Leaving ICU

I began this blog soon after beginning work as Director of the English program at ICU some 6 years ago.  Having reached ICU's mandatory retirement age, I will be leaving at the end of the academic year.  The intent of this blog was initially a way to share information and thoughts with my colleagues in the English program, but it has also attracted some interest from outside ICU, and I have enjoyed hearing from colleagues around the world.

Like many bloggers, I haven't been very consistent in posting things, but it has been a good experience and has encouraged me to use blogs with my classes.  It seems like a good time for me to end this blog.

For those of you still reading this, I will add a link to a paper I published last autumn which reflects on my experience as Director over the last six years. 

Best wishes to all the program directors (or indirectors) out there!

What Does It Mean To Be Human? A Historical Perspective 1800-2011 | Brain Pickings

• What Does It Mean To Be Human? A Historical Perspective 1800-2011 | Brain Pickings

  "Ultimately, What It Means to Be Human is less an answer than it is an invitation to a series of questions, questions about who and what we are as a species, as souls, and as nodes in a larger complex ecosystem of sentient beings. As Bourke poetically puts it, Erasing the awe-inspiring variety of sentient life impoverishes all our lives.” And whether this lens applies to animals or social stereotypes, one thing is certain: At a time when the need to celebrate both our shared humanity and our meaningful differences is all the more painfully evident, the question of what makes us human becomes not one of philosophy alone but also of politics, justice, identity, and every fiber of existence that lies between."

  tags: elametatopic

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Critical Thinking | TechNyou

• Critical Thinking | TechNyou

  Nice site with several resources including a ppt slide show on crtitical thinking and a series of two-minute animated videos on aspects of critical thinking.

  tags: elpcrithnk

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

TED-Ed | Lessons Worth Sharing

A new TED site with educational material and accompanying lessons.  Teachers can customize the lessons and use the site to create their own lessons for any TEd or YouTube video content.  This could be very useful in our Research Writing courses among others

http://ed.ted.com

Coursera.org

• This is a good looking site for high-quality on-line courses.  It might be interesting to get a group of ICU studnts to take one of these courses with the ELA providing English language support.

• Coursera.org

  tags: oer

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stunlaw: Computational Thinking: Some thoughts about Abduction

Article exploring the importance of a triad of induction, deduction and abduction, and the importance of the latter in computational thinking.  Could be useful in explaining hypothesis formation as part of critical thinking.

http://stunlaw.blogspot.ca/2012/03/computational-thinking-some-thoughts.html

How Leaders Lose Their Luck - Anthony Tjan - Harvard Business Review

Good list of leadership qualities that are hardest to achieve and maintain

How Leaders Lose Their Luck - Anthony Tjan - Harvard Business Review

• tags: leadership

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Blog posting related to complexity and learning and critical thinking.

• I am currently reading Morin's On Complexity, and find this blog posting very helpful. 

• Communications & Society: Complexity and Personal Learning Environments

  The problem, of course, is that we don't have much language yet to talk intelligently about this kind of complexity. Our notions of critical thinking (interpretation, analysis, evaluation, inference, explanation, self-regulation, and so on) are all pretty much individual mental exercises aimed at reducing complexity to simple clarity. We need new ways to examine and think about complex, rhizomatic structures. Morin mentions three ways to think, or principles, that help us approach the complex: a dialogic principle (dia-logic), the principle of organizational recursion, and the holographic principle (by which I think he means what I would call fractal). Deleuze and Guattari mention cartography and decalcomania. I was pleased in our Elluminate session yesterday (Wed, 2010 Oct 06) when George Siemens spoke about mapping learning and knowledge to real life and listed resonance, synchronicity, wayfinding, amplification, and learning/knowledge symmetry aspects of connectivist learning. I don't know if he intends them as critical (or perhaps higher order) thinking skills, but they resonate with me that way. Recognizing and engaging pockets of resonance in an environment seems to be a critical thinking skill needed for mapping the rhizome.

  tags: complexity ple elpcrithnk

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

The Top 10 Most Common Mistakes in Consensus Process, and How to Avoid Them « how to save the world

Here is a good piece on common problems in consensus decision making.

 

How To Make Measurement Fun! | Beth’s Blog

http://www.bethkanter.org/measurement-fu

 

Interesting take on how we can re-think how we evaluate and grade students.

Wikipedia And The Death Of The Expert | The Awl

This long article includes references to some very interesting aspects of how learning, or at least our conception of it, are being forced to change.

http://www.theawl.com/2011/05/wikipedia-and-the-death-of-the-expert

Review of "Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom" by bell hooks

• Review of Teaching Critical Thinking by hooks.pdf (application/pdf Object)

This review is interesting in itself, but I am planning to read the book as well. 

• tags: elpcrithnk

 

More on Critcial Thinking

I've run across some interesting (at least to me) articles related to Critical Thinking in the last couple weeks.  I'd like to share some of them with you because, A) they might be instructive as we continue work on the curriculum reform, and B) they might help us better understand and deal with some of our internal communication problems.  I have tagged everything under "elpcrithnk", so all of this is in the helpicu Google Reader, as well as in Delicious, but I know that many of you never look at what is being tagged, so here are the links:

1. Ideas from Ryan Bretag  and Stephen Downes on the nature of Critical Thinking.  In the case of Bretag, he has compiled an amazing list of all the attributes of Critical Thinking that he has found so far from various sources.  Downes takes off from that with his own view of what makes up critical thinking.

2. An article by Barbara Fister, "In the Teeth of the Evidence", which comments on some of the difficulties in teaching CT to university students, "Maybe instead of teaching rigorous analysis that tests ideas to see if they break, we need to put a little more emphasis on understanding them better first. A little more empathy and lot more respect for evidence could go a long way."

3. A draft paper by Peter Elbow, (referenced in Fister's article) about The Believing Game,   In this paper he posits that in addition to "The Doubting Game", which is what he calls the kind of critical thinking that is the academic norm, we also need to develop the contrasting skills of looking for what is possibly good in ideas we aren't intuitively drawn to,

 "....critical thinking often helps us fend off criticisms of our ideas or ways of seeing. We see this problem in much academic and intellectual interchange. When smart people are trained only in the tradition of the doubting game, they get better and better at criticizing the ideas of others that they don’t like. They use this skill particularly well when they feel a threat to their ideas or unexamined assumptions. Yet they feel justified in fending-off what they don’t like because they feel they are engaged in "critical thinking." They take refuge in the feeling that they would be "unintellectual" if they said to an opponent what in fact they ought to say: "Your idea sounds really wrong to me. It must be alien to how I think. Let me try to enter into it and get a better perspective on my thinking--and see if there's something important that you can see that I can’t see.” In short, if we want to be good at finding flaws in our own thinking (a goal that doubters constantlytrumpet), we need the believing game."

4. Finally, a very interesting effort to create a (more or less) standardized test of critical thinking, which is being used by a number of US. liberal arts colleges and universities.    It is called the CLA Test, which stands for Collegiate Learning Assessment.  This 27 page pdf file explains the design of the test, gives examples of the question prompts, the evaluation rubrics, and samples of student responses. 

Testing as a good thing

Eide Neurolearning Blog: Hot Seat Learning - Why Testing is Not All Bad

How can we in the ELP/ELA apply this emerging wisdom?

The Role of the Educator in the Digital World ~ Stephen's Web

• The Role of the Educator in the Digital World ~ Stephen's Web
  Presentation by Stephen Downes which lists 23 roles and counting.  Interesting overview of the increasing complexity teaching in the digital age.
  tags: elpcurr fifthlearn

Eide Neurolearning Blog: Analogy as the Core of Cognition

• Eide Neurolearning Blog: Analogy as the Core of Cognition

  Good video of a Stanford Presidential lecture. "Hofstadter believes that analogy making is at the core of all cognition, and what is especially interesting is how frequently analogies seem to occur in everyday experiences and how complex the parallels can be when suddenly we have a flash of insight, "That's just like...(something else)"."

  tags: elpcrithnk

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Two kinds of knowledge

• Two Kinds of Knowledge ~ Stephen's Web

  One of the questions that is imbedded in this discussion of the nature of knowledge and learning is what kind of knowledge is represented by language itself -- is language tacit or explicit, or both?  I think that how we understand this is critical to language teaching.  This gets even more complicated when we mix language teaching with content teaching.

Communications & Society: Complexity and Personal Learning Environments

• Communications & Society: Complexity and Personal Learning Environments

  Very interesting blog post on the connection of complexity theories and learning with some suggestions for redefining critical thinking.

  tags: complexity ple elpcrithnk

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 1 | Writing Spaces

• Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 1 | Writing Spaces

  Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 1, is a collection of Creative Commons licensed essays for use in the first year writing classroom, all written by writing teachers for students. Because of the Creative Commons licensing, you can upload these texts to your personal website, share them with colleagues and students, or put them on your institutional learning management system class website. Topics in Volume 1 of the series include academic writing, how to interpret writing assignments, motives for writing, rhetorical analysis, revision, invention, writing centers, argumentation, narrative, reflective writing, Wikipedia, patchwriting, collaboration, and genres.

  tags: elptw

ELI Discovery Tool: Guide to Collaborative Learning | EDUCAUSE

• ELI Discovery Tool: Guide to Collaborative Learning | EDUCAUSE

  The Collaborative Learning Workshop Guide offers a set of action-oriented, modifiable, modular activities for use in faculty development, staff retreats, or institutional planning. Each of the modules contains topical guidelines, content, resources, and best practices, and each can be easily customized to fit the needs of your institution, department, or unit.

  tags: fifthlearn

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.