In a meeting the other day, one of our graduate students observed that for undergraduate students today, email is a way to get in touch with old people. Ouch. Deeply wounded by this notion, I decided to test this proposition out with some of the undergraduates I know. Alas, they mostly confirmed this statement. When…
General Education and Today’s Student
Wither general education in America? Tom Ehrlich, senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, is blue about the Harvard plan for general education. In an essay for Carnegie Perspectives, Ehrlich (formerly president of Indiana University) laments the proposal of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences to substantially water down Harvard’s…
Off the desktop
So, do you think this move of content from the desktop to the handheld device is gathering steam? According to today’s Washington Post the iTunes website has already sold 8 million video downloads. I don’t know about you, but that number seems like the beginning of a trend if ever I saw one. Academic content…
Scapbooking Learning (cont’d)
A reasonable question that could be asked about my plan to require a “historical scrapbook” from my students this semester is how I might assess the quality of their work. Because I expect my students to ask just this question, I’ve given them a set of assessment guidelines, drawn heavily from a grading rubric that…