Group items tagged

I am currently collaborating with two of our English teachers to co-design and co-teach research and content creation for digital research projects.   Susan Lester (10th Honors World American Literature/Composition) and I began our project about three weeks ago (read more in this blog post), and I’ll be working with John Bradford (11th Honors American Literature/Composition) as of Tuesday for the next month or so on his twist on the project (more details coming soon).  In both of our collaborative projects, we felt our students were not quite ready  in terms of skill sets or prior learning experiences to completely open up the possibilities for a digital research “paper” or project although students do have creative latitude in choosing and designing their multigenre elements that will be integrated into the wiki based “text”; students also have the option to integrate multimedia into each section of their wikified “papers”.

the three of us  felt torn in wanting to open up the options and not setting up students for utter frustration (to the point many would completely shut down) in terms of combining two advanced skill sets (new research skills and content are being introduced);

More than 200 college presidents and employers are pledging to support a liberal arts education, expand access to hands-on learning and better track schools’ success in achieving learning goals like complex problem-solving.

One interesting tidbit from the survey is surging demand for, or at least acceptance of, electronic portfolios, which look something like this.

So says a new survey by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, in which 93% of respondent employers cite critical thinking, communication and problem-solving skills as more important than a candidate’s undergraduate major.

“Teachers don’t object to the use of technology,” said Sabrina Laine, vice president of the American Institutes for Research,

In short, their ability to be creative, to share complex knowledge across locations, contexts and cultures and to manage global innovation and product development teams effectively is precisely why multiculturals in integrative roles in the innovation process do make such a positive difference.

In addition, they identified intercultural, cognitive integration (one’s ability to simultaneously hold and apply several culturally different schemas and thus to think as a member of one culture or another depending on need and context, or to think simultaneously as member of several cultures) as the key to creative, adaptive and leadership skills fostering their career success. As one of the managers Hae-Jung Hong interviewed put it:

The most important skill I need in order to develop and launch this product line successfully is to exploit what I’ve got from one part to other parts of the world, which brings something innovative in the market. I am able to do this because I have references in different languages— English, Hindi, and French. I read books in three different languages, meet people from different countries, eat food from different countries, and so on. I cannot think things in one way only. That’s not my way.

Understanding how to use Python, or write code to solve problems, is just a way of having an additional tool to be creative with."

"The old teaching method — you know, where a teacher says something and you write it down and then take a test — that's about as passive as it gets," he says. "This idea pushes kids to be more actively involved since, by and large, it's something we're both learning together. That leads to a lot of innovative teaching — and a lot of innovative learning, for that matter."

"I'm certainly not a coder," says Lisa Brown, an English teacher and head of the English department at Beaver. "But, like anything, the more I've played around with it the more I've realized there's a lot that's really accessible and understandable."

we find that ownership of a mobile phone and participation in a variety of internet activities are associated with larger and more diverse core discussion networks. (Discussion networks are a key measure of people’s most important social ties.)

having discussion networks that are more likely to contain people from different backgrounds.

For instance, frequent internet users, and those who maintain a blog are much more likely to confide in someone who is of another race.

“Scientific curiosity is the core of the human soul—wonder. Human beings have a compelling need to explore nature and understand the world around us. We are all scientists,” I observed. “Some of us have the privilege of pursuing scientific discovery as a career, but the rest of us make science possible by contributing their hard-earned money and their curiosity in support of science. Science is a group effort.” Forty-eight hours later I had my faith tested.