415Phil: Comments

Comment on "Thinking about Critical Thinking"

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 16:17:00 -0500

I chose Chemistry just as a random example.

- PHILIP TIETJEN

Comment on "Thinking about Critical Thinking"

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 14:08:24 -0500

Phil - Thanks for the post. Also, an interesting article summarizing genetic modification. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you meant, but I'm curious why you think critical thinking in chemistry would be a rejection of genetic modification?

- Andrea Gregg

Comment on "Extant Docs & Acceptable Use"

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 15:29:40 -0500

I think a big part of the problem is cases like this one :

"The 41-year-old former substitute teacher was convicted of four felony counts of endangering minors last year, stemming from an Oct. 19, 2004, classroom incident where students were exposed to inappropriate images.

Prosecutors had argued that Amero put her students at risk by exposing them to pornography and failing to shield them from the pop-up images after they appeared on her classroom computer."

The pop-ups were caused by spyware on the computer. Fortunately, she was eventually cleared of all charges after enlisting the services of an IT expert witness.

- Alice

Comment on "Include & Account"

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 09:38:20 -0500

Interesting discussion. I know that even 3 years ago wikipedia was being intensely debated in terms of accuracy, usage, etc. While I agree it still isn't a good academic source, I know plenty of academic people who start with wikipedia to get an overview of a topic and find other sources. It's a very quick, often high quality way, to find out information. Has the cream risen to the top there?

- Andrea Gregg

Comment on "Applying Gardner"

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 09:20:38 -0500

Phil - good find and interesting discussion. I'm wondering how the typical employer perceives an Evergreen graduate since it sounds like they don't get actual letter grades. It would be interesting to see an example of their transcript.

- Andrea Gregg

Comment on "Include & Account"

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 23:19:34 -0500

Phil, this passage caught my eye too, but for a different reason. This plays into one of the strengths of open source, and consequently open educational resources: community evaluated materials.

Evaluation occurs in OER and open source, but not as formally as we might like. Given any sufficiently large community working with community created objects, I believe that the cream tends to rise to the top. This happens because of a multitude of mini-evaluations that occur as people self-select objects and incorporate them into their own PLE. What could be more summative? But what better starting point for this kind of distributed evaluation than the designer (or the SME) who is the one who knows the material the best?

So from an OER perspective, the bias factor could be mitigated because even if the designer has bias, if the cream rises, the community will theoretically police itself.

- JAMES MUNDIE

Comment on "Applying Gardner"

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 09:32:50 -0500

Thanks Alice for this background on IST.

- PHILIP TIETJEN

Comment on "Applying Gardner"

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 13:44:55 -0500

As an IST graduate, I feel like I should reply here...

IST's curriculum is fairly distinct from the one discussed at Evergreen, though I'll admit some similarities in the interdisciplinary nature of it.

I am struck by the political differences. Evergreen State is notably liberal, whereas the curriculum in IST was partially developed by highly ranking members of the CIA (no, I'm neither paranoid nor kidding) and Lockheed Martin, both of which now heavily recruit from IST.

The thing I see that both of them share is a desire to make curriculum more closely match workplace expectations. In the workplace, you're expected to integrate knowledge from multiple areas to solve problems. Both IST and Evergreen do try and instill that in students.

- Alice

Comment on "Bransford & Bloom"

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 22:03:16 -0500

Hi Andrea-
Yes, "economy of teaching" is a good way to put it. Teachers face all kinds of time constraints and I think going back to the Knowledge Producer-Knowledge User dichotomy, the theorists can sometimes lose sight of this. And kind of along these same lines, it seems that one interesting way to go is to shift some of the burden [in a constructive sense] to the students where ID'ers and teachers aim to design learning environments that encourage students to take greater control and direction over their learning processes, ... more self-directed. I've read a little bit about this and hope to read more in the future.

- PHILIP TIETJEN

Comment on "Bransford & Bloom"

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 17:28:25 -0500

Great questions. I know when I taught, the rule of thumb was that good multiple choice exams were harder to write and easier to grade. And, that essay exams take less time to create and more time to grade. I realize that doesn't completely get at the points you're raising above but I do think it probably brings into it the "economy of teaching" in that it's probably (almost?) always easier, faster, and cheaper to measure the lower levels of Bloom's taxonomy than the higher levels. This is not to suggest that we shouldn't be striving for higher levels of learning, but I do think the difficulty (real or perceived) of "measuring" the higher levels contributes to this. I actually asked some sort of related questions in my blog post connected to the idea that learning outcomes should always be measurable.

- Andrea Gregg