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middle-class school deemphasized individual expression and in-depth analysis and rewarded the dutiful completion of specified rote tasks

Some students learn to take orders and others learn to chart a course of action and delegate responsibility.

“hidden curriculum”

When school environments casually yet consistently deemphasize the intellectual benefits of higher education, students become less imaginative about their futures.

College should be “sold” to all students as an opportunity to experience an intellectual awakening.

Access to higher education means that your values and interests can govern your choices.

Who you are and what you’ve done will in the very near future be so well documented by your online activities that a resume will be redundant.

a college degree will be suspect if not complemented by an admirable online record—

Cyberspace is already more real to you than the physical space of your college campus—it is becoming so for your future employers.

Instead of giving tests to find out what they’ve learned, we should test to find out what they don’t know. Their wrong answers aren’t failures, they are needs and opportunities.

But the problem is that we start at the end, at what we think students should learn, prescribing and preordaining the outcome: We have the list of right answers. We tell them our answers before they’ve asked the questions.

It’s easy to educate for the routine, and hard to educate for the novel

Why shouldn’t every university—every school—copy Google’s 20% rule, encouraging and enabling creation and experimentation, every student expected to make a book or an opera or an algorithm or a company. Rather than showing our diplomas, shouldn’t we show our portfolios of work as a far better expression of our thinking and capability?

As we increasingly move toward an environment of instant and infinite information, it becomes less important for students to know, memorize, or recall information, and more important for them to be able to find, sort, analyze, share, discuss, critique, and create information.

Wikis, blogs, tagging, social networking and other developments that fall under the “Web 2.0″ buzz are especially promising in this regard because they are inspired by a spirit of interactivity, participation, and collaboration.

Radical experiments in teaching carry no guarantees and even fewer rewards in most tenure and promotion systems, even if they are successful.

Nothing is easier to assess than information recall on multiple-choice exams, and the concise and “objective” numbers satisfy committee members busy with their own teaching and research.

Blogging came along and taught us that anybody can be a creator of information.

Wikipedia has taught us yet another lesson, that a networked information environment allows people to work together in new ways to create information that can rival (and even surpass) the content of experts by almost any measure.

many students are now struggling to find meaning and significance in their education.

When you watch somebody who is truly “in it,” somebody who has totally given themselves over to the learning process, or if you simply imagine those moments in which you were “in it” yourself, you immediately recognize that learning expands far beyond the mere cognitive dimension.

How will we assess these? I do not have the answers, but a renewed and spirited dedication to the creation of authentic learning environments that leverage the new media environment demands that we address it.

Digital Literacy and the Undergraduate Curriculum | Jeff McClurken

digital literacy: How does one find and evaluate online materials

digital identity. How should we present ourselves to the online world

willingness to experiment with a variety of online tools, and then to think critically and strategically about a project and to identify those tools that would be most useful to that project.

There certainly needs to be some basic exposure and technical support, but part of the goal is to get students to figure out how to figure out how a new tool (system, software, historical process) works on their own.

it’s good for college classes to shake students (and faculty) out of their comfort zone. Real learning happens when you’re trying to figure out the controls, not when you’re on autopilot.

be completely transparent with students regarding my use of technology. I provide links to my blog, my Twitter account, my Flickr account, my YouTube and Vimeo usernames, my Facebook page, and my instant messenger screennames.

I think that I use technology and social media responsibly (though I could work on the efficiency part). Setting an example that students can follow is important if we want those students to be more critical about their use of technology.

I have an assignment that asks students to research and write an article on Wikipedia.

“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?” The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again. On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”

How do you take advantage of someone’s habits without letting them know you’re studying their lives?

most cues fit into one of five categories: location, time, emotional state, other people or the immediately preceding action.

We’d put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance. “And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works.”