Posts Tagged ‘liberal arts’
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2021-12-10-in-china-online-degrees-on-hold-even-as-moocs-rise
With China muscling its way into the first ranks as a global power in science and technology—building vast new academic complexes, climbing to the top ranks of the world’s elite universities, surpassing the U.S. in PhD graduates in science and engineering, and on its way to outperforming all other nations in science and technology academic citations—I was puzzled to discover that China is on hold in offering online higher ed degrees.
To expand the nation’s technical talent pool, Chinese universities are upgrading their capacity to offer more up-to-date science and technology courses, with universities just beginning to introduce degrees in artificial intelligence, machine learning, software engineering and other advanced specialties. For China, the move is a departure from its centuries-old tradition of favoring literature and the liberal arts.
China has come a long way from cinema-style instruction to adopt more common digital learning practices, often closely following U.S. advances in online pedagogy, such as flipped classrooms and MOOCs.
Curiously, China’s reluctance to offer online degrees parallels the attitude toward online degrees in the Ivy League in the U.S.—both have embraced MOOCs while turning away from virtual degrees out of concern that remote degrees will damage their reputations.
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more on online ed in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=online+education
We say we prepare students for undefined futures. Are they better for it?
https://www.chronicle.com/article/an-unconvincing-argument-for-the-liberal-arts
The medieval European understanding of liberal arts, based partially on a reinterpretation of classical ideas, suggested that elites needed an open-ended education based on the trivium and quadrivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy) because, as rulers, they would face complex and unexpected problems, whereas others only needed an introduction to “practical arts” relevant to specific repeated labor.
either everyone needs liberal arts or no one does. If liberal arts and preparation for uncertainty are synonymous, it can’t possibly make sense to limit that training to future leaders or a small elite.
Liberal-arts faculty can be surprisingly incurious about how teaching actually happens in educational settings different from their own
Helga Nowotny calls “the cunning of uncertainty” and accept her argument that everyone — rich and poor, college educated in a liberal-arts curriculum, or high-school educated in a trade — can and should live with and even embrace that cunning. By “cunning,” Nowotny means that uncertainty is an irreducible part of human life and the physical universe, and that we should follow where it leads us.
John Kay has called obliquity: that in a very concrete and empirical sense, many of our most cherished goals and values are achievable only if we do not try to achieve them directly.
Maybe a liberal education is, or could be, about embracing uncertainty where it is generative, necessary, and useful.
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more on liberal arts in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=Liberal+Arts
To RSVP ahead of time, or to jump straight in at 2 pm ET this Thursday, click here:
https://shindig.com/login/event/volkbenedix
the topic of liberal education, in the company of two great advocates. On Thursday, January 28h, from 2-3 pm ET, we’ll be joined by professors Beth Benedix and Steven Volk, authors of the new book The Post-Pandemic Liberal Arts College: A Manifesto for Reinvention (publisher; our bookstore).
Beth Benedix teaches literature and religious studies at DePauw University. There she founded and directs The Castle, a nonprofit organization that partners with local public schools to build a culture of arts-integrated project-based learning, and TransformEdu, a consulting business that works with college educators to develop holistic, intentional and collaborative practices to energize the classroom.
Beth has published: Reluctant Theologians: Kafka, Celan, Jabes; Subverting Scriptures: Critical Reflections on the Uses of the Bible; Ghost Writer (A Story About Telling a Holocaust Story). She is working on a documentary film project about public education with film-makers Joel Fendelman and James Chase Sanchez.
She completed her B.A, M.A and Ph.D at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Steve Volk is Professor of History Emeritus at Oberlin College where he taught Latin American History and Museum Studies between 1986-2016. He founded the Center for Teaching Innovation and Excellence (CTIE), Oberlin’s teaching and learning center, in 2007 and served as its director until retiring in July 2018. He was named Outstanding U.S. Baccalaureate Colleges Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Center for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) in 2011. In 2012, he was named a Great Lake College Association Teagle Peadagogy Fellow. In 2003 he received the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award from the American Historical Association, and was recognized for his teaching leadership by the Northeast Ohio Council on Higher Education. In 2001 he was commended by the Government of Chile for “his contributions in helping to restore democracy” in that country.
He blogs at https://steven-volk.blog/.
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more on future trends in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=future+trends
Digital Humanities and the Future of Liberal Arts – October 11
3:30 – 5:00 p.m.
Wilson Research Collaboration Studio, University of Minnesota
A survey of some of the most exciting applications of digitization in the College of Liberal Arts along with a discussion of the potential of digital humanities for advancing and enriching our understanding of the human condition. Moderated by Jane Blocker, Art History.
The Secret to Digital Innovation in the Liberal Arts
Small liberal arts colleges looking to innovate with technology in education are finding strength in numbers.
By David Raths 12/12/16
https://campustechnology.com/Articles/2016/12/12/The-Secret-to-Digital-Innovation-in-the-Liberal-Arts.aspx
During a Dec. 8 Future Trends Forum video chat hosted by futurist Bryan Alexander, several liberal arts technology leaders spoke about their efforts to define their colleges’ approach to digital innovation.
As an example of a more promising liberal arts partnership, Eshleman pointed to LACOL, the Liberal Arts Consortium for Online Learning. LACOL’s nine member institutions comprise Amherst, Bryn Mawr, Carleton, Haverford, Pomona, Swarthmore, Vassar, Washington and Lee and Williams. LACOL is an effort to create an experimental framework that supports project work across the nine campuses. There are interesting experiments happening on each campus, and LACOL provides opportunities to use a digital network to take those to a new level, said Elizabeth Evans, LACOL’s director, who joined Eshleman on the Future Trends Forum virtual stage to describe the consortium’s setup.
This involves a multi-campus team of faculty and instructional designers, all organized around a central project, which has its ups and downs, she added.
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She is starting to work with Davidson’s Center for Interdisciplinary Studies and an entrepreneurship initiative to foster projects that are “bottom-up from students, faculty and staff who want to experiment with models of innovation.”
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She said she has learned to keep the focus off of technology initially. She asks faculty members to think about what have they wanted to do around student learning and why. “It is about that first, and technology second,” she stressed, adding that she has moved away from quantitative evaluation of projects and more toward storytelling.
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more on digital innovation in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=digital+innovation
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.