Tinderbox Lesson - An interview with Phil Scheuerman on managing a college class with Tinderbox
| Level | Intermediate |
| Published Date | 3/17/21 |
| Tags | 4CKMEl, 4Cs of Knowledge Management and Exchange, Grading, Incremental formalization, Teaching, Tinderbox, aTbRef |
| Video Length | 46:01 |
| Video URL | Tinderbox Lesson - An interview with Phil Scheuerman on managing a college class with Tinderbox - YouTube |
| Example File | TBX - L Philsche Teaching Demo.tbx (4.0 MB) |
| Revision | 1 |
| TBX Version | 8.9 |
| Instructor | Michael Becker |
| Acknowledgements | Phil Cscheruerman @philsche |
In this lesson, we interview Phil Scheuerman on managing a college class schedule and grading in Tinderbox. Phil is a professor of environmental studies at East Tennessee State University.
In the interview, Phil shares with us how he discovered Tinderbox and how he has been using it to manage his classes. He discusses how he setups up the class, its learning objectives, and key topics. He uses the map view in Tinderbox to link key topics and then shares an image of this view with his students so that they understand the relationship between the various topics that are being covered in the class. He shows us how he tracks each class assignment and grades them against the assignment rubric. He uses rules to automatically share the grades and comments with students, and compares them to other students.
Phil also explains how much more he wants to do with his process and its evolution. He provides us with a perfect example of incremental formalization. He started out using Tinderbox as a note dumping ground. He is now at a stage where he has gotten better at arranging his notes and getting value out of his process. In the future, he wants to do more with Tinderbox. For example, due to time constraints and simply needing to get the job done, right now, he has PDF anchor files in his notes (e.g. circa 1990 where we put a brochure on the web; it worked, sorta, but really did not fully capture the true essence and power of the web). To fully take advantage of all that Tinderbox has to offer Phil plans to break these PDFs up into individual notes and to use attributes to better manage them. In addition to the enhancements to his course that Phil suggests, I canât stop thinking about how he could use attributes for managing his rubric, enhance his rules, apply more CSS styling and export templates etc. However, the majority of the ideas I might apply at this point are simple directional enhancements to create more efficiency, they do not take-away from the key insight that this interview provides; that being, with Tinderbox you can organize complex ideas, communicate these ideas, and qualitatively and quantitatively analyze how effectively youâre able to teach these to a group of people. I, for one, am really looking for our next interview in the summer, after he has made his updates. 
As a teacher myself, Iâll benefit personally from this.
PS: If you have thoughts and ideas for Phil for the evolution of this TBX, please do share. As a community, letâs come together and build a killer example for teaching a class (organizing the class, concepts, students, assignments, and grading) through and with Tinderbox.
