Bay Path MFA goes to International Online Learning Conference

On my way to the 20th Online Learning Consortium International Conference!  My BPU colleagues, Mary Wiseman and Peter Testori, and I are giving a presentation about creative collaboration within an online creative writing program, our MFA in Creative Nonfiction.  Educators, writers, and faculty from colleges and universities around the world will be sharing ideas for making the online experience more interactive, dynamic, and (the buzzword) "multi-modal" than it already is.

Key for me, though, is always how to help students deepen their writing practice.   How to stimulate workshopping discussions that get at the artistic and emotional heart of a piece.  How to apply what the lessons we learn from good writers -from John McPhee to Vivian Gornick, from Phillip Lopate to Diane Ackerman to Richard Rodriguez - to our own creative work.  How to direct students to literary publications and writing resources that can advance their career and strengthen their craft. How, in other words, to participate as serious writers in the digital world we live in.

I'm looking forward to learning new ways of teaching, new ways to enhance my students' experience in the MFA.  (And, it must be admitted, to four days in Florida.  No reason faculty development and 82-degree weather can't go together!)