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Category Archives: Teaching and Learning
Postmortem on my experiments with teaching this year.
At the end of the school year, about a month ago, I was pretty unhappy with my teaching experiments this year. In my intro course, the metacognition experiment didn’t seem to go very well this year. Part of it was … Continue reading
Posted in BigWiki, Teaching and Learning, The Experiment
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End of Term: Artificial School?
The end of an academic term makes students and faculty alike crazy with stress. While a little stress tends to motivate us, too much makes us shut down. Does learning actually take place this time of the year? I’d say … Continue reading
Posted in Teaching and Learning
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The Power of Context
Last week, I finally got around to reading Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, a fascinating argument for how institutional change comes about (or not). Gladwell identifies three rules for effective change: The Law of the Few, The Stickiness Factor, and … Continue reading
A little irony
The lecture, as a teaching methodology, has gotten a lot of bad press in recent years. I should know–I’ve been one of the critics. The problem with lectures, it is said, is that they are passive, allowing recipients to simply … Continue reading
Posted in Teaching and Learning, University 2.0
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Reflections on the BigWiki Experiment
[This is the first of several reflections I wrote during the semester, but waited until it was over to post, since I didn’t want my blog reflections to influence student behavior.] After 2/3 of the semester, I’ve concluded that the … Continue reading
Posted in BigWiki, Teaching and Learning
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Studies in Pedagogy
I received an interesting heads-up from my teaching economics newsgroup about a list of pedagogical papers by the Physics Education Research at Colorado group. This group includes Carl Wieman, Nobel Laureate who I’ve blogged about before. The archive includes a … Continue reading
Posted in Teaching and Learning
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Can you become a competent athlete by only hearing someone tell you about the sport?
Learning only occurs at the intersection between a text and a reader, or between a lecture and an audience. In a comment on an earlier post, Shannon notes, [T]ext is sometimes seen as a time waster if it requires a … Continue reading
Posted in Teaching and Learning, What is Education?
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From Student-Teacher to Apprentice-Master?
A couple of students, Joe and Shannon, attended this year’s Faculty Academy, and generally hung out with the DTLT ‘Team’ and our outside speakers. Yesterday I heard that Joe was taking a course this summer with Angela, one of the … Continue reading
Posted in FA07, Teaching and Learning, What is Education?
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Part 3: Do you chew when you read?
The previous post was really a brief interlude. Let’s get back to the main thread. One of the things I learned in researching for my book is that all reading is not equal. I suppose I knew that, but I … Continue reading
Posted in Teaching and Learning, What is Education?
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Is learning a noun or a verb, Part 2
In the first post of this series I argued that learning is not merely the content of a text, lecture or other stimulus, but rather, what the student makes of that content. Here is perhaps a better example than the … Continue reading
Posted in Teaching and Learning, What is Education?
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