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This is an interesting discussion about vulnerability, trust, and power in the classroom (and outside it). It comes from the Connected Courses community, which focuses on teaching courses with a large public online component, but the discussion is applicable to any class where students are asked to take risks. It's an hour long, but well worth it. (It's also an interesting case study in bringing material from the backchannel into the foreground.)

One administrative reaction to increasing computer use in the classroom is to try and lock down the computers tighter. There's something to this, in terms of protecting a group resource - but it can also create a distracting challenge for students who just want their school iPad to work like their home one does. Sometimes trust and active supervision work better than technical lockdowns!

Written for school teachers (as in grade school, middle school, etc.), this article is not 100% relevant to pedagogical discussions in higher ed. However, the article got me thinking about how I still learn; what gets me intellectually excited; and what diverts me away from other activities in the interest of pursuing an idea. Could I turn one of these instances into an example for my students in order to show them my thought processes and how I go about exploring new pedagogical possibilities? Just et al. (2014) (http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0102976) shook the biology/paleobiology world when the discovery of two strange deep-sea species hinted at the possibility of a new phylum. I spent hours reading various accounts of this discovery, including a number of trusted blogs. I compared the article's figures of these enigmatic organisms with other figures in old references I pulled old off my shelves. I referred to dusty old descriptive texts to refresh my memory of basic taxonomic classifications. I drew diagrams. Letting my students see this process could be beneficial. Developing a project that might force them to perform similar procedures and then defend their actions, might be difficult, but it could teach them quite a lot about how learning continues.