The conversations about online proctoring of… excuse me… online surveillance during… exams has caused me to take a deeper look at the technology tools we use to ensure academic honesty. By the way, The Manifesto for Online Learning (Bayne, 2020) has a wonderful and brief discussion of this issue. Specifically, I started thinking about plagiarism Read More
Paulo Freire, an educator who worked in Brazil in the 1960’s, is well-known for several essays including “Education for Critical Consciousness” and “Extension and Communication” (Freire, 1974). In these works, Freire argues that meaningful learning occurs when the learner reaches critical consciousness which enables the learner to reflect on and understand not only what they Read More
For all of the rhetoric around being data driven for the last few decades, educators are generally woeful users of data when it comes to making classroom decisions. In my opinion, this is due to the fact that data (quantitative date that is) can only be meaningfully be applied to large data set. We might Read More
The stream of “how to teach online” books and materials to support those faculty who are teaching online. I enjoy these. They are increasingly aligned with what we know about learning (and we know much more than my teachers did… we know more than any teachers did even 10 years ago). One of the great Read More
In my first teaching position in a middle school in rural Vermont, my team had a daily “exploratory” period scheduled. Teachers were responsible for supervising an activity that was supposed to allow students to explore an interest without the traditional limits of academic classes. One of the exploratory activities that I offered which proved to Read More
Case based learning is similar to problem-based learning, but the cases that introduce problems into the curriculum tend to be more pragmatic. When introducing case-based learning, faculty will often define a situation in which the students are likely to find themselves applying what they are studying in the real world. Case-based learning can be implemented Read More
As a high school senior, I was encouraged to enroll in one of two classes to fill a mid-day opening in my schedule. Either a “build your vocabulary” course or an “improve your writing” course. Both had been added to the catalog out of concern that students from my high school were unprepared for college. Read More
I believe that schools are becoming irrelevant in the lives of young people. Adults are trying to improve schools by looking towards their past; “what worked for me will work for them,” is their misguided reasoning. We (and this pronoun includes educators and all other adults who care about our children’s future) must reinvent our Read More
Cognitive load theory is an idea I have been integrating into my presentations and workshops for a few years. (It has been addressed in this blog previously.) This is a version I have been including this summer: While technology acceptance is a theory that can explain and predict the decision to use a technology, cognitive Read More
Eric Mauzer, a Harvard physics educator, is well-known for developing the concept of integration as an aspect of deeper learning. Mauzer found that after a long course in which students were taught information and solutions without context, the course had “taught them ‘next to nothing.’ After a semester of physics, they still held the same Read More