Every semester a lot of professors' lectures are essentially reruns because many instructors are too busy to upgrade their classroom methods. 

The Medium Is the Medium ~ David Brooks - The New York Times - July 2010

In this op-ed article, famous writer and columnist, David Brooks, provides new arguments for why the act of reading books is superior to internet reading.  He refers to a philanthropist who puts it like this, '"It's not the physical presence of the books that produces the biggest impact," she suggested. "It's the change in the way the students see themselves as they build a home library. They see themselves as readers, as members of a different group."'

The New War Between Science and Religion
The Chronicle of Higher Education - By Mano Singham

There is a new war between science and religion, rising from the ashes of the old one, which ended with the defeat of the anti-evolution forces in the 2005 "intelligent design" trial. The new war concerns questions that are more profound than whether or not to teach evolution. Unlike the old science-religion war, this battle is going to be fought not in the courts but in the arena of public opinion. The new war pits those who argue that science and "moderate" forms of religion are compatible worldviews against those who think they are not.

Why We Need to Dream - NYTimes.com

So why are dreams so much more than literal playbacks of the day just passed? Why the non-sequiturs, the long forgotten characters and the unexplained state of public undress? Wilson speculates that dreams are also an attempt to search for associations between seemingly unrelated experiences, which is why it's so important for the controlling conscious self to disappear. What does this maze have to do with that maze? How can we use the lessons of today to get more food pellets tomorrow? This suggests that the strangeness of our nighttime narratives is actually an essential feature, as our memories are remixed and reshuffled, a mash-up tape made by the mind.

Some say learning styles are myth, others say they're magic ~ Washington Post

Here is my summary of the 15-page paper: Learning styles are hogwash. It's not quite that bad. The four authors agree that "people differ in the degree to which they have some fairly specific aptitudes for different kinds of thinking and for processing different types of information." Some of us consider ourselves visual learners. Some of us think we learn best if we use our hands: draw, make models, stack coins. The authors conclude, however, that "at present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning-styles assessments into general educational practice."

Scholars Turn Their Attention to Attention - The Chronicle of Higher Education

That illusion of competence is one of the things that worry scholars who study attention, cognition, and the classroom. Students' minds have been wandering since the dawn of education. But until recently--so the worry goes--students at least knew when they had checked out. A student today who moves his attention rapid-fire from text-messaging to the lecture to Facebook to note-taking and back again may walk away from the class feeling buzzed and alert, with a sense that he has absorbed much more of the lesson than he actually has.

"Heavy multitaskers are often extremely confident in their abilities," says Clifford I. Nass, a professor of psychology at Stanford University. "But there's evidence that those people are actually worse at multitasking than most people."

25 Blasphemous Quotations  By Atheist Ireland | Published: January 2, 2010

From today, 1 January 2010, the new Irish blasphemy law becomes operational, and we begin our campaign to have it repealed. Blasphemy is now a crime punishable by a €25,000 fine.

Matching Teaching Style to Learning Style May Not Help Students -  The Chronicle of Higher Education

Almost certainly, you were told that your instruction should match your students' styles. For example, kinesthetic learners--students who learn best through hands-on activities--are said to do better in classes that feature plenty of experiments, while verbal learners are said to do worse.

Now four psychologists argue that you were told wrong. There is no strong scientific evidence to support the "matching" idea, they contend in a paper published this week in Psychological Science in the Public Interest. And there is absolutely no reason for professors to adopt it in the classroom.

I generally poll my online Ethics students each semester asking them, "if this course were not offered online, would you have taken in in a traditional classroom?"  About half of my students respond that they would not be able to take the course if it were not online due to scheduling issues and the like.  Students like the flexibility and relative asynchronicity of the online classroom.

And, often, I like this flexibility too. I like getting up early in the morning and working on my online classes before coming to the office. And, I like being able to log in to my classes while at a conference or at other times when I have to get a substitute for my traditional courses.

But, there is a dark side here too. In the traditional classroom, students and instructor implicitly understand the boundaries of the course. For the most part, the teaching happens during the 3-hours per week that the class meets. For the most part, students expect their questions to be answered during class, right before or after class, or during set office hours. Some e-mail or phone communication might take place between classes, but there are limited expectations here. 

As we all know, there are no clear boundaries in the online classroom. Instructors create boundaries for students ~ setting assignment due dates, outlining expectations for discussions or group work and so forth.  As an example, I expect my online Ethics students to be active participants in the online discussions at least 3 different days per week for a minimum of about 3-hours per week.

It is more difficult, I think, to set boundaries for ourselves as instructors. How often should I log into my course? How many discussion posts should I read? How many discussion posts should I make?  We know that whenever we are not logged into our courses, students probably are ~ new discussion posts and e-mails are accumulating 24/7!

I want to feel competent and to gain a sense of personal fulfillment from teaching my online classes.  I want to earn my students' respect and for them to have a good experience in my class.  But, I must admit that these goals are much more difficult to achieve in my online classes than is the case with my traditional courses.

I am interested in exploring how we are setting boundaries for ourselves as online instructors. I want to talk about both the big picture but also the practical details of our practices. I want to examine proposed "best practices" and the efficiencies that you have found that help make online teaching fulfilling and manageable.

I'll start by outlining the boundaries I have set for myself.  First, I log into my online courses at least 5-days per week immediately checking e-mail and then discussions. I answer all e-mail right away, even if only to say, "I will investigate and get back to you,"  I spend at least 20-30 minutes reading new discussion posts and selectively responding.  If I have time, I will often check into my classes multiple times per day, often for only 5 minutes or so. Again, I will check e-mail and discussions.  I find that I am most fulfilled as an instructor when I am actively engaged with my students. On the contrary, I feel most alienated as an instructor when I feel like an outsider in my own course ~ when I have 100 unread discussions and I realize I have not been involved as a participant and facilitator.  I think my students, generally, understand my boundaries and respect them. When I take weekends off, students understand not to expect an e-mail reply until Monday morning.

I would love to hear about the boundaries you've set for yourself and how you have communicated these boundaries to your students. What do you do to feel competent as an online instructor? What give you a sense of personal and professional fulfillment?  And, what efficiencies have you discovered that might help the rest of us?

In Good Spirit,

Eric

Can the Right Kind of  Play Teach Self-Control? - NYTimes.com

Over the last few years, a new buzz phrase has emerged among scholars and scientists who study early-childhood development, a phrase that sounds more as if it belongs in the boardroom than the classroom: executive function. Originally a neuroscience term, it refers to the ability to think straight: to order your thoughts, to process information in a coherent way, to hold relevant details in your short-term memory, to avoid distractions and mental traps and focus on the task in front of you. And recently, cognitive psychologists have come to believe that executive function, and specifically the skill of self-regulation, might hold the answers to some of the most vexing questions in education today.

Can We Discuss This?- Inside Higher Ed

It's one thing to take responsibility for your own ill-conceived discussion plans, but what do you do when students are the problem? There are (at least) seven flavors of problem students:

• The brownnoser
• The polymath
• The pulseless
  
• The diverter
  
• The pariah
• The defiant
  
• The unprepared

Plato vs Grand Theft Auto ~ Roger Sandall

Plato thought the characters presented should be exemplary, and that boys should model themselves on "men of courage, self-control, independence, and religious principle." And because first impressions are important, he believed that dramatic impersonations of rogues and scoundrels could be dangerous for both actors and audiences.

Schoolchildren "must no more act a mean part than do a mean action or any other kind of wrong. For we soon reap the fruits of literature in life, and prolonged indulgence in any form of literature leaves its mark on the moral nature of a man, affecting not only the mind but physical poise and intonation." (Book Three, 395, H.D.P. Lee translation)

College for $99 a Month by Kevin Carey ~ Washington Monthly

In recent years, Americans have grown accustomed to living amid the smoking wreckage of various once-proud industries--automakers bankrupt, brand-name Wall Street banks in ruins, newspapers dying by the dozen. It's tempting in such circumstances to take comfort in the seeming permanency of our colleges and universities, in the notion that our world-beating higher education system will reliably produce research and knowledge workers for decades to come. But this is an illusion. Colleges are caught in the same kind of debt-fueled price spiral that just blew up the real estate market. They're also in the information business in a time when technology is driving down the cost of selling information to record, destabilizing lows.

In combination, these two trends threaten to shake the foundation of the modern university, in much the same way that other seemingly impregnable institutions have been torn apart. In some ways, the upheaval will be a welcome one. Students will benefit enormously from radically lower prices--particularly people like Solvig who lack disposable income and need higher learning to compete in an ever-more treacherous economy. But these huge changes will also seriously threaten the ability of universities to provide all the things beyond teaching on which society depends: science, culture, the transmission of our civilization from one generation to the next.

The New Literacy -- Clive Thompson, Wired Magazine

The first thing [Andrea Lunsford] she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom--life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

It's almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they'd leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

When Philosophy Meets Politics  ~ Factcheck.org

...Indeed, Emanuel is hardly the first philosopher to find himself in hot water for views that are taken out of context. Princeton philosopher Peter Singer (whose views about doctor-assisted suicide are controversial even in their proper context) is a frequent victim of the phenomenon. Rumors about 18th century philosopher David Hume kept him from ever obtaining an academic post. And, of course, no one can really top Socrates, who was actually executed (a fate that Coulter says she'd welcome for Emanuel) for views that he arguably didn't really hold.

As practiced as an academic discipline, ethics is devoted to talking about really difficult cases. A lot of times, those cases involve death, in some form or another. Entire courses, both undergraduate and graduate, revolve around questions of life and death. That's not because academic ethicists are all terribly morbid, a charge I heard from more than one of my students when I taught introductory courses in philosophy and ethics. It's because that's where the hard questions are.

Open Source Textbook Company Now At 400 Colleges ~ Wired.com

What did you do this summer? Flat World Knowledge stayed busy on campus and now has 40 times as many students and more than 10 times the colleges using their freemium, open-source digital textbooks. And they did it the old-fashioned way -- one professor at a time.

After a sort of beta earlier this year, Flat World is set to announce on Thursday that over 40,000 college students at more than 400 colleges are going to be using their digital, DRM-free textbooks in the Fall semester, up from 1,000 in 30 colleges in the Spring.

Digital textbooks remain a nascent business and a tough market to enter. At an average cost of $100, textbooks command the highest cover prices in publishing, outside of only some art and coffee table books. Demand is artificially inelastic as students are indentured to cost servitude at the whim of college professors who blithely assign titles a student must own if he or she hopes to do well in a given course. Now, multiply that by 4,5, or even 6 courses per semester and you are talking big bucks.

Tips for New Teachers- Chronicle of Higher Education

The first time I ever taught a college class, nearly 25 years ago, I was convinced that, at any moment, one of my students was going to stand up and expose me as a fraud.

Of course, I had good reason to worry: As a brand-new graduate assistant, I was a fraud, as Henry Adams reminded us all recently in his thought-provoking essay, "Academic Bait and Switch."

UT prepares teachers for Bible classes

by Ryan Moore
Daily Texan Staff
Friday, August 7, 2009

During the 2007 legislative session, Gov. Rick Perry signed a bill that requires Old Testament and New Testament history and literature to be added to Texas high school curriculum. The legislation states that all school districts must offer a course as an elective for the 2009-2010 school year if more than 15 students show interest.

As Classrooms Go Digital, Textbooks May Become History - NYTimes.com

Textbooks have not gone the way of the scroll yet, but many educators say that it will not be long before they are replaced by digital versions -- or supplanted altogether by lessons assembled from the wealth of free courseware, educational games, videos and projects on the Web.

The Erasure of Islam -- The Philosophers' Magazine

What Enlightenment? It may have been good for Europe, but for the rest of the world in general, and Islam in particular, the Enlightenment was a disaster. Despite their stand for freedom and liberty, reason and liberal thought, Enlightenment thinkers saw the non-West as irrational and inferior, morally decadent and fit only for colonisation.

Hot Moments in the Classroom ~ by Lee Warren, Derek Bok Center

Hot moments occur when people's feelings -- often conflictual -- rise to a point that threatens teaching and learning. They can occur during the discussion of issues people feel deeply about, or as a result of classroom dynamics in any field.

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.

Fortunately all of us can develop techniques to handle the unavoidable difficult moments. Using them can open doors to topics formerly avoided and classroom dynamics formerly neglected. Most importantly, exploring these tensions can lead to deep learning.

Link to the TED site for more information and the source video.

Not Every Child Is Secretly a Genius - ChronicleReview.com

Many people like to think that any child, with the proper nurturance, can blossom into some kind of academic oak tree, tall and proud. It's just not so.

Multiple intelligences provides a kind of cover to preserve that fable. "OK, little Jimmie may not be a rocket scientist, but he can dance real well. Shouldn't that count equally in school and life?" No. The great dancers of the Pleistocene foxtrotted their way into the stomach of a saber-tooth tiger. That is the root of the matter. Too many people have chosen to believe in what they wish to be true rather than in what is true. In the main, the motive is a pure one: to see every child as having equal potential, or at the very least some potential. Intelligence is a fundamentally meritocratic construct. There are winners and there are losers.

Introducing the Microlecture Format -- Open Education

The Micro-Lecture While one minute lectures may be beyond the scope of imagination for any veteran teacher, Shieh reports on the piloting of the concept at San Juan College in Farmington, N.M. The concept was introduced as part of a new online degree program in occupational safety last fall. According to Shieh, school administrators were so pleased with the results that they are expanding the micro-lecture concept to courses in reading and veterinary studies.

The designer of the format, David Penrose, insists that in online education "tiny bursts can teach just as well as traditional lectures when paired with assignments and discussions." The microlecture format begins with a podcast that introduces a few key terms or a critical concept, then immediately turns the learning environment over to the students.

A Lecture in 90 Seconds - Chronicle.com