Innovative Educators Webinar: Critical Thinking: Designing Instructional Strategies to Promote Critical Thought

$750.00

3-Part Workshop ~ All sessions are 1:00-2:30pm EDT.

Part 1: Wednesday, September 29

Part 2: Tuesday, October 5

Part 3: Tuesday, October 12

***If you cannot make this date and time, you can watch the recording. The recorded version is included and available for 1 year.***

303-775-6004

http://www.innovativeeducators.org/retention_p/857.htm

Critical thinking is a concept that is widely used and has high visibility in the accreditation and mission statements of educational institutions across the world. However, many educators and institutions have difficulty clarifying the concept and knowing how to infuse it within curriculum and instruction. This three part workshop focuses on explicating those concepts and principles that inform a foundational, cross-disciplinary conception of critical thinking as well as how these fundamentals translate into concrete teaching and learning strategies that, when done well, help our students improve the quality of their thinking.


Part 1: Introduction to Foundational Critical Thinking Concepts and Principles

In this first segment, participants will be introduced to a robust, cross-disciplinary conception of critical thinking. We will discuss what critical thinking is and explore how it can be substantively infused into our content areas and instructional contexts. It will be argued that critical thinking is not something that is merely added to our existing curriculum and workload, but should be the way we teach and learn. When critical thinking is treated as the organizing idea of teaching and learning substantive understanding will naturally result.


Part 2: Question Generating Concepts
The critical mind is the questioning mind. The extent to which students ask genuine questions and seek to answer them reflects the extent to which students take content seriously and think it through. The problem is that our students rarely know how to systematically ask questions that probe content by searching out assumptions, concepts, purposes, information, inferences and solutions, points of view, or implications. They rarely seek out intellectual standards to evaluate the quality of their thought and the thoughts of others: questions that target clarity, depth, relevance, validity, significance, and accuracy. We want to create a classroom culture where students actively, reflectively, and fair-mindedly question the content and each other. Such a culture cultivates important intellectual skills and abilities as well as virtuous dispositions like intellectual flexibility, empathy, humility, integrity, open-mindedness, and perseverance to name a few. This session will focus on the relationship between our ability to question and our ability to think critically. Participants will explore various ways to help students develop questions that analyze and evaluate content and their thinking.

Part 3: Focus on Instructional Strategies that Promote Critical Thought
This session will build on the foundational critical thinking concepts and principles addressed in the first session. In doing so, participants will explore the intimate relationship between what it means to think critically and how we can design instruction to promote critical thought. Based on best practices in teaching and learning, participants will engage and discuss specific instructional strategies designed to foster critical thought and the cultivation of higher order thinking skills. The instructional strategies act as examples of what instructors can do on a typical day of class, so at the end of the session participants should have a short list of practical strategies they can immediately incorporate into their instruction.

Participants will explicate the concept of critical thinking.

Participants will contextualize foundational critical thinking concepts as intellectual tools to help students learn to as clear, focused, deep, and reflective questions.
Participants will work with and compile a list of instructional strategies designed to be transferred to their instructional contexts.

This workshop is appropriate for faculty and administrators interested in practical strategies for improving student thinking. This is also relevant to those administrators who have articulated critical thinking as part of their accreditation plans and/or college mission statements.
 
Dr. Enoch Hale is a Fellow at the Foundation and Center for Critical Thinking. With over a decade of teaching experience, Dr. Hale brings a wealth of experience to the workshop setting. Recognizing the importance of placing critical thinking at the heart of instruction early on in his teaching career, Dr. Hale took an incremental but systematic approach to bringing critical thinking theory and practice into his courses.

He holds a B.A. degree in intellectual and social history, a Masters degree in liberal arts and sciences, a secondary single subject credential in social science, and a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies with an emphasis on critical thinking and educational reform. His research interests involve identifying practical methods for teaching students to identify and work through complex interdisciplinary issues and problems as well as studying how teachers learn. Dr. Hale regularly conducts workshops throughout the country, teaches a graduate course on critical thinking, and has been a presenter at the annual International Conference on Critical Thinking for the last five years.

Innovative Educators Webinar: Critical Thinking: Designing Instructional Strategies to Promote Critical Thought

Inside Higher Education: Open-Source Lecture Capture

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/09/13/matterhorn

September 13, 2010
For years, the main battleground in higher education between commercial technology and free, open-source alternatives has been the learning-management system market, where the open-source platforms Moodle and Sakai have been modestly chipping away at Blackboard, the commercial juggernaut.


Now, a new project from the online educational technology collective OpenCast, called Matterhorn 1.0, could open up a new front in the battle between open-source and proprietary — on a landscape that still has plenty of unclaimed territory: the lecture capture market.

Lecture capture — the practice of recording lectures, storing them in a library, and allowing students to play them back whenever they want, along with accompanying slides or other media — has become one of the more popular trappings of e-learning. Some research suggests that having lectures available for playback could help students retain lecture content. Another study indicated that it would not prompt students to cut class, as some professors have feared. The number of companies selling lecture capture hardware, software, and services has grown to more than a dozen, with the top providers serving hundreds of colleges. All in all, the lecture capture market did more than $50 million in business last year, according to a recent report from the consulting firm Frost & Sullivan. The firm predicts that figure will triple by 2016.



Matterhorn, by contrast, is free — nominally, at least. Developed over 16 months by an international alliance of institutions with foundation grants, and released several weeks ago, Matterhorn was designed as an alternative to proprietary, out-of-the-box lecture capture products, whose yearly licensing fees can be in the tens of thousands of dollars. Like Moodle and Sakai, its source code is publicly available; developers can build and share different features, and campuses can shape the platform to meet their particular needs. A dozen universities are currently piloting Matterhorn, most of them large, public institutions. They include Northwestern University, Indiana University, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and a number of non-U.S. institutions, including the University of Toronto and the University of Cambridge. Many others have downloaded it with the intention of experimenting, says Adam Hochman, an instructional technologist at Berkeley and Matterhorn project manager.


As with any open-source project, adopting Matterhorn is not actually free; the labor and expertise required to put the platform in place costs money, as do the video cameras, microphones, and other hardware that does not come with the package. And it takes vigilance and expertise to monitor the system for hiccups.


“Lecture capture can’t work 50 percent of the time; it has to work 100 percent of the time,” says Eric Burns, chief operating officer at Panopto, a top commercial provider. And most college I.T. staffs do not have the know-how and manpower to fix problems quickly enough to satisfy the students and professors who count on the system to work every time, says Tony Abate, the chief financial officer at Echo360, another provider.


“If you look at research on the total cost of ownership for servers running applications, about 80 percent of total cost of ownership is from ongoing management and maintenance,” says Michael Berger, director of marketing at Tegrity, which offers a hosted lecture capture service that starts at $10,000 for 250 hours. “You can make it do just about anything you want,” says Burns, of Panopto. “But you have to put a lot of quarters in the slot.” This is especially true, the providers say, if you want to deploy it in a lot of classrooms.


Such is the refrain of the commercial establishment. But Hochman, the Matterhorn project manager, says that while it does cost money to build and maintain the open-source system, the price is not unmanageable, even at scale. He also says that although the commercial companies do add a lot of value by being able to troubleshoot errors quickly, the members of the OpenCast community are hardly slouches, and can advise on a problem in a pinch. And it is only a matter of time, he says, before some entrepreneurs make a business out of providing stable support to Matterhorn users, like Moodlerooms has for Moodle users.


Bruce Sandhorst, an instructional technology coordinator at Nebraska, says his institution chose to be one of the first dozen or so to pilot Matterhorn precisely because officials there believe it will be cheaper to deploy at scale than any commercial system. “We’re pretty confident at this point that we can scale this out in a reasonable way without major expense,” says Sandhorst. “…Of course there is some expense to this, but compared to some of the price quotes we were getting — some of the commercial entities for us were cost-prohibitive.”


Aimee Roberts, an industry analyst at Frost & Sullivan who co-authored the recent report on lecture capture, says she thinks the Matterhorn will generate a lot of interest, though perhaps not many leaps of faith. “I am certain that this technology will pique the interest of cost-conscious institutions, as well as those who are now dabbling in lecture capture as a curiosity, to dip their toes in and test the waters while minimizing technology investment risk,” Roberts wrote in an e-mail. “However, a larger institution who desires a campus wide deployment, is often willing to pay for a technology that they know will work — something that is tried and tested.” Matterhorn will probably not take significant market share from the commercial providers, Roberts wrote, especially since lecture capture has not nearly saturated the market.


Hochman says he thinks some institutions will at least start by using Matterhorn alongside the out-of-the-box alternatives. “We try to play well with other systems,” he says. “In our minds we’re not competing with other systems; we can integrate with them. There’s a lot of flexibility there.”


Burns, the COO of Panopto, says the arrival of Matterhorn should benefit consumers by keeping his company and its commercial kin on their game. “Whatever the commercial vendors will deliver will have to be significantly better than the open-source alternative in order to justify the cost,” Burns says. “It has to retain that advantage.”


For the latest technology news from Inside Higher Ed, follow IHEtech on Twitter.
— Steve Kolowich

Inside Higher Education: Open-Source Lecture Capture

The Chronicle of Higher Education: Obama Declares Week to Honor Historically Black Colleges and Universities

http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Obama-Declares-Week-to-Honor/26857/

September 12, 2010
The coming week will be filled with White House-sponsored events to raise awareness of and support the efforts of the nation's 105 historically black colleges, so it only makes sense that President Obama has declared the week as National Historically Black Colleges and Universities Week. The week's events are part of a conference organized by the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities and will feature, for example, discussions of ways institutions can strengthen their fund raising and corporate partnerships. The president's domestic-policy adviser is scheduled to speak on Monday morning, and a press announcement says President Obama is invited but not confirmed. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and other key officials are also scheduled to speak at the conference, as are the presidents of several black colleges and other experts on minority-serving institutions.

The Chronicle of Higher Education: Obama Declares Week to Honor Historically Black Colleges and Universities