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Chris Long

Composition 1.01: How Email Can Change the Way Professors Teach - James Somers - Techno... - 0 views

  • Ericsson argues that to become an expert at something you have to log about 10,000 hours of practice, but not just any practice -- a kind of practice that includes an "active search for methods to improve performance," immediate informative feedback, structure, supervision from an expert, and "close attention to every detail of performance 'each one done correctly, time and again, until excellence in every detail becomes a firmly ingrained habit.'"
  • It's no wonder that so many students struggle with writing: you're never really shown how to do it.
  • that their guidance, however individuated, isn't fast enough
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Or as John Whittier-Ferguson puts it, "It's moving at a pace that's not at all like the pace of someone actually working on a piece of writing."
  • With e-mail, Whittier-Ferguson didn't have to so much invent a wonderfully responsive critical machine as become one: sit at his computer; encourage students to send him work in progress; respond to it quickly.
  • "That's what it's all about," he says. "They rise to the level at which I'm engaging."
  • But above all it's deliberate practice: goal-directed, supervised.
  • Of course that may be the answer: the practice might be uncommon because professors just don't want to see that much student writing or spend that much time critiquing it
  • But it's a shame, too, because that could be all it takes to get a few of those students to take seriously the idea that they have something to say, that saying it right matters; to show them how hard that is and to give them a taste of the labor; to rope them into the delightfully painful business of trying and trying to write.
Chris Long

Iain D. Thomson - Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education -... - 0 views

  • This impressive study argues that Heidegger's deconstruction of metaphysics as ontotheology, when suitably understood, provides the key to his misunderstood critique of technology and to the underappreciated potential of his thought to contribute to efforts to respond to "our own growing crisis in higher education."
  • the potential to resolve the current pedagogical crisis
    • Chris Long
       
      Are crises things to be resolved?
  • Thomson expands insightfully on the awakening of a "fundamental comportment" involved here, more a "hearkening" than a "resoluteness" or "releasement" (a consideration of die Grundstimmung der Verhaltenheit might be helpful here; see p. 161 n. 21), on the senses of negative and positive ontological freedom entailed by this vision of education, and not least on Heidegger's conception of teaching as (in contrast to instruction) a matter of learning, specifically, learning to let students learn.
    • Chris Long
       
      Learning to let students learn ... Yes, easy to say, hard to do.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • "That is, the university community would be unified both by its shared commitment to forming excellent individuals (where excellence is understood in terms of the ontological perfectionism outlined earlier) and by the shared recognition on the part of this community that its members are committed to the same important pursuit . . . not simply of understanding what is, but of recognizing, contesting, and seeking to transcend the underlying ontotheology that generates the ontological presuppositions implicitly guiding the various fields of knowledge" (177).
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