CTLT and Friends

State and local governments: Showcase your social media adoption and see what your peers are doing. Government and elected officials: Promote your social media activities and increase your followers. Citizens: Get connected with your local government officials and activities.  Get started now by searching for your city, your state, your county, or a government official!

n this paper, we revisit these findings by comparing the practices of discursive production and participation among top U.S. political blogs on the left, right, and center during Summer, 2008. Based on qualitative coding of the top 155 political blogs, our results reveal significant cross-ideological variations along several important dimensions. Notably, we find evidence of an association between ideological affiliation and the technologies, institutions, and practices of participation across political blogs. Sites on the left adopt more participatory technical platforms; are comprised of significantly fewer sole-authored sites; include user blogs; maintain more fluid boundaries between secondary and primary content; include longer narrative and discussion posts; and (among the top half of the blogs in our sample) more often use blogs as platforms for mobilization as well as discursive production.

I started to wish that I had the opportunity (or was aware of the opportunity) to participate in more general, broad-based teaching workshops. I've done the disciplinary thing for years; something new could definitely push me in productive ways.

But, in my career at least, disciplinary teaching practices have dominated my training, and I've started to look at changing that.

Professors who are heavily focused on learning how to improve their teaching stand apart as a very distinct subset of college faculties, according to a new study examining how members of the professoriate spend their time.

those who are focused on tackling societal problems stand apart as their own breed. Other faculty members, it suggests, are pretty much mutts, according to its classification scheme.

1,000 full-time faculty members at four-year colleges and universities gathered as part of the Faculty Professional Performance Survey administered by Mr. Braxton and two Vanderbilt doctoral students in 1999. That survey had asked the faculty members how often they engaged in each of nearly 70 distinct scholarly activities, such as experimenting with a new teaching method, publishing a critical book review in a journal, or being interviewed on a local television station. All of the faculty members examined in the new analysis were either tenured or tenure-track and fell into one of four academic disciplines: biology, chemistry, history, or sociology.

For students, the act of filling out those forms is sometimes a fleeting, half-conscious moment. But for instructors whose careers can live and die by student evaluations, getting back the forms is an hour of high anxiety

"They have destroyed higher education." Mr. Crumbley believes the forms lead inexorably to grade inflation and the dumbing down of the curriculum.

Texas enacted a law that will require every public college to post each faculty member's student-evaluation scores on a public Web site.

The recognition that a college that offered credit for experiential learning could stand with traditional institutions, while commonplace today, was a leap of faith then. Empire State had to demonstrate its validity through results—educational outcomes—and on that score, it stood tall. In fact, focusing on outcomes, as we did, led many of us to question how well traditional institutions would measure up!

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.

The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone still awake. Those types of PowerPoint presentations, Dr. Hammes said, are known as “hypnotizing chickens.”

Drawing from two years of experience offering the 'Connectivism and Connective Knowledge' course in a distributed online environment, the National Research Council's Personal Learning Environment (PLE) project is expanding the model to courses outside the discipline of education. Specifically, Stephen Downes and Rita Kop - who have both offered Critical Thinking courses through more traditional online and offline means, are adapting this material to the distributed model. The purpose of this course is two-fold. First, the design of the course is based on an understanding of the skills and capacities required to effectively learn using a PLE. Second, the offering of the course is intended to test whether learners can employ a PLE environment in order to develop those capacities. Thus, combined, the objectives of the course are intended to demonstrate whether learning may be self-directed with a PLE, or whether an additional pedagogy is required prior to the use of a PLE. Research will form an integral component of the course.

Community as curriculum is not meant as a simple alternative to the package version of learning. It is, rather, meant to point to the learning that takes place on top of that model and to point to the strategies for continuing learning throughout a career. There is a base amount of knowledge that is required to be able to enter a community, and there are methods for acquiring the specific kinds of literacy needed to learn within a specific community.

Sunstein’s fear was that the Internet might lead to a more ghettoized, polarized and insular electorate.

Yet new research complicates this picture

Assessment Quickies #1: What Are Student Learning Outcomes?