2,259 Matching Annotations
  1. Jul 2015
    1. All available evidence suggests that over 60% of new Ph.D.s in science in the United States will not have careers in academic research, yet graduate training in science has followed the same basic format for almost 100 years, heavily focused on producing academic researchers.

      Would be nice to be able to track down this reference, because this is a rather startling statistic. Although I suppose that in any highly competitive field, e.g., acting, sports, the percentages of those actually pursuing what they were trained for might be even lower?

    1. the week you learned that the killers of Michael Brown would go free

      I read this paragraph three times, blinking back tears. Moments like this get collected by many (not all) of our students. It's amazing to ask them, to give them space -- perhaps a little information -- to tell their own memories of these weeks. There's something here for curriculum, for teasing out the memories of our students over the past years. And asking them what these stories mean to them, and asking them to use writing to remember and to make meaning of these moments. That's how anti-racist education with African-American and Latino youth is different.

  2. Jun 2015
    1. Its fascinating that people find it "counterintuitive" that people are more likely to respect and follow authorities if they are treated with respect and fairness. Where did we get the idea that we should abuse people in order to get them to do what we think they should?

    1. Teachers Know Best is a multi-year research effort to better understand how teachers use digital instructional tools and how these tools can be improved to foster personalized learning.

      Important potential partner/collaborator. Here's their site.

  3. May 2015
    1. to interact and collaborate with others.

      This emphasis on collaboration is particularly important in social reading. Through replies, each annotation is actually the beginning of a potential conversation.

    2. Write routinely over extended time frames (time for research, reflection, and revision) and shorter time frames (a single sitting or a day or two) for a range of tasks, purposes, and audiences.

      Digital annotation is particularly suited to this type of everyday writing practice.

      In a sense, it's more like posting to Facebook or Twitter than writing an essay. But because it is grounded in text, it encourages more thoughtfulness.

      At the same time, if students are regularly annotating using an application like hypothes.is, then they will surely exceed the word count usually required in a five page essay. Annotation projects might be seen as pre-writing--a collaborative drafting space for ideas and language to be developed later in formal papers--or it might be seen as an end in itself.

    3. through the effective selection, organization, and analysis of content.

      This is essential to the pedagogy of annotation as well. The first step must be to identify an appropriate selection of text from a document. The annotation itself is the space for analysis.

    4. Gather relevant information from multiple print and digital sources,

      Students using an annotation application like hypothes.is can literally map their research on a topic in tagged annotations on sources from across the Internet.

    1. The focus on "decoding" should send shivers down the spine of every English teacher who has ever had a student demand they just tell them what the poem means.

      I think Billy Collins captures this tortuous pedagogy well in "Intro to Poetry":

      But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope<br> and torture a confession out of it.

      They begin beating it with a hose<br> to find out what it really means.

    1. he greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way.

      Annotation would seem to have a role to play here.

    1. I first discovered the power of collaborative annotation

      Collins actually imagines a moment of shared marginalia in his poem. In a copy of A Catcher in the Rye that he borrows from a library as a boy, he finds the following: “Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.” The young Collins imagines the note to be written by a beautiful girl and feels himself in a sense falling in love with that other reader. Though we need not develop a dating service out of the modern technologies that allow for social reading, we can at least see the humanity that can be shared in the margin of a digital page: the teachable moments, the conversations that might occur. We have glimpsed such moments on other social media like Twitter and Facebook, but I argue they lack the depth of annotation, which brings together text, comment, and now, readers.

    1. Analyze how two or more texts address similar themes or topics in order to build knowledge or to compare the approaches the authors take.

      Again, the hypothes.is application allows for this kind of intertextual analysis to be activated and visualized in powerful ways. Students can literally link between related themes or moments in various texts studied.

    2. words and phrases

      Digital annotation powerfully visualizes this process, as the application allows the user to isolate a particular word or phrase, and then create a comment specifically on that piece of textual evidence.

    3. PRINT THIS PAGE

      No, annotate this page!

    4. including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words.

      Image Description

      The possibilities of digital writing, given the WYSIWYG interface above, allow for students to integrate a variety of media into their own annotation compositions. Moreover, this use of media is not simply illustrative but as an integral part of the overall argument.

      Image Description

    5. Read closely

      Image Description

      Close reading is a major emphasis of the Common Core Standards, though most English teachers since New Critic I.A. Richards would probably agree that is it essential to any humanities curriculum. As the "Introduction" to the ELA section states:

      Students who meet the Standards readily undertake the close, attentive reading that is at the heart of understanding and enjoying great works of literature.

      Digital annotation, though, is close reading 2.0. The major activity of a service like hypothes.is is "annotation," the highlighting and noting of words, phrases, and sentences, which demands that students keep their thinking and writing "close" to the text and its evidence.

      Moreover, because digital annotation has the potential to be collaborative. It links this mandate for close reading with later calls in the Standards for collaboration. I like to think of hypothes.is as a "A Social Network for Close Reading." Could we make students obsess with annotations on the web like they obsess with Facebook and Twitter posts?...

  4. Apr 2015
    1. If you want to help low-income students succeed, it’s not enough to deal with their academic and financial obstacles. You also need to address their doubts and misconceptions and fears. To solve the problem of college completion, you first need to get inside the mind of a college student.

      How do you get inside the mind of a college student?

  5. Mar 2015
    1. SCENE I. Elsinore. A platform before the castle. FRANCISCO at his post. Enter to him BERNARDO BERNARDO Who's there? FRANCISCO Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself.

      Image Description

      This has to be one of the most intense opening scenes in all of literature. We are immediately thrown into a moment of panic as each guard responds wearily to the other's approach. In general these opening lines set the tone of the play to be one of apprehension.

  6. Dec 2014
    1. The computer science taught in colleges still focusses more on theory than on commercial application; the business of teaching practical coding skills has the whiff of trade school. So-called coding “boot camps,” such as General Assembly, founded in 2010, are trying to fill the gap, teaching crash courses in how to design Web sites and write code. But Jake Schwartz, the co-founder and C.E.O. of General Assembly, told me, “There’s simply not enough senior people in the system.”
    1. Britain’s Coalition government is rushing through an anti-terrorism bill that would require universities to take action to stop students and staff from being drawn into terrorist activity. According to Home Secretary Theresa May, this would require higher education institutions to ban extremists from speaking on campus.

      That seems all kinds of problematic, to me. The government really should not be telling universities what speech to allow on their campuses. That's antithetical to liberal education, as far as I can tell.

  7. May 2014
  8. Feb 2014
    1. If we can’t keep raising costs for students (we can’t) and if no one is coming to save us (they aren’t), then the only remaining way to help these students is to make a cheaper version of higher education for the new student majority.
  9. Jan 2014
    1. The federal government already spends enough on student aid to cover tuition for every public college student in America. Maybe it's time to try.

      How can we start this moving in Congress?

  10. Dec 2013
    1. Audrey Watters, hackeducation.com Education APIs: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

      Looking forward to reading/hearing Audrey Water's thoughts on education APIs.

  11. Nov 2013
    1. I wish I had not known the wretched-ness of wasting so much of my youth in this way. I wish that the scholars of rhetoric and dialectic would heed my advice and would sometimes think of the truth and usefulness of their subjects instead of tenaciously and obstinately quarreling over matters which they have naively accepted at a first hearing, without ever giving them proper consideration

      Regret. Ever achievable? Too quick to argue. Maybe difference between education and schooling?

  12. Oct 2013
    1. the rules which are laid down in the art of oratory could not have been observed, and noted, and reduced to system, if they had not first had their birth in the genius of orators

      Early study of a language needed.

    2. For it is because they are eloquent that they exemplify these rules; it is not that they use them in order to be eloquent.

      Early education needed?

    3. For even the art of grammar, which teaches correctness of speech, need not be learnt by boys, if they have the advantage of growing up and living among men who speak correctly.

      Early education maybe good but not necessarily.

    1. But the other sort of speakers call that force which ought rather to be called violence.

      lack of eloquence, art

    2. But there are some things concerning this point that very naturally deceive the unskilful; for division, though it is of great consequence in pleadings, diminishes the appearance of strength; what is rough is imagined more bulky than what is polished; and objects when scattered are thought more numerous than when they are ranged in order.
    3. Still it must be allowed that learning does take away something, as the file takes something from rough metal, the whetstone from blunt instruments, and age from wine; but it takes away what is faulty, and that which learning has polished is less only because it is better.
    1. That mere boys should sit mixed with young men, I do not approve; for though such a man as ought to preside over their studies and conduct may keep even the eldest of his pupils under control, yet the more tender ought to be separate from the more mature, and they should all be kept free, not merely from the guilt of licentiousness, but even from the suspicion of it
    2. Of these professors the morals must first be ascertained, a point of which I proceed to treat in this part of my work, not because I do not think that the same examination is to be made, and with the utmost care, in regard also to other teachers (as indeed I have shown in the preceding book), but because the very age of the pupils makes attention to the matter still more necessary. 3. For boys are consigned to these professors when almost grown up and continue their studies under them even after they are become men. Greater care must in consequence be adopted with regard to them in order that the purity of the master may secure their more tender years from corruption and that his authority deter their bolder age from licentiousness. 4. Nor is it enough that he give, in himself, an example of the strictest morality, unless he regulate also, by severity of discipline, the conduct of those who come to receive his instructions.
    1. For minds, before they are hardened are more ready to learn, as is proved by the fact that children, within two years after they can fairly pronounce words, speak almost the whole language, though no one incites them to learn; but for how many years does the Latin tongue resist the efforts of our purchased slaves! You may well understand, if you attempt to teach a grown up person to read, that those who do everything in their own art with excellence are not without reason called παιδομαθεῖς (paidomatheis), that is, "instructed from boyhood." 10. The temper of boys is better able to bear labor than that of men, for as neither the falls of children, with which they are so often thrown on the ground, nor their crawling on hands and knees, nor, soon after, constant play and running all day hither and thither, inconvenience their bodies so much as those of adults, because they are of little weight and no burden to themselves, so their minds likewise, I conceive, suffer less from fatigue, because they exert themselves with less effort and do not apply to study by putting any force upon themselves, but merely yield themselves to others to be formed. 11. Moreover, in addition to the other pliancy of that age, they follow their teachers, as it were, with greater confidence and do not set themselves to measure what they have already done. Consideration about labor is as yet unknown to them, and as we ourselves have frequently experienced, toil has less effect upon the powers than thought.

      Interesting thought, pliancy of youth

    2. Do not players on the harp, for example, exert their memory and attend to the sound of their voice and the various inflections of it, while at the same time they strike part of the strings with their right hand and pull, stop, or let loose others with their left, while not even their foot is idle, but beats time to their playing, all these acts being done simultaneously

      Example of our what our busy, flexible minds are capable of.

    1. The teacher will he cautious, likewise, that concluding syllables be not lost; that his pupil's speech be all of a similar character; that whenever he has to raise his voice, the effort may be that of his lungs, and not of his head; and that his gesture may be suited to his voice, and his looks to his gesture. 9

      Speech therapy?

    2. SOME TIME is also to be devoted to the actor, but only so far as the future orator requires the art of delivery, for I do not wish the boy whom I educate for this pursuit either to be broken to the shrillness of a woman's voice or to repeat the tremulous tones of an old man's. 2. Neither let him imitate the vices of the drunkard nor adapt himself to the baseness of the slave; nor let him learn to display the feelings of love, or avarice, or fear: acquirements which are not at all necessary to the orator and which corrupt the mind, especially while it is yet tender and uninformed in early youth, for frequent imitation settles into habit.

      Is a parent supposed to limit a child's exposure to the world?

    1. At present, the negligence of paedagogi seems to be made amends for in such a way that boys are not obliged to do what is right, but are punished whenever they have not done it. Besides, after you have coerced a boy with stripes, how will you treat him when he becomes a young man, to whom such terror cannot be held out, and by whom more difficult studies must be pursued? 16. Add to these considerations that many things unpleasant to be mentioned, and likely afterwards to cause shame, often happen to boys while being whipped, under the influence of pain or fear. Such shame enervates and depresses the mind, and makes them shun people's sight and feel a constant uneasiness. 17. If, moreover, there has been too little care in choosing governors and tutors of reputable character, I am ashamed to say how scandalously unworthy men may abuse their privilege of punishing, and what opportunity also the terror of the unhappy children may sometimes accord to others. I will not dwell upon this point; what is already understood is more than enough. It will be sufficient, therefore, to intimate that no man should be allowed too much authority over an age so weak and so unable to resist ill treatment.
    2. Therefore, a child is to be admonished, as early as possible, that he must do nothing too eagerly, nothing dishonestly, nothing without self-control, and we must always keep in mind the maxim of Virgil, Adeo in teneris consuescere multum est, "of so much importance is the acquirement of habit in the young."

      The early education needed.

    1. But supposing that either interest, or friendship, or money, should secure to any parent a domestic tutor of the highest learning, and in every respect unrivalled, will he, however, spend the whole day on one pupil? Or can the application of any pupil be so constant as not to be sometimes wearied, like the sight of the eyes, by continued direction to one object, especially as study requires the far greater portion of time to be solitary.

      No freedom in learning.

    2. People think that morals are corrupted in schools; indeed they are at times corrupted, but such may be the case even at home.

      Morals: home vs school

    3. et it is not to be concealed that there are some, who from certain notions of their own, disapprove of this almost public mode of instruction.

      examining public vs. private education: an ongoing argument. wonder if we ever might like to try something else.

    1. I do not disapprove, however, the practice, which is well known, of giving children, for the sake of stimulating them to learn, ivory figures of letters to play with, or whatever else can be invented, in which that infantine age may take delight, and which may be pleasing to handle, look at, or name.

      Learning through play

    2. Nor let those parents, who have not had the fortune to get learning themselves, bestow the less care on the instruction of their children, but let them, on this very account, be more solicitous as to other particulars.

      Do not let the parents limitations pass on to their children.

    3. The study of Latin ought, therefore, to follow at no long interval, and soon after to keep pace with the Greek; thus it will happen that when we have begun to attend to both tongues with equal care, neither will impede the other.

      Languages were taught in grade school as a rule in modern times, but are no longer integral to public secondary education, as a rule.

  13. Sep 2013
    1. And let no one suppose that I claim that just living can be taught;(25) for, in a word, I hold that there does not exist an art of the kind which can implant sobriety and justice in depraved natures. Nevertheless, I do think that the study of political discourse can help more than any other thing to stimulate and form such qualities of character.

      Refinement rather than creation of a virtuous soul. Interesting view of nature versus nurture.

    2. For ability, whether in speech or in any other activity, is found in those who are well endowed by nature and have been schooled by practical experience
    3. practical experience or to the native ability of the student, but undertake to transmit the science of discourse as simply as they would teach the letters of the alphabet, not having taken trouble to examine into the nature of each kind of knowledge

      Reflects Isocrates' educational method.

    1. charging that I corrupt young men

      Like Plato's Socrates.

    2. I beg you, then, neither to credit nor to discredit what has been said to you until you have heard to the end what I also have to say, bearing it in mind that there would have been no need of granting to the accused the right of making a defense, had it been possible to reach a just verdict from the arguments of the accuser.

      Postpone judgment, allow me the space to discuss, no matter what. How closely does this defense align with what we might think of as education?

    3. For men who have been gifted with eloquence by nature and by fortune, are governed in what they say by chance, and not by any standard of what is best, whereas those who have gained this power by the study of philosophy and by the exercise of reason never speak without weighing their words, and so are less often in error as to a course of action. Therefore, it behoves all men to want to have many of their youth engaged in training to become speakers

      Proposing the need of the proper education system of rhetoric.

    1. Please, then, to remember that there are two processes of training all things, including body and soul; in the one, as we said, we treat them with a view to pleasure, and in the other with a view to the highest good, and then we do not indulge but resist them: was not that the distinction which we drew? CALLICLES: Very true. SOCRATES: And the one which had pleasure in view was just a vulgar flattery:—was not that another of our conclusions? CALLICLES: Be it so, if you will have it. SOCRATES: And the other had in view the greatest improvement of that which was ministered to, whether body or soul? CALLICLES: Quite true. SOCRATES: And must we not have the same end in view in the treatment of our city and citizens? Must we not try and make them as good as possible?

      Socrates's philosophy of education?

  14. Aug 2013
    1. 还记得小时候的《思想品德》课么?它是道德教育的一种,但不是道德教育的全部。转型期的中国需要怎样的道德教育?全球化的时代是否需要全球普世道德?本周中国教育论坛邀请到了哈佛大学资深科学家和研究员魏毅先生来与我们共同探讨道德教育的话题。

      moral education