CTLT and Friends

The vast majority of structured learning is content-rich and interaction-poor. That’s understandable in the context of a 20th century mindset and how learning professionals have been taught to develop ‘learning’ events. But it simply isn’t appropriate for today’s world.

Dr Ebbinghaus’ experiment revealed we suffer an exponential ‘forgetting curve’ and that about 50% of context-free information is lost in the first hour after acquisition if there is no opportunity to reinforce it with practice.

The need to become Interactivity Designers. That’s what they need to do.

Academic scientists value teaching as much as research — but universities apparently don't

Nature Education, last year conducted a survey of 450 university-level science faculty members from more than 30 countries. The first report from that survey, freely available at http://go.nature.com/5wEKij, focuses on 'postsecondary' university- and college-level education. It finds that more than half of the respondents in Europe, Asia and North America feel that the quality of undergraduate science education in their country is mediocre, poor or very poor.

77% of respondents indicated that they considered their teaching responsibilities to be just as important as their research — and 16% said teaching was more important.

What you get from a college, by contrast, varies wildly from department to department, professor to professor, and course to course. The idea implicit in college brands—that every course reflects certain institutional values and standards—is mostly a fraud. In reality, there are both great and terrible courses at the most esteemed and at the most denigrated institutions.

With a grant from the nonprofit Lumina Foundation for Education, physics and history professors from a range of Utah two- and four-year institutions are applying the "tuning" methods developed as part of the sweeping Bologna Process reforms in Europe.

The group also created "employability maps" by surveying employers of recent physics graduates—including General Electric, Simco Electronics, and the Air Force—to find out what knowledge and skills are needed for successful science careers.

Six weeks after vowing to cull the bad apples from the for-profit higher-education sector, some Senate Democrats are asking whether the whole barrel is spoiled, and largely blaming accreditors for the rot.

Pressed by lawmakers, Mr. Kutz faulted the Education Department, saying it has failed in its oversight of the sector.

"Consistent oversight is going to be necessary," he said.

Not everybody is happy when I say words have different meanings for each person that uses them. But it's hard to escape that conclusion when you actually look at language.

Geoffrey K. Pullum writes, "The people who think clarity involves lack of ambiguity, so we have to strive to eliminate all multiple meanings and should never let a word develop a new sense... they simply don't get it about how language works, do they?" A good lesson for the Semantic Web people, no?

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!

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.

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.

Here's what they found: In 1961, the average full-time college student spent 40 hours per week on academic work (that's time in class and studying). In 2003, it was 27 hours. The authors figure that 21st-century students spend an average of 10 hours fewer every week studying than their 1961 counterparts. Over the course of a four-year college career, that would add up to something like 1,500 fewer hours spent hitting the books.

the difference isn't caused by more people stretching out their college experience. Also, according to the authors, the difference can't be explained by the fact that more students have jobs or by the fact that the makeup of the student body has changed since the sixties. From the paper: "The large decline in academic time investment is an important pattern its own right, and one that motivates future research into underlying causes."In other words, we don't know why. 

Here's the abstract for the working paper, which was written by Philip S. Babcock and Mindy Marks

Students give the same responses on paper as on online course evaluations but are less likely to respond to online surveys, according to a recent study.

The only meaningful difference between student ratings completed online and on paper was that students who took online surveys gave their professors higher ratings for using educational technology to promote learning.

Seventy-eight percent of students enrolled in classes with paper surveys responded to them, but  only 53 percent of students enrolled in classes with online surveys responded.

Educational institutions are the exception: They will get Ning for free due to the support of an unannounced sponsor.