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The Foundation and Center for Critical Thinking aim to improve education in colleges, universities and primary through secondary schools. We present publications, conferences, workshops and professional development programs, emphasizing instructional strategies, Socratic questioning, critical reading and writing, higher order thinking, assessment, research, quality enhancement, and competency standards.

A virtual round table for meetings & events, with free, unlimited web conferences.

At exactly this moment, online education is poised (and threatening) to replicate the conditions, courses, structures, and hierarchical relations of brick-and-mortar industrial-era education. Cathy N. Davidson argued exactly this at her presentation, "Access Demands a Paradigm Shift," at the 2013 Modern Language Association conference. The mistake being made, I think, is a simple and even understandable one, but damning and destructive nonetheless. Those of us responsible for education (both its formation and care) are hugging too tightly to what we've helped build, its pillars, policies, economies, and institutions. None of these, though, map promisingly into digital space. If we continue to tread our current path, we'll be left with a Frankenstein's monster of what we now know of education. This is the imminent destruction of our educational system of which so many speak: taking an institution inspired by the efficiency of post-industrial machines and redrawing it inside the machines of the digital age. Education rendered into a dull 2-dimensional carbon copy, scanned, faxed, encoded and then made human-readable, an utter lack of intellectual bravery.

Is anybody attending this?

here are a few tools that, thanks to the increasing availability of wireless connectivity at conference centres these days, might help to turn your passive listeners into a bunch of multitasking audience collaborators.

according to Dr. Gary Small, a neuroscientist & professor at UCLA, who spoke at the Learning & the Brain Conference, "The technology train has left. You have to deal with it, understand it, and get some perspective."

One of the organizers of Edcamp Philly, a free education "unconference" that took place in Philadelphia last May. The event attracted the attention of educators from around the world--not only for the excellent content and collaborative spirit, but also for the unconference model itself -- one that costs next to nothing to produce by facilitating ad-hoc community participation.

"The first Networked Learning Conference Hotseat with Peter Goodyear has attracted a lot of interesting discussion. Most of the discussion has centred on what is meant by networked learning and there seem to be as many definitions as there are people in the forum."

What's shocking is how incredibly well Torrance's creativity index predicted those kids' creative accomplishments as adults. Those who came up with more good ideas on Torrance's tasks grew up to be entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers. Jonathan Plucker of Indiana University recently reanalyzed Torrance's data. The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.

Grades tend to reduce the quality of students' thinking.  Given that students may lose interest in what they're learning as a result of grades, it makes sense that they're also apt to think less deeply.  One series of studies, for example, found that students given numerical grades were significantly less creative than those who received qualitative feedback but no grades.  The more the task required creative thinking, in fact, the worse the performance of students who knew they were going to be graded.  Providing students with comments in addition to a grade didn't help:  the highest achievement occurred only when comments were given instead of numerical scores (Butler, 1987; Butler, 1988; Butler and Nisan, 1986).

The spurious nature of grading seems particularly true in the case of writing. Most any piece of writing can, and often does, receive any grade.

I liked this article because it talks about how it is easier for resistant writers to write by blogging.

I like this one a lot. Could be another workshop for us and/or for our faculty group. Not to overlook the fact, these activities also count as professional development, just like attending a conference, and actually with more personal benefit.