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Nils Peterson

Innovating the 21st-Century University: It's Time! (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE - 4 views

www.educause.edu/...195370

educause university2.0

shared by Nils Peterson on 06 Feb 10 - Cached
  • change is required in two vast and interwoven domains that permeate the deep structures and operating model of the university: (1) the value created for the main customers of the university (the students); and (2) the model of production for how that value is created. First we need to toss out the old industrial model of pedagogy (how learning is accomplished) and replace it with a new model called collaborative learning. Second we need an entirely new modus operandi for how the subject matter, course materials, texts, written and spoken word, and other media (the content of higher education) are created.
  • Research shows that mutual exploration, group problem solving, and collective meaning-making produce better learning outcomes and understanding overall. Brown and Adler cite a study by Richard J. Light, of the Harvard Graduate School of Education: "Light discovered that one of the strongest determinants of students' success in higher education . . . was their ability to form or participate in small study groups. Students who studied in groups, even only once a week, were more engaged in their studies, were better prepared for class, and learned significantly more than students who worked on their own."
  • Second, the web enables students to collaborate with others independent of time and geography. Finally, the web represents a new mode of production for knowledge, and that changes just about everything regarding how the "content" of college and university courses are created.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • As Seymour Papert, one of the world's foremost experts on how technology can provide new ways to learn, put it: "The scandal of education is that every time you teach something, you deprive a [student] of the pleasure and benefit of discovery."14 Students need to integrate new information with the information they already have — to "construct" new knowledge structures and meaning.
  • Universities need an entirely new modus operandi for how the content of higher education is created. The university needs to open up, embrace collaborative knowledge production, and break down the walls that exist among institutions of higher education and between those institutions and the rest of the world.To do so, universities require deep structural changes — and soon. More than three years ago, Charles M. Vest published "Open Content and the Emerging Global Meta-University" in EDUCAUSE Review. In his concluding paragraph, Vest offered a tantalizing vision: "My view is that in the open-access movement, we are seeing the early emergence of a meta-university — a transcendent, accessible, empowering, dynamic, communally constructed framework of open materials and platforms on which much of higher education worldwide can be constructed or enhanced. The Internet and the Web will provide the communication infrastructure, and the open-access movement and its derivatives will provide much of the knowledge and information infrastructure." Vest wrote that the meta-university "will speed the propagation of high-quality education and scholarship. . . . The emerging meta-university, built on the power and ubiquity of the Web and launched by the open courseware movement, will give teachers and learners everywhere the ability to access and share teaching materials, scholarly publications, scientific works in progress, teleoperation of experiments, and worldwide collaborations, thereby achieving economic efficiencies and raising the quality of education through a noble and global endeavor."17
  • Used properly, wikis are tremendously powerful tools to collaborate and co-innovate new content. Tapscott wrote the foreword for a book called We Are Smarter Than Me (2008). The book, a best-seller, was written by Barry Libert, Jon Spector, and more than 4,000 people who contributed to the book's wiki. If a global collaboration can write a book, surely one could be used to create a university course. A professor could operate a wiki with other teachers. Or a professor could use a wiki with his or her students, thereby co-innovating course content with the students themselves. Rather than simply being the recipients of the professor's knowledge, the students co-create the knowledge on their own, which has been shown to be one of the most effective methods of learning.
  • The student might enroll in the primary college in Oregon and register to take a behavioral psychology course from Stanford University and a medieval history course from Cambridge. For these students, the collective syllabi of the world form their menu for higher education. Yet the opportunity goes beyond simply mixing and matching courses. Next-generation faculty will create a context whereby students from around the world can participate in online discussions, forums, and wikis to discover, learn, and produce knowledge as networked individuals and collectively.
  • But what about credentials? As long as the universities can grant degrees, their supremacy will never be challenged." This is myopic thinking. The value of a credential and even the prestige of a university are rooted in its effectiveness as a learning institution. If these institutions are shown to be inferior to alternative learning environments, their capacity to credential will surely diminish. How much longer will, say, a Harvard undergraduate degree, taught mostly through lectures by teaching assistants in large classes, be able to compete in status with the small class size of liberal arts colleges or the superior delivery systems that harness the new models of learning?
  • As part of this, the academic journal should be disintermediated and the textbook industry eliminated. In fact, the word textbook is an oxymoron today. Content should be multimedia — not just text. Content should be networked and hyperlinked bits — not atoms. Moreover, interactive courseware — not separate "books" — should be used to present this content to students, constituting a platform for every subject, across disciplines, among institutions, and around the world. The textbook industry will never reinvent itself, however, since legacy cultures and business models die hard. It will be up to scholars and students to do this collectively.
  • Ultimately, we will need more objective measures centered on students' learning performance.
Gary Brown

Top News - School of the Future: Lessons in failure - 0 views

www.eschoolnews.com/...top-news

transformation technology microsoft 21st Century Skills

shared by Gary Brown on 25 Jun 09 - Cached
  • School of the Future: Lessons in failure How Microsoft's and Philadelphia's innovative school became an example of what not to do By Meris Stansbury, Associate Editor   Primary Topic Channel:  Tech Leadership   Students at the School of the Future when it first opened in 2006. <script language=JavaScript src="http://rotator.adjuggler.com/servlet/ajrotator/173768/0/vj?z=eschool&dim=173789&pos=6&abr=$scriptiniframe"></script><noscript><a href="http://rotator.adjuggler.com/servlet/ajrotator/173768/0/cc?z=eschool&pos=6"><img src="http://rotator.adjuggler.com/servlet/ajrotator/173768/0/vc?z=eschool&dim=173789&pos=6&abr=$imginiframe" width="300" height="250" border="0"></a></noscript> Also of Interest Cheaper eBook reader challenges Kindle Carnegie Corporation: 'Do school differently' Former college QB battles video game maker Dueling curricula put copyright ed in spotlight Campus payroll project sees delays, more costs <script language=JavaScript src="http://rotator.adjuggler.com/servlet/ajrotator/324506/0/vj?z=eschool&dim=173789&pos=2&abr=$scriptiniframe"></script><noscript><a href="http://rotator.adjuggler.com/servlet/ajrotator/324506/0/cc?z=eschool&pos=2"><img src="http://rotator.adjuggler.com/servlet/ajrotator/324506/0/vc?z=eschool&dim=173789&pos=2&abr=$imginiframe" width="300" height="250" border="0"></a></noscript> When it opened its doors in 2006, Philadelphia's School of the Future (SOF) was touted as a high school that would revolutionize education: It would teach at-risk students critical 21st-century skills needed for college and the work force by emphasizing project-based learning, technology, and community involvement. But three years, three superintendents, four principals, and countless problems later, experts at a May 28 panel discussion hosted by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) agreed: The Microsoft-inspired project has been a failure so far. Microsoft points to the school's rapid turnover in leadership as the key reason for this failure, but other observers question why the company did not take a more active role in translating its vision for the school into reality. Regardless of where the responsibility lies, the project's failure to date offers several cautionary lessons in school reform--and panelists wondered if the school could use these lessons to succeed in the future.
  • Gary Brown on 25 Jun 09
     
    The discussion about Microsoft's Philadelphia School of the future, failing so far. (partial access to article only)
  • Gary Brown on 25 Jun 09
     
    I highlight this as a model where faculty and their teaching beliefs appear not to have been addressed.
Gary Brown

Building A New Framework for Collegiality - WorldWise - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 1 views

chronicle.com/...26207

collegiality

shared by Gary Brown on 16 Aug 10 - Cached
  • I think part of the problem is not the shortage of time as such, but a feeling that the time available is not under the individual’s control. In other words, the essential independence of spirit that goes with being an academic is being undermined.
  • Academic life is meant to be collegial, that is based on 'shared power and authority vested among colleagues’ according to the dictionary, but the models of collegiality that have evolved are often solutions to the problems of another age, when universities were typically much smaller and less complex.
  • Perhaps there are other models of collegiality which might produce a better sense of say? Funnily enough, the most interesting models seem to come from business, often painted as academe’s alter ego.
  • Gary Brown on 16 Aug 10
     
    I note the recognition of one of our key challenges, and the search for solutions in other models and sectors....
Gary Brown

Will a Culture of Entitlement Bankrupt Higher Education? - Commentary - The Chronicle o... - 2 views

chronicle.com/...48819

accountability economics.

shared by Gary Brown on 19 Oct 09 - Cached
  • The economy has suffered changes so deep and fundamental that institutions cannot just hunker down to weather the storm. The time has come for creative reconstruction. We must summon the courage and will to re-engineer education in ways founded on shared responsibility, demanding hard work and a willingness on the part of everyone involved to let go of "the way it's always been."
  • We need to break down expectations based on entitlement and focus on educational productivity and outcomes. Institutions should review redundancies, rethink staffing models, and streamline business practices. Productivity measures should be applied in all areas. In the same way that secondary schools are being challenged to consider longer school days and an extended academic year, we in higher education need to revisit basic assumptions about how we deliver higher education to students. We should not be tied to any one model or structure.
  • For example, we should re-evaluate the notion that large classes are inherently pedagogically unsound. What both students and faculty members tend to prefer—small classes—is not the only educationally effective approach. Although no one would advocate for large classes in every discipline or instance, we should review what we do in light of new financial contingencies, while keeping an eye on what students learn.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • the growing demand for a better-prepared work force, we need to revisit undergraduate education as a whole. We should re-examine the teacher/scholar model, for instance. Is it appropriate for every institution? Does that model really produce what it is supposed to: thinkers and makers, learned and professionally skilled graduates?
  • We should separate legitimate aspirations and a drive toward excellence from the costly and often fruitless pursuit of higher status—which may feed egos but is beyond the reasonable prospects of many institutions.
Nils Peterson

Edge: THE IMPENDING DEMISE OF THE UNIVERSITY By Don Tapscott - 1 views

www.edge.org/...tapscott09_index.html

shared by Nils Peterson on 05 Jun 09 - Cached
  • For those of us like me who have been working on the Internet for years, it was very clear you couldn't encounter free software and you couldn't encounter Wikipedia and you couldn't encounter all of the wealth of cultural materials that people create and exchange, and the valuable actual software that people create, without an understanding that something much more complex is happening than the dominant ideology of the last 40 years or so. But you could if you weren't looking there, because we were used in the industrial system to think in these terms.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 28 Aug 09
       
      Hard to read because of the double negatives. He's saying there is lots of evidence of a new model in operation
  • It's a model that is teacher-focused, one-way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated in the learning process. Yet the students, who have grown up in an interactive digital world, learn differently. Schooled on Google and Wikipedia, they want to inquire, not rely on the professor for a detailed roadmap. They want an animated conversation, not a lecture. They want an interactive education, not a broadcast one
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 28 Aug 09
       
      and it has implications for assessment and vehicles for assessment (portfolios)
  • Theron DesRosier on 05 Jun 09
     
    "In the industrial model of student mass production, the teacher is the broadcaster. A broadcast is by definition the transmission of information from transmitter to receiver in a one-way, linear fashion. The teacher is the transmitter and student is a receptor in the learning process. The formula goes like this: "I'm a professor and I have knowledge. You're a student, you're an empty vessel and you don't. Get ready, here it comes. Your goal is to take this data into your short-term memory and through practice and repetition build deeper cognitive structures so you can recall it to me when I test you."... The definition of a lecture has become the process in which the notes of the teacher go to the notes of the student without going through the brains of either. "
S Spaeth

Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUC... - 1 views

www.educause.edu/...162420

John Seely Brown Learning 2.0 Educause

shared by S Spaeth on 18 Sep 09 - Cached
  • More than one-third of the world’s population is under 20. There are over 30 million people today qualified to enter a university who have no place to go. During the next decade, this 30 million will grow to 100 million. To meet this staggering demand, a major university needs to be created each week.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 18 Sep 09
       
      quote from Sir John Daniel, 1996. The decade he speaks of has past
  • Open source communities have developed a well-established path by which newcomers can “learn the ropes” and become trusted members of the community through a process of legitimate peripheral participation.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 18 Sep 09
       
      He describes an apprentice model, but we might also think about peripheral participation in terms of giving feedback using an educative rubric.
  • Lectures from model teachers are recorded on video and are then physically distributed via DVD to schools that typically lack well-trained instructors (as well as Internet connections). While the lectures are being played on a monitor (which is often powered by a battery, since many participating schools also lack reliable electricity), a “mediator,” who could be a local teacher or simply a bright student, periodically pauses the video and encourages engagement among the students by asking questions or initiating discussions about the material they are watching.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The Faulkes Telescope Project and the Decameron Web are just two of scores of research and scholarly portals that provide access to both educational resources and a community of experts in a given domain. The web offers innumerable opportunities for students to find and join niche communities where they can benefit from the opportunities for distributed cognitive apprenticeship. Finding and joining a community that ignites a student’s passion can set the stage for the student to acquire both deep knowledge about a subject (“learning about”) and the ability to participate in the practice of a field through productive inquiry and peer-based learning (“learning to be”). These communities are harbingers of the emergence of a new form of technology-enhanced learning—Learning 2.0—which goes beyond providing free access to traditional course materials and educational tools and creates a participatory architecture for supporting communities of learners.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 18 Sep 09
       
      Kramer's Plant Biotech group could be one of these. It needs tasks that permit legitimate peripheral participation. One of those could be peer assessment. Another could be social bookmarking. I now see it needs not just an _open_ platform, but an _extensible_ one. Here is where the hub and spoke model may play in.
    • S Spaeth
      S Spaeth on 06 Oct 09
       
      I infer that you are referring to this research group. http://www.officeofresearch.wsu.edu/missions/health/kramer.html I am curious to learn why you selected this lab as an example.
  • open participatory learning ecosystems
Nils Peterson

Swift Kick Central: Playing Catch Up: Colleges and the Web - 1 views

blog.swiftkickonline.com/...h-up-colleges-and-the-web.html

shared by Nils Peterson on 05 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Based on the incredible investment of universities in social architecture: in quads, residence halls and lounges, it's ironic that most universities still do not see the internet as cost effective social venue, despite the countless examples online
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 05 Oct 09
       
      Found this guy because he put our Harvesting Gradebook YouTube in his feed. At this blog, and at Tom Krieglstein he is writing some interesting analysis.
  • Universities just couldn't see how to extend the old value and investment into connecting and learning, to the new field.
  • Universities are following along the same trends of the internet as a whole, with a bit of a lag. College websites are still mostly "web 1.0": characterized by static content, controlled by a centralized office.  Curriculum and learning is still centralized and controlled in learning managment systems like Blackboard. Where there are discussion features in Blackboard, the content stays centralized with the class and is lost at the end of the term. Where there are blogs on university websites, they tend to be written by selected and edited "brand ambassadors" - an attempt to put a real face on a preferred message.This year, often led by the admissions department, it has become fashionable for schools to use social media links on their sites. The thinking, however, is still mostly in the 1.0 paradigm: "follow the school on twitter" or "become a fan of the university on Facebook." In this paradigm, the university is still the focus, a one to many publisher in the center. Based on competition and financial pressures, businesses based on publishing models are scrambling to decentralize, lower cost structures, and move their models towards connecting and aggregating. When will the paradigm shift for the University?
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 05 Oct 09
       
      Is he asking the right, hard question, or, does the publishing model not apply?
Peggy Collins

The enterprise implications of Google Wave | Enterprise Web 2.0 | ZDNet.com - 1 views

blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe

wave collaboration google

shared by Peggy Collins on 01 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Peggy Collins on 01 Oct 09
     
    "What Google has done with the Wave protocol is essentially create a new kind of social media format that is distinctively different from blogs, wikis, activity streams, RSS, or most familiar online communication models except possibly IM. Both blogs and wikis were created in the era of page-oriented Web applications and haven't changed much since. In contrast, Google Wave is designed for real-time participation and editing of shared conversations and documents and is more akin to the simultaneous multiuser experience of Google Docs than with traditional blogs and wiki editing. Though Google is sometimes criticized for missing the social aspect of the Web, that is patently not the case with waves, which are fundamentally social in nature. Participants can be added in real-time, new conversations forked off (via private replies), social media sharing is assumed to be the norm, and connection with a user's contextual server-side data is also a core feature including location, search, and more. The result is stored in a persistent document known as a wave, access to which can be embedded anywhere that HTML can be embedded, whether that's a Web page or an enterprise portal. Users can then discover and interact with the wave, joining the conversation, adding more information, etc. Google has also leveraged its investments in Google Gadgets and OpenSocial, two key technologies for spreading online services beyond the original boundaries of the sites they came from. All in all, Google Wave is a smart and well-constructed bundle of collaborative capabilities with many of the modern sensibilities we've come to expect in the Web 2.0 era including an acutely social nature, rapid interaction, and community-based technology."
Joshua Yeidel

Doonesbury@Slate - Daily Briefing - 1 views

www.doonesbury.com/...index.html

web_2.0

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 22 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 22 Oct 09
     
    "Here are top rated news and opinions reviewed by NewsTrust.net, a social news network devoted to good journalism. We rate the news based on quality, not just popularity."
  • Joshua Yeidel on 22 Oct 09
     
    A social model of news and opinion aggregation
Kimberly Green

THe Business of Higher Education - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...business

education

shared by Kimberly Green on 02 Dec 09 - Cached
  • Kimberly Green on 02 Dec 09
     
    The Business of Higher Education (Praeger), a new three-part collection of essays edited by John C. Knapp and David J. Siegel, presents a wide range of perspectives on the complex impact of business models on higher education. The authors -- respectively, the Mann Family Professor of Ethics and Leadership at Samford University, and an associate professor of educational leadership at East Carolina University -- are neither pro- nor anti-business; they describe themselves, instead, as "ambivalent, conflicted, and (perhaps more positively) open to the merits of strong arguments." Those they (and readers) get, from such shrinking violets as E. Gordon Gee, Marc Bousquet and Cary Nelson.
Joshua Yeidel

News: Measuring 2-Year Students' Success - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...data

assessment accountability

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 21 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 21 Oct 10
     
    Measuring student success for federal purposes in community colleges -- and only one passing mention of learning. The factory model prevails -- stamp that widget (student) and send it out the door (they sell themselves!)
Theron DesRosier

THE FUTURE OF EVERYTHING: - 0 views

feeds2.feedburner.com/academic-commons

shared by Theron DesRosier on 09 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 09 Mar 09
     
    "In the face of an economic crisis of unprecedented and in many ways still not fully understood dimensions, there is a natural inclination to retrench, to stop considering what the next new thing might be, to slow down on innovation and experimentation. This is a mistake. This is the moment when we must confront the core assumptions of our educational enterprises, and to ask hard questions about why we do what we do, and how we can change in order to survive and perhaps even thrive. This symposium, which is part of the Future of Everything project hosted by Academic Commons (http://academiccommons.org/futureofeverything/), brings us together to consider the possible futures of a host of interconnected topics: the book, the library, our system of scholarly communication, classroom technology, software distribution, the lecture, the seminar, existing and future business models,and ultimately, the college and the university. You'll have a chance to hear from leading practitioners who are creating the next generation tools, resources, spaces, and policies, and to engage in on-line dialogue before, during, and after the event. The work of the symposium will be used to inform the publication of an on-line reader that we hope will be broadly useful for all engaged in re-imagining future services, facilities, and policies on campus. Date: May 19, 2009 Place: Norwood, MA"
Nils Peterson

WSU Today Online - Professor brings new approach into classroom - 3 views

www.wsutoday.wsu.edu/...Publications.asp

shared by Nils Peterson on 09 Mar 10 - Cached
  • What do Wikipedia, Linux, Mozilla Firefox, and Threadless Tees have in common? All were created outside the traditional product development model using a mass collaborative approach. In mass collaborative product development (MCPD), large groups of people compete and collaborate globally to develop new products and services.
  • the MCPD phenomenon is under way in the management and business communities. But few have examined it from an engineering design standpoint.
  • A more natural process
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • companies are trying out MCPD to not only foster a more collaborative workplace but to bring in outside innovation
  • But engineering curricula, said Panchal, tends to remain focused on traditional approaches to product development.
  • “This is not a hierarchical model," said Panchal. "Rather, people self-select activities they’re interested in."
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 10 Mar 10
       
      see various harvesting gradebook ideas from 2008, student finds problem in community, that becomes a motivating spine for their personal curriculum
  • Gary Brown on 09 Mar 10
     
    collaborative development on our doorstep. We should introduce ourselves.
Nils Peterson

Shifting Faculty Roles for New Learning Environments « Center for Teaching, L... - 0 views

wsuctlt.wordpress.com/...-for-new-learning-environments

aacu learning_community new model

shared by Nils Peterson on 31 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Nils Peterson on 31 Mar 09
     
    This is the packet for AAC&U. Comments welcome, changes hard to implement at this late hour.
  • Nils Peterson on 31 Mar 09
     
    Materials for the AAC&U Conf April 2-4, 2009. The last link is to a new Theron-inspired JamyeJ graphic.
Gary Brown

Saving Public Universities - 0 views

www.convergemag.com/...aving-Public-Universities.html

Western Governors

shared by Gary Brown on 17 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Many public universities do offer online courses while primarily maintaining traditional ones. But the public higher-education model for the future may already exist: the completely online Western Governors University (WGU), launched in 1998. Back then, it was described as highly controversial. Now WGU is the largest virtual university in the United States, using technology to offer a flexible structure and reasonable pricing to meet adult learners’ needs.
  • keeps its costs down by relying heavily on technology and independent learning resources, and by using a student-centric model versus a professor-centric approach
  • Additionally WGU is the first and only system that gives students credit for what they know rather than the courses they complete.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • “As you take a course at WGU, you pass it by passing certain tests along the way,” Thomasian said. “Your tests aren’t on a set schedule in terms of, ‘You have to take it this month or that month.’ You can start moving those tests ahead, passing that competency and moving to the end of the course, and passing the competency for that.”
  • It was fun to cross the 10,000 student threshold about two years ago,” Partridge said, “and we’re right at the door of 20,000 right now.”
  • Now he said the university enrolls approximately 1,000 new students each month.
  • Gary Brown on 17 Aug 10
     
    The rise of the faculty free institution--should we worry?
Joshua Yeidel

Wikis in the workplace: a practical introduction - Ars Technica - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...welcome-to-the-wiki-party.ars

wiki

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 18 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 18 Nov 09
     
    "The wiki crops up in many companies' internal discussions about process improvements and efficient collaboration, but it is often shot down because so few people have exposure to good models of what a really successful business wiki can do. Ars is here to help with a practical introduction based on real-world examples."
Nils Peterson

New Grilling of For-Profits Could Turn Up the Heat for All of Higher Education - Govern... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...66020

shared by Nils Peterson on 25 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Congress plans to put for-profit colleges under the microscope on Thursday, asking whether a higher-education model that consumes more than double its proportionate share of federal student aid is an innovation worthy of duplication or a recipe for long-term economic disaster.
  • The evaluation threatens new headaches for an industry that is sometimes exalted by government policy makers as a lean results-oriented example for the rest of academe, and other times caricatured as an opportunistic outlier that peddles low-value education to unprepared high school dropouts.
  • Economic bubbles such as the unsustainable surge in housing prices "typically are built on ignorance and borrowed money," says one prominent pessimist on the matter, Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a professor of law at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. "And the reason you've got a higher-education bubble is ignorance and borrowed money," Mr. Reynolds said.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Congress and colleges still lack a firm sense of "what our higher education system is producing," said Jamie P. Merisotis, president of the Lumina Foundation for Education.
  • Mr. Reynolds said. Colleges of all type have been raising tuition for years as the government offers ever-growing amounts of grant aid and loan money, he said. The price inflation is driven by the fact that a government-backed loan, while offering students only a slight break from market interest rates, "looks cheap because you don't have to make payments for a while,"
  • That determination to expand the distribution of federal tuition assistance has left Congress and the White House seeking other ways to ensure that students get quality for their money. Just last week, the House education committee held a hearing in which Democratic members joined the Education Department's inspector general in pressing accrediting agencies to more clearly define the "credit hour" measurement used in student-aid allocations. Some colleges have objected, wanting more flexibility in defining their educational missions.
  • Whether it involves defining credit hours or setting accreditation standards, the root of the problem may be that the government is looking for better ways to ensure that its money is spent on worthwhile educational ventures, and yet it doesn't want to challenge the right of each college to define its own mission. So far that has proven to be a fundamental contradiction in judging the overall value of higher education, said Mr. Merisotis, of the Lumina Foundation. "There's got to be a third way," he said. "We don't have it yet."
Nils Peterson

2009 Annual Meeting | Conference Program - 0 views

www.aacu.org/...program.cfm

shared by Nils Peterson on 22 Jan 09 - Cached
  • This session explores the notion that assessment for transformational learning is best utilized as a learning tool. By providing timely, transparent, and appropriate feedback, both to students and to the institution itself, learning is enhanced – a far different motive for assessment than is external accountability.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 22 Jan 09
       
      need to get to these guys with our harvesting gradebook ideas...
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 22 Jan 09
       
      decided to attend another session. Hersh was OK before lunch, but the talk by Pan looks more promising
  • Academic and corporate communities agree on the urgent need for contemporary, research-based pedagogies of engagement in STEM fields. Participants will learn how leaders from academic departments and institutions have collaborated with leaders from the corporate and business community in regional networks to ensure that graduates meet the expectations of prospective employers and the public.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 22 Jan 09
       
      here is another session with links to CTLT work, both harvesting gradebook and the ABET work
  • Professor Pan will discuss the reflective teaching methods used to prepare students to recognize and mobilize community assets as they design, implement, and evaluate projects to improve public health.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 22 Jan 09
       
      Students tasked to learn about a community, ride the bus, make a Doc appt. Then tasked to do a non-clinical health project in that community (they do plenty of clinical stuff elsewhere in the program). Project must build capacity in the community to survive after the student leaves. Example. Work with hispanic parents in Sacramento about parenting issue, ex getting kids to sleep on time. Student had identified problem in the community, but first project idea was show a video, which was not capacity building. Rather than showing the video, used the video as a template and made a new video. Families were actors. Result was spanish DVD that the community could own. Pan thinks this is increased capacity in the community.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Freshman Survey annually examines the academic habits of mind of entering first-year students.  Along with academic involvement, the survey examines diversity, civic engagement, college admissions and expectations of college. 
  • The project aims to promote faculty and student assessment of undergraduate research products in relation to outcomes associated with basic research skills and general undergraduate learning principles (communication and quantitative reasoning, critical thinking, and integration and application of knowledge).
  • They focus educators on the magnitude of the challenge to prepare an ever-increasingly diverse, globally-connected student body with the knowledge, ability, processes, and confidence to adapt to diverse environments and respond creatively to the enormous issues facing humankind.
  • One challenge of civic engagement in the co-curriculum is the merging of cost and outcome: creating meaningful experiences for students and the community with small staffs, on small budgets, while still having significant, purposeful impact. 
  • a)claims that faculty are the sole arbiters of what constitutes a liberal education and b) counter claims that student life professionals also possess the knowledge and expertise critical to defining students’ total learning experiences.  
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 22 Jan 09
       
      also, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
  • This session introduces a three-year national effort to document how colleges and universities are using assessment data to improve teaching and learning and to facilitate the dissemination and adoption of best practices in the assessment of college learning outcomes.
  • Exciting pedagogies of engagement abound, including undergraduate research, community-engaged learning, interdisciplinary exploration, and international study.  However, such experiences are typically optional and non-credit-bearing for students, and/or “on top of” the workload for faculty. This session explores strategies for integrating engaged learning into the institutional fabric (curriculum, student role, faculty role) and increasing access to these transformative experiences.
  • hands-on experiential learning, especially in collaboration with other students, is a superior pedagogy but how can this be provided in increasingly larger introductory classes? 
  • As educators seek innovative ways to manage knowledge and expand interdisciplinary attention to pressing global issues, as students and parents look for assurances that their tuition investment will pay professional dividends, and as alumni look for meaningful ways to give back to the institutions that nurtured and prepared them, colleges and universities can integrate these disparate goals through the Guilds, intergenerational membership networks that draw strength from the contributions of all of their members.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 22 Jan 09
       
      see Theron's ideas for COMM.
  • Civic engagement learning derives its power from the engagement of students with real communities—local, national, and global. This panel explores the relationship between student learning and the contexts in which that learning unfolds by examining programs that place students in diverse contexts close to campus and far afield.
  • For institutional assessment to make a difference for student learning its results must result in changes in classroom practice. This session explores ways in which the institutional assessment of student learning, such as the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education and the Collegiate Learning Assessment, can be connected to our classrooms.
  • Interdisciplinary Teaching and Object-Based Learning in Campus Museums
  • To address pressing needs of their communities, government and non-profit agencies are requesting higher education to provide education in an array of human and social services. To serve these needs effectively, higher educationneeds to broaden and deepen its consultation with practitioners in designing new curricula. Colleges and universities would do well to consider a curriculum development model that requires consultation not only with potential employers, but also with practitioners and supervisors of practitioners.
  • Should Academics be Active? Campuses and Cutting Edge Civic Engagement
  • If transformational liberal education requires engaging the whole student across the educational experience, how can colleges and universities renew strategy and allocate resources effectively to support it?  How can assessment be used to improve student learning and strengthen a transformational learning environment? 
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 22 Jan 09
       
      Purpose of university is not to grant degrees, it has something to do with learning. Keeling's perspective is that the learning should be transformative; changing perspective. Liberating and emancipatory Learning is a complex interaction among student and others, new knowledge and experience, event, own aspirations. learners construct meaning from these elements. "we change our minds" altering the brain at the micro-level Brain imaging research demonstrates that analogical learning (abstract) demands more from more areas of the brain than semantic (concrete) learning. Mind is not an abstraction, it is based in the brain, a working physical organ .Learner and the environment matter to the learning. Seeds magazine, current issue on brain imaging and learning. Segway from brain research to need for university to educate the whole student. Uses the term 'transformative learning' meaning to transform the learning (re-wire the brain) but does not use transformative assessment (see wikipedia).
  • But as public debates roil, higher education has been more reactive than proactive on the question of how best to ensure that today’s students are fully prepared for a fast-paced future.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 22 Jan 09
       
      Bologna process being adopted (slowly) in EU, the idea is to make academic degrees more interchangeable and understandable across the EU three elements * Qualification Frameworks (transnational, national, disciplinary). Frameworks are graduated, with increasing expertise and autonomy required for the upper levels. They sound like broad skills that we might recognize in the WSU CITR. Not clear how they are assessed * Tuning (benchmarking) process * Diploma Supplements (licensure, thesis, other capstone activities) these extend the information in the transcript. US equivalent might be the Kuali Students system for extending the transcript. Emerging dialog on American capability This dialog is coming from 2 directions * on campus * employers Connect to the Greater Exceptions (2000-2005) iniative. Concluded that American HE has islands of innovation. Lead to LEAP (Liberal Education and America's Promise) Initiative (2005-2015). The dialog is converging because of several forces * Changes in the balance of economic and political power. "The rise of the rest (of the world)" * Global economy in which innovation is key to growth and prosperity LEAP attempts to frame the dialog (look for LEAP in AACU website). Miami-Dade CC has announced a LEAP-derived covenant, the goals must span all aspects of their programs. Define liberal education Knowledge of human cultures and the physical and natural world intellectual and practical skills responsibility integrative skills Marker of success is (here is where the Transformative Gradebook fits in): evidence that students can apply the essential learning outcomes to complex, unscripted problems and real-world settings Current failure -- have not tracked our progress, or have found that we are not doing well. See AACU employer survey 5-10% percent of current graduates taking courses that would meet the global competencies (transcript analysis) See NSSE on Personal and social responsibility gains, less tha
  • Dr. Pan will also talk about strategies for breaking down cultural barriers.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 24 Jan 09
       
      Pan. found a non-profit agency to be a conduit and coordinator to level the power between univ and grass roots orgs. helped with cultural gaps.
Gary Brown

News: Turning Surveys Into Reforms - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...nsse

assessment NSSE Closing the loop

shared by Gary Brown on 26 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education, warned those gathered here that they would be foolish to think that accountability demands were a thing of the past.
  • She said that while she is “impressed” with the work of NSSE, she thinks higher education is “not moving fast enough” right now to have in place accountability systems that truly answer the questions being asked of higher education. The best bet for higher education, she said, is to more fully embrace various voluntary systems, and show that they are used to promote improvements.
  • One reason NSSE data are not used more, some here said, was the decentralized nature of American higher education. David Paris, executive director of the New Leadership Alliance for Student Learning and Accountability, said that “every faculty member is king or queen in his or her classroom.” As such, he said, “they can take the lessons of NSSE” about the kinds of activities that engage students, but they don’t have to. “There is no authority or dominant professional culture that could impel any faculty member to apply” what NSSE teaches about engaged learning, he said.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • She stressed that NSSE averages may no longer reflect any single reality of one type of faculty member. She challenged Paris’s description of powerful faculty members by noting that many adjuncts have relatively little control over their pedagogy, and must follow syllabuses and rules set by others. So the power to execute NSSE ideas, she said, may not rest with those doing most of the teaching.
  • Research presented here, however, by the Wabash College National Study of Liberal Arts Education offered concrete evidence of direct correlations between NSSE attributes and specific skills, such as critical thinking skills. The Wabash study, which involves 49 colleges of all types, features cohorts of students being analyzed on various NSSE benchmarks (for academic challenge, for instance, or supportive campus environment or faculty-student interaction) and various measures of learning, such as tests to show critical thinking skills or cognitive skills or the development of leadership skills.
  • The irony of the Wabash work with NSSE data and other data, Blaich said, was that it demonstrates the failure of colleges to act on information they get -- unless someone (in this case Wabash) drives home the ideas.“In every case, after collecting loads of information, we have yet to find a single thing that institutions didn’t already know. Everyone at the institution didn’t know -- it may have been filed away,” he said, but someone had the data. “It just wasn’t followed. There wasn’t sufficient organizational energy to use that data to improve student learning.”
  • “I want to try to make the point that there is a distinction between participating in NSSE and using NSSE," he said. "In the end, what good is it if all you get is a report?"
  • Kimberly Green on 26 Oct 09
     
    An interesting discussion, exploring basic questions CTLT folks are familiar with, grappling with the question of how to use survey data and how to identify and address limitations. 10 years after launch of National Survey of Student Engagement, many worry that colleges have been speedier to embrace giving the questionnaire than using its results. And some experts want changes in what the survey measures. I note these limitations, near the end of the article: Adrianna Kezar, associate professor of higher education at the University of Southern California, noted that NSSE's questions were drafted based on the model of students attending a single residential college. Indeed many of the questions concern out-of-class experiences (both academic and otherwise) that suggest someone is living in a college community. Kezar noted that this is no longer a valid assumption for many undergraduates. Nor is the assumption that they have time to interact with peers and professors out of class when many are holding down jobs. Nor is the assumption -- when students are "swirling" from college to college, or taking courses at multiple colleges at the same time -- that any single institution is responsible for their engagement. Further, Kezar noted that there is an implicit assumption in NSSE of faculty being part of a stable college community. Questions about seeing faculty members outside of class, she said, don't necessarily work when adjunct faculty members may lack offices or the ability to interact with students from one semester to the next. Kezar said that she thinks full-time adjunct faculty members may actually encourage more engagement than tenured professors because the adjuncts are focused on teaching and generally not on research. And she emphasized that concerns about the impact of part-time adjuncts on student engagement arise not out of criticism of those individuals, but of the system that assigns them teaching duties without much support. S
  • Gary Brown on 02 Nov 09
     
    Repeat of highlighted resource, but merits revisiting.
Gary Brown

Wise Men Gone: Stephen Toulmin and John E. Smith - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...63649

critical thinking

shared by Gary Brown on 26 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Toulmin, born in London in 1922, earned his undergraduate degree in 1942 from King's College, Cambridge, in mathematics and physics. After participating in radar research and intelligence work during World War II in England and at Allied headquarters in Germany, he returned to Cambridge, where he studied with Ludwig Wittgenstein, the greatest influence on his thought, earning his Ph.D. in moral philosophy in 1948.
  • Toulmin moved to the United States, where he taught at Brandeis, Michigan State, and Northwestern Universities and the University of Chicago before landing in 1993 at the University of Southern California.
  • Toulmin's first, most enduring contribution to keeping philosophy sensible came in his 1958 book, The Uses of Argument (Cambridge University Press). Deceptively formalistic on its surface because it posited a general model of argument, Toulmin's view, in fact, was better described as taxonomic, yet flexible. He believed that formal systems of logic misrepresent the complex way that humans reason in most fields requiring what philosophers call "practical reason," and he offered, accordingly, a theory of knowledge as warranted belief.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Toulmin rejected the abstract syllogistic logic, meant to produce absolute standards for proving propositions true, that had become fashionable in analytic philosophy. Instead he argued (in the spirit of Wittgenstein) that philosophers must monitor how people actually argue if the philosophers' observations about persuasion are to make any sense. Toulmin took jurisprudential reasoning as his chief example in The Uses of Argument, but he believed that some aspects of a good argument depend on the field in which they're presented, while others are "field invariant."
  • Toulmin's "central thesis is that every sort of argumentation can in principle claim rationality and that the criteria to be applied when determining the soundness of the argumentation depend on the nature of the problems to which the argumentation relates."
  • But Toulmin, trained in the hard sciences and mathematics himself, saw through the science worship of less-credentialed sorts. He didn't relent, announcing "our need to reappropriate the wisdom of the 16th-century humanists, and develop a point of view that combines the abstract rigor and exactitude of the 17th-century 'new philosophy' with a practical concern for human life in its concrete detail."
  • Toulmin declared its upshot: "From now on, permanent validity must be set aside as illusory, and our idea of rationality related to specific functions of ... human reason. ... For me personally, the outcome of 40 years of philosophical critique was thus a new vision of—so to speak—the rhetoric of philosophy."
  • Gary Brown on 26 Jan 10
     
    FYI, Toulmin was the primary influence on the first WSU Critical Thinking Rubric. (Carella was the other philosopher.)
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