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Patrick Higgins

Why Undergrads Aren't Writing Enough - Brainstorm - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 49 views

  • When it comes to writing-heavy courses, students don’t want to take them and teachers don’t want to teach them. When it comes to writing assignments in non-writing-oriented courses, students don’t like them to run too long and neither do teachers. Writing is just too much work for both sides. For every upper-division class in the humanities, 25 pages of finished out-of-class writing is a proper minimum. But for most students, that sounds like a daunting total—and an unjust one. For teachers handling three or more classes with 25 or more students, grading all those pages conscientiously (which means giving substantive feedback) keeps them up all night three weeks every semester. For those lucky teachers on a 2-2 load with 25 students or less per course, they feel the publish-or-perish mandate and all those pages of student prose turn into a road block.
    • Patrick Higgins
       
      This is an interesting section.  My feeling is that there has to be a way to increase what's viewed as "writing."  Does writing have to live solely in the 20+ page paper?  Can not the cumulative total of writing be considered?  
  • When it comes to writing-heavy courses, students don’t want to take them and teachers don’t want to teach them.
marcmancinelli

Think Again: Education - By Ben Wildavsky | Foreign Policy - 31 views

  • But when the results from the first major international math test came out in 1967, the effort did not seem to have made much of a difference. Japan took first place out of 12 countries, while the United States finished near the bottom.
  • By the early 1970s, American students were ranking last among industrialized countries in seven of 19 tests of academic achievement and never made it to first or even second place in any of them. A decade later, "A Nation at Risk," the landmark 1983 report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, cited these and other academic failings to buttress its stark claim that "if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war."
    • marcmancinelli
       
      US has long been mediocre or at the bottom of international comparisons, but it's not a zer-sum game
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  • J. Michael Shaughnessy, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, argues that the latest PISA test "underscores the need for integrating reasoning and sense making in our teaching of mathematics." Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, claims that the same results "tell us … that if you don't make smart investments in teachers, respect them, or involve them in decision-making, as the top-performing countries do, students pay a price."
    • marcmancinelli
       
      People use crises to advance their own agendas...
  • But don't expect any of them to bring the country back to its educational golden age -- there wasn't one.
  • According to the most recent statistics, the U.S. share of foreign students fell from 24 percent in 2000 to just below 19 percent in 2008. Meanwhile, countries like Australia, Canada, and Japan saw increased market shares from their 2000 levels, though they are still far below the American numbers.
  • And even with its declining share, the United States still commands 9 percentage points more of the market than its nearest competitor, Britain.
  • A 2008 Rand Corp. report found that nearly two-thirds of the most highly cited articles in science and technology come from the United States, and seven in 10 Nobel Prize winners are employed by American universities. And the United States spends about 2.9 percent of its GDP on postsecondary education, about twice the percentage spent by China, the European Union, and Japan in 2006.
  • But over the long term, exactly where countries sit in the university hierarchy will be less and less relevant, as Americans' understanding of who is "us" and who is "them" gradually changes. Already, a historically unprecedented level of student and faculty mobility has become a defining characteristic of global higher education. Cross-border scientific collaboration, as measured by the volume of publications by co-authors from different countries, has more than doubled in two decades.
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    A great perspective piece on American education compared to the world.
Angela Hagan

Aspirin stimulates insulin - 6 views

  • AbstractNormal subjects and patients with adult-onset diabetes received 10 gm. of aspirin in four days. On the fourth day, the fasting serum glucose and the glucose response to oral glucose were decreased in both groups. These changes were associated with increased levels of serum insulin and pancreatic glucagon, although the glucagon responses to oral glucose were unchanged. In the diabetic patients, aspirin therapy was followed by a decreased glucose response to I.V. glucose and by the appearance of an early insulin peak, which could not be demonstrated before treatment. Aspirin did not affect the I.V. glucose tolerance in normal subjects, although it did enhance the early insulin peak. A decrease in the fasting levels of free fatty acids was noted in both groups, whereas the fasting level of triglycerides decreased only in the diabetic patients. Cholesterolemia did not change in either group. A few preliminary observations indicate that, in normal subjects, ibuprofen and ketoprofen, two other presumed prostaglandin inhibitors, did not affect fasting glycemia, glucose tolerance, or the insulin response to glucose. No changes were noted after the administration of placebo. Last A1C 4.8No Rx, Diet modification, exercise, Supps and HerbalsI am a retired HYPOGLYCEMIC Reply With Quote 11-08-2010 #2 trinitarian3n1 D.D. Family Moderator Join Date November 2007 Location In the mitten, USA Age 41 Posts > 100 About T2 dx 3/07, tx w/very lo carb D&E Met, bolus R Blog Entries 127 That's a hefty dose of aspirin. John C.A clean house is the sign of a broken computer.Last HgbA1c - 5.5% 2/2011 Reply With Quote 11-08-2010 #3 MCS D.D. Family Join Date August 2010 Posts > 100 About T2, trying to live a healthy life Yes it is, 650mg 4 times a day. I wonder if they did that to make sure they had a response and if there is a break point of some lower dose. I am on 325 once a day now. Been that high in the past for other things, lots of ringing in the ears when you get that high of a dose. Last A1C 4.8No Rx, Diet modification, exercise, Supps and HerbalsI am a retired HYPOGLYCEMIC Reply With Quote 11-08-2010 #4 furball64801 D.D. Family Join Date December 2009 Posts > 100 About type 2 25 yrs mother aunt type 2 thin 50 yrs Blog Entr
  • The therory is that it helps to regenerate the once turned off Beta cells, not over working the exiting ones. This is just one article I found, they are many, most of them concern Salsalate a drug used for arthritis. It works by lowering the inflammation of the liver and pancreas. Lowers IR, its a pretty interesting concept based largerly on inflammation of one muscles and organs. Originally Posted by jeanne wagner i know for heart health they recommend the baby 81 mg a day. I would think you wouldn't have a stomach lining left if you took that on a daily basis. Also just because it stimulates insulin doesn't mean it is a good thing. Sulfonyureas also overstimulate insulin and there is some thought they lead to beta cell burnout. I think it is better to find things like metformin that make you more sensitive to the insulin you naturally make. Last A1C 4.8No Rx, Diet modification, exercise, Supps and HerbalsI am a retired HYPOGLYCEMIC Reply With Quote 11-08-2010 #7 MCS D.D. Family Join Date August 2010 Posts > 100 About T2, trying to live a healthy life Here is a few more articles concerning NSAID's and insulin if you are interested.http://www.annals.org/content/152/6/346.abstracthttp://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/1...026.x/abstracthttp://www.theannals.com/cgi/content/abstract/44/7/1207 Last A1C 4.8No Rx, Diet modification, exercise, Supps and HerbalsI am a retired HYPOGLYCEMIC Reply With Quote MCS was thanked for this post by: Nan-OH 11-08-2010 #8 CalgaryDiabetic D.D. Family Join Date June 2009 Location Calgary,Canada Posts > 100 About diabetic since 1997, on insulin 2000 Guarantied tummy ulcer with so much aspirin. Reply With Quote 11-09-2010 #9 MCS
Florence Dujardin

Revisiting Professional Learning Communities to Increase College Readiness - 17 views

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    For over a decade, professional learning communities (PLCs) have been touted as an effective way to build upon the knowledge and skills of experienced teachers, yet much of the evidence base is derived from self-reports by practitioners. Although several generations of school reform (the standards movement, No Child Left Behind, and now the Common Core State Standards) have cited improving teacher effectiveness as key to improving student achievement, little change has occurred in the nature of professional development. This article argues that professional development generally, and PLCs in particular, would benefit from the insights gleaned from the extensive literature on teacher expertise that focuses on how well teachers understand the content they teach and how well they understand how students learn that content.
Florence Dujardin

Building Stronger Ties With Alumni Through Facebook to Increase Volunteerism and Charit... - 23 views

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    This research explores how strength of network ties, as fostered by the use of a social network site, Facebook, (a) influences alumni attitudes toward volunteering for and making charitable gifts to their alma mater, and (b) fortifies consistency between attitude and behavior. After exploratory interviews and participant observation, a survey of 3,085 alumni was conducted for hypothesis testing. Structural equation modeling analysis revealed: First, active participation in Facebook groups positively predicted strength of network ties along 2 dimensions: frequency of communication and emotional closeness. Second, both dimensions of tie strength influenced actual behavior, albeit via different routes. The paper also contributes to attitude change research in showing that strength of network ties can help ensure consistencies between attitude and behavior.
Casey Finnerty

The Poor Quality of an Undergraduate Education - NYTimes.com - 40 views

  • large numbers of the students were making their way through college with minimal exposure to rigorous coursework, only a modest investment of effort and little or no meaningful improvement in skills like writing and reasoning.
  • Simply put: academic investments are a lower priority.
  • When 18-year-olds are emboldened to see themselves in this manner, many look for ways to attain an educational credential effortlessly and comfortably. And they are catered to accordingly. The customer is always right.
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  • Too many institutions, for instance, rely primarily on student course evaluations to assess teaching. This creates perverse incentives for professors to demand little and give out good grades
  • Most of all, we hope that during this commencement season, our faculty colleagues will pause to consider the state of undergraduate learning and our collective responsibility to increase academic rigor on our campuses.
Javier E

News: Decline of 'Western Civ'? - Inside Higher Ed - 25 views

  • Fifty years ago, 10 of the 50 "top" colleges mandated a Western Civ course, while students at 31 of them could choose a "Western Civilization" course from among a group of courses that would fulfill general education requirements. The situation is different today, according to the report. None of those "top 50" colleges and only one of the 75 public universities, the University of South Carolina, mandates one semester of "Western Civ." The association did not count Columbia University and Colgate University as offering the traditional "Western Civ" course, even though those institutions require two-semester courses on Western thought, because those courses include non-Western texts. Sixteen of the "Top 50" list Western Civ among several choices for a general education curriculum, as do 44 of the 75 large public institutions.
  • The "traditional Western Civ course," he said, was especially well suited for the student population of the 1960s. But he said today's student body is radically different and might not be as interested in such courses. He also attributed the change to an increasing specialization among professors, which affects how well they can teach broad survey courses and how much they enjoy doing so.
  • Whereas many colleges in the 1960s had standard core curriculums, more and more universities have moved to a model where students select from a broad range of courses in thematic areas.
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  • "The notion that the cultural traditions of our population reside in Western Civilization is belied by the demographic changes in the American population," Grossman said. He said it is knowledge of world history, a perspective that encompasses Western Civilization, that students are going to need in order to be successful in business, nonprofit, and government jobs.
Keith Rowley

Mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional brain gray matter density - 1 views

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    Sara Lazar's report on the brain scan research they've done on meditators.
Keith Rowley

Brief meditative exercise helps cognition - 5 views

  • "Simply stated, the profound improvements that we found after just 4 days of meditation training- are really surprising," Zeidan noted. "It goes to show that the mind is, in fact, easily changeable and highly influenced, especially by meditation."
  • The meditation training involved in the study was an abbreviated "mindfulness" training regime modeled on basic "Shamatha skills" from a Buddhist meditation tradition
  • "Findings like these suggest that meditation's benefits may not require extensive training to be realized, and that meditation's first benefits may be associated with increasing the ability to sustain attention,"
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  • seems to be strong evidence for the idea that we may be able to modify our own minds to improve our cognitive processing -- most importantly in the ability to sustain attention and vigilance -- within a week's time."
  • Both groups also improved following the meditation and reading experiences in measures of mood, but only the group that received the meditation training improved significantly in the cognitive measures. The meditation group scored consistently higher averages than the reading/listening group on all the cognitive tests and as much as ten times better on one challenging test that involved sustaining the ability to focus, while holding other information in mind. "The meditation group did especially better on all the cognitive tests that were timed," Zeidan noted. "In tasks where participants had to process information under time constraints causing stress, the group briefly trained in mindfulness performed significantly better."
  • participants were instructed to relax, with their eyes closed, and to simply focus on the flow of their breath occurring at the tip of their nose. If a random thought arose, they were told to passively notice and acknowledge the thought and to simply let 'it' go, by bringing the attention back to the sensations of the breath."
  • "The simple process of focusing on the breath in a relaxed manner, in a way that teaches you to regulate your emotions by raising one's awareness of mental processes as they're happening is like working out a bicep, but you are doing it to your brain. Mindfulness meditation teaches you to release sensory events that would easily distract, whether it is your own thoughts or an external noise, in an emotion-regulating fashion.
  • "This kind of training seems to prepare the mind for activity, but it's not necessarily permanent," Zeidan cautions. "This doesn't mean that you meditate for four days and you're done -- you need to keep practicing."
Peter Beens

Ideas to Inspire - 26 views

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    Teachers from around the world share their inspiring ideas for using technology in the classroom.  These are pulled together as a presentation that teachers everywhere can benefit from.
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    Get inspired for some creative lesson plans or share your already awesome lessons on this visually appealing board.
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    Get inspired for some creative lesson plans or share your already awesome lessons on this visually appealing board.
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    Great visuals to inspire lesson plans. We are a visual world and students are attracted to this. Good source for creating ideas to helping student increase their learning skills
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    Great starting point for inspirational ideas in the classroom.
Jac Londe

Fractional-reserve banking - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 1 views

  • Fractional-reserve banking
  • Fractional-reserve banking is a type of banking whereby the bank does not retain all of a customer’s deposits within the bank. Funds received by the bank are generally lent to other customers. This means that available funds (called bank reserves) are only a fraction (called the reserve ratio) of the quantity of deposits at the bank. As most bank deposits are treated as money in their own right, fractional reserve banking increases the money supply, and banks are said to create money.
Paul McKean

educational-origami - Bloom's Digital Taxonomy - 145 views

  • This is an update to Bloom's Revised Taxonomy which attempts to account for the new behaviours and actions emerging as technology advances and becomes more ubiquitous.
  • Details last edit Oct 9, 2009 12:19 am by achurches - 56 revisions - locked Tags a churches blooms blooms digital taxonomy blooms revised taxonomy digital edorigami learning a churches blooms blooms digital taxonomy blooms revised taxonomy digital edorigami learning a churches blooms blooms digital taxonomy blooms revised taxonomy digital edorigami learning Type a tag name. Press comma or enter to add another. Cancel Table of Contents Synopsis: A little Disclaimer: Introduction and Background: Bloom's Domains of learning The Cognitive Domain - Bloom's Taxonomy Bloom's Revised Taxonomy Bloom's Revised Taxonomy Sub Categories Bloom's as a learning process. Is it important where you start? Must I start with remembering? Bloom's Digital Taxonomy Bloom's Digital Taxonomy Summary Map Bloom's Digital Taxonomy and Collaboration. Resources: Web 2.0 Tutorials Acknowledgements:This is the introduction to Bloom's Digital Taxonomy. The different taxonomical levels can be viewed individually via the navigation bar or below this introduction as embedded pages. Synopsis:  This is an update to Bloom's Revised Taxonomy which attempts to account for the new behaviours and actions emerging as technology advances and becomes more ubiquitous. Bloom's Revised Taxonomy accounts for many of the traditional c
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    This is an update to Bloom's Revised Taxonomy which attempts to account for the new behaviours and actions emerging as technology advances and becomes more ubiquitous.
Justin Medved

The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media... - 24 views

  • Pieces are not dreamed up by trained editors nor commissioned based on submitted questions. Instead they are assigned by an algorithm, which mines nearly a terabyte of search data, Internet traffic patterns, and keyword rates to determine what users want to know and how much advertisers will pay to appear next to the answers.
  • To appreciate the impact Demand is poised to have on the Web, imagine a classroom where one kid raises his hand after every question and screams out the answer. He may not be smart or even right, but he makes it difficult to hear anybody else.
  • But what Demand has realized is that the Internet gets only half of the simplest economic formula right: It has the supply part down but ignores demand. Give a million monkeys a million WordPress accounts and you still might never get a seven-point tutorial on how to keep wasps away from a swimming pool. Yet that’s what people want to know.
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  • That’s not to say there isn’t any room for humans in Demand’s process. They just aren’t worth very much. First, a crowdsourced team of freelance “title proofers” turn the algorithm’s often awkward or nonsensical phrases into something people will understand: “How to make a church-pew breakfast nook,” for example, becomes “How to make a breakfast nook out of a church pew.” Approved headlines get fed into a password-protected section of Demand’s Web site called Demand Studios, where any Demand freelancer can see what jobs are available. It’s the online equivalent of day laborers waiting in front of Home Depot. Writers can typically select 10 articles at a time; videographers can hoard 40. Nearly every freelancer scrambles to load their assignment queue with titles they can produce quickly and with the least amount of effort — because pay for individual stories is so lousy, only a high-speed, high-volume approach will work. The average writer earns $15 per article for pieces that top out at a few hundred words, and the average filmmaker about $20 per clip, paid weekly via PayPal. Demand also offers revenue sharing on some articles, though it can take months to reach even $15 in such payments. Other freelancers sign up for the chance to copyedit ($2.50 an article), fact-check ($1 an article), approve the quality of a film (25 to 50 cents a video), transcribe ($1 to $2 per video), or offer up their expertise to be quoted or filmed (free). Title proofers get 8 cents a headline. Coming soon: photographers and photo editors. So far, the company has paid out more than $17 million to Demand Studios workers; if the enterprise reaches Rosenblatt’s goal of producing 1 million pieces of content a month, the payouts could easily hit $200 million a year, less than a third of what The New York Times shells out in wages and benefits to produce its roughly 5,000 articles a month.
  • But once it was automated, every algorithm-generated piece of content produced 4.9 times the revenue of the human-created ideas. So Rosenblatt got rid of the editors. Suddenly, profit on each piece was 20 to 25 times what it had been. It turned out that gut instinct and experience were less effective at predicting what readers and viewers wanted — and worse for the company — than a formula.
  • Here is the thing that Rosenblatt has since discovered: Online content is not worth very much. This may be a truism, but Rosenblatt has the hard, mathematical proof. It’s right there in black and white, in the Demand Media database — the lifetime value of every story, algorithmically derived, and very, very small. Most media companies are trying hard to increase those numbers, to boost the value of their online content until it matches the amount of money it costs to produce. But Rosenblatt thinks they have it exactly backward. Instead of trying to raise the market value of online content to match the cost of producing it — perhaps an impossible proposition — the secret is to cut costs until they match the market value.
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    This is facinating!!!
D. S. Koelling

Font Size May Not Aid Learning, but Its Style Can, Researchers Find - NYTimes.com - 110 views

  • Is it easier to remember a new fact if it appears in normal type, like this, or in big, bold letters, like this?
  • Font size has no effect on memory, even though most people assume that bigger is better. But font style does.
  • New research finds that people retain significantly more material — whether science, history or language — when they study it in a font that is not only unfamiliar but also hard to read.
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  • “So much of the learning that we do now is unsupervised, on our own,” said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, “that it’s crucial to be able to monitor that learning accurately; that is, to know how well we know what we know, so that we avoid fooling ourselves.”
  • “Studying something in the presence of an answer, whether it’s conscious or not, influences how you interpret the question,” Dr. Bjork said. “You don’t appreciate all of the other things that would have come to mind if the answer weren’t there. “Let’s say you’re studying capitals and you see that Australia’s is Canberra. O.K., that seems easy enough. But when the exam question appears, you think: ‘Uh oh, was it Sydney? Melbourne? Adelaide?’ ” That’s why some experts are leery of students’ increasing use of online sites like Cramster, Course Hero, Koofers and others that offer summaries, step-by-step problem solving and copies of previous exams. The extra help may provide a valuable supplement to a difficult or crowded course, but it could also leave students with a false sense of mastery. Even course outlines provided by a teacher, a textbook or other outside source can create a false sense of security, some research suggests. In one experiment, researchers found that participants studying a difficult chapter on the industrial uses of microbes remembered more when they were given a poor outline — which they had to rework to match the material — than a more accurate one.
  • a cognitive quality known as fluency, a measure of how easy a piece of information is to process.
  • On real tests, font size made no difference and practice paid off, the study found.
  • And so it goes, researchers say, with most study sessions: difficulty builds mental muscle, while ease often builds only confidence.
  • To test the approach in the classroom, the researchers conducted a large experiment involving 222 students at a public school in Chesterland, Ohio. One group had all its supplementary study materials, in English, history and science courses, reset in an unusual font, like Monotype Corsiva. The others studied as before. After the lessons were completed, the researchers evaluated the classes’ relevant tests and found that those students who’d been squinting at the stranger typefaces did significantly better than the others in all the classes — particularly in physics. “The reason that the unusual fonts are effective is that it causes us to think more deeply about the material,” a co-author of the study, Daniel M. Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Princeton, wrote in an e-mail. “But we are capable of thinking deeply without being subjected to unusual fonts. Think of it this way, you can’t skim material in a hard to read font, so putting text in a hard-to-read font will force you to read more carefully.” Then again, so will raw effort, he and other researchers said. Concentrating harder. Making outlines from scratch. Working through problem sets without glancing at the answers. And studying with classmates who test one another.
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    Students' raw effort improves learning [No surprise there, huh?]
Javier E

The Default Major - Skating Through B-School - NYTimes.com - 41 views

  • Dr. Mason, who teaches economics at the University of North Florida, believes his students are just as intelligent as they’ve always been. But many of them don’t read their textbooks, or do much of anything else that their parents would have called studying. “We used to complain that K-12 schools didn’t hold students to high standards,” he says with a sigh. “And here we are doing the same thing ourselves.”
  • all evidence suggests that student disengagement is at its worst in Dr. Mason’s domain: undergraduate business education.
  • “Business education has come to be defined in the minds of students as a place for developing elite social networks and getting access to corporate recruiters,”
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  • It’s an attitude that Dr. Khurana first saw in M.B.A. programs but has migrated, he says, to the undergraduate level.
  • Second, in management and marketing, no strong consensus has emerged about what students ought to learn or how they ought to learn it.
  • Gains on the C.L.A. closely parallel the amount of time students reported spending on homework. Another explanation is the heavy prevalence of group assignments in business courses: the more time students spent studying in groups, the weaker their gains in the kinds of skills the C.L.A. measures.
  • The pedagogical theory is that managers need to function in groups, so a management education without such experiences would be like medical training without a residency. While some group projects are genuinely challenging, the consensus among students and professors is that they are one of the elements of business that make it easy to skate through college.
  • “We’ve got students who don’t read, and grow up not reading,” he says. “There are too many other things competing for their time. The frequency and quantity of drinking keeps getting higher. We have issues with depression. Getting students alert and motivated — even getting them to class, to be honest with you — it’s a challenge.”
  • “A lot of classes I’ve been exposed to, you just go to class and they do the PowerPoint from the book,” he says. “It just seems kind of pointless to go when (a) you’re probably not going to be paying much attention anyway and (b) it would probably be worth more of your time just to sit with your book and read it.”
  • “It seems like now, every take-home test you get, you can just go and Google. If the question is from a test bank, you can just type the text in, and somebody out there will have it and you can just use that.”
  • This is not senioritis, he says: this is the way all four years have been. In a typical day, “I just play sports, maybe go to the gym. Eat. Probably drink a little bit. Just kind of goof around all day.” He says his grade-point average is 3.3.
  • concrete business skills tend to expire in five years or so as technology and organizations change.
  • History and philosophy, on the other hand, provide the kind of contextual knowledge and reasoning skills that are indispensable for business students.
  • when they hand in papers, they’re marked up twice: once for content by a professor with specialized expertise, and once for writing quality by a business-communication professor.
  • a national survey of 259 business professors who had been teaching for at least 10 years. On average, respondents said they had reduced the math and analytic-thinking requirements in their courses. In exchange, they had increased the number of requirements related to computer skills and group presentations.
  • what about employers? What do they want? According to national surveys, they want to hire 22-year-olds who can write coherently, think creatively and analyze quantitative data, and they’re perfectly happy to hire English or biology majors. Most Ivy League universities and elite liberal arts colleges, in fact, don’t even offer undergraduate business majors.
Eric Langhorst

Strictly business? Personal tweets make profs more "credible" - 32 views

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    "The group that only saw social tweets ended up rating that professor higher in credibility than the group that saw only scholarly tweets. Researchers also said there was an especially significant difference in ratings when it came to whether a professor was "caring" or not. "These results support previous research that shows revealing personal information can increase a professor's perceived credibility," says the paper. "[I]t was interesting to note that the scholarly tweets did not significantly raise competence ratings in the groups that saw the scholarly posts. This could be an indication that caring, not competence, is the most important dimension when it comes to assessing perceived credibility on social networking sites." Not all students felt good about the social tweets, though. The researchers found that older students tended to rate the professors lower in credibility after having viewed their Twitter accounts. These students were also more likely to think it was a bad idea for profes"
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    Note the limitation of the study: (fake) professors were all female. Also, younger and older students responded differently.
Kurt Schmidt

A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education, Part 2 - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher E... - 43 views

  • 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.
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  • Students increasingly are pressured to go to college not because they want to learn (much less become prepared for the duties of citizenship), but because they and their parents believe—perhaps rightly—that not going will exclude them from middle-class jobs.
  • At most universities, a student is likely to be unknown to the professor and would expect to feel like a nuisance, a distraction from more important work.
  • As academic expectations have decreased, social programming and extracurricular activities have expanded to fill more than the available time. That is particularly the case for residential students, for whom the possibility of social isolation is a source of great anxiety.
  • College has become unaffordable for most people without substantial loans; essentially they are mortgaging their future in the expectation of greater earnings. In order to reduce borrowing, more and more students leave class early or arrive late or neglect assignments, because they are working to provide money for tuition or living expenses.
  • As students' anxiety about the future increases, no amount of special pleading for general-education courses on history, literature, or philosophy—really anything that is not obviously job-related—will convince most students that they should take those courses seriously.
  • But at the major universities, most professors are too busy to care about individual students, and it is easy to become lost amid a sea of equally disenchanted undergraduates looking for some kind of purpose—and not finding it.
  • we need to make "rigorous and high-quality educational experiences a moral imperative."
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    ". . . we need to make 'rigorous and high-quality educational experiences a moral imperative.'"
D. S. Koelling

Helping First-Year Students Help Themselves - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Educ... - 1 views

  • According to a yearly national survey of more than 200,000 first-year students conducted by researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles, college freshmen are increasingly "overwhelmed," rating their emotional health at the lowest levels in the 25 years the question has been asked. Such is the latest problem dropped at the offices of higher-education administrators and professors nationwide: Young adults raised with a single-minded focus on gaining admission to college now need help translating that focus into ways to thrive on campus and beyond.
  • Many young adults weren't taught the basic life skills and coping mechanisms for challenging times.
  • The consequences for students who lack those skills have become increasingly clear both on campus and after graduation. At Pitt, where I teach, and at other institutions, student-life administrators have noticed a marked decrease in resiliency, particularly among first-year students. That leads to an increase in everything from roommate disagreements to emotional imbalance and crisis. After graduation, employers complain that a lack of coping mechanisms makes for less proficient workers: According to a 2006 report by the Conference Board, a business-research group, three-quarters of surveyed employers said incoming new graduates were deficient in "soft" skills like communication and decision making.
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  • Parents and high-school educators certainly have a role to play, but college administrators and professors cannot abdicate their role as an influential socialization force to guide young adults toward better self-management.
  • The way to combat the decline in emotional health among first-year students is to offer them opportunities to build such self-efficacy from the start.
  • Teaching interpersonal skills of self-presentation is also essential, as it makes students' interactions with roommates, professors, and professional colleagues flow more smoothly. By following suggestions popularized by Dale Carnegie during the Great Depression—to think in terms of the interests of others, smile, and express honest and sincere appreciation—my Generation WTF students report being happily stunned by more-successful interviews, better relationships with family members, and more-meaningful interactions with friends.
  • While much of my advice seems revolutionary to them, adults from previous generations know that I'm simply teaching a return to core values of self-control, honesty, thrift, and perseverance­—the basic skills that will allow those in "emerging adulthood" to get on with life.
D. S. Koelling

5 Myths About the 'Information Age' - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Ed... - 0 views

  • 1. "The book is dead." Wrong: More books are produced in print each year than in the previous year. One million new titles will appear worldwide in 2011. In one day in Britain—"Super Thursday," last October 1—800 new works were published.
  • 2. "We have entered the information age." This announcement is usually intoned solemnly, as if information did not exist in other ages. But every age is an age of information, each in its own way and according to the media available at the time.
  • 3. "All information is now available online." The absurdity of this claim is obvious to anyone who has ever done research in archives. Only a tiny fraction of archival material has ever been read, much less digitized. Most judicial decisions and legislation, both state and federal, have never appeared on the Web. The vast output of regulations and reports by public bodies remains largely inaccessible to the citizens it affects. Google estimates that 129,864,880 different books exist in the world, and it claims to have digitized 15 million of them—or about 12 percent.
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  • 4. "Libraries are obsolete." Everywhere in the country librarians report that they have never had so many patrons. At Harvard, our reading rooms are full. The 85 branch libraries of the New York Public Library system are crammed with people.
  • 5. "The future is digital." True enough, but misleading. In 10, 20, or 50 years, the information environment will be overwhelmingly digital, but the prevalence of electronic communication does not mean that printed material will cease to be important. Research in the relatively new discipline of book history has demonstrated that new modes of communication do not displace old ones, at least not in the short run.
  • I mention these misconceptions because I think they stand in the way of understanding shifts in the information environment. They make the changes appear too dramatic. They present things ahistorically and in sharp contrasts—before and after, either/or, black and white. A more nuanced view would reject the common notion that old books and e-books occupy opposite and antagonistic extremes on a technological spectrum. Old books and e-books should be thought of as allies, not enemies.
  • Last year the sale of e-books (digitized texts designed for hand-held readers) doubled, accounting for 10 percent of sales in the trade-book market. This year they are expected to reach 15 or even 20 percent. But there are indications that the sale of printed books has increased at the same time.
  • Many of us worry about a decline in deep, reflective, cover-to-cover reading. We deplore the shift to blogs, snippets, and tweets. In the case of research, we might concede that word searches have advantages, but we refuse to believe that they can lead to the kind of understanding that comes with the continuous study of an entire book. Is it true, however, that deep reading has declined, or even that it always prevailed?
  • Writing looks as bad as reading to those who see nothing but decline in the advent of the Internet. As one lament puts it: Books used to be written for the general reader; now they are written by the general reader. The Internet certainly has stimulated self-publishing, but why should that be deplored? Many writers with important things to say had not been able to break into print, and anyone who finds little value in their work can ignore it.
  • One could cite other examples of how the new technology is reinforcing old modes of communication rather than undermining them. I don't mean to minimize the difficulties faced by authors, publishers, and readers, but I believe that some historically informed reflection could dispel the misconceptions that prevent us from making the most of "the information age"—if we must call it that.
Roland Gesthuizen

What Is a Book? The Definition Continues to Blur: Tech News and Analysis « - 45 views

  • a whole series of ongoing attempts to reimagine the entire industry of writing and selling books. If you’re an author, it’s a time of incredible chaos, but also incredible opportunity.
  • a market where Amazon is already publishing what it calls “Singles,” or short book-length publications that virtually anyone can produce.
  • author Barry Eisler, after publishing a number of books through the traditional route, said recently he’s going to start self-publishing, because he will have more control over the process and will keep more of the revenue.
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    "It used to be so easy to define what a book was: a collection of printed pages bound inside a cover (hard or soft) that you could place on a shelf in your library, or in a store. Now, there are e-books, and blogs that turn into books, and long pieces of journalism that are somewhere between magazine articles and short books"
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    Good article that notes the increase of self-publication with eBooks that can be purchased from Amazon
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