I replicated the go-to method for using ChatGPT to “cheat” on college essays. Here are my takeaways.
I replicated the go-to method for using ChatGPT to “cheat” on college essays. Here are my takeaways.
I wrapped the 2022 edition of my undergraduate “Grand Strategy” seminar this past Tuesday. This must have the eight or ninth iteration of the class. I like teaching it. I really do. But I have...
In this “Whiskey Optional” episode, PTJ facilitates a conversation among four colleagues from dif…
The volume calls on international-relations instructors to make use of “subversive pedagogies” — ones that embrace a more holistic understanding of teaching. It invites academics to interrogate what we teach, how we teach, where we teach, and whom we teach.
Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post settled on a theme for her extremely negative review of the new "The Lone Ranger" flick. Indeed, one might argue that developing a unifying thread is an important part of short-form writing. It holds everything together and provides the reader with a single, if stylized, takeaway. He basic theme? That The Lone Ranger tries to combine too many different themes, tones, and film elements. It suffers from such a severe case of summer blockbuster-itis that it pushes through mashup, beyond potpourri, and into full-blown incoherence. As she writes: What’s more,...
Ari Kohen on the value of "edutainment": Finally, and most importantly, is the central claim that the test of education is whether or not it’s entertaining. Wales asks, “why wouldn’t you have the most entertaining professor, the one with the proven track record of getting knowledge into people’s heads?” Is there evidence that the most entertaining lecture is the one that gets “knowledge into people’s heads”? Again, I’m not suggesting that a boring lecture is going to do the trick, but I’m arguing that entertaining students doesn’t necessarily equate with teaching them something. When I...
LATE UPDATE: PTJ blogs about undergrad education
Because not everyone reads comment threads, in part because of the way that people engage with The Duck via RSS readers, and because think the questions involved are really important ones, I'm going to post my reaction to PM's "Yes, I do envy physicists"as a separate post of its own:Man, I was right with you until your advance response to commenters. Making "data and its analysis central to the undergraduate experience" -- a.k.a. emphasizing undergraduate research, such that one of the primary learning outcomes of a BA in International Relations or Government or Political Science or whatever...
A crass, gaudy, all-American display.Someone named Steven Walt has published an article, wildly posted on the Internet, entitled “The Myth of American Exceptionalism”. I don’t know who Mr. Walt is, but the bio says he is a professor at Harvard University. Unfortunately we are seeing too much of this type of thinking coming out of America’s college professors. I should take the time to offer a point by point rebuttal to Mr. Walt’s article. ...But I have found that people like Mr. Walt don’t really listen to facts or care too much about history. -- D. Hancock, RedState.comAcademics often use...
I've put together a collection, albeit not a comprehensive one, of posts at the Duck of Minerva that focus on what might be called "the profession." The link is now a tab (Academia and Graduate School) below our banner.The rationale? Many of our most consistently popular pieces -- including ones that still get significant hits years after their publication -- fall into this category, so I think it might be a good service to try to consolidate links to them.In theory, post labels should do that, but after seven years of myriad bloggers our "labels" are a disaster. We have over a thousand;...
On a wall outside of the Intercultural Center auditorium. Make of it what you will.
Yes. Your students have less observable brain activity duringlecture than when they're asleep.Updated for the humorless. See postscript below.A new paper in IEEE Transactions in Biomedical Engineering suggests so:Long-term assessment of EDA [a measure of nervous system activity] revealed interesting trends in the participant’s sympathetic modulation over a week-long period. Intervals of elevated EDA frequently corresponded to times when the participant was studying, doing homework, or taking an exam. This is possibly due to the increased cognitive stress associated with these activities. The...