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Academic Blogger Scrivener has recently compiled entries for the latest Teaching Carnival (#3) on his blog Scrivenings. In case you haven’t come across a blog carnival before, it’s a collection of entries from various blogs on a theme, and here the theme is teaching in higher education. Scrivener also offers links to TC2 (in October) and the original one. One of the nice things about what they’re calling an “ubercarnival” is that it moves from host to host. (Now where is that umlaut key when you need it?)

Entries in Teaching Carnival 3 range from practical and theoretical issues in the classroom, to pedagogical styles, dealing with tricky classroom dynamics, and much more.

I followed a link from TC3 to a post on Steven D. Krause’s blog about using audio to provide feedback for students on their written work. The key, of course, is not only whether it’s useful, but whether it’s efficient for faculty. Daniel Anderson, a commenter on this post, suggests that recording brief audio files was easier for him than writing feedback on papers.

Krause’s TC3 entry led me also to a Kairos article by Jack Wilson on the theory and practice and consequences of sending such audio feedback to students: Perception Is All: Using Audio Files To Reach Across the Divide. Though Wilson describes the technology from the perspective of a distance ed professor, he also reminds us that in a sense, “All education is distance education.” Among other things, Wilson argues that his audio feedback both increases a sense of community and closeness with his students, helps reach students with different learning styles, and offers a lasting record of the comments for both professor and student.