CTLT and Friends

How many teachers are this enthusiastic, well-prepared, or facilitated? What principles are responsible for the inspirational power of this presentation? Should inspiration be part of education?

but it is still a lecture, and only a few of us, about 2%, learn well from even great lectures. The trick is to design activities that help learners discover this. But the fact that 2% do learn to mimic the lecture, as you note, with more or less success, is precisely why lecture is so difficult to supplant. That 2% represents the faculty and those who lead the institutions they work in......

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.'

Sums it up nicely Josh... Thanks

In this landmark book, Scott Page redefines the way we understand ourselves in relation to one another.The Differenceis about how we think in groups--and how our collective wisdom exceeds the sum of its parts. Why can teams of people find better solutions than brilliant individuals working alone? And why are the best group decisions and predictions those that draw upon the very qualities that make each of us unique? The answers lie in diversity--not what we look like outside, but what we look like within, our distinct tools and abilities. The Differencereveals that progress and innovation may depend less on lone thinkers with enormous IQs than on diverse people working together and capitalizing on their individuality.

We (Jayme Jacobson, Nils Peterson, and I) have been talking about this a lot lately. This article reminded me of another article in the Harvard Business Review by Lakhani and Jeppesen on crowdsourcing. They found that successful Innocentive solvers often worked in disciplines removed from the posted problem. "Radical innovations often happen at the intersections of disciplines…The more diverse the problem solving population, the more likely the problem will be solved." Lakhani and Jeppesen May 2007 Harvard Business Review Thanks Stephen

It is heating up again

Forwarded from a colleague.

Read it and weep.

I think this reader comment captures it: Right--it's not about the students learning anything--it's about YOUR learning, and you let them come along for the ride. How could you fit that into learning objectives? Please. This is why people think all of us are navel-gazing, self-indulgent mopes.

Doesn't it depend on the nature of the learning objectives? I mean, you could list a set of facts and skills levels students should have attained. You could specify a number of discrete facts and skills to be attained within certain areas of the course curriculum. Or, you could do something more creative such as measure the number of claims with evidence in student writing that is within the subject matter of the course to demonstrate a level of articulation.

At CTLT, I never did become fully settled on certain subject types though, like mathematics and natural sciences. Depending on the subject matter, specific facts like natural laws and methods must be discretely learned and learned perfectly. And, indeed in some subjects, there is such a thing as perfect understanding where anything even slightly less is failure to learn. This is rigid, yes.. But I do not see the alternative in some subjects and teachers of those subjects certainly don't either. I do think that sometimes there can be more flexibility in the order of learning of discrete fundamentals. Learning out of order often convinced me of the importance of things skipped, causing me to go back and study more comprehensively on my own, in my own time, and according to my own interest.

Variations on a theme, but notable now in particular as we debate general education reform.

the outsourcing loop becomes a diatribe against rubrics...

It's hard to see how either outsourced assessment or harvested assessment can be accomplished convincingly without rubrics. How else can the standards of the teacher be enacted by the grader? From there we are driven to consider how, in the absence of a rubric, the standards of the teacher can be enacted by the student. Is it "ethical" to use the Potter Stewart standard: "I'll know it when I see it"?

Yes, who is the "priest" in the preceding rendering--one who shares principles of quality (rubrics), or one who divines a grade a proclaims who is a "real, viable, educated adult"?

an interesting post about Google Wave and academic document collaboration

This is a fun one to look at and makes a few good points.

Another resource particularly useful for science faculty

a useful resource for our partners here at WSU from a new Cal State partner.

A discussion that coincides with reports this morning that again homeland security had the data; they just failed to understand the meaning of the data.

it is worth a watch, and as a resource

This is well done - many potential applications - a self check, for one, and for use in the myriad of teaching situations we find ourselves in both in work and outside of work.

"It is hoped that, in some small way, this blog can both engage and challenge faculty and administrators alike to become more intentional in their program assessment efforts, creating systematic and efficient processes that actually have the likelihood of improving student learning while honoring faculty time."

As recommended by Ashley. Apparently Dr. Rogers' blog is just starting up, so you can "get in on the ground floor".

Communities identify authentic problems that are inter-disciplinary and reach beyond the definition of the course.

Hey Stephen, I am having trouble opening this link. Can you send another?

CLA debunking, but the best item may be the forthcoming book on "limited learning on College Campuses."

"Micheal Scriven and I spent more than a few years trying to apply his multiple-ranking item tool (a very robust and creative tool, I recommend it to others when the alternative is multiple-choice items) to the assessment of critical thinking in health care professionals. The result might be deemed partially successful, at best. I eventually abandoned the test after about 10,000 administrations because the scoring was so complex we could not place it in non-technical hands."

In comments on an article about CLA, Scriven's name comes up...

A featured article in Educause Quarterly contains this quote: "The importance of authentic, web-enabled learner assessment is clearly behind Caulfield's notion of "loosely coupled assessment" (first coined in a blog post by Mike Caulfield July 31, 2007) and WSU's harvesting gradebook project, with which we claim shared intellectual roots."