“Students with mastery orientation seek to improve their competence. Those with performance orientations seek to prove their competence.” (p. 122)

Mano Singham (a colleague whose work I greatly admire) makes such an important point in a viewpoint piece published in the October 11, 2009 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. He thinks we are getting carried away with generational stereotypes. Rather than being monnikers that identify whole generations (like baby boomers), they have become trendy labels attached to ever smaller age cohorts (Generation X, Y, the Millenials). But what worries him most is how these stereotypes lump very diverse students together.

In my classroom-based courses I have always valued discussion as a powerful learning tool that provides students with opportunities to explain their reasoning and understanding, learn different perspectives and points of view, and re-think and possibly revise their own conceptions based on careful reflection of potentially disparate viewpoints. As I prepared to teach my first online course five years ago, it was only natural that discussion would be a part of it.

Administrators can help inspire much-needed reform of the tenure and promotion processes at their institutions if they begin discussions of reducing the workload of both candidates and committees in the following three ways.

At its heart, The World is Open: How Web Technology is Revolutionizing Education is based on the premise that “anyone can now learn anything from anyone at anytime.” (p. 7)

In last Wednesday’s post, Stephen F. Davis, Patrick F. Drinan, and Tricia Bertram Gallant, the authors of the newly released CHEATING IN SCHOOL: What We Know and What We Can Do, recommended steps faculty can take to reduce cheating in their classroom.

I had breakfast with a good colleague this morning. We were following up on a conversation we’ve been having electronically. It started when I recommended a book that my colleague said he’d read; however he objected to all the “pronouncements” made by the author. He was referring to how this author tried to distill research findings on various topics into simple declarative statements and how those statements denied all the complexity and variability of the research. After reading his email, I looked at the blog entry I was working on ... one that summarized key findings from a study. There were pronouncements everywhere. I quickly revised, working to make the statements less definitive and more qualified. When I wrote my colleague and fessed up to what I’d discovered, he responded by saying that he’d just had a conversation with a colleague who asked him for some teaching advice. “All I did was make pronouncements,” he wrote.

For six years, Cecilia McInnis-Bowers and E. Byron Chew served as dean-partners for the division of business and graduate programs at Birmingham-Southern College, taking shared leadership beyond a simple division of labor by working together on every decision, jointly advising students, and conducting each meeting and telephone call together.

Larry Ragan, director of faculty development for Penn State World Campus, may have given a new spin to the old expression “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” Except, unlike the philosophical musing that’s become immortalized as one of those motivational posters, Ragan’s focus is on improving online learning.