Group items tagged

This is the thing about creativity that is rarely acknowledged: Most people don’t actually like it. Studies confirm what many creative people have suspected all along: People are biased against creative thinking, despite all of their insistence otherwise.

Staw says most people are risk-averse. He refers to them as satisfiers.

Satisfiers avoid stirring things up, even if it means forsaking the truth or rejecting a good idea.

sitting passively.

the learning experience students receive will probably be fundamentally different from the one they get today.

online classes that let students learn at their own pace, drawing on materials from schools across the country—not just a single professor and a hefty textbook.

Traditionally, schools have been judged by how many prospective students they turn away, not by how many competent graduates they churn out.

Adoption of these technologies has raised significant questions about student privacy because vendors are storing personal student data on servers located outside of a district's physical jurisdiction.

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?

Long the building blocks of academia, textbooks are seen more as albatross and less as asset these days. They are expensive — some costing more than $300. They are quickly outdated. They can be so heavy that students and teachers are forced to tote them around in wheeled luggage carts. Students, professors and universities are rebelling against the weighty — and wasteful — tomes. Stanford University's brand new physics and engineering library is advertised as "bookless"; relying almost solely on digital material. Free and downloadable textbooks are at the heart of the growing "open educational resources" movement that seeks to make education more available and more affordable. Groups such as Connexions at Rice University and the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources in Silicon Valley are supporting free online textbook initiatives.

how can we teach self-direction, collaboration, creativity et al if we’re not practicing those things ourselves? It would be like being asked to teach Physics with only a textbook understanding of it.