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David Wetzel

What is the Value of Vocational or Technical Education? - 10 views

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    A shortage of skilled workers in today's workforce is attributed by many employers to the lack of satisfactory education beyond high school.
Mireille Jansma

The Master List of Free Online College Courses | Universities and Colleges - 1 views

  • Healthcare, Medical, and Nursing Education and Teaching Business and MBA Science and Engineering Criminal Justice and Legal Studies Computers and Information Technology (I.T.) Arts and Humanities Vocational and Career Training
Martin Burrett

12 things teachers can do to help reduce stress - 4 views

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    Yay, another new year! Where does the time go? Being a teacher is a stressful job, but one of the most rewarding vocations available. Sometimes, it is possible to lose sight of the important things in life, as the stress of the job takes over your life. We all make resolutions with good intentions, but reducing work stress is critical for ensuring that the job doesn't absorb every waking moment in your life. Below are 12 suggestions on how teachers (and school leaders) can reduce stress, for themselves, for colleagues, and for pupils. Some of the suggestions might seem obvious, but it's nice to be reminded, and to allow you to reflect on opportunities you have to reduce some of the stress in your life.
Martin Burrett

The Positive Power of Negative Thinking - 0 views

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    "Fads in education come and go, with many settings being full of optimism, hope, and trying to instil a positive mindset among their pupils. Yet, all these positive, happy signals sometimes fall short of providing individuals the skills to think more critically within the world they engage in. Many people believe that thinking negatively is a bad thing, and do not consider it as a positive force for good. Expecting things to go wrong can be a great force for good, and with grades and expectations in schools set very high, what happens when things don't go to plan? People are completely stuffed. If exams scores do not reach expected levels, then deciding on a college, university, or vocational options can throw individuals off-course, but having considered the negative outcome options can provide a backup plan of which they still have some control."
Ed Webb

The threat to our universities | Books | The Guardian - 0 views

  • It is worth emphasising, in the face of routine dismissals by snobbish commentators, that many of these courses may be intellectually fruitful as well as practical: media studies are often singled out as being the most egregiously valueless, yet there can be few forces in modern societies so obviously in need of more systematic and disinterested understanding than the media themselves
  • Nearly two-thirds of the roughly 130 university-level institutions in Britain today did not exist as universities as recently as 20 years ago.
  • Mass education, vocational training and big science are among the dominant realities, and are here to stay.
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  • 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.
Felix Gryffeth

In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The study of the humanities evolved during the 20th century “to focus almost entirely on personal intellectual development,” said Richard M. Freeland, the Massachusetts commissioner of higher education. “But what we haven’t paid a lot of attention to is how students can put those abilities effectively to use in the world. We’ve created a disjunction between the liberal arts and sciences and our role as citizens and professionals.”Mr. Freeland is part of what he calls a revolutionary movement to close the “chasm in higher education between the liberal arts and sciences and professional programs.” The Association of American Colleges and Universities recently issued a report arguing the humanities should abandon the “old Ivory Tower view of liberal education” and instead emphasize its practical and economic value.
  • Derek Bok, a former president of Harvard and the author of several books on higher education, argues, “The humanities has a lot to contribute to the preparation of students for their vocational lives.” He said he was referring not only to writing and analytical skills but also to the type of ethical issues raised by new technology like stem-cell research. But he added: “There’s a lot more to a liberal education than improving the economy. I think that is one of the worst mistakes that policy makers often make — not being able to see beyond that.” Anthony T. Kronman, a professor of law at Yale and the author of “Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life,” goes further. Summing up the benefits of exploring what’s called “a life worth living” in a consumable sound bite is not easy, Mr. Kronman said. But “the need for my older view of the humanities is, if anything, more urgent today,” he added, referring to the widespread indictment of greed, irresponsibility and fraud that led to the financial meltdown. In his view this is the time to re-examine “what we care about and what we value,” a problem the humanities “are extremely well-equipped to address.”
Ruth Howard

The Importance of Managing Your Online Reputation « emergent by design - 17 views

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    Will Rich points to this post re 'online reputation' and job readiness. For me it points to the need for students to use the social tools together with adult help rather than separately as when banned from use at school. And of course..how to help, really?!
Ruth Howard

Voices from The Internet as Play's videos on Vimeo - 9 views

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    The videos of the Internet as Playground and Factory Conference here.
Ruth Howard

Internet as Playground and Factory :: Intro - 6 views

  • Large corporations then profit from this interaction by collecting and selling this data.  Social participation is the oil of the digital economy. Today, communication is a mode of social production facilitated by new capitalist imperatives and it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between play, consumption and production, life and work, labor and non-labor.  
  • The revenues of today's social aggregators are promising but their speculative value exceeds billions of dollars. Capital manages to expropriate value from the commons; labor goes beyond the factory, all of society is put to work. Every aspect of life drives the digital economy: sexual desire, boredom, friendship — and all becomes fodder for speculative profit.
  • Free Software and similar practices have provided important alternatives to and critiques of traditional modes of intellectual property to date but user agency is not just a question of content ownership. Users should demand data portability, the right to pack up and leave the walled gardens of institutionalized labor à la Facebook or StudiVZ. We should ask which rights users have beyond their roles as consumers and citizens.
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  • How much should Google pay them to tag an image? Such payment could easily become more of an insult than a remuneration. Currently, there are few adequate definitions of labor that fit the complex, hybrid realities of the digital economy.
  • The Internet as Playground and Factory poses a series of questions about the conundrums surrounding labor (and often the labor of love) in relation to our digital present:
Ruth Howard

More from Ponoko | Beyond The Beyond - 0 views

  • Ponoko and ShopBot announce partnership
  • More than 20,000 online creators meet over 6,000 digital fabricators
  • The launch today of www.100kGarages.com begins a new chapter in how things are made and distributed, enabling anyone with an Internet connection to get almost anything custom made and delivered from local state-of-the-art digital makers.
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  • The website is a partnership between Ponoko, the world’s easiest making system, and ShopBot, a world leader in the design of affordable, high-performance digital making tools. Using the 100kGarages website anyone can get their ideas made locally with the click of a mouse, and delivered within just a few days. It is powered by Ponoko’s online ‘click to make’ system and ShopBot digital fabricators in 54 countries around the world. For the innovators who President Obama called “the risk takers, the doers, and the makers of things”, 100kGarages is an exciting new service for everyone who wants to get things made – by making it yourself or finding someone to make it for you.
  • www.100kGarages.com
  • Ponoko, the world’s easiest making system, is an online marketplace for everyone to make real things. It’s where creators, digital fabricators, materials suppliers and buyers meet to make almost anything. More than 30,000 user-generated designs have been instantly priced online, made and delivered since Ponoko was selected to launch at TechCrunch40 in 2007. Ponoko has reinvented how goods are designed, made and distributed
  • ShopBot Tools designs and manufactures low-cost, high-value CNC tools for digital fabrication of wood, plastic and aluminum products.
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