Searching for "Liberal Arts"
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.
++++++++++++++++++++++
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/.
+++++++++++++
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.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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.”
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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.
+++++++
more on digital innovation in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=digital+innovation
Liberalism is the most successful idea of the past 400 years
But its best years are behind it, according to a new book
https://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21735578-its-best-years-are-behind-it-according-new-book-liberalism-most
quality of opportunity has produced a new meritocratic aristocracy that has all the aloofness of the old aristocracy with none of its sense of noblesse oblige. Democracy has degenerated into a theatre of the absurd. And technological advances are reducing ever more areas of work into meaningless drudgery
Mr Deneen’s fixation on the essence of liberalism leads to the second big problem of his book: his failure to recognise liberalism’s ability to reform itself and address its internal problems. The late 19th century saw America suffering from many of the problems that are reappearing today, including the creation of a business aristocracy, the rise of vast companies, the corruption of politics and the sense that society was dividing into winners and losers. But a wide variety of reformers, working within the liberal tradition, tackled these problems head on. Theodore Roosevelt took on the trusts. Progressives cleaned up government corruption. University reformers modernised academic syllabuses and built ladders of opportunity. Rather than dying, liberalism reformed itself.
the importance of liberal education
Setting Up Ghana’s First Liberal Arts College Makes Him A ‘Genius’
http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/10/14/448569082/setting-up-ghanas-first-liberal-arts-college-makes-him-a-genius
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.
+++++++++++++++++++++
more on online ed in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=online+education
https://middleburycampus.com/54712/news/million-dollar-library-budget-cut-hinders-resource-access-burdens-librarians/
The Middlebury College Libraries had its non-personnel budget cut by nearly a third for the 2021 fiscal year, resulting in reduced or delayed access to databases, journals and books, as well as an increasing reliance on interlibrary loan (ILL).
Other services were transitioned to a token system. In contrast to the previous unlimited access model, the college now pays for a finite supply of tokens that are used to purchase access to sources individually.
++++++++++++
more on libraries in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=academic+library
Faculty Members Fear Pandemic Will Weaken Their Ranks
By Megan Zahneis APRIL 09, 2020
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Faculty-Members-Fear-Pandemic/248476
Covid-19 is being described as both a crisis and an opportunity for higher education. But how “opportunity” is defined depends on where one stands in the academic hierarchy. While some hope the pandemic provides a chance to reverse troubling trends toward the adjunctification and casualization of academic labor, administrators may see it as a different sort of opportunity, to realign institutional priorities or exert greater authority over their faculties.
A statement by the Tenure for the Common Good group offers 20 recommendations for administrators, including that they “resist using the current crisis as an opportunity to exploit contingency further by hiring more contingent faculty into precarious positions.”
As faculty members are asked to take on greater teaching, advising, and administrative responsibilities, faculty development and retention “will be more important to institutional resilience — survival — than ever before,” Kiernan Mathews, executive director and principal investigator of the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education, wrote on Twitter.
To DePaola, the pandemic doesn’t pose new problems to academe as much as it magnifies existing ones. “Everything was held together with gum and paper clips, and coronavirus came and just sort of knocked it all down at once,” DePaola said. “I think none of the crises that this virus is causing are new. They’re just accelerated greatly. And the contradictions of the system are heightened all at once for people to see.”
++++++++++++++++
The Small World Network of College Classes: Implications for Epidemic Spread on a University Campus
https://osf.io/6kuet/
2020-04-11
Beginning in March 2020, many universities shifted to on-line instruction to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, and many now face the difficult decision of whether and how to resume in-person instruction. This article uses complete transcript data from a medium-sized residential American university to map the two-node network that connects students and classes through course enrollments. We show that the enrollment networks of the university and its liberal arts college are “small-world” networks, characterized by high clustering and short average path lengths. In both networks, at least 98% of students are in the main component, and most students can reach each other in two steps. Removing very large courses slightly elongates path lengths, but does not disconnect these networks or eliminate all alternative paths between students. Although students from different majors tend to be clustered together, gateway courses and distributional requirements create cross-major integration. We close by discussing the implications of course networks for understanding potential epidemic spread of infection on university campuses.
+++++++++++++++
Digital Agility: Embracing a Holistic Approach to Digital Literacy in the Liberal Arts
https://er.educause.edu/blogs/2020/1/digital-agility-embracing-a-holistic-approach-to-digital-literacy-in-the-liberal-arts
A 2016 Pew Research Center study indicates that the digital divide in the United States is not solely about access to technology; it also is about the ability to use technology to get what we need.1 What does digital readiness mean; applying cumulative knowledge to real-world situations. Having a tech or STEM-related degree does not ensure digital readiness.
How Can We Encourage Digital Agility in the Liberal Arts?
Digital pedagogy often creates opportunities for instructors to create non-disposable assignments—assignments that are not designed to be thrown away but rather have a purpose past being required.3
“We need to marry the best of our academic work with the best of edtech. In other words, what would it look like if education technology were embedded in the everyday practice of academic disciplines?”4
Project-based learning fits well within the curricular flexibility of the liberal arts. In project-based work, students apply what they are learning in the context of an engaging experience.
Building off frameworks that are already in place, like the Association for College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy,
External-facing work offers students real situations where, if we imagine what digital agility looks like, they have to adjust to possible new digital environments and approaches.
Reflection provides a way for meaning-making to happen across individual assignments, projects, and classes. Without the chance to assemble assignments into a larger narrative, each experience lives in its own void.
How Can Institutions Build Systems-Level Support?
Liberal arts colleges in particular are interested in the ways they prepare graduates to be agile and critical in a digital world—as seen in the Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education (VALUE) Rubrics.
he Bryn Mawr Digital Competencies Framework5 was followed by more formal conversations and the formation of a working group (including Carleton College,
++++++++++++
more on digital fluency in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=digital+fluency