Rewriting Paradigms

One day you’re a sage on the stage; and the next, you’re struggling for more hits on YouTube, more followers on Twitter, or more +1s on Google+. Or maybe, as an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education recounts, you spent two years creating an online course, and the administration decides to assign it to someone else to teach. Whether you are a teacher in K-12 or a university professor, the demands on your time and the challenges to your skillset have risen yet again. Tha

I guess that image of President Obama learning how to code as part of last year’s Hour of Code was not enough to convince everyone of the value of technology in education. Despite there being little agreement over the specifics of technology in learning, there is a growing trend that values a high degree of human touch when implementing technology in learning. And that can result in some unexpected challenges to the role of teacher in both face-to-face and online learning env

“You can never be smart enough to know how it will evolve.” Such was the advice from Scott Heiferman, CEO and co-founder of Meetup, the online platform for organizing face-to-face meetings that now boasts nearly 200,000 meetup groups worldwide. Early recognition came when people started using the platform to organize for Howard Dean’s presidential campaign, something its founders had not planned on. “Whatever you’re doing, you need luck; you need a hook. We had politics.” Hei

If we could really step back and apply the principles of backward planning, we may not need to be talking about grit at the post-secondary level of education. But there it is in a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Looking Beyond Data to Help Students Succeed, and a related one, An Enrollment Experiment, Grounded in ‘Grit,’ discussing  two schools looking beyond standard assessments of performance and measuring noncognitive skills in order to help students w

As the worlds of higher education and K-12 redefine their missions and reshape their offerings, we continue to see resistance to models of learning that seek to engage students in more practically-oriented, design-driven programs. This week in the Chronicle of Higher Education, three articles detailed shifting focus in college curricula in which either the authors or the commenters questioned models in which curriculum veered away from a traditional liberal arts foundation: “