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10 Forecasts about the Future

From the MINNESOTA FUTURE WORK SCAN:
Each year since 1985, the editors of THE FUTURIST have selected the most thought-provoking ideas and forecasts appearing in the magazine. Over the years, Outlook has spotlighted the emergence of such epochal developments as the Internet, virtual reality, and the end of the Cold War.

Go to: http://www.wfs.org/forecasts.htm to read the editors' top 10 forecasts from Outlook 2006.

(Minnesota Future Work is an environmental scanning program designed to identify new and emerging occupations, the skills required for such occupations, and the education and training needed to develop such skills.

Freshman Seminars

College student success (and the lack of it) is garnering a lot of attention in the popular media, and this article at CNN on freshman seminars is an example. While pointing out that they've been around for a long time, it discusses their increasing popularity.
CNN.com - Freshman seminars gain popularity - Jan 5, 2006

The interdisciplinary seminar focused on phenomena relevant to freshman experience is one approach that offers advantages for students as well as faculty.

I had the chance to lead the re-design of a freshman course at Wayne State University almost a decade ago, and it was a bracing experience, involving more than 100 faculty, instructional technologists, librarians, and student affairs professionals. In the revised course, senior faculty taught an orientation to college work by helping students prepare debate arguments on a current-events topic (which varied by faculty member's discipline). Debate was chosen as a vehicle quite deliberately: WSU's debate team is a longtime national prize-winner. We sought to increase students pride in affiilation with the university at one of its points of strength. Students learned how to do library and Internet research, to work with a team, and to present their work. They also learned how to get the support services they might need to be successful (in the project and as students generally) through a simultaneous orientation to student services.

Our freshman course quickly led to some faculty working together to create freshman learning communities around it and related courses.

What freshmen seminars and learning communities are going strong here in the Minnesota State Colleges & Universities system?

Underachieving

In articles based on his upcoming new book, "Our Underachieveing Colleges," former Harvard president Derek Bok points out ways in which faculty and even governing boards can better attend to student learning. Indeed, he says that American higher education is in decline because of our persistent neglect of the evidence on student learning outcomes.

Hurrah! Bok makes the points that we in faculty development have been articulating for years. Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching president, Lee Schulman, couldn't ask for a better endorsement of the scholarship of teaching and learning.

If these previews are any indication, this will be a good read. Hope it stirs up some new action!

The Critical Role of Trustees in Enhancing Student Learning by Derek Bok in the December 16, 2005 Chronicle of Higher Education.

Are Colleges Failing? by Derek Bok in the December 18, 2005 Boston Globe..

From the Chronicle article: "Despite many more courses in the catalog and books in the library, it is not clear that undergraduates today are learning more or becoming more proficient in writing, speaking, and critical thinking than their parents and grandparents were when they were students 25 or 50 years ago.

What does seem reasonably clear is that colleges are much less effective than they should be. To cite just a few examples, lecturing remains the most common method of instruction even though much research suggests that more-active forms of teaching help students learn more and remember better what they learn...."

And from the Boston Globe editorial:
"-Despite the hours spent debating different models of general education, the choices faculties make rarely lead to any significant difference in the cognitive development of undergraduates.

-Most college seniors do not think that they have made substantial progress in improving their competence in writing or quantitative methods, and some assessments have found that many students actually regress.

-Students who start college with average critical thinking skills only tend to progress over the next four years from the 50th percentile of their class to approximately the 69th percentile. Most undergraduates leave college still inclined to approach unstructured ''real life" problems with a form of primitive relativism, believing that there are no firm grounds for preferring one conclusion over another...."