Blog U.: The Genius in All of Us - Technology and Learning - Inside Higher Ed

Blog U.: The Genius in All of Us - Technology and Learning - Inside Higher Ed

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• Mothering at Mid-Career: Sad Stories

  By Libby Gruner June 7, 2010 8:57 pm
  I’ve been consumed by news stories lately, one local—within the community of “mother bloggers” — and one national. The local, a story of a child’s death; the national, the Gulf Coast oil spill. They have little in common except the way they make me feel: impotent, enraged, worried. Impotent, because it seems there’s so little I can do to change the way things are. Enraged, because the stories both suggest miscarriages of justice. Worried, because they hit close to home: I have children, I drive a car — I’m part of these stories.
  I don’t subscribe to a daily newspaper, and, while the New York Times is on my feedreader, it’s in the section marked “news,” currently at 1000+ unread. I’ll go in and “mark all read” pretty soon to reset the counter to zero, but the chance that I’ll actually work through more than a few stories is pretty slim. I do get a Sunday paper — again, the Times, despite living five states and 300+ miles away from New York, as it’s the paper of my youth (and of the best Sunday crossword puzzle). I listen to NPR. But I often find the news so overwhelming that I simply ignore it. I wish I didn’t — I wish I were better informed, more active, more involved — but my efforts at keeping on top of things so often collapse into impotence, rage, and worry that I give up easily.
  The parents of children lost to addiction and violence can’t ignore the news, though, nor can the residents of the Gulf Coast. And in some way we will all be residents of the Gulf Coast 

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  The Genius in All of Us

  By Joshua Kim June 7, 2010 9:23 pm
  
  I'm convinced that technology will provide the bridge between learning theory and teaching practice in higher ed. The gap between what we know and what we can actually accomplish is always large. For instance, we know that the best learning takes place in a seminar setting, with students and teachers sitting around a table and constructing knowledge through conversation, dialogue, and opportunities for active learning. The problem is that the resources do not exist to turn every class into a seminar, as the seminar method does not scale. Instead, we have lecture courses. When I first started teaching at WVU my intro to sociology class had about 200 students. It was my efforts to use technology in these courses (in 1998) that first got me interested in learning technology.
  Which bring me to David Shenk's new book: The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told About Genetics, Talent and IQ is Wrong. Shenk's basic argument is that we need