Higher Education Observer

T he following is the text of a TED TALK style presentation I'm doing on Open Educational Resources. It's not everything I could say, but my time is limited. My own research showed a discrepancy between OER learning outcomes at an access institution and an R1 (I published it in an academic book), which I ascribe to less student preparedness and their difficulty navigating digital texts cognitively.   I have a rockstar PowerPoint to go with this (you probably didn't get my irony there.)  Every year our college has a BOLD TALKS session by faculty. This is mine. Free money! Sounds good, right? But is there really such a thing as free money? Despite what some politicians would like us to believer, we know that free money is an oxymoron. However, what if you could receive a stipend of 2-5,000 dollars for changing the way you teach one of your courses? The University System of Georgia realizes that to motivate faculty to adopt open educational resources and te...

I've been thinking about the faculty member's power in the classroom. In spending time with some colleagues, I've been wondering how much of their teaching career is about that power over students rather than love of discipline, service to the community, career advancement, or something else. A related question, how much can we expect our students to "confess" their experience? I ask this because I sat in a session in a conference recently in which the presenter described an exercise they (gender unidentified here) ask students in the class to divide themselves in groups by subcultures. After that, they each have to sit in front of the class (in the group) and answer the question "What is hard for you as a member of your subculture about living in this country?" And they each must talk for two minutes on this. Obviously, this instructor has an agenda. I am appalled by this exercise. It seems a blatant use of the instructor's power. What if a ...

If you have not read Neil Postman's classic, Amusing Ourselves to Death , then resolve to do so.  I've read it three times. A related book is Mary Ann Wolfe's Reader, Come Home. It is no longer really debatable that our devices, the Internet, and digital reading has transformed/is transforming/will soon transform our brains. The question is what to do about it. Accept it, since all technologies change our brains to some extent? Writing certainly did, as Plato warned his contemporaries. Print surely did (another must read being Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy). TV did, as Postman prophesies (not so much in the futuristic prediction sense as the warning, preaching sense). And now our total dependence (she says as she types on her laptop for her blog) digitization of information and communication. Second, resist it by divorcing oneself as much as possible from their use. Possible for some, but not many. We do not really need social media, now, do we? Third, contr...

Thoughtful and fact-based essay on campus free speech victories and challenges, some from the supposed "victims." https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/the-legal-promise-and-sobering-reality I'm a major David French fan. My own campus is not exactly the University of North Carolina, but I have run into these tensions. Last year a drag parade/show was offered to the students and advertised on the campus media (the most reliable being the "stall wall," which I've also seen called the Daily Flush or the Flush Flash --"Everybody knows because everybody goes." I raised  a concern about this because I did not see how it was necessarily a positive depiction of youth who struggle with the sexual identity. Most are not interested in the flamboyance of that lifestyle, and they may not be comfortable with their struggle to be or not be "gay" being confused in the more public mind with drag shows. I also wasn't sure how donors ...

A recent edition of the podcast Hidden Brain has a fantastic look at learning. I highly recommend it. Although the idea of the clicker method is not applicable to liberal arts or knowledge-based courses, what he brings out about the emotional sides of learning and the teacher/student relationship is very insightful.