Patricia Alexander delivered a powerful workshop yesterday as the more than 50 people in attendance can attest. The good news is it is not over. We will hold a faculty development Lunch+Learn (Alexander Workshop Revisited) on Monday, February 13 in the Private Dining Room of the LU Dining Hall. The doors open at 11:45 AM, the discussion start at noon and registration is now open. Grab a lunch, bring your notes from the session and join the dialogue. If you were unable to attend the original workshop, come and discover what you missed. Rice University is trying a new initiative hoping to drive the costs of textbooks down and save students money. A free online physics book, peer-reviewed and designed to compete with major publishers’ offerings, will debut next month through the non-profit publisher OpenStax College. Using Rice’s Connexions platform, OpenStax will offer free course materials for five common introductory classes. The textbooks are open to classes anywhere and organizers believe the programs could save students $90 million in the next five years if the books capture 10 percent of the national market. Erin E. Templeton recommends you try Wordle for introducing students to close-reading and the basics of textual analysis. She says that there are two things that make Wordle invaluable. First, "it’s free and very easy to use because it is an open web-based program so all students with access to a computer can use it. It doesn’t require specific hardware (read: iPad) or charge fees for accessing the site." Second, "it’s fun." Generating a Word Cloud is as simple as clicking on the “Create” link, pasting in “a bunch of text,” and clicking “Go.” Once the Word Cloud is created, students can then play with fonts, color schemes, and other visual variables such as whether they prefer the words to be laid out horizontally, vertically, or a bit of both. She notes that by using it in her literature class to "deconstruct and defamiliarize the passage, Wordle magically freed students from the summary trap and helped them to think about the text analytically beyond the constraints of plot. Word clouds do not have plots, at least not in the linear convention sense that allows easy summary, so analysis was suddenly less confusing." The Lecture Check (Mazur, 1997) is an active learning strategy that works very well in large classes, but is equally effective in smaller class enrollments. The first step is to deliver a lecture for 15 to 20 minutes, and then project a question for the class to see. Often this is a multiple choice item that is similar to the type of question that will be used on an exam. Students are asked to raise their hands as the instructor asks how many think ‘a’ is the correct response; how many chose ‘b,’; and so on. If most of the students have the correct response, the instructor simply continues with the course material. If, however, more than approximately 20% chose the incorrect response, the instructor has students turn to their neighbor and convince them of the correct choice. Finally, the instructor goes through the items again to see how many choose each alternative. If an unacceptable number still have incorrect responses, it may be wise to go back over the material. Students also can be called on to defend the selection they have made.