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People from the commercial sector who believe they have some truth to reveal to the misguided people in higher education see themselves very much in the role of what Saul Bellow terms 'Reality Instructors.' The reality instructor is referenced in the marvellous Herzog, ("Moses was irresistible to a man like Simkin who loved to pity and to poke fun at the same time. He was a Reality-Instructor. Many such. I bring them out") but the character is a constant theme in Bellow's novels. It is usually manifest in a male, street-wise character who delights in teaching the main, intellectual character some truths about the 'real world'. But it's worth pointing out that the main character is aware of this, enjoys it, and that these truths are rarely as valuable and as robust as the reality-instructor believes.

Instead of universities being told how to operate in a tough financial climate, maybe businesses should be coming to them and asking 'you have managed to maintain a viable business and role in society for hundreds of years. You have adapted without completing ruining your entire system, and, ahem, throwing the world into a deep crisis. How do you do it?'

With all the interaction and kind help that we’ve received from the education community, we’d like to recognize those educators who are taking pioneering steps in getting their students and/or their peers started on collaborative research using Diigo’s powerful features. To express our appreciation, we’ve designed a “Diigo Education Pioneer” badge especially for you! Along with that, a big “Thank you”!

So, who gets to have this “Diigo Education Pioneer” badge?  Well, once your account has been approved for the education upgrade and you have started using and sharing Diigo with your students and/or colleagues in an educational setting,  you can get your own in your “Teacher Console” area >> Get Your Own Badge! We have a whole array of nice looking badges to suit your own personal style

this rather sobering reflection on the state of education today from Richard Peck: You can teach children, or you can fear their parents, but you can’t do both. So true. When teachers pander to parents, children lose. They become spoiled, weak, vain, self-indulgent. Parents can’t always demand enough from their children — we are too close, too sympathetic. A good teacher will take a child and force them to do better than they thought they could. And it will cost the child. It will be hard. It will make them work, think, cry even. But it will make them grow.

while informal writing is an integral part of youth culture, teenagers also overwhelmingly understand the importance of good writing: 86 percent of teens consider formal writing skills essential to future success. While today's "screenagers" may offer but cursory glances at web pages that does not mean they discount the importance of a sustained engagement with a Shakespearean drama.

in the best-case scenarios, teachers will use these changes to demonstrate to students the power of the written word and the importance of communicating clearly, and teachers will then give students new tools and strategies to improve their command of prose and persuasion.

Web pages and accompanying multimedia are now integral primary sources for chroniclers and historians of the 21st century.

To me “sound pedagogy” isn’t a guarded gateway through which all things must pass before becoming true learning, it’s an ideal that should permeate and inform everything.

the perpetual conflict between the educational technology unit and the learning and teaching unit

The educational technologist are seen to be tech-obsessed, light on pedagogy and prone to obscure abbreviations; while the academics are stereotyped as waffley anti-technologists with a love of chalk-and-talk. Adding to this complexity, each sphere tends to be characterised by a distinct culture and common language. Often times the divisions are so clearly delineated that, despite units merging on paper, the two spheres operate largely independently of one another.

My students are more involved with technology than ever before. They have taken the lead in mass networking and graphic design

They block network programs such as Facebook because of a fear of what might be abused. They block all Web-based e-mail systems that in all reality should help the majority of students. They also reject the use of iPods and cell phones because they believe the use of these new technologies would reduce a student's capacity to learn

no one is going to stop the use of these technologies.

if you encourage discussion in class, you have to be prepared for your students to arrive at conclusions that are unpalatable to you.

When I started, largely out of exasperation, to investigate the educational research literature for myself, I was pleasantly surprised to find there was some genuinely useful and scholarly work out there, which recognised the demands of different subjects and even admitted that university lecturers aren't all workshy and stupid... It's a shame that this better stuff doesn't seem to have fed through into the generic courses that most institutions offer. My personal advice to anyone starting out as a university teacher: find a few colleagues who take their teaching seriously (there are almost certain to be some in the department) and ask them for advice; sit in on their classes if possible; remember you'll never teach perfectly but you can always teach better; and close your ears to well-meaning interference from anybody who's never actually spent time at the chalkface!

Magueijo's could acknowledge that some people teaching these courses are genuinely concerned about improving teaching, and they need academics' help in designing better courses that do so. Sotto's side should acknowldge that however much they talk about how important teaching is (as if they discovered this, and academics did not know), they are not listening to the people attending their courses if those people feel utterly patronised and frustrated at the waste of their time. If academics treated their students like educationalists treat their student academics they'd be appalling teachers. A simple course allowing us to learn from a video of our own lectures would be immensely useful. Instead whole empires of education have developed that need to justify themselves and grow, so they subject us to educational jargon and make us write essays on the educationalist's pet theory.

With almost all of the world's codified knowledge at your fingertips, why should you spend increasingly scarce attention loading up your own mind just in case you may some day need this particular fact or concept? Far better, one might argue, to access efficiently what you need, when you need it. This depends, of course, on building up a sufficient internalized structure of concepts to be able to link with the online store of knowledge. How to teach this is perhaps the greatest challenge and opportunity facing educators in the 21st century.

Those of us who are still skeptical might recall that Plato, in the Phaedrus, suggested that writing would “create forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it.”

re•fuse•nik (n) somebody who refuses to agree to, take part in, or cooperate with something, especially on grounds of principle (informal) Why do I think people are Refuseniks? Let's look at a little history: The first major introduction of computers into the classroom took place, essentially with the introduction of the Apple II-e computer. The Apple II-e was introduced in 1983 and became a staple of campuses around the world. So, in order to keep things simple, let’s just say it was 1985 by the time Apple II-e’s really hit it big in the classroom. So, without too much mathematical calculation going on here, it is not a stretch to say that computers have been in the schools for at least 24 years. A teacher, even with 35 years experience today, will have had 63% of their professional life exposed to computers in their work environment. A teacher with less than 24 years of experience will have not known a school without a computer.