January 2011
9 posts
The care and maintenance of your adviser
If your adviser isn’t looking after you in the way you need, then you need to look after them. At some point in the PhD journey, most graduate students come to an important realization: “This is my thesis. My name is written on the front of it. I need to become the driver.” The sooner the candidate does this, the better. If you’re not getting feedback, clear direction or the...
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Teaching seldom comes naturally
New faculty start from a stronger position when they believe that regardless of natural ability, much about teaching still needs to be learned. Some instructional knowledge is straightforward, but just beyond those first easy answers are a slew of complicated algorithms mastered with practice and a commitment to pursue excellence. For the vast majority of teachers, learning to teach and...
Tips and Tricks for Teaching Online: How to Teach... →
This paper summarizes some of the best ideas and practices gathered from successful online instructors and recent literature. Suggestions include good online class design, syllabus development, and online class facilitation offering hints for success for both new and experienced online instructors.
“Recent literature”? This article was published in 2004, and all but one of the...
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Brain Waves Module 1: Neuroscience, society and... →
The Royal Society has released the first for four reports in its Brain Waves project exploring “the potential and the limitations of neuroscience insights for policymaking, as well as the benefits and the risks posed by applications of neuroscience and neurotechnologies.” The first report is Module 1: Neuroscience, society and policy. Subsequent reports will include:
Module 2:...
'We pauperize education' →
“…The richest nation on Earth has never allocated enough resources to build sufficient schools, to compensate adequately its teachers, and to surround them with the prestige our work justifies. We squander funds on highways, on the frenetic pursuit of recreation, on the overabundance of overkill armament, but we pauperize education.” — From March 14, 1964 speech by Dr. Martin Luther...
“With regard to the quality of research, we tend to evaluate faculty the way the...”
– Lee Shulman, former president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
Tim Wise speech on Martin Luther King Day, January...
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Is it true that we can only learn when we are...
By Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity.
What does it mean when our cats bring small, wounded animals into the house? Most people interpret these deposits as offerings or gifts, however inaptly chosen, meant to please or propitiate us, the cats’ humans. But according to the anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, “Cats may be assuming the...