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In this blog posting, David Silver explains how Twitter replaced three other technologies he was using in the classroom.

Last, but certainly not least, here is one of countless articles about Professor David Parry’s work with Twitter, from early 2008. This is the first Twitter in the classroom story that I came across and it has been discussed and posted about many times on the Internet.

Twitter for Academia Promoting Twitteracy in the classroom How to use Twitter in the Classroom 50 ways to use Twitter in the classroom

It's one thing to be closed to students' arguments or to insist on conformity with a prof's views.  It is another altogether when students do not know how to argue their own points, especially points that are not political.  At some point, isn't it the case that the prof does know even a little bit more about their subjects than their students?

Several studies (post 1998) seem to indicate that the capacity to understand and engage in logical argumentation has diminished (at least in the 'Western' world). These studies seem to have encouraged the state education boards (committees) of several states to entertain making a "critical thinking" or "Introductory logic" course part of the required core.

I have found Susan Wolcott's teaching materials, which are informed by research by K.S. Kitchener and P. M. King, to be the most helpful in addressing student accusations of bias.  I had long been puzzled by why my colleagues in philosophy are so often accused of bias when, in my own observation of their teaching, they take care to keep their own views of a philosophical topic hidden from students.  Indeed, they spend a great deal of time playing devil's advocate and championing the philosophical position that is getting the least airtime in class discussion, readily switching sides if another perspective begins to be neglected.  Wolcott's developmental analysis, which explains how students arrive at college as "confused fact finders" and often get stuck in learning critical thinking skills at the "biased jumper" stage, helps me to understand how students attribute bias to professors when the students lack skills to maneuver around arguments.  The most helpful part of Wolcott's analysis is her suggestion that, if one gives students an assignment that is more than one level above their current abilities in critical thinking, they will completely ignore the assignment task.  This failing is particularly visible when students are asked to compare strengths/weaknesses in two arguments but instead write essays in which they juxtrapose two arguments and ignore the task of forging comparisons.  In Wolcott's workbooks (available by request on her website), she describes assignments that are specifically designed to help students build a scaffolding for critical thinking so that, over four years, they can actually leave the "biased jumper" stage and move on to more advanced levels of critical thinking.  One need not be a slavish adherent to the developmental theory behind Wolcott's work to find her practical suggestions extremely helpful in the classroom.   Her chart on stages of critical thinking is the first link below; her website is the second link.   http://www.wolcottlynch.com/Do... http://www.wolcottlynch.com/Ed...

The classroom and campus are not divorced from the polarized language in the greater society wherein people are entrenched in their own views and arguments become heated, hateful, and accusatory.  The focus of this study on political bias is not helpful under the circumstances.  The greater argument is that students need to be taught how to argue effectively, with facts, logic and reasoning not just in the classroom but beyond.

What happened to the 'Sage on the Stage' as the 'provacatuer-in-chief'?  Some of my best classroom experiences came from faculty that prompted critical thinking and discussion by speaking from all sides of an issue.  They were sufficiently informed to deflate weak arguments from students with probing questions.  They also defended an issue from every side with factual information.  In the best instances, I truly did not know the personal position of a faculty member.  It was more important to them to fully and fairly cover an issue than it was to espouse a personal preference.  That spoke volumes to me about the love of learning, critical examination of strongly held personal beliefs, and assertive but fair-minded discourse.  Do those faculty still exist?

The study suggests that those faculty do exist and in fact are numerous, but that students' ever-diminishing skills in critical thinking and argumentation lead them to misunderstand the questioning, challenging Socratic dialogue and "devil's advocate" work of the professor as simple bias. 

When I was teaching controversial subjects the advice from the Administration was, "Teach the debate."  Its pretty hard to "teach the debate" without actually having some of those debates.  When students "checked out" during those debates I always wondered if they were the ones who were going to report on their teaching evaluations that, "the professor was biased."  Of course when the student intellectually "checks out," i.e., remains quiet, only says what they think I want to hear, etc., they are not doing A work in the class.  This reinforces their view that "the professor is biased."

Education’s job should be, says Kay, to bridge this gap. To help, that is, people form these necessary new idea-receiving categories–teaching them the capacity for ideas–early on in their lives, so that as they grow they are ready to embrace the things we need them to know. Let me say that in a better way: so that as they grow they are ready to know in the ways we need them to know.

cultivate the ability to conceive of, work with, create, understand, manipulate, tinker with, disrupt, and, generally, appreciate the beauty of systems

Seeing systems is an epistemology, a way of knowing, a mindset

a game, or a simulation, thought of as a thing we might create (rather than a thing we only act within), is a visceral example of systems thinking

It’s the Flatland story–that we need to train our 2D minds to see in a kind of 3D–and Kay’s genius is that he recognizes we have to bake this ability into the species, through education, as close to birth as possible.

Systems thinking is to be conceived of as a platform skill or an increased capacity on top of which we will be able to construct new sorts of ideas and ways of knowing, of more complex natures still. The step beyond seeing a single system is of course the ability to see interacting systems – a kind of meta-systemic thinking – and this is what I think Kay is really interested in, because it’s what he does. At one point he showed a slide of multiple systems–the human body, the environment, the internet, and he said in a kind of aside, “they’re all one system . . .”

The point is to be able to see connections between the silos. Says Kay, the liberal arts have done a bad job at “adding in epistemology” among the “smokestacks” (i.e. disciplines)

What happens when you’re stuck in a system? You don’t understand the world and yourself and others as existing in constant development, as being in process; you think you are a fixed essence or part within a system (instead of a system influencing systems) and you inadvertently trap yourself in a kind of tautological loop where you can only think about things you’re thinking about and do the things you do and you thus limit yourself to a kind of non-nutritive regurgitation of factoids, or the robotic meaningless actions of an automaton, or what Kay calls living in a pop culture

A downside of being epistemologically limited to thinking within a system is that you overemphasize the importance of the content and facts as that system orders them

contemporary children have very little experience with the kinds of tasks that they'll have to perform as grown-ups. Children have increasingly little chance to practice even basic skills like cooking and caregiving. Contemporary adolescents and pre-adolescents often don't do much of anything except go to school. Even the paper route and the baby-sitting job have largely disappeared.

This control system depends much more on learning. It becomes increasingly effective throughout childhood and continues to develop during adolescence and adulthood, as we gain more experience. You come to make better decisions by making not-so-good decisions and then correcting them. You get to be a good planner by making plans, implementing them and seeing the results again and again. Expertise comes with experience.

first with the industrial revolution and then even more dramatically with the information revolution, children have come to take on adult roles later and later. Five hundred years ago, Shakespeare knew that the emotionally intense combination of teenage sexuality and peer-induced risk could be tragic—witness "Romeo and Juliet." But, on the other hand, if not for fate, 13-year-old Juliet would have become a wife and mother within a year or two.

Wide-ranging, flexible and broad learning, the kind we encourage in high-school and college, may actually be in tension with the ability to develop finely-honed, controlled, focused expertise in a particular skill, the kind of learning that once routinely took place in human societies. For most of our history, children have started their internships when they were seven, not 27

experience shapes the brain. People often think that if some ability is located in a particular part of the brain, that must mean that it's "hard-wired" and inflexible. But, in fact, the brain is so powerful precisely because it is so sensitive to experience. It's as true to say that our experience of controlling our impulses make the prefrontal cortex develop as it is to say that prefrontal development makes us better at controlling our impulses. Our social and cultural life shapes our biology.

it is noticeable, and surely regrettable, how little the public debate about universities in contemporary Britain makes any kind of appeal to this widespread appreciation on the part of ordinary intelligent citizens that there should be places where these kinds of inquiries are being pursued at their highest level. Part of the problem may be that while universities are spectacularly good at producing new forms of understanding, they are not always very good at explaining what they are doing when they do this.

talking to audiences outside universities (some of whom may be graduates), I am struck by the level of curiosity about, and enthusiasm for, ideas and the quest for greater understanding, whether in history and literature, or physics and biology, or any number of other fields. Some members of these audiences may not have had the chance to study these things themselves, but they very much want their children to have the opportunity to do so; others may have enjoyed only limited and perhaps not altogether happy experience of higher education in their own lives, but have now in their adulthood discovered a keen amateur reading interest in these subjects; others still may have retired from occupations that largely frustrated their intellectual or aesthetic inclinations and are now hungry for stimulation.

the American social critic Thorstein Veblen published a book entitled The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Businessmen, in which he declared: "Ideally, and in the popular apprehension, the university is, as it has always been, a corporation for the cultivation and care of the community's highest aspirations and ideals." Given that Veblen's larger purpose, as indicated by his book's subtitle, involved a vigorous critique of current tendencies in American higher education, the confidence and downrightness of this declaration are striking. And I particularly like his passing insistence that this elevated conception of the university and the "popular apprehension" of it coincide, about which he was surely right.

If we are only trustees for our generation of the peculiar cultural achievement that is the university, then those of us whose lives have been shaped by the immeasurable privilege of teaching and working in a university are not entitled to give up on the attempt to make the case for its best purposes and to make that case tell in the public domain, however discouraging the immediate circumstances. After all, no previous generation entirely surrendered this ideal of the university to those fantasists who think they represent the real world. Asking ourselves "What are universities for?" may help remind us, amid distracting circumstances, that we – all of us, inside universities or out – are indeed merely custodians for the present generation of a complex intellectual inheritance which we did not create, and which is not ours to destroy.

University economics departments are failing. While science and engineering have developed reliable and informed understanding of the world, so they can advise politicians and others wisely, economics in academia has singularly failed to move beyond flat-Earth insistence that ancient dogma is correct, in the face of resounding evidence that it is not.

I studied at a U.K. university for 4 years and much later taught at one for 12 years. My last role was as head of the R&D group of a large company in India. My corporate role confirmed for me the belief that it is quite wrong for companies to expect universities to train the graduates they will hire. Universities are for educating minds (usually young and impressionable, but not necessarily) in ways that companies are totally incapable of. On the other hand, companies are or should be excellent at training people for the specific skills that they require: if they are not, there are plenty of other agencies that will provide such training. I remember many inclusive discussions with some of my university colleagues when they insisted we should provide the kind of targeted education that companies expected, which did not include anything fundamental or theoretical. In contrast, the companies I know of are looking for educated minds capable of adapting to the present and the relatively uncertain future business environment. They have much more to gain from a person whose education includes basic subjects that may not be of practical use today, than in someone trained in, say, word and spreadsheet processing who is unable to work effectively when the nature of business changes. The ideal employee would be one best equipped to participate in making those changes, not one who needs to be trained again in new skills.

Individual lecturers may be great but the system is against the few whose primary interest is education and students.

I had the ability to set my own schedule most of the time. I could be with my kids when I needed to be, and still get the work done.

the minute I found myself in a job that is typical for the vast majority of working women (and men), working long hours on someone else’s schedule, I could no longer be both the parent and the professional I wanted to be

having it all, at least for me, depended almost entirely on what type of job I had.

having it all was not possible in many types of jobs, including high government office—at least not for very long.

“Having control over your schedule is the only way that women who want to have a career and a family can make it work.”

Yet the decision to step down from a position of power—to value family over professional advancement, even for a time—is directly at odds with the prevailing social pressures on career professionals in the United States.

“leaving to spend time with your family” is a euphemism for being fired.

Think about what this “standard Washington excuse” implies: it is so unthinkable that an official would actually step down to spend time with his or her family that this must be a cover for something else.

it cannot change unless top women speak out.

Both were very clear that they did not want that life, but could not figure out how to combine professional success and satisfaction with a real commitment to family.

many of us are also reinforcing a falsehood: that “having it all” is, more than anything, a function of personal determination.

there has been very little honest discussion among women of our age about the real barriers and flaws that still exist in the system despite the opportunities we inherited.

But we have choices about the type and tempo of the work we do. We are the women who could be leading, and who should be equally represented in the leadership ranks.

women are less happy today than their predecessors were in 1972, both in absolute terms and relative to men.

The best hope for improving the lot of all women, and for closing what Wolfers and Stevenson call a “new gender gap”—measured by well-being rather than wages—is to close the leadership gap:

Only when women wield power in sufficient numbers will we create a society that genuinely works for all women. That will be a society that works for everyone.

We must clear them out of the way to make room for a more honest and productive discussion about real solutions to the problems faced by professional women.

These women cannot possibly be the standard against which even very talented professional women should measure themselves. Such a standard sets up most women for a sense of failure

A simple measure is how many women in top positions have children compared with their male colleagues.

Every male Supreme Court justice has a family. Two of the three female justices are single with no children.

women hold fewer than 30 percent of the senior foreign-policy positions in each of these institutions.

“You know what would help the vast majority of women with work/family balance? MAKE SCHOOL SCHEDULES MATCH WORK SCHEDULES.” The present system, she noted, is based on a society that no longer exists—one in which farming was a major occupation and stay-at-home moms were the norm. Yet the system hasn’t changed.

“Inflexible schedules, unrelenting travel, and constant pressure to be in the office are common features of these jobs.”

I would hope to see commencement speeches that finger America’s social and business policies, rather than women’s level of ambition, in explaining the dearth of women at the top. But changing these policies requires much more than speeches. It means fighting the mundane battles—every day, every year—in individual workplaces, in legislatures, and in the media.

assumes that most women will feel as comfortable as men do about being away from their children, as long as their partner is home with them. In my experience, that is simply not the case.

I do not believe fathers love their children any less than mothers do, but men do seem more likely to choose their job at a cost to their family, while women seem more likely to choose their family at a cost to their job.

To many men, however, the choice to spend more time with their children, instead of working long hours on issues that affect many lives, seems selfish.

It is not clear to me that this ethical framework makes sense for society. Why should we want leaders who fall short on personal responsibilities?

Regardless, it is clear which set of choices society values more today. Workers who put their careers first are typically rewarded; workers who choose their families are overlooked, disbelieved, or accused of unprofessionalism.

having a supportive mate may well be a necessary condition if women are to have it all, but it is not sufficient

Ultimately, it is society that must change, coming to value choices to put family ahead of work just as much as those to put work ahead of family. If we really valued those choices, we would value the people who make them; if we valued the people who make them, we would do everything possible to hire and retain them; if we did everything possible to allow them to combine work and family equally over time, then the choices would get a lot easier.

Given the way our work culture is oriented today, I recommend establishing yourself in your career first but still trying to have kids before you are 35—or else freeze your eggs, whether you are married or not.

But the truth is, neither sequence is optimal, and both involve trade-offs that men do not have to make.

You should be able to have a family if you want one—however and whenever your life circumstances allow—and still have the career you desire.

If more women could strike this balance, more women would reach leadership positions. And if more women were in leadership positions, they could make it easier for more women to stay in the workforce. The rest of this essay details how.

I have to admit that my assumption that I would stay late made me much less efficient over the course of the day than I might have been, and certainly less so than some of my colleagues, who managed to get the same amount of work done and go home at a decent hour.

Still, armed with e-mail, instant messaging, phones, and videoconferencing technology, we should be able to move to a culture where the office is a base of operations more than the required locus of work.

Being able to work from home—in the evening after children are put to bed, or during their sick days or snow days, and at least some of the time on weekends—can be the key, for mothers, to carrying your full load versus letting a team down at crucial moments.

Changes in default office rules should not advantage parents over other workers; indeed, done right, they can improve relations among co-workers by raising their awareness of each other’s circumstances and instilling a sense of fairness.

The policy was shaped by the belief that giving women “special treatment” can “backfire if the broader norms shaping the behavior of all employees do not change.”

Our assumptions are just that: things we believe that are not necessarily so. Yet what we assume has an enormous impact on our perceptions and responses. Fortunately, changing our assumptions is up to us.

One of the best ways to move social norms in this direction is to choose and celebrate different role models.

If we didn’t start to learn how to integrate our personal, social, and professional lives, we were about five years away from morphing into the angry woman on the other side of a mahogany desk who questions her staff’s work ethic after standard 12-hour workdays, before heading home to eat moo shoo pork in her lonely apartment.

Women have contributed to the fetish of the one-dimensional life, albeit by necessity. The pioneer generation of feminists walled off their personal lives from their professional personas to ensure that they could never be discriminated against for a lack of commitment to their work.

It seems odd to me to list degrees, awards, positions, and interests and not include the dimension of my life that is most important to me—and takes an enormous amount of my time.

when my entire purpose is to make family references routine and normal in professional life.

This does not mean that you should insist that your colleagues spend time cooing over pictures of your baby or listening to the prodigious accomplishments of your kindergartner. It does mean that if you are late coming in one week, because it is your turn to drive the kids to school, that you be honest about what you are doing.

Seeking out a more balanced life is not a women’s issue; balance would be better for us all.

Indeed, the most frequent reaction I get in putting forth these ideas is that when the choice is whether to hire a man who will work whenever and wherever needed, or a woman who needs more flexibility, choosing the man will add more value to the company.

In 2011, a study on flexibility in the workplace by Ellen Galinsky, Kelly Sakai, and Tyler Wigton of the Families and Work Institute showed that increased flexibility correlates positively with job engagement, job satisfaction, employee retention, and employee health.

Other scholars have concluded that good family policies attract better talent, which in turn raises productivity, but that the policies themselves have no impact on productivity.

What is evident, however, is that many firms that recruit and train well-educated professional women are aware that when a woman leaves because of bad work-family balance, they are losing the money and time they invested in her.

The answer—already being deployed in different corners of the industry—is a combination of alternative fee structures, virtual firms, women-owned firms, and the outsourcing of discrete legal jobs to other jurisdictions.

Women, and Generation X and Y lawyers more generally, are pushing for these changes on the supply side; clients determined to reduce legal fees and increase flexible service are pulling on the demand side. Slowly, change is happening.

In trying to address these issues, some firms are finding out that women’s ways of working may just be better ways of working, for employees and clients alike.

“We believe that connecting play and imagination may be the single most important step in unleashing the new culture of learning.”

“Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.” Google apparently has taken note.

the more often people with different perspectives come together, the more likely creative ideas are to emerge. Giving workers the ability to integrate their non-work lives with their work—whether they spend that time mothering or marathoning—will open the door to a much wider range of influences and ideas.

Men have, of course, become much more involved parents over the past couple of decades, and that, too, suggests broad support for big changes in the way we balance work and family.

women would do well to frame work-family balance in terms of the broader social and economic issues that affect both women and men.

These women are extraordinary role models.

Yet I also want a world in which, in Lisa Jackson’s words, “to be a strong woman, you don’t have to give up on the things that define you as a woman.”

“Empowering yourself,” Jackson said in her speech at Princeton, “doesn’t have to mean rejecting motherhood, or eliminating the nurturing or feminine aspects of who you are.”

But now is the time to revisit the assumption that women must rush to adapt to the “man’s world” that our mothers and mentors warned us about.

If women are ever to achieve real equality as leaders, then we have to stop accepting male behavior and male choices as the default and the ideal.

We must insist on changing social policies and bending career tracks to accommodate our choices, too. We have the power to do it if we decide to, and we have many men standing beside us.

But when we do, we will stop talking about whether women can have it all.

The home-game version of this means no longer encouraging kids to spring straight ahead to the right answer

The new view is that creativity is part of normal brain function.

“As a child, I never had an identity as a ‘creative person,’ ” Schwarzrock recalls. “But now that I know, it helps explain a lot of what I felt and went through.”

In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach.

fact-finding

problem-finding

Next, idea-finding