The cliche is that we live in a time of rapid technological change; in fact, technological inertia is just as important. Textbooks are a prime example. A writing class, for example, can be effectively taught using only the Purdue Online Writing Lab and the Internet. That’s been true for at least five years or more, if not a decade. Yet the textbook industry plods along, almost unchanged.

There are also open source online writing textbooks available, such as “Writing Spaces.” There is no shortage of open source tools of every kind, from word processing to websites. Given the rise in college costs over the last decade, and the (perhaps overstated) death of the printed book, you would…

If you took a picture of a classroom at the time of the War of 1812, a professor once pointed out to me, it would look roughly the same as a classroom today: teacher in front, a blackboard, students in chairs. Maybe our classrooms have white boards, or some sort of electronic board; perhaps there’s a computer on the podium and a screen that drops down. In any case, the modern classroom has changed far less than, say, transportation over the last two centuries.

Then as now we had grades, yet we know that grades are not good ways to guide learning. Most grades– even if derived from multiple choice testing– are unreliable. Still we continue to have…

Whenever I hear something about the end or the continuing life of reading and writing I always try to remember that the kind of reading and writing matters as much as the quantity. That’s why it’s important to look carefully at the ongoing research into literacy reported in the Washington Post piece, “Teens are still reading for fun, say media specialists.” The details matter.

It’s not that Facebook and phones are bad for literacy– in some cases, they can reinforce creative and critical thinking– but that the sustained attention and concentration required in some kinds of reading and writing– novels, essays, memoir, — is important to the personal and intellectual transformations that are a necessary part of being educated…

I was happy to see a new survey/study of student writing practices released this week, called “Revisualizing Composition: Mapping the Writing Lives of First Year College Students.” It’s always good to have new information, and it’s especially refreshing to see such a wide range of institutions included, ranging from research and Ph.D. granting schools to community colleges. I have to say, though, that I found the initial findings disappointing.

First, there seems to be nothing new here: blogs and web writing are less popular than they were; texting on phones is up; students see academic writing as important, etc. There are a few ideas that might be worth exploring. Why has social networking, for example, had…

In 25 or 50 years, when someone or other, most likely a graduate student, writes a history of U.S. Higher Education in our time, the New Faculty Majority “Program for Change: 2010-2030” will have to play a key role. I don’t think it matters if the particulars of the program are achieved or not; its historical importance is its attempt to imagine a new employment system in U.S. higher education using a model developed largely in California and Canada. I think that it’s broad enough to be useful to almost anyone interested in reforming higher education. It’s our, “What is to be Done.”

OK, maybe it’s only our “Port Huron Statement.” Hopefully, in articulating this vision, the NFM…

Paternalism is a hardy perennial in higher education. Perhaps for obvious reasons, once we begin thinking about our students as our children, or, better, as our customers, we stop thinking of them as adult learners. As children, we need a lot of guidance; as adults, we have to learn to set our own agendas and then follow it over an extended period of time. It’s a difficult process and it’s probably always to some extent a matter of trial and error. At key moments, then, we, as teachers, have to just stand back and watch.

That’s why, as the cliche goes, failure is so important. Adult learners need to be independent learners, and independent learning is, well, learned. Some teachers…