Bloom's Sixth

Using technology to help students take risks Rather than use technology to make education more efficient, why not use it to help students take more risks in learning? That’s the question that Greg Toppo poses in an article for The Hechinger Report. “Good teaching is not about playing it safe,” Toppo writes. “It’s about getting kids to ask questions, argue a point, confront failure and try again.” He’s exactly right. By helping students push…

Bozenna Pasik-Duncan specializes in a branch of probability theory called stochastic systems, which views problems through a lens of randomness. She teaches courses in that area, as well as in subjects like applied statistics, linear algebra and optimization theory. When faced with a high dropout and failure rate among students in a large 100-level calculus class, though, Pasik-Duncan found a solution in a distinctively humanistic…

Several faculty members and graduate students from KU attended this year’s conference of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. I wasn’t able to go, though I did listen in on a few of the sessions remotely. I’ve collected tweets and videos into a Storify presentation that shows some of the thinking, conversations and approaches of the convention and the society.

An organization called Reclaim Open Learning held its first symposium last week. The organization promotes innovation in higher education through the use of technology, online resources and open learning in unconventional ways. The approach and goals of Reclaim Open Learning aren’t for everyone, though …

I got a reminder this week of the value of collaboration. In my 300-level hybrid class Infomania, I asked students to critique a hierarchical model of information and information processing explained by Gene Bellinger, Durval Castro and Anthony Mills. The model, originally proposed by …