Category Archives: 21st C Learning

Writing for an authentic audience – Duke U.’s “The Reader Project”

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Finding an “authentic audience” for our writing. Invaluable. When student learners write for an audience larger than just their immediate teachers, then the writing takes on an inherent value and becomes capable of making a real difference. It’s not just for a grade; it’s for a purpose.

I just received the following email from Duke. I am thrilled that my university is taking such a step to engage writers with authentic-audience readers.

From: “The Reader Project”
Subject: Duke Econ and Public Policy Alumni – Volunteers Needed
Date: September 6, 2012 1:15:00 PM EDT
To: BOADAMS
Reply-To: readerproject@duke.edu
Dear James,

I am Celia Mellinger, the Program Coordinator for the Duke Reader Project, an initiative of the Thompson Writing Program in collaboration with Alumni Affairs. The Reader Project offers Duke Students the opportunity to get feedback on a class writing project from someone outside the classroom setting who has professional experience relevant to their project. The readers get a chance to positively interact with current Duke Students, and the students get to hear how their writing sounds to a member of their target audience.

Working with the Duke Alumni Association, we thought you might be interested in volunteering for one of these courses this semester:

  • ECON 306 and POLSCI 351: Economic History and Modernization of the Islamic Middle East 
    Readers Needed: People with professional experience related to the Middle East or with professional experience in any aspect of world affairs, international economics, international politics, the global economy, or the comparative history of civilizations.
  • ECON 370: Global Capital Markets
    Readers Needed: Financial market professionals with 5 or more years of experience.
  • HISTORY 364D: American Business History
    Readers Needed: People with professional experience dealing with regulatory issues; business management in particular, also consulting, policy or legal work related to business-government relations. Please read the specific topics listed in Student Writing Assignment.
  • POLSCI 302S: Political Persuasion
    Readers Needed: Experts in fields such as political science, communications, and media studies.
  • POLSCI 664S: Leaders, Nations and War 
    Readers Needed: People with professional experience in areas such as international politics, international relations, and governmental work in foreign affairs, diplomatic work, or international journalism.

In each course, the student is working on a writing project involving multiple drafts. Giving feedback on their writing should be a simple response from your professional perspective: Does it include useful information? Is the analysis and argument compelling? Which parts are presented according to professional norms, and which not? Etc. We encourage most of the feedback to be “face-to-face,” using webcams if the reader is too far from campus for a meeting.

Volunteer commitment is around 5 hours total over the course of the semester, distributed between late Sept and early Dec. If you are interested in helping our current cohort of Duke students improve their scholarly writing skills, please reply, indicating which course(s) you are interested in, and include a short bio of your experience and relationship to Duke, to help us match you with the right student. You will receive more information about the course and a match, if possible, after the students sign up in late-September. Feel free to contact me with any questions and visit our website for more information about the project and the courses offered this semester.

Thank you so much for taking the time to engage with our students!

Sincerely,
Celia Mellinger
Coordinator, Duke Reader Project
Duke Alumni Association

An idea worth spreading – Grant Lichtman visiting with 50 schools re: future of schools & schools of the future #EdJourney @GrantLichtman

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This from Grant Lichtman (@GrantLichtman)…

Dear Colleagues,

As you know, over the next three months I will be meeting with hundreds of educators at more than 50 leading independent, charter, and public schools around the country, each with a unique story to tell about how they are evolving their organizations to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing world.

I hope you will help leverage this opportunity for professional connections with fellow educators around the country who share common interests.  How?  It is really simple.   Share this link to my blog, The Learning Pond, or #EdJourney on Twitter with a few colleagues or collaborators. My blog posts will have active links to people, places, and programs that might be of interest. Here are three examples before I even leave San Diego, of schools that are doing some really interesting work:

Groundbreaking New Pilot at Dallas Townview Magnet School

This is What School Innovation Looks Like

Middle School Hunger Game: Check It Out

I am fortunate to be visiting some of the most exciting schools in America, and I hope to widely distribute those seeds of knowledge. Thanks for helping to share, learn, and grow!

Regards,

—

Grant Lichtman

http://learningpond.wordpress.com

Twitter @GrantLichtman

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  • How To Prepare For The 4th Era of Innovation | Co.Design: business + innovation + design

    tags: innovation design #MustRead brainfood

  • The Disciplined Pursuit of Less – Greg McKeown – Harvard Business Review

    tags: leadership clarity paradox #MustRead brain food UnbouBrainFood

    • “the clarity paradox,” which can be summed up in four predictable phases:

        

      Phase 1: When we really have clarity of purpose, it leads to success.
       Phase 2: When we have success, it leads to more options and opportunities.
       Phase 3: When we have increased options and opportunities, it leads to diffused efforts.
       Phase 4: Diffused efforts undermine the very clarity that led to our success in the first place.

    • Curiously, and overstating the point in order to make it, success is a catalyst for failure.
    • one of the key reasons for these failures was that companies fell into “the undisciplined pursuit of more.”
    • What can we do to avoid the clarity paradox and continue our upward momentum? Here are three suggestions:
    • First, use more extreme criteria.
    • Second, ask “What is essential?” and eliminate the rest.
    • Third, beware of the endowment effect.
    • If success is a catalyst for failure because it leads to the “undisciplined pursuit of more,” then one simple antidote is the disciplined pursuit of less.

  • The Body and the Classroom: Phenomenology and Online Learning

    Massive open online courses (MOOCs), such as those offered by Coursera, are particularly intriguing in that they help democratize education.

    tags: online learning online_education online education #MustRead universities

    • Massive open online courses (MOOCs), such as those offered by Coursera, are particularly intriguing in that they help democratize education.
    • Still, there is much to be said in defense of the real-world classroom
    • Is there any intrinsic value to being bodily present in the classroom?
    • Students learn not only from engaging with ideas, but also by engaging each other.
    • Online education raises exciting possibilities for universities. MOOCs democratize educational access. But democratic education is also about habituating ourselves to encounter our fellow citizens, to disagree passionately and to tolerate disagreement. Traditional liberal arts classrooms democratize education not in quantitative terms, but in quality of access to Others.

  • The Washington Monthly – The Magazine – The Siege of Academe

    According to the National Venture Capital Association, investment in education technology companies increased from less than $100 million in 2007 to nearly $400 million last year. For the huge generator of innovation, technology, and wealth that is Silicon Valley, higher education is a particularly fat target right now.

    tags: education technology disruption university online education online_education #MustRead brainfood

    • According to the National Venture Capital Association, investment in education technology companies increased from less than $100 million in 2007 to nearly $400 million last year. For the huge generator of innovation, technology, and wealth that is Silicon Valley, higher education is a particularly fat target right now.
    • The ongoing carnage in the newspaper industry provides an object lesson of what can happen when a long-established, information-focused industry’s business model is challenged by low-price competitors online.
    • The recent surge of money into higher education startups reflects growing interest in the category.
    • Is the real money to be made, per Marc Andreessen, in eating the existing education industry? Or will it be in providing service to the industry, helping them do what they do better? In terms popularized by Harvard business professor Clayton Christensen, this is the difference between “disruptive” and “sustaining” innovation.
    • So the VC guys and the start-ups look at K-12 and higher education, which between them cost over $1 trillion per year in America, and much more around the world. They see businesses that are organized around communication between people and the exchange of information, two things that are increasingly happening over the Internet. Right now, nearly all of that communication and exchange happens on physical platforms—schools and colleges—that were built a long time ago. A huge amount of money is tied up in labor and business arrangements that depend on things staying that way. How likely are they to stay that way, in the long term? Sure, there are a ton of regulatory protections and political complications tied up in the fact that most education is funded by the taxpayer. As always, the timing would be difficult, and there is as much risk in being too early as too late.
    • To drive home the point of just how cheap it is to be Quizlet, one of its executives asks me how much money the United States spends per year to educate a single student in K-12 education. About $15,000, I say. That’s more than what it costs us per month to host the entire site, serving millions,
    • In less than a year, online higher education has gone from the province of downmarket for-profit colleges to being embraced by the most famous universities in the world.
    • We may not know who and we may not know when, but someone is going to write the software that eats higher education.
    • Older models often adapt and endure in significant if less important forms.

  • School Reform for Realists

    tags: school reform strategy business #MustRead Senge UnbouBrainFood brainfood

  • Climate Science as Culture War | Stanford Social Innovation Review

    tags: climate science culture social innovation #MustRead brainfood

    • Today, there is no doubt that a scientific consensus exists on the issue  of climate change
    • And yet a social consensus on climate change does not exist
    • answers to this question can be  found, not from the physical sciences, but from the social science  disciplines of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and others.
    • people’s opinions  on this and other complex scientific issues are based on their  prior ideological preferences, personal experience, and values—all  of which are heavily influenced by their referent groups and their  individual psychology.
    • We must acknowledge  that the debate over climate change, like almost all environmental  issues, is a debate over culture, worldviews, and ideology
      • The debate over school change must also be over culture, world views, and ideology.
    • Political affiliation is one of the strongest correlates  with individual uncertainty about climate change, not scientific  knowledge.
      • I wonder what the analogue is to education and the issue of school transformation? “Political affiliation is one of the strongest correlates with individual uncertainty about climate change, not scientific knowledge.”
    • “logic schism,”  a breakdown in debate in which opposing sides are talking about  completely different cultural issues.

  • No, algebra isn’t necessary — and yes, STEM is overrated – The Answer Sheet – The Washington Post

    tags: algebra STEM #MustRead

    • We can teach people the skills they need if we allow them to choose what interests them and then teach them to predict, evaluate, diagnose, etc., within their area of interest.

  • A Conversation About Big Shifts | Democratizing Knowledge

    tags: School Change Big Shifts NAIS schools of the future #MustRead

  • From STEM to STEAM: Science and Art Go Hand-in-Hand | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network

    tags: steam stem #MustRead

  • A List of the World According to the Class of 2016 | NewsFeed | TIME.com

    tags: culture #MustRead

  • 21st Century Schools or 21st Century Learning?

    tags: 21st 21C 21stcenturylearning brainfood #MustRead

  • It’s Time to Re-Think the U.S. Education System – Tammy Erickson – Harvard Business Review

    tags: education brainfood UnbouBrainFood #MustRead schools of the future Change

    • although there are some encouraging signs of change, several major challenges stand out from my ongoing discussions with today’s 11-13 year olds.
    • A disconnect between the way school works and how they function outside school.
    • We are not preparing these kids for the world as it operates today.
    • Boredom with the teacher-centered learning process.
    • Shifting sources of authority.
    • new role for teachers (and parents): that of a learning facilitator and coach, rather than of an authoritative source of information.
    • Growing interest in pragmatic, job-oriented skills.
    • Unease regarding global standing.
    • Thurow argued that the most significant invention in U.S. history was the public education system established in the early days of the industrial revolution.
    • Thurow argues that this unique educational system produced a workforce that was perfectly matched — in both skills and behavior — to the burgeoning needs of the new industrial economy.
    • Students emerging from this system had both the right knowledge (reading, math) to perform the industrial jobs and the right behaviors (punctuality, focus on specific linear tasks) to form an efficient industrial workforce.
    • modeled both on the interests of industrialization and in the image of it: specialization into separate subjects, standardized curricula, conformity, batch processing — by age group. The system was designed to leverage a “lock step” approach over set periods of time and using broadcast delivery methods to prepare students effectively for known jobs.
    • our current approach to education was designed for a different age
    • we all know, most of the jobs of tomorrow will not be industrial jobs.
    • gap between the output of our educational system and the job demands of the current century is enormous — and growing wider.
    • kids intuitively recognize the gap. They’re asking for a change.

  • Cutting the Digital Lifeline and Finding Serenity – NYTimes.com

    tags: nytimes com social media balance #MustRead

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