category: General Education

How We Encourage Cheating in Education I was watching a news report this morning about students using ChatGPT that asked whether this was considered cheating. That got me to thinking about how we encourage cheating in education.. Think about it: The purpose for education is to provide the student with the foundational knowledge they need to be successful in work and life. We all want to be successful, so cheating to get there doesn’t seem to me to be a very profitable endeavor. After all, at the end of the day you still have to know how to do things in order to be successful. I used to remind my nursing students of this all the time: If you want to be a good nurse you’re going to need to actually know what you’re doing. Cheating might get you through the class, it might even allow you to pass the licensing exam but the real test is whether you can function in the real world. It’s a hell of a lot less stressful to actually know what you’re doing when in an emergency than to try to wing it because you lack the knowledge to actually perform correctly. ...

My Thoughts on Competency Based Education Competency based education has gathered quite a lot of steam over the last few years. Many universities now assert that they are competency based and promote this as somehow better than traditional education. In general, it seems that competency based education is a way of expediting the educational process whereby the student can move forward more quickly so long as the student can demonstrate competence in a subject. ...

Returning to Basics The title of this blog is iamcuri.us. That title was chosen to reflect the many and sundry interests that I have and the drive I have to explore new ideas and to learn new things. While I think some of my posts here have reflected that, others seems to skew in specific directions that seem to narrow the focus on the blog. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the posts that outline my tinkering in websites and self-hosting do reflect my questioning and exploring and learning. Still, I think that it’s time I pushed into some new areas and revisit in more detail some old areas, too. ...

The Evolution of an Academic Had someone told me on the day of my high school graduation in 1977 that I would one day be an academic, in possession of a doctoral degree and teaching at the university level, I’d have warned them that whatever they were smoking was muddling their brain. Yet, here I am, forty years later, in possession of not one, but two master’s degrees, and a doctorate, teaching at a university. How did that happen? ...

Making Progress … Slowly There has been a lot going on the last few months. I have been struggling to get my dissertation done. The biggest obstacle has been locating participants for a qualitative study. I finally got responses to my recruiting efforts and have been able to interview 7 people. That’s not a great response, but is better than nothing (which is what I had in the past!) and allows me to move forward. Did I say I was excited? ...

Is Education Relevant One of the questions with which I have wrestled for a while now is the question of what it means to be ‘educated’. The problem, of course, is that there is no one definition and that, I think, creates much of the problem in evaluating educational programs. The state of Georgia recently put on the ballot a bill that would create an “Opportunity School District”. In an effort to address “failing” schools, the state proposed taking them over and doing whatever is necessary to ‘improve’ outcomes. As I pondered the proposal, one of the questions that I continually confronted was what does it mean for school to “fail”? Who determines this? And, on what is it based? Advertisements for the plan suggested that “only 12% of third graders in our failings schools are reading on grade-level.” That, of course, raised other questions for me. For example, how does this compare to third graders in those schools that are not considered to be failing? What does it mean to read on grade level? Recognizing that people learn at different rates and that skills such as reading are commonly dependent on external factors such as how much reading goes on in the home, is the standard even appropriate? These and several other questions brought me back around to the question of what it means to be educated. ...

Life Long Learning One of the ‘goals’ of the nursing department is that we develop ’life long learners’. What this means, I suppose is up for some debate but I think, generally, that what is meant is that we prepare our students to learn how to identify their professional learning needs and help them develop the skills needed to meet those on-going needs. After all, health care is an ever-evolving field and constant learning is required. As I have pointed out to my students for many years, many of the diseases that we deal with today were not identified ...

Designing Your Life I ‘attended’ a presentation by Story Musgrave, the astronaut, on “Designing your life” or some such similar topic. While I wasn’t overly impressed with his general rambling presentation style, I was very impressed with the message that threaded throughout his story. I took several keys away from the presentation. The value of curiosity The first takeaway was the importance of curiosity in achieving an effective life. From high school drop out, he went on to earn a BS in math and statistics, MBA in operations analysis and computer programming, BA in chemistry, MD, and MS in physiology and biophysics within an 8 year period. He would later earn an MA in literature. To me, the broad range of areas, as much as the time frame for these accomplishments, says a great deal. He explored the areas that interested him. He committed himself to those areas. Most students today would be counseled to choose a singular path and follow it. Yet, the life he built for himself was one based on the intersections of his interests. Each area of interest exposed him to ideas that he wanted to explore further and so he did. By not limiting himself to a given field, he opened up new avenues for self expression and provided himself the skills to create new opportunities. ...

How Social Filters Impact an Educated Response One of the hallmarks of the well-educated person is, I think, the ability and willingness to explore all sides of an issue before making a decision. Unfortunately, it seems that few people, even those who are, in fact, well-educated, truly take the time to explore an issue before taking a stance on it. And, to a large extent, I get it. It’s hard to do. It’s hard, not only because it takes time and effort, but because we are bombarded by so much information from so many different sources and on so many different topics that it is difficult to winnow out the wheat from the chaff. What is important? What should I be concerned with? What issues can I reasonably relegate to secondary or tertiary concern and on which should I focus my attention? ...

The First Thing Every College Should Do For Its Students For some time now I’ve argued that colleges and universities have dropped the ball on one of the most important preparatory steps in attending college: Defining what a college education is all about. Students often go to college without a clear conception of what they’re supposed to be getting from the experience. They go because college has become the “thing you do” after high school. Like their secondary education, they never really stop to think about why they’re going, or what the benefits are. More importantly, many students see college as simply an extension of their secondary education. That is, learning without an express purpose other than “I’ll need to know this someday.” ...