Collecting followers and likes authenticates and quantifies our existence without the need for deconstruction. We will not move any closer to the horizon of self if our sense of identity is based on validation through acknowledgement rather than engaging in dialogue and deconstruction.

As with justice and the law what becomes crucial within this conception of self and identity is the willingness to deconstruct or interpet. Damaging essentialization based on shoring-up (sure-ing up?) well worn binaries such as real/virtual, authentic/fake falls away as the ‘work’ of identity becomes interpretation, questioning and negotiation.

It’s about the student and his or her feelings and thoughts, though often articulated clumsily and from an as yet unthought through position.

For example, when discussing how women’s remarks are often ignored in business settings, the class or the instructor may be ignoring the remarks of women in the class. Seeing this and talking about it in the moment can enhance people’s understanding of the issue.

In extreme cases, urge them to see a counselor

perhaps particularly the student(s) who has generated the hot moment.

to manage ourselves

For some instructors, hot moments are the very stuff of classroom life. They thrive on such moments, encourage them, and use them for pointed learning. Others abhor hot moments and do everything possible to prevent or stifle them. For them, conflict prevents learning.

Would you rather trust a human legal system or the details of some computer code you don't have the expertise to audit?

These outcomes and estimated effect sizes bring us back to a key applied question: Which method—longhand (on paper or eWriter) or laptop—should students use to take notes? At this point, we would argue that the available evidence does not provide a definitive answer to this question.

Our students have an unprecedented breadth of information resources at their fingertips, yet there is a significant danger that they will miss the opportunity to engage with those voices that hold the greatest prospects for growth. Collecting confirmations of one’s existing views is a poor substitute for meaningful learning.

Recent discussions of “trigger warnings” in higher education, notifications that teachers are supposed to provide if class material might provoke a strong emotional response

For example, an individual who believes that knowledge in a certain domain consists of a set of discrete, relatively static facts will likely achieve a sense of certainty on a research question much more quickly than someone who views knowledge as provisional, relative, and evolving.

Nyhan and Reifler also found that presenting challenging information in a chart or graph tends to reduce disconfirmation bias. The researchers concluded that the decreased ambiguity of graphical information (as opposed to text) makes it harder for test subjects to question or argue against the content of the chart.

A study by Nyhan and Reifler showed that having test subjects engage in a self-affirmation exercise significantly reduced their level of defensive processing when faced with counter-attitudinal information on policy issues.

Likewise, merely telling students that motivated reasoning has an impact on their information processing is apt to yield mixed results because students who view themselves as intelligent, fair-minded people will likely meet this revelation with a level of disconfirmation bias.

additional motivation for test subjects to process information accurately made the impact of early preferences less prominent, though the influence did not disappear entirely

For a review of such research, see Daniel T. Willingham, “Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach?” American Educator 31, 2 (2007): 13, http://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/Crit_Thinking.pdf.

Is it safe to assume that we give each bit of information a “fair hearing,” always adjusting our beliefs to conform to compelling evidence? Or do our backgrounds and preferences inhibit our ability to be objective when evaluating information that challenges our beliefs?

By examining information as a product of people’s contingent choices, rather than as an impartial recording of unchanging truths, the critically information-literate student develops an outlook toward information characterized by a robust sense of agency and a heightened concern for justice.

Active-learning techniques — like sharing the responsibility for leading discussions or framing classroom expectations with our students — show them they indeed belong in this "scholarly space" and give them the confidence to engage with the course and one another.

That’s true not just within the classroom environment, but in the web of interactions students experience

More specifically

Am I having my students read a bunch of monographs, all authored by white males, for example?

Or you can ask them to take 1-5 minutes in class before you start discussion.

It is important for the instructor to determine what the problem is for each particular class.

They

and purposefully

a tendency, developed over the last five years, that I’ve come to call “errand paralysis.”

the stuff that wouldn’t make my job easier or my work better

For me, personally, empathy does not come from responding to a situation en masse, and trusting strangers, but from getting close to people different from myself online, getting to know them enough that I can (however partially) see a different worldview, and then also trust what they say in a 140-character tweet and can engage with them deeply, through layers of context.

It is based on reciprocity and a level of trust that each party is actively seeking value-added information for the other.

Years of traditional education teaches students that what really matters is their grades, not their learning. Students know that while teachers might give lipspeak to “learning,” in the end, the grade is what everyone — teachers, parents, administrators, other students, and society at large — cares about.

Working hard requires opportunity and encouragement in addition to intrinsic desire — indeed, opportunity and encouragement can often spark that intrinsic desire.

But the reason I wanted to go back in that moment was the same reason students want to stick with familiar grading systems: I know how it works, I know how to communicate about it, I know how to get the best results from it, and it sticks within the letter-grading system I’ve used for 20 years as a teacher and longer as a student. I can recite all the dangers and disadvantages of letter grading, but because it’s the system I’ve known for pretty much my entire life, there’s still a certain comfort to it, and whenever things get weird or challenging or unpredictable, I get an atavistic desire to go back to what is familiar.

At Clark, we established networked communities to help professors from different disciplines share innovative pedagogies and ideas for leading student work on group projects.

Individuals are most creative when provided space to follow their interests without sanction, when support and guidance are readily available, and when social community is fostered.

My work, rooted in both theory and practice, reveals three things that are essential to bringing individuals into the circle of change: autonomy, guidance, and a sense of social community, or working toward a larger meaningful goal.

Does the widespread and routine collection of student data in ever new and potentially more-invasive forms risk normalizing and numbing students to the potential privacy and security risks?

how do we help students navigate privacy issues in learning spaces augmented with social/digital media. There was a specific request for examples to walk students through this. Here is what I do.

Inclusion: The active, intentional, and ongoing engagement with diversity—in the curriculum, in the co-curriculum, and in communities (intellectual, social, cultural, geographical) with which individuals might connect—in ways that increase awareness, content knowledge, cognitive sophistication, and empathic understanding of the complex ways individuals interact within systems and institutions

In other words, a student may have decided that they want to remain a peripheral member.

It is amazing what calling someone by their name can do for a community and a feeling of belonging.

“I say class is like a snack and when you really eat is at home, doing your homework. That’s where you get your nutrients.”

in the forum, we talk about what we decide to talk about, but in the blog, each student can talk about whatever he or she individually wants to talk about.

The forum was the voice of the group.

They have less patience for being bored.

efficiency has come to mean accomplishing a task with the least possible human intervention—a goal that often turns out to be self-defeating, particularly when efficiency becomes almost an end in itself. Recall Thomas Edison’s famous line that genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration and contrast it with our contemporary enthusiasm for machine-like efficiency

In most universities, alumni relations is a function that is kept distinct from academics and has fund-raising as its primary focus. For alumni/lifelong learners to become an integral part of a university community, we need to better integrate them with all parts of the university.

At the graduate professional education level, however, many universities seem to forget that we are in the relationship business and behave as if we are simple content/knowledge providers

half of what we learn today will become obsolete five years from now

We ought to be able to celebrate both our highly public teams of scholars and our quiet hermits, and we ought to be flexible enough to allow one to become the other.

the internet may not be the most effective means of bringing work to an audience, particularly if you don’t already have some sort of access to an audience that will allow your work to be discovered

How public do you want to be? and How do you want to be public?

In a strong school culture, leaders communicate directly with teachers, administrators, counselors, and families, who also all communicate directly with each other.

In a strong culture, there are many, overlapping, and cohesive interactions among all members of the organization.

We’re asking faculty to play “Icky Thump” when they haven’t mastered “Love Me Do.” We’re asking them to knit complex cables when they haven’t even combined knits and purls. We’re asking them to bomb down a black diamond run when they haven’t figured out how to stay upright on the green run.

Digital Pedagogy, Identity, Networks, and Scholarship

They are often composed of a blend of traditional scholarly articles, short-form blog posts, and practical advice, sometimes separated into distinct content areas and sometimes all in one place.

I think not including links (which a surprising number of web writers still don’t) is in many cases a sign of intellectual cowardice. What it says is that the writer is unprepared to have his or her ideas tested by comparing them to anyone else’s, and is hoping that no one will notice. In other cases, it’s a sign of intellectual arrogance

Taken together, these somewhat equivocal results lead to a short discussion of the limitations of the data, which are available in anonymized form via Deep Blue

OA articles may have been previously available in working paper or pre-print versions that differ from their final published form. The resulting final publications may benefit from that early availability

Remember that although many movies are not as good from an academic perspective as the literature they are based on, one of your objectives is to get them interested in that literature.

It would seem that radio might be the most appropriate delivery for educational audio in developing regions, except for this surprising fact: Some developing nations are going wireless.

most podcasters work for free

Perhaps the most interesting thing is that although podcasting is much like radio, in that it is a one-way medium, most podcasters consider it as two-way communication because their podcasts are available on websites and they have either accompanying blogs to which listeners add comments, or provide email addresses for listeners to write to them.

gathering around the radio to listen is still a common group or community activity.

Let’s instead design games that help strangers form positive pro-social relationships.

Attitudes towards looking like you’re working when you aren’t are akin to school policies that require students to perform attention, as though the performance of attention may be linked to actual attention, or even learning. The pretending takes precedence over the actual doing.

I’m thinking about video games, and how I learn playing them.

Except that if the written assessment is such that it can be graded accurately by software, that’s probably not very good assessment. If what’s important are the facts and key concepts, won’t multiple-choice do?

On the other hand, computers cannot read.

Automated grading is supposed to “free” the instructor for other tasks, except there is no more important task.

My hunch is that it’s not that screen reading or digital notetaking are worse for learning, but that we don’t talk enough about what the digital texts enable that might be quite different from what is enabled by print. 

Why can’t Statler and Waldorf annotate?

I began collecting information on educational soap operas – serial dramas whose purpose is education or social transformation. They were mostly played in developing countries, and mostly played on the radio.

We can no longer use the expression “in real life” or IRL, as your online self is your real, off-line self

When in Resident mode the individual is going online to connect to, or to be with, other people. This mode is about social presence.

In Visitor mode individuals do not leave any social trace online.

In hindsight, I read these acts as cries for help, a kind of academic self-medication. I was bored, not because I’d mastered the required material – I got more than my share of non-A grades – but because the things I was asked to do were generally uninspiring. Perhaps nothing was more uninspiring than preparing for an AP exam.

But what makes the story in places like Toledo and the region around it hard for many politicians and even economists to understand is that the anxiety goes well beyond automation and the number of jobs. For many people, your job defines your life.

I had a learning disability when I was in school. But I could do factory work. Factory work is what we did. Now robots do that job. What happens to people like me?

“Tribes of affection matter,” Kaptur says. “Whether it’s work-related, or a vets’ organization, or church, neighborhood, neighborhood businesses—they’re all evaporating. It’s the disappearance of everything they’ve worked for. Their identity, really.”

People have come to believe that they, their jobs, their communities, and the social contract that binds them to work and place and each other are under threat. And they’re not wrong.

How-ever, grit is not a panacea to deflect all of the arrows or some of the slings. It is a single trait with weak to moderate predictive power of certain outcome variables.

Have multiple writing, research, conference, and grant activities in process and review to keep you on track to attain your long-term career target.

One common denominator of virtually all academic positions is the peer review and feedback process. It is also a primary source for “taking a licking” from the disappointment, rejection, and feelings of failure experienced by faculty and ad-ministrators. Peer review is deeply ingrained in the academic culture. It provides the credibility to our ideas, teaching effectiveness, research contribu-tions, and publications (Kreuter, 2014).