Education
Week in Review: January 30–February 5
Monday, February 8th, 2010 | Education, WIR, news | No Comments
The “better late than never” edition of news for this week. Be sure to check out the “Assorted Extras” links to an image placeholder technique you can share with web design students and a poetry interactive.
Campus Issues
Donations have decreased at colleges across the country (Inside Higher Ed). Yale will cut staff and freeze some salaries to meet a $150 million budget gap (NYTimes). Princeton’s efforts to squash grade inflation are meeting with complaints from students (NYTimes). In a ten-year strategic plan, the president of University of New Hampshire calls for interdisciplinary collaboration and rewards for innovation to ensure the school’s future (Boston.com).
Intellectual Property Rights
UCLA has removed all copyrighted films from their course Websites because complaints of copyright violation from the Association for Information and Media Equipment (Chronicle of Higher Ed). IP rights and piracy have been at issue for centuries (Inside Higher Ed), and many universities are unsure what is and isn’t legal (Inside Higher Ed). The UCLA action has lead to speculation about the role of video projects in education (Inside Higher Ed) and emerging understandings of copyright and online streaming (Inside Higher Ed).
In a strike against a possible plagiarism mill, an Illinois court has shut down an online term paper site until it can prove ownership of the essays it sells (USA Today).
Government
Federal funding for FY2011 may fall short for Pell Grants, the Department of Labor’s Career Pathways Innovation Fund, and the National Endowment for the Humanities (Inside Higher Ed). The proposed end to the Leveraging Educational Assistance Partnership program could spell the end of millions of dollars in matching funds from state coffers for students (Inside Higher Ed). Lobbyists are challenging the federal plan to end government subsidies to private lenders and provide the monies to directly to students (NYTimes).
A letter from Jill Biden counters misconceptions about federally-subsidized loans and urges community colleges to offer the loans to students (Chronicle of Higher Ed).
According to a recent report, the number of nonprofit schools gaining federal funding as “Hispanic-Serving Institutions” is increasing (Inside Higher Ed).
Tablet Computing
The new iPad has inspired discussion of the tablet’s educational benefits (PCWorld), how students will respond (Nevada Sagebrush), and how the various tablets stack up (Lifehacker). Apple’s decision to use a proprietary format for ebooks on the iPad complicates things for consumers and publishers (Yahoo! News). The free Blio Reader may change expectations for ebooks, with features that duplicate layout and appearance of paper-based books (eSchoolNews). Regardless of the evolution of ebooks and tablets, author Katherine Paterson argues that we’ll still read paper-based books (NY Daily News).
Technology
Universities report increasing interest in hybrid courses, which combine online and traditional classroom experiences (eSchoolNews). A Brigham Young University experiment found that free online distance courses did not harm traditional course enrollment (Chronicle of Higher Ed).
A recent Pew Trust report finds that teens do not use Twitter or blog but their interest in social networking sites is growing (Washington Post). Regardless of teen engagement, teachers can benefit from using Twitter to connect with other teachers (Educational Leadership). For tenure purposes, however, a UC-Berkeley reports indicates professors should focus on traditional publication options (Chronicle of Higher Ed).
Assorted Extras
- 8 Easy Ways to Get Digital Natives Wild about Reading (Huffington Post)
- Dummy Image Generator (Lifehacker)
- Fun with punctuation (Boing Boing)
- “For Better for Verse” interactive shows how poetic meter works (UVA Today)
- Social Learning in the Enterprise—in 4 minutes (Jane’s Learning Pick of the Day)
Why You Should Try Twitter in the Classroom
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 | 21st century literacy, classroom activity | No Comments
If you’re even slightly interested in how you might use Twitter in the classroom, take a look at William M. Ferriter’s essay “Why Teachers Should Try Twitter” from Educational Leadership.
The article explains, “For educators who use this tool to build a network of people whose Twitter messages connect to their work, Twitter becomes a constant source of new ideas to explore.” It includes some tips and how-to’s as well as a personal story on how the experience affected the author’s understanding of differentiated instruction.
Week in Review: January 24–30
Sunday, January 31st, 2010 | Education, WIR, news | 1 Comment
Having posted daily headlines for over a year now, I wanted to try a weekly round-up of the key stories from the previous week. This is the first effort in that project. My goal is to identify the key stories that a college educator should know about, and occasionally to pass along some “assorted extras” that might be useful or amusing to teachers and students.
Academic Freedom
The AAUP announced this week that they’ve begun a new publication, The AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom, to focus on the significant questions of what we can teach, when and how we can teach it, and what difference our teaching and research decisions make upon our careers (ProfHacker).
At the same time, students in Culpepper, Virginia are denied the chance to read the newest edition of The Diary of Anne Frank, due to the “sexually explicit material and homosexual themes” (Washington Post). Also facing censorship, students at work on the newspaper at L.A. City College have found administrators attempting to control the topics they cover and information they publish (LA Times).
Assessment
A campus-wide understanding of how students are learning and how each campus contributes to a national snapshot of educational outcomes was the focus of discussion recently at the annual conference of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation’s annual forum (Inside Higher Ed).
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development is developing discipline-specific tests to measure learning outcomes and cross-institutional comparisons, with the participation of the U.S. government (Inside Higher Ed).
Improving instruction and student achievement may rely greatly on eliminating obstacles and motivating faculty, according to commentary at the annual conference of the Association of American Colleges and
Universities (Chroncile of Higher Ed).
Government
President Obama’s State of the Union address proposed changes to financial aid and support for lowering the high cost of a college education. Meanwhile Jill Biden stressed the presidential administration’s support for community colleges. Congressional Reps. Timothy Bishop (D-N.Y.) and Michael Castle (R-Del.) introduced legislation to help identify and eliminate diploma and accredidation mills.
Tablet Computing
Predictions ran wild early on (Inside Higher Ed) about Apple’s much anticipated tablet PC this week, but turned to criticism as the iPad was introduced with a conceivably ill-chosen name (PCWorld) and an all-white male introductory video. Tablets are a hot topic of discussion in educational circles (Chronicle of Higher Ed) because of their potential effect on collaboration and electronic textbook use.
Obituaries
- Louis Auchincloss, novelist and biographer (NYTimes)
- J.D. Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye (NPR)
- Howard Zinn, Historian, author of A People’s History of the United States (NYTimes)
Assorted Extras
- 5 Lessons Professors Can Learn From Video Games (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
- 150 Free Advanced PowerPoint Slides to Jazz Up Your Presentations (Lifehacker)
- How to use a semicolon: The most feared punctuation on earth (The Oatmeal)
- Yearbooks ending at University of Virginia, other colleges (Washington Post)
Change Your Metaphor
Monday, January 25th, 2010 | 21st century literacy, Bedford Bits, Education, NCTE Inbox | No Comments
No more plug and play education. It’s time for more blossom and grow! Okay, so the metaphors aren’t really parallel. I guess it should be plant and grow, but that’s not as catchy. The difference between the two metaphors, though, it spot on for what we need to pursue for effective instruction.
I wrote about educational metaphors for NCTE’s Inbox blog this week. I wasn’t really thinking about the different ways of thinking about education until I read the PDF of Chapter One from Rebecca Bowers Sipe’s Adolescent Literacy at Risk? The Impact of Standards.
The agrarian metaphor for the educational system that Sipe outlines suddenly clicked perfectly with the “growth mindset” that I read about last fall in the article“The Truth about Grit,” published in The Boston Globe. (You can read more about that article in one of my Bedford Bits blogs from last October.)
The words we use always matter. In the case of metaphors, they can matter more than we may realize. The industrial metaphor for education has brought us a classroom where the strategies and information can be uniform. There’s no accounting for the differentiation of the students. Every student is the same. Teachers just plug in the units, and students are ready to go.
Course, in the real classroom, every student is different. That’s why plug and play strategies don’t work—and why we need to shift the way we think about education back to a more agrarian model that relies on strategies that help students blossom and grow.
Bits Post: Warning: No Yelling in the Food Court
Thursday, December 10th, 2009 | Bedford Bits, classroom activity | No Comments
Try this incredibly simple but quite useful analogy to reach students who are struggling with issues of audience and style. Soon they’ll be speaking to, and not at, their audience.
Bits Post: Getting Beyond Words in Visual Analysis
Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 | Bedford Bits, classroom activity, visual rhetoric | No Comments
Take a poster into the classroom, and what will students see when you ask them to analyze the message? Most of the time they zoom in on whatever words are included. They may later come back to other aspects of the poster, but the words color what they see. Here’s an easy technique to emphasize the other aspects of these visual messages.
Inbox Blog: How to Move Closer to School 2.0
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 | 21st century literacy, NCTE Inbox, Uncategorized | No Comments
William Kist’s article “From Web 2.0 to School 2.0: Tales from the Field” includes vignettes of students using digital technologies to connect to one another and to the texts that they explore. How can you get to School 2.0? I outline three steps to using social networking in the classroom in this week’s NCTE Inbox Blog.
WFMAD 5: Word Geek
Wednesday, August 5th, 2009 | WFMAD, vocabulary | No Comments
Dear Teacher,
I completely fail at vocabulary exercises. Sure, I can use your words in a sentence, but they sound like words I was told to use in a sentence. They never sound like anything natural. No matter how much I try to rephrase or revise, they all sound wrong.
Maybe it’s that there’s no context. Just a floating sentence with some new word. Maybe context would help.
Shive: She looked at the three sets of hungry eyes staring up at her and then back at the bare crust of bread in her hand. She turned to the counter, away from their faces, and shived and slivered the crust into three transparent slices, hoping they wouldn’t see the tears that fell on the board as she worked.
Hmm. Not really. That sounds like some toss off from a Grapes of Wrath draft. Or some really awful Lifetime movie about a welfare mother. The word didn’t even get to have star-billing. It didn’t feel right without the “and slivered” bit. Just not right. Definite FAIL.
Why do teachers want us to write these vocabulary sentences anyway? Do they really think that this is going to help us actually use these crazy words? Maybe they don’t want us to use them. Maybe we’re just supposed to recognize them in some Shakespeare thing later. I just don’t see the point, but w/e. I’ll write your sentences.
Dwale: “It’s pure dwale to presume that someone will learn a word just by dropping it in an awkward sentence that they’d otherwise never write,” she said to her English teacher, Mrs. Grimes.
WFMAD stands for “Writing for Fifteen Minutes a Day.” Author Laurie Halse Anderson
Teachers can use a similar project to discuss writing successes and challenges (as well as get some fast drafting done). As my Inbox blog entry this week explains, it’s an easy way to build community in just 15 minutes!
Oh Internet, You Pandora’s Box!
Monday, April 13th, 2009 | 21st century literacy | No Comments
It seems that some jurors are actively twittering about the court cases they are hearing and worse yet, doing their own research on the lawyers, the parties in the case, and the case itself —all as the legal cases are unfolding in front of them. There’s more about "Illegal 21st Century Research Skills" in my Bits blog entry today, but there was one piece that just didn’t fit into that post.
You see, I know the research these jurors are doing is illegal, but I couldn’t help but smile a bit as I read about the cases. The NY Times article stated that in one case, the judge found that jurors had been "conducting Google searches on the lawyers and the defendant, looking up news articles about the case, checking definitions on wikipedia and searching for evidence that had been specifically excluded by the judge."
(If only we could get students to do all this background work before they come to class to discuss a reading!)
The article continued, explaining that when asked why he did all this, one of the jurors explained, "I was curious." Oh Internet! You cruel box of treasures, luring us to peek inside!!
Poem 8: “We Real Cool”
Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 | American Lit, ReadWriteThink, lesson plan, poetry | No Comments
Another poem I enjoy teaching, Gwendolyn Brooks’s "We Real Cool" has been a powerful tool for discussions of voice and style in the classroom. Like "The Writer," this poem inspired a ReadWriteThink lesson plan, Many Years Later: Responding to Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool.”
The activity that I describe in the lesson, and also in a related English Journal article, “Write Like You Talk (Snapshots),” demonstrated to me how important it is for students to writing from authentic subject position and in their own voice. (You can find out more by reading the EJ article.)
Okay, I admit though, choosing this poem is probably prideful. It’s a poem I like and that I teach well. Further, it led to my first publication in English Journal. Who wouldn’t be pleased about that?
But there’s more. I found about a month ago that the Library of Congress’s Web Guide, "Gwendolyn Brooks: Online Resources," points to my lesson plan. Seriously, scroll down to the lesson plan section and there it is. Okay, it’s just a link, but hey, someone at the Library of Congress thought my lesson was good enough to point to. And it’s all because of that great poem by Gwendolyn Brooks.
Literacy and Education in the News
- Men, not ladies, first: we're still sexist in writing | Sify News http://bit.ly/cKoVK5
- Alice In Wonderland's Secret Ingredient: Math : NPR http://bit.ly/aQzE45
- Ten of the best men writing as women in literature | Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/aMIr3R
- Tell Congress to Make the Write Decision - National Writing Project http://bit.ly/9XC5T2
- Faculty underreport cheating : The Collegian Online http://bit.ly/cjp5VO
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