blogging about .edu stuff
Archive for education
August 5, 2007 at 9:15 am · Filed under education, higher education
It’s commonly thought that the notion of a Military Industrial Complex was the brainchild of Dwight D. Eisenhower. In fact, the establishment of the military academy, West Point, in 1802, birthed the idea. At a time when scientific knowledge was beginning to take center stage in colleges and universities, West Point, the first technical institute in the U.S., became the national center for scientific inquiry. “Under its’ auspices all sciences became pertinent to military purposes (Rudolph, 1962, p. 228).
Rudolph, H. (1962). The american college and university: A history. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
June 18, 2007 at 9:32 am · Filed under SoTL, education
This article and comments in NYT got me to thinking about the scholarship of teaching and learning. Some of the comments addressed the idea that teaching and learning can be evaluated, not through standardized test scores, but through systematic collection of various kinds of evidence that teaching and learning is happening. I’m not yet convinced that there is a direct cause and effect relationship between teaching and learning that can be measured at the classroom level. Perhaps that’s what I need to explore.
There are some interesting and well thought through comments here. It’s worth a peek.
June 17, 2007 at 9:07 am · Filed under distance education, distributed learning, education, educational technology
A Stanford University program offers gifted students an online education. They log on to class from all over the world. Read more
I like watching online education evolving.
February 7, 2007 at 4:57 pm · Filed under News, education, educational technology, higher education, jobs
Reed said he “envisions students becoming more like
telecommuters. They might meet with faculty and peers one day a week
on campus, and then use simulations, virtual worlds and downloaded
information the rest of the week to complete coursework.” Read more
Feels like I’m on the crest of the big Kahuna wave, here….
January 21, 2007 at 7:49 pm · Filed under Gender, TheWeb, education, educational technology, equity issues, trends
I was glad to participate in this conversation with others who question the whole digital natives/immigrants, net geners “movement.” Of course many are off to the ELI annual meeting where this movement seems to generate its ideas.
Being relatively new to academic discourse from the inside, I’m wondering if this is the way it goes. There’s popular culture that may or may not be grounded in rigorous investigation, but nobody seems to mind. We all jump on the bandwagon, cause it’s there, the D.J.’s good and the celebrities show up.
As was pointed out in this conversation, where’s the discussion of class, SES, ethnicity and I’ll add gender? It’s painfully obvious, (to me anyway) that this talk is coming from predominantly white male voices. The circling conversations as well. I think I might have posted this white paper before,
Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, which gets at the issue from a different angle, defining and categorizing via activities and use.
January 15, 2007 at 9:09 am · Filed under News, education, equity issues, multiculturalism, schools
Two articles that have me thinking we’re a long way off from the kind of schooling Dewey proposed.
Tips for getting into Magnet schools in LA
For many minorities, UC Riverside is the campus of choice
December 5, 2006 at 5:04 pm · Filed under Teaching with Technology, critical theory, education, educational technology, multiculturalism
Second Life and Pedagogy of the Oppressed seem to be two very different worlds at the moment for me. The people, the themes, the points of departure are incongruent and I don’t think they have to be. I don’t think I’m missing the point when I argue that liberating educational practices might be achieved with the aid of emerging technologies in ways that may not have been conceived of before. Participatory culture, the ways in which social technologies enable us to express, share, create and use artifacts and ideas, is one of those ideas that seems new, but in fact is an old notion recast to convey what is happening in our connected world.
November 12, 2006 at 11:40 pm · Filed under Students, education
by Lisa Delpit is a great book. I only read a couple of chapters but it’s one of those books that makes you really think. It’s along the line of the experience I had reading E.D. Hirsch, hearing another angle, when you feel like all you’ve been hearing is one side of a story. In this case it’s the “progressive” side.
What Hirsch and Delpit agree on is a sound rationale for why progressive education can actually prevent kids of color and low SES from succeeding academically. It doesn’t meet their needs. They argue for more traditional teaching strategies. I don’t agree with Hirsch about teaching the classical, Eurocentric canon however. Delpit pointed out that the whole language reading program the schools were using at the time, was not used by Black teachers. In their opinions, their kids needed to develop the technical side of writing, not fluency. They needed to learn how to write to get into colleges and realistically compete on the job market.
July 13, 2006 at 8:01 am · Filed under education
in 1897 about the nature of educational methods that next to deadness and dullness, formalism and routine, our education is threatened with no greater evil than sentimentalism.
and
this sentimentalism is the necessary result of the attempt to divorce feeling from action
Whoa. Aha. Is he saying something akin to Budhism, something to do with distinguishing between having basic human emotions and their cognitive component which thrust them into something more, something bigger?
Sentimentalism–”the excessive expression of feelings of tenderness, sadness or nostalgia in behavior, speech or writing”
