January 12, 2010 – 6:59 am
Over the past several weeks I’ve been watching Journalism, the Humanities, and the Marketplace wonder about itself. We have Tiger Woods to watch and now a variety of gripes about the Edwards’ and “what was really going on.” The news this morning is a round table expressing justifications for the story. Nothing [...]
December 3, 2009 – 8:49 pm
Dale Daugherty at O’Reilly writes,
On this same day, I heard from a physics teacher in California that he can’t access the Makezine.com site. He was trying to download a project plan for the Wooden Mini Yacht in Volume 20 of Make to use in his class. His school district uses software to block access to [...]
November 25, 2009 – 10:22 am
Lawrence Johnson on FB has sparked yet another conversation related to education and culture, drawing on an example of textbook company incentives and the seeming de-emphasis of the value of hard work required for excellence in learning: use this tool and student performance will improve. The conversation is proceeding but as I don’t like [...]
October 22, 2009 – 9:31 am
Mark Bernstein writes, concerning William Chace’s article in The American Scholar and in reference to a relevant tweet on knowledge about books and, in addition, “whether there could be a single correct answer to any of the important questions that one might ask of an English professor:
Harvard and Tufts and BU and Brown and Brandeis [...]
October 21, 2009 – 6:17 pm
In my FYE course I’ve been insisting that students make games that challenge people to fail. This is a core element of games: if there’s no real challenge, there’s no real reason to play and no fun. Via FB, Beau Anderson links to this article in Scientific American titled Getting it Wrong: Surprising [...]
September 12, 2009 – 11:52 am
Dennis Jerz announces a position in writing instruction at Seton Hill University.
Seton Hill University seeks specialist in Composition/Writing Studies for tenure-track, Assistant Professor of English, beginning fall 2010. The faculty member will teach composition and related courses in the Undergraduate Writing Program, with additional generalist responsibilities in English. 4/4 course load. A Ph.D. in [...]
I’ve been looking for the right word to describe the evaluation of problem solving processes. Today, while struggling with some evaluative language, it hit me: disassemble. That’s it.
We apply problem solving processes daily, even when we lose the keys. Ah, backtrack. We follow processes, but do we do enough to evaluate them [...]
It’s been a long and short semester. Lots of evaluations yet to get through. But it’s also somewhat sad to see the semester go. My commitments to our Ability-based teaching and learning system have come to formal close, as chair of the team that developed, put into place, then revised, and again [...]
February 28, 2009 – 12:23 pm
From what I remember of my younger days, I used to consider myself a “teacher.” I was someone who “instructed” students in the arcane arts of reading, writing, literature and history. I grew up a medievalist and nurtured the image of the dusty scholar in his library professing on Beowulf.
Academics call themselves by [...]
January 14, 2009 – 11:44 am
An interesting and significant dialogue on the relationship between Denis Rancourt and the University of Ottawa
JF: Why is it important to you to not grade your students?
DR: With grades students learn to guess the professor’s mind and to obey. It is a very sophisticated machinery, whereby the natural desire to learn, the intrinsic motivation to [...]
January 5, 2009 – 7:02 am
I’m deep into Maryanne Wolf at the moment. Her distillation of neuroscience and learning stages requires stepping back and pondering. I’ve been interested for many years in the physical/physiological apparatus of confusing, slippery things: memory, for example, consciousness. Much of memory is described in fiction and poetry, but what does the lamp inside [...]
January 2, 2009 – 7:50 am
Via a Christina Costa tweet, an interesting video and set of observations on Personal Learning Environments or PLEs.
Link.
December 23, 2008 – 3:41 pm
While I think that Joseph Kuglemass generalizes on Aristotle and Critical Thinking in this article at Inside Higher Ed, it’s well worth the read. He writes:
From the middle of the last century until fairly recently, the idea that the purpose of undergraduate education is to foster “critical thinking” has had a virtual monopoly in [...]
December 21, 2008 – 9:43 am
An excellent post by Tim O’Reilly on hard work. This follows the theme in my last post on semester observations.
There’s a long arc in computing that teaches us how much we gain through advances in ease-of-use, with the iPhone being the latest breakthrough success. But it’s important to remember how much we lose when [...]
December 20, 2008 – 1:21 pm
It was a short, busy semester, with lots of revision work to the College’s General Education model, lots of talks, meetings, and out-of-classroom work, and a lot of preparation for the Spring already. I still don’t know how to get all the required work done, especially given the break when no one heeds their [...]
That Night I Wandered on my Homeward Way (DrunkenBoat 10)
100 Days: 100 Poems, Summer 2008
