Multilitteratus Incognitus

I was reading this article on InsideHigherEd the other day about Drake University's "Outsourcing" of language learning. In short they replaced formal classes lead by tenured faculty (or just faculty who had second language acquisition experience) with the following: small discussion groups led by on-campus native speakers, a weekly session with a scholar of the language, a one-semester course on language acquisition and the use of several Web-based learning technologies. In other words, lower paid undergraduate or graduate students from abroad that probably have little experience with actual second language acquisition. I don't doubt that a learner, when immersed in a foreign language and foreign culture situation can pick up conversational skills. For this I would go back to the learning-acquisition hypothesis --> Acquisition being a "natural" and subconscious process of picking up certain information while Learning being a more structured way of pickin...

Well here's some near-the-end-of-the-month humor for you. One of the things that I remember doing in my Introduction to Instructional Design class was looking at products (mostly toys) and without instructions figuring out what they do, and designing instruction for them. We would design instruction that would let the parent know in simple terms how to operate the toy so that they could show their kid. This image came through my RSS reader a few days ago and reminded me of those early days in Instructional Design.

I was reading this opinion piece on the Chronicle of Higher Education on Careers. The author reports back on a forum discussion where people talk about your first job influencing your career. Essentially should you go get a teaching job right after you get your PhD, or should you publish your heart out and try to get to that R1 institution where fame and fortune lies (or so they say). I quite honestly don't get where this vitriol is coming from. Why is it that teaching faculty get little respect. If you want a 5/5 course load, why shouldn't you be judged on your teaching ability? Why are we hearing all this whining about getting a 3/3 course load and time for research and if you go teach at a community college you're not as good as someone in an R1 (research) institution. People go to college to learn. They attend college for educational purposes (well that and Frat parties if you are going to one of the party school teeheehee), so why isn't there an expectation that...