For the Times...they are a-Changin’ (...still)!

BUT, we do have a great many  “best practices”  because of this tradition…8 This was one of my very first blog posts (back in February 2011) - way before I rediscovered my love of visual literacy (that's why it has no images)! I have had an 'upgrade' (or follow-up post) on me to-do-list for some time - but just wondered if the post has stood up to the 'test of time'. I think it has...but looks better with a few images (and a few 'red-hot' links)...what do you thunk? 8

Trust me – I’ve asked people these questions over and over. Noone has been able to give me an answer – apart from “That’s just the way it is”…. 8

Maybe, I’m a bit thick!

Maybe, the university (we know and love) has a wee design flaw!8 Here’s another one…why do we train PhD candidates only to do research, when we know most of them will be hired to “teach” our kids. Teaching people “how to teach” (or at least helping them “understand how people learn”) would seem like a pretty good idea for say, a lecturer, yes?

...it all does not seem “right” somehow…8 Yeah, yeah...Tony's needs to blow off some steam and have a rant! But it’s not just me that thinks that the Academe’s obsession with research might, just a teeny-weeny bit, be getting in the way of student LEARNing. Lauren Pope, writing in 2006, offered this advice to parents and kids getting ready for college:

...for the undergraduate, the Ivies and their clones are scams. In those universities, you will be ignored. There are no rewards for teaching, so professors, famous or not, do little or none of it. If they do, you’ll only ever see them behind a lectern. In many of these schools you will never write a paper. Nearly half of your enormous classes will be taught by part-timers, many of whom can barely speak English. And he was talking about the best universities on the planet.

As things stand, less than half of all young people go on to university, and many of those who do, now endure an assembly-line experience at least as passive and depersonalised as school.