn't always easy and won't completely happen in one semester of course, but here we will start growing the seeds.

Our blogs will record our process of inquiry as it grows and changes in our individual and collective ways. The brain work required to focus our ideas into coherent blog posts will provide the constant practice needed to hone our skills of thinking, writing, reading, processing (The blogs are our mental push-ups, and by the end of 16 weeks, we will all have some new muscles to show off). I am hoping that the blogs will also be a place to be creative, take risks, start new ideas, weed through some ideas, get feedback, learn about failure, and learn about improvement. From a different angle, the blogs will also be a way to simply document this whole adventure.

Today, as I work on finishing up the syllabus for our semester, I am excited about the possibilities that lie ahead for all of us. What does inquiry mean? So many things: autonomy, creativity, activity, discipline, agency, curiosity, leadership, involvement, community ... and more. What new meanings will you bring to inquiry? In closing, I am linking to a video created by the amazing SCSU Orientation Ambassadors (that you have probably already seen) since it represents the excitement of the coming weeks!