Here’s what I propose. In the 21st century, we flip Bloom’s taxonomy. Rather than starting with knowledge, we start with creating, and eventually discern the knowledge that we need from it.

"As online course delivery becomes increasingly prevalent in higher education, it becomes more important to assist faculty in gaining new pedagogical skills. This article scans current literature regarding concerns and best practices in this area, and reports on a study of institutional support for training LIS faculty. The online survey of 16 quantitative and qualitative questions was distributed to all faculty from ALA accredited master’s programs requesting feedback about what support was available and what support was especially needed and/or appreciated by the faculty members. The results of this survey suggest a model of institutional support that includes faculty course release, LIS program level training and support, and structured mentoring. Implementation of such a model will help institutions create a culture of support for online
teaching."

Treads familiar ground but has some interesting references.

"As a public school teacher, I've come to believe that good teaching comes down to six essential practices. I call them Inducement, Conveyance, Meta-Learning, Empowerment, Modeling, and Application. Just as when all eight amino acids must be present for a protein to form, all six of these activities must be present for Good Teaching (and Good Learning) to occur."

"Standards Based Grading (SBG), what is it? Let me just say that SBG is a different way of thinking about grades. In Standards Based Grading, the main idea is that the grade is a measure of what students understand. It is not a measure of how well the students are obedient and it is not a measure of how much effort the students put into homework"

"In that spirit, in this post I want to explain how to go about forking a document, such as a syllabus, on GitHub. I also want to suggest some best practices that will make it easier to fork shared documents."

"How do you solve hard problem sets in such a way that they can be integrated into a structured, low-stress study schedule? In this post I will present a four step process. The process is an elaboration on the advice given in Straight-A. It’s a mixture of the results of my research for this book as well as personal experience, having fought these beasts over the past seven years."

"Much has been written about Design-based Research, but what about hearing from some of the experts themselves? These short interviews, conducted at AERA International Convention in 2006, provide some specific insights from some notable researchers in the field of Design-based Research."

A collaboration of scientists, artists, students, and anyone else interested in science, this project produces small zines and web comics on a variety of topics . Read online, download zines, and share your ideas here!

"One way I teach students the philosophy of science is by using the documentary "The King of Kong: A fist full of quarters.""

"To understand the school one has to begin with a completely different mindset from that which dominates current educational thinking. One has to begin with the thought: Adults do not control children's education

"Why teach search?
Google understands the importance of finding the right information at the right time. We create tools to let you find the information you need, of the kind you need, when you need it. In most cases, a simple search works really well. But for more specialized questions, a bit of instruction in how to search improves all searcher--from middle school students to trained professionals--and lets you discover and use more, higher quality sources than ever before."

"Open Thinking and Digital Pedagogy is the personal and professional blogging space of Dr. Alec Couros, a professor of educational technology and media at the Faculty of Education, University of Regina. I created this space in early 2004 as I pondered the educational uses of blogging and podcasting. This space is a growing collection of personal reflections and resources related to teaching and learning, democratic media, critical media literacy, digital citizenship, openness, and social justice."

"Is the research paper still justifiable as a means of grading a college student's performance?

Critics of the form say it is outdated because the Internet has made sources so readily accessible. In addition, argues an article published recently by the John William Pope Center for Higher Education, research papers promote deference to conventional opinions."

"I was struck by what the curious folks behind the Project Information Literacy project noticed when they gathered and examined research assignment prompts. These documents were well intentioned, but they were all about what the final product should look like: page length, number of sources, width of margins. They were almost entirely silent about how students should proceed, what tools would be particularly useful or even why it was worth doing. Though teachers covered those things in class, the prompts unintentionally enforced the notion that students all too often have: that their task is to produce a certain number of pages citing a required number of sources by a particular date."

"This leads me to wonder (again) why we ask first year students to make their paper look sort of like a JSTOR article instead of sort of like a story in the New York Times Magazine. When we tell them “in order to write about ideas, you need to find good sources and cite them accurately,” finding and citing becomes the task

"But the silver lining here is that what will most improve or sharpen practices of new media creation and interpretation is not technical skill with hardware and software nor is it being the most brave-new-worldish professor on the block. What would most dramatically improve or transform existing digital practices of cultural interpretation and information literacy would be the extrapolation and extension of many of the existing and long-standing strengths of humanistic inquiry. Note I do not say, “Just keep doing what you’re doing.” New media environments are new, and the jobs and practices which extend from them are also novel. "

"The pattern applies to the cultural materials on the syllabus. If teachers want students to discern the implicit meanings in commercial images, they should have students study images of more complexity and subtlety. A few days with images taken from great photography and film will equip them to “read” music videos much more effectively than will a few days with those videos themselves. Poetry by Alexander Pope and Edna St. Vincent Millay will do more for students’ verbal cognizance than will political advertisements and Twitter tweets.

This is the immediate virtue of anti-relevance. If teachers want to raise critical thinking about contemporary mass culture, they should expose students to past high culture."

"A Framework for K-12 Science Education identifies the key scientific practices, concepts and ideas that all students should learn by the time they complete high school. It is intended as a guide for those who develop science education standards, those who design curricula and assessments, and others who work in K-12 science education. "

via comments on Khan academy.

"And yet, despite Dewey’s explicit hesitations, nearly a century later, the history of American education suggests that order almost always wins out over justice, no matter authorial intentions—and no matter that Deweyans persist in sprouting up across the educational landscape. We might need to come to terms with the fact that education—or more precisely, schooling—is meant to serve the ends of the status quo, i.e., brutal inequality. And thus, if the educational reformers have been successful at anything, it’s in ensuring a more efficient machine for reproducing the status quo. "

"That sense of entitlement to leadership and its prerogatives is crippling the political classes worldwide. In the name of leadership, technocrats live apart from their citizenry, experts decline to sully their knowledgeable conversations by engagement with the insufficiently educated, activists burn bright with the Promethean fire they bear into what they imagine to be the darkness of apathetic communities. Leaders do to others and are not done unto. "

"A new book, Loving and Hating Mathematics: Challenging the Myths of Mathematical Life (Princeton University Press) takes a look at some of the most common (mis)conceptions about mathematics and mathematicians, addressing their origins and assessing their truth value in a somewhat unexpected fashion. Rather than amassing data on PISA and SAT scores, analyzing the race and gender breakdowns of degrees awarded or tenure and promotion rates, or perhaps administering Enneagram tests to math majors, authors Reuben Hersh and Vera John-Steiner focus on the lives and experiences of mathematicians, past and present."

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/2011/05/09/how-i-talk-about-searching-discovery-and-research-in-courses

"Another concept that I haven’t tried yet but which seems like a natural possibility is guiding students through the preparatory work that an author or producer might do if they were adapting a body of knowledge, a setting or a story for some kind of media besides scholarly publication. Say, what kinds of researched knowledge you might need if you were going to write a script, make costumes, find locations, fine-tune dialogue, craft audio, and so on for a film working with a particular historical setting. "

"Showing students how to read critically and formulate research queries is part of the teaching function of college libraries. But how do you teach students to read critically that which has no text?

That is the challenge Frances May, an adjunct librarian at the University of North Texas, took on when she decided to adapt her library’s orientation program to meet what she sees as a growing demand for “visual literacy” among today’s college students."

"Probing the uses of nine different types of social media among professors, the study found that professors consider YouTube the most useful tool by far -- for both teaching and non-classroom professional use. Nearly a third of respondents said they instructed students to watch online videos as homework, and about 73 percent said they thought YouTube videos were either somewhat or very valuable for classroom use, regardless of whether they use them currently.

Other Web 2.0 tools fared less well among the professors -- particularly the tools with the most currency in broader culture. Only 2 percent of the professors said they used Twitter in class, and another 2 percent said they used it for professional purposes outside the classroom. Slightly more said they could see at least some value in the microblogging site, but those long-sellers still amounted to less than a tenth of all respondents."

"Fostering innovation, in other words, isn't just a matter of improving the quantity or quality of math and science education. It's a matter of restructuring how we approach and teach all our subjects, from the liberal arts to math, science and engineering. And it means focusing as much on teaching how to combine those fields of knowledge and think in flexible, integrative, and creative ways, as we do on the subject matter itself. "

"What I worry about when I hear this pushback against talk of skills, literacies and competencies is that it is easy for that to slide into a belief that liberal arts inquiry is distinguished by its comprehensive resistance to or rejection of the language of practicality, applicability or usage. Or that such talk, if not rejected, should be swallowed up in a fog of opacity and evasion, dissolved by irreducible complexities."

"I have, however, become increasingly concerned in recent years - not about the talent of the applicants but about the education American universities are providing. Even from America's great liberal arts colleges, transcripts reflect an undergraduate specialization that would have been unthinkably narrow just a generation ago. "

The Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies (SCEMS) assists the museum community in acquiring and strengthening its understandings and practices of museology. This website is one of the Center's tools for serving the educational and informational needs of the field.

What all this suggests is that there is a stronger relationship between conceptual knowledge and mechanics, and between conceptual knowledge and problem solving skill, than there is between mechanical mastery and problem solving skill....
If this relationship holds in general — and I think that it does, and I’m not the only one — then clearly the environment most likely to teach calculus students how to be effective problem solvers is not the classroom primarily focused on computation. A healthy, interacting mixture of conceptual and mechanical work — with a primary emphasis on conceptual understanding — would seem to be what we need instead. The fact that this kind of environment stands in stark contrast to the typical calculus experience (both in the way we run our classes and the pedagogy implied in the books we choose) is something well worth considering.

Since Gates is a multibillionaire, he can't possibly understand what it means to work in an environment where you might be fired for disagreeing with your boss. Nor can he possibly understand that schools are collaborative cultures that need senior teachers who are ready and willing to help newcomers. He can't imagine that school is different from Microsoft or other big corporations. Let's be honest. CCSSO and The New York Times pay attention to what Gates says because he is so rich. If he didn't run the biggest foundation in the world, if he wasn't one of the richest men in the world, would anyone care about his opinion of education? Really, who would care what he said if he were the chairman of the Whatzit Corporation and sold widgets?

The problem these articles are identifying is this:  What are our kids doing instead of doing what we want them to be doing at the moment?

The problem with the problem, though, is that what we want them to be doing is preparing to be forty-five years old.

The kids are all right and they’re no fools.  They know what we want them to do and they don’t like it much.

The real problem is that there is no alternative for them between preparing to be forty-five and sitting around bored to tears all day.

So they compromise.  That is, they offer a teenager’s version of compromise, which is to put off doing what the adults want them to do by promising to do it later.  Then they sit around bored to tears, looking for ways to distract themselves from their boredom.

TeachingWithData.org is portal of teaching and learning resources for infusing quantitative literacy into the social science curriculum. A Pathway of the National Science Digital Library, TwD aims to support the social science instructor at secondary and post-secondary schools by presenting user-friendly, data-driven student exercises, pedagogical literature, and much more! Resources are available on a wide range of topics and disciplines.

Robin Hanson quotes Peter Gray. "Employers in industry saw schooling as a way to create better workers. To them, the most crucial lessons were punctuality, following directions, tolerance for long hours of tedious work, and a minimal ability to read and write. From their point of view (though they may not have put it this way), the duller the subjects taught in schools the better."

I'm a Science Communication Lecturer at Imperial College, London. This blog reflects my personal views.

My work touches on a range of science and society issues, but I'm especially interested in young people's relationships with science, science on the internet and science policy.

I have a background in history of science, sociology of education and children's literature, and maintain an interest in all these areas.

Overwhelmed by curriculum standards, American teachers warn there’s no room in the day for a creativity class. Kids are fortunate if they get an art class once or twice a week. But to scientists, this is a non sequitur, borne out of what University of Georgia’s Mark Runco calls “art bias.” The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded. When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.

First, you have to understand that educational policy is consumed by the achievement gap, which is the disparity between groups of students on most educational measures, particularly the groups of race and socio-economic income—and, if I'm going to be honest, it's race that generates the most intensity. I don't just mean that this is the number one priority. It's the only priority. The achievement gap pervades every corner of American educational policy discussion. Nothing else matters....

Why? I think ed schools see the public rejection of affirmative action, its embrace of welfare reform and crackdowns on illegal immigrants, and all the other rollbacks of the liberal agenda as profoundly wrong and evil acts. They see education as a means of rectifying the injustices committed by an ignorant society, with themselves as one of the last bastions of protection for under-represented minorities.