Renewing the effort to do fairly regular blogging now that a new semester has started. Truth be told, the last semester put me in a bit of a funk regarding my teaching. My evaluations and in-class observations were generally positive, but because of what I was teaching (and what I was taking) I had to [...]
One of the major issues that comes up in my computers-and-education course is the idea of making electronic content accessible to people who use alternate technologies for reading/consuming information online. Intellectually this makes a lot of sense to me, but I’ve had some gut level resistance. And I think when you get down to it, [...]
Kinda wanted to have some brilliant thoughts to mark my return from blogging, but my brain’s getting ready to shut off, so we’ll have them tomorrow.
A lot of my energy today has gone toward technology problems. I want to make PDF files of several major writings from the anti-Federalist side of the constitutional ratification debate [...]
I was all set to link to an essay in the Times of London about education tat is pretty darn close to the exact opposite of my thinking in terms of the role of the teacher. And then when I went to reread the essay and get the URL I discovered that the Times site [...]
Started up another batch of education classes this week. Reflecting on the week, most of what I learned appears to be technical terminology for things that are pretty obvious with a few minutes’ thought. Indeed, many of the ideas I’ve encountered are things that have been in the back of my head for a while, [...]
Barack Obama was in town to speak to the National Education Association convention and said something to the effect that he supported a concept of merit pay for teachers, but not anything that’s actually been proposed under that heading. (In fact, looking at the text of the speech, the word “merit” doesn’t appear at all, [...]
I went to an open house at the neighborhood public school today - Alex will start kindergarten this fall, so we registered her there. I got to look at the kindergarten classrooms, and the kids there seemed enthusiastic. Lots of projects and signs were hung around the room, and while it wasn’t the brightest of [...]
A quick follow-up to my earlier post which cited stats on the continuing wage gap between men and women, the Associated Press has an article citing a study which shows that the wage gap between equally qualified male and female college-educated workers is evident as early as one year after college and continues to widen [...]
Are you pondering what I’m pondering?
Probably not, unless you’re pondering the best example of Alton Brown’s Good Eats series to show in a philosophy class tomorrow. But I think I need something to visualize the pragmatist idea of education being connected to life, and while we’re at it, maybe we’ll learn something about ice cream.
And [...]
I’ve always been concerned about a disconnect between my college teaching and the Deweyan ideals I have in mind. I open every semester by telling the students that I want the course to be a dialogue, but if the students don’t feel like talking on a given day, things veer more toward monologue. (And in [...]