Monthly Archives: April 2018
Several years ago, I participated in a book group sponsored by our university’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning (CATL). We read and discussed Therese Huston’s Teaching What You Don’t Know (more recently I read her How Women Decide which I also recommend). We’ve all been in that boat, maybe the department is understaffed and needs help covering a course outside our expertise. Or a chair or dean “suggests” you… Read More
My professional writing students often get annoyed with me when they ask questions about an assignment because my answer is usually “it depends.” The same is true if you are wondering if you can put together cross-functional students teams for a group project in one of your courses. A colleague in computing sciences who tries to do Scrum in his programming courses says cross-functional teams are rarely possible because students are all… Read More
I saw a post on Twitter a few weeks ago that I can’t get out of my mind: Jeffries can be cantankerous (which is awesome), but he’s dead-on with this one. He’s talking about software companies and teams. Companies implementing Scrum tend to have one of a few major problems (based on what I’ve read): implementing Scrum without addressing waterfall or traditionalist company culture issues that will ultimately doom an Agile approach… Read More
I attended the 2018 Conference on College Composition and Communication in Kansas City recently, the largest gathering of instructors and scholars of writing in higher education. I presented on writing and sticky notes in the Design Thinking Studio, but my absolute favorite panel was on rhetorical failure. In rhetoric and writing studies, we often teach students that if they are not successful in their communication, they must not have understood the audience… Read More
As I mentioned last week in my “Why I’m Not Sprinting” post, I’m not always Agile. Sometimes my Scrum board becomes the place I fear the most (shout-out to Dashboard Confessional). I will sometimes leave projects off the board even though they are taking up much of my time. Even though I’m committed to the idea that vitality is more important that productivity, I don’t always take my own advice. I don’t… Read More
Are You Ready to Be Agile?
Rebecca Pope-Ruark, PhD
rebecca pope-ruark 