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IT staff should participate in academic planning to develop course projects and institution-wide outcomes, and faculty should sit on technology committees to develop shared goals and values with IT staff.

Only with the insight this provides can IT staff propose systemic technological solutions that meet the specific needs, as well as the broader academic objectives, of faculty.

faculty need to know how students learn with technology and what students can create or do because of it.3

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.

Diigo is much more than a simple web annotation or social bookmarking tool. It is an online research and collaborative research tool that integrates tags, digital highlights, interactive sticky notes, captured snapshots, and group-based collaboration, allowing a whole new process of online information management, learning, and teaching in the 21st Century.

My Network is a new Diigo social features that adds to the product's strength. My Network creates a "content-centric social network," in which people are connected by what they clip, tag, and highlight. Users will be able to collaborate with other users based not on who is a friend to whom, but rather by who is interested in what. My network delivers web content specifically tailored to a user interests and shows users with similar interest. Participation in a larger network is made possible with its community features that connects users with people with common interests; thus, building global communities around topics and knowledge, tags, and sites.

Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other Stuff (Diigo) is a powerful free social bookmarking website with annotating capabilities.

If you accept that Learning is a Conversation, and that some of the most powerful learning can take place in the process of conversing and exchanging ideas with others, then setting up ways to have as many of these conversations as possible seems like an obvious thing to do.

It might be easy to think that the people on the stage at conferences have the knowledge and that if we simply listen to them we will get wisdom, but the truth is that sometimes it just doesn't work like that, and even if it does, most of those ideas gather far more momentum once we start to internalise them through further conversation with others. Ideas beget ideas, one thing leads to another, and you often find some of the best, most useful ideas come to you not from what was said by a speaker, but from things that came to to you as a result of further conversation about what was said.  (by the way, the same logic applies in classrooms too!)

If we limit our notion of learning to the "official" channel - the teacher, the textbook, the syllabus - we miss so much. Yes, learning happens at school, but what about outside school? Yes, learning happens in the classroom, but what about outside the classroom? Yes, learning happens in the act of "being taught", but what about when we are not "being taught"?

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,”

These days, pen-and-paper and word-processing skills are not enough to fully prepare students for writing beyond K-12. Students also need direct instruction in digital writing—or writing created or read on a computer or other Internet-connected device. Digital writing requires both traditional writing skills—knowledge of the process, conventions, organizational structure, etc.—and more advanced techniques, such as the ability to meld visual, audio, and text into a single piece.

“Students can critically read in a variety of ways: When they raise vital questions and problems from the text, When they gather and assess relevant information and then offer plausible interpretations of that information, When they test their interpretations against previous knowledge or experience …, When they examine their assumptions and the implications of those assumptions, and When they use what they have read to communicate effectively with others or to develop potential solutions to complex problems.

Interpretation of evidence

Making connections

Most schools will say that they want students to have an understanding of their world as a whole, but they seldom look at topics with an interdisciplinary focus. Why? It is easy to find reasons why this disjointed approach to learning happens: · Some argue that there is so much content and so many skills to be learned  in each discipline that they don’t have time to integrate subjects. · Others say that the each discipline has a body of knowledge and skills that  should stand on its own and not be muddied by the intrusion of other disciplines. · Secondary educators say that there is insufficient common planning time  to combine their efforts to teach an interdisciplinary course. · Still others say that the whole system is geared toward separate subjects  and to break out of this would require a monumental effort. · Others are guided by “the tests,” which are presented by separate disciplines.

The ultimate goal for the study of any subject is to develop a deeper understanding of its content and skills so that students can engage in higher-level thinking and higher- level application of its principles. When students dig deeper and understand content across several disciplines, they will be better equipped to engage in substantive discussion and application of the topic. They will also be better able to see relationships across disciplines.

learning is a process which occurs within the mind of the individual as they process stimuli arriving from their sensory buffer from their environment (broadly speaking), into working memory and onward into long-term memory. 

self-guided learning or self-initiated learning

what is significant

The promise of the Common Core is dying and teaching and learning are being distorted.  The well that should sustain the Core has been poisoned.

Whether or not learning the word ‘commission’ is appropriate for second graders could be debated—I personally think it is a bit over the top.  What is of deeper concern, however, is that during a time when 7 year olds should be listening to and making music, they are instead taking a vocabulary quiz.

Real learning occurs in the mind of the learner when she makes connections with prior learning, makes meaning, and retains that knowledge in order to create additional meaning from new information.  In short, with tests we see traces of learning, not learning itself.

shape the content within the modules in any way that suit their desired purposes

“Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off. You have to ask the question – you have to want to know – in order to open up the space for the answer to fit.”

self-concepts are extremely resistant to change, even in the light of facts that clearly contradict them (Swann, 1992).

Stated more positively, with more balance between the various levels, the teacher will experience less inner and outer frictions. Ideally, there is a complete “alignment” of the levels, which means that the teacher's behavior, competencies, beliefs, identity and mission together form one coherent whole matching the environment.

Students should never use information in Wikipedia (or any other online encyclopedia) for formal purposes (such as school essays) until they have verified and evaluated the information based on external sources. For this reason, Wikipedia, like any encyclopedia, is a great starting place for research but not always a great ending place.

It is possible for a given Wikipedia article to be biased, outdated, or factually incorrect. This is true of any resource. One should always double-check the accuracy of important facts, regardless of the source. In general, popular Wikipedia articles are more accurate than ones that receive little traffic, because they are read more often and therefore any errors are corrected in a more timely fashion. Wikipedia articles may also suffer from issues such as Western bias, but hopefully this will also improve with time. For more information

Although the majority of edits attempt to improve the encyclopedia, vandalism is frequent.

U.S. schools under the jurisdiction of state and federal governments are now scripted processes that view knowledge as static capital, students as passive and empty vessels, and teachers as compliant conduits for state-approved content. The accountability paradigm is antithetical to human agency and autonomy and thus to democracy, but it serves the needs of the status quo and the ruling elite; in effect, accountability paradigms driving compulsory education are oppressive:

Re-reading and re-writing the world acknowledges that being as a human is always becoming, and these acts embrace the perpetual cycle of re-reading and re-writing as essential for both human agency and democracy. Teaching and learning are reciprocal and on-going, not hierarchical and ends to attain, possess.