CALL ME MAGGIE

pedagogy

  • The Three Horsemen of the MOOCpocaplypse

    A small foray into the political after a few weeks of mostly concentrating on spirituality. But not too far in as my concern is prompted by my contemplation. I want to thank my good brother Lance W. for pointing out… Continue reading

    The Three Horsemen of the MOOCpocaplypse

  • The Banking Conception of Education

    “In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing.” Paulo Freire, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed                … Continue reading

  • What is Interdisciplinary Communication?

    How can we make sense of different perspectives on the same subject? How does what I learn about, say, environmental problems in my science class relate to what I learn about them in my philosophy class? Can professors from different… Continue reading

  • Howard Gardner: Digital Technology and A Well-Rounded Education | DMLcentral

    As digital technologies become daily staples in both our personal and professional lives, there’s been much discussion among educators and community leaders as to whether these devices and innovations could in some way be accountable for shifts in the ethical… Continue reading

  • What’s Worth Learning: How Outdated Curricula are Failing America’s Students

    Cut through the hype and the ideology-driven political rhetoric and it’s clear that, decade after decade, institutional performance nationwide changes little. Even schools considered models and pointed to with pride—upscale, beautiful, well-staffed, shipping high percentages of their graduates off to… Continue reading

  • Standardized Tests Not Justin Bieber are Destroying our Culture

    I do not have kids of my own. But I pay school taxes like anybody else who owns propert or rents an apartment. [Yes, Matilda… if you rent an apartment, a portion of your rent obviously goes to school taxes].… Continue reading

  • Henry A. Giroux | The War Against Teachers as Public Intellectuals in Dark Times

    …In the name of austerity, schools are defunded so as to fail and provide an excuse to be turned over to the privatizing advocates of free-market fundamentalism. In this discourse, free-market reform refuses to imagine public education as the provision… Continue reading

  • The Rise of Democratic Schools and ‘Solutionaries’…

    Twenty years ago at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Severn Cullis-Suzuki, a 12-year-old girl from Canada, “silenced the world for six minutes” with her raw and powerful oration lambasting adults for dumping the problems they created onto the… Continue reading

  • The Audacious & Looming Spectre of Differential Tuition

    My mind is completely boggled. Someone can do the relatively simple accounting and see that the humanities–“majors without an immediate job payoff”–are already subsidizing other majors which have a “job payoff.” In fact, this was already done at few institutions,… Continue reading

  • The end of the university « Andrew Taggart

    Nice meditation on a favorite subject of mine: where exactly higher education may be going in the globalized Society of Control. Taggart asks some good questions and is moving toward an intriguing elucidation: …any serious threat to the status quo… Continue reading

  • Hacking Your Education, Part 2

    And here is part 2 of the talk I gave in September 2012 to students at the University of North Texas.  [You can find Part 1 here.] Keith Brown – Hacking Your Education Part 2 from Anthony Miles on Vimeo. Continue reading

  • » Hard-to-Believe! High School Student Researchers?

    I am always humbled to know that I have had a philosophical career that could only have been born in an atmosphere like the one at Waxahachie High School. While I was never one of the computer science and research… Continue reading

  • How do we Shape Souls Without Longing?

    Nice looking backward at Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind. Deneen correctly locates the import of the text in its prescient concern with the dis-ease of indifference. Today we live in a different age, one that so worried Bloom—an age… Continue reading

  • The Entitlement of Opinion

    The problem with “I’m entitled to my opinion” is that, all too often, it’s used to shelter beliefs that should have been abandoned. It becomes shorthand for “I can say or think whatever I like” – and by extension, continuing… Continue reading

  • Tolkien & Teaching

    In his mythology, Tolkien tells us that the elves crossed the sea in rebellion, and even those who linger yet in Middle Earth do not forget and yearn for a return to their land of origin.  For elves, the sea is… Continue reading

  • Pedagogy by Carrot

    The majority of students today expect assignments with finite parameters, clear grading paths, and a checklist of things they can tick off to get an A. “Pick my own topic for an essay? What do you mean by that? What… Continue reading

  • TechnoScience & the New Pedagogy

    In the past, the suggestion of getting a college degree without ever cracking a book meant paying a degree mill. It meant the degree was in name only, reflecting neither learning nor effort. Then distance learning meant correspondence courses, perhaps… Continue reading

  • How Computerized Tutors Are Learning to Teach Humans – NYTimes.com

    Neil Heffernan was listening to his fiancée, Cristina Lindquist, tutor one of her students in mathematics when he had an idea. Heffernan was a graduate student in computer science, and by this point — the summer of 1997 — he… Continue reading