http://lwveducation.com/the-prize-who-is-in-charge-of-americas-schools/
podcast: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/fresh-air/id214089682?mt=2&i=352838278
The Prize is a story about good intentions gone awry. They turn into political struggles, condescending and arrogant management policies, and money wasted. They are thwarted by community mistrust which led to rebellion. Note that none of this mentions the children. It may be an opportunity lost for them. If their parents stay involved, workable strategies to improve schools may emerge.
The Prize gives little insight into what works in schools to break the cycle of poverty. The Newark example explains what did not work. Individual teachers, given adequate support, are effective. Some lessons learned about charter and district collaboration have emerged. Small steps are being taken. I will post them next. What we do know is that, in the last analysis, parents own the schools. Without them, nothing good will happen.
Prepare For ‘The End Of College’: Here’s What Free Higher Ed Looks Like
http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/03/03/390167950/prepare-for-the-end-of-college-heres-what-free-higher-ed-looks-like
a future in which “the idea of ‘admission’ to college will become an anachronism, because the University of Everywhere will be open to everyone” and “educational resources that have been scarce and expensive for centuries will be abundant and free.”
why the majority of American college students decide to go to college
partly this [is] being driven by the fact that people need to go to college in order to make their way in the world and get credentials for, frankly, not the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars that colleges charge today.
the use of social media, personal versus institutional, or personal in the context of an institutional repercussions, is a complex and thorny issue. How much can one criticize the institution in their personal social media? And if the institution responds, when does it become silencing the social media as expression of free speech?
Is the article below touching only a specific [political] issue, or academia, as an institution, goes beyond this issue in imposing on freedom of speech?
Why I Was Fired
http://chronicle.com/article/Why-I-Was-Fired/233640
My tweets might appear uncivil, but such a judgment can’t be made in an ideological or rhetorical vacuum. Insofar as “civil” is profoundly racialized and has a long history of demanding conformity, I frequently choose incivility as a form of communication. This choice is both moral and rhetorical.
Academics are usually eager to contest censorship and deconstruct vague charges of vulgarity. When it comes to defending Israel, though, anything goes.
Students are capable of serious discussion, of formulating responses, of thinking through discomfort. They like my teaching because I refuse to infantilize them; I treat them as thinking adults. My philosophy is simple: Teach them the modes and practices of critical thought and let them figure out things on their own.
Professors are often punished for disrupting convention in informal ways, however. My case is interesting because administrators ignored the de facto standards that regulate our behavior and exercised their power directly. This should be worrisome to any scholar who isn’t a sycophant.
The coming of “academic capitalism” has been anticipated and praised for years; today it is here.
Benjamin Ginsberg points out that in the past 30 years, the administrator-to-student ratio has increased while the instructor-to-student ratio has stagnated. The rise of untenured, or non-tenure-track, faculty exacerbates the problem; a significant demographic in academe lacks job security or the working conditions that allow them to maximize their pedagogical talent. Over a recent 10-year period, spending on administration outpaced spending on instruction. At American universities, there are now more administrators and their staffers than full-time faculty. In the past 10 years, administrative salaries have steadily risen while custodians and groundskeepers suffer the inevitable budget cuts — as do the students whose tuition and fees supplement this largess.
When so much money is at stake, those who raid the budget have a deep interest in maintaining the reputation of the institution. Their privilege and the condition of the brand are causally related. The brand thus predominates. Its predominance often arrives at the expense of student well-being.
critical thinking is a terribly undesirable quality in the corporate world, much more damning than selfishness or sycophancy. Let us then be honest about critical thinking: On the tongues of cunning bureaucrats, it is little more than an additive to brand equity, the vainglorious pomp of smug, uptight automatons who like to use buzzwords in their PowerPoint presentations.
Critical thinking by faculty is even more undesirable. In research institutions, we are paid to generate prestige and to amass grant money; in teaching-centered colleges, we enjoy excess enrollments according to fine-tuned equations that maximize the student-teacher ratio. (In elite liberal-arts colleges, we pamper the kids with simulations of parental affection.) Critical thinking is especially harmful to adjuncts, reliant as they are for income on the munificence of well-paid bosses who cultivate a distended assemblage of expendable employees.
more on social media in this IMS blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/?s=social+media&submit=Search
The Digital Revolution in Higher Education: Challenges and Opportunities for Today’s Universities: Webinar
http://campustechnology.com/Webcasts/2015/10/Cisco-The-Future-and-Present-Challenges-of-Education-100815/Asset.aspx
There is a phenomenon taking place in higher education today. It is nothing short of a revolution regarding the advances in technology and how institutions of higher learning along with nontraditional organizations are utilizing powerful new tools to change the delivery of higher education . These new tools include new mobile devices, enhanced and feature-rich learning management systems, data-feeding sensors, 3D printers, smart classrooms, smart buildings, and collaboration tools allowing students and faculty to collaborate just about anywhere face-to-face, virtually.
The Association for Authentic, Experiential and Evidence-Based Learning (AAEEBL.org) is nearly 7 years old. It is the North American professional association for the global eportfolio community of practice and research field. “ePortfolio” is an idea about how technology can be implemented to best advantage in our world today. The eportfolio idea is that the learner is the anchor and center for the record of learning — the eportfolio is owned by the learner and the eportfolio stays with the learner between courses, between institutions and into life. It is a powerful idea and the growth of eportfolio technology in higher education around the world suggests educators understand that power.
At the Conference at the University of Georgia November 9-10, you will attend sessions that demonstrate how 10 different institutions have deployed eportfolio technology in ways appropriate to initiatives on their campuses. Kathleen Yancey of Florida State University, a founder of the U. S. eportfolio movement, is keynote.
AAEEBL is writing The Field Guide to ePortfolio to be published by AAC&U in 2016. This is a timely publication. Each conference and each webinar that AAEEBL holds contributes to the ideas in the Field Guide, being created by a team of 60 AAEEBL members. You can find out more about this project at this conference.
The Big University
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/06/opinion/david-brooks-the-big-university.html
for the past many decades colleges narrowed down to focus on professional academic disciplines, but now there are a series of forces leading them to widen out so that they leave a mark on the full human being.
http://scsu.mn/TechInstruct
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