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Michèle Drechsler

Socialbookmarking with Diigo and Education. A survey that could interest you. - 77 views

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Disrupting College - 3 views

  • Using online learning in a new business model focused exclusively on teaching and learning, not research—and focused on highly structured programs targeted at preparation for careers—has meanwhile given several organizations a significant cost advantage and allowed them to grow rapidly.
  • Using online learning in a new business model focused exclusively on teaching and learning, not research—and focused on highly structured programs targeted at preparation for careers—has meanwhile given several organizations a significant cost advantage and allowed them to grow rapidly.
  • Using online learning in a new business model focused exclusively on teaching and learning, not research—and focused on highly structured programs targeted at preparation for careers—has meanwhile given several organizations a significant cost advantage and allowed them to grow rapidly.
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  • Recommendations for existing institutions of higher education also emerge from an understanding of disruptive innovation. These colleges and universities should: Apply the correct business model for the task. These institutions have conflated value propositions and business models, which creates significant, unsustainable overhead costs. Drive the disruptive innovation. Some institutions have this opportunity, but to do so, they need to set up an autonomous business model unencumbered by their existing processes and priorities. They can leverage their existing fixed resources in this autonomous model to give themselves a cost advantage over what to this point have been the low-cost disruptive innovators. Develop a strategy of focus. The historical strategy of trying to be great at everything and mimic institutions such as Harvard is not a viable strategy going forward. Frame online learning as a sustaining innovation. Institutions can use this new technology to disrupt the existing classroom model to extend convenience to many more students as well as provide a better learning experience.
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    An article showing how online learning is a disruptive technology. Shining [the challenges of today's higher ed] through the lens of these theories on innovation will provide some insights into how we can move forward and a language that allows people to come together to frame these challenges in ways that will create a much higher chance of success. This report assumes that everyone is adept at online learning. This is not the case and students will have to be trained on how to be effective online learners. Courses will also have to address multiple learning styles and not just the read/write that most online courses currently are programmed for. Despite this missing piece, this is a very important article that focuses on some very key issues of our current higher ed system. The recommendations at the end of the article for policy makers are very apt. Highly recommended reading!
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    Are high schools preparing students for success in college and careers when what we do is so very different from what they will experience when they leave our little boxes?
sha towers

Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic | The Economist - 27 views

  • There is an oversupply of PhDs. Although a doctorate is designed as training for a job in academia, the number of PhD positions is unrelated to the number of job openings. Meanwhile, business leaders complain about shortages of high-level skills, suggesting PhDs are not teaching the right things. The fiercest critics compare research doctorates to Ponzi or pyramid schemes.
  • A graduate assistant at Yale might earn $20,000 a year for nine months of teaching. The average pay of full professors in America was $109,000 in 2009
  • America produced more than 100,000 doctoral degrees between 2005 and 2009. In the same period there were just 16,000 new professorships.
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  • PhD students and contract staff known as “postdocs”, described by one student as “the ugly underbelly of academia”, do much of the research these days.
  • In some areas five years as a postdoc is now a prerequisite for landing a secure full-time job.
  • About one-third of Austria’s PhD graduates take jobs unrelated to their degrees. In Germany 13% of all PhD graduates end up in lowly occupations. In the Netherlands the proportion is 21%.
  • In America only 57% of doctoral students will have a PhD ten years after their first date of enrolment. In the humanities, where most students pay for their own PhDs, the figure is 49%.
  • in 1966 only 23% of science and engineering PhDs in America were awarded to students born outside the country. By 2006 that proportion had increased to 48%. Foreign students tend to tolerate poorer working conditions, and the supply of cheap, brilliant, foreign labour also keeps wages down.
  • The earnings premium for a PhD is 26%. But the premium for a master’s degree, which can be accomplished in as little as one year, is almost as high, at 23%
  • PhDs in maths and computing, social sciences and languages earn no more than those with master’s degrees
  • the skills learned in the course of a PhD can be readily acquired through much shorter courses.
  • In one study of British PhD graduates, about a third admitted that they were doing their doctorate partly to go on being a student, or put off job hunting.
  • The more bright students stay at universities, the better it is for academics. Postgraduate students bring in grants and beef up their supervisors’ publication records.
  • Writing lab reports, giving academic presentations and conducting six-month literature reviews can be surprisingly unhelpful in a world where technical knowledge has to be assimilated quickly and presented simply to a wide audience.
  • Many of those who embark on a PhD are the smartest in their class and will have been the best at everything they have done. They will have amassed awards and prizes. As this year’s new crop of graduate students bounce into their research, few will be willing to accept that the system they are entering could be designed for the benefit of others, that even hard work and brilliance may well not be enough to succeed, and that they would be better off doing something else.
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    article from the Economist "The Disposable Academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time
Randolph Hollingsworth

Phase 1 Findings from eReader Project, ePublishing Working Group, Fall 2010, Notre Dame... - 19 views

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    Use of iPads in MGT30700 (Project Management), Fall 2010 from Aug 23-Oct 8 Report Prepared by Corey M. Angst, Ph.D. & Emily Malinowski (MBA 2011) Mendoza College of Business, University of Notre Dame December 21, 2010 First, our findings suggest the greatest value of the iPad may not be its ability to function as an eBook reader but instead its capacity to function as a consolidator or aggregator of information. Second, a statistically significant proportion of students felt the iPad, 1) makes class more interesting, 2) encourages exploration of additional topics, 3) provides functions/tools not possible with a textbook, and 4) helps students more effectively manage their time. See wiki https://wiki.nd.edu/display/oitepublishing/iPad+Configuration+for+Pilot. It also includes an Enterprise Deployment Guide
Richard Bradshaw

The Progressive Movement and the Transformation of American Politics | The Heritage Fou... - 33 views

  • Government had to be limited both because it was dangerous if it got too powerful and because it was not supposed to provide for the highest things in life.
  • In Progressivism, the domestic policy of government had two main concerns. First, government must protect the poor and other victims of capitalism through redistribution of resources, anti-trust laws, government control over the details of commerce and production: i.e., dictating at what prices things must be sold, methods of manufacture, government participation in the banking system, and so on. Second, government must become involved in the "spiritual" development of its citizens -- not, of course, through promotion of religion, but through protecting the environment ("conservation"), education (understood as education to personal creativity), and spiritual uplift through subsidy and promotion of the arts and culture.
  • Progressives therefore embraced a much more active and indeed imperialistic foreign policy than the Founders did.
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  • The trend to turn power over to multinational organizations also begins in this period, as may be seen in Wilson's plan for a League of Nations, under whose rules America would have delegated control over the deployment of its own armed forces to that body.
  • The Progressives wanted to sweep away what they regarded as this amateurism in politics. They had confidence that modern science had superseded the perspective of the liberally educated statesman. Only those educated in the top universities, preferably in the social sciences, were thought to be capable of governing.
  • Government, it was thought, needed to be led by those who see where history is going, who understand the ever-evolving idea of human dignity.
  • Politics in the sense of favoritism and self-interest would disappear and be replaced by the universal rule of enlightened bureaucracy.
  • Today's liberals, or the teachers of today's liberals, learned to reject the principles of the founding from their teachers, the Progressives.
  • That is the disparagement of nature and the celebration of human will, the idea that everything of value in life is created by man's choice, not by nature or necessity.
  • Liberal domestic policy follows the same principle. It tends to elevate the "other" to moral superiority over against those whom the Founders would have called the decent and the honorable, the men of wisdom and virtue. The more a person is lacking, the greater is his or her moral claim on society. The deaf, the blind, the disabled, the stupid, the improvident, the ignorant, and even (in a 1984 speech of presidential candidate Walter Mondale) the sad -- those who are lowest are extolled as the sacred other.
  • The first great battle for the American soul was settled in the Civil War. The second battle for America's soul, initiated over a century ago, is still raging. The choice for the Founders' constitutionalism or the Progressive-liberal administrative state is yet to be fully resolved.
  • The Progressive system managed to gain a foothold in American politics only when it made major compromises with the Founders' constitutionalism.
  • Sober liberal friends of the Great Society would later admit that a central reason for its failure was precisely the fact that it was an expertise-driven engineering project, which had never sought the support or even the acquiescence of popular majorities.
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    I hope you know better than to use any resource from such a biased source in the classroom without one from the opposite side, say the Brookings Institution in this case. I found your posting of this article from this anti- free thought organization that is a puppet of big business and the far right on an education site plain wrong.
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    Well, the truth is I did not intend to share this bookmark with Diigo Education, but somehow it was posted in the group. I had intended it only for myself as part of research I am doing.
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.
Julio Quintero

Falling Short? College Learning and Career Success | Association of American Colleges &... - 19 views

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    The report summarizes selected findings from two different national surveys-one of business and nonprofit leaders and another of current college students. Consistent with findings from 5 earlier surveys commissioned by AAC&U as part of its ongoing Liberal Education and America's Promise (LEAP) Initiative, employers overwhelmingly endorse broad learning and cross-cutting skills as the best preparation for long-term career success.
Laura Doto

Final Report: Friendship | DIGITAL YOUTH RESEARCH - 1 views

  • Social relations—not simply physical space—structure the social worlds of youth.
    • Laura Doto
       
      A critical conclusion to be realized that can inform our assumptions as educators.
  • When teens are involved in friendship-driven practices, online and offline are not separate worlds—they are simply different settings in which to gather with friends and peers
  • these dynamics reinforce existing friendship patterns as well as constitute new kinds of social arrangements.
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  • Homophily describes the likelihood that people connect to others who share their interests and identity.
  • One survey of Israeli teens suggests that those who develop friendships online tend toward less homogenous connections than teens who do not build such connections
  • Teens frequently use social media as additional channels of communication to get to know classmates and turn acquaintances into friendships.
  • Some teens—especially marginalized and ostracized ones—often relish the opportunity to find connections beyond their schools. Teens who are driven by specific interests that may not be supported by their schools, such as those described in the Creative Production and Gaming chapters, often build relationships with others online through shared practice.
  • there are plenty of teens who relish the opportunity to make new connections through social media, this practice is heavily stigmatized
  • the public myths about online “predators” do not reflect the actual realities of sexual solicitation and risky online behavior (Wolak et al. 2008). Not only do unfounded fears limit teenagers unnecessarily, they also obscure preventable problematic behavior
  • As she described her typical session on Photobucket, it became clear that a shared understanding of friendship and romance was being constructed by her and other Photobucket users:
  • The fact that they draw from all of these sources suggests that youth’s friendship maintenance is in tune with a discourse of love and friendship that is being widely displayed and (re)circulated.
  • “It’s like have you noticed that you may have someone in your Top 8 but you’re not in theirs and you kinda think to yourself that you’re not as important to that person as they are to you . . . and oh, to be in the coveted number-one spot!”
  • Taking someone off your Top 8 is your new passive-aggressive power play when someone pisses you off.
  • Top Friends are persistent, publicly displayed, and easily alterable. This makes it difficult for teens to avoid the issue or make excuses such as “I forgot.” When pressured to include someone, teens often oblige or attempt to ward off this interaction by listing those who list them
  • Other teens avoid this struggle by listing only bands or family members. While teens may get jealous if other peers are listed, family members are exempt from the comparative urge.
  • to avoid social drama with her friends:
  • The Top Friends feature is a good example of how structural aspects of software can force articulations that do not map well to how offline social behavior works.
  • teens have developed a variety of social norms to govern what is and is not appropriate
  • The problem with explicit ranking, however, is that it creates or accentuates hierarchies where they did not exist offline, or were deliberately and strategically ambiguous, thus forcing a new set of social-status negotiations. The give-and-take over these forms of social ranking is an example of how social norms are being negotiated in tandem with the adoption of new technologies, and how peers give ongoing feedback to one another as part of these struggles to develop new cultural standards.
  • While teen dramas are only one component of friendship, they are often made extremely visible by social media. The persistent and networked qualities of social media alter the ways that these dramas play out in teen life. For this reason, it is important to pay special attention to the role that social media play in the negotiation of teen status.
  • primarily a continuation of broader dramas.
  • social media amplify dramas because they extend social worlds beyond the school.
  • Gossip and rumors have played a role in teen struggles for status and attention since well before social media entered the scene
  • social media certainly alter the efficiency and potential scale of interactions. Because of this, there is greater potential for gossip to spread much further and at a faster pace, making social media a culprit in teen drama. While teen gossip predates the Internet, some teens blame the technologies for their roles in making gossip easier and more viral
  • That’s what happened with me and my friends. We got into a lot of drama with it and I was like, anyone can write anything. It can be fact, fiction. Most people, what they read they believe. Even if it’s not true (C.J. Pascoe, Living Digital).
  • finds the News Feed useful “because it helps you to see who’s keeping track of who and who’s talking to who.” She enjoys knowing when two people break up so that she knows why someone is upset or when she should reach out to offer support. Knowing this information also prevents awkward conversations that might reference the new ex. While she loves the ability to keep up with the lives of her peers, she also realizes that this means that “everybody knows your business.”
  • Some teens find the News Feed annoying or irrelevant. Gadil, an Indian 16-year-old from Los Angeles, thinks that it is impersonal while others think it is downright creepy. For Tara, a Vietnamese 16-year-old from Michigan, the News Feed takes what was public and makes it more public: “Facebook’s already public. I think it makes it way too like stalker-ish.” Her 18-year-old sister, Lila, concurs and points out that it gets “rumors going faster.” Kat, a white 14-year-old from Salem, Massachusetts, uses Facebook’s privacy settings to hide stories from the News Feed for the sake of appearances.
  • While gossip is fairly universal among teens, the rumors that are spread can be quite hurtful. Some of this escalates to the level of bullying. We are unable to assess whether or not bullying is on the rise because of social media. Other scholars have found that most teens do not experience Internet-driven harassment (Wolak, Mitchell, and Finkelhor 2007). Those who do may not fit the traditional profile of those who experience school-based bullying (Ybarra, Diener-West, and Leaf 2007), but harassment, both mediated and unmediated, is linked to a myriad of psychosocial issues that includes substance use and school problems (Hinduja and Patchin 2008; Ybarra et al. 2007).
  • Measuring “cyberbullying” or Internet harassment is difficult, in part because both scholars and teens struggle to define it. The teens we interviewed spoke regularly of “drama” or “gossip” or “rumors,” but few used the language of “bullying” or “harassment” unless we introduced these terms. When Sasha, a white 16-year-old from Michigan, was asked specifically about whether or not rumors were bullying, she said: I don’t know, people at school, they don’t realize when they are bullying a lot of the time nowadays because it’s not so much physical anymore. It’s more like you think you’re joking around with someone in school but it’s really hurting them. Like you think it’s a funny inside joke between you two, but it’s really hurtful to them, and you can’t realize it anymore. Sasha, like many of the teens we interviewed, saw rumors as hurtful, but she was not sure if they were bullying. Some teens saw bullying as being about physical harm; others saw it as premeditated, intentionally malicious, and sustained in nature. While all acknowledged that it could take place online, the teens we interviewed thought that most bullying took place offline, even if they talked about how drama was happening online.
  • it did not matter whether it was online or offline; the result was still the same. In handling this, she did not get offline, but she did switch schools and friend groups.
  • Technology provides more channels through which youth can potentially bully one another. That said, most teens we interviewed who discussed being bullied did not focus on the use of technology and did not believe that technology is a significant factor in bullying.
  • They did, though, see rumors, drama, and gossip as pervasive. The distinction may be more connected with language and conception than with practice. Bianca, a white 16-year-old from Michigan, sees drama as being fueled by her peers’ desire to get attention and have something to talk about. She thinks the reason that people create drama is boredom. While drama can be hurtful, many teens see it simply as a part of everyday social life.
  • Although some drama may start out of boredom or entertainment, it is situated in a context where negotiating social relations and school hierarchies is part of everyday life. Teens are dealing daily with sociability and related tensions.
  • Tara thinks that it emerges because some teens do not know how to best negotiate their feelings and the feelings of others.
  • Teens can use the ability to publicly validate one another on social network sites to reaffirm a friendship.
  • So, while drama is common, teens actually spend much more time and effort trying to preserve harmony, reassure friends, and reaffirm relationships. This spirit of reciprocity is common across a wide range of peer-based learning environments we have observed.
  • From this perspective, commenting is not as much about being nice as it is about relying on reciprocity for self-gain
  • That makes them feel like they’re popular, that they’re getting comments all the time by different people, even people that they don’t know. So it makes them feel popular in a way (Rural and Urban Youth).
  • Gossip, drama, bullying, and posing are unavoidable side effects of teens’ everyday negotiations over friendship and peer status. What takes place in this realm resembles much of what took place even before the Internet, but certain features of social media alter the dynamics around these processes. The public, persistent, searchable, and spreadable nature of mediated information affects the way rumors flow and how dramas play out. The explicitness surrounding the display of relationships and online communication can heighten the social stakes and intensity of status negotiation. The scale of this varies, but those who experience mediated harassment are certainly scarred by the process. Further, the ethic of reciprocity embedded in networked publics supports the development of friendships and shared norms, but it also plays into pressures toward conformity and participation in local, school-based peer networks. While there is a dark side to what takes place, teens still relish the friendship opportunities that social media provide.
  • While social warfare and drama do exist, the value of social media rests in their ability to strengthen connections. Teens leverage social media for a variety of practices that are familiar elements of teen life: gossiping, flirting, joking around, and hanging out. Although the underlying practices are quite familiar, the networked, public nature of online communication does inflect these practices in new ways.
  • Adults’ efforts to regulate youth access to MySpace are the latest example of how adults are working to hold on to authority over teen socialization in the face of a gradual erosion of parental influence during the teen years.
  • learning how to manage the unique affordances of networked sociality can help teens navigate future collegiate and professional spheres where mediated interactions are assumed.
  • articulating those friendships online means that they become subject to public scrutiny in new ways;
  • This makes lessons about social life (both the failures and successes) more consequential and persistent
  • make these dynamics visible in a more persistent and accessible public arena.
  • co-constructing new sets of social norms together with their peers and the efforts of technology developers. The dynamics of social reciprocity and negotiations over popularity and status are all being supported by participation in publics of the networked variety as formative influences in teen life. While we see no indication that social media are changing the fundamental nature of these friendship practices, we do see differences in the intensity of engagement among peers, and conversely, in the relative alienation of parents and teachers from these social worlds.
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    MacArthur Foundation Study - Friendship chapter
Hobbes W

Dealing with organizational hubris and humility - Jeffrey Braithwaite - 27 views

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    "Maybe this ego-driven reporting of one's capabilities only happens among American college professors? Hardly. You do not have to stretch your observational powers too far to see that most of those at the helm of big companies, political parties, prestigious legal practices, or accounting and consulting groups have large doses of self-belief. It's only a small step to hubris."
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