EDUC 818 - W12

"The research of more than 2,300 undergraduates found 45 percent of students show no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years."

"MIT has decided to put the two together-free content and sophisticated online pedagogy­-and add a third, crucial ingredient: credentials. Beginning this spring, students will be able to take free, online courses offered through the MITx initiative. If they prove they've learned the materi­al, MITx will, for a small fee, give them a credential certifying as much."

Praise for ability is commonly considered to have beneficial effects on motivation. Contrary to this popular belief, six studies demonstrated that praise for intelligence had more negative consequences for students' achievement motivation than praise for effort. Fifth graders praised for intelligence were found to care more about performance goals relative to learning goals than children praised for effort. After failure, they also displayed less task persistence, less task enjoyment, more lowability attributions, and worse task performance than children praised for effort. Finally, children praised for intelligence described it as a fixed trait more than children praised for hard work, who believed it to be subject to improvement. These findings have important implications for how achievement is best encouraged, as well as for more theoretical issues, such as the potential cost of performance goals and the socialization of contingent self-worth.

A diagram explaining why some individuals are resiliant and others are lazy when it comes to learning and facing obstacles.

"citeulike is a free service for managing and discovering scholarly references "

"LectureTools turns student laptops into in-class communication tools and increases student participation regardless of class size."

Universal Design for Learning is a set of principles for curriculum development that give all individuals equal opportunities to learn. UDL provides a blueprint for creating instructional goals, methods, materials, and assessments that work for everyone--not a single, one-size-fits-all solution but rather flexible approaches that can be customized and adjusted for individual needs."

"Apple is empowering students to share content in real time, turning a classroom lesson into a social-networking experience."

"That puts most college-level students right at the beginning of what Metros calls the literacy continuum. "Literacy sits on a continuum. As we move up the continuum, we become more learned, practiced, original, sophisticated, and critical," she explains. So where would we like our students to be on the literacy continuum? "While we do need to move our students toward digital literacy, I think there is some confusion about this continuum. I don't think we need to make everyone an expert. For example, you could be a student in economics and be literate in technology; but if you are a student in film studies, you are going to need to be truly fluent in certain technologies.""

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"Zygote Media Group, which provided the imagery for Google's modeling, has built Zygote Body with the code. It offers the same navigation and features. To support this launch, the Google Body team has built a new, open-source 3D viewer at open-3d-viewer.googlecode.com. Thanks to the work of Google engineers, any developer can now use the same kind of 3D model browser for her or his own project."

Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work-in the web browser itself.

"By combining threading with search, technology makes an economic virtue of virtual disorganization. The personal productivity issue knowledge workers and effective executives need to ponder is whether habits of efficiency that once improved performance have decayed into mindless ruts that delay or undermine desired outcomes. Are folders and filing systems worth fifteen to twenty-five minutes a day of contemplative classification and sort for serious managers?"

"Light's research indicates that students take their writing more seriously when they write for their peers than when they write for their professors. His argument, as I recall it, was that a student can turn in a paper to a professor in which something isn't explained very clearly, assuming that the professor will fill in the gaps. Students know their peers can't fill in those gaps, so they have to work a little harder to explain themselves if they want their peers to understand them. And since they generally want to share their ideas with their peers, they put forth that effort."