Formation Continue du Supérieur

By David Silbey. Stephen Walt writes in support of learning history, but reveals that he hasn’t quite followed his own prescription:
The United States and the European Union backed the anti-Yanukovych forces in Ukraine in a fit of idealistic absentmindedness, and don’t seem to have considered the possibility that Russia would see this action as a threat to its vital interests and would respond in a sharp and ruthless manner. It is the latest in a string of bipartisan foreign-policy failures, a long list that includes the invasion of Iraq in 2003. More...

By David Silbey. In 1945, as World War II ended in the Pacific, people turned to reestablishing small things:
That day the commander of the British Landing Force and two other officers visited the grave of Will Adams at the nearby village of Hammamate. Adams, who was born at Gillingham, near Chatham, in 1575, was the first Englishman to land in Japan and lived there from 1600 until his death in 1620. More...

By Robert Talbert. In the previous post about the flipped/inverted calculus class, we looked at getting student buy-in for the flipped concept, so that when they are asked to do Guided Practice and other such assignments, they won’t rebel (much). When you hear people talk about the flipped classroom, much of the time the emphasis is on what happens before class – the videos, how to get students to do the reading, and so on. But the real magic is what happens in class when students come, prepared with some basic knowledge they’ve acquired for themselves, and put it to work with their peers on hard problems. More...

By Brian Mathews. ACRL is working to redefine Information Literacy: draft. I’m very happy to see that Threshold Concepts are making it into the conversation. I would like to offer one suggestion: change literacy. I have a forthcoming essay in portal that will hopefully be out this summer, but here is an unedited snippet that touches in the concept. In short, I view the ability to anticipate, create, adapt, and deal with change (in the broadest since) as a vital fluency for people today. If we treat change as a literary then we can better prepare students for the challenges they will face tomorrow. More...