I think the era that a person knows everything is passed and now every person need to be specialized in a very very small area. In this approach, having a technology like google can be helpful since you are expert in a tiny area of your field and the google and the internet can help you for other areas that you are interested in but not expert.

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I don’t think that google makes us stupid but I think it makes us dependent. Before the age of google, we depends on our knowledge so people who care about knowledge tried to learn as much as they from the thing they read and study. However, in the age of google that you can get the answer of any questions in a second, maybe you don’t pay that much attention to what you are reading for instance. So I think now we depends more on the internet than ourselves.

Thanks Amy.

I am totally agree with you. I have two short answer questions and the comments of students there were much more helpful compare to those multiple choice questions.

I do your suggestions in pop quizzes I gave them in class. For instance there is a theory that says why some firms in short run shut down their firms to minimize their loss and I gave them a quiz (which counts extra credit so there is not any stress then) that why the cafe in Newman library closed during summer whereas ABP cafe in squires open. So they can apply that theory to this question and I think it helps them to understand better then.

Could you explain more about CIDER workshop? Is it specific for your major or it is a workshop for all students from different majors?

I also want to say that it is really interesting that you have a goal to implement a learning service in your future career. I think it is important to have such goal since it can affect your direction when you enter into academia and as a result it will be helpful for community you will serve in future.

Thanks Yasaman for your comment and I really appreciate that. Your suggestions are great and applicable in general. My problem is I don’t have enough freedom to make project assignments for students. The other thing is unlike the experiences I had in Iran, here students do not like to participate in class activity too much. For instance, I design a game in class to give some intuition to students to learn better supply and demand and market procedure. I need several volunteers to come ahead and play the game because for a large class it is unfeasible to ask all of people to play game, so I need some volunteers and then most of students are reluctant to come and play the game. It is weird for me because if it were in Iran, I guess there would be lots of volunteers, but here only few people came and I begged other students to come!!!

For me, stimulating students to be active in class and not sitting and listening is very challenging. Although I put some incentives and extra credits for class participation and I always appreciate those who ask question, answer questions and participate in class discussion, but overall I think I am not successful enough and those policies do not work effectively.

It is interesting to read your idea. I have an experience of making a mistake in class last week. Unfortunately I found my mistake almost at the end of class and there is no time to explain it to students since my class was on Friday and on Friday no one wants to stay in class more than even one minute!!

That mistake gives me a bad feeling during the whole weekend. I felt I am responsible to all of students and if someone becomes confused about my mistake I have made, this will be my fault. It is not hard at all for me to talk about my mistake and admit that in a situation I was wrong. I think we are all human being and we could make a mistake. The only worry for me was my mistake may cause confusion for some of students and I felt guilty about this issue.

On Monday I try to explain my mistake very clearly to students. I hope all of them understand it and no one remains confused!

You need to think about the limitation of this tool also. GIS can be used mostly whenever we are studying some data that we can reflect them on map. So this tool is very limited and it cannot be used widely for different subject.

Thanks for your post. I really enjoy reading your post. I understand and agree with this statement “Critical pedagogy forces practitioners to recognize the role of teacher and student is not a subversive relationship but a fluid one.” my problem is how can we apply this new approach in education system? As I said in my blog post too, in a theoretical and abstract class, it seems it is impossible to apply this approach to mind of students with lots of assumptions they have in their mind and with a system that evaluate students just by tests.

Thanks Willie for your comment.

I think I should consider your suggestion and ask my students to bring their own examples into class. Thanks for your idea!

About doing artistic assignment I am not quite sure that what do you mean. my course is microecnomics and it is full of theories related to decision making process of firms and household. There is not a lot of data or something like this and I am not sure what specific artistic assignment I can give to my students.

Hi Siddharth,

Thanks for your comment. There are several problems that prevent to change the format of the class:

1) Econ 2005 is a core introductory course that covers main concepts and theories of microeconomics and as a result the nature of the course is in a way that we need to test students through hw/exams to become sure that students understand most of theories and concepts. Having a final project will give a chance for each student or group of students to focus only on narrow issues with use of several theories they have learned through the course so even if I can do that, the weight of the project could not be above 10-15% of the whole grade and as a result I think the challenge is still there.

2) As a graduate student, I don’t have freedom to change the format of the course. The course format is determined by Econ department and there are several sections of econ2005 in every semester. I have some freedom to change the weight of tests/hw or add a small project but I don’t have freedom to put for instance 40% of the whole grade for a final project.

3) Most of my students are either freshmen or sophomores and for them it is also very hard to do a project for a course such as principle of microeconomics.

4) In addition, I myself found doing project for elective course so useful and helpful for learning but not for core/theoretical course and I think having evaluation based on hw/exams work better for a course like econ2005. The challenge in my mind is to find a way to stimulate learning environment with current format.