Two or three times each year, I post links to several exceptional articles I’ve read in the past couple of months. I think you’ll find them interesting. And, since we’re now entering the holiday season, it seems appropriate to post a few today. The first, “America is disastrously failing to educate internationally literate citizens” by Margee Ensign, president of Dickinson College, for the Philadelphia Inquirer. She concludes: “ . . . in...
“Sociologists, however, are finding that parental investment in their children has diverged sharply over the last 40 years with growing gaps between the middle and the upper classes. In a May 2018 paper published in the American Sociological Review, researchers from the University of California at Berkeley and Colorado State University found that the most affluent Americans are driving this difference, spending ever higher amounts of money on their children’s education and...
The world is beginning to harvest the advantages achieved by bringing technology-based learning into both the academic classroom and the corporate training environment. In education, many of the foundation skills and competencies — upon graduation, so critical to the workplace — can be achieved through the use of technology in the classroom. “Students using technology demonstrate any number of improvements: more confidence, higher motivation, peer mentoring, collaboration, and enhanced self-esteem” (Barbara Means). ...
With American education policy being dissected, kicked and abused on an almost-daily basis, we need to look, once again, at the giant who left us almost a decade ago. Theodore Sizer’s influence lives on — but, obviously not in the halls of Congress nor in the Betsy DeVos Department of Education. Dr. Sizer’s view of education reform — “with a premium on classroom creativity, bottom-up innovation and multiple measures of student learning”...
In the case of skills training, many of the current e-Learning offerings do not begin to compare with the learning values designed into the older technologies: interactive laser videodisc (IVD) and CD-ROM training. Moreover, e-Learning courseware will need to embrace those media-rich values if it ever hopes to attain the same, or better, results. And, with that thought in mind, what I mean by “media-rich” is courseware that is designed for today’s...
“Not everyone is academically inclined — and there’s nothing wrong with that. Preparing your kids for whatever their future brings is an act of mutuality, and one of the ways we look out for those we love. Maybe that will be college, but maybe it will be something less traditional. More than two-thirds of high school graduates go on to college , and a lot of financial resources and planning go into preparing...