Kevin Wade, that plaintiff's father, said he thinks schools should focus on teaching students cheating is wrong."You can't take a person's work and run it through a computer and make an honest person out of them,"

it seems like Turnitin is a commercial use. They turn around and sell this service, and it's expensive. And the service only works because they get these papers

Learning is more than earning an A says Cathy N. Davidson, the professor, who recently returned to teach English and interdisciplinary studies after eight years in administration. But students don't always see it that way. Vying for an A by trying to figure out what a professor wants or through the least amount of work has made the traditional grading scale superficial, she says.

"Do all the work, you get an A. Don't need an A? Don't have time to do all the work? No problem. You can aim for and earn a B. There will be a chart.  You do the assignment satisfactorily, you get the points.  Add up the points, there's your grade. Clearcut. No guesswork. No second-guessing 'what the prof wants.' No gaming the system," Ms. Davidson wrote Sunday in a blog post detailing her strategy on hastac.org (pronounced "haystack"), the acronym for  "humanities, arts, science, and technology-advanced collaboration.," which she co-founded.

It's important to teach students how to be responsible contributors to evaluations and assessment. Students are contributing and assessing each other on the Internet anyway, so why not make that a part of learning?"

Stories Matter will have a second phase wherein independent academics, teachers, and other interested communities will be able to download the software and apply it to their own collections, or interact with already clipped interviews posted by the Life Stories CURA project. The goal is to make Stories Matter an accessible tool for oral historians from all walks of life, and to provide people with an alternative to transcription that will ensure researchers continue interacting with and learning from the interviews they conduct once the interview is completed.

Download the software The application runs with Adobe AIR 1.5.1, on either the Windows, Mac or Linux platform.

The idea is that we  should challenge thinking, inspire creativity, and stir up discussion with a Powerpoint presentation – not present a series of dry facts. 

More than any thing else, Mr. Bowen wants to discourage professors from using PowerPoint, because they often lean on the slide-display program as a crutch rather using it as a creative tool. Class time should be reserved for discussion, he contends, especially now that students can download lectures online and find libraries of information on the Web.

Davidson and Goldberg call on us to examine potential new models of digital learning and rethink our virtually enabled and enhanced learning institutions.

available in a free digital edition

what school requires students to do -- think abstractly -- is in fact not something our brains are designed to be good at or to enjoy

it is critical that the task be just difficult enough to hold our interest but not so difficult that we give up in frustration. When this balance is struck, it is actually pleasurable to focus the mind for long periods of time

Students are ready to understand knowledge but not create it. For most, that is enough. Attempting a great leap forward is likely to fail.

It's all spaghetti against the wall

We never know if we are right. There is only doing the right thing at what we hope is the right time in hopes of making the difference we hope to make.Our work? Most days it's like driving along the Pacific Coast Highway at night in the fog: You can only see the stretch of road just in front of you and even that is shrouded in fog. So we drive on, guided by faith--in the kids, in ourselves, in our work.

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What was clear today was that it was our relationship and their appreciation for the importance of ideas and my subject that remained one, two, eight or ten years later.

After all these encounters, these smiles, these chats and talks in the cafe, through emails and Twitters, what do I realize, what's the lesson? (Does there always have to be a lesson, Mr. Burke? they whine....). Relationships matter: you to your kids, you to your subject, kids to each other.

you can't teach kids if you don't know who they are or what they care about. The lesson is that if you don't know or care about what you teach, they will not remember it, will not value it going forward.

This blog has provided me with an opportunity to share my learning, and more than anything else it has challenged me to be accountable in a way that no other professional development ever has. It has reminded me that I love to learn and it is part of a learning process that I truly love.