Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

I rarely grade alone. The students rarely do their homework in isolation. The same chatting software that, when mismanaged, give us fits in our classrooms, enables us to collaborate in dynamic ways. Students now continue fiery classroom debates when they get home from school. They now walk each other through difficult readings of “The Odyssey” and “Hamlet” and return to class with stronger understandings

it is more crucial that they learn how to sift thoughtfully through increasing amounts of information.

The issue now is distinguishing between rich resources and the online collection of surface facts, misinformation, and inexcusable lies that masquerade as the truth. It will be hard for our students to be thoughtful citizens without this ability to discern the useful from the irrelevant. This is especially clear during this election season. If they are never asked to practice dealing with this new onslaught of information, they will have to practice when the stakes are much higher.

For much of his education, Xue Longlong was silently accompanied from grade to grade, school to school, by a sealed Manila envelope stamped top secret. Stuffed inside were grades, test results, evaluations by fellow students and teachers, his Communist Party application and — most important for his job prospects — proof of his 2006 college degree.

In protest of what he says are textbooks’ intolerably high prices — and the dumbing down of their content to appeal to the widest possible market — Professor McAfee has put his introductory economics textbook online free. He says he most likely could have earned a $100,000 advance on the book had he gone the traditional publishing route, and it would have had a list price approaching $200.