Quick sand is visually more to the point than the treading water and putting out fires I envision myself doing in grad school. It would seem that we are the students that are covering new ground upon which to stand firm and it will be interesting to see just what our students think after they survive our teaching!
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I understand your apprehension in having technology used in the classroom. I have sat in on too many lectures where the main purpose of the laptop is to Facebook and make a shield from behind which students text. I think that there is a great amount of teaching potential in many of the new formats, but will it be worth all of the up front work that it takes to make them run smoothly?
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So where does this critical thought ability develop? At some point basic concepts must be learned in order to understand larger concepts that require more critical thinking. Banking certainly is not the answer, but as we have seen so far, we are hardly ready to completely rearrange the way we learn and teach. The answers might come in at the higher education level where many classes can be developed and carried out in their own nuanced ways. The problem then will be communicating the value of the new system to the product of the old system who rates and judges those wha are brave enough to try this.
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So where does this critical thought ability develop? At some point basic concepts must be learned in order to understand larger concepts that require more critical thinking. Banking certainly is not the answer, but as we have seen so far, we are hardly ready to completely rearrange the way we learn and teach. The answers might come in at the higher education level where many classes can be developed and carried out in their own nuanced ways. The problem then will be communicating the value of the new system to the product of the old system who rates and judges those wha are brave enough to try this.
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Thank you for sharing. I was fortunate enough to have exposure to many wonderful individuals who had their own differing abilities through a camp as a teenager, and many of my experiences there still pop up in my hidden brain. I think that it is important to have exposure, to reopen our “norms” that we develop through common exposure. Thank you again for sharing.
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Thank you for sharing. I was fortunate enough to have exposure to many wonderful individuals who had their own differing abilities through a camp as a teenager, and many of my experiences there still pop up in my hidden brain. I think that it is important to have exposure, to reopen our “norms” that we develop through common exposure. Thank you again for sharing.
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Exactly! I was just having a short conversation with my old advisor about me taking over his class. One thing that we settled on was tying material from the lecture to real world and sometimes very personal experiences. I think that was what made the class one of my favorites and it is one of the many things that I hope to impart in the class in the upcoming semester.
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I like it. Assessment could be a very useful two way tool. If students new that their responses on the tests could shape the class, that could get interesting. Maybe it could be a section of the exam, maybe it could be the whole thing. I don’t think we can trash testing and assessment just yet, but… we could tune it to be more than just a metric. I know that there are subsets of psychology that focus on the impact of survey questions, imagine if we could harness that kind of information to use the tests as teaching aids as well.
“Exhibitionism” is an interesting way to put it. I myself vary in my personal online presence and my professional online presence. While I am very unlikely to ever his the status update button on Facebook, I will put serious thought and effort into a blog post, linked in profile, or tweet. I have been working in extension related research for a few years now and I am beginning to see social networking as a valuable tool in extension. At some point sharing research and findings can be made considerably more easy without looking like self-promotion. That is at least my goal when I post, but that could be skewed by the very applied nature of my research. Credibility is definitely a concern in social media. I do think that the informative value or the connection necessary for communication to be successful, can be damaged by poor grammar and misspellings. That is true for all communication. I hope that members of our research community can find a way to synthesize their research that can be readily accessible and perhaps combat some of the inappropriate popular science blogs that are loosely based on science. If we do not confront these very loud but incorrect voices, our stakeholders will be left to assume that writers like the “Food Babe” are adequately informed. Concerns of self-promotion and self-grandizing are probably a good sign of humility at this point! Good luck!
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