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scholarly articles on weak ties and their benefits. (many of these are available through the UD library!) :-)

"Use of in-class concept questions with clickers can transform an instructor-centered "transmissionist" environment to a more learner-centered constructivist classroom. To compare the effectiveness of three different approaches using clickers, pairs of similar questions were used to monitor student understanding in majors' and nonmajors' genetics courses. After answering the first question individually, students participated in peer discussion only, listened to an instructor explanation only, or engaged in peer discussion followed by instructor explanation, before answering a second question individually. Our results show that the combination of peer discussion followed by instructor explanation improved average student performance substantially when compared with either alone. When gains in learning were analyzed for three ability groups of students (weak, medium, and strong, based on overall clicker performance), all groups benefited most from the combination approach, suggesting that peer discussion and instructor explanation are synergistic in helping students. However, this analysis also revealed that, for the nonmajors, the gains of weak performers using the combination approach were only slightly better than their gains using instructor explanation alone. In contrast, the strong performers in both courses were not helped by the instructor-only approach, emphasizing the importance of peer discussion, even among top-performing students."

"Granovetter found, for instance, that people were nearly three times as likely to have found their job through a "personal contact" than through an advertisement, headhunter or other "formal means." In other words, success is largely about who you know, not what you learned in school or how you searched on Monster.com."

"To the catalog of financial stresses on higher education-the imminent explosion in online learning, cutbacks in state aid and weak endowments-you can add one more: tapped-out parents."

"What makes so many of those atrocious singers laughable to us-excepting the ones who put on deliberately bad performances in order to get on camera-turns out to be a problem that plagues many undergraduates, especially the weakest among them: an inability to judge accurately their own level of skill or knowledge in a specific area. Poor metacognition means that some terrible yet hopeful singers on American Idol are unable to assess their own weak vocal talents. And it means that some students have a mistaken sense of confidence in the depth of their learning."

""I didn't let my child loose on the streets without teaching her about traffic and looking both ways. Similarly, I don't like to see otherwise well-educated people loose in digital culture without knowing something about what makes a small-world network work or why a portfolio of weak ties is important. Networks particularly affect privacy and reputation-the places where our private lives intersect or collide with public knowledge, whether or not we know what to do about it.""

"If you're an optimist, you're excited to use these advancements to complement your teaching style. On the other hand, you might be a little concerned that a robot will replace you in the next 3-10 years. In any case, the time to prepare for these changes is now. By practicing and sharpening our human strengths (in other words - robots' weaknesses), we can improve our chances of thriving in a world where AI is ubiquitous in every classroom, school and home. Here are 3 skills to start honing today that give educators an advantage over AI."