Bloom's Sixth

In a review essay for the Washington Post, Janet Napolitano takes on the idea that higher education is in crisis. She brushes aside criticisms from Ryan Craig (College Disrupted) and Kevin Carey (The End of College) and says that instead of falling apart, colleges and universities are going through “an intense period of evolution driven by advances in technology and better understanding of cognitive learning.” Higher education, she…

The note cards I handed out to students in my hybrid class last week drew astonished looks. Each contained a hand-written list of three things: events, people, animals, objects, locations, movies, songs, television shows. All were random, created one evening in a stream of consciousness. For instance: “Eye of the Tiger” Eye of a needle Arctic Ocean and Fire alarms Fairy tales Calvin Klein “Here’s the fun part,” I told students. “Find a connection among the three things.” That’s where the astonishment came in. The main goal of the exercise was to help students synthesize, to open…

Angelique Kobler offered an uncomfortable question about education last week. Kobler, assistant superintendent for teaching and learning at the Lawrence school district, met with the KU Task Force on Course Redesign and explained the steady expansion of blended learning in Lawrence public schools. To illustrate the need for new ways of engaging students, she said, she asks her staff a…

If you want to find a quick answer to a question, where do you go? Google, most likely. If you want to help students from half a dozen disciplines understand how the elements of linear algebra apply to them, where do you go? Again, Google. But this time, think outside the search box. That’s one of the tricks Erik Van Vleck, a professor of math at KU, uses to help students learn linear algebra. Students in all disciplines use Google to search for information. Van Vleck pushes them to look at the search engine in…

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 …