Barriers in STEM Disciplines

I thought this was interesting. Since most of you are in in some STEM discipline, I wonder if any of you experienced discouragement in pursuing your field from faculty.

Colleges, Professors Discourage Women from Pursuing STEM Careers -- Campus Technology via kwout

Excellence Without a Soul: A Conversation about Undergraduate Education w\Harry Lewis

You might find this presentation/discussion by/with Harry Lewis interesting. It touches on several of our course themes. Do note that you can speed it up with the button in the middle of the playbar.

Muhammad Yunus to Speak at Foellinger 3/1

Via Tiffany. This might be of interest to the rest of you.

News & Calendar « CSAMES, College of LAS, University of Illinois via kwout

Group Genius

I'm now reading a book called Group Genius, by Keith Sawyer, the featured speaker at the Active Learning Retreat held last week. He conceives of learning like a collaboration of jazz musicians or performance of an improvisation theater group or like a well functioning team on a basketball court. I wonder if any of you have had such an experience and feeling (it is called Flow) and if you've had it in the context of any courses you've taken.

Amazon.com: Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration eBook: Keith Sawyer: Kindle Store via kwout

Some Pop Psychology I Happen To Agree With....

....and may your GPAs be treating you nicely.

The Dramatic Rise of Anxiety and Depression in Children and Adolescents: Is It Connected to the Decline in Play and Rise in Schooling? | Psychology Today via kwout

Do Students Read the Trib During Break?

I wonder how many students are aware of this, if not from the Tribune than from some other source.

Illinois universities await overdue state funds - chicagotribune.com via kwout

Did We Engage in Critical Pedagogy?

I thought this piece interesting and relevant. Some of you at the beginning of the course thought about effective change in political terms. Perhaps we should have explored that more.

t r u t h o u t | Rethinking Education as the Practice of Freedom: Paulo Freire and the Promise of Critical Pedagogy via kwout

Saying Goodbye

Not me, at least not yet. There are still some submissions to grade. It's Judith Warner who is leaving for a different assignment at the NY Times. There is a lot to learn from her writing.

Goodbye to All This - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com via kwout

Does Competition Over Grades Produce The Same Results As Competition Over Sports?

This is by the same guy who wrote the piece on school as a prison.

The Morally Questionable Lessons of Formal Sports I: A New Look at the Classic Robbers Cave Experiment | Psychology Today via kwout

Tipping with video capture

Another observation where simplicity wins the day.

Now, Pocket-Sized Video Cameras in Motion - NYTimes.com via kwout

Photos and bad rhymes

There was a fussy bunny named Hester,

Came to class near the end of the semester.

Cute and snuggly she be,

And hopefully germ free,

Otherwise she or we must sequester.

I'm not pushing my luck on the limericks, so without further ado the other photo.

Report on 2009 NSSE

At the page linked below you can get the full report. The forward of full report, by Russ Edgerton, is worth reading. It will give you some background that helps in understanding some issue. NSSE started when Bill Clinton was still president. The threat was the U.S. News and World Report College Rankings. Finding an alternative was a major impetus for NSSE. Yet participating colleges, who have found that their institutional data got them beat up in the press, were reluctant to release the NSSE results. So, 10 years later the US News rankings are as entrenched as ever in driving people's attitudes about colleges, while NSSE guides internal decision making on the various campuses, but doesn't impact public views. There is another point that Edgerton makes that I take small (but important) issue with. He argues (correctly in my view that we largely don't implement best practice in undergraduate education because the incentives are weak to nil for doing so. But implicitly he argues that effective teaching is just applying known results. I think that is wrong. What is known about effective practice are high level principles. How to incorporate those principles into any specific course is itself an applied research, along the lines of the doctor in Gawande's chapter The Bell Curve. There is creativity in the teaching art in finding effective was to implement the principles. Instituting a culture that encourages such experimentation with teaching probably requires going beyond simple incentives. And we're nowhere near doing that sort of thing at the institutional level yet.

AAC&U News | December 2009 | Facts & Figures via kwout

Are you a dandelion or an orchid?

I thought this piece was incredibly interesting. It is about the interplay between our genes and our environment. Some of us have plasticity (orchids) - in a warm, welcoming environment these people flourish, in a harsh aggressive environment, these people become problem children. Other people show less sensitivity to the environment (dandelions) and outperform the orchids in the bad environments but under perform in the welcoming environments.

The hypothesis in this article is that early development is where these interaction effects manifest. One can speculate on whether the early development effects can be reversed later in life. There is nothing on that in this piece. It might be interesting to try to tie the ideas in this article to your own notions of what makes students engaged or not.

The Science of Success - The Atlantic (December 2009) via kwout

The best medicine...

.... though the muscle relaxant isn't half bad either.

Illinois Fighting Illini vs. Clemson Tigers - Recap - December 02, 2009 - ESPN via kwout

Macroeconomic Policy a la Paul Krugman

I will confess to not fully understanding macro and balancing long term growth with short term need. So while I know there are arguments for reducing the Federal deficit, what Krugman says in this piece makes sense to me. He has been arguing for this sort of thing for some time. The first paragraph below does give a macroecon sense of the issues the University will face in the coming years. On the second paragraph, after the bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis failed a few years ago, I thought we'd see a public works program to address that issue, not fundamentally as a jobs program, just because our bridge infrastructure needs an upgrade. So I'm asking, why not put two and two together?

Op-Ed Columnist - The Jobs Imperative - NYTimes.com via kwout

My Next Car Purchase?

I saw Carlos Ghosn on Charlie Rose (click on Recent Shows) last night (I have recorded it from the night before). It's quite a good interview - a lot of themes from Drucker come up during it. Ghosn is the CEO of Nissan/Renault. They are coming out with an electric car, the Nissan Leaf. Looks pretty cool.

The wind in CU blows from west to east

Could we be next?

Regents Raise Tuition 32 Percent in California - NYTimes.com via kwout

Some nonsense for when you need a break

One of the sessions I attended this afternoon in the online conference I mentioned in class was about "geo-storytelling," meaning combining something like the second project for the 396 students with Google maps. I thought that was a cool idea, so I thought we might try something just for fun, simpler but perhaps interesting to the class. For some of you I have your gmail address. If so, I will invite you to contribute to the Map below. You can put in where you were born, where you grew up, stuff like that. The Map is private so your identity info should not be available to anyone outside the class. In the map below, just the locations show up. The version I've started with has 3 locations for me, where I was born in the Bronx, where I lived as a Junior and Senior while at Cornell, and where I lived in Chicago while a Grad student in Northwestern. I added a fourth location, in West Des Moines where my wife grew up, so the ultimate map would include the entire state of Illinois.

Participating in this is entirely voluntary and will not affect your grade in any, way, shape or form. The way I will invite you will allow you to invite others in the class, but only do that if somebody else doesn't show up on their own.

Have fun.

View Origins in a larger map

Some Historical Context

Perhaps we haven't discussed enough about the times in which we live epitomized, for example, by the bankruptcy of General Motors. Here is some historical context. You don't get lampooned in the comics unless you're incredibly important.

Other Li'l Abner characters via kwout

The Final Front Ear

Anybody looking for a new major?

NASA finds 'significant' water on moon - CNN.com via kwout