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We should be very careful in thinking about whether we’re working on the right problems. If we don’t, that ties into the problem that we don’t have experimental evidence that could move us forward. We're trying to develop theories that we use to find out which are good experiments to make, and these are the experiments that we build.   We build particle detectors and try to find dark matter; we build larger colliders in the hope of producing new particles; we shoot satellites into orbit and try to look back into the early universe, and we do that because we hope there’s something new to find there. We think there is because we have some idea from the theories that we’ve been working on that this would be something good to probe. If we are working with the wrong theories, we are making the wrong extrapolations, we have the wrong expectations, we make the wrong experiments, and then we don’t get any new data. We have no guidance to develop these theories. So, it’s a chicken and egg problem. We have to break the cycle. I don’t have a miracle cure to these problems. These are hard problems. It’s not clear what a good theory is to develop. I’m not any wiser than all the other 20,000 people in the field.

I’m still asking myself the same question that I asked myself ten years ago: "What is going on in my community?" I work in the foundations of physics, and I see a lot of strange things happening there. When I look at the papers that are being published, many of them seem to be produced simply because papers have to be produced. They don’t move us forward in any significant way. I get the impression that people are working on them not so much because it’s what they’re interested in but because they have to produce outcomes in a short amount of time. They sit on short-term positions and have short-term contracts, and papers must be produced.

The field that I mostly work in is the foundations of physics, which is, roughly speaking, composed of cosmology, the foundations of quantum mechanics, high-energy particle physics, and quantum gravity. It’s a peculiar field because there hasn’t been new data for almost four decades, since we established the Standard Model of particle physics. There has been, of course, the Higgs particle that was discovered at the LHC in 2012, and there have been some additions to the Standard Model, but there has not been a great new paradigm change, as Kuhn would have put it. We’re still using the same techniques, and we’re still working with the same theories as we did in the 1970s.

Now consider that, according to the American Association of Community Colleges, about half of all freshmen and sophomores are enrolled at the nation's 1,300 two-year colleges, and many of those students transfer to four-year institutions. For a large percentage of people who earn bachelor's degrees, then, the liberal-arts portion of their education was acquired at a two-year college. Next, factor in all of the community-college students who enter the work force after earning two-year degrees or certificates, and whose only exposure to the liberal arts occurred in whatever core courses their programs required. The conclusion becomes obvious: Two-year colleges are among the country's leading providers of liberal-arts education, although they seldom get credit for that role.

Employers rank communication and analytical skills among the most important attributes they seek in new hires, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Perhaps those of us who teach those very skills at community colleges should embrace the integral role we play in preparing the nation's workers rather than rejecting the idea of work-force development as somehow beneath us.

More important, this new perspective could have a positive effect on student success. If we come to see ourselves as preparing students not just for transfer but ultimately for the work force, students may be more likely to understand the relevance of the skills that we teach them and better able to use those skills for some purpose other than just getting a passing grade.

a new P2PU course that I am facilitating, Crowdsourced Art: A Participatory Exercise in Collaboration and Collective Creativity.

creativity should not be – and was never meant to be – the prerogative of a few chosen individuals.

This course will be an introduction to crowdsourced art, and an experiment in collective creativity. We’ll learn about crowdsourced art – the central topic of my PhD research – and we’ll work together to develop a children’s book about a snail called Hashtag and his adventures on the Internet.

There seems to be a common sentiment that online courses open up the door for students to become more mischievous and dishonest than they ever would dare in a more traditional classroom setting, but why is that the case?

Can he or she know for sure—even when students are in direct eyesight as they work through an exam—that nothing improper is happening? And what about the instructor who gives take-home exams? How are these any different from the kinds of exams that students in an online course might take?

Perhaps the key for all of us—regardless of where and how we teach our course—is to really rethink just what assessment means, because no matter where the class takes place, someone who wants to behave in a dishonest way will probably figure out how to do so.

at least 45 percent of undergraduates demonstrated "no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills in the first two years of college, and 36 percent showed no progress in four years."

What good does it do to increase the number of students in college if the ones who are already there are not learning much? Would it not make more sense to improve the quality of education before we increase the quantity of students?

students in math, science, humanities, and social sciences—rather than those in more directly career-oriented fields—tend to show the most growth in the areas measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment, the primary tool used in their study. Also, students learn more from professors with high expectations who interact with them outside of the classroom. If you do more reading, writing, and thinking, you tend to get better at those things, particularly if you have a lot of support from your teachers.

One effort I started in June was to announce a seed grant program to support individual faculty and small teams that wanted to try different ways of teaching their course. So the internal funding helps support students or assistants or web developers or other people to help faculty recraft all or part of their course in order to see if new approaches really help.

here isn't an actual fixed fund. We got about 40 applicants. Maybe 20 of those things we funded. Each one was up to $25,000. I think I'd like to continue that on a quarterly basis. And really, we're new at all this. So the scale of this effort will depend on the faculty input and the outcome of how effective we find this to be.

We now have the ability for individual faculty or programs on campuses to produce appealing online content with relatively low effort and distribute that wide

I compared my results against national data, and I began beating the averages.

the obvious struck me as interesting: even Rafael Nadal has a coach. Nearly every élite tennis player in the world does. Professional athletes use coaches to make sure they are as good as they can be.

They don’t even have to be good at the sport. The famous Olympic gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi couldn’t do a split if his life depended on it. Mainly, they observe, they judge, and they guide.

Over the last twenty years, technology has reorganized how we live, how we communicate, and how we learn.

Information development was slow.

A federal jury in Los Angeles on Tuesday ordered singers Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams to pay about $7.4 million to the family of Marvin Gaye, after finding the duo’s 2013 hit song “Blurred Lines” copied parts of Mr. Gaye’s “Got to Give it Up.”

only to compare “Blurred Lines” to the sheet music composition of “Got to Give it Up.” So the jury only heard a stripped down version of Mr. Gaye’s song, with his lyrics over a bass line and keyboards.

We can't know what the classroom will look or feel like. We do know, however, that most school districts are organized to deliver education that inhibits rather than encourages innovation. That needs to change.

like "Deeper Learning" as a way to convey both the acquisition of knowledge and the transference/application of knowledge along with developing skills employers find valuable -- collaboration, communications and critical thinking

t's time to move on and work together to develop education systems that meet students where they live and provide a relevant education to develop cognitive and non-cognitive skills

Udutu, a Canadian company, has a set of rich media interactive course development tools for creating courses on iPads and iPhones. Courses built with the Udutu authoring tool will play on iPads and iPhones because the interactions utilize DHTML or HTML5 as an option instead of Flash, and all the navigation and templates are HTML.

Articulate has several tools for publishing learning content to mobile devices, including Presenter ’09 and Screenr.

In theory, dual enrollment enables high school students to accrue college credits for very little cost and imbues them with a sense of confidence that they can complete college work. If students can succeed in college classes while still in high school, conventional wisdom holds, they will be more likely to matriculate at the postsecondary level.

The problem is that high school is not college and completion of a dual enrollment high school class is not always a guarantee that students have learned the material.