Group items tagged

Begin by examining your curriculum and identifying a topic that you think will be interesting to students.

Are in-depth group discussions provided during class time? Are students coached to question their thinking processes and those of their classmates? Are students afforded opportunities to evaluate their progress regularly? Are students encouraged to pose questions regularly in class? Are students provided with guides to help them reflect on their thinking (such as Bloom’s Taxonomy)? Do class projects engage students in analysis, synthesis, and evaluation? Are students given opportunities to consider various opinions and to justify their own beliefs?

Table 1 Bloom's Cognitive Taxonomy Competence Description Question/Prompt Knowledge Dates, events, formulas, other facts When did the United States become an independent country from England? What is the formula for area? Comprehension Recognize meaning, sequence, events, interpret information, compare ideas, make inferences, predict ideas What is the author's purpose? How are these numbers related? Is water of sunshine more critical to plant life? Human life? Application Use of information and concepts to solve problems Using your knowledge of calories and your physical makeup, calculate how much energy you must exert to lose three pounds per month. Demonstrate your understanding of how to create a Web site. Analysis Recognize patterns, parts, components Considering the stock market, examine which investments were the most lucrative this quarter. Organize these games by level of difficulty. Synthesis Use of information to create a new system, generalize, draw conclusions When did the United States become an independent country from England? What is the formula for area? Evaluation Assess concepts, weigh opinions for subjectivity, select items, judge Which type of dog would be best suited for your family, given your lifestyle and housing? Which local newspaper is written the most objectively?

Facilitating motivation involves a multitude of processes, seven of which will be examined here.1. Challenge2. Choice3. Control4. Caring5. Curiosity6. Competence7. Connectedness

copyright

also meant to protect the rights of users in order to promote creativity, innovation, and the spread of knowledge

not on how much of a piece of copyrighted work that we use, but instead on the ways in which we use it.

In his deliberately provocative — and deeply nihilistic — new book, “Reality Hunger,” the onetime novelist David Shields asserts that fiction “has never seemed less central to the culture’s sense of itself.”

Mr. Shields’s book consists of 618 fragments, including hundreds of quotations taken from other writers like Philip Roth, Joan Didion and Saul Bellow — quotations that Mr. Shields, 53, has taken out of context and in some cases, he says, “also revised, at least a little — for the sake of compression, consistency or whim.”

It’s also a question, as Mr. Lanier, 49, astutely points out in his new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” of how online collectivism, social networking and popular software designs are changing the way people think and process information, a question of what becomes of originality and imagination in a world that prizes “metaness” and regards the mash-up as “more important than the sources who were mashed.”

They are more diligent than older adults, however, in trying to protect themselves. In a new study to be released this month, the Pew Internet Project has found that people in their 20s exert more control over their digital reputations than older adults, more vigorously deleting unwanted posts and limiting information about themselves. “Social networking requires vigilance, not only in what you post, but what your friends post about you,” said Mary Madden, a senior research specialist who oversaw the study by Pew, which examines online behavior. “Now you are responsible for everything.”

manipulated positive and negative expectations of students while their brains were scanned and tested their performance on cognitive tasks. To induce expectations of success, she primed college students with words such as smart, intelligent and clever just before asking them to perform a test. To induce expectations of failure, she primed them with words like stupid and ignorant. The students performed better after being primed with an affirmative message. Examining the brain-imaging data, Bengtsson found that the students' brains responded differently to the mistakes they made depending on whether they were primed with the word clever or the word stupid. When the mistake followed positive words, she observed enhanced activity in the anterior medial part of the prefrontal cortex (a region that is involved in self-reflection and recollection). However, when the participants were primed with the word stupid, there was no heightened activity after a wrong answer. It appears that after being primed with the word stupid, the brain expected to do poorly and did not show signs of surprise or conflict when it made an error

But, in the past few generations, the imagery and rhetoric of academic marketing have cultivated a belief that college will be, if not decadent, at least primarily recreational: social activities, sporting events, and travel.

Increasingly, students are buying an "experience" instead of earning an education, and, in the competition to attract customers, that's what's colleges are selling.

a growing percentage of students are arriving at college without ever having written a research paper, read a novel, or taken an essay examination. And those students do not perceive that they have missed something in their education; after all, they have top grades. In that context, the demands of professors for different kinds of work can seem bewildering and unreasonable, and students naturally gravitate to courses with more-familiar expectations.

Since it is through communication that we exercise our political, economic and social power, we risk contributing to the hegemonic perpetuation of class if we fail to demand equal access to newer technologies and adequately prepared teachers for all students

They can benefit their students by developing and then teaching their students to develop expertise in evaluation of search engines and critical analysis of Web site credibility. Well-prepared teachers, with a deep and broad understanding of language, linguistics, literature, rhetoric, writing, speaking, and listening, can complement those talents by studying additional semiotic systems that don’t rely solely on alphabetic texts.

Not only will teachers need to understand “fair use” policies, they are likely to need to integrate units on ethics back into the curriculum to complement those units on rhetoric.