The Post-Lecture Classroom: How Will Students Fare? - Robinson Meyer - The Atlantic

The Post-Lecture Classroom: How Will Students Fare? - Robinson Meyer - The Atlantic

So, with the help of Echo360, he devised a flipped model for the classroom.
In 2012, that flipped model looked like this:

At home, before class, students watched brief lecture modules, which introduced them to the day’s content. They also read a textbook — the same, introductory-level book as in 2011 — before they arrived.
When they got to class, Mumper would begin by asking them “audience response” questions. He’d put a multiple-choice question about the previous night’s lectures on a PowerPoint slide and ask all the students to respond via small, cheap clickers. He’d then look at their response, live, as they answered, and address any inconsistencies or incorrect beliefs revealed. Maybe 50 percent of the class got the wrong answer to one of these questions: This gave him an opportunity to lecture just enough so that students could understand what they got wrong.

Then, the class would split up into pairs, and Mumper would ask them a question which required them to apply the previous night’s content, such as: “Given your knowledge of the skin and transdermal delivery, describe how you might treat this patient who had breakthrough cancer pain.” The pairs would discuss an answer, then share their findings with the class. At the end of that section, Mumper would go over any points relevant to the question which he felt the class failed to bring up.

In 2012, in class’s final section, a team of students would give a 10 minute presentation to the rest of the class based on the previous night’s reading, then lead a discussion about it. Mumper would then conduct a quiz.
Student presentations were students’s least favorite part of the class, and in 2013 they was replaced. In 2013, too, Mumper removed the introductory reading and replaced it with a “carefully selected” clincal study about the day’s topic. Instead of presenting (or taking a quiz, which was relegated to after-class online work), students read a clinical study and discussed it together and then as a class.

Then, they’d go home, watch the lecture-modules, do some reading, come back in and do it all again.

no pulitzer

Pulitzer article

motivated unreasoning

Psychologists have a term for this: “motivated reasoning,” which Dan Kahan, a professor of law and psychology at Yale, defines as “when a person is conforming their assessments of information to some interest or goal that is independent of accuracy”—an interest or goal such as remaining a well-regarded member of his political party, or winning the next election, or even just winning an argument. Geoffrey Cohen, a professor of psychology at Stanford, has shown how motivated reasoning can drive even the opinions of engaged partisans. In 2003, when he was an assistant professor at Yale, Cohen asked a group of undergraduates, who had previously described their political views as either very liberal or very conservative, to participate in a test to study, they were told, their “memory of everyday current events.”

The students were shown two articles: one was a generic news story; the other described a proposed welfare policy. The first article was a decoy; it was the students’ reactions to the second that interested Cohen. He was actually testing whether party identifications influence voters when they evaluate new policies. To find out, he produced multiple versions of the welfare article. Some students read about a program that was extremely generous—more generous, in fact, than any welfare policy that has ever existed in the United States—while others were presented with a very stingy proposal. But there was a twist: some versions of the article about the generous proposal portrayed it as being endorsed by Republican Party leaders; and some versions of the article about the meagre program described it as having Democratic support. The results showed that, “for both liberal and conservative participants, the effect of reference group information overrode that of policy content. If their party endorsed it, liberals supported even a harsh welfare program, and conservatives supported even a lavish one.”

privacy versus power

great pictures

The nature of democracy

From Znet

The media therefore presents gossip not in spite of American democracy, but to enhance and preserve a certain conception of it: one that involves spectators, not participants; public ratification, not public decision making. It is antithetical to a participatory economy and the idea of self-governance, and displays a striking commitment to reactionary ideology, despite illusions of an independent press. The issue at hand is and will always be whether or not the media is free, but will remain unresolved as long as the media is responsible for the gossip that debases public life.

William E. Shaub is a violin performance major at the Juilliard School of Music in Manhattan and the editor of TheFBM.com.

 

How true. Yukie says that in Japan scandals are more about connections to unpopular groups or money scandals. At least that appears to have some political relevance...though it rarely does...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/sunday-review/hard-truths-about-disclosure.html?hp

To illustrate how few people actually read its terms and conditions disclosure, the online retailer Gamestation, on April Fools’ Day 2010, replaced the usual text with what it called an “immortal soul clause,” which read: “By placing an order via this Web site on the first day of the fourth month of the year 2010 anno Domini, you agree to grant us a non-transferable option to claim, for now and forever more, your immortal soul.” Eager to get on with their online purchase, 88 percent of customers clicked the box to sell their souls. (The 12 percent who opted out were rewarded with a cash credit for their diligence.)