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.
The common experience is that getting admitted is the most exhausting part. After that, the struggle mainly is financial. 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.
Academically Adrift ends on a depressing note: "A renewed commitment to improving undergraduate education is unlikely to occur without changes to the organizational cultures of colleges and universities." Institutions are inherently conservative; they do not change easily. Many leaps of faith are necessary, and the people involved—teachers, students, parents, administrators, lawmakers, and others—have so many fundamental disagreements about the purposes of higher education that it is hard to know where to begin the conversation. It's far easier to make cuts to an inherently broken system than to begin building something new.
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.
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."
Given the growing momentum of these trends, what does it mean for students, teachers, schools, and the education community at large?
Collaborating and customizing. Educators are learning to work together, with their students, and with other experts in creating content, and are able to tailor it to exactly what they need.
Critical thinking. Students are learning how to effectively find content and to discern reliable sources.
Democratizing education. With Internet access becoming more ubiquitous, the children of the poorest people are able to get access to the same quality education as the wealthiest.
Changing the textbook industry. Textbook publishers are finding ways to make themselves relevant to their digital audience.
Emphasizing skills over facts. Curriculum incorporates skill-building.
Sorry forgot the three trends (the above are consequences of these trends)
1. Digital delivery "No longer shackled to books as their only source of content, educators and students are going online to find reliable, valuable, and up-to-the-minute information"
2. Interest driven curriculum "Though students typically have to wait until their third year of college to choose what they learn, the idea of K-12 education being tailored to students' own interests is becoming more commonplace"
3. Skills 2.0 " Instead of learning from others who have the credentials to 'teach' in this new networked world, we learn with others whom we seek (and who seek us) on our own and with whom we often share nothing more than a passion for knowing"
Embed a Video on the Wired How-To Wiki
From Wired How-To Wiki
Jump to: navigation, search Adding video is a great way to help illustrate your How-To Wiki article. Here are some instructions.
But, bottom line: The video must be hosted on YouTube.
A site with virtual Dice. Choose a die with 6, 8, 10 or 12 sides. You can customise the dice with text and using wingdings font allows you to have pictures. Great for many activities.
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Maths
tackle what colleges were doing poorly: graduating students. Half the students who enroll in post-secondary education never get a degree but still accumulate debt
school spends millions to employ more than 160 “admissions counselors” who man the phones, especially on weekends, guiding prospective students into the right degree program
vast majority are working adults, many with families, whose lives rarely align with an academic timetable.
“College is designed in every way for that 20 percent—cost, time, scheduling, everything,” says LeBlanc. He set out to create an institution for the other 80 percent, one that was flexible and offered a seamless online experience
low completion rate can be blamed partly on the fact that college is still designed for 18-year-olds who are signing up for an immersive, four-year experience replete with football games and beer-drinking. But those traditional students make up only 20 percent of the post-secondary population.
online courses are created centrally and then farmed out to a small army of adjuncts hired for as little as $2,200 a class. Those adjuncts have scant leeway in crafting the learning experience.
An instructor’s main job is to swoop in when a student is in trouble. Often, they don’t pick up the warning signs themselves. Instead, SNHU’s predictive analytics platform plays watchdog, sending up a red flag to an instructor when a student hasn’t logged on recently or has spent too much time on an assignment
highly standardized courses, and adjuncts who act more like coaches than professors
All currently supported versions of EndNote are 32-bit applications. EndNote when installed on x64 based systems will install by default to:"C:\Program Files (x86)\EndNote (#)" where (#) is the version of EndNote.
重新查看了endnote主页，X4可以与WIN7 64位兼容，但与64位office 2010不兼容。
LZ只能换32位 office 2010了。
Word Processor Compatibility:
EndNote is compatible with the following word processing and text formats: Cite While You Write feature compatible with:
Microsoft Word® 2003, 2007 & 2010 (32 bit)
Note: Microsoft recommends 32-bit Office 2010 for both 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems. Office 64-bit is optimized for advanced data analysis scenarios that most users don抰 require, and existing 32-bit add-ins are not supported on Office 64-bit.
Feed readers
are probably the most important digital tool for today's learner because they
make sifting through the amazing amount of content added to the Internet
easy. Also known as aggregators, feed readers are free tools that can
automatically check nearly any website for new content dozens of times a
day---saving ridiculous amounts of time and customizing learning experiences for
anyone.
Imagine
never having to go hunting for new information from your favorite sources
again. Learning goes from a frustrating search through thousands of
marginal links written by questionable characters to quickly browsing the
thoughts of writers that you trust, respect and enjoy.
Feed readers can
quickly and easily support blogging in the classroom, allowing teachers to
provide students with ready access to age-appropriate sites of interest that are
connected to the curriculum. By collecting sites in advance and organizing
them with a feed reader, teachers can make accessing information manageable for
their students.
Here are several
examples of feed readers in action:
Used specifically as
a part of one classroom project, this feed list contains information related to
global warming that students can use as a starting point for individual
research.
While there are literally dozens of different feed reader
programs to choose from (Bloglines andGoogle Reader are two
biggies), Pageflakes is a favorite of
many educators because it has a visual layout that is easy to read and
interesting to look at. It is also free and web-based. That
means that users can check accounts from any computer with an Internet
connection. Finally, Pageflakes makes it quick and easy to add new
websites to a growing feed list—and to get rid of any websites that users are no
longer interested in.
What's even
better: Pageflakes has been developinga teacher version of their tooljust for us that includes an online grade tracker,
a task list and a built in writing tutor. As Pageflakes works to perfect
its teacher product, this might become one of the first kid-friendly feed
readers on the market. Teacher Pageflakes users can actually blog and create a
discussion forum directly in their feed reader---making an all-in-one digital
home for students.
For more
information about the teacher version of Pageflakes, check out this
review:
at least 45 percent of undergraduates demonstrated "no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills in the first two years of college, and 36 percent showed no progress in four years."
What good does it do to increase the number of students in college if the ones who are already there are not learning much? Would it not make more sense to improve the quality of education before we increase the quantity of students?
students in math, science, humanities, and social sciences—rather than those in more directly career-oriented fields—tend to show the most growth in the areas measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment, the primary tool used in their study. Also, students learn more from professors with high expectations who interact with them outside of the classroom. If you do more reading, writing, and thinking, you tend to get better at those things, particularly if you have a lot of support from your teachers.
Increasingly, undergraduates are not prepared adequately in any academic area but often arrive with strong convictions about their abilities.
It has become difficult to give students honest feedback.
As the college-age population declines, many tuition-driven institutions struggle to find enough paying customers to balance their budgets. That makes it necessary to recruit even more unprepared students, who then must be retained, shifting the burden for academic success away from the student and on to the teacher.
Although a lot of emphasis is placed on research on the tenure track, most faculty members are not on that track and are retained on the basis of what students think of them.
Students gravitate to lenient professors and to courses that are reputedly easy, particularly in general education.
It is impossible to maintain high expectations for long unless everyone holds the line in all comparable courses—and we face strong incentives not to do that.
Formerly, full-time, tenured faculty members with terminal degrees and long-term ties to the institution did most of the teaching. Such faculty members not only were free to grade honestly and teach with conviction but also had a deep understanding of the curriculum, their colleagues, and the institutional mission. Now undergraduate teaching relies primarily on graduate students and transient, part-time instructors on short-term contracts who teach at multiple institutions and whose performance is judged almost entirely by student-satisfaction surveys.
Contingent faculty members, who are paid so little, routinely teach course loads that are impossible to sustain without cutting a lot of corners.
Many colleges are now so packed with transient teachers, and multitasking faculty-administrators, that it is impossible to maintain some kind of logical development in the sequencing of courses.
Students may be enjoying high self-esteem, but college teachers seem to be suffering from a lack of self-confidence.
There are better forums for discussion than online discussion forums. The discussion forum is a ubiquitous component of every learning management system and online learning platform from Blackboard to Moodle to Coursera.
as though one relatively standardized interface can stand in for the many and varied modes of interaction we might have in a physical classroom
The point is not to reproduce what occurs in the physical classroom, but to provide support for discussion that takes advantage of the digital environment.
Too much of an idyllic view of the physical classrom. If what is said here about it where the case in the mayority of cases, the world would be a much better one.
While some might argue that the 140-character limit doesn’t allow for deep inquiry, we disagree. Twitter, rather, becomes a tool for a collective inquiry, creating depth through the metonymic relationship between tweets and between tweets and what they link to.
"There are better forums for discussion than online discussion forums. The discussion forum is a ubiquitous component of every learning management system and online learning platform from Blackboard to Moodle to Coursera."
"Ensures original work by checking submitted papers against 20+ billion web pages, 220+ million student papers and leading library databases and publications. Saves time and improves feedback through online grading where standard and customized marks appear directly on the student's paper. "
Check papers against 24+ billion web pages, 250+ million student papers and 110,000+ publications. Save instructors' time while providing rich feedback on student written work. Improve student writing by engaging them in the peer review process.
"Vyew allows you to meet and share content in real-time or anytime. Upload images, files, documents and videos into a room. Users can access and contribute at anytime.
Why use Vyew?
It's easy - no installations.
It's compatible - PC, Mac, Linux, powerpoints, documents, images, videos, mp3's, flash files.
It's FREE! - Our free version is free forever. Unlimited use with up to 10 people. What's the catch? It's ad supported.
Conferencing features - whiteboarding, video conferencing, screen sharing, Voice-over-IP.
Collaboration features - continuous rooms are always saved and always-on. Contextual discussion forums, voice-notes, track and log activity.
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A great site for collaborating online. Work on documents together in real time, video chat and share your screen with others are just a few features that make this a great site for tutoring, meetings and webinars.
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+&+Web+Tools
We're going to see growing pressure on higher education to offer increasingly differentiated paths to education
the demographic bubble supporting growth—and a disproportionate investment—in higher education has moved on to health care and to end-of-life issues. That bubble is not likely to come back to higher education
the tensions around cost are not going to go away in the next five years
The demand for more evidence-based demonstration that the methods of teaching and learning are working will continue to intensify
What is that vision now, in the 21st century? For me, it's the notion that education can be tailored and customized for every single individual
The danger is that we will concentrate exclusively on finding ways to refine the current system and we will lose the opportunity to reimagine higher education for this century, this economy, and this technology. We will miss the opportunity to redefine education for a world in which access to information, networks, and computation is ubiquitous
American maverick who insisted that the only way to tell a great story was to go out and report it.
journalism could offer the kinds of literary pleasure found in books.
Wolfe scorned the reluctance of American writers to confront social issues and warned that self-absorption and master’s programs would kill the novel. “So the doors close and the walls go up!” he wrote in his 1989 literary manifesto, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast.” He was astonished that no author of his generation had written a sweeping, 19th century style novel about contemporary New York City, and ended up writing one himself, “The Bonfire of the Vanities.”
“My contention is that status is on everybody’s mind all of the time, whether they’re conscious of it or not,”
“new journalism” combined the emotional impact of a novel, the analysis of the best essays, and the factual foundation of hard reporting. He mingled it all in an over-the-top style that made life itself seem like one spectacular headline.
pointed look at fund-raising for the Black Panther Party by Leonard Bernstein and other wealthy whites.
And no one more memorably captured the beauty-and-the-beast divide between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones: “The Beatles want to hold your hand,” he wrote, “but the Rolling Stones want to burn down your town!”
s a child, he did rewrites of the Authurian legends and penned biographies of his heroes.
unsuccessful pitching tryout with the New York Giants before
The Washington Post, where he won Washington Newspaper Guild awards in 1960 for his coverage of U.S.-Cuban affairs and a satiric account of that year’s Senate civil rights filibuster.
The next year, Wolfe was assigned to cover a “Hot Rod & Custom Car” show. He completed a story, the kind “any of the somnambulistic totem newspapers in America would have come up with.”
But he knew there was a much richer, and longer story to tell, one about a thriving subculture that captured the post-World War II economic boom and the new freedom to “build monuments” to one’s own style. No newspaper could contain what Wolfe had in mind, so he turned to Esquire magazine, wrote up 49 pages and helped give birth to a new kind of reporter.
“For the who-what-where-when-why of traditional journalism, he has substituted what he calls ‘the wowie!'” according to a 1965 Newsweek story.
“A Man in Full” turned Wolfe’s smirk to Atlanta society. His 2004 novel, “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” looked at life on a fictional elite college campus rife with drinking, status obsession and sex.
includes short VIDEO
"Wolfe scorned the reluctance of American writers to confront social issues and warned that self-absorption and master's programs would kill the novel."
Create 6-sided biography cubes, mystery cubes, story cubes, or your own custom cube. Fun way to share information or plan out a project! Includes graphic organizer (pdf) and lets you print and save a pdf of your cube when you're finished.
