Improve learning — speak informally

July 26, 2006

Hey, it’s a history blog, so I can refer back to stuff we missed, right?

Especially for teachers, go read this entry in Creating Passionate Users.

The author is a techie, but she’s talking about writing clearly (are you listening Texas teachers whose kids have to write well to get promoted?). She’s also discussing simple presentations, the type any business person does, the kind teachers and professors do all the time. And she has research to back her claims, that informal language improves student learning significantly. Not slang, not slouchy language — just not the formal, stilted stuff found in most textbooks.

Arrgghh! Textbooks! A subject for another rant, another day.

Leave a Comment » | Pedagogy, Teaching | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

9/11, opinions, and academic freedom

July 24, 2006

An opinion piece in Sunday’s papers goes to the root of a problem that plagues the teaching of history.

Stanley Fish professes law at Florida International University. In Sunday’s New York Times he offers his views on college professors who indoctrinate their students, as opposed to doctrinaire college professors who teach. Fish draws a careful and reasoned distinction between academic freedom, which he notes is the freedom to study virtually anything and try to bring value to academics with one’s analysis of the subject, and freedom of speech, which in this case includes a freedom for advocacy to indoctrinate students, and a freedom which Mr. Fish claims to be out of line in the classroom.

The article will be available free for a few days at the New York Times’ website.

The case in question involves a teacher with a one-semester contract at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Kevin Barrett teaches “Islam: Religion and Culture.” What makes this course controversial is Mr. Barrett’s saying, on a radio talk show, that he shared with his students his view that the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, was perpetrated by the American government, rather than terrorists.

Fish wrote:

Mr. Barrett’s critics argue that academic freedom has limits and should not be invoked to justify the dissemination of lies and fantasies. Mr. Barrett’s supporters (most of whom are not partisans of his conspiracy theory) insist that it is the very point of an academic institution to entertain all points of view, however unpopular. (This was the position taken by the university’s provost, Patrick Farrell, when he ruled on July 10 that Mr. Barrett would be retained: “We cannot allow political pressure from critics of unpopular ideas to inhibit the free exchange of ideas.”)

Both sides get it wrong. The problem is that each assumes that academic freedom is about protecting the content of a professor’s speech; one side thinks that no content should be ruled out in advance; while the other would draw the line at propositions (like the denial of the Holocaust or the flatness of the world) considered by almost everyone to be crazy or dangerous.

Read the rest of this entry »

1 Comment | Curricula, Ethics, Pedagogy | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

History of Resisting Technology

July 6, 2006

techdirt has this wonderful short compilation of bad predictions about new technologies ruining entertainment industries — print the page and put it in your copy of Christopher Cerf’s and Victor Navasky’s The Experts Speak.

I attended a presentation of education guru Harry Wong two weeks ago. He had probably a dozen slides featuring quotations from the experts from this book and other sources, and each comment was met with “oohs” and “ahhs.” My first use of these wrongway predictions was in 1988 and 1989 in the “Committing to Leadership” program at AMR (American Airlines). It’s amazing to me that they still seem new to so many — but they are funny, and thought provoking, even if they are not new.

1 Comment | Future, Good Quotes, Pedagogy, Technology | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Next Entries »