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Gary Brown

Change Management 101: A Primer - 1 views

shared by Gary Brown on 13 Jan 10 - Cached
  • To recapitulate, there are at least four basic definitions of change management:  1.      The task of managing change (from a reactive or a proactive posture) 2.      An area of professional practice (with considerable variation in competency and skill levels among practitioners) 3.      A body of knowledge (consisting of models, methods, techniques, and other tools) 4.      A control mechanism (consisting of requirements, standards, processes and procedures).
  • the problems found in organizations, especially the change problems, have both a content and a process dimension.
  • The process of change has been characterized as having three basic stages: unfreezing, changing, and re-freezing. This view draws heavily on Kurt Lewin’s adoption of the systems concept of homeostasis or dynamic stability.
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  • The Change Process as Problem Solving and Problem Finding
  • What is not useful about this framework is that it does not allow for change efforts that begin with the organization in extremis
  • this framework is that it gives rise to thinking about a staged approach to changing things.
  • Change as a “How” Problem
  • Change as a “What” Problem
  • Change as a “Why” Problem
  • The Approach taken to Change Management Mirrors Management's Mindset
  • People in core units, buffered as they are from environmental turbulence and with a history of relying on adherence to standardized procedures, typically focus on “how” questions.
  • To summarize: Problems may be formulated in terms of “how,” “what” and “why” questions. Which formulation is used depends on where in the organization the person posing the question or formulating the problem is situated, and where the organization is situated in its own life cycle. “How” questions tend to cluster in core units. “What” questions tend to cluster in buffer units. People in perimeter units tend to ask “what” and “how” questions. “Why” questions are typically the responsibility of top management.
  • One More Time: How do you manage change? The honest answer is that you manage it pretty much the same way you’d manage anything else of a turbulent, messy, chaotic nature, that is, you don’t really manage it, you grapple with it. It’s more a matter of leadership ability than management skill. The first thing to do is jump in. You can’t do anything about it from the outside. A clear sense of mission or purpose is essential. The simpler the mission statement the better. “Kick ass in the marketplace” is a whole lot more meaningful than “Respond to market needs with a range of products and services that have been carefully designed and developed to compare so favorably in our customers’ eyes with the products and services offered by our competitors that the majority of buying decisions will be made in our favor.” Build a team. “Lone wolves” have their uses, but managing change isn’t one of them. On the other hand, the right kind of lone wolf makes an excellent temporary team leader. Maintain a flat organizational team structure and rely on minimal and informal reporting requirements. Pick people with relevant skills and high energy levels. You’ll need both. Toss out the rulebook. Change, by definition, calls for a configured response, not adherence to prefigured routines. Shift to an action-feedback model. Plan and act in short intervals. Do your analysis on the fly. No lengthy up-front studies, please. Remember the hare and the tortoise. Set flexible priorities. You must have the ability to drop what you’re doing and tend to something more important. Treat everything as a temporary measure. Don’t “lock in” until the last minute, and then insist on the right to change your mind. Ask for volunteers. You’ll be surprised at who shows up. You’ll be pleasantly surprised by what they can do. Find a good “straw boss” or team leader and stay out of his or her way. Give the team members whatever they ask for — except authority. They’ll generally ask only for what they really need in the way of resources. If they start asking for authority, that’s a signal they’re headed toward some kind of power-based confrontation and that spells trouble. Nip it in the bud! Concentrate dispersed knowledge. Start and maintain an issues logbook. Let anyone go anywhere and talk to anyone about anything. Keep the communications barriers low, widely spaced, and easily hurdled. Initially, if things look chaotic, relax — they are. Remember, the task of change management is to bring order to a messy situation, not pretend that it’s already well organized and disciplined.
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    Note the "why" challenge and the role of leadership
S Spaeth

MIT Press Journals - International Journal of Learning and Media - Full Text - 0 views

  • Howard GardnerHobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education
  • As shown in table 1, we will be cognizant throughout of who the learners are, where they learn, how they learn, what are the principal curricula, and how competences are purveyed via the media of the time. The grid itself contains generalizations about the past and present, and speculation about the future, thus providing a broad portrait of changes over time. While we do not discuss each entry in the grid, we hope that it aids in thinking about learning in formal and informal settings.
  • Uniform schooling reflects both fairness and efficiency. It appears fair to treat all children in the same way; and it is also efficient, given classes of 20, 30, or even 60 charges in one room, sometimes arrayed by age, sometimes decidedly heterogeneous in composition.
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  • It would be an exaggeration to claim that formal education takes place without attention to what has been learned about the processes of successful learning, such as insights into student motivation, study habits, strategies, metacognition, and other approaches obtained from experience, or, more recently and systematically, from the psychological and cognitive sciences. But it would probably be accurate to say that such accumulated knowledge is used only spottily and sporadically in most parts of the world. Education—teaching and learning—changes very slowly.
  • Yet, nowhere are these ideas dominant. Indeed, until today, one might say that the European classroom models of the 19th century continue to hold sway: Teachers give out information, students are expected to master it with little help, and the awards of the culture during the years of school go to those who can crack the various literate and disciplinary codes.
  • One strategy might involve formal education playing a role in informal learning spaces (perhaps on the analogy of teaching hospitals), and learners' out-of-school passions finding a validating place in formal educational arenas.
  • NDM's vast resources, including the provision of many activities in which the user assumes a formative role, can complement constructivist approaches to education. As noted above, a motivated learner can investigate a wide variety of personal interests on his or her own.
  • At this point in time, deeply constructivist classrooms remain few and far between despite evidence that hands-on, problem-solving approaches in the classroom result in higher levels of student engagement, conceptual thinking, knowledge transfer, and retention (Scardamalia, Bereiter, and Lamon 1994; Bransford et al. 1999; Hmelo-Silver 2004; Meier 1995; Project Zero and Reggio Children 2001; Sizer 1984). But in an environment of “No Child Left Behind” and standardized tests linked to federal funding, the implementation of constructivist principles in the classroom can be considered a risky enterprise for public schools.
  • A web-based project at MIT, for instance, paired French language students with peers in France learning to speak English, and provided students an authentic opportunity to practice their language skills, learn online communication skills, and negotiate the implicit guidelines of a different culture (Cultura 2007).
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    In this article we argue that, after millennia of considering education (learning and teaching) chiefly in one way, we may well have reached a set of tipping points: Going forward, learning may be far more individualized, far more in the hands (and the minds) of the learner, and far more interactive than ever before. This constitutes a paradox: As the digital era progresses, learning may be at once more individual (contoured to a person's own style, proclivities, and interests) yet more social (involving networking, group work, the wisdom of crowds, etc.). How these seemingly contradictory directions are addressed impacts the future complexion of learning.
Nils Peterson

Edge 313 - 1 views

  • So what's the point? It's a culture. Call it the algorithmic culture. To get it, you need to be part of it, you need to come out of it. Otherwise, you spend the rest of your life dancing to the tune of other people's code. Just look at Europe where the idea of competition in the Internet space appears to focus on litigation, legislation, regulation, and criminalization.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      US vs Euro thinking about the Internet
  • TIME TO START TAKING THE INTERNET SERIOUSLY 1.  No moment in technology history has ever been more exciting or dangerous than now. The Internet is like a new computer running a flashy, exciting demo. We have been entranced by this demo for fifteen years. But now it is time to get to work, and make the Internet do what we want it to.
  • Wherever computers exist, nearly everyone who writes uses a word processor. The word processor is one of history's most successful inventions. Most people call it not just useful but indispensable. Granted that the word processor is indeed indispensable, what good has it done? We say we can't do without it; but if we had to give it up, what difference would it make? Have word processors improved the quality of modern writing? What has the indispensable word processor accomplished? 4. It has increased not the quality but the quantity of our writing — "our" meaning society's as a whole. The Internet for its part has increased not the quality but the quantity of the information we see. Increasing quantity is easier than improving quality. Instead of letting the Internet solve the easy problems, it's time we got it to solve the important ones.
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  • Modern search engines combine the functions of libraries and business directories on a global scale, in a flash: a lightning bolt of brilliant engineering. These search engines are indispensable — just like word processors. But they solve an easy problem. It has always been harder to find the right person than the right fact. Human experience and expertise are the most valuable resources on the Internet — if we could find them. Using a search engine to find (or be found by) the right person is a harder, more subtle problem than ordinary Internet search.
  • Will you store your personal information on your own personal machines, or on nameless servers far away in the Cloud, or both? Answer: in the Cloud. The Cloud (or the Internet Operating System, IOS — "Cloud 1.0") will take charge of your personal machines. It will move the information you need at any given moment onto your own cellphone, laptop, pad, pod — but will always keep charge of the master copy. When you make changes to any document, the changes will be reflected immediately in the Cloud. Many parts of this service are available already.
  • The Internet will never create a new economy based on voluntary instead of paid work — but it can help create the best economy in history, where new markets (a free market in education, for example) change the world. Good news! — the Net will destroy the university as we know it (except for a few unusually prestigious or beautiful campuses).
  • In short: it's time to think about the Internet instead of just letting it happen.
  • The traditional web site is static, but the Internet specializes in flowing, changing information. The "velocity of information" is important — not just the facts but their rate and direction of flow. Today's typical website is like a stained glass window, many small panels leaded together. There is no good way to change stained glass, and no one expects it to change. So it's not surprising that the Internet is now being overtaken by a different kind of cyberstructure. 14. The structure called a cyberstream or lifestream is better suited to the Internet than a conventional website because it shows information-in-motion, a rushing flow of fresh information instead of a stagnant pool.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      jayme will like this for her timeline portfolios
  • There is no clear way to blend two standard websites together, but it's obvious how to blend two streams. You simply shuffle them together like two decks of cards, maintaining time-order — putting the earlier document first. Blending is important because we must be able to add and subtract in the Cybersphere. We add streams together by blending them. Because it's easy to blend any group of streams, it's easy to integrate stream-structured sites so we can treat the group as a unit, not as many separate points of activity; and integration is important to solving the information overload problem. We subtract streams by searching or focusing. Searching a stream for "snow" means that I subtract every stream-element that doesn't deal with snow. Subtracting the "not snow" stream from the mainstream yields a "snow" stream. Blending streams and searching them are the addition and subtraction of the new Cybersphere.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      is Yahoo Pipes a precursor? Theron sent me an email, subject: "let me pipe that for you"
    • Nils Peterson
       
      Google Buzz might also be a ersion of this. It bring together items from your (multiple) public streams.
  • Internet culture is a culture of nowness. The Internet tells you what your friends are doing and the world news now, the state of the shops and markets and weather now, public opinion, trends and fashions now. The Internet connects each of us to countless sites right now — to many different places at one moment in time.
  • Once we understand the inherent bias in an instrument, we can correct it. The Internet has a large bias in favor of now. Using lifestreams (which arrange information in time instead of space), historians can assemble, argue about and gradually refine timelines of historical fact. Such timelines are not history, but they are the raw material of history.
  • Before long, all personal, familial and institutional histories will take visible form in streams.   A lifestream is tangible time:  as life flashes past on waterskis across time's ocean, a lifestream is the wake left in its trail. Dew crystallizes out of the air along cool surfaces; streams crystallize out of the Cybersphere along veins of time. As streams begin to trickle and then rush through the spring thaw in the Cybersphere, our obsession with "nowness" will recede
    • Nils Peterson
       
      barrett has been using lifestream. this guy claims to have coined it lonf ago...in any event, it is a very different picture of portfolio -- more like "not your father's" than like AAEEBL.
  • The Internet today is, after all, a machine for reinforcing our prejudices. The wider the selection of information, the more finicky we can be about choosing just what we like and ignoring the rest. On the Net we have the satisfaction of reading only opinions we already agree with, only facts (or alleged facts) we already know. You might read ten stories about ten different topics in a traditional newspaper; on the net, many people spend that same amount of time reading ten stories about the same topic. But again, once we understand the inherent bias in an instrument, we can correct it. One of the hardest, most fascinating problems of this cyber-century is how to add "drift" to the net, so that your view sometimes wanders (as your mind wanders when you're tired) into places you hadn't planned to go. Touching the machine brings the original topic back. We need help overcoming rationality sometimes, and allowing our thoughts to wander and metamorphose as they do in sleep.
Theron DesRosier

Stanford Study of Writing - Research - Sample Out of Class Texts - 0 views

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    Students consistently told us that "really good" or "the best" writing is writing that is performative, that makes something happen in the world; for more information about this aspect of our findings, please see our article "Performing Writing, Performing Literacy" Throughout the five years, students reported being deeply engaged with writing out of class: for these students, extracurricular writing is very important, often more important than any of the writing they are doing for classes. Of the thousands of out-of-class texts students contributed, here is a representative sample:
Gary Brown

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

  • 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.
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  • 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?"
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    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
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    Repeat of highlighted resource, but merits revisiting.
Nils Peterson

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

  • 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.
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  • 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.
Joshua Yeidel

In Many States, Public Higher Education Is Hitting a Point of 'Peril' - Government - Th... - 0 views

  • Nevada universities are preparing to close colleges, departments, and programs; demoralized professors are fleeing the state; and thousands of students are being shut out of classes at community colleges. The prospect of shutting down an entire institution remains a "distinct possibility" for the future, the chancellor says.
  • the resiliency of public financial support for American higher education is threatened, putting quality, capacity, and the underlying ability to meet student and societal needs at risk
  • "Higher education is changing by virtue of 1,000 painful cuts," said Stephen R. Portch, a former chancellor of the University System of Georgia. If public colleges cannot revamp their structures—such as by creating ways to measure learning more effectively and allowing capable students to earn degrees more quickly­—state tax systems will continue to limit spending on colleges in ways that will erode quality, Mr. Portch said, leaving faculty members to teach more and more students and take more and more unpaid furlough days, alongside fewer and fewer colleagues. "Business isn't coming back to normal this time," he says.
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    Nevada universities are preparing to close colleges, departments, and programs; demoralized professors are fleeing the state; and thousands of students are being shut out of classes at community colleges. The prospect of shutting down an entire institution remains a "distinct possibility" for the future, the chancellor says. The resiliency of public financial support for American higher education is threatened, putting quality, capacity, and the underlying ability to meet student and societal needs at risk.
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    Washington is not the hardest-hit state. Our work can be seen as having a direct bearing on this crisis.
Matthew Tedder

Small classes have long-term benefit for all students, research says - 2 views

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    Don't we start higher education with generally larger classes and work toward smaller ones? I am not sure, how much starting with smaller classes applies to higher ed.. but it's something to think differently about.
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    Lots of research in higher ed tends to debunk the belief that smaller classes without additional kinds of mediation will have little impact. Many have argued turning the curriculum in higher ed upside down. Small classes in first years, then when students have internalized new learning strategies they are more likely to get more out of the large lecture class and have the schema to contextualize and therefore learn more from the bombardment of facts that are most often lectures.
Gary Brown

What's Wrong With the American University System - Culture - The Atlantic - 3 views

  • But when the young superstar sat down with the department chair, he seemed to have only one goal: to land a tenure-track position that involved as many sabbaticals and as little teaching as possible
  • Hacker and his coauthor, New York Times writer Claudia Dreifus, use this cautionary tale to launch their new book, a fierce critique of modern academia called Higher Education? "The question mark in our title," they write, "is the key to this book." To their minds, little of what takes place on college campuses today can be considered either "higher" or "education."
  • They blame a system that favors research over teaching and vocational training over liberal arts.
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  • Tenure, they argue, does anything but protect intellectual freedom
  • Schools get status by bringing on professors who are star researchers, star scholars. That's all we really know about Caltech or MIT or Stanford. We don't really know about the quality of undergraduate teaching at any of these places. And it's the students who suffer.
  • Claudia and I were up at Harvard talking to students, and they said they get nothing from their classes, but that doesn't matter. They're smart already—they can breeze through college. The point is that they're going to be Harvard people when they come out.
  • So tenure is, in fact, the enemy of spontaneity, the enemy of intellectual freedom.
  • Good teaching can't be quantified at the college level.
  • or instance, Evergreen College, a sweet little state school in Olympia, Washington. We spent three days there and it was fantastic. They don't give grades, and they don't have academic departments. There are no faculty rankings. Almost all the classes we saw were taught by two professors—say, one from philosophy and one from psychology, teaching jointly on Henry and William James. Even though they don't give grades, the professors write out long evaluations for students. And the students have no problem getting into graduate schools.
  • I like Missouri Western State. It's a third-tier university, but the faculty realize they're going to stay there, they're not going to get hired away by other colleges, so they pitch in and take teaching seriously. At a school like that, you have a decent chance of finding a mentor who will write you a strong recommendation, better than you would at Harvard.
  • We believe the current criteria for admissions—particularly the SAT—are just so out of whack. It's like No Child Left Behind. It really is. It's one of the biggest crimes that's ever been perpetrated.
  • Professor X. He argued that some students just aren't ready for college. What's your view on that? Our view is that the primary obligation belongs to the teacher. Good teaching is not just imparting knowledge, like pouring milk into a jug. It's the job of the teacher to get students interested and turned on no matter what the subject is. Every student can be turned on if teachers really engage in this way. We saw it at Evergreen and other places that have this emphasis.
  • This is the hand I was dealt this semester. This is my job." Some people say to me, "Your students at Queens, are they any good?" I say, "I make them good." Every student is capable of college. I know some people have had difficult high school educations. But if you have good teachers who really care, it's remarkable how you can make up the difference.
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    In case you haven't already seen this.  While don't deny higher education needs attention, I personal wish there'd be far more attention paid to lower education and regressive education (my own term for, redressing and improving the education of all U.S. citizens).  We are in the process of destroying our country and our world.  Education as at the very heart of any solution.
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    More of the discussion in the news--the Atlantic
Gary Brown

Educators Mull How to Motivate Professors to Improve Teaching - Curriculum - The Chroni... - 4 views

  • "Without an unrelenting focus on quality—on defining and measuring and ensuring the learning outcomes of students—any effort to increase college-completion rates would be a hollow effort indeed."
  • If colleges are going to provide high-quality educations to millions of additional students, they said, the institutions will need to develop measures of student learning than can assure parents, employers, and taxpayers that no one's time and money are being wasted.
  • "Effective assessment is critical to ensure that our colleges and universities are delivering the kinds of educational experiences that we believe we actually provide for students," said Ronald A. Crutcher, president of Wheaton College, in Massachusetts, during the opening plenary. "That data is also vital to addressing the skepticism that society has about the value of a liberal education."
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  • But many speakers insisted that colleges should go ahead and take drastic steps to improve the quality of their instruction, without using rigid faculty-incentive structures or the fiscal crisis as excuses for inaction.
  • Handing out "teacher of the year" awards may not do much for a college
  • W.E. Deming argued, quality has to be designed into the entire system and supported by top management (that is, every decision made by CEOs and Presidents, and support systems as well as operations) rather than being made the responsibility solely of those delivering 'at the coal face'.
  • I see as a certain cluelessness among those who think one can create substantial change based on volunteerism
  • Current approaches to broaden the instructional repertoires of faculty members include faculty workshops, summer leave, and individual consultations, but these approaches work only for those relatively few faculty members who seek out opportunities to broaden their instructional methods.
  • The approach that makes sense to me is to engage faculty members at the departmental level in a discussion of the future and the implications of the future for their field, their college, their students, and themselves. You are invited to join an ongoing discussion of this issue at http://innovate-ideagora.ning.com/forum/topics/addressing-the-problem-of
  • Putting pressure on professors to improve teaching will not result in better education. The primary reason is that they do not know how to make real improvements. The problem is that in many fields of education there is either not enough research, or they do not have good ways of evaluationg the results of their teaching.
  • Then there needs to be a research based assessment that can be used by individual professors, NOT by the administration.
  • Humanities educatiors either have to learn enough statistics and cognitive science so they can make valid scientific comparisons of different strategies, or they have to work with cognitive scientists and statisticians
  • good teaching takes time
  • On the measurement side, about half of the assessments constructed by faculty fail to meet reasonable minimum standards for validity. (Interestingly, these failures leave the door open to a class action lawsuit. Physicians are successfully sued for failing to apply scientific findings correctly; commerce is replete with lawsuits based on measurement errors.)
  • The elephant in the corner of the room --still-- is that we refuse to measure learning outcomes and impact, especially proficiencies generalized to one's life outside the classroom.
  • until universities stop playing games to make themselves look better because they want to maintain their comfortable positions and actually look at what they can do to improve nothing is going to change.
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    our work, our friends (Ken and Jim), and more context that shapes our strategy.
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    How about using examples of highly motivational lecture and teaching techniques like the Richard Dawkins video I presented on this forum, recently. Even if teacher's do not consciously try to adopt good working techniques, there is at least a strong subconscious human tendency to mimic behaviors. I think that if teachers see more effective techniques, they will automatically begin to adopt adopt them.
Nils Peterson

Views: Changing the Equation - Inside Higher Ed - 1 views

  • But each year, after some gnashing of teeth, we opted to set tuition and institutional aid at levels that would maximize our net tuition revenue. Why? We were following conventional wisdom that said that investing more resources translates into higher quality and higher quality attracts more resources
  • But each year, after some gnashing of teeth, we opted to set tuition and institutional aid at levels that would maximize our net tuition revenue. Why? We were following conventional wisdom that said that investing more resources translates into higher quality and higher quality attracts more resource
  • But each year, after some gnashing of teeth, we opted to set tuition and institutional aid at levels that would maximize our net tuition revenue. Why? We were following conventional wisdom that said that investing more resources translates into higher quality and higher quality attracts more resources
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • year we strug
  • year we strug
  • those who control influential rating systems of the sort published by U.S. News & World Report -- define academic quality as small classes taught by distinguished faculty, grand campuses with impressive libraries and laboratories, and bright students heavily recruited. Since all of these indicators of quality are costly, my college’s pursuit of quality, like that of so many others, led us to seek more revenue to spend on quality improvements. And the strategy worked.
  • Based on those concerns, and informed by the literature on the “teaching to learning” paradigm shift, we began to change our focus from what we were teaching to what and how our students were learning.
  • No one wants to cut costs if their reputation for quality will suffer, yet no one wants to fall off the cliff.
  • When quality is defined by those things that require substantial resources, efforts to reduce costs are doomed to failure
  • some of the best thinkers in higher education have urged us to define the quality in terms of student outcomes.
  • Faculty said they wanted to move away from giving lectures and then having students parrot the information back to them on tests. They said they were tired of complaining that students couldn’t write well or think critically, but not having the time to address those problems because there was so much material to cover. And they were concerned when they read that employers had reported in national surveys that, while graduates knew a lot about the subjects they studied, they didn’t know how to apply what they had learned to practical problems or work in teams or with people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds.
  • Our applications have doubled over the last decade and now, for the first time in our 134-year history, we receive the majority of our applications from out-of-state students.
  • We established what we call college-wide learning goals that focus on "essential" skills and attributes that are critical for success in our increasingly complex world. These include critical and analytical thinking, creativity, writing and other communication skills, leadership, collaboration and teamwork, and global consciousness, social responsibility and ethical awareness.
  • despite claims to the contrary, many of the factors that drive up costs add little value. Research conducted by Dennis Jones and Jane Wellman found that “there is no consistent relationship between spending and performance, whether that is measured by spending against degree production, measures of student engagement, evidence of high impact practices, students’ satisfaction with their education, or future earnings.” Indeed, they concluded that “the absolute level of resources is less important than the way those resources are used.”
  • After more than a year, the group had developed what we now describe as a low-residency, project- and competency-based program. Here students don’t take courses or earn grades. The requirements for the degree are for students to complete a series of projects, captured in an electronic portfolio,
  • students must acquire and apply specific competencies
  • Faculty spend their time coaching students, providing them with feedback on their projects and running two-day residencies that bring students to campus periodically to learn through intensive face-to-face interaction
  • After a year and a half, the evidence suggests that students are learning as much as, if not more than, those enrolled in our traditional business program
  • As the campus learns more about the demonstration project, other faculty are expressing interest in applying its design principles to courses and degree programs in their fields. They created a Learning Coalition as a forum to explore different ways to capitalize on the potential of the learning paradigm.
  • a problem-based general education curriculum
  • At the very least, finding innovative ways to lower costs without compromising student learning is wise competitive positioning for an uncertain future
  • the focus of student evaluations has changed noticeably. Instead of focusing almost 100% on the instructor and whether he/she was good, bad, or indifferent, our students' evaluations are now focusing on the students themselves - as to what they learned, how much they have learned, and how much fun they had learning.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      gary diigoed this article. this comment shines another light -- the focus of the course eval shifted from faculty member to course & student learning when the focus shifted from teaching to learning
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    A must read spotted by Jane Sherman--I've highlighed, as usual, much of it.
Joshua Yeidel

Cheaters Never Win, at Least in Physics, a Professor Finds - Wired Campus - The Chronic... - 1 views

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    "The professor said he did find a way to greatly reduce cheating on homework in his class. He switched to a "studio" model of teaching, in which students sit in small groups working through tutorials on computers while professors and teaching assistants roam the room answering questions, rather than a traditional lecture. With lectures, he detected cheating on about 11 percent of homework problems, but now he detects copying on only about 3 percent of them. It might help that he shares findings from his study to his students, showing them that cheaters are much more likely to get C's and D's on exams than those who work out homework problems on their own. "
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    A physics professor figures out how to detect cheating on homework, (an assessment), triangulates with another assessment (OK, it's an exam) to determine the impact on student learning, and modifies his teaching practice, reducing cheating from 11% to 3%.
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    This is a happy ending and an interesting useful outcome from assessment. There is also a kind of "duh" quality to it, but that is not a problem. What I'm pondering, though, is the time and energy expended for a 7% gain. What I hope follows is further assessment of the gains for the other 93% relative to learning and attitude toward learning, school, and the subject matter.....
Gary Brown

Texas A&M's Faculty Ratings: Right and Wrong - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Edu... - 0 views

  • "Academia is highly specialized. We don't mean to be exclusive. We are a public-serving group of people. But at the same time, that public isn't well-enough aware of what we do and who we are to evaluate us."
  • But the think tank is correct that taxpayers deserve to know how their money is being spent. Public-university operating costs in Texas have gone up more than 60 percent in the last two decades, even after adjusting for inflation, and professors are among the state's highest-paid public employees. The state needs accountability measures, and they must be enforced by a party other than the faculty, who, it could easily be charged, have a conflict of interest. That's what Texas A&M got right.
  • Moosally is right about one thing: The public isn't well aware of what she and many of her colleagues do. But they should be. That is not to say that the public will be able to understand what goes on in all of the chemistry laboratories in Texas. But Moosally teaches English at a college that is not exactly tasked with performing cutting-edge research. Houston-Downtown's mission is to provide "educational opportunities and access to students from a variety of backgrounds including many first-generation college students."
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • No doubt there is useful research coming out of the university system. But plenty could be omitted without a great deal of detriment to students' education. For instance, Hugill's most recent contributions have included a chapter on "Transitions in Hegemony: A Theory Based on State Type and Technology" and the article "German Great-Power Relations in the Pages of Simplicissimus, 1896-1914." Moosally's master's thesis was titled "Resumptive Pronouns in Modern Standard Arabic: A Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar Account," and her current research interests include "interactions between grammar knowledge and writing abilities/interest [and] cross-linguistic patterns of agreement."
  • According to a 2004 survey by The Chronicle, 71 percent of Americans thought it was very important for colleges to prepare undergraduates for careers, while only 56 percent thought it was very important for colleges to "discover more about the world through research."
  • Only 35 percent of respondents felt it was very important for colleges to "provide useful information to the public on issues affecting their daily lives."
  • What Texas A&M officials have also missed is that faculty members must be held accountable for what they teach.
  • Professors receive more credit for teaching higher-level students. But again, that is backward. The idea should be to give senior faculty members more credit for teaching introductory classes.
  • Moreover, the metric entirely ignores teaching quality. Who cares how many "student hours" professors put in if they are not particularly good teachers anyway?
  • Ultimately there needs to be a systemic solution to the problem of teacher quality. Someone—a grown-up, preferably—needs to get into the classroom and watch what is being done there.
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    Another one in which the comments say more than I might--but the range of these accountability pieces underscore the work to do....
Gary Brown

The Public Be Damned - Innovations - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

  • A new generation comes along, and a new bunch of books critical of academia are starting to appear. Two recently out include Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus' Higher Education? and Mark Taylor's Crisis on Campus. We are told colleges have lost their way, have lost sight of what is important, namely shaping young minds and turning immature adolescents into responsible young adults. The last round of muckraking had a decidedly conservative cast to it, while this one is more conventionally left wing or apolitical.
  • But until there is mass indignation about the behavior of colleges--their obscene costs, their bloated bureaucracies, the scandalously low teaching loads, the tons trivial academic research, the corruption of intercollegiate sports
  • Reform requires threats of reduced funding from the financiers of higher education.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • the Academic Class has radically different perceptions that the public that funds higher education.
  • The public believes state universities have as their top mission the intellectual and leadership development of undergraduate students, while the Academic Class believes that research and graduate education is truly more important.
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    for the collection
S Spaeth

QuickTopic for Teachers - 0 views

  • "This free, web-based message board allows you to set up a web-based discussion board for your class where your students can post messages to one another, to students in another class, or to a parent "expert." These message areas are closed to outside users because they are set up by invitation."
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    QuickTopic free message boards and the Quick Doc Review collaborative online document review service are excellent tools for all kinds of teachers. Below are a few examples of citations by teaching resource sites that we've found. * "...this amazingly easy site will also send you emails of newly posted messages. ... Also check out the Document Review tool for posting text and eliciting feedback generously provided by QuickTopic" NC State University - Teaching Literature for Young Adults - Resources for teachers.
Gary Brown

Better Monitoring of Teacher-Training Programs Is Recommended - Government - The Chroni... - 0 views

shared by Gary Brown on 30 Apr 10 - Cached
    • Gary Brown
       
      Weird since most Education programs focus on...research mehtods...
  • "There's a lot of talk out there about alternative routes into teaching being very different from traditional routes, and we found that that distinction just is not meaningful," Ms. Lagemann said. Colleges of education vary widely in their methods, and many alternative-certification programs require participants to take classes at colleges and universities, she pointed out. In some cases, students pursuing a traditional education degree and students in an alternative-certification program are in the same class.
Matthew Tedder

A New School Teaches Students Through Videogames | Popular Science - 1 views

  •  
    Nothing more powerfully engages students than video games. It's just be very difficult finding ways to exploit this for educational purposes without destroying that affect in the process. My own best idea on the holy grail of a truly addictive game useful for very general and comprehensive educational purposes is an RTS game from an FPS perspective beginning the neolithic times, in a persistent world. A student would begin as a primitive man and gradually work his way toward inventing all the technologies of the modern world in building his civilization. He'd invent each tool by learning the physics and usefulness of it. Then he could add it to the village he founds to expand it. The village and eventual civilization would be, along with its annals, would be a e-portfolio (why the world needs to be persistent, not starting fresh each time the student logs on--he must always be building upon the foundations already established). The student would design the economic system, etc. and his "subjects" would follow the rules he stipulates. He could trade with the villages of others for items he might need to get ahead but cannot produce them himself until he learns the principles behind the technology. The population might be given needs also for entertainment, thus poetry, etc. for a more pacified people. Many ideas can be added within this framework. It's a student's own world in which he can feel safe and for which he should develop more interest as it continue to operation even when he is offline (to increase engagement). And being multiplayer can also provide the social aspect and teamwork for shared goals.... like say, building a trading route and defending it from bandits, investing materials for construction of a dam and irrigation... etc. I have a basic design to build the infrastructure for this. There wouldn't by chance be any grants out there that might apply?
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    I really like this game idea. Seems like it would be a monster of an undertaking not just for the game engine itself, but more so for the content. Let me know if you get this one off the ground.
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    I realized while writing this that it would be difficult to for education professionals to understand this concept. I should have known Shirey would get it. After so much experience in software, one starts to see two personality types--those who design software from a philosophical perspective and those who do so from an immediate, practical point of view. The philosophicals enjoy designing and writing new kinds of software. They are also the kind of people who tend to enjoy RTS games. The immediates struggle trying to write software from scratch, except for where they understand some pre-known framework for writing software of the particular class. They are more often relegated to debugging and tweaking software. These people tend to prefer FPS games. Systems administrators tend to fall more into this category, as well. It's a good complement, I think. I design and they maintain. Philosophicals tend not to be such good maintainers. Immediates tend to make good systems administrators, too. What this all suggests to me is that the only way non-philosophicals (the particular type I mean--don't use the term too generally) are unlikely to "get" the concept until the can see and use it. I would love to be proven wrong. I designed a framework that I think would make building it not so difficult or time consuming. But yes, building content is a chore. Therefore, the way I designed the framework is to allow run-time additions and modifications. That is, you can start simple and gradually add content over time. I think this makes sense in any case because as knowledge changes, so should educational content. Educational methods may also evolve. So I think it is very important that the mechanism for adding and editing be as easy to use as possible. This is where you want the input of non-software engineers.....even non-gamers.
Gary Brown

Free Online Courses, at a Very High Price - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

  • At this point in the openness conversation, the example you hear over and over is a little-known university in Utah that took the old model, and, in the words of its president, "blew that up." That is Western Governors University—a nonprofit, accredited online institution that typically charges $2,890 per six-month term—where students advance by showing what they've learned, not how much time they've spent in class. It's called competency-based education. It means you can fast-forward your degree by testing out of stuff you've already mastered. Some see a marriage of open content and competency-based learning as a model for the small-pieces-loosely-joined chain of cheaper, fragmented education. "We view the role of the university of the future as measuring and credentialing learning, not the source of all learning," says Robert W. Mendenhall, the president.
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    Wiley gets prime time along with challenges to open ed from the "Chronicle of Ancient Education," but blooming in the desert is an emergent species of education. This piece echoes cites Nils' has marked in emerging market nations, but through the Chronicle's lens.
Nils Peterson

OCW Consortium - Running courses openly - fewer problems and more benefits th... - 0 views

  • The idea of open teaching — opening access to the course materials and interaction to anyone, not just the enrolled students — seems foreign and a bit wacky to many professors and lecturers. More students sound like more work, less opportunity to engage with each individual student, and the practicalities of facilitating a diverse group of participants using online technologies seems daunting as well. It turns out that those who try it are often surprised that it’s much more rewarding and easier than they thought.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      Punch line is the last sentence. Theron is showing me violin & piano master classes on YouTube. Question of earning credit for the learning is also addressed in the master class context -- audition for positions, play competitions.
Gary Brown

Doctoral Students Think Teaching Assistantships Hold Them Back - Faculty - The Chronicl... - 0 views

  • Doctoral Students Think Teaching Assistantships Hold Them Back By Peter Schmidt A new survey of recent Ph.D. recipients has found that more than four out of five of those who received paid teaching assistantships believe that having them prolonged their doctoral education, though not enough to keep them from completing the programs in a timely manner.
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    a hot topic for us right now, and the comments are important.
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