21st Century Scholar

Some of my most vivid memories as a high school teacher are of police. Police cars patrolled the neighborhood. They parked in front of the school and at nearby intersections. In school, police officers walked the hallways. Out of school, they walked the streets. Police were ever-present in the neighborhood. That is the context in [...]

Arguably, critical thinking is one of the most important cognitive strategies to be acquired by college-bound students. Through the Collegiate Academic Scholars course, as I have written about in my two previous blog entries (Negotiating Reciprocity through College Readiness Efforts and Reciprocity and College Readiness: Authoring Mantras and Anthems), I am able to facilitate activities [...]

Thursday is TechDay would like to introduce you to the Edupunk movement. No, they won’t beat you up. No, they aren’t mean and aloof or any of the other pejoratives associated with the word “punk.” What is it? Well, Stephen Downes defines it as “student-centered, resourceful, teacher- or community-created rather than corporate-sourced.” The movement’s growth spurt is [...]

To figure out where we want to go, we first need to figure out what we want to do. For most of my academic life I have harped on Ortega y Gasset’s statement about the importance of understanding the mission of higher education and if we do not, then everything else is “love’s labor lost.” [...]

As this blog is being published, I find it amusingly coincidental that I am traveling through some of the United States’ most earthquake-prone areas to get to the USRio+2.0 Conference: Center for Social Innovation (CSI) at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. It is a conference that is co-sponsored by the U.S. Department of State that [...]

My interest in college readiness includes organizations and individual actors; therefore, the case study methodology is an appropriate research tradition. After receiving approval from the Institutional Review Board (IRB), and gaining entrée and access to the respective case, the data collection begins. However, one of the first elements established for my projects is determining reciprocity: [...]

Thursday is TechDay Today’s Thursday is TechDay blog is an introduction to the future of qualitative research software: the online platform. If you haven’t heard the news, there’s a new qualitative software player in town. It’s called Dedoose, and it’s worth a look for two reasons. First, within the qualitative research community, it pioneers the [...]

This week 21st Century Scholar is delighted to host Linda Serra Hagedorn as our guest blogger.  Linda Serra Hagedorn is Associate Dean of Undergraduate Programs, and professor at Iowa State University.  Dr. Hagedorn’s research focuses on college student success.  She is especially interested in issues pertaining to underrepresented student groups, and equity.  Prior to joining [...]

by Randy Clemens My sisters and I used to trick or treat, collecting our candy in sleeping bags. A successful Halloween night ended with tired legs and a mound of sugary confections to sort through. A good bounty included quality stuff like full-sized candy bars and hand-fulls of Sweetarts. Pennies, candy corn, tootsie rolls, and [...]

by Bill Tierney Call me crazy, but I have long enjoyed reading the writing of students.   Every now and then someone puts together a nifty sentence, paragraph or paper, and I still get a rush of excitement at his or her accomplishment.  I also enjoy watching someone’s work improve over time. I always have offered [...]