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20 slides at 20 seconds per slide, a Pecha Kucha is, as Jason writes, necessarily “SHORT, INFORMAL, and CREATIVE.”

In addition to the time constraint of the Pecha Kucha, your presentation must also follow the 1/1/5 rule. That is, you must have at least one image per slide, you can use each exact image only once, and you should add no more than five words per slide. The formal constraints of this rigid format call for discipline, focus, practice, and paradoxically, creativity.

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.

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.

1. "The book is dead." Wrong: More books are produced in print each year than in the previous year. One million new titles will appear worldwide in 2011. In one day in Britain—"Super Thursday," last October 1—800 new works were published.

2. "We have entered the information age." This announcement is usually intoned solemnly, as if information did not exist in other ages. But every age is an age of information, each in its own way and according to the media available at the time.

3. "All information is now available online." The absurdity of this claim is obvious to anyone who has ever done research in archives. Only a tiny fraction of archival material has ever been read, much less digitized. Most judicial decisions and legislation, both state and federal, have never appeared on the Web. The vast output of regulations and reports by public bodies remains largely inaccessible to the citizens it affects. Google estimates that 129,864,880 different books exist in the world, and it claims to have digitized 15 million of them—or about 12 percent.

¿Existe un punto de convergencia entre las prioridades internacionales e institucionales?

¿qué hay del ideal de preparar a estudiantes con un amplio sentido de ciudadanía global, capaces de trabajar en equipos y ambientes internacionales, que tengan un refinado sentido de tolerancia y concientización multicultural, que hablen varios idiomas y que tengan un claro sentido de responsabilidad tanto local como global?

Now consider that, according to the American Association of Community Colleges, about half of all freshmen and sophomores are enrolled at the nation's 1,300 two-year colleges, and many of those students transfer to four-year institutions. For a large percentage of people who earn bachelor's degrees, then, the liberal-arts portion of their education was acquired at a two-year college. Next, factor in all of the community-college students who enter the work force after earning two-year degrees or certificates, and whose only exposure to the liberal arts occurred in whatever core courses their programs required. The conclusion becomes obvious: Two-year colleges are among the country's leading providers of liberal-arts education, although they seldom get credit for that role.

Employers rank communication and analytical skills among the most important attributes they seek in new hires, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Perhaps those of us who teach those very skills at community colleges should embrace the integral role we play in preparing the nation's workers rather than rejecting the idea of work-force development as somehow beneath us.

More important, this new perspective could have a positive effect on student success. If we come to see ourselves as preparing students not just for transfer but ultimately for the work force, students may be more likely to understand the relevance of the skills that we teach them and better able to use those skills for some purpose other than just getting a passing grade.

Blau and Caspi learned two things: first, that in general students felt that collaborating with partners improved the quality of drafts. On the other hand, the students mostly felt that their edits improved other people’s drafts, whereas other people’s edits worsened their own drafts. Blau and Caspi posit that a sense of ownership of the draft was pedagogically useful–that students’ perceptions of the overall quality of their work increased as they felt responsible for it. As a consequence, they conclude that the best way to reap the benefits of collaboration and psychological ownership of writing is to have students make suggestions to one another’s drafts, but not to edit one another’s writing directly.

When a student says, “Just tell me what you want,” the student could be speaking from a place of great frustration.

if students know what we want them to do and they understand how we will evaluate their efforts, they are more apt to do the work we assign.  They’ll take chances, and they’ll do so without much complaint. If we want students to take chances, they must be able to trust us.

Have I met my office hours?  (If not, have I left a note or alerted students to the change?) Is my syllabus online or otherwise available other than on the first day of the semester? Do I return student work in a reasonable amount of time? Do I require a textbook, and am I using that book? Do I respect my students and the knowledge they bring to the classroom? Have I set clear guidelines about assignments, even if the assignment is broad? If I have strict syllabus policies, do I enforce them equally and fairly? Am I creative or innovative in my approach to the subject?  (Am I modeling the kind of behavior/actions I wish to see in my students?) Have I been clear about how interpretive or creative takes on assignments will be evaluated?  (Am I sure I’m not evaluating harshly, for example, if I disagree with the student’s interpretation of the assignment?)

The term authenticity has been applied to music in various ways. It might be used to describe a piece of music (recorded, notated, performed); the process by which the music is taught and learned ( through recordings, live models, notation); or the manner in which it is performed (venue, dress, behaviors).

In other words, authenticity lies within the perceptions of the individual.

Anthony Palmer, who teaches music education at Boston University, has said that music with "absolute authenticity" is performed (a) by and for members of the culture; (b) in a typical setting, as determined by the members of the culture; (c) with instruments specified by the creator(s) of the music; and (d) in its original language.[ 8] Inarguably, and as Palmer recognizes, attaining this level of authenticity is impossible in a school music program (unless we consider "school music" residing within a unique culture of its own). In school, music is separated from its primary source many times over. Music is passed from its primary source (composer, grandmother) to an intermediary (arranger, performer, notation, recording) and channeled through a publisher or presenter to the teacher and finally to students. To confound matters, there are variants of melodies, lyrics, dances, games, and performance styles.