News Roundup: F8, Robot phones, and MacOS | IDG Connect

"A roundup of the week’s tech news including the new Boston Dynamics, AI waiters, and predicting gentrification." notes Dan Swinhoe, Staff Writer at IDG Connect. 

F8
Facebook held its annual developer conference this week. The company kindly laid out its 10 year plan for world domination, including video, search, messaging, connectivity, Artificial Intelligence and Virtual/Augmented Reality.

There was a big focus on FB Messenger and the introduction of bots; the company has partnered with over 30 companies to provide automated customer service, and will open up the platform to allow others to develop their own bots. M, Facebook’s own chatbot assistant is reportedly still months away from released.

The company also revealed it had poached one of Google’s executive to lead its new hardware division. The company laid out its vision for the day when AR/VR glasses were indistinguishable from regular spectacles, as well as revealing its design for a high-quality 3D-360 video capture system.

Internet.org and Facebook’s Free Basics service may have a low take-up, but more than half of users switch to a paid service within a month of joining, suggesting Zuckerberg’s Facebook for All plan is slowly working.

We also learned that FB at Work – the social network’s attempt at moving into the enterprise, is still happening, but has been delayed until later this year...

Who needs chatbots, when you’ve got robot phones?
While automated chatbots are taking over customer service, and artificial intelligence will be taking over the world, Sharp have made the most adorable little robot phone you’ll ever see.

The $1800 RoBoHon, first revealed last year and due to go on sale next month, is a walking, talking cute-as-a-button robot with smartphone capabilities. Apparently its AI capabilities will enable it not only to understand voice commands, but also recognise your face and greet you by name.

Standing at nearly 8 inches and featuring arms & legs, it’s not particularly practical to put in your pocket. Despite the steep price tag and general ridiculousness of the product, Sharp hopes to sell 5000 RoBoHons a month.
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Source: IDG Connect

NEW E-BOOK: Inside the Every Student Succeeds Act: The New Federal K-12 Law

Education Week Press inform, "For the first time in more than a decade – and a half-century after enactment of the country’s main k-12 law – Congress has redefined the federal role in elementary and secondary education."

But what does the Every Student Succeeds Act actually mean for schools and the communities they serve? And how does the new law differ from its predecessor, the No Child Left Behind Act? 

In this essential guide to ESSA, Education Week explains what the law will mean for: 

• Accountability and testing
• Teacher quality
• Early-childhood education
• Special education
• Academic standards, including the Common Core
• English-language learners
• Teacher evaluation
 
Inside ESSA gets to the heart of a law set to reshape our education system and the people it serves for many years to come.

E-Book:

Amazon Kindle BUY $4.95

Barnes & Noble Nook BUY $4.95

Related link
Education Week Press Books 

Source: Education Week Press

Diversity and Inclusion in the College Classroom | Faculty Focus

Take a closer look at this new resource from Faculty Focus below.

Photo: Mary Bart

Mary Bart, Managing Editor inform, "For the past few months, we’ve been working with a couple dozen faculty members to develop a new handbook to help Faculty Focus readers tackle some of the trickiest challenges in creating an inclusive and respectful learning environment for a community of learners that is growing increasingly diverse."

Diversity and Inclusion in the College Classroom features 20 articles from faculty teaching at a wide range of institutions throughout the United States and Canada.

Download this free, 38-page handbook now

Whether you need help managing difficult conversations and responding to “hot moments” or creating a more inclusive curriculum and incorporating culturally responsive teaching and learning practices, our 38-page handbook is loaded with practical assignments and hard-hitting advice.

Here are a few of the articles you will find in this valuable resource:

• Managing Hot Moments in the Classroom: Concrete Strategies for Cooling Down Tension
• Activities for Building Cultural Competencies in Our Students and Ourselves
• Managing Microaggressions in the College Classroom
• Inclusive Assessment: Equal or Equitable?
• Creating a Culture of Inclusion in the Online Classroom
• Set-Create-Reflect: An Approach for Culturally Responsive Teaching 

Download this free, 38-page handbook now.

Source: Faculty Focus

Books to read before university | Times Higher Education

Follow on Twitter as @MatthewReiszTHE

Matthew Reisz, reporter and features writer inform, Scholars choose ‘essential’ texts to introduce sixth-formers to the academy.

Photo: Getty

“Our undergraduates – and postgraduate students as well – seem mainly not to be avid readers,” says Jo Brewis, professor of organisation and consumption at the University of Leicester. As a result, she accepts that “recommending whole books would be rather daunting” for them, and she tends not to do so.
Tales of students’ aversion to the traditional contents of university libraries are becoming commonplace among academics, with the internet typically fingered as the culprit.

“Incoming undergraduates have had their attention habits fashioned in a totally different world than that of those who are teaching them,” reflects Tamson Pietsch, fellow in history at the University of Sydney. “This can lead to a clash of expectations and also of abilities on both sides of the equation. In many ways, incoming students absorb information quickly, they understand the power of images, and are adept at moving between different types of sources and platforms. They are perhaps less used to concentrating for long periods of time and working through the nuances of an argument developed over the course of many pages.”

Indeed, the flood of information with which they are deluged in the digital era means that even academics are reputedly reading fewer whole books than they used to. Stephen Curry, professor of structural biology at Imperial College London, was sufficiently keen to remind himself that “not everything can be argued in 800 to 1,000 words”, so he made “a recent new year’s resolution to read less on the internet and more [in] books”.

The reason, he says, is that books permit a deep and sophisticated development of ideas. “Students often come from school feeling they understand the concept of ‘energy’ or ‘the atom’,” he explains. But “these were struggled over fiercely before they gained wider acceptance. Even concepts that seem grounded can be undermined and superseded. It is tempting to think that the 20th century was such a great age of science that we are now just fiddling at the edges. A historical approach can help students realise that there is still room for them to make a contribution.”

Len Fisher, visiting fellow in physics at the University of Bristol, also regrets the increasing move towards seeking information on the internet, since books “drive and encourage readers to think for themselves in a way that just looking up answers does not” and “allow for serendipity – spotting that unexpected, fascinating titbit as you turn the pages or glance at the next book on the shelf”. Students also have a lot to learn from “books that show why scientists ask the questions that they do, rather than mere explanations of the answers – not just ‘history and philosophy of science’ type books, but biographies, books about big questions and intimate histories”. The point, he says, is to bring ideas to life by associating them with the lives and personalities of the people who first had them. As well as physicist Richard Feynman’s memoir Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman, he also recommends James Watson’s The Double Helix as another prime example.

Brewis herself would like to see students reading more because “it would enable them to make more considered arguments in their coursework or examinations, and to demonstrate to us as assessors that they have considered the debates and controversies in the literature and arrived at reasoned conclusions on that basis”. She also believes that reading a book on a topic ostensibly unrelated to that of the degree can bring a valuable external perspective to bear on assumptions that otherwise typically go unquestioned: “We always want our students to reflect on the status quo, on what we take for granted and on what the alternatives might be,” she says.

In principle, Jenny Pickerill, professor in environmental geography at the University of Sheffield, would also “encourage any student to read well beyond the set readings”. She believes that they should take on “anything that excites or challenges them”, noting that “some of the books I have found most thought-provoking and that have shaped my research are biographies or journalistic non-fiction”. Yet when she does recommend full-length books, “students struggle with them, saying the language or concepts are too hard. I recently had a student suggest an alternative book for a module I am teaching which they found easier to engage with. It was a good book, but it was not really academic enough and I am still unsure if that matters or whether I should be recommending more readable books. There is currently a disjuncture between the types of reading we want students to engage with and the types students feel able or willing to do.”

For Pietsch, it remains important that universities “facilitate forms of engagement with ideas and arguments that are deeper and slower than those usually available online”. And she believes that academics can help to make this happen by teaching students that “reading a book from front to back cover is not necessarily the best way to use it. Things like the index, introduction and conclusion, as well as skim and strategic reading, help to make a long book that might at first seem insurmountable [become] very useful. And let’s face it, this is how academics read too.”

One thought we had at Times Higher Education was that it might also be fruitful to start students early. What if heads of first year were to set incoming students a book to read before they even arrive on campus, as an introduction to university study? Of course, to inspire a bibliophilia that lasts until graduation day and beyond, the book would have to be particularly engaging, as well as instructive. So we asked a range of academics to contribute one recommendation each to a list that is also being published this week in our sister publication, TES, read by schoolteachers.

Although we stressed that the choice shouldn’t be too specialist, we otherwise left the criteria pretty vague. It could be a book that would “help potential students hone their critical thinking, prepare them for independent learning, understand the basics of scientific (or social scientific) method or even negotiate the social and sexual minefield that lies ahead”. Contributors were free to select “an inspiration or a warning, a classic of popular science writing, a polemic, a satire, a novel or a biography”.

In the event, we were delighted to receive suggestions in all of these categories, ranging from Ludwig Wittgenstein to P. G. Wodehouse. Scholars are keen to warn students about everything from their own cognitive biases and the continuing obstacles faced by women to the often savage nature of intellectual progress and the battles within universities between the in-crowd and the out-crowd. Others want to inspire students to engage politically, to question authority and the views they grew up with, or simply to relish “the excitement of ideas and the possibility of life and sexuality”. It is hard to believe that there isn’t something in there for even the most bibliophobic of 18-year-olds.
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Source: Times Higher Education

Teachers collaborate, students learn art | The San Diego Union-Tribune

Photo: Christine Huard

"Enrichment program allows instructors to step away and spend time assessing their classrooms" summarizes Christine Huard, Reporter, South County | East & South County.

Enrichment teacher Diana Rios instructs sixth-graders about measures and time signatures at Lincoln Acres School in National City.
Photo: The San Diego Union-Tribune 

Every other Wednesday, Cynthia Valle-Lone leaves her sixth-graders in the hands of another instructor so she can spend the morning huddled with a small group of teachers and work on ways to help students do better in school.

The time together gives the teachers a chance to look at which child needs a gentle boost and which needs to be pushed harder. Then they develop learning strategies to take back to their classrooms at Lincoln Acres Elementary.

Valle-Lone said she values the time to collaborate with her colleagues, and her students love it, too. She said they ask excitedly on Wednesdays if it’s the day Diana Rios, one of 19 full-time enrichment teachers hired by the National School District to teach arts, will be there.

The children now are learning to read and play music, but they also study dance, theater and visual arts in five-week sessions throughout the school year. The program also has a physical education component.

Launched in 2014, the new approach has been a success for students and teachers alike. When Valle-Lone bows out of the classroom, Rios steps in with a lesson plan ready to go. That’s the way it works throughout the district’s 10 schools. It means classroom teachers get real free time to collaborate because they don’t have to prepare materials for the enrichment teacher.

“It’s an added bonus to have someone coming in with a lesson plan for the kids,” Valle-Lone said. “They do a lot of activities that we don’t have a lot of time to plan for.”

Teaming up with other teachers in the same grade level allows Valle-Lone and her colleagues to take a good look at the positive things going on in the classroom and see the areas where they need to focus more attention, she said.

The teacher said one example of a benefit students are getting is that they are finding out there are different ways to learn a subject. They’re also making improvements to their math skills without knowing it.

Valle-Lone likes that what the children are learning in arts directly relates to the work she does with them in the classroom.

Last week, the students spent the morning going over notes, measures and time signatures that are the basics of music theory. They counted out the beats of 1/8 notes, 1/4 notes, 1/2 notes and whole notes, and easily connected the concept to fractions.

To teach rhythmic values, Rios used an interactive white board to move notes onto the screen as she asked which ones could be used to make up two, three or four beats. As the students answered, she guided them to work with each other.

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Source: The San Diego Union-Tribune

Staying Sharp: Service project links music to memory | The Ithacan

"Music has a way of representing and preserving certain moments in a person’s life in a way far different from the way other memory cues do. In the same manner that music can work as a memory aid, music can work as medicine, as one new service-learning program at Ithaca College shows." reports Angela Weldon, Assistant Life & Culture Editor. 

Harpist and IC affiliate Anna O’Connell performed examples of therapeutic harp music during the Community-Based Learning Spotlight Event hosted by the Office of Civic Engagement and the Center for Faculty Excellence on April 4 in McHenry Lounge in the Whalen Center for Music. The event reintroduced the Music as Medicine Project and highlighted students’ work with the initiative.

The Music as Medicine Project — a collaboration between the School of Music, the Gerontology Institute, the Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies, the Office of Civic Engagement and the Center for Faculty Excellence — highlights the therapeutic power of music and the importance of service-learning. The initiative emerged from conversations between the Gerontology Institute and the School of Music during the fall semester.

According to the national organization Music & Memory, the brain and music are tightly linked. Music is often associated with certain episodic memories and acts as a recall cue for memory. For older adults and those struggling with diseases of memory impairment, such as dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, music can act as a powerful memory aid and bring comfort and healing to affected individuals.

The science behind this link has been verified over the years, and the practice of the therapeutic benefits of music dates back to just after World War I and World War II, when practitioners used music to heal and engage veterans.

According to the American Music Therapy Association, music can help increase or maintain patients’ physical, mental and emotional functioning. Music stimulates the senses and cognition and can be used to heal people across many spectrums, including those with Alzheimer’s and dementia.

Renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks conducted notable research dealing with music and memory. In a video discussing his book “Musicophilia,” Sacks said despite severe memory impairment, virtually everyone’s memory responds to music, and music can be a reawakening for those who have lost their pasts and their identities.

“A common thing in Alzheimer’s is to lose one’s memory for events and really to lose one’s autobiography, to lose one’s personal memories, and they can’t be accessed directly,”  Sacks said. “But personal memories are embedded in some extent in things like music. … People can regain a sense of identity, at least for a while.”

Sacks said this is because music, especially familiar music, can trigger memory and communication in the brain for those who have lost the ability to tap into their former selves.

“The parts of the brain which respond to music are very close to the parts of the brain concerned with memory and emotion and mood, so familiar songs will bring back memories,” Sacks said.

Patricia Spencer, assistant professor and faculty director of service-learning in the Office of Civic Engagement, said music can be an integral key to connecting with older individuals in a way that other therapies cannot.

“One of our last memories that we hold on to is our musical memory,” Spencer said. “Even as seniors start to lose some of their ability to communicate, if you can reconnect with musical memory, they sometimes will find language again, and they can talk about that music or where they were at the time they heard that music, why they love that song.”

The Music as Medicine Project works with this knowledge to substitute overmedication of patients in favor of music therapy.
 
The initiative emerged from conversations among the three academic departments about the work of Music & Memory. That idea has since blossomed into three classes in the separate disciplines, a student organization and several other service-learning programs.
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Source: The Ithacan

Six Ways to Support Personalized Learning | EDUCAUSE Review

Photo: Gregory Dobbin

Gregory Dobbin, Senior Editor, EDUCAUSE notes, "In September 2015, EDUCAUSE announced the winners of Integrated Planning and Advising for Student Success (iPASS) grants, which were awarded to 26 institutions from across the United States."

The initiative is intended to help two-year and four-year higher education institutions launch projects to address three broad, student-facing functions: education planning, counseling and coaching, and risk targeting and intervention. The goals of the iPASS initiative have clear connections with personalized learning, which refers to "a broad range of services, tools, and curricular models designed to create individualized learning for students." EDUCAUSE turned to the iPASS grantees — institutions committed to student success — for their thoughts on personalized learning. We asked them:

"What one thing should higher education institutions do to support personalized learning for their students?"

Their responses broke into six themes, mostly — but not uniformly — relevant to both two-year and four-year institutions. (The responses have been edited for length and style.)

1. Focus on Differing Levels of Preparation 
Many respondents pointed to the unevenness in students' preparation for college as a significant and longstanding problem that personalized learning can address.

"Some students need extra support in learning how to be students." (two-year)

"Mitigate the differences in students' prior preparation and allow forward progress in the courses most likely to provide gateways to major and degree." (four-year)

"We know that low-income, first-generation college students need more personalized assistance in navigating college. Getting aid, choosing classes and majors, identifying when things are not going well and knowing where to reach out for help — these are all skills necessary to college success, but they are not equally distributed among the student population. The pairing of new technologies and proactive interventions means that large public universities can now deliver individualized assistance to students at scale." (four-year)

2. Strengthen Student Engagement 
The tools and techniques of personalized learning are seen by many as effective agents in deepening the level of engagement students have with their institution, their instructors, and their education.

"There are several things we should be pursuing, but it boils down to increasing student engagement, including increased time on task and increased interest." (four-year)

"At a community college, the most important single thing to support personalized learning is to establish a personal relationship with each student, focused on individual goals. [...] This foundational personal relationship is only possible by using strategies that can scale, employing cohort-based approaches and technology to save time and effort on the bureaucratic aspects of a student's experience, freeing up resources for authentic interaction." (two-year)

"This process [of documentation and reflection on multiple and diverse learning experiences] makes learning visible to students themselves, helping them connect those experiences and integrate them into a meaningful whole, larger than the sum of the parts. Done well, this process supports a powerful and iterative developmental process of identify formation, which we could talk about as purposeful self-authorship." (two-year)

Read more...

Additional resources 
Video: What Is Personalized Learning? by Gerry Bayne and Gregory Dobbin 
 
 

Source: EDUCAUSE Review and educause Channel (YouTube).

Man Does Not Live By Math Alone: Education Is More Than STEM | CNSNews.com

Photo: Eric Metaxas

Eric Metaxas, bestselling author of “Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Prophet, Martyr, Spy.” insist, "C. S. Lewis once said that education without values makes us into “more clever devils.” Here's why that’s so."

Kindergarten students Mia Page, left, and Oliver Pisciotta join classmates at Mesnier Primary School in a STEM education project using pipe cleaners to construct replica bean stalks.
Photo: CNSNews.com

We’ve all seen the studies showing that students in America are falling behind in STEM subjects—STEM is shorthand for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics—and many in education and government are freaking out. The STEM Education Coalition warns that 60 percent of employers are having a hard time finding qualified workers, and that of 65 education systems worldwide, American students rank only 27th in math and 20th in science.

“STEM education must be elevated as a national priority,” the group recommends. “Our nation’s future economic prosperity,” they say, “is closely linked with student success in the STEM fields.”

I agree. This is a serious matter. But what about our moral and ethical security? Many in academia and government in these budget-cutting times are joining the stampede to emphasize STEM education at the expense of the humanities. And Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria says that’s short-sighted. “Technical chops are just one ingredient needed for innovation and economic success,” Zakaria says. “No matter how strong your math and science skills are, you still need to know how to learn, think and even write.” Studies show that subjects such as literature, philosophy, and ethics actually improve STEM performance! Truly, man does not live by math alone.

While STEM subjects are necessary to our national well-being, subjects such as history, philosophy, the arts, and, yes, theology—which, after all, used to be known as “the queen of the sciences”—are vital to our spiritual well-being. While the former can provide us with facts and information, the latter supply us with meaning and wisdom.
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Editor's Note: This piece was originally published by BreakPoint.

Source: CNSNews.com

From Written to Digital: The New Literacy by Phillip Ventimiglia and George L. Pullman

Photo: George L. Pullman

Photo:  Phillip Ventimiglia

"In his book about the history of the digital revolution, Walter Isaacson contends that the major innovations of the digital revolution—from the first general-purpose computer to the transistor to the iPhone—were all created by individuals who understood how to synthesize the humanities with technology." according to Phillip Ventimiglia, Georgia State University's first Chief Innovation Officer and George L. Pullman, Georgia State University faculty member, jointly appointed in the English and Communication Departments.
 

Yet even though there is much focus in higher education on how we teach using technology (e.g., e-texts, flipped classrooms, adaptive learning, personalized learning), what we teach about technology is just as important. Because technology enables students to solve problems across a range of disciplines, those of us at higher education institutions need to rethink not just how we teach our students but what we teach our students.

Digital Literacy and 21st-Century Success 
In today's world, college/university graduates come into contact with a quickly evolving range of technologies and have access to a wealth of information. Students can be more successful after graduation if they are digitally literate—having learned how to identify and create digital solutions, adapt to new tools, and discover more effective and efficient ways of doing things in their fields. The use of technology has transformed every discipline and career, from engineers to doctors to politicians. Yet the traditional academic experience does not prepare many students for the challenges they'll face in these professions today. For instance, young campaign managers must be versed in tasks such as writing a blog and analyzing a social networking initiative, rather than just planning traditional stump speeches and campaign rallies.

This gap between employers' expectations and students' skills is demonstrated by disparities in perceptions of students' readiness to enter the workforce. In a recent study, when students were asked if they felt digitally prepared for work, 44 percent responded that they felt "well-prepared" or "very prepared." In contrast, only 18 percent of surveyed employers responded that students are prepared for entry-level positions.¹ Additionally, employers often find digital tools more valuable than traditional tools in evaluating job applicants. In a Hart Research Associates study, employers found electronic portfolios significantly more useful than a college transcript in assessing whether students had the skills necessary to fill a position: 80 percent of employers found electronic portfolios fairly or very useful, but only 45 percent of employers found traditional college transcripts helpful.²

We have heard the same feedback about the value of digital skills to graduates directly from some major corporations. Jaime Casap, Google's Chief Educational Evangelist, told us: "Digital citizenship is the minimum requirement for the new economy. We need strong digital leaders!" Victor Montgomery, State Farm Business Analyst in charge of local recruitment in Atlanta, stated: "Digital literacy bridges the opportunity divide for students. With that in mind, we are looking for students that display initiative, innovation, and creativity while transforming the communities they live in."³

The need for students to learn digital literacy skills should not be surprising, given that this generation of students has known technology only from a consumer perspective. Whereas older technologists first experienced technology in the workplace and then found ways to merge technology into their personal lives, the current generation of students first experienced technology as a means of entertainment and social communication. Despite having grown up with access to an increasing amount of technology, students now need to learn how to use technology to solve problems in academic and professional settings. Historically, we in higher education have not readied students for this transition, even though students are increasingly asked to use technology in their learning experiences. Many students enter college having already used technology to complete academic assignments: 75 percent of high school students have accessed class information through an online portal, 52 percent have taken tests online, and 37 percent have used online textbooks.⁴

Learning to write, learning to think, and—these days—learning to form computational structures and to think digitally are requisites not only for employment but also for intellectual independence. Traditionally, the liberal arts have been about learning to think logically and to express ideas. The "liberal" in the liberal arts is about freedom. Some people have argued that widespread literacy (understood as reading at an eighth-grade level) was about making sure factory workers could read manuals well enough to keep machines running, rather than about providing for an informed citizenry. The equivalent for digital literacy would be to define it simply as being able to learn software quickly. Instead, digital literacy should be defined as knowing the effective practices suited to the dominant media. We should not teach students just the skills that will prepare them to follow instructions or quickly comprehend a user interface; instead we should aim to help students develop the expertise that will allow them to combine and create technologies to develop new and dynamic solutions. Just as traditional literacy and the liberal arts have been the key to independence since the advent of public schooling, digital literacy today is about intellectual freedom (see figure 1). 

Many early digital literacy efforts in higher education focused on providing a single class that covered base-level skills, such as creating a PowerPoint presentation or spreadsheet. But what is truly needed in higher education today is integration of digital literacy throughout the curriculum, so that students are able to do the following:

1. Find and vet information online. In the digital world, being able to not only find information online but also determine its quality and validity is crucial.
2. See problems from digital perspectives. Students need to be able to analyze a problem and determine how to use digital tools to solve it. For example, can a problem be solved more quickly by creating a spreadsheet or by working the problem manually?
3. Become self-directed learners. The Internet has put all of the world's knowledge at our fingertips. Students should know how to take advantage of that availability of information to become lifelong learners.
4. Obtain digital solutions. Technology is constantly changing. Students must learn how to evaluate and buy the right digital tools to solve the problem at hand, rather than just relying on the tools they have used in the past.
5. Learn software quickly. Software is also always changing and improving, so students need to be able to quickly teach themselves new tools. For example, whereas being an expert in spreadsheets was an important quantitative skill set in the past, now it is increasingly important to be an expert in visualization tools such as Tableau.
6. Design and create digital solutions. Ultimately students should build a skill set that allows them to develop or customize their own digital tools. This does not necessarily mean that students need to be able to write their own applications from scratch. Rather, they should be comfortable customizing and combining tools to create a complete solution—for example, creating a web-form to automate the collection of customer evaluations and then outputting the results to a spreadsheet for analysis.

To understand the fundamental impact that digital literacy can have, we can look to history. Whenever the dominant medium of communication changes, controversy follows. When oral communication was replaced by written literacy as the main means of recording and transferring knowledge—a transformation that took place over decades and at different rates in different places—Socrates was recorded to have complained: "No written discourse, whether in meter or in prose, deserves to be treated very seriously."⁵ Socrates was concerned that transitioning from oral communication to written literacy would degrade people's intellect. If people learned by reading books, rather than by debating with their elders, they would replace a real education with a superficial likeness of one. They would have the appearance of learning because they could talk about all the things they had read, but they would be unable to think for themselves or even know they needed to, having become accustomed to simply looking things up in books and accepting what they read.

From today's perspective, Socrates' rejection of literacy seems irrational, yet echoes of the same argument are raised about information being found by searching the Internet rather than by combing through printed source materials. As we transition again, this time from written literacy to digital literacy, the fears that Socrates voiced are resurfacing. We know the transition will be profound and we can't yet anticipate the consequences, so it's reasonable to be concerned. Resistance, however, is as futile now as it was in Socrates' day.
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Additional resources

Writing Online:Rhetoric for the Digital Age

Amazon writes, "Contrary to the old adage about finding new names for old things, Writing Online: Rhetoric for the Digital Age gives new life and new meaning to old names. The book and its companion website transform ancient rhetoric as a process of oral composition—invention, arrangement, memory, style, and delivery—into a digital rhetoric, a dynamic process of writing for the World Wide Web: dynamic because it shows not only how to write in a Web-based medium but, more importantly, how to learn and adapt to a medium that is constantly evolving and changing. 

Publisher: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. (March 1, 2016) 

Source: EDUCAUSE Review

The Beauty of the Virtual Discussion Section | Chronicle of Higher Education

Photo: Michael C. Munger

Michael C. Munger, professor of political science and head of the philosophy, politics, and economics program at Duke University insist, "Instead of Sisyphus in the classroom, you can be a rock star."

Photo: Randy Lyhus for The Chronicle

Discussion sections seem essential for impersonal large classes because instructors want a space to interact with students directly. We imagine that discussion sections provide that space.

But what we imagine is often different from reality. Here’s how the reality was described by one student newspaper:

"There is the other discussion section, the one more common in most classes here at the university. This discussion section seems more like a bad blind date than a class: Awkward silences, filled only by an occasional, often irrelevant comment that just makes everyone roll their eyes and glance at their watch."

That view isn’t unique: When students are asked about the contribution of discussion sections to learning, their reactions range from tepid to dismissive.

Colleges and universities are under increasing pressure to teach more, cheaper, and better. Discussion sections not only aren’t very effective, they are expensive.

But there is another option: the "virtual section." I’ve used it for years, and it has made me a much better instructor.

Reconsidering the traditional approach. In large introductory courses, there is a certain level of enrollment — maybe it’s 70 students, maybe 110 — where classroom discussion becomes impractical. The instructor is limited to being the "sage on the stage" on Mondays and Wednesdays, so another class session is scheduled on Friday for small-group discussions.

When I taught at the University of Texas in the late 1980s, our combined "American and Texas Government" class met with 1,400 students in the main classroom, and 26 teaching assistants, each with two sections. That’s about 26 students per "small group," but that was how it worked.

The rationale was that TAs got experience "teaching," and that the students loved sitting in hot, crowded converted closets, bored out of their minds. OK, that makes it sound bad. But I was never convinced that the students — or, for that matter, the teaching assistants — got that much out of the experience. The goal of the TAs was usually just "to get them (the students) to talk."

But leading a group discussion is not easy, and the TAs hadn’t had much practice or training. Learning can take place even if students don’t talk, and talking surely doesn’t equal learning.


And discussion sections are expensive, even when they work. The use of sections can actually limit class size. In many cases, there isn’t much difference — from the professor’s perspective — between a lecture class of 120 and one of 300, but the size is constrained by four factors:

• Instructor ability to perform well in a large class setting.
• An auditorium or classroom with size, intimacy, and acoustics conducive to effective pedagogy.
• Enough teaching assistants to meet discussion sections.
• Enough break-out rooms at attractive time slots to house effective discussion sections.

Of course, small isn’t always better, either. I recently visited a medium-size state university that prides itself on having "small classes." Each semester my host department offers up to 12 separate versions of its main intro course. None of the 12 are larger than 25 students; some have only half that number — for a total enrollment in the 12 courses of about 200 students. When I asked who was actually teaching those courses, my host reluctantly admitted that only three of them were taught by tenure-track faculty, and the other 10 or so by adjuncts. Given normal turnover among contingent faculty, at least three or four of the adjuncts teaching the course were always, in each semester, doing so for the first time. It was as if the department was always starting over, rolling the rock back up the hill.

The university had a nice 200-seat auditorium. At least two of the tenured professors were master instructors, and could do that "rock star" version of the intro class for an audience of 200. Suppose the department had (plausibly) counted the large class double in terms of the instructor’s course-load. Instead of 12 versions of the intro course, the department could have offered one large intro course, plus 10 small upper-division classes of variety and depth.

Alternatively, some of those 10 adjunct positions used to teach the intro course could be consolidated into a tenure line, with consequent improvement in the quality of the department and the connections students are able to create with permanent faculty members.

Why not do that? Given the emphasis on small classes, the faculty was concerned that the "rock star" version would rob students of any human-scale experience. Discussion sections would have been the usual answer, but my hosts cited as constraints the third and fourth factors listed above: The department couldn’t afford enough TAs to meet with discussion sections, and didn’t have enough rooms to house them.
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Source: Chronicle of Higher Education