article2read - Sharon Elin on Diigo

15 Dec 09

13 Dec 09

Has Ontario taught its high-school students not to think? | University Affairs

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pedagogy article2read

most of the students I see are not so much disengaged as poorly trained for university expectations. Students' ability to do analysis and synthesis seems to have been replaced by rote memorization and regurgitation in both the sciences and the humanities. This is a complaint that I hear from instructors in senior high-school classes through to professors in the humanities.
students do not really understand what they are doing even when they have covered the material in high school.
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- More important is the ability to relate these facts in new ways, to see them in a new light, and to bring quite disparate ideas together to solve new problems or create new forms of art. This ability to analyze and synthesize is what makes good scientists, writers, philosophers and artists. It is the ability needed to drive a knowledge-based economy.
- Much of the new curriculum in the junior grades is considered by many experienced teachers to be beyond the mental development of students at that level. This encourages blind memorization rather than understanding.
- Moreover, the new curriculum significantly reduces time spent on the visual arts, and was so content-heavy that it greatly limited the amount of time available for developing analytical and conceptual-understanding skills from kindergarten on
- much of the teaching at the elementary level is now directed to passing those tests, as schools are rated publicly on the results
- our students entering university are a year younger. The teenage brain is still developing its "executive functions" during this time, so students enter university with a year's less ability to analyze and plan ahead.
- grade inflation is clearly present
- - I agree this trend toward video and video games has reduced reading habits and turned the focus off text and onto multimedia delivery of information, but I'm not sure this trend alone has reduced analytical skills. Many video games require deep levels of analytical maneuvering to complete. A great book to read on this is Steven Johnson's book, "Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter" - on 2009-12-13
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- The trend among young people to move away from reading and towards video and video games, means they spend less time developing reading/writing/analytical skills
- They do not appreciate that, even as students, they will be expected to develop new knowledge, not just regurgitate existing facts.
- Students continue to demonstrate serious deficiencies in problem solving skills, basic math skills, and hands-on laboratory skills when they arrive at the university level
- There may be 10 years of students who have been taught not to think, and reversing that effect will be not be easy without a determined effort.

04 Dec 09

Is Technology Producing A Decline In Critical Thinking And Analysis?

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Tutorial: Two Uses of Technology to Improve Literacy and Critical Thinking | Education | Change.org

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17 Nov 09

Why You Can't Use Personal Technology at the Office - WSJ.com

There's a reason professional chefs bring their own knives to work, rather than using a dull set of blades lying around the kitchen.

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career culture article2read controversy

This is the double life many people lead: yesterday's technology for work, today's technology for everything else. The past decade has brought awesome innovations to the marketplace—Internet search, the iPhone, Twitter and so on—but consumers, not companies, embrace them first and with the most gusto.
nanny-state attitude of employers who block access to Web sites
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- lock down PCs so users can't install software and force employees to use clunky programs
- There's a reason professional chefs bring their own knives to work, rather than using a dull set of blades lying around the kitchen.
- there are indirect costs connected with upgrades that give businesses an incentive to stick with battle-tested technologies, like the hassles of retraining workers and of dealing with buggy new products. In one example, many companies never bothered to upgrade to Microsoft's last version of its operating system, Windows Vista, in part because of technical issues with the software when it was first released.
- The rise of the consumer market also means people have gotten a lot smarter when it comes to technology—and a lot less patient with substandard stuff at the office. Even with the weak economy, companies will find it harder to recruit savvy workers if they don't let them use their favored technology.
- many executives agree that change is in the air

16 Oct 09

Innovate: The Loophole Generation

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08 Oct 09

comparing blogs & discussion boards

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07 Oct 09

Protecting copyright at the cost of children’s rights? : Tim’s Blog

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05 Oct 09

Insidious Pedagogy: How CMS Impact Teaching

"Most college instructors do not work or play much on the Web, and thus utilize Web–based systems primarily at their basic level. The defaults of the CMS therefore tend to determine the way Web–novice faculty teach online, encouraging methods based on posting of material and engendering usage that focuses on administrative tasks."

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pedagogy article2read elearning

most college instructors do not work or play much on the Web, and thus utilize Web–based systems primarily at their basic level. The defaults of the CMS therefore tend to determine the way Web–novice faculty teach online, encouraging methods based on posting of material and engendering usage that focuses on administrative tasks.

04 Oct 09

01 Oct 09

TheEngTeacher: Technology's Impact on Effective #Teaching Strategies

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elearning article2read

28 Sep 09

Wake Up and Smell the New Epistemology - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

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"It is imperative that someone studying this generation realize that we have the world at our fingertips — and the world has been at our fingertips for our entire lives. I think this access to information seriously undermines this generation's view of authority, especially traditional scholastic authority." Today's students know full well that authorities can be found for every position and any knowledge claim, and consequently the students are dubious (privately, that is) about anything we claim to be true or important.
Of course, this new epistemology does not imply that our students have become skilled arbiters of information and interpretation. It simply means that they arrive at college with well-established methods of sorting, doubting, or ignoring the same. That, by itself, is not troubling. Many professors encourage students to question authority, and would welcome more who challenged and debated ideas. But this new epistemology carries some heavy baggage — indeed, it is inseparably conjoined with personal economics. Short of fame or a lottery win, today's students recognize that a college degree is the minimum credential they will need to attain their desired standard of living (and hence "happiness"). So this new epistemology produces a rather odd kind of student — one who appears polite and dutiful but who cares little about the course work, the larger questions it raises, or the value of living an examined life. And it produces such students in overwhelming abundance.
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- we must respect students as thinkers, even though their thinking skills may be undeveloped and their knowledge base shallow. Moreover, our respect must be genuine. Students have keen hypocrisy sensors and do not like being patronized.
- transparent
- It is not just residential-college students who live in a bubble — many faculty members do as well.