Consulting you and your organization via expressive arts, digital media, organizational and health communication, research, and vocational development to know and share your story with your constituents.
Higher Education Reform | Situated-Systemic and Design-Method Recommendations
Excerpt | The gist: Design applied research programs to better situate learners as social contributors.
"It's time to revamp academia by designing graduate programs to orient research-practitioners who can situate themselves to benefit society by applying their themes cross-sector in areas such as health, education, or more broadly, well-being and community development."
-->What say you? Contribute your ideas for education reform from a situated (1) and systemic (2) perspective? What's your ideal? 
In the past 30 years, scientists have discovered a lot about how people learn. But traditional universities are slow to change their ways. So a group of educators in Minnesota decided to build a brand new college.
Excerpt | "You risk your tenure as an early-career professor if you focus too much on teaching, even at our teaching-centered institutions," says Julie Schell, an education researcher at Harvard University who wrote her dissertation on why the lecture continues to be a dominant approach...
"It's kind of ironic that we as professors don't have any type of training in any way, shape or form," says Andy Petzold. "It's the only teaching degree that you don't need to go through any actual training in teaching to do."
-->Embed desired outcomes into program design and university cultural values. If not desired outcomes, then desired contribution. Transition from this snail-pace pursuit of siloing knowledge as a business terrain or metric for the academic to valuing multiple modes or applications for a degree.
This shift includes redesigning PhDs to be philosophy degrees, and valuing professional and practitioner-researcher doctorates as well. Widen the terrain, and where academics interact with learners, proffer social science training for teaching. 
Lecturing was invented as a way to share information in a time before books were widely available. Now, there are better approaches.
Excerpt | Mazur says after just a few minutes of talking to each other, most of the students seemed to have a much better understanding of the concept he'd been trying to teach.
-->Fully appreciate that, or maximize, social science & interaction influence human learning. 
Rescooped via Jeffrey Jablonski, PhD
Excerpts | As tuition soared at American colleges and universities in recent decades, so did the number of part-time, non-tenured faculty teaching America's students.
Adjunct teachers account for about 70 percent of instructors on college campuses, up from about 43 percent in 1975, according to the most recent numbers from the Department of Education.
Joshua Boldt, an adjunct professor who teaches in the English department at the University of Georgia, isn't surprised that adjuncts are organizing at campuses where they have no voice.
"Part of me thinks if that's the way we're going with a temporary labor structure, then we need to realize that's the direction we're going and stop paying people like it is just a temporary situation. If this is the model of the future university, then we need to acknowledge it and it has to be fair," he said.
-->Design universities and programs with themes for sustainability, agility, and fairness. 
My (Dena Rosko's) Higher Education Reform board on Pinterest at http://bit.ly/xZR9Ci 
100 Ways To Use Twitter In Education, By Degree Of Difficulty
-->Consider how social media, or intermedia, performs, curates, archives, communicates, and mediates learning (1) and social life (2). Learners need techno-cultural studies and digital literacy to perform on virtual or distributed teams. U.S. Department of Education Releases Blueprint to Transform Career and Technical Education
Excerpt | "The Administration’s FY 2013 budget proposes an additional $1 billion to help 500,000 (a 50 percent increase) high school students participate in Career Academies, programs offered in high school that combine college curricula with a career emphasis, such as healthcare or engineering..."
-->To further education reform, we must replace separatist and meroticratic assumptions that silo knowledge in disciplines and people and primacy of natural, medical, engineering science or "fact" over other disciplines *in favor of* cross-sector and transdisciplinary collaboration for the benefit of our hosting locale and to contribute to global community, in step with program themes, vision, and mission, and via sustainable means, e.g., reduce time to complete by making programs more modular, thematic, and research-practitioner-based. 
George Monbiot: Academic publishers charge vast fees to access research paid for by us.
Excerpt | "Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the western world? Whose monopolistic practices make Walmart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch a socialist? You won't guess the answer in a month of Sundays. While there are plenty of candidates, my vote goes not to the banks, the oil companies or the health insurers, but – wait for it – to academic publishers. Theirs might sound like a fusty and insignificant sector. It is anything but. Of all corporate scams, the racket they run is most urgently in need of referral to the competition authorities...."
--> Perhaps if we balance out the bibliometrics required for tenure or teaching positions with an equally value to applied research, consulting services, and if a Uni builds its own research repository, plus recommendations via http://hvrd.me/IqVEKi, we may reduce cost, but improve focus on our Uni themes. Suggestions? Faculty Advisory Council Memorandum on Journal Pricing.
Major Periodical Subscriptions Cannot Be Sustained says Harvard University Memo to Faculty Members in all Schools, Faculties, and Units from The Faculty Advisory Council on April 17, 2012; Encourages submit to Open Access journals and to raise awareness of cost issues.
Excerpt | "We write to communicate an untenable situation facing the Harvard Library. Many large journal publishers have made the scholarly communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive. This situation is exacerbated by efforts of certain publishers (called “providers”) to acquire, bundle, and increase the pricing on journals.
Harvard’s annual cost for journals from these providers now approaches $3.75M. In 2010, the comparable amount accounted for more than 20% of all periodical subscription costs and just under 10% of all collection costs for everything the Library acquires. Some journals cost as much as $40,000 per year, others in the tens of thousands..."
-->To what extent should publicly funded resources overlap with industry, if at all? What do you suggest as a solution to the increasing costs in higher education, including publishing? Recommended Reading: Books about Life in Academia
(In alphabetical order by title. Most listings and blurbs come from The Chronicle of Higher Education.) 
Toward A Whole Academic Self
"Over the years, I tried to put myself back together by various means, to return to my sticky and complex personhood..."
-->Reform higher edu as a vocational process instead of a disciplinary container. 
Sellout is a resource for humanities PhDs considering careers beyond academe. Published by Mark Johnson, an English PhD who found a career outside the university.
Excerpt | "What's it like working outside academe? How should you prepare? This site explores these questions and more. Sellout is produced by Mark Johnson, an English literature PhD who found a career outside the university."
-->Higher edu needs to dismantle the motif of separatism and better communicate relevance and application so that people can apply their studies to benefit their community. Pupils at a school in Wellington have seen their grades increase after 'wellbeing' lessons were introduced to the curriculum...
-->Is the secret to quality education happiness, or more broadly wellbeing, or is happiness just another USA cultural value? Note that this study was a UK study. |
Andrew Miller (@betamiller on Twitter) is a National Faculty member for the Buck Institute for Education, an organization specializing in 21st century project-based learning...
Excerpt | The focus should be on teacher practice, then tools and structures. The flipped classroom is one way to help move teachers toward better teaching but does not ensure it.
-->I love the mention of reflection. Reflective learning assumes learning to be a process that also comprises a tacit resource within a person. The next step includes understanding social science interventions for engagement and how those impact learning and success. 
Lecturing was invented as a way to share information in a time before books were widely available. Now, there are better approaches.
Excerpt | Personal narrative plays an important role in Mike Garver’s teaching style. Garver, a professor of marketing at Central Michigan University, often uses anecdotes from his own life in his lectures, according to one of his students...
“Even though your lecture was spectacular,” Garver recalls his mentor saying, “you’re down here at the bottom of Bloom’s Taxonomy.” He challenged Garver to infuse higher orders of learning into his teaching methodology. “I have been chasing that dream ever since,” Garver says.
-->Fully appreciate that, or maximize, narrative, performance, and empathetic understanding influence human learning. Self-disclosure via narrative comprises one mode, but the framework draws from psychotherapeutic idea of "becoming" expressed via performance narrative. 
Welcome Welcome to EmergingEdTech”! I’ve believed for years that properly implemented and supported technology can help make classroom work and course...
Excerpt | Technology just for the sake of technology is a mistake. Just like any successful business project, technology implementations in schools and classrooms, no matter how small or large, will benefit from planning.
-->Fabulous resource on emerging tech use in education. My favorite category: Blogs & Blogging at http://www.emergingedtech.com/category/blogs/ 
College & University | An initiative for educators from the Center for Courage & Renewal... 
PLoS ONE: an inclusive, peer-reviewed, open-access resource from the PUBLIC LIBRARY OF SCIENCE. Reports of well-performed scientific studies from all disciplines freely available to the whole world.
-->Imagine the progress in collaborating as open access online. 
Excerpts | "Some California colleges are helping struggling math students complete all the math they need in a single yearlong course, instead of requiring them to take the usual sequence of courses that can take years to complete and that many never finish.
First offered during the current academic year, the course is called Statway — short for Statistics Pathway — and is aimed at students who are not ready for college-level math...
Banks said the Statway course worked for her for a number of reasons. For one, Michelle Brock, the instructor, 'from the very start debunked a lot of preconceived ideas about math — about there being math people and not math people.'
'That was brilliant,' Banks said. 'Nobody addresses that in math class.'..."
-->Just so long as quantitative/qualitative requirements queue in balance. I prefer to pay for courses that directly lead into my proposed research especially by the doctoral level and considering course expense. It bothers me the primacy of "fact," "data," and "science" over other disciplines. 
Here's a higher education shocker: Thanks to tuition hikes at California's state universities on one hand, and Ivy League financial aid policies on the other, attending Harvard is actually the better deal for the Golden State's middle class students.
Excerpt: "No longer are public higher education institutions the beacon of egalitarian learning: They can't afford to be.
-->How can we turn this trend around? In what ways can we design our higher edu programs for sustainability, access, cross-sector influence, and completion? Where do these themes impact affordability? PhinisheD is a discussion and support group for students who cannot seem to finish their dissertations or theses... 
The Blogging 101 Event from Virtual Teaching Expo is an online event where Teachers can learn everything they need to about Teaching Blogs including: Blogging Basics, Adding Videos to your Blog, Build Your Blog Faster with Buddies, A Balanced Blogger...
"Teaching blogs are quickly transforming the way educators teach! From them, a new community has emerged that is filled with creative teaching tips, printables, photographs, and video clips. Bursting with creative teaching tips, there are many ways to be involved like linky parties, giveaways, and exchanging blog buttons. Join in now - the teaching blog community grows daily and will continue to be an avenue for teachers around the world to connect and learn from one another..."
-->Learn digital literacy, distributed or virtual teams, and grassroots journalism via blog writing. So you want to do a PhD in the humanities?
Be sure to be willing to laugh when you watch this video posted by Leo Charbonneau in Margin Notes.
What in the humor can you flip to an ask, or what you want to change in higher edu? Confessions of a Community College Dean
"In which a veteran of cultural studies seminars in the 1990's moves into academic administration and finds himself a married suburban father of two. Foucault, plus lawn care. Comments are welcome. Comments for general readership can be posted directly after the blog entry. For private comments, I can be reached at deandad at gmail dot com. The opinions expressed here are my own (or those of commenters), and not those of my (unnamed) employer." 
Excerpts | "The Path Forward discusses the essential role of graduate education in producing a highly skilled workforce in the United States. In order to secure American innovation and competitiveness in the 21st century, graduate school must remain a viable option for a growing number of Americans...
The Commission on the Future of Graduate Education in the United States is a joint effort of the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) and Educational Testing Service (ETS). It was charged with overseeing a research effort to examine the political, demographic, socioeconomic, educational, and financial trends that impact participation in graduate education. The assumption underlying this work was that the global competitiveness of the United States and capacity for innovation hinges fundamentally on a strong system of graduate education.
The 18-member Commission includes university presidents, graduate deans, provosts, industry leaders, and higher education scholars. The Commission guided the development of a report outlining the research findings and recommendations to universities, industry, and policymakers, and will seek to create a national conversation on how to increase graduate degree attainment by all segments of the country's population.
The Commission's report was released on April 29, 2010, at a forum at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C..."
-->Download the PDF report in English or Simplified Chinese. I add the need to include themes for sustainability, health, and community development in education, and remove the obstacle in metaphor, or assuming that education remains separate from professional life, which leads to the fallacy that professional or applied research somehow is "less" credible. Such ivory tower nonsense must stop for higher education to *communicate* releavance and to *benefit* its (1) local hosting locale and (2) the global community.
Cost and time to completes must improve, or shorten time to completes to 4 years tops instead of 6-8! Conceive education as a progression, and stop believing that requiring students to take umpteen years and credits worth of courses at the PhD/Doctorate level "prepares" them for academic work. Let the undergraduate degree be well-rounded, the Master's a specific transitionary focus, and the doctorate an applied work consistent with program themes and values.
To do so, western education must replace the "meritocratic" assumption with systems' thinking and provide a pathway for students to situate themselves. Stop using doctorates as a promise you can't keep, or siloing students to perpetuate academia, e.g., preparing them for teaching careers *only*. Improve completion rates by, again, bringing in students' professional, or better yet, vocational lives as a whole. To that end, offset the "containment" metaphor that comes from the "separatist" motif in education (see Freire, 1970; 1994), and rely more on organizational development frameworks (e.g., Mary Parker Follett, 1918, yes, 1918!). |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |  |
5 |
|
Next |
