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Gary Brown

The Profession: More Pressure on Faculty Members, From Every Direction - Almanac of Hig... - 2 views

shared by Gary Brown on 25 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Changes in the American professoriate’s employment patterns and types, demographics, and work life are the greatest we have seen in over half a century.
  • But averages obscure the widening salary ranges on campuses, particularly between presidents and faculty members
  • The drive toward institutional prestige that most professors consider a high priority at their four-year institutions has intensified the focus on research there.
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  • Some faculty members, permanent and contingent, are expected to cover their full salaries with grants. With the tenure bottleneck narrowing, junior faculty members are often advised to focus on research, do a reasonable job of teaching, and avoid service.
  • Faculty members report spending more than half of their time on teaching and classroom-related activities. Professors are increasingly expected to use new technologies in both distance education and on-campus courses, and to be more systematic about assessing student learning at both course and program levels.
  • The scholarship of teaching and learning, in which faculty members examine the effects of their teaching strategies, is spreading; the advent of conferences and publications marks its increasing acceptance as serious scholarship.
  • The “corporatization” of institutional administrations in the face of fiscal distress and severe budget cuts imperils faculty governance, which falls increasingly to the shrinking number of permanent tenured faculty members.
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    New realities rendered starkly.
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    Note: A "premium content" article -- you must be a paid subscriber to see it, not just a registered site user.
Joshua Yeidel

Blog U.: The Challenge of Value-Added - Digital Tweed - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

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    Quoting a 1984 study, "higher education should ensure that the mounds of data already collected on students are converted into useful information and fed back [to campus officials and faculty] in ways that enhance student learning and lead to improvement in programs, teaching practices, and the environment in which teaching and learning take place." The example given is an analysis of test scores in the Los Angeles Unified School District by the LA Times.
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    It's going to take some assessment (and political) smarts to deflect the notion that existing data can be re-purposed easily to assess "value-added".
Joshua Yeidel

Teaching for America - NYTimes.com - 1 views

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    Tom Friedman reports (approvingly) on Arne Duncan's plans to upgrade the teaching profession.  Any gueses how this might apply to "higher" education?
Joshua Yeidel

inventio: Randy Bass Text - 0 views

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    Changing the status of the problem in teaching from terminal remediation to ongoing investigation is precisely what the movement for a scholarship of teaching is all about.
Corinna Lo

IJ-SoTL - A Method for Collaboratively Developing and Validating a Rubric - 1 views

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    "Assessing student learning outcomes relative to a valid and reliable standard that is academically-sound and employer-relevant presents a challenge to the scholarship of teaching and learning. In this paper, readers are guided through a method for collaboratively developing and validating a rubric that integrates baseline data collected from academics and professionals. The method addresses two additional goals: (1) to formulate and test a rubric as a teaching and learning protocol for a multi-section course taught by various instructors; and (2) to assure that students' learning outcomes are consistently assessed against the rubric regardless of teacher or section. Steps in the process include formulating the rubric, collecting data, and sequentially analyzing the techniques used to validate the rubric and to insure precision in grading papers in multiple sections of a course."
Gary Brown

You Only Get This Type of Education in Class - Mythic Attributes of the Lecture ~ Steph... - 0 views

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    You Only Get This Type of Education in Class - Mythic Attributes of the Lecture Good discussion of the use of the lecture in online learning, both on whether it is advisable, and on how to approach the idea. Given that the lecture has such a bad reputation, why do I produce so many of them? What I have found is that I do some of my best thinking though speaking. Giving a talk forces me to reconceptualize my thoughts. So for me, a lecture is inevitably a learning experience. As for my audience, well, I have often maintained that they learn very little from the content of the lecture, and much more from my mannerisms and approach. A lecture (like a demonstration) isn't a learning event (except for the speaker), it's an enabling event, a celebration of what we already know and believe. Lectures challenge, invigorate, enliven, enable and enlighten, but they do not teach (much). Experience teaches. David Jones, The Weblog of (a) David Jones, June 9, 2009. [Link] [Tags: Online Learning, Experience] [Previous][Next]
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    This is a provocative description of the lecture
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.
Theron DesRosier

www.courseportflio.org - an international repository for documenting student learning - 0 views

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    Home page: "The Peer Review of Teaching Project (PRTP) provides faculty with a structured and practical model that combines inquiry into the intellectual work of a course, careful investigation of student understanding and performance, and faculty reflection on teaching effectiveness. Begun in 1994, the PRTP has engaged hundreds of faculty members from numerous universities. In 2005, the project was awarded a TIAA-CREF Theodore M. Hesburgh Award Certificate of Excellence in recognition of it being an exceptional faculty development program designed to enhance undergraduate student achievement. "
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.
Gary Brown

Why Liberal Arts Need Career Services - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 1 views

shared by Gary Brown on 04 Nov 09 - Cached
  • I have consulted with deans who say they really want to improve their career-services programs—but no, they can't offer career courses for credit, their professors aren't interested in supervising internships, and they must tread lightly around anything that might be seen by the faculty as encroaching vocationalism.
  • I've also heard from numerous professors, "Our good students go to graduate school. We don't need to focus on those who are looking for jobs."
  • I have also been told, "The professors are too busy teaching to worry about how the students will use their knowledge. It's not their job." And I've had more than one faculty member confess to me that they really aren't sure how what they teach applies in the nonacademic world.
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  • There's no way to predict which moments of a liberal-arts education will be directly relevant in the workplace, but it's imperative that students know such moments occur frequently, and that the skills and knowledge they're learning are far from obscure and irrelevant.
  • We use visual-thinking techniques to help students connect the dots between their academic experience and the workplace.
  • But the opportunity to teach a career course that directly draws from a liberal-arts curriculum is not offered at many institutions. Instead, if courses are offered at all, they typically focus on basic job-finding skills like résumé writing and networking, serving to reinforce professors' worst beliefs about career advising: that it distracts and detracts from the educational process.
  • Professors, academic deans, and career-center staff members must work together. Learn what is happening in each other's shops. And don't have just a superficial conversation about services—instead, engage in a conversation about what is truly distinct about the curriculum, what students are learning, and how to make employers care.
  • Career-center personnel should find out what employers are seeking and what they say about your students.
  • If more liberal-arts faculties and career experts get together, watch out—the results could be amazing.
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    As we work with CLA, perhaps inviting Careers Services to join as independent reviewers will help the effort
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    What seems to be missing here is inclusion of employers directly into the learning community. If professors "aren't sure how what they teach applies in the nonacademic world", get somebody directly involved who is, as one voice in the conversation, anyway. Of course this will be challenging to the professoriate, but it could also be revitalizing.
Ashley Ater Kranov

Teaching Experiment Decodes a Discipline - Teaching - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

  • Several years ago, a small group of faculty members at Indiana University at Bloomington decided to do something about the problem. The key, they concluded, was to construct every history course around two core skills of their discipline: assembling evidence and interpreting it.
  • The historians at Indiana have tried to help students through several specific bottlenecks by dividing large concepts into smaller, evidence-related steps. (See the box below.)
  • "Students come into our classrooms believing that history is about stories full of names and dates," says Arlene J. Díaz, an associate professor of history at Indiana who is one of four directors of the department's History Learning Project, as the redesign effort is known. But in courses, "they discover that history is actually about interpretation, evidence, and argument."
Gary Brown

A New Digital Repository for Sociology Instructors - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Hi... - 1 views

shared by Gary Brown on 27 May 10 - Cached
  • the leaders of the American Sociological Association—believe that it also helps if instructors bring to their lecture halls a well-designed syllabus and a decent idea of how to engage students with the material.
  • Materials will be assessed by peer-review committees for their fidelity to a set of principles of high-quality teaching that have been identified by the association.
  • Our goal for the peer-review process is not only to sort out which materials belong in the repository, but also to promote a conversation within the discipline about effective teaching and learning
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  • include them in their tenure-and promotion portfolios.
  • As Ernest Boyer said, faculty reward systems will need to be revised in order for faculty members to truly be rewarded on the basis of their scholarship of teaching."
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    Here's a repository in the making, and argument we have been making.
Matthew Tedder

National Teaching Plan - 2 views

shared by Matthew Tedder on 02 Aug 10 - Cached
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    National Teaching Plan
Joshua Yeidel

5 Non-Western Teaching Strategies - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 1 views

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    Methods and attitudes from other cultures can enliven the classroom.
Joshua Yeidel

Using Clickers to Facilitate Peer Review in a Writing Seminar - ProfHacker - The Chroni... - 0 views

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    "Teaching a writing seminar has also provided me with an opportunity to use clickers in ways that are new to me. "
Joshua Yeidel

Wired Campus: Randy Bass and Bret Eynon: We Need R&D for Teaching With Techno... - 0 views

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    Bass and Eynon identify "four shifts in thnking and action" to address the problem that there are "no established practices [in teaching and learning] that enable us to turn the individual breakthrough into something more than idiosyncratic.'
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    Sums it up nicely Josh... Thanks
Nils Peterson

2009 Annual Meeting | Conference Program - 0 views

  • 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
       
      need to get to these guys with our harvesting gradebook ideas...
    • Nils Peterson
       
      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
       
      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
       
      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.
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  • 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
       
      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
       
      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
       
      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
       
      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
       
      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.
Theron DesRosier

Netvibes : Washington State University Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology - A... - 0 views

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    Bookmarks of the Center for Teaching Learning and Technology at Washington State University.
Theron DesRosier

Sugata Mitra shows how kids teach themselves | Video on TED.com - 0 views

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    "Speaking at LIFT 2007, Sugata Mitra talks about his Hole in the Wall project. Young kids in this project figured out how to use a PC on their own -- and then taught other kids. He asks, what else can children teach themselves?" This reminds me, in some ways, of the model John Seeley Brown used at Xerox.
Theron DesRosier

We Are Media » About Project Background - 0 views

  • The We Are Media Project is a community of people from nonprofits who are interested in learning and teaching about how social media strategies and tools can enable nonprofit organizations to create, compile, and distribute their stories and change the world. Curated by NTEN, the community will work in a networked way to help identify the best existing resources, people, and case studies that will give nonprofit organizations the knowledge and resources they need to be the media. The community will help identify and point to the best how-to guides and useful resources that cover all aspects of creating, aggregating, and distributing social media. The resulting curriculum which will live on this wiki and will also cover important organizational adoption issues, strategy, ROI analysis, as well as the tools.
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    The We Are Media Project is a community of people from nonprofits who are interested in learning and teaching about how social media strategies and tools can enable nonprofit organizations to create, compile, and distribute their stories and change the world.\nCurated by NTEN, the community will work in a networked way to help identify the best existing resources, people, and case studies that will give nonprofit organizations the knowledge and resources they need to be the media. The community will help identify and point to the best how-to guides and useful resources that cover all aspects of creating, aggregating, and distributing social media. The resulting curriculum which will live on this wiki and will also cover important organizational adoption issues, strategy, ROI analysis, as well as the tools.
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    Thanks Stephen, great bookmark. We are thinking about Change.gov right now. Wondering how we make it less broadcast and more 2.0.
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